Paradise

British rock band, Coldplay, in their chart topping single, "Paradise," presents the universal theme that reality's hardships can be escaped through ersatz dreams along with the reasoning that dreams are a "paradise" and a paradise is merely a shuteye away. The song follows the average, typical, and ordinary girl through her so-called "princess years" (the fact that every girl has the superficial knowledge of having a fairytale life) to her "prime years" (where reality strikes her like a bowling ball, that not everything is possible). Coldplay approaches this theme through various poetic devices, but the most evident in their lyrics are: abnormal antitheses, hyped hyperboles, perplex personifications, rhythmic repetitions, raspy rhymes, and imaginative imageries.
Coldplay utilizes an abnormal antithesis to manipulate the sense of a thing that is the direct opposite of something else. Coldplay wrote, "The wheel breaks the butterfly," comparing the frugal wings of a butterfly to a more coarse ridges of a wheel. The antithesis presents the image that a wheel could instantly take down a butterfly metaphorically revealing that the normal girl could be knocked down as easily as the butterfly with the obstacles handed to her in life.
They then go on to use hyped hyperboles to exaggerate the context of the lyrics to show a tougher struggle of the girl's life in comparison to what it truly is. Coldplay describes the girl to face demeaning obstacles in her life by having to square up to reality, "And [having] the bullets [be] ca[ught] in her teeth" (16). Exaggerating the effect of how robust her situation might have been to having to resort to catching a bullet in her teeth. They then go on to portray her teardrop as a waterf...

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...finally, Coldplay sets the entire mood through their usage of imagery. From the very beginning, Coldplay depicts the girl's tough lifestyle by illustrating that her childhood dreams were not coming true ("But it flew away from her reach" (3)) to her never wanting to face her fears, which in this case is reality ("I know the sun must set to rise" (38)). Through every verse, Coldplay tells the listeners of another obstacle that the girl has to face if she perceives to open her eyes, such as: "bullets" (16), "wheels" (20), and "stormy skies" (36); so she should stay asleep and stay at peace.
Coldplay in "Paradise," in fact uses many poetic devices to get their point across that one doesn't always have to impede their fears right away, but can escape through the journey of their imaginations (dreams) and coinciding living their own magical, even festive paradises.