Literature

Marianne Faithfull: the singer with an inimitable voice was a Romantic poet at heart

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Faithfull related to the poems of the Romantics and often used them to articulate her own feelings.

By Gemma Ware

Marianne Faithfull, the London-born singer with an inimitable voice, has passed away at the age of 78. She was known for many things: she was a pop star, an actress and a muse. But she was probably best known for her voice.

When she first entered the world of pop in 1964, her high-pitched tones rang with mellifluous vibrato. As she grew older and lived an increasingly excessive lifestyle, she developed a rasp – a quality borne of her unique experiences.

Faithfull’s final musical releases were works that incorporated Romantic poetry in different ways. She Walks in Beauty (2021) is a spoken-word album of canonical Romantic poetry by the likes of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats. Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995 (2022) is a chronological retrospective of her career which uses the name of William Blake’s poetry collection (1789) as its title.

As a PhD student focused on the legacy of Romanticism in 1960s and 1970s popular music, I’ve closely examined Faithfull’s engagement with Romantic literature throughout her career. These final two albums represent a beautiful culmination of her artistic journey, and are a testament to her unique voice and strong poetic influences

Songs of Innocence and Experience 1965-1995, like Blake’s poetry collection, is broken up into the sections Innocence and Experience.

The Innocence portion of the album covers Faithfull’s youth, featuring early hits such as This Little Bird. Her early sound incorporated baroque pop instrumentation, including harps, harpsichord and horn arrangements (Come and Stay with Me), as well as folk styles with the acoustic guitar at the centre of the sound (Cockleshells).

Faithfull’s voice in this section portrays her as an “innocent” girl in pop stardom, as its high pitch and pure tone embody a sense of naivete that is also reflected in her lyrics about young love, such as in Come and Stay With Me:

We’ll live a life no one has ever known
But I know you’re thinking that I’m hardly grown
But oh thank God, at last and finally
I can see you’re gonna stay with me

There is a noticeable shift in the Innocence section of the album with the song Sister Morphine. As the song was made in collaboration with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger, it features a noticeably more rock sound in contrast to her previous pop productions. You can also hear subtle changes in Faithfull’s voice: it cracks and sounds strained in places.

The song’s lyrics (“Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams”) reflect the darker side of the mythologised “swinging sixties” lifestyle and its drug culture, which Faithfull has come to symbolise.

Blake’s Songs of Innocence features a piper as the presiding narrator over the poems. In contrast, Songs of Experience is meant to be heard through the voice of an ancient bard, as established in Introduction to the Songs of Experience:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

The Experience section of Faithfull’s album features music from Broken English (1979) and her re-recording of As Tears Go By, from Strange Weather (1987). The songs in this portion of the album exhibit her completely transformed voice: from piper to bard, it is deeper, raw and more weathered as a result of her struggles with addiction and bouts of illness. This brought a distinct edge to her music, marking a new phase in her career.

Beyond the qualities of her voice, Faithfull’s song selection reflects Blake’s notions of Experience. Strange Weather (“Will you take me across the Channel / London Bridge is falling down”) aligns with Blake’s London geographically and thematically, as both explore entrapment and decay. Faithfull’s depiction of societal monotony, as in “Strangers talk only about the weather / All over the world / It’s the same …” echo Blake’s “charter’d street(s)” and “mind-forg’d manacles”.

Faithfull’s connection to Romantic poetry is most overt in She Walks in Beauty, which she made with Warren Ellis (Australian composer and member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). In this album, she recites Romantic poetry set to Ellis’s music.

The poems she selected to recite are all by male poets and many feature voiceless female subjects, such as Byron’s She Walks in Beauty or Thomas Hood’s The Bridge of Sighs. On the album’s liner notes, Faithfull described how she related with these women, particularly Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.

The Lady of Shalott is a woman cursed to live alone in a tower near Camelot – unable to look directly at the world, forced to weave what she sees in the mirror. Faithfull uses the Lady to reflect on the pressure she felt to conform to the expectations imposed on her by the press and music industry. There is a parallel between the Lady’s forced isolation and her struggles with being controlled and defined by external forces, as she explained:

Do I identify with the Lady? Oh yeah, always. I’m nothing like the Lady of Shalott, but I guess I wanted to be … When Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics for As Tears Go By, he knew this poem. There’s a bit he always said he used from here, the thing about ‘it was the closing of the day’.

In the liner notes, Faithfull also mentioned that her love of poetry was thanks to her English teacher at St Joseph’s Convent in Reading, Mrs Simpson, and to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, an anthology of English poetry, which she had bought as a teenager.

Faithfull’s lifelong interest in literature came to fruition in her two final projects. They exemplify how she was a pop star, muse and chanteuse – and also a Romantic.

Source: Marianne Faithfull: the singer with an inimitable voice was a Romantic poet at heart

The Radical Politics of Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wylde

Oscar Wilde is known today for his satirical wit, but he maintained a lifelong interest in political affairs — one which would lead him to Irish nationalism, women’s suffrage and the fight against capitalism.

That Oscar Wilde found much to ridicule in the conventional values of late Victorian society is evident to anyone who has turned a page of his work. What is less known is that the playwright and poet envisioned a very different society as not only desirable but possible, and penned a political essay—The Soul of Man Under Socialism—in which he outlined his political beliefs. One of Wilde’s most frequently quoted lines—often reproduced without reference to its source—is contained within that work: ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.’

Wilde lived a full life, albeit a short one. Born in October 1854 at Dublin’s Westland Row, but raised primarily at nearby Merrion Square, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was the son of two of the great eccentrics—and intellects—of nineteenth-century Dublin. His father, William Wilde, was a pioneering surgeon and medical authority, who accepted a Knighthood in Dublin Castle, the home of British rule on the island of Ireland. By comparison, his mother Jane Wilde spent much of her life seeking to break that connection with Britain. A folklorist, poet and essayist, she wrote under the pen-name Speranza, the Italian word for hope.

The Nation and Young Ireland

The household in which Wilde was raised was one of intense political discussion, encouraged by Speranza who saw the home as something of a political salon. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett was invited by Speranza to come ‘explain what female liberty means’, in a city where the question of women’s suffrage failed to gain the same traction as on the neighbouring island for some decades.

As a poet, Speranza’s output appeared in the pages of The Nation, a seperatist newspaper aligned with the Young Ireland movement. The title—Young Ireland, and thus the Young Irelanders—was a bestowed reference to the emerging national-republican movements sweeping the continent in the 1840s, in particular Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy.

A break with the conservative constitutional nationalism of Daniel O’Connell, the Young Irelanders heralded the Second French Revolution with the observation that ‘dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice, and freedom to those who labour.’ The movement led an abortive insurrection in 1848 against the backdrop of famine and starvation, Speranza’s poetry encouraging ‘Fainting forms, hunger-stricken’ into revolt.

Speranza, later quoted by James Connolly in the pages of Labour in Irish History, frequently hosted veterans of the Young Ireland movement in the family home, Wilde later recalling that ‘with regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a Catholic child is the saints of the cathedral.’

A Different Kind of Separatism: Wilde in America

Wilde’s comments on the Young Irelanders were made during a speaking tour of the United States in 1881, the young poet embarking on a journey across the country speaking on aestheticism, but discovering that audiences were instead drawn by the chance to hear Speranza’s son.

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No Man Is an Island

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By John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.


A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595, in the National Portrait Gallery, London

John Donne

Born: 22 January 1572, London, Died: 31 March 1631 (age 59 years), London, UK