Literary devices in Beatles songs | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Speaking of personifications, are Day Tripper /Drive My Car candidates? They involve the first person but clearly address another one. Girl is another one that comes close. It’s as if on Rubber Soul the standard love/conflict material is slowly morphing into character studies, Nowhere Man is more explicitly a character song. They revert to this kind of “personification” Now And Then .

Some Revolver songs literary bits:

And Your Bird Can Sing : The two chief things about this song are the repeated refrains (you don’t get me, I’ll be round), and the alliteration/consonance: you say you’ve seen sseven wonders which has an interesting ABABBA pattern. There’s also prized possesions and bird is broken and the nice rhyme swing for sing.

Good Day Sunshine is just simple rhymes and there’s nothing of literary note at all, Doctor Robert is the same (except for the one well/well double-meaning). I’m Only Sleeping is only a little more involved in its rhyme scheme, the chief interest is in the metre, which undulates in a regular way in the verses and has a different rhythm in the choruses, so it manages to suggest a daze/daydream via that alone.

Personifications:

Eleanor Rigby : Is the face a metaphor or not, it’s left open. The present tense is used throughout until Rigby dies but snaps back to present tense on Father McKenzie in the next line. It gives an objectivity to the song’s point of view, we’re explicitly asked to “look at him working” like an exhibit, or more likely, a series of vignettes, suggesting Paul was thinking very visually. I think @Beatlebug is right, this is the first consciously third-person song.

Compare with For No One which is second-person-character (I only just saw that, @Beatlebug!). That song uses a lot of repetition in You and She to place the characters in opposition, and persists with the same first and last line verse repetitions until it breaks down in the fourth verse (like the relationship), the first line and the last line alter then, and by the fifth verse it suggests that he isn’t the one who changed because the first line repetition reappears but the last line is “you won’t forget her”. And what are tears cried For No One ? Not tears at all. Tears, perhaps, that should be cried from his point of view? It inserts a lonely note into the story of a couple without having to explain itself, it’s one of those Beatle metaphors that doesn’t look like much until you look at it.

Moving on from Revolver , personification is rife on Sgt Peppers (the Band itself for one): the Sgt Peppers songs are basically MC opening and closing spiels, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is a present-tense dream sequence narrative, She’s Leaving Home is another character study, also present tense with the buy/bye pun. Mr Kite is another present tense narrative, another spiel like Sgt Peppers and John’s other present tense narrative Good Morning Good Morning is also based on an ad, but its also a rare third-person song from John (the other one, oddly is Nowhere Man and even in that one he addresses the character directly). And Lovely Rita is clearly a personification, Paul veering between past and present tense in the verses and choruses as if he’s not sure whether he’s in the song or looking at a character.

There are some odd cases like Hey Bulldog and Baby You’re A Rich Man where you’d call them almost-characters but only in the sense of being an object for the narrator’s side of the conversation, and in much the same sense as Drive My Car . Dear Prudence addresses an actual person in present tense, and so does Martha My Dear (you don’t have to know it’s a dog).

All the character songs I can think of off the top of my head after this point all follow the same pattern: present tense, in most cases, and there’s also that weird alliteration in the names, Polythene Pam , Mean Mr Mustard , Rocky Raccoon , Bungalow Bill, Sexy Sadie . In fact, I’m of the mind that Rocky and Bill and Sadie are in past tense just to be different, just for the White Album . Cry Baby Cry is a collection of characters in past and present tense in rather jumbled fashion, rather dreamlike and not meant to be consistent. Maxwell is the exception after the White Album , not alliterated but can’t decide whether it’s entirely present or past tense (more on that further).

What’s interesting is how much they avoid past tense with their characters, which makes the songs more immediate and tangible and free from questions about points of view that a past tense often suggests, and also not having to declense anything which would mess up the rhythms. And when you examine the past tense personifications, they mostly use northern-tensed action words rather than a more clunky southern passive style, so its take/took see/saw, say/said rather than waits/waited, shouts/shouted. Paul breaks these rules when he wants to of course. He uses checked in Rocky Raccoon but uses studied in the first line of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer . If you examine that song closely it’s hard to understand why he couldn’t have gone full past tense, the only annoying word is waits/waited but he could have simply used “stayed”. The chorus could go either way, they scan the same.

And this is just personifications!

Just want to point out without another reedit that present tense is of course preferable in all styles of lyric for the same reasons. I think it’s a little-remarked fact that the Beatles northern English is direct, active, unadorned and consequently underestimated.

Blackbird isn’t anthropomorphic, but as Paul later admitted, the intent was.

Ok the big one, I Am The Walrus . The title is almost a joke about anthropomorphism, maybe the whole song is. Similies and metaphors, onomatopoeia, allusion, cacophany, consonance, assonance, alliteration, for a start! Then antithesis (boy you’ve been a naughty girl), internal rhymes, and, I’m not entirely certain, malapropism (expert textpert seems to be there just for the rhyme). You could characterize I Am The Walrus , goo goo g’joob. as a caesura. And parallelism is obvious from the structure of the verses. I’m trying to figure out what semolina pilchard, just plain surrealism or an onomatopoeic reference? elementary penguin sounds awfully close to it, definitely association by internal rhyme. I’m sure there’s more.