"Candles on the River"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Earlier to-day, I realized that I forgot something about "Candles on the River" in the post I wrote about Argent's In Deep.

The first verse (and the song itself) starts with the lines "Candles on the river / Islands in the rain."  As phrases, they're pretty parallel, but the interesting thing is the allusions behind them.

The "candles" part would seem to be a reference to the Zombies' "Brief Candles," which - according to the Zombie Heaven liner notes - is a title that Chris White took from Aldous Huxley's collection of short stories.  But Huxley himself took that phrase ("brief candle") from Shakespeare's Macbeth:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.  (Macbeth V.v.2376-2385)

Incidentally, Huxley also took the title Brave New World from Shakespeare.  Specifically The Tempest, which is also the source of the quotation in the original liner notes to Odessey and Oracle:

Be not afraid;
The isle is full of noises
Sound, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices

Also incidentally, William Faulker used this same section of Macbeth for the title for The Sound and the Fury.  Faulker also wrote "A Rose for Emily," which Rod Argent took for a title for an Odessey and Oracle song.

Anyway, it would appear that the line "candles on the river" is a reference to "Brief Candles," but I think the Macbeth reference is stronger.  In "Candles on the River," the candles represent people - the same representation they have in Macbeth.  In "Brief Candles," they represent memories: "bright and tiny gems of memory."

But listening to In Deep recently, the second line ("Islands in the rain") caught my attention (especially because I was working on transcribing the lyrics).  It could just be a phrase constructed to have a sort of similarity to "candles in the river," but because the first line has a literary allusion, I think the second does too - to John Donne's "No man is an island."

So there's the parallelism between both lines just as phrases, but there's also the parallelism between them as allusions to English writers - Shakespeare and Donne.  Interestingly, the order of the allusions in those lines mirrors Shakespeare's and Donne's lives.  While they were contemporaries, Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born sooner and died sooner than Donne (1572-1631).