Coming Up Roses

hmm... while I hate having to say any elliott songs are about drugs, this one is one that I believe is. "Coming up Roses" supposedly means the flash of blood that shoots into the syringe when you shoot up on heroin. "cold white brother riding your blood" is the drug itself... "I don't need your permission to bury my love under this bare light bulb" I've always interpreted as even though people rant about doing drugs, he's not gonna stop, he'll bury his love (heroin) in his arm under the bare light bulb, maybe in a basement or something somewhere. "While the moon does its division you're buried below" is either dead or in that same basement, shooting up. "The things that you tell yourself, they'll kill you in time" is how he might say "heroin's OK, it won't hurt me" will eventually hurt him.

The imagery in this song is perhaps the most vivid of all Elliott's songs. It's very poetic, and fraught with metaphors and ambiguities.

To me, though, this song just speaks of the awkward, difficulties of life, "I'm a junkyard full of false starts" and the way people are always struggling to stay above the water, always hiding things, and always just barely making it through the day out of pure luck, because there's no organisation, no purpose, no drive in their lives;

"So you got in a kind of trouble that nobody knows And you're coming up roses everywhere you go Red roses"

But that's just me. I adore this song.

pushing up daisies

I love this song, like everyone else. It's absolutely beautiful and I think its some of his best lyrics.

This song makes me think about sickle cell anemia (the moon is a sickle cell/It'll kill you), and refers to red and white blood.. the sickle cell moon doing division.. It's clever. I don't know where to go with that though. It's like sadness is an illness?

Elliott Smith so often hides his drug references in everyday phrases made into elaborate metaphors, and that's why I think he's one of the greatest writers about that subject ever. it all sort of represents the way addiction just creeps into every part of a person's life.

There's an underlying problem that no one can see: "So you got in a kind of trouble that nobody knows." To interpret this song you have to work off of this idea -- that your troubles cannot be seen by others. What others see, in stark contrast, is you "coming up roses everywhere you go." They see you succeeding. Everywhere you go things are working out. But all this success is prone to collapse if the "trouble that nobody knows" comes out. In a sense, you're bound to everyone's misperception of you, and you become a distorted version of your ideal self. What exists in the void created by the differentiation between your distorted self and your ideal self? But these ideas are expressed at the end of the song. From here, we have to work backward to attempt to answer the question I have raised, among many others that many others have certainly raised. Unfortunately, the lyrics at the front end of the song lend themselves to so many different interpretations it's startling. (Meaning, I'm not yet ready to go there.)

Deliberately or serendipitously, Smith's song reworks Sylvia Plath's poem "I Am Vertical," which itself replies to Auden's lines, "Let us honor, if we can,/ The vertical man,/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one."

The big difference? Auden was an emotionally healthy man for whom our general tendency to value the dead over the living could only appear as an irony and an insult to life itself. Plath and Smith were suicidal depressives for whom death figures as a consummation devoutly to be wished. The fact that dying not only relieves us of life's difficulties--"the pressure of days," as Smith calls them elsewhere--but also invests us with "value"--in Auden's words--renders it doubly attractive to Plath and Smith.

In both cases you have death aestheticized, made beautiful through its connection with natural cycles. Plath's poem thus ends, "I shall be useful when I lie down finally:/ Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me." Compare that to Smith's refrain: "While the moon does its division/ You're buried below/ And it's coming up roses everywhere./ You've gone red roses."

Did Smith know the Plath poem, or the Auden poem? Maybe. For a guy his age, he was pretty well read in literature and philosophy. But it doesn't matter that much. The idea that life is a "conspiracy against the human race" (Thomas Ligotti), a "burden" (Schopenhauer), a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing"--this forms one of the great echo-chambers of western art.

I've always thought this song was about the masks people wear, the way we present ourselves as being "fine," or "okay," when, really, our world is falling to peices and there's a wall we can't climb-we're lost and lonely, afraid and discouraged. We're still "coming up roses" on the outside.

i have to agree with mon no jigoku. the signs are obvious...and not that im familiar with the lingo...but come on. i've never been a fan of trying to interpret other peoples work, but there isn't much to interpret here. hes talking about shooting up.