There She Goes, My Beautiful World

Track 32 on Lovely Creatures: The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Producer

This is a song about the creative process, writer’s block, suffering for one’s art, and the need of the artist to achieve immortality through one’s work. Here Cave is… Read More

Nov. 15, 20041 viewer25.3K views

There She Goes, My Beautiful World Lyrics

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air

The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

John Wilmot penned his poetry
Riddled with the pox
Nabokov wrote on index cards
At a lectern, in his socks

St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
Imprisoned in a box
And Johnny Thunders was half alive
When he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years
I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

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Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
While writing Das Kapital
And Gauguin, he buggered off, man
And went all tropical

While Philip Larkin stuck it out
In a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospital

I will kneel at your feet, I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep, I will roll on the floor
And I'll ask for nothing, nothing in this life
I'll ask for nothing, give me everlasting life

I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet
Brother, and blow it
If you've got a field, that don't yield
Well get up and hoe it

I look at you and you look at me and
Deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse
But then I weren't much of a poet

I will be your slave, I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal with your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas with your alchemy
O come on send that stuff on down to me

Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

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About

Genius Annotation

This is a song about the creative process, writer’s block, suffering for one’s art, and the need of the artist to achieve immortality through one’s work. Here Cave is, perhaps, in the throes of writer’s block, and he is focused on how his muses could create through any adversity. That is his very problem. He is comparing his own work to that of artists he admires, and in his eyes his own work seems diminished, and he feels unable to create.
Cave is praying to God for not only the inspiration to create, but also to achieve immortality through his art.