Inexplicable Things Blog

Have you seen Jack in The Green 
with his long tail hanging down?

The above are the first two lines of the Jethro Tull song «Jack in the Green», a song that has been very dear to me since I first discovered it some twenty years ago. It was written by Ian Anderson and it’s something as rare as a positive song with a deep, multi-layered meaning of the kind that any literary analyst loves to work with. The rest of the first verse goes like this:

He quietly sits under every tree
in the folds of his velvet gown.

He drinks from the empty acorn cup
the dew that dawn sweetly bestows
And taps his cane upon the ground
signals the snowdrops it’s time to grow

Now, I won’t bore you with a literary analysis of this masterpiece. Instead, I will tell you a little bit about the main…