[885] Night Vision

By day give thanks, by night beware
Half the world in sweetness, the other in fear

When the darkness takes you, with her hand across your face
Don't give in too quickly, find the things she's erased

  Find the line, find the shape through the grain
  Find the outline and things will tell you their name

The table, the guitar, the empty glass
All will blend together when the daylight has passed

  Find the line, find the shape through the grain
  Find the outline and things will tell you their name

Now I watch you falling into sleep
Watch your fist uncurl against the sheet
Watch your lips fall open and your eyes dim
In blind faith

I would shelter you
And keep you in light
But I can only teach you
Night vision
Night vision
Night vision

	-- Suzanne Vega

I like everyday poems. Of course, I also like love poems, and war poems,
metaphysicals and the Movement, irreverent flights of whimsy and dense
conglomerations of weighty syllables. But there's a special place in my
affections for poems that celebrate the simple, the ordinary, the casual -
and which do so in such a manner as to offer a new way of seeing them.

Today's poem is one such. Who hasn't reflected on the way things look after
the lights have been turned out? The strange shapes furniture and fabric
take, the patterns of moonlight and shadow rippling across walls and floor,
the reflected images in mirrors, the silhouettes of lamps and bookshelves
and chairs and vases... at night, reality itself seems to 'suffer a
sea-change / into something rich and strange' [1].

And Vega captures this. "Night vision" is a song [2] that combines the magic
of darkness with the tenderness and poetry of love, and it's wonderfully,
wonderfully done.

thomas.

[1] Shakespeare, "The Tempest". See poem #16
[2] It's on her utterly brilliant (and surprisingly little known) second
album, "Solitude Standing", released in 1987.

From: "Langmaid, Nick" <Nick.Langmaid@>


I found these lyrics very interesting, so I dug a little deeper.

The words are a loose translation of a work called "Juan Gris" by French
poet Paul Eluard.

Juan Gris was a Spanish cubist painter who lived and worked in Paris in the
early part of the twentieth century.

"Find the line, find the shape through the grain
 Find the outline and things will tell you their name"

It's a nice commentary on the cubist style.  These lines aren't in Eluard's
poem (unless my French is much worse than I think it is!) so Suzanne has
added them, closing the loop.  Very tidy.

Nick.



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From: G & J Waters <dawaters@>

I was listening to this song tonight, and I love it as a poem. For me,
it's also about our fear of the dark, and what parents (and anyone who
loves someone, I suppose) want for their child (or beloved) - to keep
them in light. But in this world this is not possible, so we try to
teach "night vision" -- how to make it through the "dark night of the
soul," when fear grips us and we feel as if we can't continue, how the
recognition of the familiar grounds us.
jwaters