Pagan Poetry

Björk wrote it and produced it with Marius de Vries. The second Vespertine single came out on 5 November 2001, with Aurora, Domestica and Batabid as B-sides and a radio edit of 4:01. It uses music boxes she had collected for years and is in C-sharp minor. The lyrics are read as being about sexual pleasure and emotional fulfilment in romance.

It reached number thirty-eight in the UK and number five on the UK independent chart. Pitchfork ranked it 227th on its list of the top 500 tracks of the 2000s. Nick Knight's video, with a dress by Alexander McQueen and piercing imagery, was banned by MTV in the US, and Björk posted the uncensored version to YouTube on 9 July 2019.

Live

She played it on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2001 with the Greenlandic women's choir, a harpist and Matmos. Setlist.fm logs it in 222 of her sets, the fourth most of any song.