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So the first thing you think of when you listen to Hozier’s song Run probably isn’t the colonisation of Ireland. In fact, most of you probably don’t think about Run at all- it’s an album-only bonus track with a 0 popularity score on iTunes. But I’m here today to tell you why that is WRONG and why this song is actually one of the most fascinating and complex tracks on his album. 

So like a lot of Hozier’s songs, Run is overflowing with cryptic allusions and innuendo that are pretty recalcitrant to any attempts to make meaning of them. The song has a total of 2 comments on songmeanings.com, and the interpretations on genius.com are fairly basic and unfocused, which is fair enough because the lyrics aren’t even listed correctly. All of these speculations look at the song as a meditation on forbidden love. A fair interpretation…

Rare is this love, keep it covered I need you to run to me, run to me lover Run until you feel your lungs bleeding

… except that Hozier provides us with plenty of evidence that there is a much more concrete metaphor at work here. He gives us the biggest clue in this video from when he performed the song in Birmingham.

“[James Joyce] famously had a quote about Ireland in which he lovingly said […] that Ireland is the sow that eats its farrow. And so it’s the pig that eats her young, which I think he meant that in a loving way, but this next song is kind of about that, I suppose.” - Hozier 23/1/2015

So now we know the song isn’t about a woman, it’s about Ireland. Someone on songmeanings.com makes an interesting link to James Joyce’s book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where the quote is taken from, and its allusions to the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell and his destructive affair. 

“Parnell and Kitty O'Shea are the love that needs to be covered, because it was an adulterous affair. Which just points to the thrust of the song being the destructive nature of love, if for no other reason than because people aren’t willing to tolerate it.” -teaspill 8/2/2015

This is an interesting idea, which I can’t really comment on because I only wiki’d the book to pass my undergraduate literature class and consequently don’t know too much about it.  What I DO know about is HISTORY. Lets break down the lyrics. 

Oh but the farrow knows Her hungry eyes, her ancient soul It’s carried by the sneering menagerie

Know what it is to grow Beneath her sky, a punishing cold To slowly learn of her ancient misery

So we have the sow consuming her farrow (not pharaoh smh). He brings in the image of this “sneering menagerie”, and we get the sense of this brutal, unforgiving land full of savage animals. He’s setting the scene for us here. (Side note: I like the connection teaspill makes between the consuming of young and the actual disease consumption, which results in bleeding lungs. Nice.)

To be twisted by something  A shame without a sin Like how she twisted the bog man After she married him

Here’s Hozier’s next clue: the bog man. People seem confused by this one- let me lay it down for you guys. Bog bodies are naturally embalmed corpses, sometimes over 3000 years old, that have been discovered in marshy and boggy areas in multiple European countries. Most notably: in Ireland. 

Hozier seems to be referring to a particular bog man who was discovered in Clonycavan Ireland in 2003. 

WARNING: The images of these mummies on the linked National Geographic article are graphic and sometimes very disturbing.

… he was naked, his head wrenched sharply to the left, his legs and lower arms missing, ripped away by the machine that had dug him from a bog… His head and trunk carried marks of deliberate violence, inflicted before he was cast into the mire: His nose had been broken, his skull shattered, his abdomen sliced open. While he lay in the bog, the weight of sodden sphagnum moss had flattened his crushed head, and the dark waters had tanned his skin to leather and dyed his hair orange red… - Karen E. Lange, 7/9/2007

“Twisted”, indeed. Hozier again likens love (in this case, marriage) to consumption, using the image of the bog man consumed by the earth as his metaphor. So what is the song really about? Is it using Ireland as a metaphor for love, or love as a metaphor for Ireland? Let’s dig further. 

But in all the world There is one lover worthy of her With as many souls claimed as she

So now we have a new character, someone who is equally vicious towards their children. But wait- Hozier doesn’t specify just which souls this character has claimed, they might very well be other people’s children.

But for all he’s worth He still shatters always on her earth The cause of every tear she’d ever weep

Rushing ashore to meet her Foaming with loneliness White hands to fondle and beat her To give her his onliness 

So this character has white hands with which he “fondle(s) and beat(s)” Ireland and is the source and cause of all of her troubles. 

I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland

wonder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws_(Ireland)

who this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland

could possibly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_and_contributing_factors

be.

There’s a whooole bunch of evidence that England is represented by the male figure in Hozier’s song. The fact that he rushes to her shore “foaming with loneliness” - another expression that likens sexual desire to England’s drive for colonial expansion, absorbing and consuming the countries of others into its empire like a cancer. “Shatter(ing) on her earth” could mean the violence of invasions and counter-rebellions, or it could refer to the policies enforced upon the Irish that had the effect, among others, of ravaging farmland and eventually contributing to the Great Famine of Ireland: literally breaking her earth. We already know Hozier is interested in colonialism, from his song Foreigner’s God which I may or may not also write a meta for at a later date. What we have now, then, is the story of Ireland’s relationship to England, which is only viewed through the prism of a destructive romantic relationship. 

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