I found the strangest thing.

I had just deleted the comments that WordPress had identified as spam and was glancing through a list of my blog posts for the last few weeks when I realized there was one I had started and saved as a draft, but never completed. It didn’t have much in it. Just a video of a live performance of “Sign No More” by Mumford & Sons:

And some of the lyrics:

Love it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

And now I wonder what I was going to write about these. Obviously I was going to turn them into a blog post, and then I didn’t. What thought process was I going through at the time? It was in April, the cruelest month (no violets, just dead land). And there were so many things going on in my life and in my head. I remember days when I wanted to hide under the covers because I felt so overwhelmed. There was so much work to do, and it seemed as though spring would never come, warmth and light would never come again.

But this is an optimistic song, isn’t it? In some ways. I think I focused on it partly because I’ve always loved the original, from Much Ado About Nothing, which is one of my touchstones for how to tell a great love story. Between Benedick and Beatrice, I mean. Someday I want to write a pair of lovers with that sort of physical and intellectual chemistry. Here is the original, by that Shakespeare guy:

Mumford & Sons has turned it into quite a different song, of course. No longer about the fickleness of men, which was a popular Renaissance theme, but about love as a process of self-discovery. Which is a much more modern way of looking at it.