The lyrics should read
"'Cause I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.
I felt the false azure from windowpanes."
This is a reference to the opening lines of the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. It's a very complex and multilayered narrative, but death, remembrance of things past, and authorship are huge themes in the novel, as they may be in this song.
The lines in the poem that begins the novel read "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/in the false azure of the windowpane." They describe how the speaker witnessed a waxwing (a type of bird) die by crashing into a window reflecting the sky. Evidently, the bird mistook the "false azure" of the sky's reflection in the window for the real thing, and tried to fly into it.
The lyrics should read "'Cause I was the shadow of the waxwing slain. I felt the false azure from windowpanes."
This is a reference to the opening lines of the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. It's a very complex and multilayered narrative, but death, remembrance of things past, and authorship are huge themes in the novel, as they may be in this song.
The lines in the poem that begins the novel read "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/in the false azure of the windowpane." They describe how the speaker witnessed a waxwing (a type of bird) die by crashing into a window reflecting the sky. Evidently, the bird mistook the "false azure" of the sky's reflection in the window for the real thing, and tried to fly into it.