More than Lions in the Winter

Hoyt Axton wrote a song entitled “Like a Lion in the Winter” that he sang with Linda Ronstadt:

Like a lion in the winter I can hear the summer call
Like a ship out on the ocean made of stone
And sometimes when I get lonely I can swear I hear you call
Oh, the nights are cold when you don't keep me warm.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing.

Some sail rivers deep and muddy some sail rivers clear and cold
But the river that I'm sailin' goes to sea
And sometimes I do grow weary sometimes I feel old
And sometimes I wonder if you think of me.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing.

Like a lion in the winter I can hear the summer call
Like a ship out on the ocean made of stone
And sometimes when I get lonely I can swear I hear you call
Oh, the nights are cold when you don't keep me warm.

And when I first saw you I first loved you
With a song that I sang to the fire in your eyes
But somebody told you that it wouldn't be easy
And you carried that lie for the devil to sing...

The theme of the song derives, I believe, from the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine /Henry II of a thousand years ago via the James Goldman play and the Katherine Hepburn/Peter O'Toole film, “A Lion in the Winter.”

Henry II and Eleanor, Hepburn and O'Toole, and Hoyt Axton are gone, and Linda Ronstadt is now sixty-eight and can no longer sing because of Parkinson's disease. So we can probably feel the strength of this song easier more than ever as we watch Axton and Ronstadt sing it. It seems to me that the very existence itself of this song and video makes it clearer than ever that we are something more than animals in the winter of our lives, more than ships out on the ocean made of stone.