Bert Jansch / The Black Swan / 2006
The Old Triangle
melancholy, weary, quietly desperate
This is a cover of the traditional Irish prison ballad most associated with Brendan Behan's play, here rendered by Jansch in his spare, unadorned folk-guitar style. The song is a first-person account of a night and day inside a Dublin jail, built around a repeated image of a warder's triangle bell marking the hours along the Royal Canal.
confinement longing and separation institutional cruelty the passage of time working-class Dublin life
Who's speaking
An unnamed male prisoner narrates in first person, addressing no one in particular but effectively confiding in the listener; the voice is plaintive and resigned rather than defiant, and can be trusted as a direct, unembellished account of prison routine.
What happens
The song moves through a single day and night in a cell: waking hungry to vermin and a barked order from a guard, watching gulls over the prison wall in the evening, lying awake grieving for an absent lover while another inmate stirs, and finally sinking into gathering dusk and quiet grief. There is no plot resolution, only cyclical repetition, mirroring the monotony of incarceration.
How it's built
Strophic form with each verse followed by an identical refrain describing the bell sounding along the canal. The refrain never varies, functioning almost like a tolling clock; the verses shift slightly in imagery and time of day, giving the illusion of narrative movement while the surrounding frame stays fixed, reinforcing the sense of stasis.
Section by section
Opening verse
“the mice were squealing”
The scene is established through small, degrading sensory details rather than dramatic statement, immediately grounding the listener in physical discomfort and neglect.
Second verse
“screw was bawling”
The guard's dehumanizing address introduces the theme of institutional power, delivered in brusque, almost comic vernacular that undercuts any sentimentality.
Middle verses
The imagery shifts outward briefly to birds over the wall, offering a glimpse of freedom the narrator cannot share, before turning back inward to private grief over a lost love, deepening the emotional register from discomfort to sorrow.
Verse on the women's prison
A moment of longing crosses gender lines, imagining companionship in the nearby women's ward; it reads as both romantic yearning and a wry acknowledgment of the absurdity of desire under lock and key.
Closing verse
The song ends without resolution, simply repeating the pattern of declining light and private weeping, reinforcing that nothing changes and the day's end brings no relief, only the same bell.
Craft
- refrain
- The recurring line about the bell sounding by the canal anchors every verse, turning the sound into a symbol of confinement and enforced time-keeping.
- onomatopoeia
- The bell's ringing is rendered phonetically, giving the refrain a percussive, almost mechanical quality that echoes prison routine.
- synecdoche
- The bell and its sound come to stand in for the entire prison system and its control over the inmates' days.
- pathetic fallacy
- The wind rising and the day declining are used to mirror the narrator's fading spirit as the song progresses toward its close.
Reading it
Read most straightforwardly, the song is a lament for lost freedom and lost love, using the prison bell as a relentless marker of time that the narrator cannot escape. A secondary reading treats the piece as social commentary embedded in Behan's own prison background, using dark humor in lines about the guard and the women's prison to critique the absurdity and cruelty of incarceration rather than simply mourning it. Jansch's version leans into the mournful reading through his hushed vocal delivery and minimal accompaniment, softening the satirical edge that the song can carry in more theatrical performances.
Context
The song originates as a traditional Irish ballad popularized through Brendan Behan's 1954 play about a condemned prisoner, and has been recorded by many folk artists including The Dubliners. Jansch, as a British/Scottish folk revivalist closely tied to that tradition, includes it on The Black Swan as one of several traditional or borrowed songs alongside his originals, treating it with the same understated guitar-based intimacy he brought to his own writing.
Listen for
- The unchanging refrain and how its repetition creates a sense of time locked in place
- The shift in imagery from vermin and shouting to birds and dusk, marking a movement from harshness to melancholy
- Jansch's restrained vocal phrasing, which resists melodrama despite the subject matter
- The dry, almost wry tone of the line about the women's prison amid otherwise mournful verses
- The way natural imagery of wind and fading light stands in for the narrator's emotional state
About Bert Jansch
Herbert Jansch was a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s as an acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter.
1943 - 2011 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue