This is my favorite Donovan song. Really, hands down. I loved it when I was little. Now I find out it’s taken from a Yiddish play written in the 1940’s and the words about the calf going to slaughter is a Holocaust metaphor. It never occurred to me to see it that way, and I see Holocaust metaphors in a lot of things. Sometimes a calf going to slaughter is just a calf going to slaughter, sometimes not. And I just thought it was an old folk song about the rustic necessity of killing animals.
Lady Garfunkel's Song of the Day 