‘A Pin-Light Bent’ is the 10th track on Joanna Newsom’s fourth album, Divers.

The instrumentation is unusually bare for the album: solo harp and Newsom’s own voice, creating a strongly emotional and personal atmosphere.

The song’s narrator muses over the fragility of life and the relative insignificance of their own existence in the grand scheme of the universe. It is inspired by, and contains references to, James Dickey’s poem ‘Falling’, which was in turn inspired by a New York Times article detailing the accidental death of a female flight attendant following her fall out of an airplane in flight.

This is parallel to a narrative in the album’s second track, ‘Sapokanikan’, in which former New York City mayor John Purroy Mitchel fell to his death from an airplane he was piloting due to an unfastened seatbelt. As the penultimate track, ‘A Pin-Light Bent’ is essentially a thematic mirror image of the second track, giving further credence to the album’s chiastic structure.