This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
The evil it spread like a fever ahead
It was night when you died, my firefly
What could I have said to raise you from the dead?
Oh could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?
Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die
Sitting at the bed with the halo at your head
Was it all a disguise, like Junior High
Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction
Now, where am I?
My fading supply
Did you get enough love, my little dove
Why do you cry?
And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right
My little Versailles
The hospital asked should the body be cast
Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in cloth
Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?
Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light
Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
It was night when you died, my firefly
What could I have said to raise you from the dead?
Oh could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?
Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die
Sitting at the bed with the halo at your head
Was it all a disguise, like Junior High
Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction
Now, where am I?
My fading supply
Did you get enough love, my little dove
Why do you cry?
And I'm sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right
My little Versailles
The hospital asked should the body be cast
Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in cloth
Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?
Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light
Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
We're all gonna die
Lyrics submitted by Mellow_Harsher
Fourth of July Lyrics as written by Sufjan Stevens
Lyrics © BMG Rights Management
Lyrics powered by LyricFind
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this is very mind-opening song. it is about a conversation between sufjan and his mother and the main point is to tell how short life really is. in they talk about light as a metaphor to life "Make the most of your life, while it is rife While it is light" but the events where light is involved are so short for example in 4th of july the light lasts only seconds and then it is darkness again. In the song Sufjan says to his mother "Oh could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?". By this he wants to tell her that Even though life is so short flash of light in the darkness I wanted to spend this moment with you.
[Comment Removed]
Carrie is the name of his mother, who left the family when Sufjan was young, and later died of cancer in 2012. This song is a (presumably imagined) conversation between Sufjan and her.
This review elaborates more: consequenceofsound.net/2015/03/album-review-sufjan-stevens-carrie-lowell/
(I should clarify that I noted her name being "Carrie" to point out that she's half of the album's namesake)
Would go along with the imagined conversation. One of the most important songs from the album
That ending feels so dry... like death I guess.
When uses the flying bugs and birds to refer to his mother, I think he is creating the image of her "flying" into the sky, like going up to heaven after she passed. Or she is still flying around like an angel after her death.
I guess it's his mother singing to him on these paragraphs since they alternate who sings on each of them
This is definitely a poetic "conversation" between Sufjan and his mother. I listened to this song recently, and honestly this song seemed morbid. But, being a Christian (as Sufjan is, too) I think this song is actually pretty hopeful. Bare with me...
The joy of Christ is that his power prevails through every circumstance, even the really devastating ones. He conquered death, so that his followers will have "abundant life" on earth and after death. So then, death becomes hopeful, not hopeless. With that in mind:
When Sufjan's mother says, "Well you do enough talk, my little hawk Tell me why do you cry? Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn, or the Fourth of July? We're all gonna die."
... It's his mother comforting him. I'll be frank- I love my mom, and she has comforted me through all kinds of pain. Sufjan's mother was dying, so it makes sense that the most comforting thing to say would be "someday you will die, too." Death is a reality, but I find that with Christ, I'm really alright with dying. And even though it hurts, I can have hope in the midst of watching someone I love die.
Anyway, the main poetic point of the song is a mother trying to provide comfort for her son, even as she didn't do the best job when her son was a child. And of course there is emotional pain from a loved one dying, because this is a broken world. It's just interesting to me that the mother is talking to Sufjan as if he were a child, but this song was written when he was a fully grown man. I can relate to that. Even as I get older and become and adult, I am still my mother's child.
Use of "Hawk" and "Dove" reminds of Thirsty by The National:
I don't have a hawk in my heart / no dumbass dove in my dumbass brain
A devastatingly brilliant song.
I think the song is about him as a boy catching fireflies on the Fourth of July in Tilamook State Forest while visiting his mother in Oregon one summer. The Tilamook Burn was the site of a series of wildfires that ravaged that part of Oregon from 1933 to 1951 and, after the area rebounded, was renamed the Tilamook State Forest in 1973.
Not sure if anyone has ever done this, but we used to catch live fireflies in mason jars or our cupped hands as a kid. While marveling at their bio-luminescence, those captured insects wouldn't live long and I imagine it was the same for Sufjan who later wrote this song as an elegy to those beautifully doomed creatures whose memory has been likened here to that of his dying mother.
This song really haunts me as it seems to capture a child's momentary contemplation of the death of all things and the briefness an fragility of life itself.
I think he is comparing the spread of the Tillamook burn (a historically destructive wildfire in Oregon, where his mother lived) to the spread of her cancer (the spread of evil).