An Ordinary World?
Duran Duran, William Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“But I won’t cry for yesterday, there’s an ordinary world
Somehow I have to find
And as I try to make my way to the ordinary world
I will learn to survive…”
— Duran Duran, ‘Ordinary World’“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved”
― William Shakespeare, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’
1.
I have loved and lost. That loss never goes away. It is how we cope with the loss that will define us, the death of that love and not the loved one. We grieve and some never finalize the loss but continue to mourn in a lesser, lacking, fractured world. The song by Duran Duran, Ordinary World, suggests exactly that. It is a beautiful and haunting sung soliloquy that Shakespeare would have been happy with. It brings some of the archaic English language of the 16th century in Shakespeare’s magisterial sonnets into our modern world.
When in love we no longer inhabit the “ordinary world”. It has become extraordinary in its intensity of feeling and the locus of a singular space has moved and coalesced into a duality of one shared condition. All has changed. Everything is transformed into a New World that exists like a…
