Ironbound/Fancy Poultry is the only song that has an omniscient narrator. By using an omniscient narrator, the songwriter got the opportunity to guide the reader/listener, to take his hand and lead him through his fictional world. The narrator can tell the story from different points-of-view, he has a multitude of perspectives, he can look into the characters, has insight into their feelings and thoughts.
If you have a close look at the first stanza, one can see how the omniscient narrator 'builds up' his world. He starts with the setting, he tells the reader where the song takes place ('In the Ironbound section / Near Avenue L'), who is in this place ('the Portuguese women'), he describes the surrounding ('clouds so low', 'wires cut'), and tells the reader when it happens ('The morning so slow'). So he already answers all important questions in the first stanza. The description of the setting is continued in the second stanza and it is not before the last line of this stanza that the main character appears. So Suzanne uses twelve full lines to describe the Ironbound section. In this song, the surrounding is very important, because it reflects the inner state of the main character. (As for example in Cracking and In Liverpool.) The reader gets the impression of a very 'urban' place, dirty and grey and very cramped. The only positive things that add some hope are the 'sky' and 'the light'. Both these things are violently 'cut', are torn into pieces by 'the beams and bridges' that seem to bind the people. The 'wires' complete the cage in which the humans are trapped. And suddenly the listener finds himself within this scenery. By addressing the reader with the line 'Come to see what you sell', the listener gets involved and is forced to listen.
The sadness and hopelessness of the setting are stressed by the dark 'o'-sounds and the internal rhymes in lines 4 and 5 ('so low'/'so slow'). Other means of onomatopoeia are the vast numbers of alliterations, for example in the lines 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 13. Up to the 12th line the scenery is described. Hopeless and unpleasant, bound by the tracks that run round, bound by the wires that separate man from the sky, bound by the beams and bridges that cut the light.
The light actually plays a big part. Suzanne uses the light, the shadow and the colours like a painter to make the environment as realistic as possible. She does this in several other songs, most important though in In Liverpool where she describes a comparable urban place. In this song she also uses the light to introduce the main character ('The light is pale and thin / Like you').
In Ironbound the main character is not a second person that is addressed as 'you', but a third person who, just like the wires cut through the sky, now appears 'through the rust and heat'. Before, the narrator chose a point-of-view that allowed the reader to watch the scenery from the perspective of a bird so that one has a survey of the Ironbound market. Now that the main character appears, the omniscient narrator changes the perspective from wide-angle to close-up. He focuses on the woman like a camera. The author catches the sympathy of the reader for this character by describing its appearance with the adjectives 'light and sweet'. These two adjectives, which have a positive connotation, contrast with the words 'rust and heat' in the previous line, which both have a negative connotation. There is also a very strong contrast in sounds: At the beginning, the deep and dark 'o'- sounds create a depressing atmosphere that is contrasted with the more 'uplifting', high and bright 'e'-sounds, such as in 'light', 'sweet', and 'skin' that are used to describe the woman. The feeling of being caught in a cold, dirty and soul-less place is emphasized throughout the song by a lot of concrete hints, most of all by the use of words like 'Ironbound' itself, by 'fence', 'gate', and 'Bound up in iron and wire and fate' (in this line the strength of the chains is stressed by the polysyndeton).
The feeling of hopelessness is also reflected in the music. The song is written in a-minor and in a moderate 4/4 time. The melody itself is very smooth and calm without huge intervals. While the song goes on, the characterþs wish to break free grows stronger and stronger. This is represented in the instrumental parts between the verses. Here the harmony suddenly changes into D-major, the first 'bright' chord that represents the longing to break out. But soon it is altered back into a-minor and the song continues.
Not so the second time: After the line 'Away from the Ironbound border', the second part of the song begins. And suddenly everything changes: the song continues in a 12/8 time that is light and playful, the harmony changes, not into the bright D but into the even brighter A-major. In the melody we suddenly have the biggest interval in the whole song. Also, the point-of-view changes. We now have a first person narrator. The mood isn't sad any more, it becomes more ironical. The woman is locked into her milieu and her environment, and next to her someone is selling wings, the actual symbol of freedom and liberty. To make it even more ironical, Suzanne uses the double meaning of the word 'free': the wings themselves are 'nearly free'. Also, the other poultry parts seem to refer to the human body: breasts, thighs, backs and hearts. The word 'heart' is stressed not only by the polysyndeton in line 38, but even more by the rest in the melody right in front of it. It sounds like a slight hesitation.
The song reaches its climax in the repetition of the bitter ironical phrase 'nearly free'. This is also the musical climax. There are now only two chords left which represent the schizophrenia and irony of the song: on the one hand there is the bright and open A-major representing the wish to break free and to fly away; on the other hand we have F-major, a narrow and restrained chord representing the chains. The tension between these two feelings is also stressed by the chromatic in the melody (one time 'free' on e -- the other time on f) and in the guitar work (the changes between c and c#).
Ironbound/Fancy Poultry is a song about a theme that was often used by naturalistic writers. It is about how man is bound and chained in his urban environment, how he tries to escape from his milieu and to break free. The two feelings of freedom and of being caught are expressed by contrasts throughout the song. There are contrasts in words, in sounds ('o', 'e'), in chords (A, F), in measures (4/4, 12/8), in the point-of-view (omniscient narrator/first person), in rhetorical devices (asyndeton 11 33-34, polysyndeton 1 38), and in the overall structure of the song itself.
In the end, Suzanne does not decide for neither the freedom nor the chains. The song fades out with the 'struggle' of the chords A and F, leaving the listener uncertain. During the song, the listener is thrown from an emotional high to an emotional low in the next moment. It is kind of an 'emotional roller coaster', but I think that it what makes the song so strong.
--Philipp Hofmann