Poetry set to music

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Bobby_Jim

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Pandora recently served up to me “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by Donovan.

youtube.com/watch?v=UQUT6mS0eY8

I was rather amazed when I heard this; partly the simple but beautiful guitar accompaniment but also the mystical lyric - like something out of Celtic legend. Come to find out, the lyric is a poem by William Butler Yeats. Nothing like using a great poet as your songwriter.

It got me thinking - what are some other examples of this, popular songs based upon a much older poem. The other example that springs to mind is Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”. But I’m sure there are others…
 
DaveBj said:
youtube.com/watch?v=ttv0ljOiPSs

“The Lady of Shallott” (Lord Tennyson), and

youtube.com/watch?v=e7Y-VBD0kRI

“The Highwayman” (Alfred Noyes)

Both sung by Loreena McKennitt
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I like the second better than the first. Both quite long in song form, which brings up a possible problem in translating poetry to song. On the other extreme is “Morning is Broken” where they added a lengthy piano part to get it up to radio single length.
 
Bobby_Jim said:
I like the second better than the first. Both quite long in song form, which brings up a possible problem in translating poetry to song. On the other extreme is “Morning is Broken” where they added a lengthy piano part to get it up to radio single length.
Click to expand...
Yes they are rather long. That doesn’t bother me, but on “Lady of Shallott,” if I were doing it, I think I would have used more contrasting melodies to give it more of a durch-komponiert feel. (There’s a term I haven’t used in some time 😃 ) As concerns “Morning Has Broken,” the Cat Stevens version is still my favorite, perhaps because of the piano solo (I am a keyboardist).
 
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