Okay, that's what that means.

There's a line in a song in Iolanthe that it all of a sudden occurred to me that I didn't know what it meant. And I was too impatient to go and asknavrins, so I just looked it up.

It turns out it means the opposite of what I thought it means, so I've been reacting to it all wrong. When Lord Mountararat sings that we should "pipe our eye" because our Strephon didn't die -- that's cockney rhyming slang for "cry". So it's a much more angry and hostile line than I'd realized. Ooops. Well, that's why we have rehearsals.