Why Are You Sad, Little Birch lyrics and meaning

This sutartinė, with the refrain "lioj liūdela," can be understood as a song about sorrow whose true cause lies deeper than the surface. First the birch is asked why it is sad - whether it grieves for its branches or green leaves - but the birch answers that it grieves for neither. The answer suggests that the real reason for grief remains unspoken.

The same structure then passes to the brother, who does not grieve for his horse or saddle, and to the sister, who does not grieve for rue or her young days. This parallelism gradually approaches the heart of the matter: each figure denies the apparent reason, but the sorrow itself remains.

A second reading is that what each one claims not to grieve for is precisely what is being grieved. The sister says she does not mourn the rue or her young days, yet rue - the sign of maidenhood - and youth are exactly what she loses in marriage. The sutartinė can therefore be read as a lament hidden before a wedding: beneath denial lies grief for the end of girlhood and for the childhood home. The brother's horse and the birch's branches belong to the same field of farewell. The birch, like the sister, is one face of the same loss, while the refrain "liūdela" holds the whole song in a quiet tone of sadness.