Favorite Maiden Lyrics

With Iron Maiden being my favorite band, several lyrics resonate deeply with me and I find extremely thought provoking.

I personally find Maiden's lyricism to either be a hit or miss, with either the lyrics being amazingly profound (Revelations Hallowed be thy Name, The Educated Fool) or just really pathetic and shallow (Quest for Fire, Invaders, Deja Vu). Or sometimes, the lyrics are fantastic yet this music sounds uninspired (2 A.M from the X Factor)

So in short, what are some of your favorite Maiden lyrics?
 
"Just for a second a glimpse of my father I see,
And in a movement he beckons to me,
And in a moment the memories are all that remains,
And all the wounds are reopening again."

I lost my dad in 1999 and I still think I see him sometimes, so that struck a particular chord with me. In a similar vein,

"Out of the shadows and into the sun,
Dreams of the past as the old ways are done,
Oh there is beauty and surely there is pain,
But we must endure it to live again.

The man who casts no shadow has no soul."
 
"Just for a second a glimpse of my father I see,
And in a movement he beckons to me,
And in a moment the memories are all that remains,
And all the wounds are reopening again."

I lost my dad in 1999 and I still think I see him sometimes, so that struck a particular chord with me.

Me too, for the same reason; I lost my dad just two years ago, and that lyric has become very poignant all of a sudden.

Finally, a topic I feel I can do good in! I have always tried to interpret a majority of Iron Maiden's lyrics. Here are some of my favorite lyrics:

"Just by looking through your eyes,
he could see the future penetrating right in through your mind.
See the truth and see your lies,
but for all his power couldn't foresee his own demise."

"Bury your morals, and bury your dead.
Bury your head in the sand.
E=MC squared, you can relate
how we made God with our hands."

"Eyes are closed and death is
calling, reaching out it's hand.
Call upon the starlight to surround you."

"So I watch and I wait, and I pray for an answer.
An end to the strife and the world's misery.
But the end never came, and we're digging the graves.
And we're loading the guns for the kill."

"So I think I'll leave you, with your bishops and your guilt.
So until the next time, have a good sin!"

Practically all of Hallowed Be Thy Name, but particularly:
"Mark my words believe my soul lives on,
don't worry now that I have gone,
I've gone beyond to seek the truth.
When you know that your time is close at hand,
maybe then you'll begin to understand
life down here is just a strange illusion."

"As the guards march me out to the courtyard,
somebody cries from a cell, 'God be with you.'
If there's a god, why does he let me go?"
 
Thanks. I rarely listen to the song, it's the one song that I tend to ignore from A Matter of Life and Death.
 
"Have you ever been alone at night? Thought you heard footsteps behind. Turn around, no one's there! And, as you quicken up your pace, you find it hard to look again, because you're sure that someone's there"

"I'm just a lonely soldier, fighting in a bloody, hopeless war! Don't know what I'm fighting, who it is, or what I'm fighting for. Thought it was for money, make my fortune, now I'm not so sure. Seem to just have lost my way"

All lyrics from Hallowed
 
Starblind seems to me to be very wonderful and very bleak all at the same time. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. I think it may be Maiden's bleakest ever lyric.

It's a fantastic, dreamy, methaphorical and poetic telling of an anti-religious thought, supported by a glorious concept. The rhythmic flow, choice of words, everything is right on point. It sure is bleak, considering the importance the society has given to religious beliefs.
 
Starblind seems to me to be very wonderful and very bleak all at the same time. I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. I think it may be Maiden's bleakest ever lyric.
The thing about Starblind's lyrics, for me, isn't just the words themselves, but how they are sung. On Starblind an older, wiser, and more vocal weathered Bruce is giving would could be his last vocal performance ever. It is bleak, desperate, but hopeful to.
 
Are the lyrics to Starblind bleak? They are melancholic. Elegiac. Sad, perhaps. But bleak? I suppose that depends on whether you take the outcome implied in the song (In your once and future grave you'll fall endlessly deceived) as necessary or not. Personally, I believe it tells us that things may turn out that way, but they do not need to. It is up to us to decide.

If I was to look for the bleakest lyrics in Maiden's catalogue, I would say they are from Paschendale. No doubt one of my favourite passages, but also perhaps the single most bleak is this one:

Cruelty has a human heart
Every man does play his part
Terror of the men we kill
The human heart is hungry still.


Essentially, these lyrics say that all the terrors, all the nightmares and all the insanity that manifested themselves in the trenches of Flanders and elsewhere, are inherent to human nature. They are within us and can reappear at any given time. If you believe that mankind is following a path of destiny, that means the bullets of Passchendaele, the gas of Auschwitz and the slashing of Rwanda were bound to happen. They were part of a predetermined path that mankind is taking, hard wired in its heart and soul. I think these particular lyrics are so strong because they spell out precisely what I was thinking when I walked along the trenches of Verdun, and saw the furnaces of Buchenwald. You are inclined to think it. But that is a momentary impression. I don't believe that this is all there is to it.

I don't believe in destiny as a superordinated force, and I also do not think that human nature is necessarily an inertial state that has always been and always will be the way it is. If that were the case, then how did we make our way out of Olduvai Gorge? Why aren't we throwing dirt around like chimps, or swinging from tree to tree? Something has once changed in human nature that made us use hand axes and paint buffalos on cave walls, and I believe that whatever this was, it is still in us. We can grow beyond Passchendaele, we can shed our skins and swim into the darkened void beyond. We only need to realise that what is holding us from doing so is our limited understanding of ourselves. If we want to dance among the worlds that orbit stars that aren't our sun (isn't this just beautifully worded?), we must find out who we really are.

If that sounds transcendental, I am afraid that I do not mean it that way. I am talking science. We must learn about how we are wired from psychoanalytics. We must learn about our mistakes and triumphs from studying history. We must understand just how boundless our language of expression is from studying art. We must take inspiration from the beauty we are capable of creating by studying humanities. If we do that, we can walk away from freedoms offered by the jailers in their cage, we can determine ourselves where we are heading, and understand that what is keeping us from ascending is ourselves. Religion's cruel device and the blanks of sin are things we made ourselves! They are self-imposed restrictions, ancient structures that have long outlived their usefulness and only linger on because we are afraid of dropping them. Have we not heard of it, that God is dead?

We are free to choose whatever life to live or life to lose, but our time is short. Should we waste it by following popes, gods and emperors?
 
Perun, that is a very well thought-out, well-expressed and beautifully written mini-thesis, and as such deserves adequate consideration before I post a proper response. Thank you for taking the trouble to write it.
 
Aw, thanks. :blush: I had a creative outburst earlier, I guess.
 
We must learn about how we are wired from psychoanalytics. We must learn about our mistakes and triumphs from studying history. We must understand just how boundless our language of expression is from studying art. We must take inspiration from the beauty we are capable of creating by studying humanities. If we do that, we can walk away from freedoms offered by the jailers in their cage, we can determine ourselves where we are heading, and understand that what is keeping us from ascending is ourselves. Religion's cruel device and the blanks of sin are things we made ourselves! They are self-imposed restrictions, ancient structures that have long outlived their usefulness and only linger on because we are afraid of dropping them. Have we not heard of it, that God is dead?

We are free to choose whatever life to live or life to lose, but our time is short. Should we waste it by following popes, gods and emperors?
Perun, that was impressive indeed. But I hope you don't mind me telling this, but your post also sounded a bit like a sermon. (can be said of my post as well ;) )

And I am getting a bit bleak now:

Who is we here? As science has proven: people are different, have different intellects, different kinds of wisdom and norms. And circumstances.
Although I absolutely would wish the same (or most of it) as you, I do not think it's that realistic. It's idealistic. I know that not everybody thinks the same. It's not possible to turn the current human race into people who have the same goal (all study art and history, learn from the past). Not everyone is capable to be educated.

Should the educated educate the uneducated in the same way?

Still, nothing wrong with idealism. It's good to fight for a cause. But religions have fought for their ideals as well. They also wanted to turn people into a mass of same thought.

Your ideal can be seen as the best but I fear that's not a universal thought. Apart from intellectual obstructions, there are also evil and corrupt forces at work. We need to deal with what we have and we can't change it radically. To get rid of the "evil" Vatican or the religious might in Iran moderate leaders are needed. In a difficult and lengthy era of transition, tolerance and patience is what's needed to achieve such endgames. Also education, but from both sides: from within and from without religious circles. The question is: how to "battle" fundamentalism, also from both sides. Atheists can be very fundamentalist, very intolerant. People should have the freedom to be religious, or not? If so, then that must be understood by educated atheists, instead of eliminated.
 
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