“On the second day he came with a single red rose It is another kind of wrong track, calming us down after having frightened us: he sounds normal, whereas very soon he will do something absolutely not normal. This time, the adjectives chosen by the man are not scary. This idea leads us back to his comparison of her as a rose. Though the intention stays implicit, the man suggests to bring her to this place “where the wild roses grow”. I said, “Do you know where the wild roses grow The alternance of voices underlines the parallelism of feelings, and mimics the phenomenon of reciprocal attraction. She was more beautiful than any woman I’d seen” “On the second day I brought her a flower But is it really the same? NO: each time this chorus comes back, its meaning is slightly different, updated according to the flow of new data. It is repeated without any modification of the lyrics or the music. So we can say those elements build up a wrong track: we are here lead to believe true something that will later prove false. As the following will show, this hides a contrary drive. The mention of his “careful hand” and the tender gesture of wiping the tears, let us think that this man is tender and loving, and establishes a positive pronostic for their love story: since it starts good, it should continue good. The fact that she is crying will remain unexplained, but as long as we do not know it, it generates a suspense: will we get the explanation? He wiped at the tears that ran down my face” “He would be my first man, and with a careful hand The very literary, poetic style adds much to the quality of the song, especially in a verse like “My trembling subsided in his sure embrace” in which actions of the characters get somewhat distanciated, which adds to the beauty of the emotions involved. Thus, those lines make us enter the development – Act II – tensed by the implicit dramatic question: will they stay together and be happy? We could play rewriting two songs, one per character: we then would lose all the tension built by the confrontation and harmony between those points of view.Įven if this plot point was already told by the man, it was a different way. In terms of narration time, it is interesting to notice that this song doubles the chronology of actions: each event gets repeated twice, once per each of the characters involved. This new change of narrator definitely confirms that the song is a duo in which the points of view are closely intertwined. My trembling subsided in his sure embrace” “When he knocked on my door and entered the room On the contrary, the adjective “bloody” attributed to the roses, carries something scary, a potential threat that rises the tension up. This romantic analogy between the color of her lips and a place down the river where wild roses grow, sounds as a hint of her near death next to such a place, in a rather magical logics. That grew down the river, all bloody and wild” “For her lips were the color of the roses It sounds old-fashioned and cliché, but the song is soon going to treat this theme a more original way. We can easily recognize the old stereotype of love at first sight. From there, we expect to know whether the love story will stand or not: implicitly, it gives us the goal: stay together, or not.įor the moment, the two characters share the same actantial role: they are both Hero, and there is no Antagonist yet. This first meeting is the catalyst of what will obviously be a love story. The contrast between Kylie Minogue’s soft, high-pitched voice, and Nick Cave’s deep, bassy, rocky voice, contributes to dramatize the situation and carries something erotic at the same time: female/male. It is obviously more interesting to tell the story from two sides rather than only one. This double point of view over the same events will characterize the whole song. The narrator changes and becomes a man, interpreted by Nick Cave. “From the first day I saw her I knew she was the one The fact this chorus is written both at present (“they call me”) and past times (“my name was”) plays as a discrete hint of what is going to happen to her. This chorus also stands as the beginning of Act I: exposition.įor the moment, she is the narrator of the story. This chorus sung by the sweet, feminine voice of Kylie Minogue, gives us straight away two major plot elements: 1/ the theme, it’s about a woman compared to a rose, and 2/ the Antagonist – even if we do not know yet that she will soon get such a status. The song, that lasts 3:57, starts, after a brief violin-based instrumental, by the CHORUS:
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