Warning: this post discusses sensitive matters related to mental health and depression.
More than ten years ago, before my wife and I moved to Ottawa, I remember sitting with my guitar and composing a song which has mystified me ever since the day I scrawled it on loose-leaf. Today’s analysis will consider briefly the lyrics and music and discuss the idea of inspiration.
The Cliff
Upon the cliff in summer time
The wind is fair the seagulls cry
I find your place a sacred stone
Which moss replaced used for a throne
And it is wet trembles in my hand
You cannot speak I cannot stand
The morning flees a naked band
Of colour streams across the strand
You walked these woods alone
The trees held out their hands
The leaves played with your hair
The darkness crept in there
The yellow clouds that bickered north
Brought piercing rains to cut my soul
Tin hedges clapped beneath the brine
The sea’s red foam churned overnight
And as the wake made a dash
For freedom’s eye in a piece of glass
You strode the crag in a burnished dress
Felt sunset’s brush paint cheek and sash
You left the world alone
The sea welcomed you in
The long train of gin
Whistled in the bones
Oh in the bones
The wretched hike the winter gales
The icy teeth and frosted nails
Upon my skin I wear your scarf
The ocean’s roar a mane of rime
Encircled here I feel your doubt
The ghostly mood the demon shout
Of lover’s guilt of unsaid grief
An empty bed a kitchen cleaned
Your tracks were fresh and as I reached
That sacred spot my hand was slow
You never glanced I let you go
The occasion for this song is perhaps the most mystifying part of its composition. Thematically it is completely unrelated to anything in my own experience, nor was it a response to an emerging event in the world. It was not even a response to a vivid encounter with nature nor the product of drugs or other substances. Instead, it came to me all at once as pure inspiration. I don’t mean the kind that sets apart sacred texts, but borrowing from the ancient idea of a muse that uses the poet as a vessel, I confess that I supplied no particular agency or explicit intellectual labour in its production.
Put simply, I don’t know what it means. Or, I don’t know what it is supposed to mean, or what the author’s intent is. In one respect, this is exciting, because it offers a rare opportunity to get out of the way in the interpretive process. But, this poem haunts me, not due to the tragic scene it paints (though this is heart-wrenching), but for some of the completely wild lines that make no sense but somehow place pictures in my mind:
“The morning flees a naked band
Of colour streams across the strand.”
Now I can see the imagery of the sun painting the clouds in wonderful hues as it moves across the sky. But, what is a naked band of colour?
“Tin hedges clapped beneath the brine…”
What are these tin hedges? How are they beneath the briny water, and what does their clapping represent? Perhaps it is a reference to the churning water as silvery waves (that look somehow like hedgerows) crash into each other as they are tossed back and forth far below the cliff?
“And as the wake made a dash
For freedom’s eye in a piece of glass”
I have no clue. The waves are pictured as trapped, and they are making a run for their freedom – but not just freedom, they are aiming for the eye of freedom found in a piece of glass. Perhaps it is best to think of the “eye” as a gateway or portal, like the eye of a camel, which makes the point that freedom has a very specific and narrow entryway. A piece of glass might refer to translucent bottles that wash up on the shoreline or a looking glass.
Now this last bit seems like a great candidate for the nonsense bin and we should perhaps not pay it much heed, chocking it up to bad poetry. Fine by me! What this gesture cannot account for is how these lines, and the rest of the odd phrases “long train of gin / whistled in the bones” still produce vivid pictures in the mind. How can our imaginations process such nonsense into something which suggests moral meaning or power? These waves, with all their strange dashing and clapping, seem exactly appropriate for the stormy emotional moment overtaking the subject of the poem.
I do recall one important moment in the composition of the song and it is the way my musical instincts changed in the last stanza. The mood intensifies. The music, simple as it is with basic major chords like A, E, and D (with a C# and B to transition the final part of each stanza), became even simpler, and I remember the heavy downstrokes of the D chord that opened the final stanza transitioning in the second line to an equally strong A. Back and forth between the two with nothing else. Even now as I play it, I remember how all the notes seem to open up and my voice grabs at the minor 6th interval of the D, which gives that tense or unpleasant feeling because the voice pulls toward resolution as a perfect fifth exactly on the phrase “upon my skin”. I’m not sure the recording above does it justice, but you get the idea.
And I think it is fitting. In a disjointed fashion – moving backward and forward in time – the speaker recalls a journey up to the cliff in search of the beloved (“the wretched hike”) in the middle of winter – having grabbed the subject’s scarf in a rush, which is a bittersweet protection against the elements. And then, surrounded by the frost and the shaggy mane of ice covering the cliffside, the speaker remembers all the mental anguish and markers of depression, including how it impacted their relationship.
I share this piece with you because I know others may be haunted and healed by it. It does not glorify or celebrate personal choice, nor does it conceive of these difficult matters in moral terms. My own journey through grief reminds me that most things are out of my control, which is not a call to complacency, but a pragmatic tonic. What grounds your actions? What ground mine? Hope is not always apparent, as this piece makes clear. Sometimes the music simply stops without explanation. But that doesn’t mean the experience of a poem or song like this offers no help. Sometimes it is best to wrestle with the past and weep so that we may move forward.
Todd Anderson (Stuff of the Rind, Sand and Sail, Collected Poems) writes the newsletter Mirth to share a behind-the-scenes look at his writing process as well as to offer readers the first fruits of his poetry and reflections. He grew up in the forests of small-town Ontario, contending against nature in all its beauty and harshness. His training as a literary scholar of Latin and English literature inflects his love of poignant turns of phrase, but it is the influence of his family and their myriad adventures together that infuses his story-telling and poetry with its substance and power. Todd lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and six children. If you are interested in supporting Todd’s work, please follow the links below to donate or buy his books.
Todd Edward Anderson 