He’d also divided it, for “wild” went into “Wild Honey” and “child” went into “Flower Child” (effectively pairing it with her in the real world of Dublin), again conferring the possibility of all these songs actually relating to the same object he’d defined artistically. Furthermore this neat little division of terms inferentially made him the bee in the sexual euphemism he’d developed in “Always”, to exist as the bee and the flower, -before it all went sour. This was thanks to the overtly sexual approach between himself in the 1st person and the woman as object he’d dubbed his flower child. He deepened the context, however, by repeating the self-same couplet alluding to the bee and flower from “Always” in another B-Side (off All That You Can’t Leave Behind) called “Levitate”, where he juxtaposed it in the same verse with a couplet he was yet to use later a second time in “Miracle Drug” (the newborn allusion he invoked in turn in “Yahweh”), so we’ll cross that bridge (on the significance of that couplet about freedom coming with the crown of a baby’s head) when we get there, as “Yahweh” imbues the allusion with a decidedly religious context. So once again we have this cross-pollination of sexual union man/woman with religious overtones. That this association by inference is deliberate is unquestionable, because the real implication of the song “Levitate” is that it literally invokes and asks for the descent of the Holy Spirit, to lift him up, the same pairing that exists by implication in “Wild Honey”, thanks to what the bee symbolism meant to the ancients, -and thanks to what “Trip Through Your Wires” was actually expressing in his own lexicon.
In the realm of Bono’s continuity of continual pairing, because of the allusion to both being together in a boat pulling in opposite directions in “Flower Child”, he’d also made a full circle that could effectively conflate the context of “Summer Rain” (where both were situated in a rowboat and she’d let [him] be [her] enemy) with the same feminine object who’d protected him from the “cruel sun” as “wild honey”, also associating her with “Grace” by virtue of them both diving for pearls, when in fact in terms of what she’d divulged to him, these songs were all depicting facets of the same situation. Connecting “Summer Rain” and “Wild Honey” by the boat allusion in “Summer Rain” also in turn connected his veiled lyrical reference/descriptor of her that he resurrected from “Luminous Times” (of a tiny hand with a grip on the world) to the context depicted in “Wild Honey”.
–Furthermore “Flower Child”, by virtue of the sugar vs. weed-killer metaphor would later connect to the song “Mercy”. And so the net is weaved and cast, defining his object as art and relating through it. All this is not to obscure the fact that in U2’s cannon, the origin of “honey” as feminine object (who is additionally, “child”) lies in “Even Better Than the Real Thing”; in other words, consummation itself.