'Paid on Both Sides' by W H Auden - SKYFALL's literary roots

After listening to BBC Radio 4, I found this blog entry:

Quote :

On skyfall
A correspondent from BBC Radio 4's Front Row calls to ask whether I have any views about the name of the new James Bond movie, Skyfall. Had I ever heard the word before?

I certainly had. Thanks to various children, I am aware of characters in Transformers universes with this name, and I recall an adventure fantasy from the 1980s which had a planet called Skyfall. And there was a striking use by W H Auden, in the charade (his first dramatic work) he wrote in 1928 and dedicated to Cecil Day Lewis, 'Paid on Both Sides', which has the vivid lines:

"Though heart fears all heart cries for, rebuffs with mortal beat
Skyfall, the legs sucked under, adder's bite."

But apart from this, the coinage seems a somewhat predictable compound. Other words ending in fall in English are unremarkable - rainfall, snowfall, waterfall, and suchlike, alongside figurative extensions such as pitfall, landfall, and shortfall. It does lend itself to cosmic invention, though: a quick search on Google produces starfall, moonfall, planetfall, sunfall, and others. So skyfall is in good company. But we'll have to wait and see what motivates the title in this case.

I'm wondering if it's 'James Bond meets Chicken Licken'. You remember him? An acorn falls on his head, and he thinks the sky is falling down so he rushes off to tell the king? Maybe the new Bond baddy is Foxy Loxy in disguise.

http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-skyfall.html

This was posted by David Crystal, the lexicographer who was called by Mark Lawson on yesterday's Front Row. You can listen to it here on the BBC iPlayer, from around 24 minutes in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016ljjb/Front_Row_Anthony_Horowitz_on_Sherlock_Holmes_Skyfall/

An interesting fact - counting A VIEW TO A KILL and DIE ANOTHER DAY, it will the third Bond title to have some forbearance in a song or poem.

Cumberland hunting song titled "D'Ye Ken John Peel" - written by John Woodcock Graves in 1820.

"From the drag to the chase
from the chase to the view
from the view to a death
in the morning..."

Ian Fleming simply modified "from the view to a death" into "From a View to a Kill."

"Into My Heart an Air That Kills" from A.E. Houseman's poem cycle - A Shropshire Lad

"But since the man that runs away / Lives to die another day".

Neil Purvis & Robert Wade almost quote the last line ad verbatim in Bond's confrontation with Graves/Moon.

Very good.

Indeed, clever fellow.

Amazing what people will subject to scholarly analysis. Not that I mind, of course. Just slightly bemusing in a charming sort of way.

You pointing the finger at me?

I would never point the finger at the messenger.