"Overhead the albatross hangs
motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and summery
And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light
Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can
And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks
And no one tries
No one flies around the sun
Almost every day you fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky"
I guess you can call them modern day bards, Pink Floyd. Yes.
I never could figure out the hullaballoo around them till now. And then I heard
“Echoes” and there I connected across time to the band and I was mentally
floating the sheer joy of this lyrical poetry. The philosophical nature of this
amazing piece held me enraptured and made me overwhelmingly ecstatic. It also
made me use unnecessary ornamental language! Not just the lyrics, but the music
too. My God, the music. Let’s not go into that part though.
Anyway, so much for my frenzied diatribe on the music. I was
pretty much interested to put out my interpretation of the song. So yeah, here it
goes.
The albatross evokes a vivid image of ‘The rime of the
ancient mariner’ by Coleridge. Probably, it was
an allusion to that. This brings to my mind the depiction of a man who feels
entrapped and chained in the rut of everyday living. He feels his life is
miserable and dreary and the albatross is a constant reminder of the same.
This fellow, he also has this feeling of darkness
surrounding him from all over and which has a strange way of looming up on him and
his life wherever he goes. It is like a fortress around him, this darkness. And
he is again jailed by the same.Over this fortress, every moment of his waking
life, he sees green fields. And looking at those, a part of him is always
tempted to somehow get out of his castle of darkness for he thinks life is
great outside. It has been so long since he has been inside this fortress that
a part of him wants to have no truck with “breaking the damn wall” , but there
is a part of him that really wants to get out. And that part perseveres. That
part “stirs” and “tries to climb towards the light”
Enter verse two and as fate would have it, this fellow has
scaled over the fortress wall and is out. He feels that finally he has reached
his Shangri-la, that finally he is out of his fortress and in a world where
bliss reigns supreme. With these
thoughts he enters the ‘new world’. But soon he realizes that bliss is a free bird. It detests
company. He realizes that the people of the ‘new world’ are all trapped in
their own island fortresses for he can see himself in any man who passes by.
Seeing this evokes in him a feeling of a shared bond, of the brotherhood in misery,
and the final realization that true paradise evades all.
The last verse, I feel refers to his invective against the
now mythical happiness. He accuses it of soliciting him, all the while knowing
that it is unattainable. He accuses it of taunting him, of being cheeky but
never providing any comfort or reassurance of ever achieving it. But even after
all this tirade, in his heart of hearts,
he knows that he still craves that paradise of joy, much like the addict’s next
‘hit’. So in a final act of desperation he ‘throws the window wide’ and calls
to it ‘across the sky’
This song paints a dystopian vision of a man’s life which to
a great extent is true. We mortals are in a way looking for that happiness
outside. In my view, this song also alludes to our nature of seeking happiness
from material possessions and points to the transitory nature of that happiness.
It points out the basic fallacy in human nature which seeks pleasure from
outside and keeps running behind things like fame and fortune. And after
achieving all that, if ever, man finally realizes that things like that can
never bring true bliss. And if the fortress walls ever have to stop being a
prison, they have to be torn down and not scaled over.
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