The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #154293   Message #3619402
Posted By: Lighter
16-Apr-14 - 11:30 AM
Thread Name: Have difficulty understanding lyrics...
Subject: RE: Have difficulty understanding lyrics...
Poets can lie too. But nobody much cares, because only a relative handful of people take poetry seriously, at least where I come from. (Rhyme makes them like it better. That's why so many greeting cards are in verse.)

Movies lie even more. And many, many people take them seriously.

But now to the questions:

"Weakness woes" make sense as "physical woes caused by physical weakness." As he says, he's too stiff to touch his toes.

The off-hand tone of "Even if we make a mistake sometimes" suggests that people generally don't think or care much about the "mistakes." They're too busy with their own problems. It's a form of verbal irony, since the writer pretty clearly thinks they *should* care.

"The no colors" undoubtedly means the blackness of night that fades into the violet color of dawn. White light contains all wavelengths of color, but complete blackness is the absence of color.

"Puppy-warm" is just plain bad writing. English-speakers love dogs, puppies especially. Puppies are famously warm. Red and yellow (but not usually violet) are called "warm colors." So the colors of dawn are "warm as puppies." But to compare colors of light to the cuddly warmth of a puppy is way too far-fetched and sentimental ("Awww! Puppies! So cute!") for me. Some will disagree.

I suppose it's the colors of dawn that are "whirling twirling." What else could it be in context? But I've never seen that happen. I suppose whirling and twirling imply the excitement the guy feels about daybreak. Maybe he's been looking at Van Goghs.

> A lot of Song Lyrics are written from a poetic slant, so that the 'sound' of a phrase matters more than the literal meaning.

In other words, some lyrics are nearly meaningless. Or meaningless to everybody but the writer. (By ordinary standards, that means meaningless.)

That has only been true in English for the past hundred years or so. Before that, the words *always* counted for more than the sounds. The sound was supposed to aid the sense when possible, not to replace it.