Blue Little Dove lyrics and meaning

This song can be understood as a song about the loss of freedom, perhaps with a hidden allegory. At the beginning the blue little dove is asked who shot it, and the yellow little crucian carp is asked who caught it. These questions can be read as a lament over free creatures that have been captured.

The answer is that the brother shot the dove with a gun, and the sister caught the crucian carp with a silk net. The fact that close kin are the ones who capture them may be understood as a hint at a girl being sent out of the home, a human fate often concealed in songs under the images of a bird or fish.

A cuckoo gathers the dove's blue feathers, and a pike gathers the crucian carp's golden scales; both times the song laments that it would have been better for the dove to fly through the forest and for the crucian carp to dive in the water. This regret may be read as setting freedom above capture. This is one possible meaning, but the motif of lost freedom is clear in the song.

A second interpretive version is also possible. The song may be read as a ballad-like lament for youth cut short too early, not only as a marriage allegory. The shot bird and caught fish would then be images of a young life stopped at the height of beauty, while the gathering of feathers and scales would recall the keeping of memory after loss. The final stanza supports such a reading, because it mourns not simply capture but the lost possibility of flying and diving, that is, living freely. This remains only a possible meaning, but it explains why the song so persistently returns to images of free movement.