Midnight - not a sound from the
pavement.
Has the moon lost her memory,
She is smiling
alone.
In the lamplight, the withered leaves
collect at my feet.
And the wind begins to
moan.
Memory - all alone in the
moonlight.
I can
smile at the old days,
I was
beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what
happiness was.
Let the memory
live again.
Every street light seems to beat a
fatalistic warning.
Someone
mutters and the streetlamp gutters,
And soon it will be
morning.
Daylight, I must wait for the
sunrise.
I must think of a new life,
And
I mustn't give in.
When the
dawn comes tonight will be a memory too,
And a new day will begin.
Burnt out ends of smokey days,
The
stale cold
smell of morning.
The
streetlamp dies, another night is over,
Another
day is dawning.
Touch me, it's so easy to
leave me
All alone with the memory
Of my days in the
sun.
If you touch me, you'll
understand what happiness is.
Look, a new day has begun.
This, the main Torch Song from the musical Cats, is the only number in the show that doesn't take its
lyric from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
The lyric is, at least primarily, composed by Eliot, but it comes instead from Prufrock and Other Observations a 1917 collection aimed at an adult audience, where the OPBoPC targeted children. Given the erudition and obscurity of Eliot's adult poetry, it's not surprising that whereas the other songs in the show are simply the poem set to music, there are some significant changes - all simplifications- between this and its source poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night.
One must be fair, the changes are somewhat necessary:
TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
may be powerful and lyrical as poetry, but it doesn't really have the
simplicity and
directness required to make a moving song.
I have been unable to find any attribution for who did the adaptation, unless it was Andrew Lloyd Webber himself - this seems unlikely, given the fact that he has never been known as a lyricist, though not impossible - I would personally be inclined to speculate they are the work of Don Black who was most closely associated with working with Lloyd Webber (collaborating with him on the show Song and Dance which was concurrent with Cats), although given his personal relationship with Elaine Paige, who was to play the lead and sing the song, it's possible that Tim Rice did the job.
Whoever penned the words, Memory became the best known, and most recorded track from the libretto, with the essential performance probably being that of Barbra Streisand, rather than either Paige or the other long-running female lead, Marti Webb.