Cosmic Love

Absolutely rip-roaring, mind-blowing song! Her voice is absolutely captivating...now I know why she called the album 'Lungs' - she's certainly got a good pair on her!

IMO the song it's about a woman who falls in, apparently, unrequited love with a man. She feels so consumed and overwhelmed by this emotion - blinded by the intensity of it - that she is literally in the dark; totally lost, confused, scared, cannot see the wood for the trees, and also in agony because she believes that he doesn't feel the same way. She decides she has to remove herself from his influence, yet in doing so she finds out that he is in fact in love with her too, so they lose themselves in each other ("Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too, So I stayed in the darkness with you").

What I especially like about this song is how the chorus is ambiguous enough to be able to be interpreted, convincingly, as both negative and positive emotions; respectively, prior to the middle eight and after it. The first two choruses her supposed unrequited love for him is impacting on her negatively, but in the ones following his revelation in the middle eight she is still consumed by her love for him but now, because their feeling is mutual, the power of the love that they share is powerful enough to destroy cosmic bodies. His love has blown her away.

Such an intense song, perfection.

Honestly I don't think this song is so much about being in love as it is about being in love unhappily. I heard this the first time on the radio, and the radiowoman said that the singer wrote this song while she was living with her boyfriend. To me, it's more about staying with someone even though you don't really want to, but you can't leave him/her for any number of reasons.

"I took the stars from our eyes, and then I made a map And knew that somehow I could find my way back Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too So I stayed in the darkness with you"

Maybe it means that she stayed with him, but had a backup plan if some day she couldn't take it no more. :) Just my interpretation. Definetely think there's some sort of dark/corrupting vibe to the song. Absolutely beautiful! One of the most touching songs I've ever heard.

Hauntingly beautiful.

To me, this song is about a woman who has fallen quickly and passionately in love with a man when she wasn't expecting it. He is a man plagued by something, haunted by his past perhaps. She was trying to help him out of the dark part of himself, but in doing so she fell victim to the darkness as well. Possibly a drug problem, depression, or even a terminal illness.

This. Song. ...Simply the most beautiful and powerful song I have heard in my thirty-one year obsession and love affair with music. The rage, the madness, the grief that Florence is able to bring through is just devastating. It has the cadence of a hawk trapped inside the cage built for a canary, such is the raw emotion that blasts out from the speakers. I don't think any other vocalist in the whole world could pull this song off. It's so big, so epic, so primal, so all consuming, it would be very easy for the voice to become lost amid the enormity of the music, but Florence grabs the music by the balls and just rips out the most heartwrenching tears and violent beauty. The song makes me want to get on the floor, pound my fists and scream at the top of my lungs and hurl violent tears into the sky, such is the depth of emotion in just four short minutes.

This is musical perfection...and yes- please for the love of everything sacred in this world...DO NOT ASSOCIATE THIS SONG WITH ANY OF STEPHENIE MEYER'S GARBAGE. This song reaches so much further than teenybopper bullshit. This song is art in its highest form. "Twilight" "New Moon" and all those other books and movies are not even in the same realm as art.

song of the year.

This is an absoutely amazing song, and the first time I heard it I thought "Oh God, please don't ever let it become famous so we don't have people relating it to Twilight and New Moon."

What an absolutely mediocre companion to an amazing song. Very powerful.

Haunting and Beautiful. I agree with daveydaveson. This song is too great to be compared with that mass mediocre fad.

I also agree that there are dark underlying themes. From the very beginning of the song when she admits she fell in love, it isn't a happy go-lucky love. It has her screaming, and she loses something critical (eyesight to represent something very important). The story begins and ends in darkness, and she seems to be allured by her new world as well as afraid ("No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight" <- she's trying to describe her surreal situation) While she plans ways to maybe get away from that confusing love (creating the map)-at least in the world of the song- she never does. There's something magnetic that keeps her there. That's what I gleaned from it.

I don't know what this song means to Florence, but to me it has brought back the experience and feelings as I sat next to my father while he was dying, and the many feelings I have now that he is gone. I feel that I have begun to make a map to recovery from my grief during the past six weeks, but sometimes, I want to stay with him, in the darkness of his passing and my belief that his presence is still with me somehow.

I also believe this song is about unrequited love that is, returned in the end, but I don't think love is being potrayed in a positive manner. Darkness symbolizes loss, sadness, confusion, ignorance, etc., none of which are ideal states of being. The fact that all light providing entities are blown out enhances this fact. In the end when they are both in the darkness, I see it as they are both so consumed and infatuated with each other that they lose touch with the life and light around them. They love in desperation and obsession. Love, in this case, seems like an unhealthy need, one that steals them away from other positives in their life. But a song/poem can be read in a myriad of ways. This song like most others can have many meanings.

This song is about being blinded by love at first sight. To see no light beyond the light of one's beloved.

"A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes
 I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind
 The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
 You left me in the dark
 No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight
 In the shadow of your heart"

Here we have another metaphor. She is listening for the sound of his heart. She doesn't say she doesn't hear the sound, she says she hears the sound and it stops. This indicates that he appeared to share the same feelings, but pulled away unsure of himself. It could have been too sudden for him.

 "And in the dark, I can hear your heartbeat
 I tried to find the sound
 But then it stopped,"

Even so she is still blinded by her love for him and can see only him.

 "and I was in the darkness,"

So she becomes depressed.

 "So darkness I became"

Here we see a more literal metaphor. "Starry-eyed" means "given to naive wishes, judgments, etc.; full of unsophisticated optimism" and so she is saying that she has given up and is taking those starry-eyes away and trying to pull herself back together finding her way back to some semblance of normality.

 "I took the stars from our eyes, and then I made a map
 And knew that somehow I could find my way back"

Just as she is ready to move on he realizes his own feelings and she again hears his heart, his emotions. She realizes that he was similarly blinded by his love for her so she chooses to remain blinded to her love for him.

 "Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too"
  So I stayed in the darkness with you"

She continues the verses as before that she is left in the dark. This is nothing depressing since the darkness here is blindness to love. It's why she sings it in such an uplifting way, IMHO.

I'm surprised at all the other interpretations that didn't come close to this. I don't think it's as simple as unrequited love, nor do I think it is at all religious. It's cosmic in it's depth alone.