Bono Wild Irish Rose Lyrics

In a field by a river
My love and I did lie
And on my naked shoulder
She too proud to cry
She said that I must leave her
An icy tear she froze
How could I melt the heart
Of a wild irish rose

Well a gypsy she has made of me
A servent of the street
And back to bed I've travelled
To taste a love as sweet
Well the heart it knows no reasons
And reason never knows
As I lie with them I'm thinking
Of a wild irish rose

Bono speaks:
"This is based on a...on the time we spent in a hotel called the Millon Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles. It's like a half-way house hotel for b__s and people thrown out of hospitals under the Regean era. And I was being taken through this hotel--I was doing some filming down there--and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the b__s drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line, 'The city of Angels/Has brought a devil out in me', and developed it on from there. The Rose in Ireland, as you know, is a sort of romantic image of love, obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself. That is an image I thought would be nice to subvert."

Well I saw the city of angels
It brought a devil out in me
And hell's hotel on sunset
Showed a w____ no mercy
As the orange sky was screaming
From the roof I let her go
These are the dizzying heights that brought me
My wild irish rose

Now red is the rose
That she layed on my grave
A life is what she wanted
And a life I surely gave
Like a hundred men before me
They lay lying here in rows
Young men, b_____
As a wild irish rose