Into The Sphere Of The Eternal
taken from Escimo Chain
"Who speaks in primordial images speaks as with a thousand tongues; he grips and overpowers, and at the same time he elevates that which he treats out of the individual and personal transitory into the sphere of the eternal..." Jung.
Amongst the archetypes which haunt the British imagination, one of the most elusive is that of the lonely, melancholy, slightly fey maiden girl. Though she may appear on shapes subtly other than this, we may find her form most often in the defiantly free, dancing, dreaming ingenue, sister to the wind and the tall trees, handmaiden of the Spring, lither and more liberated than a child, yet lacking the guile and acquired social graces of the grown woman.
In literature, she is to be seen in the stripped-willow-wand whiteness and otherworldliness of the heroines in John Cowper Powys's romances, notably Christie Malakite of 'Wolf Solent' and Morwyn of the novel of that name; in the Pan-worshipping wild girls of Algernon Blackwood's nature stories; in the yearning young women of Arthur Machen's prose poems and stories; and in the pale svelte allure of Haidee Croyland in David Lindsay's 'The Violet Apple'. Partaking of some of the attributes of Artemis, Aphrodite and Athena, she is perhaps nearest to the nymphs and sylphs of Arcadia, with a hint too of their tragic destinies.
Something in the soaring, wayward chords of 'See Emily Play' and its fragmentary images suggests it is a hymn to this same archetype, the strange girl, the long-gowned loon, the wild white dancer. The song's spangles of sound give it an eerie, sidereal glamour highly appropriate for the invocation of such an image, while its rushing, headlong pace convey the kinetic ecstasy of her dance. The wistful, gentle tones of the singer suggest the figure's vulnerability, as if we must whisper as we watch her for fear of startling her away.
It is said the original Emily was a girl that Syd Barrett saw walking and dancing naked through some woods one morning, after he had slept under the stars. This, whether truth or myth, is very suggestive. It is clear that the songwriter was inspired by a single, startling vision, one might almost say a visitation: he then strove to convey the essence of this experiences in such glimpses, disassociated and tangential, as he could recover; leaving us to understand, and visualise all that might be unsaid. In this, he follows the same technique as the writers evoked earlier, who tell us what they can of the other dimensions they know, but rely upon the reader to extend their understanding subliminally and intuitively to what is not said. Especially as we might wonder exactly what we should see Emily play. What are the 'games in May' of the chorus's strange couplet ? Are they like the Green, Scarlet and White Ceremonies of Machen's 'The White People', that incantatory exploration of an adolescent girl's innocent initiations ? Are they the pagan fertility rites most often associated with the month of May ?
We shall never know for sure how much of all this was playing inside Syd Barrett's mind when he wrote this deceptively simple, artfully naive song. But we would do well to remember that Emily and all her elfin sisters are sigils as well as symbols, and that the tingling mist into which she steps as the song fades away is close to the veil of the beyond, the great high realm of our furthest dreams.
Mark Valentine - January 1997
'See Emily Play' is concerned with subverting harmonic implications. The initial key of G Major is immediately threatened by the E minor shape of the tune, clearly shown in the middle ground, though the background pattern is a three note descent in G; the verse concludes with a plagal cadence in G. This insistence on played cadences serves to weaken the sense of arrival at key points.
The chorus oscillates between D and E Majors, the line shadowing the harmony, and this E presence leads naturally to A at 'free games for May'; but once again the cadence is played, and any pretensions to stability are destroyed by the addition of G in the melody, turning the chord into a dominant; this prepares the way for the final cadence, in the melody C Sharp to D, suggesting a perfect cadence in D Major; but as it turns out the underlying harmony is G, another played cadence, leaving the music unclosed.
Closure only only occurs at the end of the entire song, when this G chord is followed by the long expected D.
Robert Wieck - June 1997.