Look Homeward Angel

Steve Kilbey/Tim Powles/William Bowden/Simon Polinski

Appears On:

Lyrics (unofficial)

[rev. Sept. 12, 2013]

Come on

You asked me "how do you sleep at night?"
Well I tell you I reign my dreams in so tight
Why peer blindly (ahhh) into crimson lake
When the night fails stars break up like flake

At the window's
Angel of the west
Looking homewards
Looking how I like you best

Like a persistent ache
Like a birthday cake
Like the kind of thirst you feel so cursed
You never never gonna slake

Now wake up
Now get up
Now heat up
Now rise up
Rise up like a bird

Notes

Steve stated in a radio interview on 774 ABC Melbourne on October 18, 2011, that he had borrowed the title of this song from Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life, a 1929 novel by Thomas Wolfe. Said Steve:

"Rock bands freely take titles to use as their own titles, or some bands even made kind of careers of having book titles as the actual lyrics all through the song, they just throw in the title of a book that sounds good that they haven't even read. I did it with a book called Look Homeward, Angel. I have no idea what that book's about, but I love that title and I just co-opted it. And who's gonna get me?" [laughs]

Wolfe, in turn, pulled the title from the John Milton poem Lycidas:

"Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."
(163-164)