ABSTRACT
Love, in Cave's love songs, is very often something to endure rather than enjoy. Cave has himself, of course, written on love in the form of the love song, and in particular on the love songs he has composed and performed, the ones he nominates his gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children'. The beautiful world is passing' perhaps because the world of the English countryside seems so different to the world of the song and the album Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus. It also permits Cave to return to a theory of melancholy and creativity that has had a long, long history stretching at least to Aristotle in marking out and valuing art and artists. Admittedly, such an interest in a cat together with a moose, a violin, a century-and-a-half-old painting, a gospel, a tome on Elizabethan psychology and a couple of Romantic poets offers a somewhat obscure beginning for thinking about, creativity and Cave's love songs.
