Nah, I think the doctor is Death himself. Okay, it starts off and he shows up, and the moon recoils in horror. It colors the world red, everybody lit up like a target for our doctor to knock off. Whenever he shows up it's cold and dark. This line is especially telling:
I saw him at the crossroads, but I never saw him cross it,
one minute he was on this side,
and the next he was be over on the other.
so went his rounds, one sad patient after another.
The crossroads is the line between life and death. When the narrator sees him in the land of the living, the next thing he knows he's on 'the other side,' without really knowing what happened. So Death goes on, one after another.
Anyway, I adore this song. I love how the end of the chorus changes each time, from "the slow thick morning" to "the flowing blue world" to "the crushed velvet world" to "the impossibly large office"...it still makes me think that Death is slowly gaining more and more territory, moving faster and faster until he's got us all crushed. At the same time...it is in past tense. Delightful, oh yeah.
Nah, I think the doctor is Death himself. Okay, it starts off and he shows up, and the moon recoils in horror. It colors the world red, everybody lit up like a target for our doctor to knock off. Whenever he shows up it's cold and dark. This line is especially telling:
I saw him at the crossroads, but I never saw him cross it, one minute he was on this side, and the next he was be over on the other. so went his rounds, one sad patient after another.
The crossroads is the line between life and death. When the narrator sees him in the land of the living, the next thing he knows he's on 'the other side,' without really knowing what happened. So Death goes on, one after another.
Anyway, I adore this song. I love how the end of the chorus changes each time, from "the slow thick morning" to "the flowing blue world" to "the crushed velvet world" to "the impossibly large office"...it still makes me think that Death is slowly gaining more and more territory, moving faster and faster until he's got us all crushed. At the same time...it is in past tense. Delightful, oh yeah.