Jim’s music and lyrics, for me, are often reminiscent of the dramatic monologues of the nineteenth century poet Robert Browning. His characters, like Jims, abide in an extreme, psychotic, obsessed and debased universe, a world amplified to operatic proportions and governed by impulse and lust.
I can never read ‘Pophyria’s Lover’, in particular, without thinking of Jim. It starts as two lovers meet on a stormy night (I always hear Wagnerian chords pulsating menacingly in the background – Dark Entwined with Darkness, or The Storm), and then the narrator, after experiencing a moment of intense bliss, decides, in order to preserve this moment for all eternity, to strangle his lover with a lock of her golden hair. He then peels back her dead eyelids and gazes into her eyes, and, propping her lopping head on his shoulder, congratulates himself.
Browning also famously wrote ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, which always presents itself to me as a prequel to Jim’s vision of Neverland. The wronged Piper (Hook) deceives the parents of Hamelin and leads away their children (The Lost Boys) away to a Cave (Obsidian) where they are to be lost forever.
Is there any other poetry that reminds people of Jim’s visions?
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