For My Fallen Angel

One of the saddest songs ever written...

The prose the song is written in itself seems general enough until the last few lines. The final stanza is a direct quote from William Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" with a minor change; originally the "her" pronouns that MDB uses were "him." In the original poem, Venus (Goddess of love) falls in love with an exceptionally gorgeous man named Adonis. Adonis isn't into Venus, or anybody really. He just likes to hunt. In a couple of situations out of something like concerned pity, he ends up kissing Venus (he rejected her, she fainted, he freaked out and kissed her. As you do) and they ended up spending a lot of time together. Towards the middle-end of the poem, Venus warns him to not hunt big animals as she had a vision of him dying. He doesn't listen and the next day he's impaled by a boar he didn't quite kill all the way. There's some other stuff in there about the two of them and him lecturing her about lust vs love and all that jazz, but it isn't so important.

What really matters is that Venus sees him dying and watches him as he takes his last breath, and when he dies she changes love. She decides that love can no longer be experienced by anybody without jealousy, obsession, sadness, and negative emotions surrounding it. In a sense, the old Venus may have died there. Which brings me to the swap.

Shakespeare: "Love's golden arrow at him should have fled and not Death's ebon dart to strike [him] dead"

Spoken by Venus. She's essentially wondering why Death will blindly strike people, and lamenting that Death took him instead of Love.

Now in MDB's version it swaps out the pronouns. So maybe it's talking about Venus. And there's some other lines that kind of stands out in support of this theory of mine.

"As I draw up my breath... may never rise." That line could be Adonis, giving Venus a farewell kiss as he prepares to shuffle off this mortal coil (forgive the Hamlet reference, I'm something of a Shakespeare geek), and musing that she may never get up from her place beside him on the ground.

"On my weak body... where we ran." Venus, or at least a part of her so to speak, may have died with Adonis. He could be talking about that, the weak body statement being from the fact that he's dying. The meadows of heaven bit could very well refer to the woods where Adonis hunted, and where he and Venus spent all of their time...

And as for the last part, it could be Adonis lamenting that he never loved her while he had the chance, and that it was unfair that she now was dying with him.

Or something like that. I like to imagine it as Adonis's death from his own perspective from that poem, despite a couple of little flaws in how the timeline in this and the poem itself lines up. In the poem, Venus finds him just as he passes onward, but with MDB's propensity for the wildly romantic and tragic, it's possible that they twisted the tale a little bit to fit this device of theirs.

If anybody made it to the end of this little essay, cheers! And rock on.

I realy really loooove thiss song I die this song

This is a beautiful song. Sorta brings a tear to my eye...

shivers Really pretty just kinda haunting. Anyone know what it means.

This is an amazing song. I think this song is pretty self explanatory. The love of his life is gone. This song puts me in a feeling of melancholy every time I hear it though

This song represents losing someone close to your heart who was suddenly struck with death and you were never expecting it so the pain hits even harder. This song is one of the most amazing songs ever in my opinion.

This is definitely the most beautifully sad song I have ever heard...the violin is breath-taking...truly amazing.

This is an amazing song. Eventhing with it, just goes together. From the wonderful violin to the lyrics and his voice. I bet if you take out the lyrics. The song would just be more amazing. Its like one of those songs you can put into a movie, like Lord of the Rings or something.

This is an amazing song. Eventhing with it, just goes together. From the wonderful violin to the lyrics and his voice. I bet if you take out the lyrics. The song would just be more amazing. Its like one of those songs you can put into a movie, like Lord of the Rings or something.