Songs With The Most Poetic Song Lyrics

Song lyrics can be mysterious to understand. If you ask ten different people what makes great song lyrics, you’ll get ten different answers.

For our needs, to be considered poetic, the lyrics should be imaginative, not too literal, and use interesting imagery.

Poetic Song Lyrics That Use Shakespeare’s Poetry

After all, Shakespeare is considered by many to be the best poet in world history. One of his best and most romantic poems is Sonnet 18. That sonnet contains this incredible line:

“Shall I compare you to a Summer’s day? You are more lovely in every way.”

I weaved this line into an original song of mine. Below, you can listen to that song on YouTube. Here is a page with full lyrics and a longer poetic analysis of this upbeat love song.

Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man

This song has incredibly imaginative and eloquently expressed imagery. Here is my full blog post with a more thorough analysis of how brilliant the lyrics are in this song.

Here is just one verse from this masterpiece:

Though I know that evening's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

Notice how after just the first two lines, you no longer know whether you are still in the modern world or a long-vanished empire that turned into sand. That’s wildly skillful writing.

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah

Just like Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, this is an epic that spans millennia. Leonard Cohen evokes king David and God himself in contrast to the uninspiring and uninteresting woman he had fallen out of love with.

You can listen here to the full song:

Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin

Led Zepplin aren’t known as a poetic band, but Stairway To Heaven features incredibly vivid imagery. You can literally picture a naive lady who has her values all mixed up, and thinks that all that matters is gold. Just about everyone knows someone like that. It’s not only an interesting image, but it’s poignant to life.

You can listen to the full song here:

Sound of Silence by Simon And Garfunkel

This song is so poetic that you don’t even need to listen to the lyrics to start interpreting the poetry. The title alone has incredible mystique, riddle, and imagery.

What is “the sound of silence?” Is it the sound of loneliness? Or not speaking up when there are injustices? Maybe it’s the silence between people, and their inability to communicate with each other or give each other the necessary warmth. There is so much there already!

Once you start thinking about the lyrics of this masterpiece, you start wondering what “to the neon signs they preyed” means in relation to the loneliness, isolation, and loss of meaningfulness.

The Boxer by Simon And Garfunkel

The lyrics of this song discuss loneliness, and all its hopelessness, especially with these lyrics:

Asking only workman’s wages, I come looking for a jobBut I get no offersJust a come-on from the whores on 7th AvenueI do declare, there were times when I was so lonesomeI took some comfort there