Vashti Bunyan / Lookaftering / 2005
Here Before
quiet, reverent, wistful
A short, hymn-like meditation on children as old souls, built from three near-identical stanzas that shift only in pronoun and image. Vashti Bunyan uses repetition and understatement to suggest that each child arrives already knowing something the speaker cannot name.
motherhood reincarnation or old-soul intuition time and memory the ineffable nature of children cyclical repetition
Who's speaking
A parent speaking retrospectively about her children, addressing no one directly -- the listener overhears a kind of private accounting. The voice is tender and untroubled, not analytical, which makes its claims feel intuitive rather than argued.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story in the conventional sense; it moves through three children (or three ways of describing children) in sequence, each introduced with the same formula and each granted the same uncanny knowingness. The progression is less plot than accretion -- each verse adds a variation on the same recognition, building toward the sense that this quality is inherited or eternal rather than particular to one child.
How it's built
Three verses of nearly identical shape, each four lines long, functioning almost like a set of variations on a single musical and verbal theme. There is no chorus or bridge in the conventional sense; the repetition itself is the structure, with small changes in verb tense and imagery marking the only forward motion. The lack of a released tension or resolution mirrors the song's suggestion of an ongoing, non-linear pattern rather than a single narrative arc.
Section by section
First verse
“wilder than moonlight”
The opening comparison sets the tone: the child is defined by an untamed, almost lunar energy, and the closing line suggests his competence isn't learned but remembered.
Second verse
The second child is described through solar rather than lunar imagery, and the faculty attributed shifts from doing to seeing -- a quieter, more perceptive form of the same inherited knowingness.
Third verse
“took his while like northern summer”
The tense shift to a completed action, alongside the seasonal image of a fleeting northern summer, introduces a note of transience absent from the earlier verses -- this child's time is bounded, even as his knowingness is affirmed one last time.
Craft
- anaphora
- Each verse opens with the same phrase announcing a child, creating a litany-like rhythm that treats each child as another instance of the same phenomenon rather than a fully separate event.
- refrain with variation
- The closing line of each verse repeats almost verbatim, but the subject shifts from 'he' to 'she' to 'he' again, suggesting the trait described transcends any single child's identity.
- natural imagery as characterization
- Moonlight, sunshine, and a season standing in for the children's temperaments lets the song describe personality through elemental, non-psychological terms, reinforcing the sense that these children are more like forces of nature than developing individuals.
- understatement
- The claim that a child has 'been here before' is delivered plainly, without embellishment or argument, which lets the uncanny idea sit quietly rather than being oversold.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on the mystery of children's innate selves -- the way infants and young children can seem to possess instincts, moods, or competencies that feel older than their years, prompting a parent's superstitious or spiritual wonder rather than literal belief in past lives. A secondary reading takes the 'been here before' motif more literally, as an expression of reincarnation belief, in keeping with the folk-mystic sensibility of Bunyan's work and the album's pastoral, otherworldly tone. The text supports both without forcing a choice, since Bunyan's delivery is plain and unelaborated.
Context
Lookaftering (2005) was Bunyan's second album, arriving decades after her 1970 debut and marking her return to music after raising a family; the domestic, retrospective tone of much of the record -- and this song's direct address to the experience of having children -- likely draws on that lived gap. I don't have confirmed biographical detail about which children or events, if any, inspired the lyric specifically, so that connection should be treated as plausible context rather than established fact.
Listen for
- the near-identical melodic and lyrical shape across all three verses, and how small changes land against that sameness
- the shift from active doing to passive seeing to a bounded, finished 'took his while' in the final verse
- the plainness of Bunyan's vocal delivery, which resists dramatizing what could be an extraordinary claim
- the way natural imagery (moonlight, sunshine, northern summer) substitutes for direct emotional description