Patient, Fine, Balanced, Kind

For this assignment, I've chosen to write about the song "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver, from the album For Emma, Forever Ago. It's been a favorite of mine for a few years now, due to it's simplicity while still having tons of emotion and thoughtfulness in it. Besides the delightful mandolin/guitar/drums in the background, the lyrics alone stand their ground in their wonderfulness, and now I'll argue why they're also poetic. The song resonates in you after listing to it, since it's so filled with regret and honesty. Therefore, the theme of this song, to me, seems to be regret and sorrow (all crammed into a still somewhat upbeat song/album). Poetry is supposed to invoke strong feelings and ideas, and if you listen to this song in the right mood, it does just that. Even if you're not in any sort of mood before listening to the song, let alone the whole album, it will put you in a sort of trance and strange mood. Accordingly, poetry is defined as a standard of beauty and intense potency. 

Justin Vernon, the founder of Bon Iver, described skinny love as when “You're in a relationship because you need help, but that's not necessarily why you should be in a relationship." His explanation is a really nice preface for analyzing the lyrics. The first line that stuck out to me was:

Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer/
I tell my love to wreck it all/
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall/

As Vernon said before, the song describes two people in a relationship that isn't necessarily a good or healthy one. The sink full of blood as well as the crushed veneer could point to domestic abuse. The lines also make me think of sacrificing part of yourself for the other person, which while I believe in mutual respect and love in relationships, your own self should still always come first. 

These next lines are my favorite:

And I told you to be patient/

And I told you to be find/ 

And I told you to be balanced/

And I told you to be kind/

Those lyrics make me picture Vernon sitting somewhere with his head in his hands, going over everything that went wrong [that was his fault] in his past relationship. Maybe he was controlling and is just realizing it now, or he was asking all of this from his partner and is still hung up on it. 

The last few lines make me think of regret and awful over thinking:

Who will love you?/ 
Who will fight?/
Who will fall far behind?/

The poetry techniques "Skinny Love" uses includes imagery, as described in the above paragraph, lots of symbolism, and specific spacing and lines breaks which create nice and resonating pauses. 

Below is the performance that got me to pick Skinny Love. It's a really fantastic video and opens with anther great Bon Iver song...