Pat Benatar / Crimes of Passion / 1980
Wuthering Heights
feverish, pleading, gothic
This is Pat Benatar's rendition of a song originally built around Emily Brontë's novel, voiced by the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw pleading to be let back into the life and body of Heathcliff. It plays as a possession narrative disguised as a love song, where longing curdles into something closer to haunting.
obsessive love death and the afterlife possession and identity merger gothic romance return and homecoming
Who's speaking
The narrator is Cathy's ghost speaking directly to Heathcliff, recalling their past and begging for reunion; the listener overhears an address meant for one person, making us eavesdroppers on an intimate, slightly unsettling plea.
What happens
The song opens with a memory of the couple's turbulent romance on the moors, then shifts into the ghost's present state -- restless, cold, unable to rest -- before arriving at the recurring plea to be let back in. Each repetition of the chorus escalates the urgency, moving from simple identification to an explicit desire to merge with or consume Heathcliff's soul.
How it's built
Verses recount backstory and interior suffering while the chorus functions as a ritual incantation, repeated with almost no variation, which mimics the ghost's compulsive return. The bridge briefly intensifies the stakes before the song cycles back into the chorus one final time and trails off mid-phrase, as though cut off rather than resolved.
Section by section
Opening verse
“too hot, too greedy”
The recollection of their romance emphasizes volatility and possessiveness rather than tenderness, establishing that this love was always consuming rather than nurturing.
First chorus
The shift to direct address and self-identification turns the song into a ritual of return; the insistence on naming herself suggests both a need to be recognized and an uncertainty about whether she still exists as a person Heathcliff can know.
Second verse and bridge
“my one dream, my only master”
Calling him a master reframes the relationship in terms of submission and ownership, reinforcing that her identity has been entirely organized around him, even in death.
Closing refrain
“let me grab your soul away”
The plea moves from longing to something closer to spiritual theft, suggesting that reunion for this narrator means absorption rather than companionship.
Final repetition
The song cuts off before resolving, leaving the plea suspended and unanswered, which reinforces the sense of a haunting that never concludes.
Craft
- apostrophe
- The entire song addresses an absent, specific person by name, which creates the illusion of a private, urgent conversation rather than a general lyric statement.
- repetition/refrain
- The chorus's near-identical repetition across the song functions less as a hook and more as an incantation, suggesting a ghost caught in a loop, unable to move past the moment of her plea.
- pathetic fallacy
- The windswept moor setting mirrors the volatility of the central relationship, tying landscape to emotional extremity.
- paradox
- The narrator's admission that she both hated and loved the same person captures the song's central tension between devotion and destruction.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a dramatization of grief and obsession so total that it survives death, with the ghost's plea functioning as both romantic devotion and a kind of spiritual violence -- she wants not just reunion but to reclaim him as part of herself. An alternative reading takes the possession imagery more literally as horror, framing the song as a ghost story first and love story second, where the romantic language is the ghost's self-justification for an essentially predatory act.
Context
This song was originally written and performed by Kate Bush in 1978, directly inspired by Emily Brontë's novel and specifically voiced as Cathy's ghost. Pat Benatar's version appears on her 1980 album Crimes of Passion as a cover, reinterpreting the material with a harder rock arrangement and her own vocal power, though the lyrics and narrative conceit remain Bush's original conception.
Listen for
- the way the chorus repeats almost unchanged, building obsession through insistence rather than variation
- the tonal shift between the backstory verses and the present-tense pleading of the chorus
- language of ownership and mastery that complicates the song's romantic surface
- the abrupt, unresolved ending that leaves the plea hanging
About Pat Benatar
Patricia Mae Giraldo is an American singer and songwriter. In the US, she has two multi-platinum albums, five platinum albums, and 15 US Billboard top 40 singles, while in Canada she had eight straight platinum albums, and has sold over 36 million albums worldwide.
b. 1953 / United States
Full biography and catalogue