Response to Pink Floyd's "Echoes"

I wanted to analyze a poem with powerful imagery, so I started looking through the Seagull Reader for the right poem to review. Then it occurred to me–why not analyze the imagery of one of the poems most familiar to me? I decided to dissect the imagery of the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s Echoes.

The song is an epic 23 minutes and 31 seconds of soaring guitar and keyboard solos, carnival sounds, and thick atmospheric vocal harmonies. For years, I have appreciated the ability of the sounds and the music in Echoes to produce a powerful emotional response in the listener. However, I have never spent the time to analyze the effect of the lyrics themselves. By examining the rhyming patterns and use of potent imagery, I discovered a potent, poetic piece of literature that even further contributes to the sense of atmosphere and generates emotional response from the song.

Despite the length, there are only three vocal sections—each consisting of a verse and a chorus, which consist of six lines and four lines respectively. Each verse line is of inconsistent length, but they all use iambic meter, with extra stresses on the first syllable of the first and fourth lines of each verse. The choruses are strictly iambic, although the words “And no one” that begin almost each line of the chorus are nearly anapestic in the way that they are stressed in the recording.

There is no strictly consistent rhyme scheme during the verse, although the second two verses use end rhyme on the first and second lines, while the first verse rhymes on the second two lines. The chorus uses end rhyme between the second and third lines, all of which rhyme with “eyes.” The chorus also repeats the phrase “And no-one” at the beginning of all but two of the twelve lines of chorus. This creates a sense of repetitiveness that lulls the listener into the cyclic motion of the music. While the rhyme and repetition of the lyrics of Echoes certainly draws the reader into the repetitive motion of the music, the real magic of these lyrics lies in the imagery that they create.

The first verse defines an image of an albatross flying over the green water of a coral reef. This coincides with “birdcalls” generated by David Gilmour’s guitar playing. All of the choruses don’t directly interact with the adjacent verses, but instead call out about the fact that no one is in control of how we act. The second paints a picture of “Strangers passing in the street/By chance two separate glances meet.” The verse continues to discuss the concept that both of these people are one and the same and together, despite their apparent separation. The third verse generates an image of the waking narrator who is invited and incited to rise and see the sunlight in the form of “A million bright ambassadors of morning.” Interestingly, this verse almost directly mimics a verse in The Beatle’s Across the Universe:

Sounds of laughter

Shades of life are ringing through my open ears

Inciting and Inviting me.

Limitless undying love which

Shines around me like a million suns and calls me on and on

Across the universe.

Perhaps this verse is a tribute, considering that Echoes was published in 1972, only three years after the 1969 release of Across the Universe on the Let It Be album. Either way, it is an effective scene and generates a strong desire for the listener to almost stand and check the nearest window.

Like much of Pink Floyd’s early music, Echoes is probably best not thought of as a story, but instead as a serious of images and mindsets that can be contemplated as a unit or in separation. However you listen and associate these verses to one another, there is no doubt that your mental state will be filled with some form of elaborate images over the course of the epic Echoes.