Bert Jansch / The Black Swan / 2006
A Woman Like You
hazy, incantatory, quietly obsessive
A late-period Bert Jansch song that treats courtship as sorcery, built from a wandering, almost dreamlike set of images rather than a clear narrative. It reads less like a coherent love story than an incantation, with the singer casting spells and sending familiars to win a woman he can barely describe.
enchantment and desire the limits of language to capture love folkloric imagery possessiveness disguised as devotion idealization
Who's speaking
A first-person male narrator addresses a woman directly, treating her as both real and mythic; he seems entranced rather than reliable, and the logic of his statements drifts the way spoken magic or a half-remembered dream might.
What happens
The song doesn't progress through events so much as circle a single emotional state. The speaker opens by confessing he can't fully picture or idealize the woman he's fixated on, then imagines using magic — birds, spells, waiting in darkness — to secure her love. The middle verses grow more possessive and secretive, imagining binding her to him while she sleeps, before the song loops back to its opening confession, ending exactly where it began.
How it's built
Verse-based with a repeated frame: the opening stanza returns almost verbatim as the closing stanza, giving the song a closed, spell-like shape rather than a linear one. The inner verses escalate in intensity and strangeness of imagery before the return collapses that escalation back into the original uncertainty.
Section by section
Opening verse
“I can't see to making you”
The speaker admits an inability to romanticize or fully imagine the woman, which sets up the whole song as an attempt to compensate for that failure through magic rather than direct expression.
First spell verse
The introduction of birds as go-betweens signals that the speaker doesn't trust plain speech or direct action; desire is displaced onto folkloric agents, which distances him from the risk of rejection.
Second verse
“I gonna fix a magic(al) spell”
The language becomes more assertive and controlling, framing the pursuit as something to be engineered rather than mutually discovered. The garden imagery hints at temptation and transgression, aligning romantic pursuit with something forbidden.
Third verse
“bind your heart unto me”
This is the song's most possessive moment, imagining the woman unconscious and unaware while the speaker acts on her. It reframes the earlier wistfulness as something closer to control, complicating the tenderness of the opening.
Closing verse (repeat)
By returning to the exact opening lines, the song refuses resolution. The spell hasn't visibly worked; the speaker is left in the same state of uncertainty, suggesting the magic was always more about his own longing than any real transformation.
Craft
- folkloric/animal symbolism
- Doves and blackbirds function as magical emissaries, borrowing from ballad and fairy-tale tradition to stand in for the speaker's desire and his attempts to act on it indirectly rather than directly.
- incantatory repetition
- The return of the opening lines at the end mimics the structure of a charm or spell, reinforcing the song's magical framing rather than telling a story with resolution.
- syntactic dislocation
- Several lines resist ordinary grammar and logic, producing a dreamlike, associative quality that suggests altered or heightened emotional states rather than clear description.
- ambiguous address ("little girl")
- The shift in how the woman is named across verses subtly changes the power dynamic, moving from reverent uncertainty toward something more controlling and paternal.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a study in longing that never quite becomes love, dressed in the language of folk magic. The speaker's inability to idealize the woman at the start, followed by escalating fantasies of control (spells, secrecy, acting on her while she sleeps), suggests infatuation curdling into a kind of possessiveness he may not fully recognize in himself. An alternative, gentler reading takes the magical imagery as pure folk-song convention — inherited from ballad tradition, where spells and birds are just poetic shorthand for wanting someone — with no darker undertone intended. The song's looping structure supports either reading, since it never resolves which is true.
Context
Bert Jansch was a foundational British folk guitarist whose late work, including "The Black Swan," often drew on traditional ballad imagery and structures. This song's magical, elliptical lyric fits that lineage of folk song where birds, spells, and enchantment stand in for romantic longing, though I don't have specific information about the writing or recording circumstances of this particular track.
Listen for
- the way the opening lines return unchanged at the end, closing the song like a spell rather than a story
- the shift from reverent uncertainty to more possessive language across the verses
- the recurring bird imagery and what it displaces or avoids saying directly
- the loose, almost dreamlike syntax that resists a single fixed meaning
- Jansch's guitar phrasing, which often carries as much of the song's mood as the words do
About Bert Jansch
Herbert Jansch was a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and came to prominence in London in the 1960s as an acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter.
1943 - 2011 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue