Love

Photo courtesy of cocoparisienne on Pixabay.com

My Grandma Elizabeth kept a couple dozen vintage songbooks stored in her piano bench. I’ve always been a sappy sentimentalist, and so as a young girl and through my teen years, I loved playing and singing those old sad love songs.

One of my favorites was “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,” by Irish poet Thomas Moore. Supposedly written in 1808 for his wife who had been scarred by smallpox, the poem professed his love for her whether or not she was still beautiful by the world’s standards.

The poem was set to an old Irish melody that also is the tune to Harvard’s alma mater, Fair Harvard.

If you listen to the beautiful instrumental version (link below) by violinist Jenny Oaks Baker, you can scroll the comments and see phrases such as BOOMMMM!!! Or Where’s the explosion?!  Those are random comments, right?

Well, as it turns out, not really.

For whatever reason (and really I can’t think of a single plausible one), the melody has been used in numerous Warner Brothers cartoons with one character trying to blow up another by rigging a piano or xylophone with explosives. The note for the words “young charms” has the TNT attached to it.

According to Wikipedia, “The gag is so well known that it is often called “The Xylophone Gag”.

You can watch several of the cartoons via the link below.

This is crazy. I have to wonder: Did someone at Warner Brothers hate this song so much they wanted to make a punch line of it? And why did they use the gag over and over?

And what’s crazier is that this isn’t even what I was going to write about tonight. So stay tuned for Saturday’s part two of “endearing young charms.”

~~~~~~~

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,

Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,

were to change by to-morrow, and flee from my arms

Like fairy-gifts, fading away!

Thou wouldst still be ador’d as this moment thou art,

Let thy loveliness fade as it will;

And, around the dear ruin, each wish of my heart

Would entwine itself verdantly still!

It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,

And thy cheeks unprofan’d by a tear,

That the fervour and faith of a love can be known,

To which time will but make thee more dear!

No! the heart that has truly lov’d, never forgets,

But as truly loves on to the close;

As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets,

The same look which she turn’d when he rose!

  • Thomas Moore

Beautiful instrumental version by Jenny Oaks Baker

Four Looney Toon cartoons all with the same premise