Talk:Turquoise (song)

Fair use rationale for Image:Donovan-Turquoise single.jpg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:46, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Is this citable?
After this first rich and gentle Keatsian stanza, the song lyrics get more subtle. However in just the first image Donovan makes clear that the woman’s smile will be spread all around the atmosphere as it, the smile, rides on the wing of a gull. Her smile is in the air and for free. The leaves follow after her in delight, like Wordsworth’s daffodils. They are glad of her passing through them, and inspirited and enlivened by her. Donovan, as singer and would-be lover, surrenders his body (hand) and heart to her, reminding her of his fragility, and then he asks for a special gentleness that he knows is full and deep within her. The word "with" is subtly apt since it implies that he has given her his heart, that is, it is in her hands, and personifying his heart as a woman is startling conceit, sounding a Yeatsian echo of naked personal truth. He has give himself over to her, an offering of his whole self. The fragility and gentleness of this first enitre stanza reflect perfectly the fragility and gentleness of the situation of this homage to, and calling on, the muse.

A line such as “your eyes feel like silence/resting on me” is a quiet well of feeling, and the lines “In the pastoral skies of sunset/I have wandered/with my eyes, and ears and heart/strained to the full” is Shelleyean in its sense of completeness as an after effect of all the gifts, and in its sense of being set free once one has been filled with the wonder of the nearness of her. It is Shelleyean, too, in Donovan's striving forth in response to her presence and her leaving---a straining after her, Donovan not being a free gull or an elusive muse. Then he sings “ I know I have tasted the essence/in the few days.” It is both the essence of her and of their time together, and it is precisely turquoise in color, that is, a milder, softer, more pleasant shade of blue, representing the quietly haunted feeling of her vanished presence and his feeling about her, but it is blue nevertheless, since she has moved on, like a gull, into the unknown. In any case, there are few songwriters who could even imagine writing these two lines.

The song goes on to wish her farewell, a generous, real 'fare well' wish, seeing her ride forth, leaving him to wander in the sunset of his emotion. This farewell is Donovan's recognition that she is a free spirit; she rides to her own rhythm. It is also a plea, a calling after her to take "care" in her wistful flight forward. Donovan closes the song with the lines "take who you love, my precious,/he might not know." Know what? Donovan does not need to say any more than that because they both "know" about the inner feeling of their experience together, especially the "strained" Donovan after the fact of her going. But her next lover might not know, ever know, the delicate beauty of her smile, her eyes, her flight and her uniqueness. Her next lover might not know her the way he did, even if after she leaves as does Donovan in his song. He might not know that she is a free spirit. He might not know that he is being given a gift of unfathomable effect and depth. He might not know how she needs to be treated, or deserves to be. He might not know that he needs to surrender to her. He might not know how "precious" she is. The fact that the song ends at "might not know," with no object for the verb, tells us that they shared, and still share in memory, a secret that does not need speaking, an intimacy that is unspeakable and does not need speaking, thus Donovan lets the song close out with the echoing sound of a piercing, plea-full, pleading, melancholic harmonica, a Keatsian ode-like goodbye. It plays itself out, with the birds having ceased to sing in sympathy, without words, without Donovan's voice, which is left to itself, in a series of chords that seem to say "fare forward, voyager." The fact that the song does not have a chorus that gets repeated between verses, a convention that was almost universally adhered to in the period, the 1960's, in which the song was written, is fresh and purposeful: there is no repetition in this song, in this story; everything is unique, or felt as unigue, as things move on and are revealed slowly, glowingly, to the singer. Donovan's song is a gift back to her whose presence was a, perhaps, silent, but nonetheless rich, gift to him, one to be pondered under the "pastoral skies," now that Donovan has been brought outdoors into the open air to witness, keenly, fully, alert in the eyes and ears, to the gulls, leaves and stallion. The whole experience seems, unspooling echoingly without words, as if a dream of love, a "fairy" tale of mysterious essence. The song could have easily begun 'once upon a time I met a woman who took my breath away when she...,' the nearly-wailing harmonica blowing the "skeleton keys of the past," as the song falls into a just, full and learned silence.

That the song sounds and feels as if it harmoniously rhymes throughout is wonderful in that it does not rhyme at all, but it still sounds and feels magically like a harmonious poem-song that was customarily written in the 1600's, and yet is thoroughly modern in its tone, images and voicing. In short, the whole song is about care, care of one another, care of oneself, care of one's effect on another, and, also, of being careful about who one gives his or her heart to, since all our hearts are "made of glass," and there are people out there who might not know.

Turquoise (in serious need of rediscovery by musicians (covers,please), musicologists and listeners)is one of the greatest musical love ballads in the last 50 years of pop/rock/fold music, with a kind of poetry that echoes the 19th century poets in its layering, but remains its own beam of full glass. The fusion of pitch-fine singing, soulful playing (both guitar and harmonica) and spare lyric is exceptional. One could argue who wrote the best song to Joan Baez, Dylan or Donovan, or to their muse, but there is no need to when both singer/songwriters wrote such moving, beautiful songs to her, the difference being that Dylan almost always wrote ambiguously, ambivalently toward women, whereas here Donovan wrote directly, prayerfully, and affectionately.

Removed the above from the article per WP:NOT. Durova Charge! 04:32, 14 February 2008 (UTC)