Gravity and love

Last week, I spoke to my students about using fresh metaphors in modern songs and poems. We'd spoken before about tired metaphors and symbols like roses for love, doves for peace, but it hadn't occurred to me to refer to contemporary writing to show them how new images can startle and affect a reader. When I read online versions of the Guardian's booklets on Greek legends, I thought of a song that cleverly uses a scientific law to represent attraction. The class was thrilled about the song, though I suspect much of their excitement came from getting to listen to music instead of having to read or write.

It was Germaine Greer's foreword for "The power of love," that mentioned the comparison of love to gravity, or rather, she reminds us that gravity is just another word that means the force of attraction. Immediately, I thought of Sara Bareilles's interpretation of gravity, which had initially struck me as a conceit - something I used to encounter often enough in metaphysical poetry (John Donne, Andrew Marvell). Despite my initial resistance to the idea, it eventually grew on me and transcended the level of fanciful-metaphor-by-writer-trying-to-be-clever. Given Bareilles's genuine emotion when she sings, the haunting words and phrasing, the song easily made my list of top 25 most played songs. It's a song about falling in love, being unable to resist the force of it. The speaker wants to escape the pull, but says she can't, or perhaps she doesn't wish to.

dimsumdolly likes the song too. She writes a poignant entry about it.

Here is Sara Bareilles's "Gravity."

Here too is the a cappella version that she recorded with her former group from UCLA, Awaken.

Bonus: Awaken does a beautiful version of Billy Joel's "And so it goes," a song about keeping silent.

To complete the circle, here's another Sara (Gazarek) with a version of "And so it goes."

Posted by Monoceros at January 21, 2008 8:40 PM