Crack in the Wall

This is the first track off of Vega's album, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles; it was released in 2014 (shortly before I began this blog).

The song has a very interesting rhyme scheme. For the first two verses, it's a b c b c c d b (as long as we rhyme "sun" with "ravine" and "scene"). Then the last verse is longer; it starts the same but then keeps going: a b c b c c d b e e f b.

The song's lyric is structured like a traditional fantasy story. Instead of a wardrobe leading to Narnia, a rabbit hole leading to Wonderland, or a train platform leading to Hogwarts, our speaker sees the following: "A crack appeared inside a wall/ A door sprang up around it... a wildish wind blew it open wide." 

While such stories are always about young people and the speaker is not that, nevertheless she has a "childish mind" and enters. After all, the door seemed to be made especially for her to find: "I could not believe I found it." 

Once she entered, did she find the fantastical fauna of Pandora from Avatar, the outlandish characters in Willy Wonka's factory, or the mystifying creatures of Oz? After all, she says, "A world of wonder lay without"...

"It was all of nature's calling." She's... outside. In nature. A really spectacular example of nature, but basically just outdoors. She lists: "field, forest, cloud, sun, heights and valleys, ravines, ivy, thorny scenes."

Still, she is enraptured, saying that she was "surrounded" by her "heart's delight." What made this "lap of nature's sprawling" so amazing? Well, there were "cascades of salt water falling," and that doesn't usually happen; saltwater is already in the sea, and the rivers that form waterfalls on the way to the sea are freshwater, having been made by rain or melted snow. 

But aside from that salient (pun intended) fact, she felt delighted to be there because "each thing did love its place."

The chorus is simply "And so, and so it goes." This is a commonplace expression, but it is one popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in his book Slaughterhouse Five; in it, Vonnegut's narrator is usually saying "so it goes" while reacting to something negative, often a death, with a feeling between acceptance and resignation... but sometimes rue. 

Back to our song. The speaker meet "the one whose land it was" and asks for a "token," something to take back to her world as a private souvenir. She is told "no" three times. The way she phases this is that she was "thrice denied," which echoes the three times Peter denies that he knows Jesus in one night (as Jesus predicts). She asks one more time, as humbly as possible, without any "pride"...

..."and found [she'd] lost that world." Oh, no. She has somehow been cast out-- or more pointedly, cast back in, to within her wall.

She has "returned as one now broken/ To a crumb, a rag, a withered leaf." This is how she sees her world-- the one she'd always lived in before entering that "door"-- now. 

She freezes in the "chilly wind of cold relief." Wait, why is she relieved? We thought she was sad to be back. Perhaps this uses the other meaning of "relief," a sculpture carved into a wall. When something is said to be "thrown into relief" it is made real, given depth. 

Like Dorothy returning from Oz, she is "as from a dream awoken." 

But also like Dorothy, she can go back (there are more than a dozen books in the Oz series). Alice returns through the lookingglass, and the children pass through the wardrobe into and out of Narnia as if it had a revolving door. 

Here, too, the speaker ends her song: "But then a crack appeared inside a wall/ And a door sprang up around it." She gets to go back in... as long as she never takes anything out with her.

In most cases, we imagine the questing youth going "into" the new world. Here, the speaker goes "outside" through the door that the crack opens in the wall; the world of wonder lay not "within" but "without."

She lives in a world of walls. A house, a city. She has had the opportunity to explore nature-- maybe she went camping?-- and now sees her urban world pale by comparison. But she knows that to return with a shell or stone is to subtract from the very nature she loves.

Now, however, she has something more important that a thing to remind her of that wondrous place-- she has a way to get back to it. And she can't wait until she does.

There, "each thing did love its place." The same seems not to be the case in the city. At least for her; she realizes she hates it there.

(While the young adult novels referenced herein are relatively recent, in history-of-literature terms, the idea of going through a portal into another world is at least as old at the tale of Orpheus following Eurydice through a cave into Pluto's cavernous underworld.)

Vega's first song on her first album in years is "Crack in the Wall," and the first song on her debut was "Cracking." Does she consider this album, seven years after her previous one, some sort of new debut? 

Next Song: Fool's Complaint