The Smiley Smile Message Board

That (In)famous Line
"Anyone care to analyze the lyrics?"

by Michael Leddy

In a recent rec.music.artists.beach-boys (a usenet discussion group - the editor) thread of that name, concerning the lyrics for SMiLE, someone wrote:

I’d like to see an analysis by someone trained in poetry, someone who is good at that sort of thing, like one of my English profs in college . . . No, it wouldn’t be definitive, but might provide some insights.

I’m a professor of English, so I guess I’d better say something.

The 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound describes three qualities of poetic language: logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia, or the play of meaning, sound, and visual imagery. Take Van Dyke’s (in)famous line from "Cabin Essence": "Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield." You can see the lyricist playing with meaning: Is "cries" a verb, or a noun? It might seem that a crow is crying "Uncover the cornfield," but there are no quotation marks in the printed lyric, so "cries" must be a noun. "Uncover" is more puzzling. What would it mean for cries to uncover a cornfield? Perhaps crows are cawing as they fly away, leaving the field as it was before they arrived and covered it. "Uncover" could be a surprising, logopoetic way to say that.

There’s considerable play of sound in this line—over and uncover, the long o in over and crow, the hard c in crow, cries, uncover, and cornfield, the repeated r sound in over, crow, cries, and corn. You could say that the line performs the repetition that it speaks of—making the same sounds, again and again. Just say the line a few times and you can hear its richness. It’s a mouthful, literally. And it has an emphatic rhythm:

DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM

That’s almost a line of Homer—dactyls (DUM da da) followed by a spondee (DUM DUM). (Homer’s lines though have six feet each, this one only five.) The long o sounds also echo roll and over in "Roll Plymouth Rock." So this line is rich in melopoeia in itself and in relation to another part of SMiLE.

As this line suggests, Van Dyke’s lyrics are often a matter of logopoeia and melopoeia: "The diamond necklace [a queen?] played the pawn," "hand in hand some ... handsome," "canvass the town . . . brush the backdrop." That sort of play with language is, simply, a large part of the pleasure of poetry. Such play may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s what I see (and love) in Van Dyke’s lyrics, along with witty cultural shorthand (for instance, the reference to Ramona in "Orange Crate Art").

As for phanopoeia, the visual image of crows leaving a field might not seem like much, but Wallace Stevens’ "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is at least one precedent for poetry of the ordinary, everyday bird. Making a striking image out of everyday stuff is one thing that modern American poets tend to do very well (William Carlos Williams, for instance). In the context of the first section of SMiLE, the image of crows leaving a field might suggest nature in flight from the European presence in (and devastation of) North America—the presence that has brought the "ribbon of concrete," the bicycle rider, railroad tracks, truck-driving men, mechanized agriculture, and an empire of homes on the range.

None of what I’ve written is what the line "means," in any simple way, but it’s often more useful with poetry to ask what a line does, or what it evokes, or what it gives a reader to find pleasure in. To say that the line means that crows are leaving a field is in fact to kill everything that’s interesting in the line. That’s the kind of approach that literary critics used to call "the heresy of paraphrase"—the reduction of the poem to a bare statement, as if the point of reading poetry were to cut away the beauty of language to get to some sort of message.

And none of what I’ve written is a matter of guesswork about what the line "really" means, or what its author "really" meant, or what Van Dyke was thinking when he wrote the line. Those ways of thinking about poetry begin with a misleading model of what it means to write, a model in which what the poet says and what the poet means are two distinct matters, the first happening on the page and the second happening in the poet’s consciousness (and thus unavailable to us). A much more workable approach is to think of the poet’s meaning as something we construct, by bringing to bear as much attentiveness and as wide a range of relevant reference as possible.

In an essay written last year for the SMiLE tour booklet, Van Dyke professes still not to know what "Over and over . . . " means. That’s indeed a respectable position for a poet to take. John Ashbery, whom many readers would consider the greatest living American poet, has said that he has no idea what it is he’s doing when he writes. The work of making and the work of noticing and explaining are two different things. As a poet myself, I tend to distrust poets who are willing to explicate their own work, and I cringe a little if someone asks me "What did you mean by that?" It’s for the reader to make something of what he or she reads, and that’s what I’ve been doing here.

As I write these words, it’s autumn in the American midwest, the cornfields are down, and I’ve begun to notice crows everywhere. I noticed them in field after field while riding the train home from Chicago, where my wife and I heard SMiLE earlier this month. When I put in a daily walk and bring SMiLE on my Walkman, I hear crows loud and clear along with the music (and along with the animals of "Barnyard"). That’s another dimension of poetry—its capacity for changing your perceptions of the world.

Michael Leddy
October 2004
Michael Leddy teaches at Eastern Illinois University in the United States and blogs at http://mleddy.blogspot.com.

Now all someone has to do is go back in time and hand  Prof. Leddy's comments to Mike!

It should be pointed out here that the quoted line is a result of Parks applying a bit of "cut-up" method to the lyric which could very well have been originally written as:

"Over and over the crow cries and hovers the cornfield / Over and over the thresher uncovers the wheatfield"

More logical, but not nearly as poetic.

Now all someone has to do is go back in time and hand  Prof. Leddy's comments to Mike!

It should be pointed out here that the quoted line is a result of Parks applying a bit of "cut-up" method to the lyric which could very well have been originally written as:

"Over and over the crow cries and hovers the cornfield / Over and over the thresher uncovers the wheatfield"

More logical, but not nearly as poetic.

That said, can anyone explain to me what this means:

Oooooo-ooooo-ooooo
Ooo-ooo-ooo

Everyone's in love with you
But you can't fall in love with anyone
Still everyone's in love with you
Though you can't fall in love with only one  

I wondered about this for, um, 32 years.
 

Not sure if you're just having a little fun or if you're serious about your inquiry, but "Everyone's In Love With You" was written for the Maharishi so the implication would  be that all of his followers are in love with him, but he is forbidden to "fall in love" with any one of his followers (don't tell Prudence Farrow that!). I'm not certain the last line quoted is "can't fall...". I've always heard it as "you can fall in love with only one"; the "one" being God.

When I suggested that the line in question was probably originally written as "over and over the crow cries and hovers the cornfield", I didn't mean that Parks intended it to be that way during the '66 sessions and it was later changed. What I'm suggesting is that Parks probably would have been aware of the "cut-up" method employed by William S. Burroughs and others in various Beat literature (where previously written sentences are cut apart and reassembled randomly) and deliberately scrambled the words in the couplet to make it more interesting/poetic/psychedelic, etc.

In a sense, the couplet is a puzzle whose literal meaning can be solved quite easily, but seems to take on greater meaning when scrambled in its current state.

Sorry 'bout the acid 'illiteration'!
'Furthur' however is not a typo...

That said, can anyone explain to me what this means:

Oooooo-ooooo-ooooo
Ooo-ooo-ooo

Everyone's in love with you
But you can't fall in love with anyone
Still everyone's in love with you
Though you can't fall in love with only one  

I wondered about this for, um, 32 years.
 

When I suggested that the line in question was probably originally written as "over and over the crow cries and hovers the cornfield", I didn't mean that Parks intended it to be that way during the '66 sessions and it was later changed. What I'm suggesting is that Parks probably would have been aware of the "cut-up" method employed by William S. Burroughs and others in various Beat literature (where previously written sentences are cut apart and reassembled randomly) and deliberately scrambled the words in the couplet to make it more interesting/poetic/psychedelic, etc.

In a sense, the couplet is a puzzle whose literal meaning can be solved quite easily, but seems to take on greater meaning when scrambled in its current state.