Blood//Water by Grandson and Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl

Lamb to the Slaughter was a famous short story written by Roald Dahl in 1953 published in the 1953 edition of the Harper’s Magazine. It describes the theme of revenge from misgiven emotions experienced after a heart-breaking event such as a break-up or death.

Lamb to the Slaughter is a story about Mary Maloney who is pregnant with a child and her husband Patrick Maloney, who have a talk after Patrick comes home for work. The conflict results in the pair breaking up. Mary, infuriated at the turn of events refuses to let Patrick go and takes a large and heavy leg of lamb and uses it as a weapon to murder her husband.

The story then follows an irregular plot line with several difficulties based around Mary hiding the evidence from the police and detectives. She cleans herself up, hides the weapon by cooking the lamb, creates a fake alibi with the grocer Sam, and in the end, makes the police and detectives themselves eat the lamb and dispose of the weapon. She giggles and watches in amusement as she has deceived the detectives into destroying their own case.

Now listening to a song called “Blood//Water” by Grandson after annotating, reading, or analysing this story causes several links to be formed and makes the reader question just how symbolic and representative of the story the song really is.

Blood//Water was written by the Canadian American songwriter ‘Grandson’ in 2018. The song is made up of octaves and has an irregular rhyme scheme pattern that differs across the stanzas. All the chorus stanzas (I.e., Stanzas 1,3,5) follow the ABCBABCB rhyme scheme. The 2nd stanza follows an AABACDCD scheme. The 4th stanza follows an ABCBDEDE scheme. Lastly, the 6th stanza follows an ABCBDEFE rhyme scheme pattern.

The song reads:

We'll never get free Lamb to the slaughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water? The price of your greed Is your son and your daughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water?

Look me in my eyes Tell me everything's not fine For the people ain't happy And the river has run dry You thought you could go free But the system is done for If you listen real closely There's a knock at your front door

We'll never get free Lamb to the slaughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water? The price of your greed Is your son and your daughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water?

When there's blood in the When there's blood in the

Beg me for mercy Admit you were toxic You poisoned me just for Another dollar in your pocket Now I am the violence I am the sickness Won't accept your silence Beg me for forgiveness

We'll never get free Lamb to the slaughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water? The price of your greed Is your son and your daughter What you gon' do When there's blood in the water?

When there's blood in the water

When there's blood in the

I am the people I am the storm I am the riot I am the swarm When the last tree's fallen The animal can't hide Money won't solve it What's your alibi?

What's your alibi?

What's your alibi?

What you gon' do when there's blood in the, blood in the water? When there's blood in the water When there's blood in the When there's blood in the water

Turquoise = Inferential Similarities

No highlight = Explicit similarities

Pink = Refrain

Now looking at the annotation, we can see several verses of similarities between the song and events of the story. Some of these references require inferring from other parts of the text while some are quite explicit.

No highlights show explicit similarities to the story.

One such instance of this is the first two lines of the song compared to the climax of the story. The climax of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is when Mary Maloney kills her husband Patrick using a leg of lamb after he refuses to stay for dinner and promptly wants to leave to go somewhere. This event is represented through the first two lines of the song. They read:

“We’ll never get free, Lamb to slaughter”

This displays how Mary feels and how she won't let Patrick leave her. It also shows the title of the story which ironically relates to how a leg of lamb was used as a weapon for murder, hence ‘Lamb to the Slaughter.’

Another example of this is the 4 stanza of the song which follows the chorus and drop. It reads:

Beg me for mercy Admit you were toxic You poisoned me just for Another dollar in your pocket Now I am the violence I am the sickness Won't accept your silence Beg me for forgiveness

This stanza depicts Mary Maloney ordering Patrick to beg for her mercy and admit he was wrong to leave his faithful wife. The 3 and 4 lines represent Patrick leaving his wife and ruining her life just to make his job and position better. The last 4 lines of the stanza describe that Mary is the conflict and problems of his life and not his job, and now, she won’t stay low and accept his reluctance to be with her.

Blue highlights represent inferential similarities to the short story. These similarities can have several interpretations and require a little extra thinking to discover.

One such instance of this is seen in stanza 1, lines 3 and 4. They read:

For the people ain't happy And the river has run dry

These lines can be interpreted in several diverse ways, hence being categorised into the inferential similarities group.

The first of these lines could signify how Patrick’s superiors are not happy with his standards in his relationship and want more focus on his job. Hence, ‘the people’ can be represented in the story as the bosses of Patrick’s station. They are not pleased with the fact that Patrick may not be able to perform his best at work due to Mary’s pregnancy.

Another interpretation of this line could be that ‘the people’ represents Mary and the unborn child they have had. This would lead the use of the phrase ‘not happy’ to relate to how mother-and-child would suffer due to the absence of a supporting father, hence their sadness and unhappiness.

The second line can also be interpreted in several ways.

One such interpretation is that ‘the river’ represents Mary’s tears and ‘has run dry’ represents how she has lost her regret in being unfaithful to Patrick. This line could be describing how after the confession, Mary lost the ability to tame her emotions and broke out in tears. However, after refusing to let him go, her tears stopped, and with no mercy, she made sure, in any form, to never let Patrick leave her, in this case, the form of murder.

Another interpretation of this line could be that the river could represent the bond flowing between Mary and Patrick. With this interpretation, we can say that their bond has run dry after the breakup conflict, and now, their emotions are misgiven and unpredictable.

Another instance of an inferential similarity is seen in the refrained line of the poem which reads:

When there's blood in the water?

This line requires a little more linking and inferencing to discover the relationship between the two pieces of writing.

We can associate the two terms blood and water to abstract ideas or look at their properties to create an inferential meaning.

We could say blood can represent violence and anger while water represents peacefulness and tranquillity. This leads us to believe that this line represents how violence can easily over-power peacefulness, correlating to how the peaceful relationship between Patrick and Mary was easily destroyed through the unrelenting power of violence and anger.

We could also interpret this line in another way by looking at the properties of these 2 liquids. By looking at the viscosity of the two liquids, we can also create an inferential meaning. Water flows very easily, hence could represent how the serenity of water can provide everlasting and flourishing bonds. However, blood flows even easier, describing how the flow of violence can easily over the flow of peace.

In short, Lamb to the Slaughter has been represented through various lines of the song, Blood//Water. The songwriter, Grandson has made no claims on the relationship of these two pieces however, as decoded by me, we can certainly say, this song has taken a little bit of inspiration from the famous short story.

:)