His Grinning Skull Lyrics

Lyric discussion by BoyNamedTim 

Cover art for His Grinning Skull lyrics by Wild Beasts

'I'll eat this young whelp's heart I will' 'I'll eat this young whelp's heart I will' 'I'll eat this young whelp's heart'

^For me the most heart-breaking musical moment of 2008 so far.

'I'll eat this young whelp's heart I will' IS a wonderful line. What do you reckon this song's about. My guess is that it's a kind of vanitas. The first half seems clear: man dies, woman misses him, but death must be accepted. But who is the narrator? A gravedigger? the woman's new lover? A graverobber? Why is the narrator in pools? What is the temptation? Then they raid his grave. So perhaps it is a graverobber? Anyways, brilliant song, superb live too.

Such a great song.

I never thought of it as a song about a death in the literal sense, that's interesting, as if the man were dead and his wife/lover who stood by him through all was finally leaving him.

Obviously there's a lot of death imagery, but I imagined it as "digging the grave" for the lover you scorned, as in ridding yourself of him completely, particularly because of the lines "and now perched on his skull/ are these cuckold's horns." I see the song as the story of a man who was his wife/lover's protector ("he who...