We continue working our way through Bruce Springsteen’s “1968 Notebook” with an entry that reads more like a poem than a song… and yet it’s believed that Bruce did in fact perform it (as with the other songs in the notebook) during his early solo acoustic performances.
If you need a primer, the 1968 Notebook contains 20 songs written by Bruce in his formative years, and we only know about its existence because it went up for public auction back in 2006, with scans made available for potential bidders to inspect.
Today’s entry is called “The Virgin Flower,” and it’s both one of the lengthiest entries in the notebook (clocking in at three pages) and one of the most difficult to transcribe let alone interpret, due to the resolution of the scans and the quality of the eighteen-year-old’s handwriting.
Still, the good folks at Springsteenlyrics.com made a valiant attempt. Enough passages are legible to get a sense of the song, but too many are illegible or (I’m pretty certain) incorrectly transcribed for us to reliably or confidently interpret.
The virgin flower standing
naked struck open the midnight
skies sharing love with those
whom see sacred growing hope with
her tender smile
The morning sun catches
her laughing ??? to his ???
through her eyes the ageless
children come and sit beside her
listen in the wind
you may hear them cry
The gentle rain cleans her
body the tattered broom sweeps
out her mind ??? dreams of
a land that lies just beyond
the starless skies
She makes her home in the
enchanted forest telling her
tales that are spun out of gold
far away from the frightened
mass that wouldn’t understand
for she’s much to [sic] cold
Her eyes appear as the greatest
??? upon which I would love to
sail into the evening of her sorrow
may her ??? never fail
The mean people mind those
??? up and proceed to work
for the master spy the bluest
??? crying ??? watches
??? to burn and die
The forest children ??? me
onward to pay homage to the
brightest eye that dwells within the
purest teardrop that falls on her
the day she dies
The virgin flower standing
naked calls to the ??? won’t
you please come home as I watch
from an open window grasping
at flashes of ??? the wind
has blown
About all we can say with some confidence about “The Virgin Flower” is that Bruce uses the natural world as a metaphor for the human one–a device he employed a few times at that age (including in the same notebook). In this case, the virgin flower appears to be a stand-in for a great matriarch–no doubt an intentional religious allusion as well.
Beyond that, I think we’d need a closer look at clearer lyrics in order to grok what young Bruce was reaching for–and since the notebook is reportedly in the hands of a private collector, maybe we’ll yet get a chance to see it for ourselves someday.
The Virgin Flower
Never recorded
Never released
Never performed
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