Blackwater Park

Ok, I did some thinking, and this is what I've come up with.

This is the magnum opus of the album; while musically some of the other songs are better (The Funeral Portrait, Dirge For November, Bleak) thematically, Blackwater Park outshines the rest. It is an analogy - on the surface, it talks of a village (Blackwater Park) where sin and disease have taken hold, and where people are dying off, until at last the narrator too is infected and dies. However, the song is an analogy for the evils in the world - Mikael is watching corruption and violence destroy the world slowly because of all the wrongs we've commited. The intro sums that up: "Confessor of the tragedies in man, lurking in the core of us all. The last dying call for the everlost; brief encounters, bleeding pain."

The narrator recalls visions of horror... "Lepers coiled neath the trees; dying men in bewildered soliloquys. Perversions bloom round the bend; seekers, lost in their quest. Ghosts of friends frolic under the waning moon ." The whole town around the man is dying out. People wander aimlessly through the world, unsure of their purposes in life.

In terms of the story, the narrator is an uninfected person, "an advocate documenting the loss". He sees the sickness but is not a part of it yet: "It is the year of death, wielding his instruments. Stealth sovereign reaper, touching us with ease. Infecting the roots in an instant, burning crop of disease." In a literal sense, he is avoiding the immoral acts of the modern world and trying to live a good life. "Fluttering with conceit; this doesn't concern me yet. Still far from the knell, taunting their bereavement " So far, he is proud of the fact that he has avoided the "disease" of such failings, and he can laugh at those who have given up, but he knows that one day he will end up like all the others.

Mikael points out mankind's morbid fascination with violence and terror ("Point fingers at the details, probe vomits for more. Caught in unbridled suspense."), and how we as a society have "lost it now", at every moment "catching the flakes of dismay" - taking in every gory detail of life via the media. He points out the sick attitudes of today's youth in his metaphor about plague survivors who more and more often want to investigate the "disease" rather than exterminate it: "Born the travesty of man, regular pulse midst pandemonium. You're plucked to the mass, parched with thirst for the wicked."

Finally, Mikael remarks "Sick liaisons raised this monumental mark; the sun sets forever over Blackwater Park." As the sickening morbidity of the survivors takes over the town, ruining it forever and confirming its eventual destruction, the metaphor is for the doomed nature of our society. If we keep finding entertainment and interest in the dark side of humanity, the sun will set on us all, too.