Listen to the track:
Cut Short
Cut Short is a modern song inspired by one of the most haunting poems of the Elizabethan age, Tichborne’s Elegy.
Chidiock Tichborne was a young English Catholic born around 1562. In 1586 he became involved in the Babington Plot, a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The plot was uncovered, and Tichborne was arrested, tried for treason and condemned to death.
While imprisoned in the Tower of London, knowing that he had only hours left to live, Tichborne wrote a final letter to his wife, Agnes. With it he included the poem now usually known as Tichborne’s Elegy. He was executed at Tyburn on 20 September 1586, aged only about 24.
The poem is extraordinary because it dwells not simply on death, but on a life ending before it has properly begun. Youth becomes “a frost of cares”, a hoped-for crop becomes “a field of tares”, and the day is already over although he has never seen the sun. Its most memorable contradiction is devastating:
“And now I live, and now my life is done.”
Cut Short takes those thoughts and places them in a modern song. Rather than retelling the politics of 1586, it imagines the emotions behind the poem in language a listener today might use: the expectation of thousands of mornings still to come, roads never travelled, words never spoken, and the simple wish for one more ordinary day.
More than four centuries separate the song from Tichborne, but the idea at its heart has hardly aged at all: the terrible realisation that there should have been more time.
[Verse 1]
I thought there would be time enough
For all the things I meant to do
A thousand mornings waiting there
A thousand roads to wander through
But evening came before my day
And all those roads have gone away
I’m counting hours I thought were years
While I’m still here
[Chorus]
And now I live
And now my life is done
I had the sky
But never saw the sun
I had a heart
With years enough to give
How can it end
While I still live?
[Verse 2]
My leaves are green, my fruit has fallen
I’m young enough to still grow old
There are words still left inside me
That now will never all be told
I’ve seen the world through open windows
But never found where I belonged
The thread was cut before the story
Could become a song
[Chorus]
And now I live
And now my life is done
I had the sky
But never saw the sun
I had a heart
With years enough to give
How can it end
While I still live?
[Bridge]
If I could have one ordinary morning
One door to open, nowhere I must be
I wouldn’t ask for heaven or forgiveness
Just one more day
That still belonged to me
[Final Chorus]
And now I live
And now my life is done
I had the sky
But never saw the sun
I had a name
I had so much to give
How can I die
While I still live?
[Outro]
My thread is cut
Before it has been spun
And now I live
And now my life is done