The Decemberists/WMG: Difference between revisions

* Colin is specific to a fault when it comes to the chronology of both songs, I've figured out that it works very well together: at 18, the Rake seduces the three-year-old Mariner's mother, bankrupts her and gives her a fatal case of tuberculosis before fleeing. Then at 21, he marries and has four children, the last of whom, Myfanwy, is stillborn and her mother dies in childbirth. By this time he'd be about 25, assuming the pregnancies happened in quick succession, although it's possible that Charlotte and Dawn were twins. Presumably, his lack of desire to remain a father after his wife dies causes him to kill his children, and then he kidnaps Margaret. Although his children's ghosts haunt him at the end of The Hazards Of Love, it is never mentioned that he dies, so he could have gone to the sea and eventually become "the captain of [a] ship...known for wanton cruelty." Meanwhile, the Mariner is 18 when he overhears the confession in the church where he works that reveals the Rake's location to him, and he spends 20 months sailing toward him, making the Mariner 19 or 20 when they meet again, and the Rake 34 or 35—and that's where they have the duel to the death in the whale's belly after being swallowed! (copy-pasted from when I wrote it on the Just Bugs Me page)

 

* It may have even been that same shipwreck that sent ol' Sweeney pitching on the waves in the first place. ''He'' was actually the lone survivor. (Dying in a whale's stomach two hours after the wreck does not count as surviving.)