Volume 2

Twelve more poems. Twelve more songs. The same engine: take a poem that has survived for centuries, find the emotional structure that made it last, and rebuild it with modern images, modern language, and post-hardcore music. The distance closes again.

The Songs

Friend of a Friend

from “La Belle Dame sans Merci” — John Keats, 1819

Keats built a poem about trust, vulnerability, betrayal, and the discovery that you were one of many. This song is a woman on an exam table, trying to tell a forensic nurse what happened after she left the restaurant with a friend of a friend.

My Father’s Son

from “The Welsh Marches” (Poem XXVIII from A Shropshire Lad) — A.E. Housman, 1896

Housman wrote about a man born from an act of war who carries both armies in his blood. This song is a man standing in his kitchen, holding the same glass his father held, hearing a voice he doesn’t recognize as his own, watching his son take the same step back he took as a child.

You’re Absolutely Right

from “The Raven” — Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

Poe built a poem about a man projecting meaning onto a non-reasoning creature capable of speech. This song is a man alone in a dark apartment, asking an AI chatbot the questions he used to ask people, watching the same phrase appear every time, and choosing it over every real voice trying to reach him.

from “Jenny” — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1870

Rossetti built a 391-line interior monologue by a man sitting in a sex worker’s room while she sleeps on his knee. He philosophizes, prays, and leaves coins in her hair at dawn. She never speaks. This song flips the perspective: Jenny was awake the whole time, and not a single word he said mattered.