Source a Pre 1920 poem.
The poem I found I couldn’t find the exact date of the poem when published but the authors dates indicate that it was definitely written pre 1920. With his dates being 1819-1892.
I Chose the poem Glimpse by Walt Whitman

- Re-work the content as a workable lyric and song structure
Late on a winters night
A crowd of workmen gather
In a bar room around the stove
Me, unremarked in the corner
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
A youth who loves me
And whom I love
Approaches me silently
And sits near to hold my hand
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
Amid the noise of coming and going
Of drinking and smutty jest
There we two content and happy
Speaking little, perhaps not a word
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
A glimpse, A glimpse
Through the interstice caught
- Outline how you have achieved this to make the lyric relatable and your reasons for the structure related to the context of the song
I approached the song with a folk song sense, Folk songs convey a story and this is exactly what the poem did and what I wanted to keep.
Each verse tells the story with the chorus taking the starting line from the poem, ‘A glimpse through an interstice caught’. I chose to use this line as the line indicates clearly the idea that this is the singers perception so is of importance, therefore it becoming my chorus.
In the first verse I set the scene, chopping out words to make the lines fit in a melodic and structural format for a song. Then headed straight into the chorus, this harnessing this typical folk genre structure.
The second verse introduces the ‘Lover’ which is the next step of the story and then carrying on to the thirds verse where the ‘lover’ scene and ‘workmen’ scene are joined together.
Structurally I split the poem verse up into three song verses by taking two lines from the poem for each verse. You can see what words I chose to cut out and which I used in this annotation below…
A lot of the time i decided to leave the word ‘Of’ out as they made the poem dated, which obviously it is a poem from the 1800s but I found just leaving this use of the word ‘Of’ out instantly modernised it.
Most of the other words I left out because melodically they just didn’t work or didn’t make sense into how I reworked the structure and lyric. There wasn’t any deeper meaning behind that.
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