Hunter's Kiss

This reminds me a lot of Book IV of Vergil's Aeneid. In it, Aeneas compares Dido in love to a deer wounded in the woods:

Wretched Dido burns, and wanders frenzied through the city, like an unwary deer struck by an arrow, that a shepherd hunting with his bow has fired at from a distance, in the Cretan woods, leaving the winged steel in her, without knowing. She runs through the woods and glades of Dicte: the lethal shaft hangs in her side.

Oh man, it IS "his cloudy breath"--I had thought the line was "I could see the steaming of his cloudy brow" and it was my favorite line in the song. It is "steaming" though, and not "streaming" as the lyrics here say. Also, I would vote for "froze in motion" over "frozen motion" in line 3; "froze in motion" sounds the same and it's grammatically incorrect (it should be "frozen in motion"), but "frozen motion" just makes no sense.

Good call, heartwork, about the Virgil inference. But the tradition of depicting courtship in terms of a male hunter pursuing a doe goes way beyond Virgil; Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare and many other widely-read poets all have sonnets with this theme. It's interesting that the sonnet tradition almost always identifies with the hunter, whereas this song takes the perspective of the hunted deer. It takes some measures to undermine the assumptions of the genre, especially in the fourth stanza, which brings the degrading and misogynistic implications of the tale to the surface: "My life is not mine / Like a dog or a wife."

Ultimately, it could still do more to subvert the genre, however. It is clear in this song that this model of courtship is bad for the woman, who is killed and carted off. But I would argue that it is also degrading to the man, and this is not represented in the song. The hunter in this song is the paradigm of idealized masculinity, powerful, enigmatic, stoic, godlike. He carts off his trophy at the end of the song with no indication that he has been reciprocally affected in any way by his violent act. While this may be the way some men prefer to see their own sexual "conquests," in reality sex and love are two-way streets and we would do well to abandon such an antiquated and patriarchal model of gender relations.

At the beginning shes says, "Here's the sad sto-o-ry about a deer, and a ma-an." Then it goes into, "A romantic scene..." Because this song is about a deer that gets killed by a hunter, but thinks that the feeling of death is love. She confuses the arrow with a kiss. I think that's beautiful and this song is just so relevant. I love it.

i think this song can be about a masochist love for a "girl hunter". The "Where it will only hurt me, not a mortal wound. Leave my lying dirty..." line & the arrow stuff looks like a metaphore for, mh... mating. Yup, i know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but... The deer is just a one night stand, but she was waiting for love and tries to see a kiss in the hunter's arrow. Pretty song.

I think I could definatly agree with the above comment, although I never thought about that.

Maybe it could be a metaphor for losing one's virginity? And maybe having it turn out to be a bad experience?

or, knowing rasputina, it really is a very strange little song about a deer and a hunter.

you never know.

I think this song is simply about a girl who can't help marrying this man. She loves him for some reason, but it's almost as if it's against her will. She feels helpless, and the "My life is not mine. Like a dog or a wife. " obviously refers to the fact that she's his wife.

This song is about the act of falling in love and then later discovering it was just an evil (or for that matter evol) trick of the mind. God, it almost scary how much I relate to this song,

This song is about the act of falling in love and then later discovering it was just an evil (or for that matter evol) trick of the mind. God, it almost scary how much I relate to this song,