"safe & sound"
The couplet "and I will do all those things / that I would have done unto me" seems to be a reference to the Golden Rule. "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets" - Matthew 7:12."dad"
This is where most my re-sparked interest lay, specifically in the line "you never gave us stones, we only ate bread." I'd always thought that, following the Matthew 7 reference in "safe & sound," this was based on Matthew 7:9-10: "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?" But then while reading Lord Byron's Don Juan, I came across a reference to Saturn:
One system eats another up, and thisI also looked up Saturn in Edith Hamilton's Mythology. She explains that
Much as old Saturn ate his progeny;
For when his pious consort gave him stones
In lieu of sons, of these he made no bones (Canto 14, stanza 1, lines 5-8)
Cronos [the Greek name for Saturn] had learned that one of his children was destined some day to dethrone him and he thought to go against fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born. But when Rhea [his wife] bore Zeus, her sixth child, she succeeded in having him secretly carried off to Crete, while she gave her husband a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he supposed was the baby and swallowed down accordingly.Later in "dad," there's the line "you'd have to eat the veins and arteries too," which seems more relevant to the story of Saturn than the Matthew text. I still can't seem to make much sense of it, but running across that reference to Saturn in Don Juan has at least showed me that there's more to "dad" than I originally thought.
