Classic Poems/Classic Rock

My middle-school-aged daughter’s English teacher recently had her examine the lyrics of some pop songs, looking for examples of poetic devices. I remember my own high school English teacher Joe Libis giving me the same assignment many years ago. But I think it might be more helpful if a teacher gave his students examples of pop lyrics which actually borrowed directly from literary works. Here are a few that I’ve always liked:

Wuthering Heights – Kate Bush retold the story Emily Bronte’s classic novel (from the ghost’s point of view!) in this song, and took it to the top of the British Charts in 1978. Pat Benatar covered it in 1980, but my favorite version is the Puppini Sisters’ cover from 2006.

Grow Old With Me – John Lennon took the first two lines of one of Robert Browning’s most beautiful love poems for his wife Elizabeth, and developed them into a love song for Yoko. Such a pity that he never completed a “finished” sounding version of this song before his death. Nevertheless, I much prefer the plaintiff “demo” version included on 1984’s Milk and Honey to the doctored and digitized version included on the 1998 Lennon Anthology.

... and while on the subject of John Lennon ...

I Am the Walrus includes not only a shout-out to that unfortunate kicking boy Edgar Allen Poe, but an early and decidedly peculiar version of “sampling” (with bits of dialogue from a BBC production of King Lear spliced onto the ending of the song).

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds got Lennon in trouble with teetotalers who noticed the “LSD” acronym in the title, but Lennon always insisted that the song’s imagery was inspired by his readings of Lewis Carroll (well, okay, maybe some of that wacky imagery was inspired by acid-trips too!)

Richard Cory – I heard Paul Simon’s song on the Sounds of Silence album years before I read Edwin A. Robinson’s actual poem, so maybe that has prejudiced me. But I’ve always preferred Mr. Simon’s version of the story to the poet’s original!

Romeo and Juliet – who but Dire Straits could re-write and sum-up Shakespeare’s immortal love poetry with the evocative line, “You and me, babe – how about it?”

Sister Moon – Sting made references to Faust and The Odyssey in Wrapped Around your Finger, and did some literary namedropping about “the old man in that book by Nabokov” in Don’t Stand So Close to Me, but he came right out and quoted Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 in this beautiful song.

And finally—

To Know Him is to Love Him – Phil Spector claimed this song was inspired by the epitaph on his father’s tombstone. Yet Bram Stoker used an almost identical phrase in the second chapter of his best-known novel. Dracula informs his real-estate agent that in anticipation of moving to Great Britain, he has been reading everything he can about the country, and the guide books have become “his friends.” The count then sums up: “Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her.” Fateful words indeed, when spoken by a dangerous man to his newly arrived houseguest …