Comment | I posted a comment about this in a July 2004 thread that seems to have been deleted from the archive, so I'll just quote myself, for the record:
The lines in the song refrain may look at first like innocent, nostalgic references to childhood, but they also have more ominous associations that reinforce the sadness of the father's absence.
A cat's cradle is a children's string game (Fadenspiel, as LEO says), but there was also an old wives' tale (superstition) that cats should be kept away from cradles because they were said to suffocate babies.
The spoon might be from the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle," but there's also an idiom "to be born with a silver spoon in one's mouth," which means to be born rich, to have everything handed to you on a silver platter and not know how to live or work independently.
"Little Boy Blue" is also a nursery rhyme, with similar lines about animals ("the sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn"). But "blue" also means sad or depressed, as the boy in the Chapin song is without his father. And "The Man in the Moon" is another Mother Goose nonsense rhyme, but the image also suggests how distant the father is, from his young son's point of view. |
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