BLUES
Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the sky,
Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the sky,
Sometimes I feel I'm gonna lay me down & die.
You can't love a woman, if that woman don't love you,
You can't love a woman, if that woman don't love you,
You can't love a woman that don't care what you do.
She gotta want you like whiskey, she gotta need you like rain,
She gotta want you like whiskey, she gotta need you like rain,
She gotta cry when you leave her, and cry till you come back again.
(enter Pee Wee Russell)
: DATE AND TEXT
12 July 1943: MS letter to JBS (Hull DP 174/2/70). Published in
Tolley (2005), 201, as continuous text instead of the three-line
stanzas of the MS. In the present edition the ampersand in l. 3 is
retained (Tolley substitutes 'and' and sacrifices informality), and, as
in Tolley, a needed comma is inserted at the end of line 2.
Immediately after the poem L. writes '(enter Pee Wee Russell)':
this should, I think, be part of the text, on the grounds that L writes
a horizontal line after this section off the text from the rest of the letter.
Below this, he comments 'The above blues has been in my head
some time, I think it's awfully good. (Swells up & bursts).' See the
discussion of blues in the note on Fuel From Blues.
Pee Wee Russell: 1906-69, jazz musician (saxophone and clarinet player).
See the note on 'And did you once see Russell plain?'
'And did you once see Russell plain?
And did he start at Condon's nod,
Ten choruses of 'Da-da Strain'?
--------You lucky fucking sod!'
(from "Laforgue")
Pee Wee Russell, Little Red School House, New York City, 1940
photo: Charles Peterson
Philip Larkin
The Complete Poems
ed. Archie Burnett
(Farrar, 2012)
photo: Charles Peterson
Philip Larkin
The Complete Poems
ed. Archie Burnett
(Farrar, 2012)
