A Little Falcon Flew In lyrics and meaning

This song can be understood as a song about a broken promise of love. At the beginning, a little falcon flies through a green forest and strikes its wings against a dry fir. The falcon often marks a young man, and its flight begins the love narrative.

The young man tells the girl to look at the dry fir: when it begins to turn green, then she will be his. The greening of a dry fir is like an impossible condition, which can be read as a sign of long delay or even an unreachable promise. Yet the dry fir really does begin to green.

But the young man who loved her is gone. The girl asks whether he is beyond seas and lagoons, or whether he has begun to love other girls. The answer is painful: he is not beyond the seas, but has simply begun to love others. This turn can be understood as unfaithfulness and the breaking of a promise. This is one possible meaning, but the motif of deceived love is clear.

A second interpretation: the greening of the dry fir can be read as a traditional image of an "impossible condition," an adynaton. The young man promises to love only when something impossible happens, and thus, hiddenly, refuses the promise from the start. The ironic turn is that the dry fir does turn green; nature fulfills the impossible condition, but the young man still does not keep his word. In this reading the song speaks not only of accidental unfaithfulness, but of an intentionally empty promise that even nature seems to condemn. This remains an inference, but it explains why the condition is framed as apparently impossible.