"I wish you peace"

[Verse]
I wish you peace when the cold winds blow
Warmed by the fire's glow
I wish you comfort in the, the lonely time
And arms to hold you when you ache inside
I wish you hope when things are going bad
Kind words when times are sad
I wish you shelter from the, the raging wind
Cooling waters at the fever's end

[Chorus x2]
I wish you peace when times are hard
The light to guide you through the dark
And when storms are high and your, your dreams are low
I wish you the strength to let love grow on (x4 the second time)
I wish you the strength to let love flow

Glow= bagliore

Comfort= rilassamento/consolazione

Lonely= solitari

Ache= provare dolore

Hope= sperare

Raging= violento

Analysis of the song:

The goal of the present work is to analyse and discuss the song “I wish you peace” by Bernie Leadon

Just considering the title the reader expects the poem to be a wish of inner peace and tranquillity departed by the speaking voice and destined to a general or specific reciver, maybe a person very important for the author that, for this reason, he doesn’t want to see suffer. Reading the title the reader may be curious to find out who's the song adressed to and why the speaking voice is wishing peace to a unidentify you.

The reader can also notice that in the title the marked word is peace, that probably would be a key word in the economy of the test.

The main topic of the song is the hope to suceed, during the dark, sad and lonly times, in finding the strenght to stay in peace with themselves, to going on loving and to continue to have the hope of being able to get out from the situation. The redaer can understand it from the repetition of the verb “wish”.

In particular the song focuses on what the author wants so as not to see the recipient suffer.

Therefore it follows that the present work is meant to find out the message of the song.

The song is organized into two stanzas and it doesn’t have a regular pattern, indeed the first stanza has more lines than the other. The second stanza can be considered the refrain of the song because  ,when the song is singed, it’s repeted two times. Considering the second time the second stanza is singed the fourth line is repeated four times, so there’s a refrain in the refrain. Therefore this line, highlighted in this way, would probably contain the message, part of the main topic, the speaking voice wants mostly draws the reader’s attenction on.

Both stanzas have the same function: to treat and expand the central topic. To reach the goal in the first stanza the speaking voice reports some of his hopes. He wishes the reciver to be in peace when the cold winds blow, warmed by the glow of fire, this is a meaphor and stays for the hope the recipient doesn’t give up to the depression, expressed by the cold winds, but fight it with positive emotions, expressed by the fire. He wishes also that the adresse would live in a comfortable way in lonley times, therefore that he can live well also alone without abandon himself to negative emotions, but also that he would have some people helping him in more dark situations, when he ache inside. The speaking voice wishes the reciver continue to hope, dream and hear kind words also in sad and hard situations and to find a shelter to protect himself from the raging wind, that stays for to find a way to tackles negative emotions that wear out you from the inside. Finally, in the last line of this stanza, the speaking voice bids the recipient to succeed in reaching the end of this suffering caused by the "inner war" and then feel a relief similar to the sense of release caused by cold water after healing from fever.

The reader can notice also that, in the third and seventh line of this stanza, there’s the repetition of the article “the”. The two articles are separated by comma. The function of this particular use of the punctation may be to create a sense of suspance and to draw the reader’s attention on the words that come after the second articles, maybe because  they are the main causes of the negative emotions we have spoken about above.

The second stanza has the function of reiterate the wishes expressed in the first one but above all to bring back the most important desire of the speaking voice, highlighted by the refrain in the refrain, that the recipient of the song can continue to love even when he is in an inner situation similar to a constant storm, without peace, tormented by inner pain.

The speaking voice refers to the adresee of the song with the personal pronoun “you”, that can be used as the second person singular pronoun or as an impersonal pronoun. Therefore the recipient of the poem would be a specific person or people in general.

Finally the reader understands the message of the song is not to let yourself fall and surrender to negative emotions, but to fight them, finding strength in the positive ones, to then succeed in obtaining inner peace