Like most anonymous, orally-transmitted poems, this one
exists in multiple versions. A quick
Google search immediately turned up a few others, but the last line is the same
in all of them; the variants come in the middle (“A ship without a bell,”
instead of “belt,” for instance). Which
means that whatever parts of the poem those who learned it misremembered or
chose to alter, they all felt the force of that ending.
The phrase “Double deed” is worth brooding over. As others have pointed out, it makes us think
of “double dealing,” dishonest or unscrupulous action. It’s not too great a leap from there to think
of the seed as the “double deed” itself, the wrong act from which all the
ensuing consequences grow. In that sense,
the poem illustrates the familiar maxim that you reap just what you sow. But in
another sense any deed is double, for
along with its intended consequences, there will be others unforeseen—you may
reap what you did not even know you were sowing.
As falcon and Mishap 13 pointed out, there are a lot of folksongs with a similar digression-winding-back-around-to-the-beginning structure. In addition to the two they mentioned, there’s the one about the old woman who swallowed a fly. But although these others evoke a similar “butterfly effect,” by which an initial event produces remote consequences, the logic leading from step to step is clearer in all of them than in “The Man of Double Deed.” In “Hush, little baby,” each gift is a replacement for the last, which has in some way proved broken or unsatisfying. In “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly,” the first act is arbitrary (“I don’t know why she swallowed the fly”), but the others follow logically: each ingested creature is supposed to catch the last one, until the anxious refrain “perhaps she’ll die” is fulfilled.
But in “The Man of Double Deed,” the almost surrealistic
leaps of association, from snow to ship to birds to lion to stick to knife,
register as frantic attempts to leap free of the determinism that is grinding
the story toward its end. To the extent
that they follow a pattern, they move through images of dissolution (“melt”), flight across the sea
(the ship), then into the air (bird and eagle), only to fall back to earth and
to the the exact location (“door”) of the speaker, where the lion is waiting. If not chickens, then eagles coming home to
roost.
Another notable feature, common in folk songs, is the
unannounced shift from third to first person.
In this case, it performs the psychological plot of the poem, in that
the double-doer begins by fleeing the consequences of his action only to be
hunted down by them at the end. One
sense of “double” here is the dichotomy “I/he.”
The third person functions as an escape-mechanism, a disavowal: “I’m not this man, I’m just telling his story.” But at the moment that fate begins to
overtake him, the mask falls away, and “he” is revealed as “I.” (Sort of like those conversations where
someone begins, “A friend of mine has got a problem . . .,” and gradually one
infers that the “friend” has been invented to avoid the embarrassment of
confession.)
Most remarkable is the sheer ferocity of the ending, which
makes the triple return to deed feel
like three hammer-blows of a remorseless fate. This fierceness is not
surprising to anyone who knows the old ballads.
In the sixties we came to think of folk songs as left-leaning protest,
and in their unsparing depiction of the constrained lives of ordinary
agricultural—and later, industrial—workers, they often are. But whoever does something wrong in a ballad
is usually marked for death and destruction, often by supernatural means. The ballads favor, indeed sometimes delight
in, capital punishment. Here, punishment
is meted out with 50% interest (in stark contrast to my TIAA-CREF account these
days!): double deed, triple death.
