Ahead By A Century

Part of Gord Downie's genius, of course, is that you can love a song like this without really getting it. It's a poetic masterpiece. And he doesn't talk about it, of course, instead letting the work speak for itself - part of the mark of a true artist.

The first thing to pay attention to is the overall dichotomy between dreams and reality. "Illusions of someday cast in a golden light" versus serious and feverish dreams, all in opposition to the rain that "falls in real time".

The hornet sting, followed by nightmares of 'revenge and doubt', is a pretty straightforward symbol of what Hamlet referred to as "the heartache and the thousand natural shocks which flesh is heir to" - getting pulled away from optimistic hopes and dreams by the various pains and challenges of life, some internal (stirring up "doubts") and others external (triggering thoughts of "revenge"). Smoking them out (as in, how people used to try to drive out hornets) is a way of trying to refocus on the good dreams, without getting sidetracked by the difficulties of life - which are just as illusory (dreams) as the original 'illusions of someday'.

The first verse is easy - it's a recollection of two young people (perhaps romantically involved; perhaps not; I don't think it matters) dreaming together about an optimistic ('golden light') future that would never come ('illusions of someday').

But the second verse is much more difficult to interpret, because it has layered meanings. Pay attention to the 'time' references in the second verse - real time, morning, day, night. This isn't accidental, and I think there's some intentional confusion of the timeline, interspersing current reality with memory.

Superficially, there seems to be an element of finding one's way in the real world, contrasting against the dreams of the first verse (and chorus). The 'morning shroud' is the fog or mist in the morning obscuring vision. The day begins and the mist clears, and we can see, but the rain isn't quite what we had dreamed in the first verse.

But it runs deeper than that. The word choice of 'shroud' is potent, because it carries other meanings - namely, as a piece of cloth laid over the deceased's face at a funeral in some traditions. So staring in the morning shroud is, I think, a death image. (I've pondered other interpretations here. Could it be a specific shroud? The shroud of Turin? There's no other religious imagery to support that. Or sometimes the mist rising from the Horseshoe Falls is referred to as a 'shroud' - given TTH's propensity for alluding to Canadian landmarks, could this be a Niagara reference? Perhaps 'ahead by a century' could be a reference to the erosion of the falls? With all the water references, it seemed worth considering, but ultimately it's too disparate from the rest of the imagery in the song.)

Death imagery isn't always literal. Sometimes it's about change, new beginnings out of a loss - and given that 'morning' is also a 'new beginning' image, the 'morning shroud' seems doubly so. But in this case, I think there's a literal element to the death. The friend passed away, leaving me to navigate the real world and its challenges on my own.

But there was conflict. The tilted cloud/hand lyrics are perhaps the toughest lyrics in the song to grasp, because we're getting outside of any recognizable metaphors, but I think we're talking about conflict. The friend remained a dreamer - in the clouds, and the narrator tried to knock him or her into reality by tilting the cloud. The 'tilted hand' is, I suspect, an inversion of the image of the even hand (for fairness and cool tempers) - basically an acknowledgement that I was unfair to you, but you pushed my buttons to get me there.

This makes the most, and the best, sense of the title lyric: It's an acknowledgement of having been wrong all along. All this time has passed, and only now am I figuring out what you knew all along: Shed revenge and doubt, and pursue your dreams.

(The alternative interpretation I've been weighing a little bit is that the friend's death is the hornet sting, both shaking the narrator from youthful naivete and simultaneously crystallizing the memory of the optimist friend. I can still make sense of the tilted hand in much the same way - I deal with others with less of an even hand because of my anger at what happened to you - but I have a much harder time figuring out the cloud lyric.)

So there's a sense of hope, of moving back to optimism, of pursuing one's dreams ("tonight we smoke them out"), but also a sense of frustration, that it's so hard to do, when it seemed to come so easily to that childhood friend who died while still an optimist. ("disappointing you is getting me down")