This song is called “Thank You,” and it is from Led Zeppelin’s second album. It is a song that has always touched me in the tenderness expressed by the lyrics, but I am only allowed to use a phrase or two; so here goes.
“If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you. When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me…. Little drops of rain whisper of the pain of tears loves lost in the days gone by…” ~ Led Zeppelin II
This song has always touched me on levels that I cannot adequately explain (we are not, unfortunately, Eskimos with six words for snow). I think I first heard it when I was very young on the radio. This would have been about 1975 give or take a year. I remember feeling a longing in the song that I was way too young to process, but I heard it. There it was embodied by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and even John Bonham stopped his bombastic drumming for this song.
As I grew older, I learned more about human relationships, how they relate to happiness, sadness, joy, contentment, etc. Led Zeppelin had continued to be my favorite band with this song as one of my all time favorites. It expresses such a permanence to love (if it is real and true) which you can see when Robert Plant declares that his love for this person will continue regardless of circumstance. The song also speaks to the purity love has when there is no agenda behind it. It simply is, and that is enough. When he writes, “If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you. When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me…” He is writing and singing about the kind of love that goes on beyond eternity. The whole world may not stop spinning and imploding, however there is this precious moment when all is right with the world. Nothing matters except the lover and the loved. There is no outside world; the only world that exists for them is the one they create through unconditional and undying love.
The song does acknowledge that there may be sadness and a yearning for “loves lost in the days gone by’. He describes these lost loves as “…..little drops of rain whisper of the pain of tears of loves in the days gone by……”. The lover is not naive; he or she knows there have been others before them, but this time, it will be perfect and there will be no need for tears because this time the lover is prepared to stand with his or her beloved through thick and thin, good and bad, beautiful and ugly; and none of these events or in some cases, the beloved may be ill, but his or her lover understands this about them, and makes a conscious choice to stay no matter what.
This is the archetypal love that we all strive for but never seem to attain. I keep holding out hope though that my soul mate is still out there. I met him once, but I turned him away to marry someone else. It was not a good match, but I learned a lot about myself, so I suppose something did come out of it. I learned never to settle just because you do not feel complete without a man. Women do this all the time; instead of waiting fro Mr. Right, they go with Mr. Right Now. Having been truly and deeply in love with someone who understood me, and didn’t mind my mood swings but rather just let them slide right off of them, I frequently ask myself why I gave up this mutually satisfying relationship to marry a man that turned out to be not much of a man at all. He was not my knight in shining armor; the other man was. I recognize that now. Albeit a little too late.
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