"Maybe after He's Gone"

Yester-day, I read the lyrics for "Maybe after He's Gone" in The "Odessey": The Zombies in Words and Images and noticed a couple features in it.

From verse to verse, there's progressively less of "she," which illustrates her leaving.  She's there at the beginning ("She told me she loved me"); by the second verse, she herself is gone, and there are just vestiges of her left ("Her smile, her tears are part of me"); and by the third verse, the narrator is by himself ("I'm on my own... I'm alone").

I also realized that "Maybe after He's Gone" starts very similarly to the second and third verses of "Tell Her No."  The first line of "Maybe after He's Gone" is "She told me she loved me," which is only slightly different from "And if she should tell you, 'I love you'" and "If she tells you, 'I love you'" in "Tell Her No."

"A Rose for Emily"

In The "Odessey": The Zombies in Words and Images, I recently read about "A Rose for Emily."  Hugh comments that "Rod was quite right in his arrangement of this very beautiful song."  This made me realize that, instrumentally, "A Rose for Emily" is the sparsest song on Odessey and Oracle (the only instrument on it is piano).  I also realized that, in a way, this relative lack of instrumentation (compared to the rest of the album or even just to the preceding and following songs) matches some of the lyrics, particularly "not a rose for Emily" and "none for you."

"I Love You"

I'm currently re-reading The "Odessey": The Zombies in Words and Images.  Recently, I read about "I Love You," and I realized that in one spot, the construction of the lyrics matches the meaning.

As it's formatted in the book, one section is:

If I could find the words in my mind

The words should explain, but the words won't come

If you could see what you mean to me

My words should explain, but the words won't come

Semantically, the line "If you could see what you mean to me" seems isolated.  ("My words should explain" follows it sequentially but not logically since the explaining words would precede the knowledge of "what you mean to me.")  The line is a protasis without an accompanying apodosis, so even in the construction here, there's a lack of words ("the words won't come").

"Trapeze"

I listened to Argent's Circus this morning and noticed a small feature in "Trapeze."  After the line "Freefall vision dragging me down," there's a descending phrase played on Moog (taking special advantage of the pitch glide), giving a sense of that "dragging... down."