(Certainly McClintock was thinking politically in addition to being a kind of hobo troubadour he was a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary labor organization that sought the overthrow of industrial capitalism.) McClintock catalogues the persecutions, injustices, and brutalities of the transient life-begging, poor sleep, bad weather, police, attack dogs, railway authorities, jail, back-breaking labor, and above all persistent hunger-and imagines a land where they are entirely redressed. Much like As You Like It, the whimsy and humor of the song counterpoints, and perhaps obscures, its political undertones. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” begins with a tramp walking past the campfires of a hobo “jungle,” declaring, “I’m headed for a land that’s far away / Beside the crystal fountain,” and inviting the others to join him in its unique pleasures: In 1928, Harry McClintock recorded a modern version of the Land of Cockaigne, based (he claimed) on the tales he heard as a young hobo traveller. As the poem observes, “Though paradisal joys are sweet, / There’s nothing there but fruit to eat.” The 14th-century poem “The Land of Cockayne” tells of an abbey where “pies and pastries form the walls,” among other delights, describing how roasted geese “fly to the abbey (believe it or not) / And cry out ‘Geese, all hot, all hot!'” and larks “land in your mouth, well-cooked and tame.” More than merely an escape from the brutalities of peasant life, Cockaigne was a kind of parodic paradise, devoted to the cares of the flesh instead of the soul. Cockaigne was a medieval peasant utopia, a magical realm of ostentatious gluttony, continual drunkenness, sexual abandon, and complete idleness. Charles’ longing description of the Forest of Arden has its roots in classical myth, but his desire to “fleet the time carelessly” might also be connected to another mythic tradition: the Land of Cockaigne.