The Curious Story of The Smiths’ ‘Cemetry Gates’

By Oliver Tearle

The Queen Is Dead is one of those classic albums on which even the minor tracks take on a kind of epic grandeur.

Undoubtedly the Smiths’ masterpiece (although all four band members expressed a preference for their swansong, Strangeways Here We Come, for the title of ‘best’), this 1986 album contains ten tracks ranging from the classic pop single (‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’), the slow balladesque album track (‘I Know It’s Over’), the uptempo bit of fluff (‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’), and the downright ‘filler’ number (‘Never Had No One Ever’, ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’).

And then there’s ‘Cemetry Gates’: the curiously misspelled closing track for side one, for those of you old enough to remember vinyl records, or young enough to have rediscovered vinyl records. After the aimless, parodic ‘Never Had No One Ever’ which precedes it, ‘Cemetry Gates’ greets us like a breath of fresh air, albeit one breathed in a churchyard where, as Philip Larkin put it, so many dead lie round.

The lyrics to this jaunty, tongue-in-cheek little track were inspired by Morrissey’s friendship with Linder Sterling, with whom he would often walk to the Southern Cemetery in West Didsbury, a suburb of the singer’s hometown of Manchester. (Indeed, this cemetery did indeed have prominent iron gates.)

The ‘story’ of ‘Cemetry Gates’

All songs have a story, of sorts, much like all poems (even non-narrative poems). And the story of ‘Cemetry Gates’ might be summarised like this: two friends visit a local graveyard and one of them proceeds to tick off the other for the friend’s supposed plagiarism of other writers’ work.

The song begins in a typically Morrisseyish vein: it’s a sunny day, but as he’s not exactly an outgoing, extroverted kind of person, that’s a cause for dread rather than elation. It’d be easier if it was overcast or even raining: the dark clouds would match his saturnine mood better.

So what do they do? The two of them head to the cemetery and ‘gravely’ (nice pun there, Morrissey: one suggested by Mercutio, who said, as he lay dying, that he would soon be ‘a grave man’?) read the inscriptions on the headstones. Morrissey becomes depressed by the brevity of life as all these gravestones offer a memento mori or reminder of one’s own mortality.

Morrissey is quick to point out, when his companion starts reciting poetry, that she has cribbed her words from another poet: Shakespeare actually wrote, in Richard III, ‘The early village-cock / Hath twice done salutation to the morn’ (Morrissey ‘misremembers’ the line), but we get the idea. His friend is passing off other people’s words as her own.

He then starts wagging his finger at her and telling her not to ‘plagiarise’ (mischievously mispronounced as ‘plague-our-eyes’ by our Morrissey, to bring out a little pun) if she’s going to write stuff. There will always be someone who will recognise that you’ve stolen these lines from somewhere and will point it out, enjoying tearing you down in the process.

But there’s a twist: in the next stanza, Morrissey’s friend comes out with a line of gibberish which, he is sure, must be original, but she then produces a poetry book which shows she actually plagiarised this line, too, from some forgotten female poet of the early nineteenth century. So this friend isn’t just ‘borrowing’ her lines from Shakespeare; she’s stealing indiscriminately from any old nonsense.

Another twist

In fact, there’s another twist. Morrissey – or rather ‘Morrissey’, the persona he adopts in this song – is a hypocrite: he, too, is guilty of plagiarism. His lines about all the people buried in the graveyard (‘all those people, all those lives, where are they now? … I want to cry’) is lifted pretty much word-for-word from the 1942 film The Man Who Came to Dinner. Watch the relevant scene here and see/hear for yourself.

A sly comment on his critics?

Morrissey was often fond of responding to criticisms of him via his songs, and ‘Cemetry Gates’ might be interpreted as a good-humoured riposte to those critics who accused Morrissey of stealing his best lines from other places: books, films, plays, poems, and the rest of it. Noel Gallagher once called Morrissey the most literate person in pop music, and Morrissey’s lyrics, like T. S. Eliot’s poems, are littered with allusions to various other works.

Some of these allusions are pretty obscure, but some are better-known. Eliot, too, was accused of plagiarism but defended himself against the charge by claiming that he was employing allusion: he wanted his readers to pick up on the borrowing and reflect on how he was using the borrowed line in his own, new work of art.

So perhaps, after all, the Morrissey in ‘Cemetry Gates’ is actually a stand-in for Morrissey’s critics, and the friend accompanying him on his graveyard jaunts is, actually, a representation of Morrissey himself. Sometimes his borrowings are called out by his critics, but some of them (‘Ere long done do does did’ etc.) pass by even the most eagle-eyed of commentators.

What lends credence to this reading of the song’s lyrics is the fact that the finger-wagging Morrissey seems to have some sympathy for the friend he’s chastising: his tone becomes one of genuine concern that someone else might seek to trip her up and laugh at her when she falls. He speaks as if he’s been there himself: a point made by Gavin Hopps in his perceptive study of Morrissey’s lyrics, The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart.

Sex and poetry

Morrissey’s companion is a fan of the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). Like Morrissey, both of these poets knew a thing or two about unrequited love: Keats longed to marry Fanny Brawne and Yeats spent much of his life yearning (in vain) for Maud Gonne, his muse.

Morrissey, meanwhile, has the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) on his side. What side?

On the one hand, this is clearly a comment on different literary tastes: Keats and Yeats were both earnest poets, not exactly known for their wry wit or humour in their work. Great poets, both, with a considerable range; but you won’t find many one-liners in either of their oeuvres, unless you count ‘Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams’ or ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ as a one-liner.

Wilde, by contrast, is known for his bon mots and witty subversions of moral statements: ‘work is the curse of the drinking classes’, for instance, or ‘I can believe anything as long as it is incredible’, or my personal favourite, following his downfall and imprisonment: ‘If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn’t deserve to have any.’

Curiously, although Wilde was a poet as well as a witty conversationalist, playwright, novelist, and writer of fairy tales, his poetry is not known for its scintillating wit. Much of it is derivative and unremarkable, and it is in his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, that we find Wilde’s most characteristically brilliant writing.

But there’s another possible link: Keats, as I already mentioned, liked Fanny (we won’t go there) while Yeats pined for Maud Gonne. These heterosexual poets are pitted against that ‘weird lover Wilde’ as Morrissey describes him at the end of ‘Cemetry Gates’: a writer known, among other things, for his homosexuality. Is there an air of pitting boring straight men against a far more entertaining figure who didn’t conform to the heteronormative expectations of his time? (Wilde was married with children, but then he was a Victorian. It was pretty much compulsory back then.)

Misspelled title?

The song’s title was infamously misspelt, though it is unclear whether this was intentional or not. But in Morrissey: Scandal and Passion, David Bret states that the misspelling was deliberate.