Tuesday, June 5, 2018

"I Need You"

I recently listened to Help! (and watched the movie), and yester-day I realized something about the structure of "I Need You."  The first couplet is:
You don't realize how much I need you
Love you all the time and never leave you
There really isn't a rhyme here (unless you count rhyming "you" with itself); instead, the lines are linkt through the assonance between "need" and "leave."  Both lines end with "you," though, which is significant.  The word is repeated as if to illustrate that the singer/speaker will "never leave you."

The beginning of the third verse has a similar feature:
Please remember how I feel about you
I could never really live without you
There's a mosaic rhyme here ("about you" rhymes with "without you"), and "you" is integral to both.  As in the first couplet, the word "you" is important in the structure in the same way that the person to whom the song is addressed is important to the singer/speaker.