Harry's Place Arts

I had resolved to send Morrissey to Coventry, to deny his existence and to transfer my affections back to Robert Smith, or to flirt with Jarvis Cocker after the relationship-ending betrayals Morrissey keeps inflicting on his fans. Finally I too have become a victim. But an article in The Telegraph by Michael Deacon entitled “Morrissey doesn’t write poetry, he writes lyrics” caught my eye (well, David T sent me a link). It seems Deacon was responding to an earlier article in which Morrissey was hailed as ‘as good as Betjeman and Larkin’.

I agree entirely with his conclusion, but his analysis is wrong-headed and betrays a deeply ingrained prejudice against song-writing as a legitimate art form that doesn’t need to be compared to poetry in the first place.

If Deacon likes some songs (or song writers) he seems too embarrassed to say it is because he admires their words. So, while he is right – lyrics and poetry are different – in support of this argument, he talks a lot of nonsense.

The first hint that Deacon is a poetry-chauvinist is this quip: “Well, there’s a reason there hasn’t been one before: Morrissey isn’t a poet. He doesn’t write poetry; he writes song lyrics. The two are not as different as chalk and cheese, but they are at least as different as Brie and Dairylea.” 

Dairylea? If he had said “brie and stilton” it would have been a concession that both are good, in different ways and in different contexts. But by likening lyrics to a cheap supermarket cheese, it betrays his prejudices.

The core of his argument seems sound, but when he says…

This isn’t the first time a literary academic has anointed a pop star. Christopher Ricks, formerly the Oxford Professor of Poetry, believes Bob Dylan belongs “in the same category” as Keats. But saying Dylan is as good as Keats is like saying Cristiano Ronaldo is as good as Sachin Tendulkar. They’re both talented, but at different things. By what means can we satisfactorily compare them? Get them to have a crack at each other’s jobs? Ronaldo would likely get bowled first ball by the Australians; Tendulkar would probably balloon his free-kicks into the stands. Dylan is yet to master the sonnet, and Keats, despite his flowing curls, is an improbable candidate for the role of rock frontman.

… why doesn’t he compare like-for-like? Why does he match Keats’s ability with words against Dylan’s (dubious) stage charisma? Dylan is a gifted wordsmith – albeit in a (sometimes*) different medium to Keats. If Deacon chose his examples to support this thesis instead of revealing and embarrassment at considering that Dylan may have a staggering talent for language, his argument might fly further. What he might say (if he could shed his snobbery) is that songs don’t have to work as ‘poems’, just as poems aren’t expected to work as ‘songs’.

[* Keats was a keen balladeer, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" being one famous example. Perhaps it would have been interesting to match Merci with 'Hurricane' or 'The Lonesome death of Hattie Caroll'.]

What’s more, some poems, like the famous ”The Love that Dare’s To Speak Its Name” are just awful. What makes this literary catastrophe “brie” while, say, Paul Simon’s – okay, I know it’s a cliche, but for a good reason – “Sound of Silence“, is mere Dairylea?

Okay, here’s an experiment. Forget well known tracts. Is this a poem or a song?

Since the soul of Carmen Miranda had captured the mind of man
Dismissed with her generation for the price of a can-can
Consigned to the sideshows of history, with the patronized orphans of film
She seeded the bait and offered the faint hope of chance to innocent men
In love with the trance of her dances And abandoned by them

Is it Auden or Abba? “Bree of Dairylea?”

Neither. It is of course, John Cale. From his album “Prayer For The Dying”, it is the final song and the odd one out. The rest of the album is an orchestral piece setting the lyrics – oh, dear, I mean, poems, of Dylan Thomas to music.

It was this thought that made me think that Deacon gets it all wrong when he writes:

Poetry is written to fit metre, song lyrics to fit melody. This is why poems look good on paper, and song lyrics almost invariably do not. One of my favourite Morrissey songs is called Speedway. It features this refrain: “All of the rumours keeping me grounded/ I never said, I never said that they were completely unfounded.”

Why does he repeat “I never said” in that clunking way? Why is the couplet so lopsided, the second line much longer than the first, and with no discernible pattern to the stresses? Because the song’s vocal melody demands it. When he sings the couplet, it flows beautifully. But on paper, it’s stone-deaf doggerel.

First of all, does Deacon understand what melody is? Melody itself has to fit a metre, a beat. If melody didn’t, it would be a very messy transcription into musical notation, which, as anyone who reads music knows, breaks everything down into beats and bars. In other words, a very strict metre! Indeed, it is only this strict metre that makes something ‘verse’ – a poem or a lyric – and not prose.

Finding the metre is not always obvious or easy. Those of us who studied Latin, no doubt, will have learned the skill of ‘scansion‘ and had to master the notation. With a bit of effort, Deacon will find that, contrary to being “stone-deaf doggerel”, the line of Morrissey verse he quotes scans rather well. In fact, you can clap the beat out as you recite it – if it helps.

But of course, this is a blind alley. A great deal of modern poetry doesn’t scan at all, or deliberately toys with scan creating jumps and jolts for poetic effect. On the other hand, so much poetry scans so infectiously that it suggests a melody to match its rhythm.

Consider how effortlessly these lines slip into melody:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

If you think I’m stretching it (and you haven’t heard Cale perform it) take a listen to this chap reciting the poem at poets.org – the poor old chap desperately want to break into song. That’s what good language does. It sings.

If a person were unfamiliar with Thomas and misidentified these verses as “John Cale lyrics” when they saw them on paper, would should we encourage them not to consider whether the verses may be poetry for the sole reason that they were introduced to them in a musical form? Wouldn’t that be silly? And if you can can consider a poem a lyric, why should it be a stretch to consider whether some lyrics might not make good poems?

Is this not a debate that might’ve raged when David reached for his lyre and thought “”He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’  Wow, that really rocks!”

I think it is fair to say that some songs make terrible poems and some poems make terrible songs. There is no shame in this. Both are word-forms that serve particular functions, and in a sense, have different loyalties or priorities. If a lyric looks good on paper, that’s an added dimension, if a poem suggests a melody, that’s an extra joy.

No one is arguing that a lyric like “Uh huh, get in on, make it funky now, you know you wanna, ooh!”  is striving to be great poetry – or any type of poetry at all. But for some writers of song, like Morrissey, like Paul Simon, like many others obviously far too numerous to mention, there is room for consideration. But do we have to ask if the words themselves are poetry, when it is the role of the writer in our lives that is arguably more important. In the world after the Fender Stratocaster, the larks have usurped the role of the Larkens in articulating the landmarks of our lives. Or just to express some intangible beauty.

For example:

I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime

What splendid verse! What lovely imagery. It’s beautiful and mysterious. And that’s before you’ve even heard the Fleet Foxes sing it.