Father Went Away lyrics and meaning

This song can be understood as an orphan song that contrasts a cruel stepmother with a loving dead mother. At the beginning the father goes on a long journey and leaves his daughter still small, not yet grown. When he returns, he meets her walking along the main road.

The daughter says she is going to the little hill, to her mother's grave, and with bitter weeping asks her mother to rise and comb her hair. The father replies that she has a stepmother like a true mother. But the daughter reveals the stepmother's cruelty: when she combed, she tore the hair; when she put on the shirt, she broke the little arms; when she girded the belt, she pressed the heart.

In contrast, the daughter remembers her real mother: when she combed, she stroked the braids, seated the child on her knees, kissed her cheeks, and the heart was light. This contrast can be read as the painful lot of an orphan, where the stepmother's cruelty is measured against the mother's love. That is one possible meaning, but the opposition between stepmother and dead mother is clear.

A second interpretive layer is also possible. The repeated actions, combing, putting on a shirt, and girding with a belt, are not only ordinary daily acts; they are acts of dressing and preparing, associated in Lithuanian tradition with a girl's maturation and with preparing a bride. From this angle the song can also be read as a song about a girl's transitional age: without her mother, there is no one to dress her and accompany her into adult womanhood, and in the stepmother's hands the same gestures of accompaniment become injury. This remains a hypothesis, but it explains why the song so carefully repeats exactly these dressing gestures.