singing the repeated "baby"s, one of the most heavily used clichés in pop songs and one that he had avoided up to that point in his songwriting; Flood later commented that "he got away with it alright." Although the song is ostensibly about love and dependency, like many U2 songs, it also lends itself to religious interpretations. Listeners have heard an allusion to the Book of Job 29:2–3 and its tale of God serving as a lamp upon Job's head walking through the darkness. Robyn Brothers suggests that ultraviolet light is "a metaphor for a divine force both unseen to the naked eye and ultimately unknowable to the human intellect." Conversely, Steve Stockman, author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey Of U2, sees "Ultraviolet" as being about Bono's wife Ali Hewson, and "how when he feels like trash, she makes him clean," but says there is good reason to interpret the song as being just as much about God. The song's title supports this view: indigo and violet rarely appear in song lyrics as frequently as other colours, while ultraviolet represents an unseen wavelength beyond the visible spectrum. As such, the title evokes the image of black light or an invisible force permeating the darkness, whose connotations are spiritual and personal, as well as technological, reflecting themes of modern alienation explored elsewhere on Achtung Baby and its follow-up album, Zooropa. Dianne Ebertt Beeaff, author of A Grand Madness: Ten Years on the Road with U2, sees the song's narrator as longing for assistance from any source, religious or secular: "This is a real plea, a bleary worn-down drained wish to disappear. A drowning man desperate to hold hands in the darkness, to have someone else point the way, to be safe and obscure." Atara Stein sees "Ultraviolet" as one of several selections on the album in which the protagonist in crisis has elevated his lover into an object of worship, desperate for her to "return to her initial role as his guide and salvation." "Ultraviolet" is also one of several songs Bono has written on the theme of woman as spirit, and it echoes the band's 1980 song "Shadows and Tall Trees" by juxtaposing love with the image of ceilings. A line in Raymond Carver's late 1980s poem "Suspenders", about the quiet that comes into a house where no one can sleep, was subconsciously recycled by Bono into the lyric.