Writers too talk about voice. Track it to its cave and you find the Greek word epos, song. (My bringing up music is not accidental.) When I refer to a character’s voice in a story or poem or play, I mean that his way of speaking constitutes a particular, unique song. This song, in any medium, monologue, or dialogue, should be

It’s been said that music is excited speech. I think of excited speech as having a kind of Brownian motion. From a little distance we might not recognize the jittering, but look close and there’s something larger than usual, something important going on for the character. Second, a character’s utterance must be authentic, using the magical combination of diction and rhythm and imagery that only he would use in this situation. And by essential I mean that this character must say this thing and he must say it in the now of the narrative.

Shakespeare understood this imperative and practiced it without ever writing (damn it) a vade mecum for his interns–and he often got it right. I don’t, but I have fun trying.

Happily he did not send me to Sidney Lanier. At Jake’s suggestion I dived into Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” the title track of his 2002 album. I figured that before analyzing the prosody I’d better listen to recordings, my favorite of which is Bruce Springteen‘s. He uses accordion and fiddle in an acoustic-ish version that gestures toward country more than Zevon’s own synthesizer-and-electric guitar orchestration does. Zevon’s rendering felt oddly like the sort of hymn you might hear in a megachurch (Zevon would hate that), what with the fourteeners he favors (pace Emily Dickinson). Given his references to the American west, where the poem is set, Springsteen’s choice makes good sense to me.

Not that it’s a my-wife-left-me-with-six children-and-my-truck-won’t-start whinge. Think mythic mashup with a half-dozen Biblical references (e.g., Jacob and the angel), a half-dozen popular culture references (e.g., John Wayne), and a half-dozen literary references (mostly name-dropping, though Shakespeare appears only in a silent nod. ‘Tis better so.). Zevon manages to turn this olla podrida into a meditation on death. We come to realize that the refrain—”My ride’s here”—refers to the speaker’s death and possible apotheosis into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s waiting for a chariot, after all.

So as you see I started trying to break down Zevon’s lyrics into their constituent parts. I’m not there yet, but it’s an interesting and I hope fruitful exercise for someone aspiring to write lyrics for an art-song.