if i could hold you for a minute

 i would do it again

Francesca-Hozier

I generally do not care much about the lyrics of a song that is why i prefer bands like Gong, Set Fire To Flames and Explosions in the Sky. The instruments do better at enunciating the right emotions. Words do it too but the composition and layering has a whole new different effect. However, Francesca is a song i love because of the lyrics and the story it unfolds, Hozier is a brilliant songwriter and Francesca is another one of his oeuvre.

Francesca is one of the most romantic song I've ever heard(as far as i can remember). It reminds me that I've loved and I'm capable of loving and caring and holding all those wonderful emotions which i thought i might have lost in the past few years. Francesca reminds of this pure joy of seeing someone and finding them as ethereal as the sunlight that comes through my window.

Sunshine that is what they are to me. 

The album "Unreal Unearth" is an inspiration drawn from a classic Italian literature piece known as "Dante's Divine Comedy". Like the classics Odyssey and the Iliad, Dante's Divine Comedy is another classic writing that serves well with psychological and human behavioral pattern. It consists of three main segments called- Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. It will take me days to explain all these for I will have to read each segment. However, the segment which is of importance to us is- Inferno on which the whole album is based. Inferno is an exegetical poem which explains Dante's journey through hell. 

"midway along the journey of our life/ i woke to find myself in a dark wood/ for i had wondered off from the straight path"

The Divine Comedy is a love chronicle. Being lost in the forest and abandoned, Dante goes through a few episodes of existential crisis and loses his senses. Virgil, a roman poet, guides him after which he is soon reunited with his beloved Beatrice. Beatrice guides him to Purgatorio and then to Paradiso. according to him, on earth hell is divided into 9 circles. Dante and Virgil both crosses each circle and on their way back Dante realizes that each of the historical figures belongs to either of those circles. these sinners includes Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Abel, Archilles and Francesca and Paola which belonged to the 'Circle of Lustful'.

Francesca was married to Giovanni who she never loved. She was the daughter of the lord of Ravenna and when its peace was threatened her father entered into an alliance with Rimini's leader by marrying off Francesca to Giovanni. Giovanni had a brother, Paolo who would soon become the illicit lover of Francesca. Giovanni was a crippled and Francesca's father, Guido knew she'd never marry to lo Sciancato (crippled) and thus played a trickery by making Paolo to stand at the alter and not Giovanni. The man she was thought was marrying was the man she fell in love with. 

Francesca and Paolo shared the same interest of literature and they'd often spend time reading the tale of Guinevere and Lancelot, which happened to have a few same instances like themselves. Soon enough they both fell for each other.

"trembled to place his lips upon my mouth...that day we did not read another page"

When Giovanni finds out about this clandestine affair he slays his wife, Francesca and brother, Paolo.

According to Dante, Paolo and Francesca resides in the circle of hell because they never had enough power to let their nobility and spirituality take over the animal instinct. They showed no intellectuality and inhibition which are very humane traits. 

-For the Romantics, however, subsuming reason to the passions was the goal of a life well lived. 

"heaven is not fit to house a love like you and i"

I won't decipher each lyric because it is quite clear after the de-brief on the backstory. 

Tragedies happen, people would often change the ways if they could turn back the time. Not love. You never want to change the presence of a person in your life, when that person is the one you fall in love with. We get hurt and lost but never enough to change the past of that love. Severe actions might change the other waves but can't change how one feels, you can never torture love out of anyone, it will be there and always. 

      do you'd think i give up, that this might've shook the love from me

      how could you think, darling, i'd scare so easily

      if someone asked me at the end/ i'll tell them put me back in

      i would do it again,

      if i could hold you for a minute/ i'd go through it again