Edited Verse

what is wrong with it

Listening to musical settings of Kipling poems I occasionally notice changes to the text, sometimes ones that change the meaning. One example is a musical version of the poem “A Pilgrim’s Way.”

The refrain line of the poem, appearing at the end of each verse, is:

The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

In the song it has been converted to

The people, oh the people, are good enough for me.

Removing the religious element of the original.

An example going the other way, pointed out to me online, is Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” by Trent Reznor, which changed "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns", adding a religious reference where there wasn't one before. A less clear example is Michael Longcor’s setting of “The Fairies Siege” which changes

I'll not fight with the Herald of God
(I know what his Master can do!)

Into

I'll not fight with the Herald of Gods
(I know what his Masters can do!)

That might be a careless error, it might be a deliberate change made because he is, or expects his audience to be, more comfortable with fictional polytheism than with real monotheism. Or it could be that someone else made the change deliberately and Michael Longcor never checked back for the original text. Another Kipling poem, “Hymn to Breaking Strain,” was recorded by one performer with minor changes, I suspect unintentional, which then showed up in other people’s performances. Pretty clearly, some singers get their texts from other singers’ settings rather than the original.

When I asked online for examples of someone changing the words and meaning of someone else’s poem, a poster on Data Secrets Lox provided a better one than any of mine:

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The song The Idiot by Stan Rogers is about someone leaving eastern Canada to work out west in a refinery, because he's too proud to go on the dole. He misses the greenery from his hometown, but encourages others to do the same despite the fact that society at large will call them idiots for it. The last bit of the song is pretty representative:

Quote

So bid farewell to the Eastern town
You never more will see
There’s self-respect and a steady check
In this refinery
You will miss the green and the woods and streams
And the dust will fill your nose
But you’ll be free, and just like me
An idiot, I suppose

So of course 40-odd years later when Seth Staton Watkin decides to make a cover, he feels compelled to add an extra verse:

Quote

These are the words I tell myself
When I miss my own hometown
I tell myself that I'm doing right
by turning that welfare down
But now I see for you and me
That I want those woods and streams
For I owe my life to this workers strife
Why can't I just be free

And of course, since that's not on-the-nose enough for 202X, he expounds on this in the song description:

Quote

As much as I love Stan Rogers, this song never sat right with me. I believe it presents a false dichotomy, to either be a slave to a capitalist overlord or a beggar taking handouts. There is a third option. A world in which the riches of the refineries and mines, offices and manufacturing plants, are shared equally among those who labor within, and not hoarded by distant despots that all too often sacrifice those who labor for profit.

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The extra verse rejects the point the original author is making in favor of a different point that Seth Watkin wants to make.

My first examples might be viewed as fraud, attributing to Kipling words he did not write. The final example is entirely honest since Watkin tells the reader that he is deliberately changing Stan Rogers’ message. Exploring my moral intuitions for why I still disapprove, the answer is an intuition for something like moral rights, the idea that an artist owns his art. Kipling’s poem and Stan Rogers’ song should not be used without their permission in ways inconsistent with their authors’ purposes. Both authors are dead so there is no way to ask for their permission but there is no reason to think they would have given it.

I would not want to carry the idea as far as civil law countries do, to give the artist a permanent, non-transferable right to control the use of his art;¹ if you want to sell someone else the right to change your work for his purposes you should be free to do so. But I think less of people who, for their own purposes, distort an artist’s message without his consent, stealing his words for their message. My reaction to changed verse is much like some people’s passionate rejection of fan fiction, an author writing stories with another author’s characters. Also rather like my reaction to the people who claimed my father’s support for views they had no reason to believe he held.

A second reason to object to lyrics that deviate from the original poem is aesthetic. Kipling was a world class poet. The people who set his poems to music are not — not even Michael Longcor, who has written some pretty good songs of his own.² Substituting the singer’s judgement for Kipling’s is usually a mistake.

For the classic spoof of the idea of meddling with some else’s verses, see Elderly Man River by Stan Freberg and Daws Butler.

Nowadays it would be “Elderly Person River.”

On the Other Hand

I recently looked online for the text of G.K. Chesterton’s poem “Lepanto,” a favorite of mine, in order to fill in a few lines I was missing. It is a poem that I owe to the late Frank Meyer. I still remember the effect of hearing it from him for the first time. Sixty years ago.

The text I found not only disagreed with my memory, it did so by adding the word “and” to two lines of the first verse. The meaning of the verse is not changed but both lines are weakened by the addition, one substantially. After reporting that outrage to other members of my family, Chesterton fans all, I went to the book shelf and checked the text in The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton. The extra words were there. I checked the text in Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton With Explanatory Notes and Commentary edited by Dale Ahlquist. They were there too.

That two words were added to a famous poem by typographical error and never corrected is, I admit, unlikely, although less unlikely for GKC, who was notoriously disorganized,

Am in London. Where should I be? (telegram to his wife)³

than for most authors, but that as good a poet as Chesterton would have made that mistake is less likely still, so I will continue to recite it without the extra words.

1. I first came across the idea in an April 1^st story in a student publication at the University of Chicago law school. The law school building was designed by a famous architect, Eero Saarinen, expanded some thirty years later. According to the story, Saarinen’s heirs were demanding that the building be put back the way he built it.

2. “Shooting star,” “Swordsman,” Windward Passage” (music #22 here),” “I like to watch you walk” among others.

3. Si non e vero e ben trovato.