Laura Marling / Peaky Blinders (Original Music From The TV Series) / 2010
What He Wrote
mournful, resigned, quietly accusatory
A song addressed partly to a goddess and partly to an absent man, this piece uses classical and religious imagery to explore a woman's entrapment in a relationship of betrayal and silencing. Written for the Peaky Blinders soundtrack, it reads less like a period narrative than a mythic monologue about voicelessness and the cost of staying loyal to someone who has already left.
silencing and voice betrayal religious/mythic guilt captivity within devotion war and absence
Who's speaking
A first-person female speaker addresses Hera and an unnamed male figure alternately; she is unreliable in the sense that her loyalty and anger contradict each other throughout, suggesting a fractured, self-justifying voice rather than a clear-eyed narrator.
What happens
The speaker opens by asking forgiveness from a goddess figure for a betrayal she has suffered, describing being silenced and discarded by a man. Fragments of his letters appear, pleading for her help, but she refuses, citing her own brokenness and prior commitment. She interrogates his moral corruption and his abandonment of her, then describes her grief and eventual acceptance that his departure was inevitable. The song closes with the war taking him away entirely, and a final image of muted, dutiful correspondence in his absence — a resigned domestic peace built on suppressed feeling.
How it's built
The song moves through repeated verse-refrain pairs built around quoted letters, with the invocation to Hera bookending the piece. Each repetition of the letter-refrain intensifies the sense of ritual and stasis, while the final verse breaks the pattern by shifting from singular to plural voice, signaling a resolution of sorts.
Section by section
Opening invocation
“He cut out my tongue”
The address to Hera situates the song within myth, framing the speaker's suffering as timeless and sanctioned by higher powers who do nothing to intervene. The image of losing her tongue establishes silencing as the central wound.
First letter refrain
The man's plea for help is undercut by the speaker's own admission of brokenness, establishing a pattern where his need overrides but does not erase her pain.
Interrogation verse
“where is the lamb that gave you your name”
The speaker questions the man's transformation into someone corrupt, using religious sacrificial imagery to suggest he has abandoned the innocence or covenant he once represented.
Grief and departure
Her physical collapse and pleading mark the emotional low point, contrasted with a retrospective claim that his absence, though painful, may have been the only way she could reclaim some agency.
War taking him
The introduction of literal conflict shifts the story from personal betrayal to a broader historical current, suggesting the man's departure is now irreversible and impersonal.
Final verse
“we write: that's alright”
The shift to a collective voice and clipped, muted exchange suggests a settled, joyless equilibrium — survival through emotional restraint rather than resolution.
Craft
- myth allusion
- Invoking Hera and other classical/religious markers (lamb, holy light) elevates a personal betrayal into an archetypal story of feminine suffering under divine or patriarchal indifference.
- refrain
- The repeated quoted letter functions as a ritualistic reminder of the man's persistent, self-serving requests, reinforcing the imbalance between his demands and her endurance.
- body imagery
- References to a cut tongue and cold hands literalize silencing and physical powerlessness, making abstract themes of voicelessness visceral.
- shift in pronoun
- The move from 'I' to 'we' in the final verse marks a change in emotional register, from isolated suffering to a quieter, shared numbness.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an allegory for female submission and endurance within a story of male absence and moral failure, using myth to universalize a specific emotional wound — likely written to evoke the Peaky Blinders setting's atmosphere of loss and quiet suffering during wartime. An alternative reading could see it as a more direct dramatic monologue for a specific unnamed character in the show, though the mythic framing suggests Marling intended something more archetypal than narrative-specific.
Context
Written for the Peaky Blinders soundtrack, the song fits Marling's broader folk tradition of using classical and religious allusion to frame personal or gendered suffering. I don't have confirmed details on whether it was written for a specific character or scene in the series.
Listen for
- the recurring quoted letter as a ritual refrain
- the shift from singular to plural voice in the final verse
- imagery of silencing (the cut tongue) recurring in different forms
- the tonal shift when literal war enters the narrative
About Laura Marling
Laura Beatrice Marling is an English folk singer-songwriter. She won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist at the 2011 Brit Awards and was nominated for the same award at the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 Brit Awards.
b. 1990 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue