Mitchell - Magdalene Laundries

I'm going to start musing on song lyrics on the blog. More often than not, they carry lots of meaning and cultural reference and seem a perfect subject for a mini analysis and a fun way of deepening the knowledge of languages and cultures. First in the series: Joni Mitchell - Magdalene Laundries.

Recorded in late 1990s, Magdalene Laundries gently tells a poignant story of an unnamed woman sent to a Magdalene asylum, a corrective institution operated by religious orders, under the auspices of the Catholic Church in Ireland, for about 150 years before they were closed down in the 1990s in the aftermath of a national scandal that revealed the extent of injustice and inhumanity meted out to its inmates. Outrageous practices were laid bare in a subsequent inquiry into systematic abuse of "fallen women" incarcerated in the asylums and "sentenced into dreamless drudgery", like laundry work, in an attempt to keep them away from the evil they were supposedly inclined to embrace. Depicted in the Magdalene Sisters, featuring stories of "prostitutes and destitutes, fallen women, jezabels and temptresses", the laundries have stained the reputation of the Church in Ireland and shaken the public out of unconditional trust towards Caholicism. Indeed, the song's wording is unrelenting in its assault on the nuns running the business:
"These bloodless brides of Jesus
If they had just once glimpsed their groom
Then they'd know, and they'd drop those stones
Concealed behind their rosaries
They wilt the grass they walk upon
They leech the light out of a room"

But it's not bile and social criticism that tears your heart out when you listen, it's the tragedy, individual here, multiplied by thousands if you know the thing was systemic, the girl had gone through at the hands of the "brides of Jesus". It reads like a page from a diary, really, penned late at night, in dim light so that no one can see, with the gloomy clarity of someone who knows her life has been wasted and doomed:
"One day I'm going to die here too
And they'll plant me in the dirt
Like some lame bulb
That never blooms come any spring
Not any spring"

Heart-wrenching. A powerful rendition of the song by Emmylou Harris can be found at the Tribute to Joni Mitchell album.