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Mer Girl


Guest Nobody Knows Me
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Guest Nobody Knows Me

I've always wondered what the title "Mer Girl" is actually alluding to and I was wondering if someone could tell me? I know that the song is about her mother but the title has always confused me.

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That's a really tough question, but it's incredibly interesting! I believe that in this case the title is more than just a name and that it offers further information about the meaning of the lyrics. First of all, it's an homage to her mother's French roots, but it's also a subtle reference to a bunch of poems by Anne Sexton, in particular to The Consecrating Mother, where the ocean is compared several times to a mother, a mother you can't have a relationship with, because she's a beloved ghost presence you wait to on the shore, alone and vainly: The ocean offered them up in the vein of/ its might/ I wanted to share this/ but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow./ The ocean steamed in and out,/ the ocean gasped upon the shore/ but I could not define her,/ I could not name her mood, her locked-/up faces./ Far off she rolled and rolled/ like a woman in labor./[...]I am that clumsy human/ on the shore/ loving you, coming, coming/ going/ and wish to put my thumb on you/ like the Song of Salomon. I didn't quote it, but the first portion of this poem is about death and how the sea is involved in it. It's beautiful, but at the same time full of pain.

That's another reference to a poem by Sexton: The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up. Once again the concept of water is strongly linked to a motherly figure and death. 

I don't know if this above is the right answer, but I hope it will be useful. I really wish she'll release more material like this in future.

 

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It's refering to water and she has also said that she wrote it after running under heavy rain when in Michigan till she found herself where her mother had been buried. 

However for a long time I thought it meant Mere Girl, like it was supposed to be a humbling song, like she could be just any girl who lost her mother, living with that loss.

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