THE JOURNEY INTO despair that Robert Smith made between 1980–82 began with a walk in a forest. The first single from Seventeen Seconds was already a fairly gloomy proposition, and not the follow up to Boys Don’t Cry that most critics were hoping for. Julie Burchill, writing for the NME, accused Smith of ‘trying to stretch a sketchy living out of moaning more meaningfully than any man has moaned before’.1
Burchill was right on two counts — ‘A Forest’ is full of moaning and full of meaning. The song describes a dream in which the singer hears a woman’s voice calling his name. He follows the sound into the trees, and the band takes up the theme, conjuring the feeling of a headlong rush into a dark world. Electronic whooshes zip past like drifts of fog. But as Smith searches for his mysterious lover in the forest, a terrible thought occurs to him:
Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late
I’m lost in the forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It’s always the same
I’m running towards nothing
Again and again and again and AGAIN!2
‘A Forest’ illustrates an important idea in romantic thought. Many of the romantics — Rousseau and Wordsworth being the clearest examples — idealised nature as a symbol of all that is good, pure and true in human nature, and a standard by which our behaviour can be measured. But there is a flip-side to this, in which the romantic individual, having rejected society, runs out into nature and finds that he is not really at home there, either. Since he is now out of options, his philosophy becomes one in which reality itself is hostile. His goals — happiness and love — exist somewhere outside of the world.
All of this makes love complicated for the romantics — and makes it more likely that they will end up confusing love with death and despair, as Keats, Robert Smith and Davey Havok have all done. Love, in the romantic imagination, is pure and natural, part of the mysterious world of feeling and the human heart, which society cannot touch. But to think this is to overburden love with a weight of unrealistic expectations. Ideal love, like nature, becomes one of the romantics’ escape destinations — existing outside of the cares of the world, or as Davey Havok would have it, in the cold regions below. But this, like all the romantics’ attempts to escape reality, is doomed to fail, since there is no real escape from the world other than death. As a consequence, love becomes an illusion, forever out of reach —
— or fatal, pulling the poet toward oblivion. The singer finds his perfect love, the ice cracks, the poet and his fatal lover sink into darkness.