She Lives On A Mountain

what a beautiful, sad song. i love gorky's songs that are like these.

to me, this particular one is (quite obviously i suppose) about falling in love with someone who is very distant from you, both in a physical and mental sense. she is from the mountains and he is from the town. she is thereby linked to the natural world whereas he is part of the bustling life of civilisation, which she probably rejected some time ago. furthermore, she is a hermit: an introverted type that is incapable of forming relationships with others, let alone falling in love with someone else (hence, his friends laugh when he suggests that she might be in love with him).

by looking towards nature, he tries to learn if she is in fact in love with him, and perhaps if he is actually in love with her (or if it's just an infatuation with the mysterious). He doesn't get any answers though (no traces i could see...is he talking about traces of his love for the girl that he would see in his reflection? i think that he is); he is just astonished by the beauty of the natural world and then when night falls, he is left wondering if he can ever fall in love with her even though he knows that he is mystified by her. he later equates her to everything surrounding the mountain ("she lives on a mountain/her face is all around"): the river, sea, etc. by doing this, perhaps that storm clouds are representative of her too, as they surely are around the mountain. and, no rain comes from the storm clouds, suggesting that she hasn't been seen for awhile and he'll never know how she felt about him, or even how he actually feels about her.