Music Is Poetry: Passenger's "The One You Love"

I consider music to be poetry because my definition of poetry is quite broad and loose. I define poetry as a release of emotions or ideas through words. “The One You Love,” a really beautiful song by Passenger from their album Flight of the Crow, is a great piece of poetry. While I don’t agree that poetry has to include specific “poetic devices” to be poetry, this song does include poetic devices. The song is, quite simply, about finding The One and figuring out how to tell when you've found The One. At the heart of the song is the idea that The One is the person you are the most comfortable with and the safest with.

In the first verse the use of repetition in the lines, "we’re all looking/ that’s what she said/ for someone to share our thoughts/ for someone to share our beds" helps with the idea of knowing when you've found The One. When you've found someone you can connect with mentally and emotionally- "our thoughts"- and connect with physically- "our beds"- then you know you've found your person. The chorus uses repetition to show signs of The One saying that "if you find someone that doesn’t try to change you/ if you find someone that doesn’t have to blame you/ if you find someone you don’t need to explain to" then you've found The One. Repeating the line "if you find someone" makes it clear that there are many signs for telling whether someone is your person to spend the rest of your life with. I love the imagery they use when they say that we're searching "for someone to keep us warm/ when the rain soaks through our clothes." I always imagine two people running through a thunderstorm holding hands and laughing and then huddling together and dancing close to each other. It paints a picture of how things are when you find The One.

And now since I've proved that this song fits the standard description of poetry and includes poetic devices I can say that I don't think these things are what makes this song poetry. It's poetry purely because someone had a strong emotion of love, or loss of love, or hope for love and needed music to pour out that emotion. Writing music is an emotional outlet and to me that's the only requirement for poetry.