[Roger Slater]

"Tangled up in Blue" is particularly awesome, isn't it? Actually, so many of Dylan's songs are about divorce. This one, not my favorite but still darn good, is apparently not fiction but a rare Dylan song that is straightforward and personal. It was written to his wife as they were separating (she leaving him), and it may have helped him delay the divorce by a year or two:

Sara

I laid on a dune, I looked at the sky,
When the children were babies and played on the beach.
You came up behind me, I saw you go by,
You were always so close and still within reach.


Sara, Sara,
Whatever made you want to change your mind?
Sara, Sara,
So easy to look at, so hard to define.


I can still see them playin' with their pails in the sand,
They run to the water their buckets to fill.
I can still see the shells fallin' out of their hands
As they follow each other back up the hill.


Sara, Sara,
Sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life,
Sara, Sara,
Radiant jewel, mystical wife.


Sleepin' in the woods by a fire in the night,
Drinkin' white rum in a Portugal bar,
Them playin' leapfrog and hearin' about Snow White,
You in the marketplace in Savanna-la-Mar.


Sara, Sara,
It's all so clear, I could never forget,
Sara, Sara,
Lovin' you is the one thing I'll never regret.


I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells,
I'd taken the cure and had just gotten through,
Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.


Sara, Sara,
Wherever we travel we're never apart.
Sara, oh Sara,
Beautiful lady, so dear to my heart.


How did I meet you? I don't know.
A messenger sent me in a tropical storm.
You were there in the winter, moonlight on the snow
And on Lily Pond Lane when the weather was warm.


Sara, oh Sara,
Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress,
Sara, Sara,
You must forgive me my unworthiness.


Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp
And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.
You always responded when I needed your help,
You gimme a map and a key to your door.


Sara, oh Sara,
Glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow,
Sara, oh Sara,
Don't ever leave me, don't ever go.

[Richard Epstein]

Printing out lyrics like that is always a useful corrective for the insistence that pop lyrics are "really" poetry. All you need do is pretend you encountered the lyrics as a post here, no background music playing in your head, and imagine what sort of critique you would give the poem. If you read "Sara," as a stand-alone poem, you would, if you were nicer than I, swallow hard and say, "There are some very good forums set up to help beginners."

All of which is not to say that it isn't an effective song. It's a very good instance of its kind. But it wasn't meant to be read as a poem. When people say pop lyricists are the real poets of our time, what they mean is, "I'm not acquainted with poetry." Christopher Ricks notwithstanding.

RHE

[Chris Childers]

To follow up on Richard Epstein in a different direction, though I enjoy Dylan, I'm not too interested in all these song lyrics. As per the thread title, I really wanted *poems,* not songs, though as a song lyric says, you can't always get what you want, & I appreciate that I don't own the thread, that it's a conversation, and that it will go where it will go, regardless of me. Still, I am particularly grateful for Maryann and Jehanne's recent comments, which are the sort of thing I was hoping for, as well as many of the earlier posts.

Chris

[Roger Slater]

But something happens to great lyrics sometimes when you are familiar with the melody. They become something very close to "poetry." Not all of them, of course. The lyrics of "Sara" don't stand up, but, for me, "Tangled Up In Blue" survives on the page. Having first come to the lyrics through a musical performance, though, sort of trains your ear to a "meter" that is private to the particular lyrics in question. A metrical poem, of course, must come packaged with its own meter, and cannot depend on any sort of extrinsic training. Anyway, some song lyrics are closer to standing alone than others, even if the songs themselves are equally appealing to hear. Dylan does have a couple of lyrics in the Norton Anthology. Robert Burns has quite a few.

I agree with Richard's general point, though. I remember many years ago seeing Paul Simon be interviewed by some egghead on the BBC. The interviewer tried to get him to say that his songs were poems set to music, and PS naturally bristled at the invitation. No, he insisted, they were songs and there's nothing wrong with that, you don't have to call them poems to flatter them. (Last year, though, he couldn't resist publishing a book of his lyrics set out as if they were poems).

It's interesting somehow that songs seem to be about divorce a lot more than poems do. I think people started posting songs because they couldn't come up with many examples of poems.

[Richard Epstein]

I think people started posting songs because they couldn't come up with many examples of poems.

I think "Heart's Needle" sort of preempted the field for a whole generation or more of poets. Sometimes a field has to lie fallow a while before there's anything more to cultivate.

RHE

[Ann Drysdale]

I'd like to nominate this, by Anne Stevenson. So much more than the sum of its parts...

Divorcing

After Gertrude Stein

I am I because my little dog knows me.
We are we because our little dog knows us.

I am I, but my little dog knows you.
You are you, but your little dog knows me.

I am I. You are you.
Poor little dog. Poor little dog.

[wendy v]

Chris, there's a long, (tedious) one by Sexton, called Break Away, which begins:

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,

[FOsen]

Always liked this one, by Pasadena homeboy, Hank Coulette (dead now, 22 years). Donald Justice and Robert Mezey edited his Collected- it's worth finding - he's wonderful.

Postscript

There are some questions one should know by heart.
A world without them must be shadowless.
Who was it said, Come let us kiss and part?

The one who asked, Why is the apple tart?
And dreamed the serpent was the letter S?
There are some questions one should know by heart.

It was the thorn that plotted to outsmart
The cunning of the rose with such success.
Who was it said, Come let us kiss and part?

There are interiors none may map or chart:
In your voice, crying, was a wilderness.
There are some questions one should know by heart.

Your ape and echo from the bitter start,
This mirror mourns your image’s caress.
Who was it said, Come let us kiss and part?

We had too little craft and too much art.
We thought two noes would make a perfect yes.
There are some questions one should know by heart.
Who was it said, Come let us kiss and part?


Henri Coulette

[Mark Allinson]

Who was it said, Come let us kiss and part?

Ooo, ooo, I know, I know!

So I'll save a postmodern student or two a Google - here it is:


61

SINCE there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

– from Idea, by Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

[Andrew Frisardi]

I’ve been meaning to add this to this thread for a while:

Revisiting Fairwarp

Remember the soft wind and the distant voices
Riding the moist air of Spring over the harrowed fields
In March, and the horses, three of them, gamboling.
The first chiff-chaffs teetered in the thornbush, timidly
Anticipating the April sun and the first dried bents,
The advent of insects. Even in the cool late-Winter evening
Above the cold cabbage-patch the gnats would swarm
Finding a warm pocket or column of rising air.
It was there we would heel in the new young plants
Holding the damp soil with a blunt dibber. Thick cakes of mud
Like parathas clung to our boots, and we killed each wireworm singly,
If the clodhopping robin didn’t pick it off first. The blackbird
Angelically sang in the bare apple-tree opening his orange bill
In the watery air, or chased his heavy ladies on the lawn.
The woods nearby were waterlogged still, the old cart-tracks impassable
Where the charcoal-burners gathered the cordwood, and once
Long ago the green glades rang with the noise of forges.
Now they are still but for the bulky doves stuffed full of green
And grain, puffing and blowing like bellows, in the bare branches.
Here the quarrelsome jay screams at every event
And the exotic pheasant from time to time blares unseen
In the bottoms. The bright-painted woodpecker yells,
And the long-tailed tit gently warns of marauders.

It was dark by six and you used to make tea and crumpets
While I cleaned off the spade in the garage.
The house was still in the evening, and we never thought,
Sitting quietly there by the splitting logs and the dog that dreamed,
Of that unknown land of tears, and its mystery
Only a few sodden acres away.

--Peter Russell (London, 1963)