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Dialogue and estrangement (Macmillan, 1996)
113. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by T. Hutchinson and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press,
1936), Wordsworth Editions 1994, p. 206.
114. J. H. Prynne, ‘Into the Day’, in A Various Art, ed. by A. Crozier and T. Longville (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), p.242.
Songs and Poems
First published in The Argotist Online
2016
What is it about a song that makes it superior to a poem? Is it the melody or the vocal rendition? Is it the lyric? Is it
the musical arrangement? No doubt, it is all of these things, but for me the main answer is that songs generalise
whereas the majority of poems today do not. When I say “poems today” I am referring mainly to contemporary
mainstream poems, those with which the majority of poetry readers will be familiar; in other words anecdotal and
descriptive poems that contain very little ambiguity or mystery. Because of this, such poems fail to enable a reader to
personally identify with them. Indeed, the majority of these poems are intended solely as vehicles for information
transfer, information that could just as easily be conveyed in a prose form. Such poems are written merely to convey
the poet’s thoughts and feelings about a specific event, situation or place experienced, or in the act of being
experienced. The poet is not necessarily concerned with whether readers can personally identify with the poem, so
long as they understand clearly the information the poet is trying to convey. This may consist of some “important”
insight gained from an experience, or it could be a prosaic statement or commentary about some commonplace
aspect of contemporarylife.
Songs, though, do more than this. They excite both the imagination and emotions; they enable you to unlock your
own highly personal box of images, memories and associations. At one time, poetry was also able to do this because,
like song, it utilised generalisation but since Wordsworth (and largely because of his influence) poetry has become
more novelistic and descriptive. Before Wordsworth, poetry (the sort written by William Blake or Thomas Wyatt, for
instance) was closer to the song or ballad tradition, in that it tended to avoid descriptive elements. As is well known,
song predates poetry-or rather, songs became poems once they were written down and read privately.
The limitations of poetry that does not generalise are plain to see if we compare some lines from one with those of a
song. First the poetry-a stanza from Frank O’Hara’s ‘Cambridge’:
It is still raining and the yellow-green cotton fruit
looks silly round a window giving out on winter trees
with only three drab leaves left. The hot plate works,
it is the sole heat on earth, and instant coffee. I
put on my warm corduroy pants, a heavy maroon sweater,
and wrap myself in my old maroon bathrobe.
What we see here is prosaic and descriptive prose that leaves little to the reader’s imagination. In contrast to this, let
us look at some song lyrics, one by Leonard Cohen and two by Bob Dylan. In Cohen’s ‘Night Comes On’ from the
album Various Positions, we have this verse:
I said, ‘Mother I’m frightened,
the thunder and the lightning,
I’ll never come through this alone’.
She said, ‘I’ll be with you,
my shawl wrapped around you,
my hand on your head when you go’.
And the night came on.
It was very calm.
I wanted the night to go on and on
but she said, ‘Go back to the world’.
Unlike O’Hara, Cohen is not averse to generalising. Consequently, this verse is loaded with interpretative possibilities.
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