Monday, November 3, 2008

Analysis of the First Stanza

In the first stanza the narrator is being introspective, and tells the listener his thoughts.  The song opens up with the line, "How does it feel to know you're everything I need,"  a few lines later he goes on to ask himself, "How does it feel to know you're everything I want," both are very sentimental.  Why this opening stanza is introspective is because it ends with "I've got a hard time saying this/so I'll sing it in a song."  Because of this I picture the enamored narrator talking to the woman who has his heart via telephone, and he's sitting at a desk looking at a picture of his love.  And as their conversation progresses the narrator struggles internally to express his deep passionate and amorous feelings for her.  So he turns to a media that he feels most comfortable expressing his deepest and most personal thoughts and feelings; Song. Everything said in the first stanza is his inner feelings.  


The rest of the first stanza depicts how ardent his love is for her.  Two lines from the first stanza, in particular, portray how enamored he truly is, "The butterflies in my stomach/they could bring me to my knees."  He refers to the popular idiom of 'butterflies in the stomach.' It is an ineffable sensation of love.  This woman who has his heart gives him an overwhelming feeling of butterflies in his stomach.  This sensation is so powerful that he can hardly stand.  Which inherently implies another popular idiom of love, 'being weak at the knees.'   The tender, melodic tone in which the music is played and sung adds to the romanticism.  In the first six lines he paints an amorous picture.  

2 comments:

Wiedbrauk said...

I see your point. I also think it's interesting that the narrator first asks the question "How does it feel to know you're everything I need?" and then delivers a statement that sounds like an answer: "The butterflies in my stomach/ could bring me to my knees."

Instead of the narrator letting the person he's addressing answer how she feels, he answers with how he feels.

Is that the narrator projecting an answer on to the person he's addressing? Or is it reminiscent of the frequently awkward, stammering declarations of really strong emotions where a question gets cut off by the next thought because the speaker is so nervous that he doesn't want the listener to think too long on any one statement that could be making a fool out of him?

whitenack said...

don't you think that his song is sort of contradicting since he can't tell the person he loves how he really feels yet he is able to gush his deepest darkest secrets to the public for interpretation in a song?