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Wild Irish Rose Lyrics
In a field by a river
my love and I did lie
And on my naked shoulder
she too proud to cry
She said that I must leave her
an icy tear she froze
How could I melt the heart
Of a Wild Irish Rose
Well a gypsy she has made of me
A servent of the street
And back to bed I've travelled
To taste a love as sweet
Well the heart it knows no reasons
And reason never knows
As I lie with them I'm thinking
Of a Wild Irish Rose
Well I saw the city of angels
It brought a devil out in me
And Hell's hotel on Sunset
Showed a whore no mercy
As the orange sky was screaming
From the roof I let her go
These are the dizzying heights that brought me
My Wild Irish Rose
Now red is the rose
That she layed on my grave
A life is what she wanted
And a life I surely gave
Like a hundred men before me
They lay lying here in rows
Young men, bloody
As a Wild Irish Rose
my love and I did lie
And on my naked shoulder
she too proud to cry
She said that I must leave her
an icy tear she froze
How could I melt the heart
Of a Wild Irish Rose
A servent of the street
And back to bed I've travelled
To taste a love as sweet
Well the heart it knows no reasons
And reason never knows
As I lie with them I'm thinking
Of a Wild Irish Rose
It brought a devil out in me
And Hell's hotel on Sunset
Showed a whore no mercy
As the orange sky was screaming
From the roof I let her go
These are the dizzying heights that brought me
My Wild Irish Rose
That she layed on my grave
A life is what she wanted
And a life I surely gave
Like a hundred men before me
They lay lying here in rows
Young men, bloody
As a Wild Irish Rose
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In Bono's words, from the middle of the MP3 from which this transcription was made:
"This is based on a...on the time we spent in a hotel called the Millon Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles. It's like a half-way house hotel for bums and people thrown out of hospitals under the Regean era. And I was being taken through this hotel--I was doing some filming down there--and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the bums drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line, 'The city of Angels/Has brought a devil out in me', and developed it on from there. The Rose in Ireland, as you know, is a sort of romantic image of love, obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself. That is an image I thought would be nice to subvert."
Beautiful lyrics
It really makes me see these images in my head. Very romantic and sad.
does anyone know what cd this song is on?
But Bono said how he came up with the idea of the lyrics, as emann333 wrote, but what is it acctually about? I kinda don't understand the connections with the verses
which movie is it in?
I just pretty much think this song is about a hooker... At least he uses this as an obvious metaphor for something more.
MagentaMSI is right - "Wild Irish Rose" is a dreadful liquor but the only thing in this song that is not a metaphor is the line "hell's hotel on sunset showed a whore no mercy". In verse 1, "my love" represents liquor. The Liquor made her a whore. The Liquor demanded her life in the final verse "A life is what she wanted/a life I surely gave"
The documentary "Bringing it all back home" shows an additional verse in the middle, but we can't hear what the lyrics are because Bono talks over this verse. Shame this song was never finished.