You do know the lyric is by Shakespeare, right?
I didn’t actually! Well, it’s adapted from Shakespeare. Here’s what Billy Shakes wrote:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
The punctuation really helps. And if I listened to my freshman english teacher (who also happened to be my mom) and deleted all the prepositional phrases, I would have realized that the sentence essentially says “So I, unhappy, lose myself.” when set to music, I think it’s very hard to realize what “unhappy” is modifying.
(this is the song we’re talking about, if you are curious)
