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Songs That Quote Literature

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

Plenty of songs inspired by literature wear the debt openly: they take a novel’s title, a poem’s refrain, or a monologue more or less whole. Others borrow so quietly that you need the book open beside you to catch it. Here are eight, from Joyce to Coleridge to Dostoevsky, with the source behind each song named and, where the source is out of copyright, quoted from the original so you can hear what the songwriter heard.

One rule for what follows: the books get quoted, the songs do not. Lyrics are still in copyright, and the interesting part is the gap between the two anyway.

Kate Bush, “The Sensual World” (1989) and “Flower of the Mountain” (2011)

This is the cleanest case of a songwriter trying to quote a book and being told no. Bush wrote “The Sensual World”, the title track of her 1989 album, around the closing pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Molly Bloom’s long unpunctuated reverie in bed. When she asked the Joyce estate for permission to use the text, she was refused, so she wrote her own words. More than twenty years later she asked again, was told yes, and re-recorded the song as “Flower of the Mountain” for her 2011 album Director’s Cut, issued on Fish People/EMI (Guardian, 2011).

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The new title comes straight from the passage, where Molly remembers her girlhood in Gibraltar. These are the novel’s final words:

Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall … and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), section 18, the final page

Bush said at the time that her own lyric had been a stand-in, adding the line that she was not James Joyce, after all. Not every critic agrees that the second version is better. A 2026 Guardian ranking preferred the 1989 original, where she translated Molly’s mood into her own words instead of singing Joyce’s. That is a fair point about borrowing in general: sometimes the paraphrase hears the book better than the quotation.

Iron Maiden, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1984)

The closing track of Powerslave, released in September 1984, is just under fourteen minutes long, the longest song the band had recorded at that point. Steve Harris wrote most of it at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, where the album was made, and Adrian Smith remembered the lyric sheet having to hang from the top of the studio wall to the floor (Metal Hammer, via Louder).

The source is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long ballad of a sailor who shoots an albatross and brings a curse on his ship. Its best-known stanza is the one about the becalmed crew dying of thirst at sea:

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part the Second

Louder describes the song as an epic based on Coleridge’s darkly foreboding poem, and it is a long way from the band’s other single that year, the sharp, snappy single “2 Minutes to Midnight”, which reached No 11 in the UK. Bruce Dickinson told Metal Hammer that when he sings it he sees himself standing on the deck of a great ship, which is about as good a description of reading Coleridge aloud as anyone has offered.

The Waterboys, “The Stolen Child” (1988)

On Fisherman’s Blues, released in 1988, Mike Scott set W. B. Yeats’s early poem to music and had it spoken by the Irish singer Tomás Mac Eoin (The Great Irish Songbook). This one really is a quotation: the words are Yeats’s. It was, as American Songwriter put it, one toe in the water. In 2011 Scott released a whole album of Yeats settings, An Appointment with Mr. Yeats.

The poem is a fairy abduction told by the fairies themselves, and its refrain is an invitation that sounds kind until you think about who is making it:

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”, in Poems

Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” (1967)

The song takes Lewis Carroll’s imagery, the shrinking and growing, the bottles and the mushroom, and rearranges it into what the Guardian calls a jarring departure from normality. The song does not quote Carroll so much as point at him. The scene it depends on is in the first chapter, when Alice finds a bottle on the table with a label tied round its neck reading DRINK ME, and Carroll adds, with perfect deadpan:

round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 1, “Down the Rabbit-Hole”

Carroll’s Alice, who checks the bottle is not marked poison before she drinks, is a more cautious child than the song’s listener is invited to be. For more of the book’s logic jokes, see Alice in Wonderland’s oddest lines.

Magazine, “A Song From Under the Floorboards” (1980)

The Guardian argues that the song is so close to Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground that the author might have deserved a co-writing credit, and suggests comparing the two opening lines. Here is Dostoevsky’s, in Constance Garnett’s translation:

I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Part I, chapter 1, trans. Constance Garnett

Dostoevsky’s man introduces himself by his faults before he gives you anything else, and that is the register the song borrows: not a plot, but a voice. Keeping a narrator’s tone and changing everything around it is how the most interesting literary songs tend to work.

The Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs” (1967)

Lou Reed took his title and subject from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs, and the Guardian calls the result a perfect musical embodiment of its subject matter, menacing and hypnotic at once. The novel’s narrator, Severin, signs a contract making himself the servant of the woman he worships, and spends the rest of the book finding out what that means. It is on Gutenberg in Fernanda Savage’s English translation, for anyone curious how a Velvet Underground song sounds as a nineteenth-century novel.

The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

The song exists because Marianne Faithfull suggested Mick Jagger read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, (Guardian). What Jagger took was a narrator, a devil who speaks for himself, not the novel’s plot. The Guardian also records that Jagger pluralised a line about President Kennedy’s assassination after the murder of his brother Robert, which tied a song about a very old devil to that year’s headlines. Bulgakov is not in the public domain, so no quotation here.

Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now” (1969)

The least obvious debt on this list. Mitchell was reading Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King on a plane, and a passage about looking down on clouds from above as well as up at them from below started the song’s opening verses (Guardian). Without the anecdote, you would never guess the source.

The borrowings at a glance

Song Year Source text How it borrows
Kate Bush, “Flower of the Mountain” 2011 (as “The Sensual World”, 1989) Joyce, Ulysses, “Penelope” Direct text, after a refusal in 1989
Iron Maiden, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 1984 Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Based on the poem
The Waterboys, “The Stolen Child” 1988 Yeats, “The Stolen Child” The poem itself, spoken over music
Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit” 1967 Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Imagery, rearranged
Magazine, “A Song From Under the Floorboards” 1980 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground Narrator and opening structure
The Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs” 1967 Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs Title, characters, theme
The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” 1968 Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita The devil’s character
Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now” 1969 Bellow, Henderson the Rain King A single image of clouds

Quoting versus being inspired

The list sorts itself into three kinds of borrowing. The Waterboys and the later Kate Bush sing the author’s own words, which needs either a public-domain text or a permission letter. Iron Maiden and Magazine keep the shape of the source, a plot or a narrator’s voice, and write new words over it. Mitchell and Jagger take one idea and leave the book behind entirely, and nobody would trace it without the songwriter saying so.

The first kind is the rarest, mostly for legal reasons, which is why Kate Bush waited more than twenty years to sing Joyce. She had done the second kind already, at eighteen, with a Victorian novel; that story is in Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” and the novel behind it. For whole records built on books, see albums named after books, and for reading about music, try books about music and musicians.

Sources

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