“Kiss me out of the bearded barley”

Filed under: Lyrics
6 Comments

Sometime in the past year or two, I was listening to the Sixpence None the Richer song “Kiss Me,” and got curious about the line “Kiss me, out of the bearded barley”; I wasn’t sure what it meant.

(Edited to add in 2025: When I said “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” the main thing I meant was: I don’t know what it means to kiss someone “out of” something. If the line were “kiss me out of the corn field” I wouldn’t know what that meant either. Is one person standing in a stand of bearded barley and leaning out of it to do the kissing? Are they both in amongst the bearded barley and the kissing drives the second one out? Neither of those seem plausible, but I don’t know what else the phrase out of might mean.)

I poked around online to find out more; I think that all I found was the annotation on genius.com, which notes that bearded barley is a “wheat-like plant which has overgrown and its ready for harvest.”

But just now, I was skimming a 1936 Dylan Thomas story, “The School for Witches,” and came across a paragraph in which the satanic witch girls are doing some sort of a ceremony, I think, led by the doctor’s daughter:

Now say, said the doctor’s daughter, Rise up out of the bearded barley. Rise out of the green grass asleep in Mr. Griffith’s dingle. […] The devil kisses me, said the girl cold in the centre of the kitchen. Kiss me out of the bearded barley. Kiss me out of the bearded barley. The girls giggled in a circle. Swive me out of the green grass. Swive me out of the green grass. Can I put on my clothes now? said the young witch, after encountering the invisible evil.

So I did some further poking around, and found a couple of articles that variously claim that Sixpence wrote the song after reading a Dylan Thomas poem or a Dylan Thomas story. So I thought they must have gotten it from this story.

Especially because the next line in the song is “Nightly, beside the green, green grass,” which seems like it could be a bowdlerized version of the abovequoted Thomas line “Swive me out of the green grass”; or possibly the line in the song could have been written by someone who doesn’t know that the verb to swive refers to having sex.

But now I’m wondering whether the “bearded barley” line also appears in a Thomas poem (as well as in this story), because this story is full of satanic witch stuff, and I gather that Sixpence is an explicitly Christian band, so I wouldn’t have expected them to quote from this particular story.

Edited in 2025 to add: I’m closing comments on this post, because I’m tired of getting comments from people who didn’t understand the post.

The main point of this post was to explore the origin of an odd and somewhat ambiguous phrase in a song. I had found a possible origin for the phrase, but it seemed odd to me that these particular songwriters would be quoting the particular story that I had found.

6 Responses to ““Kiss me out of the bearded barley””

  1. Andrina Westerdale

    Thanks for this interesting piece. Song lyrics can be endlessly fascinating

  2. janeyzusak

    I absolutely love this song! The bearded barley line was stuck in my head, so I started wondering what it meant exactly. Thank you for sharing this. Now I’m interested in reading The School for Witches lol

  3. Jeff Paris

    There’s nothing ambiguous about “kiss me out of the bearded barley.”
    Lovers are walking on a moonlight night through a field of Barley and out onto green grass, going to or coming from a dance.
    it describes an exquisite moment of connection not unlike “when the stars turn blue” by the Coors.

    • Nathan R. Earley

      I agree. It’s a specifically vague story in this song, but it’s just sixpence’s experience or writing of a girl having an experience with her lover. Nothing dark or evil or sacrificial about it imho

  4. SallyMJ

    Bearded barley refers to a type of barley plant that has long, bristle-like awns (or beards) extending from the seed head. These are very normal lyrics. Nothing vaguely satanic or suspicious here. That shouldn’t be your standard mindset when you evaluate anything in writing. If you don’t understand something, look up the straight meaning first.

  5. Jed

    Re ambiguity: I’ve now belatedly added a paragraph explaining what I found ambiguous. The ambiguity wasn’t “IS THIS SONG … SATANIC?????” It was Dylan Thomas’s phrase out of (quoted in the song), which I find confusing; I still don’t know what it means to kiss someone or swive someone “out of” a plant or a field of plants.

    Re satanism: A couple of commenters drastically misunderstood my post. I of course wasn’t claiming that the Christian (I think) band Sixpence None the Richer is satanic, nor that the song is satanic. I was saying that it’s odd and interesting that a Christian band would choose to write a sweet romantic song that appeared to quote from a short story that focuses on satanic witch girls having sex.

    The Dylan Thomas story absolutely 100% does include satanic witch girls having sex. The song does not. Thus, either the songwriters removed a couple of lines from this satanic-witch-girl context and put them in an entirely different context (which seems to me like an odd thing to do, especially for a Christian band), or I’m wrong about the origin of the lines in the song and they came from somewhere else, such as a different Dylan Thomas work, or a different work that was quoting the Dylan Thomas story.

    Anyway, I’m annoyed enough by the last couple of comments here that I’ve decided to close comments on this post.

Comments are closed.