I think that's probably right: Gay(ly) go up and down to ring the bells.
What's striking about this is that after that cheerful invocation at the beginning, the conversation of the bells quickly becomes a gloomy one about debt and disaster. Not by accident is it the Old Bailey who demands, menacingly, "When will you pay me?" Old Bailey isn't a church and never had any bells; it's the court where a debtor would be tried and condemned to the Fleet. The nearest church to it was the grimly named St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate. (Perhaps even Cockneys couldn't come up with a rhyme for Sepulchre that would scan.)
The song is a description not only of the principle parish churches of the eastern half of the city, but also of the poverty of its denizens. The final couplet, tacked on later, completes the underlying sense of crime, punishment, and retribution. Just as ring-around-the-rosy has the story of the Great Plague embedded in it.
So it's hard not to hear a certain irony in the introductory lines: Gay go up, and gay go down: your fate may rise with the upswing of the bell, but it will as surely sink on the downswing.
I also think it's interesting that the foundry that cast so many of London's bells was right there in Whitechapel--not, say, Hammersmith, which presumably also was a district with a forge.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-07-09 02:09 am (UTC)What's striking about this is that after that cheerful invocation at the beginning, the conversation of the bells quickly becomes a gloomy one about debt and disaster. Not by accident is it the Old Bailey who demands, menacingly, "When will you pay me?" Old Bailey isn't a church and never had any bells; it's the court where a debtor would be tried and condemned to the Fleet. The nearest church to it was the grimly named St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate. (Perhaps even Cockneys couldn't come up with a rhyme for Sepulchre that would scan.)
The song is a description not only of the principle parish churches of the eastern half of the city, but also of the poverty of its denizens. The final couplet, tacked on later, completes the underlying sense of crime, punishment, and retribution. Just as ring-around-the-rosy has the story of the Great Plague embedded in it.
So it's hard not to hear a certain irony in the introductory lines: Gay go up, and gay go down: your fate may rise with the upswing of the bell, but it will as surely sink on the downswing.
I also think it's interesting that the foundry that cast so many of London's bells was right there in Whitechapel--not, say, Hammersmith, which presumably also was a district with a forge.