Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
Now you got someone to blame?
You say
One love
One life
When its one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
It leaves you baby
If you don't care for it
Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it's too late
Tonight
To drag that past out
Into the light
We're one
But we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
One
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head?
Did I ask too much?
More than a lot?
You gave me nothing
Now its all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
We hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt
One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we're not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other
One
One.
U2’s “One” is a love anthem depicting struggle in relationships and healing wounds of the past caused by a significant other. This is testimony to the saying “Love is blind.”A false semblance is worn until time and truth has revealed their true intentions and the hurt they have committed, yet they continue the relationship.
The song opens with various questions asking “Is it getting better? / Or do you feel the same? / Will it make it easier on you? /Now you got someone to blame?” Filled with verbal irony, it sets a picture of hurt and distrust. This is the followed by directly saying “You say”, shifting the focus from the general audience and pointing the finger to a particular person. Their reciprocated love was “One love/ One life” These disyllabic phrases are repetitive, emphasizing the importance of being one and literally sharing a life with another. The strong affiliation continues until “…it’s one need/ In the night.”; the night representing darkness and the lovers failing to see through the extraneous nature of such specious love. Taking it for granted “…it leaves you baby/ If you don’t care for it.” It continues with other seething questions. It even goes so far as to compare them to religious figures with biblical allusion. Derisive since the opposite of healing was performed. They were not raised, and were metaphorically left for dead and humiliated after the relationship. Also, like "...lepers in [their] head", they carry the illness of past memories, slowly eating away at them until “…we do it again.”
The song’s repetitiveness is similar to that of a love/hate relationship. It is also illusory in the moderate and repetitive rythm. As soon as it is apparent they will leave it, they return to “One life/ One blood/ One life”. Love is also repeated in “Love is a temple/ Love a higher law/ Love is a temple/ Love the higher law”. The exertion between life and love’s unfair love is hung in the frangible balance. In the end, it is left up to the audience, us “Sisters/ brothers” to decide. “You got to do what you should” for we are all entangled in the variegated web as “One”.
Semblance- Outward and often specious appearance or show.
Reciprocate- Having the same relationship each to the other.
Affiliation- The state of being associated.
Extraneous- Unneeded; irrevelant
Specious- Misleading
Derisive- ridiculing
Illusory- means based on or having the nature of an illusion; apparent.
Exertion- The act of putting into play.
Frangible- Easily broken or damaged.
Variegated- diversified; varicolored
