Brought to My Senses

All this reading of C. S. Lewis and Genesis that some of us have been doing has a certain song going through my head. On Sting's 1996 CD, Mercury Falling, there's a beautiful song called "Brought to My Senses". It's so vivivdly captivating that I used to use it in my freshman English classes to illustrate such literary techniques as personification and imagery, and we even practiced a bit of critical analysis on it. Back then, I adored the song for the way it captured my love for my husband and set it into an achingly beautiful and powerful natural analogy. And it still moves me that way.

But it also moves me in a new way, just as many other love songs from the past now do. If you shift your perspective from one of love between a man and a woman, to one of love between Creator and created, you'll see something even more magnificent. Take a listen and just see if "every signpost in nature says" Who you belong to. Lyrics are also below.

Brought to My Senses--Sting

(This first part isn't on the video, but it's almost acapella and very haunting--just my little analysis here, but kind of like us before Jesus, alone with storms brewing)

Alone with my thoughts this evening I walked on the banks of Tyne
I wondered how I could win you Or if I could make you mine
Or if I could make you mine
The wind it was so insistent With tales of a stormy south
But when I spied two birds in a sycamore tree
There came a dryness in my mouth Came a dryness in my mouth
For then without rhyme or reason The two birds did rise up to fly
And where the two birds were flying
I swear I saw you and I, I swear I saw you and I


(Now the music changes and this is where the video picks up.)

I walked out this morning
It was like a veil had been removed from before my eyes
For the first time I saw the work of heaven
In the line where the hills had been married to the sky
And all around me every blade of singing grass
Was calling out your name and that our love would always last
And inside every turning leaf Is the pattern of an older tree
The shape of our future The shape of all our history
And out of the confusion Where the river meets the sea
Came things I'd never seen Things I'd never seen

I was brought to my senses
I was blind but now that I can see
Every signpost in nature Said you belong to me

I know it's true
It's written in a sky as blue
As blue as your eyes, as blue as your eyes
If nature's red in tooth and claw
Like winter's freeze and summer's thaw
The wounds she gave me Were the wounds that would heal me
And we'd be like the moon and sun
And when our courtly dance had run Its course across the sky
Then together we would lie
And out of the confusion
Where the river meets the sea
Something new would arrive Something better would arrive

I was brought to my senses
I was blind but now that I can see
Every signpost in nature Said you belong to me