This song is beautiful, mostly for the lyrics. Mark Knopfler is beloved for his keen interest in using music lyrics to give the listener colorful insights into a wide variety of timeless cultural references. Here, Knofler is not only commenting on the sadness of poverty -- of which alcohol abuse is only a symptom -- but a reference to the hardships of the album's theme, the Great Depression.

This song is beautiful, mostly for the lyrics. Mark Knopfler is beloved for his keen interest in using music lyrics to give the listener colorful insights into a wide variety of timeless cultural references. Here, Knofler is not only commenting on the sadness of poverty -- of which alcohol abuse is only a symptom -- but a reference to the hardships of the album's theme, the Great Depression.

A couple things I could perhaps add to the commentary below. First, I thought a "brass monkey date" was a spite of cold weather, which the two hobo friends considered liquor...

A couple things I could perhaps add to the commentary below. First, I thought a "brass monkey date" was a spite of cold weather, which the two hobo friends considered liquor was the best way to survive. The whisky I don't believe is imaginary at all, but in fact essential to the painful story Knofler is about to weave.

I didn't assume they were actually inside a lovely tavern, with warm service, good food and drink, but that they were actually leaning back imagining that they were -- part of the "ragpicker's dream" -- which imagines that the two also have considerable money to throw around, acting like the big shots they obviously are not. This didn't have to be a memory at all, simply a "dream" of a life only wished for by the two rail-bound men.

The 1st problem a would be interpretor runs into is operating on an assumption that the poetry is attempting to relay a complete, coherent, thought as opposed to building a trance like state using fragmented notions of mystic experiences & induced hysterics ,& the estatic ecstasy of religious psychosis ...

The 1st problem a would be interpretor runs into is operating on an assumption that the poetry is attempting to relay a complete, coherent, thought as opposed to building a trance like state using fragmented notions of mystic experiences & induced hysterics ,& the estatic ecstasy of religious psychosis ...

For 3 days , Christ laid dead & entombed ... 3 days when shadow & light became one ... Because they cease to exist for a dead man ... 3 days before the dead man, forsaken by the father,enters his 3 state , the Holy Ghost ... Shadow & light separate...

For 3 days , Christ laid dead & entombed ... 3 days when shadow & light became one ... Because they cease to exist for a dead man ... 3 days before the dead man, forsaken by the father,enters his 3 state , the Holy Ghost ... Shadow & light separate again as the new incarnation awakens to what it remembers as cricket bows ...

All of it with the surrounding context of a loved one coming to their father's funeral. The beginning is the shaman's welcome to the ritual he prepared to mark the transformative occasion. Sex , drugs, music, & mantras are the shaman's tools to reach a trance like state's of ecstasy ... Ritual is used to mark the transformation of one state to another.... The music dynamics build & intensify... Finally settling into a violent ,driving. rhythm, just prior to the rapture of the final release... Transformed ... All now with wings ...

Robert Plant looks back at the entertainment of the 1950s, the years of his childhood, and how film, television, and music stars portrayed upstanding lives, " a community life centered around the church" symbolized by their laundry, "white, clean, and neat." But, as an adult, he knows that the celebrities of that time had secrets that were hidden from the public until they blew up in public scandals: Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds's marriage ending with an affair and divorce while Johnnie Ray was arrested more than once on laws that forbade homosexuality, and had a failed marriage intended to...

Robert Plant looks back at the entertainment of the 1950s, the years of his childhood, and how film, television, and music stars portrayed upstanding lives, " a community life centered around the church" symbolized by their laundry, "white, clean, and neat." But, as an adult, he knows that the celebrities of that time had secrets that were hidden from the public until they blew up in public scandals: Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds's marriage ending with an affair and divorce while Johnnie Ray was arrested more than once on laws that forbade homosexuality, and had a failed marriage intended to conceal his preference. The song includes some audio clips that alternately emphasize the more puritanical values and the not entirely hidden longings that typify real life, unlike the false moralizing portrayals the song calls "such a long way from the streets."

So, the song calls out the enormous gap between public presentations of the celebrities' lives and the messier reality, and criticizes the morality of Pat Boone, who was an outspoken proponent of the kind of values that, the song, observes, are often not as real as they seem.