We still have poets in the Western world, bless and keep them, even in these crass commercialized times when language, like almost everything else, has been dragged down to the sticky dust of the marketplace floor. But their cultural status in most countries has long since been displaced by song lyricists. That is not entirely to be rued.

Few read and memorize poetry anymore. Even fewer—indeed, maybe no one at all—hold poets equal to prophets, their words the stuff of heavenly muses and other forms of divine visitation, as was almost universally believed true three millennia ago. Nearly everyone, however, knows at least shards of popular song lyrics. Some people who do not sing especially well think little—too little, usually—of bursting forth in the presence of other people just because they know the words; or can readily access them. Think karaoke. Then think aspirin.

The ubiquity of unbidden singing features in a recent television commercial in which two people, each alone driving their cars in urban traffic, are singing along—and soon singing with and for each other—to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” I’m not fond of the song, and am radically less fond of the commercial—but that’s just me.

At any rate, thanks to radio and other technologies of musical reproduction, exposure to lyrics has become so ubiquitous that a great many people think they know the words. For this reason, the wondrous neologism “mondegreen” had to be invented for our age. Sylvia Wright did that for us in 1954, she of the aging classics Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts (1957) and A Shark Infested Rice Pudding (1969). While her writing may be mostly forgotten, her neologism has a bright and shinning future.

Ah, but this is no time for nostalgia or snobbery. It’s time for illustrating the point: Lyrics really can work as poetry.

Not always, to be sure. Most popular song lyrics drift light years away from anything one could reasonably call poetry. Take for example Shirley Ellis’s horrifying song “The Name Game,” which became a big pop radio hit back in 1965. As the Marines hit the beach at Da Nang, countless American teenyboppers were singing this:

Shirley, Shirley
Bo-ber-ley, bo-na-na fanna
Fo-fer-ley. fee fi mo-mer-ley, Shirley!
Lincoln! Lincoln, Lincoln. bo-bin-coln
Bo-na-na fanna, fo-fin-coln
Fee fi mo-min-coln, Lincoln!

and so on and drearily on, until it ends:

Little trick with Nick!
Nick, Nick, bo-bick, bo-na-na
Fanna fo fick, fee fi mo-mick. Nick!

Nick? “Well, it did rhyme,” some may rise to defend Ms. Ellis as an accidental poet. Yes, and a leaky faucet rhymes too.

But just as there is plenty of lyrical tripe out there, real beauty—genuine poetry—also abides in many song lyrics. The fact that lyrics by definition are set to music changes them definitively, of course, into something not precisely poetry. In poetry, the sheer artistry of the construction creates its own subtle music through devices like cadence, alliteration, and assonance. In that sense, poetry is to language art the precise opposite of what instrumental music is to song. It is, in a sense, a form of demur solo a cappella singing, which comes clear in less demur forms such as unaccompanied rap, which, whether you like it or not, qualifies as a form of poetry no less than the hipster-beat “slam” variety.

Lyrics nevertheless can be read aloud without music or any form of percussion, and doing so can magically transform (some of) them from lyrics into poetry—but not any kind of poetry. Because most lyrics must fit the music they are joined with, and music has usually a certain structure, they cannot be entirely free form. Whether taken from musical comedy, light opera, big-band or sextet jazz, pop, blues, rock, folk, cajun/zydeco, or even “AM country” music, they are far more inclined to obey a regular meter and, yes, often enough even to rhyme.

The same observation read backwards makes the point just as well. Some poems are regular enough in structure as to be amenable to being put to music. The folksinger banjoist Debbie McClatchy long ago transformed two of Robert W. Service’s best-loved poetical sagas—“The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee”—into songs. I like the songs so much that I can no longer read the poems without hearing the music.

Lyrics shorn of their music would seem to render them “old-fashioned” or simple compared to how “serious” poets usually construe their challenges these days. But lyrics-as-poetry are not thereby rendered bad, and more: Their constrained, simpler structures gives them a certain mnemonic advantage over free-form poetry, just as acrostic structures did and still do in many oral language traditions. That renders them in a sense more democratic, liable to appeal to many who would never think to open a book of poetry, old or new.

So if fiction can reveal truths about human nature, history, and the divine that ordinary writing cannot—and, yes, it can—then poetry and lyrics-as-poetry can do so in a particularly concentrated way. It’s by no means unfortunate that many can find some of these truths through lyrics who would never find them through poetry. Song lyrics can also be for a young person the gateway to the appreciation of poetry as a mature adult. That has been my experience, but hardly mine alone.

But my experience has produced over time perhaps something of an oddity: As a massively plural and accumulating experience, lyrics by the ton sit somewhere in my preconscious layers like a rich archeological mound, with more long-ago-learned and then “archived” lyrics concentrated toward the bottom. For reasons rarely clear in the moment, I sometimes find myself in accidental dig mode, excavating this or that buried item. In other words, I sometimes think with and through my memory of song lyrics.

Not everything I think about is remotely serious, but some of it is, remotely at least. Let me then set that scene for you by offering four recent fragments of this phenomenon, the first two bordering on harmlessly silly, the latter two perhaps otherwise.

Fragment I. Last month, while sitting here at Antebedlam for dinner with wife, a couple of adult children and associated mates, and a skittering of granddaughters careening around and under the table, I suddenly broke into song. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. For that I have perhaps “The Balvenie” company to thank. We had mentioned and commiserated at the table over the distressed victims of Hurricane Harvey, and out of my bemused body came not just a lyric shard but a good half measure of song, my voice growing louder with emphasis on the second couplet:

Look out Cleveland, storm is comin’ through;
and it’s runnin’ right up on you.
Look out Houston, there’ll be thunder on the hill;
come on baby, don’t you lie so still.

If I need to reveal to you which song those words comes from, then you will have been able to read this lyric as poetry, since the associated music will not have stuck to your frontal cortex like molasses sticks to fingertips in winter. If, on the other hand, you’re a normal American person of a certain age and musical temperament, you will know it as an excerpt from “Look Out Cleveland,” written by Robbie Robertson but sung by the incomparable Levon Helm, on The Band’s 1969 Brown Album.

The reference to Houston was obviously Hurricane Harvey-relevant, and it was surely the storm that evoked it. The foregoing reference to Cleveland I had to sing because if you don’t render a complete musical phrase you risk having your brain explode (sort of like what happens to Roger Rabbit: “Shave and a hair cut…”—BOOM through the animated wall—“two bits!!”) Little did I realize at the time that it was prophetic of the Indians’ collapse in the playoffs after their stunning 22-game winning streak. (We’ll return to lyrics as prophecy anon.)

Fragment 2. Not long after the Brown Album eruption, I had one of those pesky elder moments, defined specifically in this case as remembering all the lyrics to a song except the first one. So there I sat, ready to avalanche into croon mode, but unable to find the damned start button.

It was a Sabbath eve at my daughter’s house, the Big Red we call it (as opposed to The Band’s Big Pink…look, you either get the allusion or you don’t). We were in minor klezmer minor mode. My youngest son was there, mumbling something about me, his father; so the scene invariably called forth a 1946 Benny Bell tune, “Son of Pincus the Peddler,” which I had learned off a 78 RPM slate in my grandmother’s 16^th Street row-home basement a long time ago.¹ (I still have unbroken and unchipped the old slate record—recorded by Benny Bell and the Agony Trio—which is an antique now, just like me.)

But I couldn’t remember how it began. It was not entirely clear to me whether, upon my sudden silent hesitation, the expression in my daughter’s eyes was one of disappointment or deliverance. In any event, about twenty minute latter, after the soup course and with everyone in mid-chicken, it came to me. I dropped my drumstick, lifted my chin, and out it ripped:

My father was a peddler,
His name you all should know.
He used to live in Brooklyn,
A long, long time ago.
When a dirty, rotten woman,
Simply made his life a wreck…

I heard the wonderful instrumental accompaniment, especially the dancing clarinet and saxophone, in my mind’s ear, so I was enjoying myself immensely. I ended the transcription of the lyrics just above in mid phrase because that was exactly the point at which the others seated at the table managed through threats and a variety of shaming techniques to get me to just shut up and eat.

Fragment 3. As I warned, there isn’t much deep meaning in “Look Out, Cleveland” or the “Son of Pincus the Peddler.” That is not always the case, however: very much to the contrary. Poetry and prophecy are still intermingled, and that includes lyrics-as-poetry as both prods and aids to thought. By way of illustration, note this one of many examples, from a song first recorded in August 1969, several eons before Donald Trump became President of the United States²:

How can we listen to you
When we know your talk is cheap?
How can we ever question
Why we give more and you keep?
How can your empty laughter
Fill a room like ours with joy?
When you’re only playing with us
Like a child does with a toy?
How can we ever feel the freedom
Or the flame lit by the spark?
How can we ever come out even
When reality is stark?
That was a wonderful remark
I had my eyes closed in the dark,
I sighed a million sighs
I told a million lies,
to myself, to myself.

See what I mean? And so now, without further ado, on to fragment 3.

As we mourn the political-correctness insanity going on at so many college campuses in the United States today, one lyric in particular stands out for me as prophetic protest aimed against the radical undifferentiated egalitarianism that has become the uber-theme of the conformist theology of postmodernism. Here, from 1964, is some poetry for you:

I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one,
And no one is better than you.
If you really believe this,
You know you have nothing to win,
And nothing to lose.
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrows do stem.
And they’ll hype you and type you
And make you feel,
That you gotta be just like them.

Written even before the coalescence of the “free speech” movement at Berkeley, the poet was perhaps reacting to an isolated case amid the timeless ubiquity of cliques and the conformity they engender. But I still find these words suitable rejoinder to the “you didn’t build that” crowd, and to those who would enjoin the preemptive surrender of agency among the supposedly helpless victims-du jour of today’s identity politics cant.

It works as well as instruction to all those who, whether they realize it or not, reject the premise of the famous correspondence between Adams and Jefferson on “the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue.” Equality under the law is what a free and just society needs not because everyone is equal by any practical, pragmatic measure, but precisely because everyone is not.

Every sentient American adult used to know this, and I remain baffled by how anyone could screw up so thoroughly—and with such damage wrought to those who can least afford it—the understanding of anything so obvious. So thanks be to the poet-prophet Robert Allen Zimmerman for giving us hopeful words of restoration and wisdom, in his song “To Ramona,” from which the foregoing lyric has been extracted. Too bad it’s not one of Dylan’s better-known songs, but it is at least good to know that sometimes a Nobel Prize for literature is deserved.

Fragment 4. I will lay the final fragment of the promised four on you soon, but before I do I want you, dear reader, to realize that my archeological mound of lyrics is volcanic these days. These are four recent examples of what is a frequent, if not constant, bubbling up of phrases, with their associated melodies usually but not always attached.

The lyrical phrases sometimes mingle with upsurges of language from a quotations file I have been building for forty years. This can be disconcerting to those for whom acts of free association can resemble a demolition derby between the ears. So, for example, right next to Marx’s mid-19^th century coinage of the noun “lumpenproletariat,” which I turned into “Trumpenproletariat” for an analytical purpose back in March 2016, my brain decided recently to park this classic lyric from a 1973 Johnny Russell song from the AM-country genre:

There’s no place
that I’d rather be
than right here,
With my red neck,
White socks,
And Blue Ribbon beer.

So what is the final of my four fragments? It is uncommon, but lyrical prophecy can be expressed in the very cadences of the prophets of old, at least as rendered in American music through the majestic English translations of the 1611 King James Bible. I thought of one such lyrical expression while reading a recent David Brooks column, “The Essential John McCain.”

Brooks uses McCain’s integrity and courage to make some general points about civic life, as he is wont to do lately. Let me assemble from his column an abbreviated illustration:

[M]ost moral education happens by power of example. . . . Public figures are our primary teachers in this mutual education. Our leaders have outsize influence in either weaving the moral order by their good example or ripping it to shreds by their bad example. . . . [McCain] has turned his own heroes into educational resources for his country. . . . These sorts of testimonies help weave a shared moral order, which is necessary to unite, guide and motivate a diverse country.

That is an essential bulwark in the age of Trump . . . this wounded and twisted man. . . . Through his daily utterances, Trump is influencing the nation in powerful ways. . . . Few would say he is spreading a contagion that we’d like our children to catch.

The moral fabric of society is invisible but essential. Some use their public position to dissolve it so they can have an open space for their selfishness. . . . [Y]ou never trade spiritual humility for worldly ferocity because in humility there is strength and in pride there is self-destruction.

In pride there is self-destruction: Yes, we have it famously from the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel and from Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” And in my mind at least, we have it in the lyrics to a song called “Pride of Man,” also written in 1964 as it happens, by Hamilton Camp, an England-born semi-itinerate songwriter, actor, and mystic.

The lyrics give away that Camp was focused on the threat of nuclear war, but he by no means ignored the more general theme—a theme that cannot help but resonate at a time when a wounded and twisted leader exudes arrogance, ignorance, and a bullying meanness of spirit unique to the history of the Oval Office.

The song is perhaps best known to folkies via Gordon Lightfoot, but the San Francisco acid rock band Quicksilver Messenger Service made a minor hit out of it in 1968 by electrifying and slowing it way down. I know the song best from the jazzgrass guitarist Tony Rice, who recorded it in 1983. It matters not for lyrical poetry’s sake, for the various covers do not significantly alter the lyrics.

Assuming that most of you, dear readers, have never heard or heard of this song—it being very far off the beaten Top 40s path—you have the privilege of reading it, sans musique, as poetry.³ I supply the full lyric of what is part admonishment, part prophecy, and part prayer. You are wise to read it aloud, as is the case with all poetry; and I will let this essay come to rest with it still shimmering in your ears:

Turn around, go back down
Back the way you came.
Can’t you see that flash of fire
ten times brighter than the day?
And behold a mighty city
Broken in the dust again.
Oh God, the pride of man
Broken in the dust again.
Turn around go back down
Back the way you came.
Babylon is laid to waste,
Egypt’s buried in her shame.
Their mighty men are beaten down
The kings have fallen in the way.
Oh God, the pride of man
Broken in the dust again.
Turn around go back down
Back the way you came.
Terror is on every side
Lo, the leaders are dismayed.
Those who put their faith in fire
In fire their faith shall be repaid.
Oh God, the pride of man
Broken in the dust again.
Turn around go back down
Back the way you came.
Shout a warning to the nations
That the sword of God is raised
On Babylon that mighty city
Rich in treasure, wide in fame.
It shall cause thy tower to fall
And make it be a pyre of flame.
Oh, thou that dwell on many waters
Rich in treasure, wide in fame.
Bow unto a god of gold,
Thy pride of might shall be thy shame.
Oh God, the pride of man
Broken in the dust again.
And only God can lead the people
Back into the earth again.
Thy holy mountain be restored:
Have mercy on thy people, Lord.