By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Until now, we’ve largely been concerned with selecting some of the best poems by famous poets – everyone from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, Coleridge to Carol Ann Duffy. But since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, after literary critics like Sir Christopher Ricks had championed Dylan’s poetic song-writing for decades, we’ve begun thinking about music and poetry, songs as well as sonnets.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Music and poetry were once natural bedfellows, with many ‘poems’ being sung to music for entertainment at feasts and royal courts, or in local taverns. If, as Walter Pater said, all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, then it’s little surprise that so many poets have tried to write poetry that is ‘musical’ in some sense. Here are ten of the best poems about music, song, dance, instruments, and the like.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I sing of a maiden’ – or, to render it in its delightful original spelling, ‘I syng of a mayden’ – is one of the oldest surviving Christmas carols written in English. The words to this classic carol are included below, along with some words of explanation and gloss.
I syng of a mayden
That is makeles,
king of alle kinges
to here sone che chees.
He cam also stille
Ther his moder was
As dew in Aprylle,
That fallyt on the gras.
Classic music inspired by classic books and writers
Music has often taken inspiration from great literature, and 1980s music was no exception. The following eight songs were all written, at least in part, because of a classic book or a well-known writer.
T’Pau, ‘China in Your Hand’. Carol Decker, lead singer with T’Pau, has said that idea for the chorus (and title) of this song came about when she was doing the washing up. China in one’s hand seemed like an apt metaphor for the fragility of one’s dreams.