I can’t imagine how anyone could find this song to be ‘without symbolism’. I think the imagery and word-play is stunning. A few of my favourite examples:
‘threw the screen…’ sounds identical to ‘through the screen…’ (i.e. going through a windscreen in a car crash)
He’s screaming like people at fairgrounds. The screams that you hear at a fairground are the screams of people who are afraid they are going to crash. And, of course, the car crash happens at the entrance to a fairground.
The drunk man looks 'like he’s buried', which, of course, he’s about to be because he was killed in the crash.
The smoke signals he is sending are ‘little whispers’. He’s worried about 'making a whisper out of her'. So 'making a whipser' turns out to be about turning her into smoke.
The last verse is full of images of lights going on and off: the moon, the headlights, the cigarette, the ‘burning out’ of the crash, the light bulb, etc. It makes me think of a few different things: the headlights of the car, the bad street lighting (?), the attraction between the two of them which proved fatal, as well as the obvious death/life imagery of light, and of the moth getting crushed because it is drawn to the light.
Perhaps some of these are unintended, but I doubt that they all are. And I don’t really care much whether they were or not.
I can’t imagine how anyone could find this song to be ‘without symbolism’. I think the imagery and word-play is stunning. A few of my favourite examples:
‘threw the screen…’ sounds identical to ‘through the screen…’ (i.e. going through a windscreen in a car crash)
He’s screaming like people at fairgrounds. The screams that you hear at a fairground are the screams of people who are afraid they are going to crash. And, of course, the car crash happens at the entrance to a fairground.
The drunk man looks 'like he’s buried', which, of course, he’s about to be because he was killed in the crash.
The smoke signals he is sending are ‘little whispers’. He’s worried about 'making a whisper out of her'. So 'making a whipser' turns out to be about turning her into smoke.
The last verse is full of images of lights going on and off: the moon, the headlights, the cigarette, the ‘burning out’ of the crash, the light bulb, etc. It makes me think of a few different things: the headlights of the car, the bad street lighting (?), the attraction between the two of them which proved fatal, as well as the obvious death/life imagery of light, and of the moth getting crushed because it is drawn to the light.
Perhaps some of these are unintended, but I doubt that they all are. And I don’t really care much whether they were or not.