Bless the Child

Bless The Child

"I was born amidst the purple waterfalls.
I was weak, yet not unblessed.
Dead to the world. Alive for the journey.
One night I dreamt a white rose withering,
a newborn drowning a lifetime loneliness.
I dreamt all my future. Relived my past.
A witnessed the beauty of the beast"

Where have all the feelings gone?
Why has all the laughter ceased?

Why am I loved only when I'm gone?
Gone back in time to bless the child
Think of me long enough to make a memory
Come bless the child one more time

How can I ever feel again?
Given the chance would I return?

I've never felt so alone in my life
As I drank from a cup which was counting my time
There's a poison drop in this cup of Man
To drink it is to follow the left hand path

"Where have all the feelings gone?
Why is the deadliest sin - to love as I loved you?
Now unblessed, homesick in time,
soon to be freed from care, from human pain.
My tale is the most bitter truth:
Time pays us but with earth & dust, and a dark, silent grave.
Remember, my child: Without innocence the cross is only iron,
hope is only an illusion & Ocean Soul's nothing but a name...

The Child bless thee & keep thee forever"

When we discussed the loss of innocence in class this past week and how Linda’s death might represent it, the first thing that came to my mind was this song by Nightwish. I know I posted a Nightwish song before, but I feel like I need to write about this one because I think it fits perfectly with the theme of the loss of innocence. At the end of “The Things They Carried” the Tim O’Brien in the novel says that he realizes now that he was trying “to save Timmy’s life with a story.” By telling all of the war stories in the novel, he was trying to release himself from the horrors of war; he was trying to reclaim his time of innocence, his inner “Timmy.” This song by Nightwish, Bless the Child speaks about the same thing; the child is a metaphor for innocence.

We start out innocent, completely sheltered from the evils of the world. We are “Alive for the journey,” ready to see what life has in store for us. But as time goes on, this innocence fades away. The “white rose withering” probably refers to the loss of that innocence, as does the “newborn drowning.” Just as Tim O’Brien relives his past (or at least relives his loss of innocence whether the events in the story actually happened to him or not), the speaker in the song relives his/hers.

As time goes on Tim O’Brien and those in his story almost become desensitized to death. Some of them shake the dead men’s hands and they often give the dead a voice. That innocence that we don’t realize we have until we lose it is gone (“why am I loved only when I’m gone”). By writing about his childhood Tim O’Brien revisits that innocence; he has essentially “Gone back in time to bless the child.” When the speaker in Bless the Child asks his/herself whether they would return to that time of innocence if they could, he/she is questioning whether he/she would go back to that state of innocence even if it meant sacrificing everything that was learned up until this point in life. As we get older we acquire more worldly knowledge, but at a high cost. Would you return to being a child, to being completely innocent, even if it meant sacrificing everything you know now? I think Tim O’Brien (in the novel) might.

The stanza “I've never felt so alone in my life/As I drank from a cup which was counting my time/There's a poison drop in this cup of Man/To drink it is to follow the left hand path” indicates the evils of growing up in our society. As we get older, we drink from the “cup” of human civilization, but this cup is poisoned. The aging process poisons our inner child and we all end up following the “left hand path” which is the path to the end of innocence. Left is often thought to represent evil, hence the “left hand path.”

The last stanza of the song talks about death. The speaker is “homesick in time,” they long to return to their childhood, to innocence. But they realize that eventually they will be freed from human pain, they will eventually die. In The Things They Carried, the narrator is freed “from human pain” through telling his stories. He makes the innocence come back to life through these tales.

I think that the last two lines of this song are some of the most interesting. “Without innocence the cross is only iron” clearly refers to religion, but it also has a deeper metaphor. Without religious belief, the cross means nothing; it is literally just a piece of metal. Just as this is true, without innocence, life may not have a meaning. If we are not able to hold onto some of our inner innocence, our inner child, life may not be worth living. Just as Tim O’Brien must hold on to his inner “Timmy” to survive, we must all hold on to our innocence in some shape or form in order to live life to its fullest. The “Ocean Soul” referred to in the last line is an interesting metaphor used often in Nightwish songs. My best interpretation of it is this: an ocean soul is a more sensitive person, a “deeper” person (like the ocean). They long for the purity and innocence of life and prefer to be (figuratively) distant from society to hold onto this part of life. The writer of this song likely believes himself to be an “ocean soul.”