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Last week, I remarked<\/a> on the pros and cons of Garth Brooks\u2019s stance on digital music (in short, he\u2019s agin it). However, I scraped together a few favorites from Youtube, which happily included the deep album cut \u201cIreland.\u201d I\u2019m using it to revive my \u201cAnatomy of a Song\u201d series, which\u00a0was sorely neglected after only one entry.\n\u201cIreland\u201d comes from the 1995 release Fresh Horses<\/em>, a project that tinkered with a wide palette of sounds. This stirring ode to the Emerald Isle has Garth getting in touch with his inner Irish tenor. It was co-written by Brooks with Stephanie Davis and Jenny Yates in the style of a folk ballad, and it\u2019s one of the best-crafted song lyrics I\u2019ve heard. Aspiring and professional writers alike should take note.<\/p>\n
It begins with a\u00a0poetic prologue, personifying \u201cmother earth\u201d with vivid images from nature and concluding that \u201cher heart, it is in Ireland.\u201d This sets the tone with an other-worldly quality before launching into the main body of the song:<\/p>\n
They say mother earth is breathing
\nWith each wave that finds the shore.
\nHer soul rises in the evening,
\nFor to open twilight\u2019s door.
\nHer eyes are the stars in heaven,
\nWatching o\u2019er us all the while.
\nAnd her heart, it is in Ireland,
\nDeep within the Emerald Isle<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe song\u2019s main story has a military setting, with bagpipes and bodhrans a\u2019blazing. The opening line, \u201cWe are forty against hundreds\u201d recalls \u201cThe Charge of the Light Brigade,\u201d so you know this probably isn\u2019t going to end well. The conflict is unspecified except for the information that it\u2019s \u201csomeone else\u2019s bloody war.\u201d \u00a0In the spirit of folk revivalist ballads, it\u2019s rather down on war in general:\u00a0\u201cWe know not we\u2019re fighting, or what we\u2019re dying for.\u201d But, also in the spirit of revivalist ballads, the lyrics are carefully chosen and beautifully rhymed. Consider this precisely crafted verse:<\/p>\n
Oh the captain, he lay bleeding.
\nI can hear him calling me.
\n\u201cThese men are yours now for the leading.
\nShow them to their destiny.\u201d
\nAs I look up all around me,
\nI see the ragged, tired, and torn.
\nI tell them to make ready,
\n\u2018Cause we\u2019re not waiting for the morn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nEven as the song\u2019s tone is very bleak, it taps into the solemn thrill\u00a0of a last battle, a glorious final charge. They strike while they still have the element of surprise, knowing that the enemy \u201cwill storm us in the morning.\u201d The lyrics paint a picture of thick darkness and heavy fog, with no sound but the breathing of the enemy\u2019s horses as they draw closer. And in the final moments, \u201cThere are no words to be spoken, just a look to say goodbye. I draw a breath, and night is broken, as I scream our battle cry.\u201d<\/p>\n
I have not yet mentioned the chorus, which gathers new\u00a0weight each time it\u2019s repeated:<\/p>\n
Ireland I am coming home
\nI can see your rolling fields of green
\nAnd fences made of stone
\nI am reaching out, won\u2019t you take my hand?
\nI\u2019m coming home, Ireland<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe obvious poignancy is that these forty are not coming home and never will. But there is a pagan sense that when you die, you always go to a place that feels like home. This makes terrible theology, but it also makes great poetry. And it does tap into something true about the human heart, which of course was most beautifully captured by C. S. Lewis in\u00a0The Last Battle.\u00a0<\/em>The longing that we feel for our earthly homes is a reflection of our longing for the home we were ultimately created for. Lewis is imagining something like more like the New Earth than the New Heaven, where we will literally find the same countries and the same lands we have loved.\u00a0We will see their alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.\u00a0Of course, this is speculative, but it\u2019s a clever and vivid way of capturing how we surely will feel when we reach our eternal home.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s only natural that the last thing these ragged, grim-faced soldiers think of is the rolling green\u00a0fields\u00a0of home. It will not be much longer now, they think. Soon they can rest. Soon they can lay down their burdens, to study war no more. The final line then wraps back around to the beginning, with a significant change: \u201cWe\u00a0were\u00a0<\/em>forty against hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n[Note: I used to have a link to the original version of the song here, but Brooks\u2019s scouts seem to have pulled it down, since YouTube is \u201cthe devil\u201d and all, according to him at least. So here\u2019s a vigorous cover band version instead.]\n