I've been gazing at this for some time but I can't persuade myself to understand it.
Meaning is "derived" from poems, or songs, because they use language, of which meaning is the central business. If meaning can be obscured in a poem by manipulation or distortion of the language, so it can in song -- by writing it differently or by performing it differently, in both cases. (The reader performs the poem as the singer does the song)
It must surely be to do with stress, and so of rhythm.
A poem, whether read silently or aloud, permits a lot of elasticity. Stresses can be placed differently, syllables can be lengthened and shortened, giving different emphases in the meaning or sometimes even different meanings. Formal strictures, iambic pentameter or lyrical format, don't change this, or very little. The stresses in an iambic pentameter can be strong or weak or middling, or missing or supernumary, at will. The iambic foot can be entirely absent (as in a famous line in KIng Lear).
Hopkins seems to have resented this reader's freedom and tried to control it with prosodic markers.
A song, strictly and traditionally speaking, offer less opportunity for shifting the meaning in performance. The words follow a syllabic and rhythmic pattern dictated by the music, and each verse has to conform to that pattern or it would not fit the music. Extra unstressed syllables etc can be slipped in but that's about all. If you speak the lyrics of a song without the music this difference becomes immediately apparent.
But how meaning is "derived" from these two things? Aesthetically? That is, concerning the concept of beauty? What does that mean? Surely in both cases aesthetic derivation would be a multiple operation, a transaction and agreement between at least two people, and if the channelling is liable to be multiplied or divided in the performance of song, I don't see that that changes anything. If you get an aesthetic contradiction between text and music in a song, something has gone badly wrong,
I wonder if this is anywhere near what you were asking?
PR
On 23 Oct 2016, at 18:48, David Lace wrote:
I agree with this, but my interest in trying to find a distinction between a song and a poem is more to do with aesthetics than the actual formal aspects of how a poem or song lyric are plotted out on the page etc. What is it that aesthetically differentiates the two? And how does the way meaning is derived from one differ in the way it is derived from the other? Assuming meaning is derived differently at all. I don’t think it is.
It is these sorts of questions I’m looking for answers to, rather than the formal differences between poems and songs.
-----------------Original Message---------------
Jamie McKendrick wrote:
At least there's a sliver of agreement! Ok you've agreed with something
quite significant even if, for you, the rhythm of poems is a matter of
little importance. For the poem that's a matter of crucial importance, it's
often the very hinge of a meaning disclosed or missed. Singers are quite
happy to stress syllables, say, a monosyllabic preposition, that would make
absolutely no sense in speech and would make nonsense of a poem read, and no
one listening to the song would mind a bit. Sometimes, as in Dylan, this
departure from speech rhythm is a matter of enjoyment - I can't think of an
example offhand but I know they exist as I've recalled thinking about it.
Here you don't need to repeat your argument about there being bad poems and
better song lyrics, no one who wasn't off their trolley would deny that -
you'd have to look far and wide for a better poem than Ariel's song in the
Tempest "Full fathom five..." (though it's telling that it was written by a
poet, whoever we think that poet was). What I'm drawing attention to is not
an 'exact' difference or a 'definition' but a direction or a tendency
distinguishing the two arts of poems and songwriting.
Jamie