This song makes my brain hurt. I've got a fuzzy image of what it's about, though. I'm having trouble finding a central theme for all of the verses. Religion is definitely involved. It talks about man being imperfect because of original sin (I think?). In the second verse, the "rabbits" are mankind; basically, if we're not prevented from doing wrong, we're going to go ahead and do it because it's in our nature to make mistakes... Which is also a lesson learned from the story of Icarus and his wax sings. Then there's the dust of earth returning line, which is a reference to the bible: when a person dies, the dust they are made from goes back into the ground, and their spirits return to God, where they are judged. So the narrator (Icarus) is asking God to have mercy on him because he is only a mortal man and is therefore imperfect (?).
The only thing I'm having trouble with is connecting the above concept with the idea of burying our dead so they can come back to life... Maybe it's because only God has the power to do that, and man, hard as he seems to try, cannot live forever? Like I said, it's fuzzy.
Oh, and I'm not religious. We've just had long discussions about this stuff in my English class after we read excerpts from the Bible. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. ^^;
This song makes my brain hurt. I've got a fuzzy image of what it's about, though. I'm having trouble finding a central theme for all of the verses. Religion is definitely involved. It talks about man being imperfect because of original sin (I think?). In the second verse, the "rabbits" are mankind; basically, if we're not prevented from doing wrong, we're going to go ahead and do it because it's in our nature to make mistakes... Which is also a lesson learned from the story of Icarus and his wax sings. Then there's the dust of earth returning line, which is a reference to the bible: when a person dies, the dust they are made from goes back into the ground, and their spirits return to God, where they are judged. So the narrator (Icarus) is asking God to have mercy on him because he is only a mortal man and is therefore imperfect (?).
The only thing I'm having trouble with is connecting the above concept with the idea of burying our dead so they can come back to life... Maybe it's because only God has the power to do that, and man, hard as he seems to try, cannot live forever? Like I said, it's fuzzy.
Oh, and I'm not religious. We've just had long discussions about this stuff in my English class after we read excerpts from the Bible. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. ^^;