Enjoy, Kris Kristofferson – Darby’s Castle
Artist: Kris Kristofferson
Album: Kristofferson
Released: 1970
Lyrics
See the ruin on the hill
Where the smoke is hanging still
Like an echo of an age long forgotten.
There’s a story of a home
Crushed beneath those blackened stones
And a roof that fell before the beams were rotten.
See, Saul Darby loved his wife
And he labored all his life
To provide her with material possessions
And he built for her a home
Of the finest wood and stone
And the building soon became his sole obsession.
Oh it took three hundred days
For the timber to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down —
When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground.
Though they shared a common bed
There was precious little said
In the moments that were set aside for sleeping.
For his busy dreams were filled
With the rooms, he’d yet to build
And he never heard young Helen Darby weeping.
Then one night he heard a sound
As he laid his pencil down
And he traced it to her door and turned the handle,
And the pale light of the moon,
Through the windows of the room,
Split the shadows where two bodies lay entangled.
Oh it took three hundred days
For the timber to be raised
And the silhouette was seen for miles around
And the gables reached as high
As the eagles in the sky
But it only took one night to bring it down —
When Darby’s castle tumbled to the ground.
