In Section Two, Chapter IV, Winston hears a washerwoman sing a popular song produced by a subsection of the Music Department of the Ministry of Truth using a machine called a “versificator.” Later, in Section Two, Chapter X, just before he is arrested, he hears her sing it again. The text gives us two verses, in the dialect of the proles, which drops initial “h” sounds and turns long “a'' sounds into something that sounds like “eye”: It was only an ‘opeless fancy;
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred
They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!”
They sye that time ‘eals all things,
They sye you can always forget;
But the smiles an’ the tears across the years
They twist my ‘eartstrings yet!
BOOK 1984
Winston thinks of this song as “rubbish” but finds it strangely moving anyway. What does this song mean in the context of the novel? Why write it in dialect? How can something written by a machine take on such a human quality? Why does Orwell include it twice?