Without hope
Without love
She sees herself
From below and above

Her untied hair
She smears the spit
Pleasure and suffering
Her beliefs conflict

It brings a smile
She cannot pretend
To believe that life
Really has no end

See the leaves
They're dying again
See the moth
It's flying again

See the leaves
They're dying again
See the moth
It's flying again
See the grass
It's dying again
See the sun
It's trying again
It's trying again
It's trying again
It's trying again
It's trying again


Lyrics submitted by romack

See the Leaves Lyrics as written by Steven Drozd Wayne Coyne

Lyrics © Songtrust Ave

Lyrics powered by LyricFind

See the Leaves song meanings
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4 Comments

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  • +1
    General Comment

    This song, like the rest of the album, is terrific, and its lyrics are quite amusing to decipher.

    Let's analyze the piece stanza by stanza according to my interpretation:

    1) To start with, we get a hopeless and unloved woman who objectifies herself. She simultaneously looks down on herself hatefully and idolizes herself with no hope of ever being who she wants.

    2) Her hair is untied and possibly cleaned/styled using her own saliva??? This could mean she lives a sort of carefree lifestyle, not concerned with fashion/appearance. Or her unkempt demeanor could represent her poverty and suffering. Juxtaposed, these two lifestyles conflict.

    3) And yet, it makes her happy to live this way, but also, returning to her hopeless outlook on life, it constrains her to believe that there is no life after death.

    4-end) The leaves dying serve as proof for her fatalistic beliefs, and yet another moth is flying again, which goes against her notion that there is no life after death. The grass dies, but then the sun brings it to life again. Apparently the woman is only able to see death; she is, after all, hopeless and without love. In spite of all of this, the sun persists. Perhaps the significance in the repetition of this verse is to show how the sun, the giver of life, perseveres in the face of death. It is possible the poetic voice in this song has faith that the woman will eventually see the light.

    Overall, the song is dichotomized conceptually into two contradictory and yet complimentary notions: that all things die, and that is the end for them, yet life is born anew out of death, and so, in a manner of speaking, there is, indeed, an afterlife. But these are just my musings...

    rthmjohnon January 17, 2012   Link

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