Bright Eyes

Speaking from personal experience, as someone who is having to watch his loved one 'slip away downstream', I think this is one of the best ever songs about death. My wife is so close; her bright eyes, normally so full of life and love, normally glowing with vitality and enjoyment, are now hollow, grey and vacant. I have watched, heartbroken, as she has declined gradually over the last 6 months. Her determination has waned, depression has set in and I know that one day soon her bright eyes will burn no longer. When does it start? Maybe death creeps up on us, ever so gradually, every time we fear it so much that it takes away from our appreciation of life. When I look at the sadness in my wife's eyes, and no doubt in my own eyes watching her, I see fear - surely far more fear of what may or may not happen when she 'floats out on the tide' than what she will ever feel when it actually does happen. Death is a return to peace and we all know it, but it's not really the fear of death that we are afraid of; it's the attachment to life. It's so hard to let go, especially when most of us spend our whole lives in a mental struggle for survival, always trying to build more security...like we can ever hope to cheat death and live forever! The harder we try to survive and improve our lives, the more we underline and reaffirm our own subconscious fear of death, which in the end always catches up with us on our death beds. If you want my advice, spend as much time as you can contemplating your own death (like the Tibetan Buddhists do). It's not morbid, it's liberating; only the soul that is at one with death can truly appreciate life without being held back by fear. This song is one of the best ways of beginning that journey. If you listen to it and feel a tightness in your chest, like a star inside trying to burn its way out of you...if you weep with sadness at the absurdity and unfairness of life and the futility of it all...if this song moves you to the very core of your being and you yearn to release your passion, yet at the same time you can't stop yourself pressing the repeat button and playing it over and over again... If you have ever loved somebody more than you even love yourself, and more than life itself... ??? If that is you, take a deep breath my friend. You are the type who will feel your loved one all around you, within and without you, for the rest of your life. Ever present. In the morning mist and the cool evening breeze, in the winter frost and the autumn leaves. What happens when we die? Where do we go? We go NOWHERE - NOW + HERE - turning and returning to the passive energy of BEING, the background presence that infuses life with its passion - our passion. And if you are the kind of person that is sensitive to that then you are fortunate that you are able to release some of those feelings now, while you are still alive and conscious. Thank you Watership Down. Thank you Mike Batt and Art Garfunkel. And thank YOU for allowing their expressions to reflect within the mirror of your own soul and in so doing allow life and death to become a little more conscious of each other. xxx

This is a truly brilliant song, haunting yet beautiful. Only the soundtrack version as heard in the film moves me to tears. The interspersion of the lyrics with the melancholy orchestral score gets me every time.

What annoys me is that so many people think that Art Garfunkel actually wrote it himself. Mike Batt wrote this song specifically for the ‘Fiver Beyond’ scene in Watership Down. We see in this scene that Hazel is not dead, only wounded. The Black Rabbit is leading Fiver through an almost dreamlike journey to find Hazel. We essentially get a glimpse through Fiver’s eyes as we realize how psychedelic and frightening his visions really are. Fiver struggles to make sense of them, but in the end he follows his feelings and usually ends up being right. We also see Hazels burning red eyes becoming ‘pale’, though we know he is not dead yet!

The song itself is about mortality, change, death, and many different concepts that prey on us mortal animals in our search to make sense of our lives and the world around us. The underlying theme is that of life being a journey. We don’t know where it will take us, but we know it must come to an end sometime. We essentially fear and muse on the darkness that lies beyond our destination. This is echoed within this scene, but also in the film’s end scene. We get a much deeper perspective of the lyrics when we see the elderly Hazel in his prospering warren. His bright youthful eyes have become pale and weak. He has come to the end of his journey and darkness is upon him, i.e. the black rabbit of death. We see that Hazels continuing journey in the afterlife will be ok, yet he still worries for what he will be leaving behind, only to be reassured by the spectre before him. Let’s hope we can all hope for such a good ending. All in all, a classic ‘sad’ song for a truly classic animated film.

This is a good song but nobody has yet to say what the song actually means to him or her.

As the theme song of "Watership Down" (an animated film about rabbits looking for a new home after being driven away by men), it is played during the death of a main character. The spirit of the "Black Rabbit" is coming to take him to a kind of heaven, I believe. I think that's why the lyrics say "following the river of death." I also wonder if that "kind of shadow" is a reference to the Black Rabbit who appears only when a rabbit is about to die.

It's a very beautiful song. One of Art Garfunkel's favorites. This is my favorite song of them all. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it.

The book, Watership Down, by Richard Adams is also a political story. General Woundwort's burrow is like a communist country. I highly doubt that this song is about communism, but hey, it's food for thought for all those of you with hyperactive imaginations.

I would say that this song was pretty obviously about death, the mystery surrounding it and how it is an inevitable rite of passage, like the course of a river.

I haven't seen the movie, I'm afraid.

this is a really moving song, turns me to teers in the movie every time

The song is partially, I believe, about myxomatosis, a viral disease which causes conjunctivitis in rabbits. The chorus, Bright eyes, Burning like fire. Bright eyes, How can you close and fail? How can the light that burned so brightly Suddenly burn so pale? Bright eyes

Is a reference to one of the earliest symptoms of the disease, runny and swollen eyes, progressing to lumps around the head and ears, and eventually causing death. It is referred to in Watership Down as the "white blindness". "How can you close and fade" is a reference to a later symptom, when the conjunctivitis has become so severe that the eyes are swollen shut.

It's a nasty concept, but then, some of the best songs out there are built on nasty concepts :p

I think this song is about the sunset...and then sunrise.. but also about death. About life. I think, like the film, it has many undertones and underlying meanings. Put i defintely think the bright eyes are the sun rise.

it's when we are supposedly brought to the afterlife and our feeelings while we get there

I fell in love with the song when I watched Watership Down. I'm currently reading the book, which is more detailed and moving than the film, but the two are both amazing. A symbol of my childhood, I suppose. I do blame my mother for showing the film to me so early in my life as it frightened me quite a bit and now I blame it for my disturbed and morbid mind =P

Bright eyes was not written for Watership Down Mike Batt composed it about his father dieing of cancer. "Bright eyes " refers to the strange look in Mike's father's eyes brought on by the pain killers. I suppose that the "suddenly burn so pale" bit must be when he finally died. The song itself is one of my favorites. very emotional. I love the book and film of watership down. The book is best because many rabbit words are not explained in the film, owsla for example.