Oh man, it IS "his cloudy breath"--I had thought the line was "I could see the steaming of his cloudy brow" and it was my favorite line in the song. It is "steaming" though, and not "streaming" as the lyrics here say. Also, I would vote for "froze in motion" over "frozen motion" in line 3; "froze in motion" sounds the same and it's grammatically incorrect (it should be "frozen in motion"), but "frozen motion" just makes no sense.
Good call, heartwork, about the Virgil inference. But the tradition of depicting courtship in terms of a male hunter pursuing a doe goes way beyond Virgil; Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare and many other widely-read poets all have sonnets with this theme. It's interesting that the sonnet tradition almost always identifies with the hunter, whereas this song takes the perspective of the hunted deer. It takes some measures to undermine the assumptions of the genre, especially in the fourth stanza, which brings the degrading and misogynistic implications of the tale to the surface: "My life is not mine / Like a dog or a wife."
Ultimately, it could still do more to subvert the genre, however. It is clear in this song that this model of courtship is bad for the woman, who is killed and carted off. But I would argue that it is also degrading to the man, and this is not represented in the song. The hunter in this song is the paradigm of idealized masculinity, powerful, enigmatic, stoic, godlike. He carts off his trophy at the end of the song with no indication that he has been reciprocally affected in any way by his violent act. While this may be the way some men prefer to see their own sexual "conquests," in reality sex and love are two-way streets and we would do well to abandon such an antiquated and patriarchal model of gender relations.
Oh man, it IS "his cloudy breath"--I had thought the line was "I could see the steaming of his cloudy brow" and it was my favorite line in the song. It is "steaming" though, and not "streaming" as the lyrics here say. Also, I would vote for "froze in motion" over "frozen motion" in line 3; "froze in motion" sounds the same and it's grammatically incorrect (it should be "frozen in motion"), but "frozen motion" just makes no sense.
Good call, heartwork, about the Virgil inference. But the tradition of depicting courtship in terms of a male hunter pursuing a doe goes way beyond Virgil; Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare and many other widely-read poets all have sonnets with this theme. It's interesting that the sonnet tradition almost always identifies with the hunter, whereas this song takes the perspective of the hunted deer. It takes some measures to undermine the assumptions of the genre, especially in the fourth stanza, which brings the degrading and misogynistic implications of the tale to the surface: "My life is not mine / Like a dog or a wife."
Ultimately, it could still do more to subvert the genre, however. It is clear in this song that this model of courtship is bad for the woman, who is killed and carted off. But I would argue that it is also degrading to the man, and this is not represented in the song. The hunter in this song is the paradigm of idealized masculinity, powerful, enigmatic, stoic, godlike. He carts off his trophy at the end of the song with no indication that he has been reciprocally affected in any way by his violent act. While this may be the way some men prefer to see their own sexual "conquests," in reality sex and love are two-way streets and we would do well to abandon such an antiquated and patriarchal model of gender relations.