Charleston Heston? Now I have this image of Moses swing dancing!
The Sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose. (Eccl. 1:5 KJV)
…therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee (John Donne, in his Meditations)
A Farewell To Arms (to Queen Elizabeth) - title of a poem by George Peele.
Double, Double (after Macbeth), More Things in Heaven (after Hamlet), and Catch a Falling Star (after John Donne) by John Brunner.
And Perry Como! Drat it, now the song is stuck in my head.
Como didn’t get into the whole “mandrake root” thing, though. Pretty funny if he’d just sung Donne’s lyric verbatim, woulda gone over with middle America just fine.
Allusions to Robert Louis Stevenson’s *Requiem * turn up fairly commonly:
"Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me;
“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
From The Lady of Shalott by Tennyson comes: “half sick of shadows” and “the mirror crack’d from side to side”. Amongst other references, Christie used the latter in a book title.
A not yet mentioned common biblical reference source is the Song of Solomon which includes in Chapter 2 (KJV):
“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.”
The biblical reference to “see through a glass darkly” also appears routinely. I’ve noted it in a book title, several magazine articles, and apparently even in a movie by Ingmar Bergman.
Charles De Lint got Dreams Underfoot from Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, by Yeats. It’s a little skewed around- the line is “I have spread my dreams under your feet”.
Madeleine L’Engle has tons of poetry and biblical references for titles: Dragons in the Waters, An Acceptable Time, And It Was Good, Many Waters, The Rock that is Higher- the Bible, mostly from the psalms. Poetry: * A Ring of Endless Light, The Small Rain, A Wind In the Door*.
The psalms are great for titles, especially the older translations.
I just remembered that Laurie King’s novel O Jerusalem is from psalm 137.
Bother. To Sail Beyond the Sunset is from Tennyson’s Ulysses, I will Fear No Evil is from psalm 23, The Number of the Beast is from Revelation.
Has anyone gotten titles from Beowulf or Chaucer? There must be some.
While plundering the local old, dusty used book store, I found (and purchased) a science fiction novel by george Bamber entitled The Sea is Boiling Hot. As far as I know, this is the only title of a speculative fiction novel taken from the text of an earlier speculative ficiton novel.
It’s from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (specifically the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter”). Which I wouldn’t consider speculative fiction.
One more particularly poignant one (if slightly modified): The Sheep Look Up.
From Milton’s Lycidas (LXVI):
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
That Brunner… bloody genius, even when it comes to picking lines out of lengthy poems.
That sounds like it could be really funny.
I’ll have to try to find that.
-FrL-
Don’t know about Beowulf - the modern English text would vary with each translation from the original.
Chaucer (like Malory) is a great source to quote from, but I do not immediately recall seeing quotations of his used as titles. Perhaps this is just a momentary blank, but all I can think of is The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog is a hilarious time travel book that owes some of its style to the equally hilarious Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog - I imagine there are more books that borrow the subtitles of other books.
Kathleen Raine’s poem “See, See Where Christ’s Blood Streams in the Firmament” was titled from a line in Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
The book title Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart by Robert Bly was taken from the poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by William Butler Yeats.
A Handful of Dust -Evelyn Waugh
Oh and then there’s “…The Gods Themselves…” by Asimov, from Schiller.
Oh, right. Ruth Reichl’s second memoir is entitled Comfort Me With Apples, which is from the Song of Solomon.
Also Robert Parker’s The Widening Gyre.
Peter S. Beagle wrote A Fine and Private Place, title taken from “To his Coy Mistress” by 15th century poet Andrew Marvel.
All the lyrics of Handel’s Messiah are taken form the New Testament.
Promises to Keep, by Gloria Mallette, and the song Forever Young, which I’ve alsways assumed was taken from Ode on a Grecian Urn.