I wandered through my playing cards - The poet sought a different truth, guided by a tarot reading. She denigrates rationality, and feels that Christian Truth is plain and self-evident. "There is no reason, and the truth is plain to see." - This line speaks to me of blind faith. Why should the face of the poet's female companion, first just ghostly, now turn a whiter shade of pale? I think the implication is clear that she is among those repressed churchly souls who would have been scandalized by the Miller's Tale. It is the age-old contrast between pagan saturnalia and repressed high-church piety, between the Dionysian and Appolonian ways of being in the world. He tells a tale that could not be more different: brief where the Knight's tale was long, earthy comedy in place of noble antiseptic rhetoric, baudy and lusty and pagan to an extent that scandalizes those in the group with pretensions of church-taught propriety. Next comes the Miller, over the objections of the innkeeper. The Knight has just told an extended and noble tale, filled with courtly love and chivalry, expresed in high rhetorical style and infused with Christian morality. Instead, I prefer a much more relaxed mode of appreciation, taking in the lines as if they were waves of free associations, loosely linked together, which (if successful) create little explosions of meaning and mood in the listener.įor me the key is the chorus, with its repeated references to Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale." If you remember, Chaucer is staying at a country inn, and listening to the tales told by other travelers. That traditional approach fails miserably with the poetic symbol-salads that began to appear in the '60s. I think that to "understand" this kind of poetry one must first give up the idea that it must be composed of several levels of finely crafted symbols which, when properly decoded, will yield the poem's layered meanings. It's one of my favorite songs from that era.
Like the song "She Said, She Said" that SteveNash wrote about earlier ( ), these lyrics seem pretty clearly to be another example of LSD-inspired poetry. They might have just as well've been closed The fourth and fifth stanzas below are missing from the recorded version, but were sung in numerous live performances by Procol Harum. Here are the complete lyrics as best I know them. Following SteveNash's suggestion, let's take a look at Keith Reid's "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
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