Backdated, archival post
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link to original on tumblr]
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Over the past few months, I've been (slowly) re-reading
The Beatles Anthology. On Sunday, I read the part about "Tomorrow Never Knows" (p. 210), which got me thinking about the lyrical structure. I just listened to it and transcribed the lyrics (checking them against those in
The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook). I was sort of right in what I was thinking. Aside from the last, each verse ends with lines that have the same structure; they're all "It is" or "It is not" completed with a gerund and then repeated:
It is not dying
It is shining
It is being
It is knowing
It is believing
It is not living
There's also a mirrored sort of structure as far as when the "not"s are present.
In the last verse, there's "Of the beginning," which somewhat holds to the established paradigm in that it ends with a gerund.
