Bruce Springsteen--"Into the Fire"

I’ve railed against abstraction in other songs--”Renegades,” for instance—but in listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Into the Fire” recently, I have also been thinking about when it works.

After all, abstraction is not automatically a bad thing, its just that works of art are traditionally all about concreteness (although the 20^th century certainly explored the exceptions to this tradition, though often in terms of sensory abstraction or purity), so it often feels like a cheap betrayal of what art can be when, instead of something specific, all we get are bland and vague generalities.

On the face of it, the chorus of “Into the Fire” is largely a string of abstractions:

“May your strength give us strength,

May your faith give us faith,

May your hope give us hope,

May your love give us love.”

Not only are those abstractions repeated within the line (“strength...strength,” etc.), but they are repeated continuously throughout the song. But even though strength, faith, hope, and love are some of the most potentially vague and empty and overused terms, they don’t feel like it here. There are at least two reasons for this.

The first reason is that they have a very particular context in this song. “Into the Fire” comes from Springsteen’s album The Rising, which was written as a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which the very first lines of the song evoke:

"The sky was falling and streaked with blood
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs,
Into the fire"

The falling sky, the fire, blood, and dust are all images of the devastation of 9/11, and the lines “Up the stairs, into the fire,” refer to the actions of the emergency personnel, particularly the firefighters, who went towards the danger—up the stairs, into the fire—while everyone else was fleeing it. The person this song is directed to, the “you” whose strength, etc., is being called upon, is one of these firefighters, so that context already helps to fill out the meaning of these otherwise abstract terms. The different verses of the song all emphasize prioritizing self-sacrifice for the greater good over choosing a good rooted in self-interest (“I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher”). The ascent up the stairs is thus also an ascent towards higher forms of these virtues than their everyday versions.

And this brings me to the second reason why Springsteen’s invocation of them is not merely abstract. Looking at the form of the appeal to these virtues (“May your strength give us strength”), the “May your..” construction as well as their almost ritualistic repetition (complete with a choir’s worth of backup singers by the end of the song), makes their invocation more of a prayer or an appeal than anything. What this means is that instead of using abstract terms like love as a shortcut or a placeholder, this song is actually a call to fill them with emotional content. To a certain extent the subject matter of the song does this, and in another way so performative nature of these lines—by calling out for strength, so the idea goes, we gain strength.