Lyric discussion by palegreen 

Umm... you are all totally off.

The song is based from the Lord Byron poem which begins with the same line, "she walks in beauty, like the night".

This song really doesn't have anything to do with a prostitute. It's more about a boy who is becoming a man (I'm eighteen and I need my heroines) identifying his notions of women with his female idols - who are actresses and pin-up girls pinned to his wall. These women are traditional femmes fatale, as shown by the reference to Raphaella, the pre-Raphaelite princess. Femmes fatale have traditionally shown up in art as symbols of the downfall of men, which is evident by his "dying." Yes, Anderson and Butler are quite arty in their references.

I agree on the Byron quotation and the pre-Raphaelite stuff but I guess Brett is playing with the different layers of meaning one can read with both those references and his own context.

I think the song is about the discovery of sexual attraction and the idealisation of women, which is constructed from the references you already mentioned, Hollywood stars like Marylin Monroe but also prostitutes, who might be the actual women to whom the boy is attracted to as he lives in a slum.

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