Gaia

Main Entry: Gaia Function: noun Etymology: Greek, Gaea Date: 1975 : the hypothesis that the living and nonliving components of earth function as a single system in such a way that the living component regulates and maintains conditions (as the temperature of the ocean or composition of the atmosphere) so as to be suitable for life; also : this system regarded as a single organism

Paraphrased poetry

Understand the sweet girl Who whispers into your ear And here—the wind rises and disappears Here—it returns from the sea And here, we listen to the gasping heart That loved us more [So I closed my pact in the starlit night] You fled in a wave of trembling cries The hearts of thousands with you You fly, oh, runner, in untiring rhythm Il treno ardente Ch’era la notte fonda I listen ... With our shipwrecked hearts With angelic eyes We saw rising in the bewitching light:

I have a bright, flashing blade Brighter than the splendor of your eyes On the lap of Mother Earth—a strange little gypsy.

The dancer dances The dancer does not dance People suffer The suffering does not consider it When she sees man, god, gnawed away by their essence She undertakes her voyage of self discovery You will meet suffering You will love her You will love her—completely wrested from innocence She weeps War is motionless at the heart of the battle How indifferent he is to the waves of the sea But his nightmare has already lasted a long time The problem of the night remains total How to cross it … Calm … calm… rolling the train As though emerging from history A girl appears, whose eyes have been bound To play Blindman’s Bluff She remains—mounted in dawn And sings perturbed Earth

This could be silly but I don't get this song. I can't move through it and feel his feelings. No idea why. So why the poetry? A capricious hail to Gaia--also called Ge.

a lament to the environment and what we do to the world as humans

This is one of my favorite James Taylor songs...it's like both a funeral lament and a love song to the earth at the same time. It expresses this deep reverence to the earth, and this connection with it...I love the line "helpless and speechless and breathless"...it's like he sees the world, and experiences the rush of beauty of it, and while he loves it, he is in agony as we have to slowly watch it die...I don't know, I'm not explaining this well, but I just find this song incredibly beautiful.

I agree this song is nice, at least to listen to. It's probably one of his best compositions and the poetry itself is beautiful, but it is an interesting knot.

One on hand, I have to agree with the general sentiment, that the cosmos is beautiful, including this earth. But on the other hand, you have to wonder what 'saving us from us' via Gaia would mean. Maybe it shows the limit of how far religious sentiment and devotion can go without some kind of guidance.

It's something many poets have struggled with, the notion of the beauty of the world, but its ugliness, and the struggle of whether it is ugly because of and in man's acts, or because he in his condition cannot see its beauty. Long prior to industrialization poets wondered on the same topic, so while I would tend to think that what inspires JT (as it does many left-leaning poets) is a reaction against industry and what it does to the cosmos when left unchecked, I can't say that this really the heart of the matter.

But I find the poem while being beautiful too shallow for my taste. It seems to be an ode to the beloved, but it does not (and he admits it in the penultimate stanza) reach beyond the visible.