Radiohead: Give Up the Ghost Meaning

Give Up the Ghost Lyrics

Don't hurt me
Don't haunt me
(repeated in the background)

Gather up the lost and the sold
Into your arms, into your arms

Gather up and pay in full
Into your arms, into your arms
Into your arms, into your arms

What seems...

1. Redrose33

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   Jan 2nd 2013 !⃝

   I have been searching for interpretations to this song because unbelievably (and this is true) it automatically started playing on my husbands iPhone as he was driving me to see my dying mother. This may be just coincidence and he may have been listening to it before we set off in the car but I heard noise coming from his coat pocket, pulled out the phone and saw "give up the ghost" on the display. I think this was a message to me from the universe that it was time to let her go and I think sociopatrol's interpretation captures this perfectly. Thank you.
2. Sociopatrol

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   Nov 16th 2012 !⃝

   I believe this song is about someone the narrator has lost (deceased). In this case I believe the person encapsulates a motherly persona, and the narrator is asking that she take on the heart felt problems of anyone, and everyone; incuding himself. She encapsulates someone that always thought of others before herself. Someone with open arms, hence "In your arms". The narrator, and everyone else in the song, takes a child like character and casts even the impossible into her hands (arms), because she can do, in the narrator and your own mind, anything. Finally at the end, and pinnacle of the song, he, and anyone else who has cast their pains upon her, are finally ready to let her go, and with her death, all their troubles. This is represented in "I think I have had my fill (In your arms), and "I think I should give up the ghost". Like a child who has grown, we must release ourselves and become our own person.

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