Smallmegapixel - Rock N Roll

Little lambs, dragonflies and interpretive fallacies.

‘McCartney … has at least a partial regard for what the French philosopher Roland Barthes described as the “death of the author”, the idea by which the act of reading necessarily involves a degree of writing, or even rewriting, the text. In his case, the song becomes what it might most truly be only when it is heard and heralded.’

- Paul Muldoon, ‘Ken Dodd, Stockhausen and Psycho: Unlocking Paul McCartney’s Musical Genius’, The Guardian, 30 October, 2021

Paul McCartney has told two different stories about the inspiration for ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’, and both are specific to the first (‘Little Lamb’) section of the song. In a 1974 interview, he recalled the song’s genesis in an emotional vigil held for a lamb that lay dying on his Scottish farm in 1970: ‘It was early in the morning and I had brought my guitar and I thought I couldn’t have done nothing for this lamb [sic], so I started singing “I have no answer for you little lamb”.’ Nearly 40 years later, McCartney would tell Tom Doyle that the song was inspired by the process of helping a neighbouring farmer by nursing his near-frozen lamb back to health: ‘He knew we were soft-hearted. He wasn’t sure it was gonna survive, so we took it in and warmed it up and fed it and it did survive.’ 

Which of these two stories represents the authentic inspiration for the song? Did the lamb die or live? Sadly, the safe bet may be laid on the former tale: it was recounted four years after the event (as opposed to 43) and it refers to a specific lyric from the song in question (one which sounds more like a plaintive elegy for a dying creature than a celebratory ode to the McCartneys’ nurturing powers). There are lyrical details in the song that don’t match those of the second story, either: if McCartney ‘took [the lamb] in and warmed it up and fed it’, why would he go on to lament in song that he ‘cannot help [the creature] in?’ I don’t suspect McCartney of telling fibs to Tom Doyle: the amount of time, energy and love his family have devoted to lambs over the years encourages the belief that both stories are based on truth but that an older McCartney misremembered which of them inspired him to write ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’. 

I don’t draw attention to the discrepancy between two versions of the song’s origin to impugn McCartney’s powers of memory or to discredit him as an authority in analyses of his work; my aim is to demonstrate that an artist’s stated intentions for their work do not always determine the meaning(s) that may be gleaned from it. This is more apparent when an artist changes their mind about what a work ‘means’ or, in the case of ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’, when an artist tells conflicting stories about a work’s genesis. 

In 1954, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley introduced the concept of the ‘intentional fallacy’ into literary criticism in order to guard against what they saw as an interpretive error: the assumption that the questions raised by art could be definitively answered by the artist. They recognised five problems associated with this assumption which are too theoretically dense to be fully unpacked here, but which may be summarised and applied to ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ as an illustrative example. 

From one perspective, McCartney’s intention in composing ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ was simply to write a song, and it is only the fact that he succeeded in this primary aim that a secondary and speculative interest in the song’s potential inspiration(s) develops. From another perspective, a critical appreciation of ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ is no different to a critical appreciation of a cheese soufflé or a reverse-cycle air conditioner: your focus should be on the qualities of the thing itself - does it work? Is it good? Whether ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ was inspired by a lamb’s death or not doesn’t change a note. From yet another perspective, while ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ may express something about McCartney’s personality or biography, the song is also constructed according to a set of pre-existing musical conventions (its key shifts from D Major to C Major and then E Major, for example), which means that the song’s qualities, good or bad, exist at a remove from their composer. The ‘I’ referred to in the song (‘I have no answer for you, little lamb’) takes on a dramatic aspect with this in mind - it may or may not be the same ‘I’ who composed the song. 

Wimsatt and Beardsley write that ‘[A] poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.’ We could apply this logic to ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ and argue that once the song was released to record buyers its potential meanings were open to anyone who could make a convincing argument for what they heard. If I said that ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ was about the marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, you’d be right to discredit my theory as historically impossible, but that doesn’t mean that only one interpretation of the song is ‘correct’, it means there’s differing subjective degrees to which interpretations are meaningful. I don’t know about you, but I find that exciting: the song’s relevance becomes universal and you get a degree of ownership over your interpretation of it, whatever MPL might have to say about its copyright. 

Once you realise that meaning is a fluid and dynamic thing, it can be fun to open the door to a range of possibilities and let ‘em in. This needn’t imply that you’re making a claim for the primacy of one subjective ‘opinion’ over others; better to think of it as entertaining different notions, trying them on for size. Well before the term ‘intentional fallacy’ had been coined, Oscar Wilde was encouraging this kind of thing as a distinguishing feature of what he called ‘the Oxford temper … play[ing] gracefully with ideas,’ as an antidote to the more extreme and limiting ‘violence of opinion merely.’ 

One of the most popular ideas associated with ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ is that it projects aspects of the Beatles’ break-up onto the fictional relationship its singer has with non-human creatures, reflecting some of McCartney’s ongoing concerns with his ex-bandmates. The case for this is usually made with reference to the second (‘Dragonfly’) half of the song, the inspiration for which McCartney has been conspicuously silent about. ‘Since you’ve gone I never know / I go on, but I miss you so … Don’t keep me waiting’ are oddly intense sentiments to feel for a dragonfly; they may, however, represent their composer’s longing for the presence of his old songwriting partner. The question ‘How did two rights make a wrong?’ could acknowledge the equal-but-opposite directions dividing Lennon and McCartney over 1969 and 1970 while also recognising that a refusal to compromise would keep them estranged. Perhaps lines like ‘You and I still have a way to go’ and ‘You and I can find a way to see’ offer hope for reunion - we may not have found the way forward yet, but there must be one; our story isn’t over yet. 

When you entertain this possibility for long enough you eventually want to ask why an anthropomorphised dragonfly has taken the place of John Lennon. Perhaps a real encounter with a dragonfly allowed McCartney to unburden himself of feelings he had toward Lennon or things he wanted to say to him but couldn’t bring himself to; perhaps McCartney himself didn’t realise this. If so, all the more reason to resist the ‘intentional fallacy’ when searching for meaning in the song. As with ‘Yesterday’, the personal circumstances of the composer’s life may have permeated the song’s atmosphere, independent of his conscious intentions. In a roundabout way, a dragonfly might be a rather apposite lyrical rendering of Lennon’s persona - there’s an exotic, restless and mercurial quality to both, and it’s a short syntactical jump from ‘dragonfly’ to ‘gadfly’ (someone who annoys you in such a way that you’re stimulated to action), a role that Lennon and McCartney certainly filled in each others’ lives. 

If the ‘Dragonfly’ section of the song is about the Lennon-McCartney relationship, how does the ‘Little Lamb’ section figure in this reading? Is that also about Lennon? It’s harder to make the argument convincingly: there’s little evidence that McCartney considered Lennon to be a helpless innocent in need of his protection, still less an indication that McCartney was inclined to provide it in 1970. I’m sure that McCartney recognised Lennon’s insecurities, but there’s none of Lennon’s jealousy, paranoia and manoeuvring present in the song’s lamb. Perhaps McCartney saw himself as the lamb left out in the cold by Lennon’s refusal to allow him ‘in’ any longer, though I’m unconvinced that a twenty-eight-year-old McCartney considered himself that helpless or vulnerable; in his contemporaneous songs, at least, he strikes a defiant attitude, drawing strength from within his family circle to push purposefully forward - a headstrong ram more than its tremulous infant.

No, if the ‘Little Lamb’ of the song is representative of any of the Beatles, it’s more likely to be the second-tier figures of Harrison and/or Starr, band-members who took a more passive (or passive-aggressive) role in the break-up and whose future seemed less assured (at least until the phenomenal success of All Things Must Pass). Until the end, McCartney would speak of Harrison as his ‘baby brother’, a description that some might find condescending but which also carried a measure of care and responsibility. This better-suits the cruel-but-kind way the singer draws boundaries: ‘I can help you out, but I cannot help you in.’ Such a reading of the song is open to the charge of speculation, but there’s nothing so very dreadful about speculating - it’s a way of playing gracefully with ideas. 

As potentially revealing (and enjoyable) as such biographical readings are, perhaps there are reasons for being a little wary of them too. One can have too much of a good thing. The same critics who warned us of the dangers of the ‘intentional fallacy’ also did the same for the closely-related ‘biographical fallacy’, which may be understood as ‘the unqualified conviction that one can read the author’s life from the work and vice versa … the business of wrenching passages out of context as evidence of the artist’s personal beliefs usually reveals more about the critic than about the artist.’ This is certainly true of Shakespeare studies, in which the Elizabethan playwright has become conveniently homosexual in queer theory and suitably nihilist in atheist readings. In more general terms, the danger of the biographical fallacy is that its emphasis on art as an extension of the artist neglects the powers of the imagination and the aesthetic conventions of form and genre. Perhaps this anecdote can illustrate the danger in a way that anchors abstract theory in creative practice:

A few years ago on Radio 4’s Front Row, Mark Lawson conducted a memorable interview with the author Sid Smith, who had won … [an] award for his book Something Like a House. Set in China during the Cultural Revolution, the novel was widely praised for its evocation of peasant life … Lawson, impressed by Smith’s depiction, asked if he spoke fluent Mandarin. Smith said no, he didn’t speak Chinese. Lawson asked if he had worked in China. No, he hadn’t. At this point Lawson became agitated. ‘But you’ve been to China,’ he said. There was a short pause, followed by Smith’s calm assertion that no, actually, he had never been to China … [Lawson] found China in the London Library, and from films, newspapers and the internet.

We need to be wary of assuming that all creativity is encoded memoir; Paul McCartney is quite capable of singing about something that doesn’t come directly from his personal experience - indeed, his imagination can do a lot of heavy lifting (think of character studies like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Another Day’). 

If you’re trying to steer clear of both the intentional fallacy and the biographical fallacy, how are you supposed to interpret a song like ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’? I think the answer lies in some of what literary theory sketches above - you pay attention to the powers of the imagination and you look to the conventions of form and genre for how the song works. A good rule of thumb is to compare the song to other songs and other works of art. You may not have to look very far. A comparison to ‘Three Legs’ (another McCartney song written at roughly the same time) reveals an intriguing connection in the way flies and flying are musically depicted. Both songs emphasise the brevity of the singer’s encounter with the nimble creature (‘Fly flies in, fly flies out’; ‘Dragonfly, fly by my window’) and both draw inspiration from flight to express a sense of boundless freedom. In ‘Three Legs’, this is achieved in the unconstrained ‘When I fly above the clouds’ section of the song; in ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’, it is the bridge connecting the song’s two halves that mimics flight in the pure joy of sound (‘La, la la la, la la la’). 

If we’re looking outside of the McCartney canon, perhaps a valuable comparison can be made to two of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). These works are generally conceived as lyric poems, but we know that Blake set them to music (as others have done) as well as depicting them visually in his illuminated manuscripts. With this in mind, it’s worth remembering that ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ was, at one time, intended for an animated film adaptation of Mary Tourtel’s Rupert Bear character, to which MPL obtained the rights in 1970. Both Blake’s and McCartney’s songs, then, were partially intended for a younger audience, despite subtle qualities appealing to the adult listener. Both are also multimodal works combining visual, musical and textual elements. 

Here is Blake’s song, ‘The Fly’ (from the Experience section of his book):

Little Fly Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush’d away.

Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?

For I dance And drink & sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life And strength & breath: And the want Of thought is death;

Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.

The singer of both Blake’s and McCartney’s songs identifies with a non-human other (a fly/dragonfly), and both use their encounter with the creature as a spur for some rather intense soul searching. There’s an extent to which neither singer raises their respective fly up to the level of human consciousness so much as they reduce themselves to ‘fly’ status: an incomprehension of situations that aren’t fully understood and over which the singer has little control emerges from both songs. There’s also an illogical or troubling quality to both that makes it hard to reconcile all their elements: in the case of Blake’s song, you’re left with the feeling that being a fly isn’t a good thing at all, despite the singer’s strained claim to happiness; in McCartney’s song, you wonder just what it is the singer wants from the dragonfly - he complains of the creature ‘hang[ing] around [his] door’ yet still appears to yearn for its presence (‘… fly by my window … come on home’). Make up your mind, McCartney. 

If we turn to ‘The Lamb’, one of Blake’s most celebrated songs of innocence, a more direct and revealing comparison might be achieved. It’s entirely possible that the education McCartney received at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys exposed him to the song, lodging the phrase ‘little lamb’ in his memory for later use (it’s commonly taught, and Alan ‘Dusty’ Durband’s A Level English Literature classes aren’t likely to have been the exception):

Little Lamb who made thee?      Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life and bid thee feed By the stream and o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice:      Little Lamb who made thee?      Dost thou know who made thee?

     Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,      Little Lamb I’ll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek and he is mild, He became a little child: I a child and thou a lamb, We are called by his name:      Little Lamb God bless thee.      Little Lamb God bless thee.

There are obvious differences between Blake’s and McCartney’s songs (Blake’s singer is a preternaturally wise child where McCartney’s appears to be an adult), though their shared use of the alliterative phrase ‘little lamb’ is striking enough to invite comparison. Both singers’ encounters with their respective lambs unlock their capacity for empathy, and both contain a deceptively complex spiritualism. Blake’s song appears childishly simple until you realise the double meaning of the final, repeated line: ‘Little Lamb, God bless thee / Little Lamb-God, bless thee.’ It’s just the kind of play on words that appeals to McCartney’s lyricism (‘This one / The swan’). In his song, the experience of suffering appears to unite the singer with the lamb, hinting at the same pantheism present in RAM’s ‘Heart of the country … where the holy people grow.’ It would be a stretch to call these songs of Christian faith, but they certainly borrow the iconography of Christianity for the sake of a little spiritual weight. Blake is more overt in his lamb-singer-God identity confusion, but he’s doing a version of the same thing: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

With both comparisons to William Blake in mind (Dragonfly and Lamb), perhaps this ramble can end by circling back to where it began: McCartney’s two different stories about the inspiration for ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’. Although both his anecdotes refer only to the shorter ‘Little Lamb’ section of the song, it may be appropriate for a song of two distinct halves to point in two different directions, towards both life and death. There’s something of this same division in Blake’s songs more generally, where those grouped together under the rubric of innocence exemplify the ‘soft-hearted’ care bestowed upon lambs by the McCartney family, while those demonstrating experience are plagued by similar doubts, difficulties and disappointments to those within McCartney’s 1974 story about the lamb’s death. 

Songs that combine musical fragments in the complementing-contrasting way of ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ have a tendency to resist a single definitive interpretation. With this in mind, I must admit to feeling rather like the singer of the ‘Little Lamb’ section in that I, too, have no answer for you. My intention, though, has been to ‘help you out’ by sketching the ways in which the frames of literary criticism reveal the richness and complexity of one of McCartney’s most affecting (though sometimes overlooked) songs.