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"
You thought the leaden winter
Would bring you down forever
But you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun
And the colors of the sea
Blind your eyes with trembling mermaids
And you touch the distant beaches
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
For the sparkling waves are calling you
To touch their white laced lips
And you see a girl?s brown body
Dancing through the turquoise
And her footprints make you follow
Where the sky loves the sea
And when your fingers find her
She drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples
In the tissues of your mind
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
And you want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter
Her name is Aphrodite
And she rides a crimson shell
You know you cannot leave her
For you touched the distant sands
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
Yeah
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
You want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter
Would bring you down forever
But you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun
And the colors of the sea
Blind your eyes with trembling mermaids
And you touch the distant beaches
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
For the sparkling waves are calling you
To touch their white laced lips
And you see a girl?s brown body
Dancing through the turquoise
And her footprints make you follow
Where the sky loves the sea
And when your fingers find her
She drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples
In the tissues of your mind
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
And you want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter
Her name is Aphrodite
And she rides a crimson shell
You know you cannot leave her
For you touched the distant sands
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
Yeah
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
You want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter
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One of the themes in stories about Ulysses is that even though he spent years struggling to return home, once he reaches it he is restless and can't be satisfied there, because he has "touched the distant sands" of foreign lands and has learned to live for adventure. (For example, in the poem "Ulysses" by Tennyson...)
So I think this song can be interpreted kind of that way. It's about someone who travels to a foreign exotic place and falls in love with both the land and a girl (who represents the place in a way). Now that he has met her, he knows that he can never be satisfied without her -- "you know you cannot leave her for you touched the distant sands." He knows he must return home to the "hard land of the winter", and he wants to take her with him, but he also knows this is impossible...and even if he did take her back there, it wouldn't be the same, and eventually the magic would probably be lost. And he probably can't stay at the "distant beaches" for the same reason -- not only does he not quite belong there, but part of its magic for him is probably the temporary nature of his stay. He is destined to move on, but now he is doomed to be dissatisfied wherever he goes. While he is traveling, he misses his homeland where he really belongs, but once he returns, he is restless for adventure and can't forget the girl that he met, who is preserved in memory as perfect, whether she really is or not -- so what he misses may or may not even exist.
It’s a feeling that everyone who travels can probably relate to at least a little...
That's exactly how I interpret this song...and you're right about that travels feeling
@greenbean I agree, too. I would add that the reference to the sirens implies that that pain is worth it. Ulysses has his crew stop their ears with wax so that the sirens' song does not affect them, but he chooses to have himself bound to the mast and to listen to it with "naked ears". Even though he knows that "the sirens sweetly singing" draw sailors to their deaths. To choose to suffer terribly, in order to learn something that no one else alive knows - it's a defining quality of the character.
allow me to correct you marcd - the lyrics were not written by Eric Clapton. They were written by Martin Sharp. He was an australian poet Clapton met in a club called The Speakeasy. He told Clapton that he'd written a poem and Clapton told him that he needed a lyric for a song.
By the way - Sharp also made the famous coverart for Disraeli Gears.
I watched the show Classic Albums on Disraeli Gears and the guy, Martin Sharp, listed in the linear notes was the one who wrote the lyrics. He said,
"I used to live in the islands of the Med. Sea and when I moved back to London I missed it so I wrote these lyrics about it."
And Clapton was at a bar and they talked and he gave him the lyrics. Then made the cover work. So that's what the guy said about it.
I understand this song intuitively because I have lived it! I always loved the song for its classical allusions and psychedelic power, but it took on even deeper dimensions of meaning for me later in life, after my tripping days were well behind me: I met my wife in Latin America - we had an amazing day at the beach while getting to know each other. I remember the intensity of the colors, the sensations, the sand, the glorious sense of isolation in the shimmering waves, the sun was reflecting off the water on her brown body, I was in love, we were all alone, I knew I had to marry her and bring her back to cold New England. I took her (poor tropical maiden) to the "hard land of the winter" and she has adapted magnificently. She has learned English, we have two beautiful children and just had our 10-year anniversary.
I have made very few good decisions in my life, but marrying my lovely Latina bride was definitely one of them. I owe part of it to this immortal song by Cream. And I owe all of it to God...
@NomadMonad <br /> absolutely lovely interpretation of this song. I always feel I want to stay when I vacation in warm climate, and then have to return to Cleveland. Yuck!<br /> Happy for you, many blessings to you and your family.
this is probably one of the best cream songs
Also, the line about "touch the distant beaches" and "where the sky loves the sea" seem to relate to an other world, like Heaven.
obviously based on the book The Odyssey by Homer.
Yes, it seems that this song was based on The Odyssey.
As far as the "where the sky loves the sea" line, I took that as merely referring to the horizon and the call of touching the "distant beaches."
Then there's the line: "And when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body, Carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind." I've always heard that for each new piece of information your brain retains, a new wrinkle is formed. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but with that in mind it seemed to me that Aphrodite here "drowns you in her body" or makes love to this man and while doing so it is ultimately becoming a memory that will stay with him forever.
And of course Aphrodite is the goddess of love, who when she was born rose naked from the sea atop a scallop shell. "and she rides a crimson shell"
the wpediers say:<br /> <br /> The lyrics are inspired by Homer's Odyssey, an account of the adventures undertaken by Ulysses. This can be seen in the song's reference to "naked ears ... tortured by the sirens sweetly singing," an event from Homer's epic. When interviewed on the episode of the VH1 show, Classic Albums, which featured Disraeli Gears, lyricist Martin Sharp explained that he had recently returned from Ibiza, which was the source of many of the images in the song (e.g. "tiny purple fishes run laughing through her fingers") and the general feeling of having left an idyll to return to "the hard lands of the winter"; Clapton stated in the same show that he had been independently writing a tune based on the Loving Spoonful's "Summer in the City", and when Sharp gave him the words (on the back of a bar napkin) they fit the tune.
People keep citing Homer and The odyssey but I don't think anyone has actually read it. Odysseus is headed home to Greece after the Trojan War -- which in the song is more England of the winter -- and the story is his adventures almost not making it, what he encounters -- like the Cyclops or Circe and the Sirens, the last referenced in the song. When they sing beguiling him to drown himself in the sea, white laced lips and girls brown body etc. in the song, he has to be tied to the mast and his (naked) ears covered up. I forget how Aphrodite is involved here directly but she is one of the cause of The Trojan War (when Helen beats her for Paris's acclaim as the most beautiful) and she is born on foam out of the sea in a shell -- see Boticelli's Birth of Venus -- she's the goddess of love and foam is semen, fertility, the sea is life here -- tiny fishes -- as well as drowning and death, temptation and orgasm, since also the sirens and Circe are other than Penelope, the whole frame tale Odysseus going home to his wife (a whole other story once he gets there). Anyway, I think the song great, the imagary right and not overdone, great song.
kabrams20 said: probably shouldnt try to make sense of this song...
...unless your stoned into oblivion
I always thought this referred to the Botticelli painting (the birth of Venus) "her name is Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell" So this song is about love and how you can never let it go back and jadda jadda jadda