Shadows And Light

While ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ album begins in a bright and breezy way looking at the simple pleasures of a teenage girl, by the time we reach this track at the end the mood has become altogether more sombre, slow and considered, conveying the nuanced complexity of a mature wisdom. The experiences during the intervening years have brought with them a hard-won understanding of the contrasts at work in the nature of things. There’s still a brightness here, but also a recognition of shadows everywhere. It’s not a sad perspective, though - more a balanced one which allows a deep and rich examination into the workings of reality.

Shadows and Light isn’t a song with a protagonist as such. It comes across more as a reflective philosophical statement about maintaining the ability to appreciate the light in the world while recognising the darkness which is also at play.

The song can be imagined as being the thoughts of a painter who immersed herself in life and has now stepped back from it. She’s painting quietly by herself, reflecting on all she’s been through and the things she’s learned from it.

The first verse begins by stating that, as in a painting (possibly the painting she’s working on), every aspect of life has its areas of light and shadow. Some things are out in the open, easily understood, while others are hidden, obscure or impenetrable. People who wish to help us can bring with them collateral damage, while those determined to drain us can provide benefits. Everything is both a threat and an attraction, associated in this verse with the devil, who is also seen as governing blindness and sight. This presumably refers to the devil in Eden (in the form of the serpent, continuing the album’s snake imagery) who leads Eve to a knowledge of good and evil, so opening her eyes from blindness to sight within the framework of the ever-present laws.

The second verse contrasts the conditions of the rich and comfortable, whose easy existences lived in the light allow their skins to tan, with those of miners whose lives of hard toil in subterranean tunnels lit only by helmet lamps turn their skins pale. It’s a nighttime world that the miners inhabit, while the rich live in a world of sunny daylight. But all may not be as it superficially appears. Presidents on society’s top rung may be concealing tremendous worries behind their easy demeanours (hostage situations are given as an example), while those on the bottom rung (spraying graffiti in subways, and in that sense subterranean like the miners) are able to exercise a degree of freedom (using, significantly here, a kind of art). God, the creator of day and night (who can possibly therefore be seen as the ‘source of light’ of the first verse), can appear cruel and/or beneficent. Meanwhile the eternal physical laws maintain the ongoing succession of day and night.

The last verse exhibits an antipathy towards critics (a coterie Ms Mitchell has suffered from unduly over the years, and who would generally pan this album on its release), and extends this more widely to any criticism of any creative work, and perhaps to anyone making critical remarks without understanding. Critics, being generally pro- or anti-, miss the nuances and so lack the competence to judge anything fully and fairly. While creativity constantly attempts to push beyond existing boundaries, critics, comfortable only within the limits of the already-known, feel threatened by anything new and react against it. Though if they manage (using the Biblical imagery of being ‘born again’) to push their discernment beyond what is familiar and comfortable, they may find delight in these things. Critics, and fallible humankind in general, warp the fundamental laws in order to manipulate what is seen as wrong and right. So not only do critics defile the creativity of artists, but they (and humankind in general) defile the creativity through which God made the world and set up the eternal laws.

The three verses of the song parallel each other in structure and content, and the imagery within them draws a good deal on the Book of Genesis. The first verse deals with the devil and ignorance and knowledge, the second with God and day and night, and the last with man and wrong and right. Each verse has its cruelty and its delight; everything is threatened by everything and drawn to everything; the laws change from ever-present to everlasting to ever-broken (the latter, naturally, by man).

The ultimate message of the song? Perhaps it’s that, if we want to understand the whole picture of anything, we must take into account not only the extremes (and possibly what lies beyond even these), but also the nuanced complexity of all the elements within.