| R.E.M. – Swan Swan H Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[rikdad:14558] Because I'm such a geek, I always thought of the way birds, swans especially, are portrayed in myth and legend as the messengers from the Land of the Dead. My mind (which is just one big pool of free-association) also always wants to make a contrast between the "noisy cats" and the way the first letters of the birds' (natural prey of cats) names would spell, "ssh." | |
| R.E.M. – Swan Swan H Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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This is just my interpretation, but as a history and art geek I always took the "Night wings and hair chains" line as referring to death and mourning. The angel of death is nearly always depicted as having black (night) wings. In the Civil War Era, mortality from all causes , even exclusive of war, was extremely high and people often of both sexes often wore jewelry made from the hair of dead or absent loved ones. Often the hair was braided and made into bracelets or brooches or the braid used to carry a pendant containing a portrait of the deceased. The "Here's your wooden greenback, sing" line that follows makes me think of the children, women and old people left behind when the soldiers marched off to war. I imagine them with their fathers, husbands and sons dead ("tell that to the Captain's mother"), wearing their mourning jewelry made of hair what money they had basically useless and without the skills or strength to make a living--as in, what were they supposed to do, sing for their suppers? When I was very young, way back in the early 60's, I knew a 112-year old woman who'd grown up on a wealthy plantation in Virginia and was 8 when the Civil war began. That's basically the story she told, that her family went from wealth to extreme poverty before they even knew what had happened. There was no food available to buy and no one who really knew how to grow any in a productive way. They lived in the midst of luxury and starved. When Michael Stipe introduced the song in Seattle in 1984, that's what he talked about also. Scarlett O'Hara and turnips were referenced, but also the fear, hunger and utter disbelief that many left behind felt |
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