Poems you'd like to have put to music

Cafe Society
1

Thread titles pretty clear, so of course I have to add conditions. I’m jerky like that.

  1. Feel free to suggest either poems you’d like to see adapted in their entirety, or poems where only a few lines are used have a jumping-off point for a song.

  2. If you’re going to quote from the poem (which I think you’ll have to) respect copyright, ok? Otherwise we’re just forcing the mods to do pointless work.

  3. Opal! You’re ALIVE!

  4. If you’re musically inclined, suggest the sort of arrangement you think would work for the poem in question. The less ambitious may simply want to name an artist you think would be suited for the musical version of this poem.

Okay?

Alrighty then. I’ve always been fond of the following poem by W. H. Auden:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children…

I’d love to hear Jewel Kilcher sing it, accompanied by, at most, guitar and acoustic piano. Past the lines I quoted, the lyrics would need extensive modification to work as a song–but then, that is why Erato gave us Stephen Sondheim, isn’t it?

Anybody else?

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I’ve always wanted to do a cover of Sister Europe by the Psychedelic Furs, with nearly the same instrumentation and chorus, but instead of the verses, read a spoken-word form of The Waste Land.