The river goeth into the sea...

two strong hearts, reaching out forever like a river to the sea - you and me...john farnham, 2 strong hearts

teh only thing remotely creative to do with that song were our hanfd movements we came up with when we sused it for a liturgical dance/expression thing in 1987....

U2's "One Tree Hill" repeats this a few different ways:

We run like a river
Run to the sea

Oh great ocean
Oh great sea
Run to the ocean
Run to the sea

Oh man. When it comes to the sea, The Cure has everyone beat, I think. I can't recall if Big Bad Bob ever used rivers as well as seas in the same sentence, but this one's close ("Snow in Summer"):

"And all the rivers/Run away/Slipping into your deep green heart/ (skip to the end of the song) Just like the snow in summer/As it melts/into the sea".

The whole song is an extended metaphor, I guess. just as HALF THE SONGS THE CURE EVER DID INVOLVED THE SEA. And water. And dark green, deep green, whatever. Why? A fixation, it was. You are so beautiful, like the sea, you see. But you left me, and I was sad, so sad. Repeat. Etc.

The Tay, the Tay , the silvery Tay
flows from Perth to Dundee all the way.

The great William MacGonagall, someone should put his poems to music, maybe Bono could do it.

Pete Townshend, "The Sea Refuses No River," from All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes.

Youngstown: Every single thing.

[Chorus:] Like a river flowing into the sea You touch me so deep Like the sun up in the sweet summer sky It's your love that shines in my life

or something like that

Led Zep 'Ten Years Gone':
Then as it was, then again it will be
Though the course may change sometimes
Rivers always reach the sea

One of my favorite films in elementary school (besides 'The Red Balloon' - which I think they showed us four times a year) was "Put me Back in the Water" - about an Eskimo kid who makes a little boat and writes his name and address on the bottom. He drops the boat in a local stream - the instructions on the boat were to write to him and then put the boat back in the water. Eventually the boat makes it to the mighty sea. (All the way from Alaska! Imagine that!)

The images have stuck with me though. So someone should write a song about that.

Did anyone ever see "Winter of the Witch" in school? It's about a mother & her kid who move into an old house. A witch lives in the attic and she makes them pancakes with LSD in them. Then they invite the whole town over to trip on these pancakes. Great children's movie. Things were very different in the early 70's.

In the Goombay Dance Band song "Seven Tears", the river flows to the sea as is the nature of such potomological entities, but its purpose is chiefly as vector for the tears in the title:
"Seven tears are running to the river
Seven tears are running to the sea."

"Put me Back in the Water" - about an Eskimo kid who makes a little boat

That would be based on Paddle-to-the-Sea, a great mid-century kid's book by Holling Clancy Hollings, if I remember his name right. In the book, the Native American kid lives to the north of Lake Superior near Lake Nipigon, so it makes sense that the boat could eventually hit the Atlantic...

Frank Black's "St. Francis Dam Disaster" is about the disaster of the same name, which took place in California in 1928, in which the St. Francis Dam crumbled, releasing a 140-ft high wall of water which swept over a number of towns, killing almost 500, before it reached the Pacific Ocean, 53 miles away. As Frank sings it, "That water seeks her own."

Thanks Ned