{"id":18573,"date":"2023-05-18T20:30:29","date_gmt":"2023-05-19T03:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18573"},"modified":"2025-08-12T09:23:52","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T16:23:52","slug":"kiss-me-out-of-the-bearded-barley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2023\/05\/18\/kiss-me-out-of-the-bearded-barley\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cKiss me out of the bearded barley\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Sometime in the past year or two, I was listening to the Sixpence None the Richer song \u201cKiss Me,\u201d and got curious about the line \u201cKiss me, out of the bearded barley\u201d; I wasn\u2019t sure what it meant.<\/p>\r\n

(Edited to add in 2025: When I said \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure what it meant,\u201d the main thing I meant was: I don\u2019t know what it means to kiss someone \u201cout of\u201d something. If the line were \u201ckiss me out of the corn field\u201d I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t know what else the phrase out of<\/i> might mean.)<\/p>\r\n

I poked around online to find out more; I think that all I found was the annotation on genius.com<\/a>, which notes that bearded barley is a \u201cwheat-like plant which has overgrown and its ready for harvest.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

But just now, I was skimming a 1936 Dylan Thomas story, \u201cThe School for Witches,\u201d and came across a paragraph in which the satanic witch girls are doing some sort of a ceremony, I think, led by the doctor\u2019s daughter:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Now say, said the doctor\u2019s daughter, Rise up out of the bearded barley. Rise out of the green grass asleep in Mr. Griffith\u2019s dingle. [\u2026] 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.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n

Especially because the next line in the song is \u201cNightly, beside the green, green grass,\u201d which seems like it could be a bowdlerized version of the abovequoted Thomas line \u201cSwive me out of the green grass\u201d; or possibly the line in the song could have been written by someone who doesn\u2019t know that the verb to swive<\/i> refers to having sex.<\/p>\r\n

But now I\u2019m wondering whether the \u201cbearded barley\u201d 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\u2019t have expected them to quote from this particular story.<\/p>\r\n

Edited in 2025 to add: I\u2019m closing comments on this post, because I\u2019m tired of getting comments from people who didn\u2019t understand the post.<\/p>\r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lyrics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18573"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18693,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18573\/revisions\/18693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}