Seree,

You say How does Dylan's case differ from Leonard Cohen's case? On Musings appears a Cohen piece clearly derived from a medieval Jewish prayer recited every Yom Kippur. Your clearly is the difference. There is no hiding the debt Cohen has, whether or not any particular reader recognizes it.

Best,
Marcia

Edit: Cohen's title, too, sends off those who care to find the original.

[This message has been edited by Marcia Karp (edited September 15, 2006).]

When I was in what would now be called pre-school (then tiny tots) we sang
"Morning has Broken" which many years later appeared as a hit created by Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam. I never heard credit given to the original composition.

---
I've just Googled and it turns out to be poem written by Eleanor Farjeon. I don't know the origin of the lovely melody:

Eleanor Farjeon
Here is the background. I never heard it mentioned when the song was a hit:
Melody of Morning Has Broken
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 15, 2006).]

Julia A. Moore had better watch out!

Sam,
You'll have to explain that crptic message. I Googled Julia but need to know more--as forum crits like to say.
Why will Julia A. Moore need to watch out?
Janet

Jest a poem.

`````````

Dylan is about one man’s fist
in the lightning sky.
Allen Ginsberg


Is about:
with apologies to Ginsberg, Yeats, and Rosen

The infant is about trading a body of water
for land, club footed,
black-eyed, blue toed,
a deuce in the hand
and an ace in the hole,
mad as the mist and snow.
The hand
is about Michelangelo.
The candle is about eating your curds
to find your way.
Faith is about needles and hay.
Gymnastics
is about sticking it. Poe
is about somebody finally getting up
to answer the door.
Déjà vu is about saline
seeping into the boat.
Fear is about fava beans and a nice chianti
subverting the form of the jungle snake.
Nature is about secrets, coves, sub
species, megaphones, healing balms,
and dispassionate devastations.
War
is about nature.
The womb is about aestivation.
Vice is about stalling for time.
The toddler is about knowing
the world by cramming everything
into the mouth.
Youth
is about spitting it out.
Passion is about death-
defying concentration.
Dickinson is about time.
Hopkins is about dragonflies.
The sage is about the mountain
high. The spine
is about bearing weight.
Old age is about bones.
The brain is about the size of the hand-
held blank slate. Dylan is about thieving,
weeding, and you deciding
what the weave is all about.
Beethoven is about scent.
Beaudelair is about the throat.
Death is about the intimacy
of distance,
the rowing of the glass boat,
secret coves, and dispassionate
devastations
mad as the mist and snow.






[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited September 15, 2006).]

And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain's tower...

Janet, yes, Eleanor Farjeon should have been given more credit for the lovely poem "Morning has broken." Tho I'm not implying that Cat Stevens didn't give her derit--perhaps he did.
I feel as if I've always known it was by her, though not sure why--perhaps it was in the modern hymnal used by my convent school's nuns in the seventies, and her name caught my eye because I already loved her children's books, like Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field...I don't remember now.

Anyway, according to my Episcopal Hymnal, the melody is called Bunessan, and is a Gaelic melody that was harmonised by Alec Wyton, b.1921.

This is one of the loveliest marriages of words and music that I know. And the poem captures a special, early-morning-in-an-English-garden feeling that I used to have in my English childhood, on that sort of morning...

Christine

Janet, if Dylan is indeed plagiarizing from a poet as bad as Henry Timrod, Julia A. Moore (adequately parodied by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn) may be next. Or, for that matter, James Whitcome Riley or Edgar Guest.

Samm
Julia has come back to me, I had tried to forget.

Ho capito.
Janet

PS: My keyboard double MMed you, but I rather like it in the context of Julia.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 20, 2006).]

I would stop short of accusing Dylan of plagiarising Timrod, but I agree with Marcia on the difference between Cohen's song and (what I've read of) Dylan's. Assuming Dylan is aware of what he's done, and that it isn't an unconscious application of that Civil War stuff 'locked' in his head, what on earth would be the problem with an acknowledgment?

BTW I also believe Eliot should have acknowledged Madison Cawein for The Wasteland, even though Cawein's poem of the same title (minus definite article) is far less innovative or interesting.