[blogforlovxr]

Lyrics:

We sailed away on a winter's day
With fate as malleable as clay
But ships are fallible, I say
And the nautical, like all things, fades and I
Can recall our caravel:
A little wicker beetle shell
With four fine maste and lateen sails
Its bearings on Cair Paravel

Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
To be the ones to've seen

The sight of bridges and balloons
Makes calm canaries irritable
They caw and claw all afternoon "Catenaries and dirigibles
Brace and buoy the living-room

A loom of metal, warp woof wimble
And a thimblesworth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble

Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
To be the ones to've seen

Oh my love
Oh it was a funny little thing
It was a funny funny little thing


I always thought this song was pretty straightforward. And it is. It's just that reading the lyrics today, a different symbolism hit me over the head. I always thought the ship and the sea in the song represented the love and journey of this couple, but it just dawned on me that what scared them/made them agitated during their travels was not the loss of that feeling, but rather..the sight of land represented something else.

Water represents something fluid of course, indefinable, call it their lust, wild love without boundaries, and what scared the bejezzus out of 'em was land. A solid structure. Maybe they started defining the construct of their relationship. And if they did, it seemed their relationship didn't survive it. Confining their togetherness in some kind of a structure, they become irritable, restless. And it sadly, fell apart.

But I guess, the narrator, looking back on that situation now, has a note of sadness/melancholy, yet I feel as well she feels a certain warmth towards that period, that relationship and might even ponder on what would've happened if they had stayed together.

And I beat myself over the head for still not having any kind of clue as to what this might refer to:


A loom of metal, warp woof wimble
And a thimblesworth of milky moon
Can touch hearts larger than a thimble

[beckercpa]

I love Bridges and Balloons. It's so heavy with Narnia references - it really sets the tone of the record.