Joanna Newsom – A Pin-Light Bent Lyrics

Joanna Newsom – A Pin-Light Bent Lyrics

A Pin-Light Bent Lyrics by Joanna Newsom

‘A Pin-Light Bent’ is the 10th track on Joanna Newsom’s fourth album, Divers.

The instrumentation is unusually bare for the album: solo harp and Newsom’s own voice, creating a strongly emotional and personal atmosphere.

The song’s narrator muses over the fragility of life and the relative insignificance of their own existence in the grand scheme of the universe. It is inspired by, and contains references to, James Dickey’s poem ‘Falling’, which was in turn inspired by a New York Times article detailing the accidental death of a female flight attendant following her fall out of an airplane in flight.

This is parallel to a narrative in the album’s second track, ‘Sapokanikan’, in which former New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel fell to his death from an airplane he was piloting due to an unfastened seatbelt. As the penultimate track, ‘A Pin-Light Bent’ is essentially a thematic mirror image of the second track, giving further credence to the album’s chiastic structure.

My life comes and goes
My life comes and goes
Short flight, free rows:
I lie down and doze

My life came and went
My life came and went
Short flight; free descent
Poor flight attendant

But the sky, over the ocean!
And the ocean, skirting the city!
And the city, bright as a garden
(When the garden woke to meet me)
From that height was a honeycomb
Made of light from those funny homes, intersected:
Each enclosed, anelectric and alone

In our lives is a common sense
That relies on the common fence
That divides, and attends
But provides scant defense
From the Great Light that shines through a pin-hole
When the pin-light calls itself Selfhood
And the Selfhood inverts on a mirror
In an Amora Obscura

But it’s mine. Or, at least, it’s lent
And my life, until the time is spent
Is a pin-light, bent
It’s a pin-light, bent