The song I choose is “Trivia: Love” by BTS, but primarily performed by one member, RM. This song is about love in general and there are many parts of the song that stick out to me. Starting from the beginning,  “The next lyrics, um / What should I write, um / Too many words circle around me / But none of them feel how I feel / I just feel it /Like the moon rises after the sun rises / Like how fingernails grow / Like trees that shed their bark once a year” Here the singer is saying how he doesn’t really know what love is and he can’t really describe the way it feels to love and be in love but he knows that he feels it. There are so many ways to talk about love and just like we cannot explain why simple things like “how fingernails grow”, we just know that it’s a fact of life that occurs. It is also interesting that he goes around explaining his love where in some of the poetry we have read is so straightforward. A bit like in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 where he spends 12 lines just talking about the beauty of a women using a bunch of comparisons with her and nature and how she outdoes everything with her beauty. However, with the song, the singer says how they cannot even put into words how much he loves this other person.  

“Before I knew you/ My heart was filled with straight lines only / I’m just a human, human, human / You erode all my corners /And make me into love, love, love”. This idea of love making everything that is straight and rigid into something that melts and loses structure. So before meeting this person, they had a certain order in their lives and now that’s all gone and “melted” away because of love. Since the song is called “Love” the word itself is repeated plenty of times. From there, there’s a part of the song that repeats “I live so I love, I live so I love” and from this I gathered that he feels that the reason he lives is to love and although the song may speak of romantic love, I believe he may also mean all types of love. In our lives we love many things and people and we live doing that and it’s a part of our lives. Repetition can be seen throughout the poems we have read so far.  

One of the parts that stuck out to me is “It’s a long way from I to U / Fuck, JKLMNOPQRST / I crossed all the letters and I reached you” which was so corny, but it just reminded of some old romantic poems. We did not discuss Shakespeare in depth, but I thought of his infamous line, “Shall I compare thee to a summers day” which basically means he thinks someone is hot. And in this song, the singer is saying how if he and this secondary person were in the alphabet, he would skip over a bunch of letters so that they could be right next to each other.  

Lastly, would be the final verse which unlike the rest of the song, is simply spoken/narrated. “You know… /You’re always meant to be…/ Destiny… / I hope you feel the same with me…/ Love” This last part really stands out because the whole song could be a way of confessing his love and at the end after confessing, he tells his someone that he hopes they feel the same way about him. He feels like they’re meant to be and it’s something he has always known.  

Something I find interesting compared to the poems we have read so far, is that gender is not mentioned at all throughout the song. In the poems we have read, the poets have made a point to make everything around them female, but the song is genderless which I think makes it more universal for all types of love, not necessarily the singer speaking to a certain person. Also, a lot of the poetry so far have been more about love within nature and how “she” (nature) holds beauty. There is also no structured form in the lines aside from the repeating chorus about living so they love. Still to me, it is on par with sonnets of love.

https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-bts-trivia-love-english-translation-lyrics