The River | Analysis

This study guide will help you analyse the song “The River” by Bruce Springsteen. We will show you examples of elements in the text that will be relevant for your analysis. In these notes, we will focus on composition, characters and narrator, language and style, rhythm and rhyme, imagery and metaphors, theme and message, and on the questions that you find in Targets.

Presentation of the text

Title: “The River”
Author: Bruce Springsteen
Published in: “The River” (album)
Date of Publication: 1981
Genre: Song

Bruce Springsteen is an American musician. His songs are famous because of the themes he explores in them, especially the theme of the American working class. The song you have to analyze, “The River”, was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s sister and her husband.

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Imagery

Visual imagery is created mostly when adjectives are employed. For example, the sixth line makes it very easy for the reader/listener to imagine the natural landscape: “We'd ride out of this valley down to where the fields were green” (l. 6).

Visual images are also created in the last stanza, when the narrator describes a young and beautiful Mary: “Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir” (l. 27).

The song also relies on auditory imagery:

At night on them banks I'd lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take (ll. 28-29)