On My Own
Producers
On My Own Lyrics
And now I'm all alone again
Nowhere to turn, no one to go to
Without a home, without a friend
Without a face to say hello to
And now the night is near
Now I can make believe he's here
Sometimes I walk alone at night
When everybody else is sleeping
I think of him and then I'm happy
With the company I'm keeping
The city goes to bed
And I can live inside my head
On my own, pretending he's beside me
All alone, I walk with him 'til morning
Without him, I feel his arms around me
And when I lose my way, I close my eyes and he has found me
In the rain, the pavement shines like silver
All the lights are misty in the river
In the darkness, the trees are full of starlight
And all I see is him and me forever and forever
And I know it's only in my mind
That I'm talking to myself and not to him
And although I know that he is blind
Still I say, there's a way for us
He is gone, the river's just a river
Without him, the world around me changes
The trees are bare and everywhere the streets are full of strangers
I love him, but every day I'm learning
All my life I've only been pretending
Without me, his world would go on turning
A world that's full of happiness that I have never known
I love him
I love him
I love him
But only on my own
Über uns
In “On My Own,” Eponine laments her unrequited love for Marius. In the first half of the song, she imagines a wonderful world with Marius as her lover. But she realizes that this is just a dream that she must constantly wake up from. Then through a myriad of darker comparisons, she describes how her imagination deceives her, and how her reality is far different from her dreams.
In this song, Eponine also fails to ever mention Marius’s name. This allows for the second meaning and theme of the song, Faith vs Nihilism. Imagine the “him” that is being referred to is God. She describes the blissful paradise of walking with god, and then as the sun is rising, and people return to the street reflects that she doesn’t actually believe, as god has not returned her love.
This song was actually inspired by a short passage from the chapter “A Rose In Misery,” where Eponine describes her life to Marius. Rather than being a romantic moment, it is an alarmingly off-hand description of her family’s poverty:
I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don’t come home again. Last winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges. We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said to myself: ‘No, it’s too cold.’ I go out alone, whenever I choose, I sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say to myself: ‘Why, there’s water there!’ The stars are like the lamps in illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears; although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I don’t know what all. I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very queer when you have had no food.
Reading this, it becomes apparent that much of Eponine’s descriptions here of a beautiful world of mutual love are actually borrowed from the book’s descriptions of hallucinations brought on by starvation, adding a subtext of emotional malnourishment to this tragic song about unrequited feelings.
Q&A
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- 13.Look Down
- 14.Stars
- 15.Red and Black
- 17.In My Life
- 19.Plumet Attack
- 20.One Day More
- 22.On My Own
- 26.Drink With Me
- 28.Dog Eats Dog
- 29.Javert’s Suicide
- 30.Turning