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Sufjan Stevens: “Casimir Pulaski Day”

I’m still trying to figure out why Sufjan Stevens’ Casmir Pulaski Day hits me like a ton of bricks every time I hear it. (Click through to watch the video.)

Here are the lyrics.

The song is about a young guy whose girlfriend died of bone cancer. Actually, it’s not clear whether the dead girl, to whom the song is addressed, was really the singer’s girlfriend, or just someone he tentatively felt up and obsessed about thereafter. As Majikthise commenters have pointed out below, it’s clear that there was a lot of mutual affection between the two of them, it’s just not clear whether exactly what kind of relationship they had.

Casimir Pulaski Day is the first Monday in March, an American regional holiday to honor a hero of the Revolutionary War known as “The Father of American Cavalry.” In today’s parlance, the revered CP would probably be described as a “foreign fighter,” but that’s almost certainly irrelevant to Sujan’s song.

Anyway, I think I like the song because it’s about someone who believes in God trying to reconcile his faith with reality. The singer is confused about why his God is taking his girlfriend away, even though he and his friends are praying for her.

There’s a complementary minor theme about the dead girl’s father freaking out about her interest in the singer ("when your father found out what we did that night"). It’s almost as if her father has, as an article of faith, the notion that his little girl is a pure, asexual being. Really as the narrator seems to makes clear, she’s a normal young woman dying of cancer who, who might well know that she doesn’t have much time. Yet this fact doesn’t make her father any more reasonable.

To me, the last four stanzas of the song are the most interesting:

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window

Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes

The narrator is describing how, on the morning of his girlfriend’s death, a cardinal hits the window. In the last two stanzas, the singer is is seeing God in the bird’s blood spattered on the window, but he can’t accept that this God he sees on the spattered pane is a god of love or mercy.

[x-posted at Majikthise]

Posted by on 07/14 at 11:29 AM

  1. Apropos of nothing--my hometown of Stevens Point, Wi has a bust of Pulaski in a small park. The town is extensively polish. There are no pulaski s\day celebrations, however

    Posted by  on  07/14  at  02:50 PM

  2. Couldn’t really be more different from Big Black’s “Kasimir S. Pulaski Day.” Well, I guess there is spattered blood in both.

    Posted by  on  07/15  at  01:13 PM

  3. This is my favorite Sufjan Stevens song. Kind of by far (and I love the rest of Illinois, and Michigan for that matter).

    Posted by  on  07/16  at  12:20 PM

  4. To be honest, the line about the cardinal hitting the window damn near ruins the song for me, but now that I think about it, it embodies Steven’s unique failure as an artist:

    He doesn’t know when to stop.  It’s what causes some of his songs to sound burdened by an orchestraton the melody and/or lyrics don’t warrant.  In this song, the line about the cardinal smacks of an MFA seminar plot contrivance; you know, the thing that makes the point the author’s already made, only obviously, and through metaphor.  Because we’re making art here, people!

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the album, fully appreciate the irony which usually works--the tenderness of the Gacy song springs to mind--but I wish someone would grab him by the shoulders and plead, or better yet, tie him to a chair and “compel” him to not include anymore brass in that song, or winds in that other one, &c.

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  07/16  at  02:44 PM

  5. Scott, I share you ambivalence about the cardinal imagery. To me, the fact that the cardinal is the state bird of Illinois is partially mitigating.

    “CP Day” is from a concept album about Illinois. So, for me, learning that the bird was an explicit Illinois tie-in made the symbolism seem a little more ironic and a little less heavy-handed.

    Posted by  on  07/16  at  05:42 PM

  6. I suppose that information about cardinals mitigates it somewhat, but at the same time, it also suggests that he had sat down with a list of facts about Illinois and panicked when he realized the state bird hadn’t made an appearance, so he tried to find some way to work it into “CP Day.”

    Unless, that is, unless he wanted the bird somehow associated with Illinois, as if it were the state which passed away the same day ... but that’s even worse.  Unless he thought the state somehow culpable for the cancer itself or the poverty of available/affordable treatments.  That’s no good either ...

    The shorter version: upon reflection, too many of his catchy, haunting songs rely on lyrics that suggest depth but which, upon examination, reveal vanilla cleverness.  (Obviously, if I didn’t love the song, this wouldn’t bother me nearly so much.  Consider my annoyance indicative of my feelings about what these flaws detract from, not an indictment of the song itself or your account of it.)

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  07/16  at  06:34 PM

  7. I must admit, I have a soft spot for vanilla cleverness.

    Any thoughts on what Stevens is getting at with the reference to the Navy Yard? (The singer says that his girlfriend’s dad drove his car to the Navy Yard “just to prove that he was sorry.")

    Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein  on  07/16  at  07:05 PM

  8. I’m not sure what the significance of the Navy yard is, but I know that it’s significant to the narrator, not the dead woman.  At least, I think I know that.  It’s a tough call, though, since there’s so much we don’t know about its narrative.

    The narrator’s gender, for one.  The significance of the title: Sufjan names it after a celebrated cavalry man, then lending the plaintive voice to a trumpet, as if the narrator expects a divine cavalry to arrive, when all it can do is lament.  The trumpeting which accompanies the cavalry’s charge should signal the arrival of hope, “a fighting chance.” The cavalry’s the deus ex machina of every old war movie, which evokes a cavalry/Calvary pun.  Jesus died on Calvary so that He could come back and lead the cavalry, right? 

    Then there’s the ambiguous time stamps: Pulaski Day (March 1st); a Tuesday night after she’s sick; a Sunay night after she’s died; not to mention all those mornings.  And the events without markers are still events, which forces us to put them in the timeline too.  Only who knows where to?  If I had to put money on it, I’d say the narrator meets the father “in the Navy yard” after the young woman’s death, which means the actual lyric could be “to the Navy Yard,” which would be in Brooklyn or outside of D.C., and thus, in the father’s mind, an appropriately penitential ride from Ohio. 

    To be honest, the songs always been confusingly affective.  The first time I heard the lines “When your father found out, what we did last night,” I flashed back to that scene in Say Anything when Diane Court arrives home after staying out all night with Lloyd ... which suggests ugly father-daughter vibes.  But when I listen to the song as a whole, it strikes me as a Midwest, lesbian romance with a Catholic angle.  (And a “what’s that thing glowing in the briefcase” pronoun “it” on “the card where [she] wrote it out.")

    Sure, sure, I could’ve just said “No,” but what fun is that?

    Finally, should we continue this at your place?  Seems like there’s more of a crowd there.

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  07/16  at  08:52 PM

  9. Scott, thanks for a fascinating analysis. I really appreciate it. The cavalry/Calvary pun hadn’t occurred to me.

    I agree about the negative father/daughter vibes. I always wondered what the girl said she was afraid of, especially in light of the singer’s earlier disclosure that her father showed up at the Navy Yard to prove that he was sorry. It seems like a your average dad (even your average distant/abusive dad), wouldn’t have to prove that he was sorry that his daughter had bone cancer.

    When I hear the line about the Navy Yard, I’m always reminded about my time in Boston, where the Navy Yard was in sight of Mass General Hospital. I can imagine someone driving to the Navy Yard and looking over at the hospital. I’m sure this has nothing to do with “CP Day”, but when I hear the song, I can’t help envisioning a station wagon in the parking lot of the Navy Yard where I used to work.

    Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein  on  07/16  at  09:30 PM

  10. I appreciate the compliment, I only wish it’d been an analysis (and grammatical, for that matter).  I’ve numerous, scattered theories about how the songs work, since Sufjan challenged us with a puzzle of an album.

    For instance, I’m not sure whether it’s significant that the first 4-H Club was founded Jessie Field Shambaugh in Goldenrod, Iowa.  That would seem to place the song, or some part of its narrative, in Iowa. But my problem, here as elsewhere, is that I seek significance beyond the edge of interpretation.  I could make a convincing case for that first line indicating that his/her gifts were supposed to remind him/her of Iowa ... but at the same time, I could call the conjunction of “goldenrod” and “4-H” a coincidence.  I can’t figure what’s meaningful from the nonsense, which is part of what I admire about Stevens, really. 

    And not just Stevens.  David Foster Wallace frequently outwits me, as does George Saunders.  I I ain’t that bright—nor am I fishing—but with them, I feel the archness in the service of a higher purpose ... which is why I’m disappointed when I can successfully identify a “clever” line in a Stevens’ song.  If it’s really that clever, it should be beyond the comprehension of a hammering dolt like me.

    Or it should aim for the heart, not the head.  I still can’t bust that image from “Here Comes a Regular”: “a picture from a fridge never stocked with food” is nonsensical in all the right ways, a gut-shot in all the others.

    Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman  on  07/16  at  11:48 PM

  11. I have to disagree with the line-
    “And the complications when I see his face
    In the morning in the window”
    -being a reference to the birds blood on the window that you suggested. He says in the morning, I believe, referring to the morning of the funeral (cp day) which he sings about before the above quotation. If he is at a funeral I’m guessing he is in a church and that leads me to believe he is looking at a stain glass painting of Jesus. I say this because the morning of her death (if it even was in the morning) and the morning of her funeral are different days. I know I’m being knit-picky but hey it changes the tone of what you were saying.

    a comment also on the line about the woman telling the narrator she was scared...I believe she is saying she is scared of dying and the whole bone cancer ordeal.

    Posted by  on  01/27  at  01:56 AM

  12. I’m really amazed to read “Casimir Pulaski Day” song. I like this song because it’s about someone who believes in God trying to settle his faith with actuality. Thanks a lot smile

    Posted by Ben smith  on  04/18  at  12:34 PM

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