BEFORE THE DELUGE

“When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky”

Jackson Browne is an American singer songwriter whose lyrics you would have heard somewhere. The words of Before the Deluge were composed as early as 1974 and are even more valid now. The words when sung were accompanied only by piano and guitar when viewed on YouTube. Something special gto me and worth listening to.

I view it as a protest song as it was written to support the ‘river keepers’ of Tennessee for them to keep the waters clean for future generations.

As a poet I do want to waste a word in the sense that every, if not most, have to earn their place on the line to maintain their right to remain there. So we right ‘tight’. And as a group we write that way within that framework. Reading all these lines which in many senses are ‘loose’ I began to think what we could be missing when we want to deliver a message with constraints.

Upon reading and looking closely at the words and lines we can see this. Conformity does not really exist. Line length varies although not overly important but cannot be ignored. He has a rhyming scheme that seems a tad haphazard but him being a lyrical man he would have to include rhyme. On occasions they could be viewed as contrived but does that matter? When sung he can place stresses on words to fit his chords. Also he repeats lines and they then become a chorus. Also he can impose his own rhythmicality to those words and lines.

These last two lines repeated below are, for me, incredibly strong and he uses them with repetition which accentuates their power. He used them in an earlier part and for him they must be of significance.

“Let creation reveal it’s secrets by and by, by and by

When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky”

Of course, you would know that I would approve of his writing as there is an absence of punctuation and I could comment as to why start each line with a capital? Does it matter either way?

The difference of my writing compared to lyrics is that they are pleasing to the eye on a page. I know we read our work aloud but that is not the same as performing them either with or without music.

So where should we go from there? The Academy of American Poets put out a variety of work on a daily basis and the formats vary a lot. They add more to the conundrum of how we should write. I ask, are the lines of Before the Deluge poetic? Do their rhythms drive the words along the lines? Or are we back again considering prose poems? No matter though I like what Jackson Browne does.

All for thought and the lyrics are below.

Lyrics for Before the Deluge

Some of them were dreamers

And some of them were fools

Who were making plans and thinking of the future

With the energy of the innocent

They were gathering the tools

They would need to make their journey back to nature

While the sand slipped through the opening

And their hands reached for the golden ring

With their hearts they turned to each other’s hearts for refuge

In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure

And some of them knew pain

And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered

And on the brave and crazy wings of youth

They went flying around in the rain

And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered

And in the end they traded their tired wings

For the resignation that living brings

And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow

For the glitter and the rouge

And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

Let the music keep our spirits high

Let the buildings keep our children dry

Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by

When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry

At the way the earth was abused

By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power

And they struggled to protect her from them

Only to be confused

By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour

And when the sand was gone and the time arrived

In the naked dawn only a few survived

And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge

Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Let the music keep our spirits high

Let the buildings keep our children dry

Let creation reveal it’s secrets by and by, by and by

When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky