Song as Poetry, Poetry as Song

Thanks for your various comments regarding the Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen lyrics; that was an interesting discussion. One can talk about lyrics as poetry, certainly, and, indeed, that's pretty much how popular music first made its way into the academy (i.e., under the guise of literary studies). Or one can talk about the embeddedness of popular music (its relation to the social conditions determining its production and consumption, its response to history, its response to the conditions of modernity, its response to monologism of various forms, etc.). Or one can talk about the structure of the pop song, which, like the novel, to some can be said to have an "ideal" form (3-4 minutes long, verse-chorus-verse, etc.). Or -- and this seems especially relevant to the discussions we've been having all semester regarding the literature we've read and the music we've listened to -- one can talk about popular music's ability to shape individual and collective memory, to organize our sense of time, and, if not actually to "stop" time, at least to focus our attention on the feeling of time. It's really not a stretch to argue that we can bring Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Keats's odes, Springsteen's "The River" and Cohen's "Hallelujah" into the same orbit. All you might say (and here I'll privilege Cohen's formulation for a moment), seek to unite the holy and the broken hallelujahs. All seek to understand time (past, present, and future) in such a way that life can be affirmed. All reflect an astonishing admixture of romanticism, idealism, resignation, bittersweet irony, and consolation. And the meaning of each lyric, in diverse ways, is to some degree intimately related to the lyric's structure and form.

Joni Mitchell rather memorably claimed that with the appearance of Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," the pop song had grown up. Since then we've encountered musicians who've nearly aspired to be poets (e.g., Dylan, Van Morrison, Mitchell, Paul Simon, etc.) and poets who've aspired to be musicians (e.g., Cohen, Patti Smith, etc.). We've talked through some examples in class (Cohen, Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Ryan Adams, Aimee Mann), but given the fact that music lyrics are all-too-often criticized for their banality and worthlessness, can you share other examples of song lyrics that function as poetry?