“I Melt With You” – Modern English
(Words/music: Modern English, available on After the Snow, 4AD 1982)

In my junior year of high school, I had to write a Shakespearian sonnet.  The assignment required us to hit all of the key points – rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, theme of love, etc.  I only remember the assignment because I insisted on trying to work in the line “I’ll stop the world and melt with you” into my poem.  For whatever reason (but probably because I have this way of making things more difficult for myself), I became mildly obsessed with having this line in my sonnet even though it was two syllables short for iambic pentameter.  I don’t remember why this was necessary to me or how I accomplished it, but I remember working it in.  I’d like to think that somehow, in the back of my mind or wherever we silently work these things out before sending them off to our brain to process, that I insisted on using it because it encapsulated the kind of love I wanted and not just to have a song quote in my poem.

Even if I jokingly take issue with the titular line (if one stopped time –stopping the world from spinning – wouldn’t that prevent melting?), it nails the sentiment of enduring love.  It goes beyond attraction and lust into the period where love becomes wanting to share time together.  That’s not to say these things don’t exist in long relationships, but they fall into a different context.  Rather, after a while, lust isn’t enough and needs something else.  For me, it’s this idea that someone else’s presence in my life could make me happy, whether it’s as small as a text message, as elaborate as a trip together, or anywhere in between.  Love isn’t boring, but rather makes the common moments uncommonly special, and that’s what I hear in this song.  It’s a sentiment worth glorifying in a sonnet or, in this case, a lovely synth-pop song.

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