| Regina Spektor – The Flowers Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Oh I should clarify something: although the boiling soup from stone bit alludes to a story which has a positive outcome, I don't think that the poetess is optimistic -- I think she is desperate. She is desperate throughout. The flowers rotting part also shows that it the relationship is clearly pretty messed up, and so we might read her as cynical, but she's clearly desperately trying to make sense of something. | |
| Regina Spektor – The Flowers Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Your analysis is really close. "By stating that she will never go to sleep, she is acknowledging that the relationship is doomed and she is grasping at a non-existent possibility." I read the line "I'll never know if I go to sleep" as a continuation of "They might [open] so I'm waiting and staying awake." So actually it is not an acknowledgment of defeat, but a grasping at straws. "...the second line referring to boiling soup from stone is a reference to an old fable; here using it to once again to embody her pessimism of finding a conclusion..." The fable that the lyric "I'm boiling soup from stone" is alluding to is not pessimistic at all -- it's a tale wherein a character, like the poet in this song, starts boiling a stone. People come by and charitably sprinkle ingredients into it until the soup becomes edible. I think of this line as a continuation of her chopping up books and trying to piece together an understanding from a community of thinkers. I think what you are reading as the pessimism of the song is contained in Regina's cadence and the sadness of the piano accompaniment. This interpolates onto us a suspicious reading of the lyrics, and so we feel like the poetess in this situation is in a doomed relationship. But despite all that stuff, I really like this analysis and I feel everything else you said is totally spot on. |
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