If you speak to me in RL, you'd probably notice that I have a lot of catchphrases. "Here's the thing" is probably the only one that made it into netspeak, but I don't use it much any more and it's not exactly profound.
I've certainly had the experience of reading poems or listening to songs about things I hadn't experienced (in this life, at any rate) and seen meaning in them - but only later, after having had the experience, did I see the
truth in them.
There are many, but the most obvious is In Memoriam 14, by Tennyson, which I'll repost here in full:
Quote:If one should bring me this report,
That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,
And I went down unto the quay,
And found thee lying in the port;
And standing, muffled round with woe,
Should see thy passengers in rank
Come stepping lightly down the plank,
And beckoning unto those they know;
And if along with these should come
The man I held as half-divine;
Should strike a sudden hand in mine,
And ask a thousand things of home;
And I should tell him all my pain,
And how my life had droop’d of late,
And he should sorrow o’er my state
And marvel what possess’d my brain;
And I perceived no touch of change,
No hint of death in all his frame,
But found him all in all the same,
I should not feel it to be strange.
It's the most perfect depiction of denial I have ever seen. The moment I read it I loved that poem and understood it on an academic level, but it wasn't until I had lost someone in this life that I could actually point to it and say I knew it to be true. What makes the above even more mind blowing is that it isn't just a metaphor - Tennyson wrote it on the day the ship carrying his best friend's body docked in England. It's a very specific emotion and very specific event perfectly generalised.
A slightly more straightforward example is another of my favourite poems, Shelly's Ozymandias.
Quote:I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Again I loved this poem from the moment I first read it, but there are a heap of double meanings that I completely and totally missed for years. The most obvious is "nothing beside remains", meaning both that there is nothing remaining beside the statue (no sign of the empire, etc) but also that the statue is nothing other than remains. I had a fantastic time when I sat down and really studied it instead of just reading it, because lots of things like that slapped me in the face and made me feel first like a total idiot for not noticing them, and second very satisfied and happy that I finally had.