The Poetry of Donovan

The Poetry of Donovan

Donovan Leitch was, and is, an iconic figure in the 60s music scene. His early career featured folk songs and he adapted through the wave of psychedelia, becoming a spokesman for the flower children's initial drive for a gentler, less materialistic world. His hit songs are well known, but the magic of the poetry in lesser known album cuts has been largely forgotten. Donovan himself referred to his poetry as “dry songs,” meaning without music, but his imagery, with or without music, remains anything but dry.

Donovan shared influences common to many American folk singers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others, but also inherited a rich history of British folk music with its myriad of legends stretching back into antiquity.
A key difference between American folk music and British folk music is the depth of historical, mythical and religious factors that have become imbedded in the British psyche. Granted that some American folk music was brought to this country by British immigrants, the proportion of a few hundred years against millennia still speaks volumes for the imbalance of experience. 

Even to dip a toe into the world of folklore is to unearth an Other Britain, one composed of mysterious fragments and survivals – a rickety bridge to the sweet grass of Albion. As Bert Lloyd mentioned, ‘To our toiling ancestors [these customs] meant everything, and in a queer irrational way they can still mean much to us.’
-Young, Rob (2011-05-10). Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (p. 183). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

One of the British people’s most treasured objects is their land. Be it woods, meadows, rocky hills or windswept islands, the land holds more than a means of making a living. The land is the tie between the present and the past. The land connects souls.

(in 1965) …he purchased three islands off the coast of Scotland
Islay, Mingay and Clett, near Skye’s north-west Vaternish peninsula, where he and his friend/‘manager’ Gypsy Dave intended to set up a ‘Renaissance community’ of artists, musicians and poets in a row of tumbledown shepherds’ cottages. In tandem with this dreamy project, he released the double album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden in 1967, which included a languid slice of Highlands picturesque, ‘Isle of Islay’
Young, Rob (2011-05-10). Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (p. 19). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

Donovan writes in the chorus of his song, Isle of Islay:

“…felt like a seed on your land,

Felt like a grain of your sand,

Felt like the tide left me here…”
Dry Songs and Scribbles, Donovan ©1967

The land and the sea are common themes for island dwellers, and Donovan is no exception. He attributed the love of the land to his (and all of Britain’s) Celtic roots:

“…I was mocked as a simpleton, when I sang of birds and bees and flowers like a child. Indeed, I was keeping the “wonder eye” open – just like a child.

     I was also showing concern for the future of the world’s ecosystem…The shamanism of the Celts finds the supreme spiritual forces in the natural world. This is why, for the Celts, Mother Earth is the Goddess.” ¹

Little pebble upon the sand, now you’re lying here in my hand,
How many years have you been here?
Little human upon the sand, from where I’m lying here in your hand,
You, to me, are but a passing breeze.
The sun will always shine where we stand
Depending in which land we may find ourselves.
Now you have my blessing, go your way
Dry songs and scribbles ©1967

The blessing of the pebble has been given, and the blessings of nature continued throughout Donovan’s music and poetry through the years. These images are understood at their core by the British folk tradition, even if not consciously.

‘The folk-memory does not retain conscious ritualism, or intellectualized secrecy,’ comments one folk historian, ‘but works as in a dream. In this way, despite a tough oral memory, the spirit of the nature rites is still present.’
Young, Rob (2011-05-10). Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (p. 185). Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

Even in nature songs that critics have deemed “childish,” flashes of sophisticated imagery weave their way through Donovan’s narratives:

Lullaby of spring “…chiffchaff eggs are painted by mother bird eating cherries…”

Peregrine “…peregrine falcon, hooded and flying, wither ye go, blindly, over the mountain…”

Terracotta: “…the riddle of birds lay solved by the lake…”

Arthurian legends featured largely in the music of Donovan. His song “Guinevere” showed her,
“…draped in white velvet, silk and lace,
Indigo eyes in the flickering candlelight,
such is the silence ‘ore royal Camelot…”

Donovan didn’t confine his poetry to written words. He had been an art student before setting off on his musical adventure and he used that talent to embellish everything that he loved, including his elusive love, Linda, who would later become his wife.

On Sunday I took Linda down to the Portobello Road Market and bought her an antique lace gown, velvet costumes and Victorian baubles. I wanted to dress her in the style of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that I loved. ²

Even that small excursion would become verse.
Damp uncomfortable, Portabella market day
Cold cutting winds, Ruffled the velvet covered stalls, Everybody is hustlin’
I buy a bloodstone ring, And smile in grey light
With a chilled lip that’s taken a sip of happiness
Feel kissed, for I think of you
Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1971

For Linda, the recipient of the bloodstone ring, Donovan would pour out his finest images. Linda had been the paramour of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, bearing his son, Julian. After Jones essentially abandoned the young mother and child, she was understandably reticent about falling in love with another “rock star.” Donovan still pursued her, with varying degrees of intensity, for years before they finally married. Enough time passed before their marriage for Donovan to father two children with his American girlfriend, Enid. Even during that time, he still longed for Linda while (he admitted) leading Enid along to keep him from being lonely. When the longing for Linda combined with Camelot inspired images, the result was the song “Legend of a Girl Child Linda.” The song never wavers from lush pictures of fairy-tale children in a fairy-tale world on a failed mission to save “the kingdom” from sadness. The first and last lines frame the story:

“I will bring you gold apples and grapes made of rubies

That have shone in the eyes of the Prince of the breeze…”

And then

“…My sword, it lies broken, and cast in a lake.

In the dream I was told that my princess would wake.”

When it came to Linda (and love in general in Linda’s absence) Donovan would compose a love song from the smallest detail, the slimmest inspiration.

Little Linda glowing cinder, Sparkle like a star

The sun and roses merely show us ‘zactly where we are

A jaguar in a hollow car Far in the winter lane

Lacework trees The jack-frost breeze Pheasant birds are slain

Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1971

 

Like all poets, Donovan was an exceptional observer of people. He was adept at painting a psychic picture of someone in just a few lines. His portrait of the Writer in the Sun captures the loneliness of a stranger:

The magazine girl poses
on my glossy paper aeroplane
too many years I spent in the city
playing with Mr. Loss & Gain
and here I sit, the retired writer in the Sun

I bathe in the Sun of the morning
lemon circles swim in the tea
fishing for time with a wishing line
and throwing it back in the sea
and here I sit, the retired writer in the Sun
Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1971

And a lady seen from afar on a hotel veranda

In the Hotel Juliet at a little table sat
Lady sipping Vichy beneath a lemon tree

In the Hotel Juliet, in the south of France they met
but that was long ago, the memory told her so

In the Hotel Juliet salada vinegrette
reciting by the sea, Rimbaud poetry

In the Hotel Juliet she dreams with no regret
a friendly half carafe, an ancient phonograph

In the Hotel Juliet at a little table sat
sentimental Lady beneath a lemon tree
Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1971

Donovan was not yet 25 years old when he had reached the top of his field and called “retreat” from the madness of what songwriter Joni Mitchell described as the “star maker machinery behind the popular song.” During his rise he was, by his own admission, immature and self-centered. We can observe some of his maturation process in another poem/song that was the product of another chance encounter of a stranger. During a trip to New York prior to the U.S. release of his album, “Sunshine Superman,” he writes:

“During that trip to New York Gyp and I were staying in a hotel called The Hampshire House. Up in the dark rooms overlooking the park, I sat up late with Shawn and a young girl singer. Her hair was cropped, an unusual style then. She explained that her hair had been caught in a Ferris wheel. A near-death situation. There in a dark gloom of the Hampshire House apartment I felt a chill, like a pall, descending on my journey…Was fame a trap?...Was my freedom slipping away?” ³

The poem/song that resulted is a cautionary tale to those who chase the bright carnival lights of fame – and the remedy for the consequences of failure to prepare.

Walkin’ in the sea shore twilight, It’s then you spy carnival lights
You slowly near a magic sight, tangerine sky minus one kite
Take time and tie your pretty hair
The gypsy driver doesn’t care if you catch your hair in the Ferris wheel and turn

A silver bicycle you shall ride, to bathe your mind in the quiet tide.
Far off as it seems, your hair will mend, with the Sampson strength to begin again
Take time and dry your pretty eyes
Watch the seagull fly from far off skies
To build its nest in the Ferris wheel and turn

Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1968

The child-like wonder of Donovan’s story-songs and idealistic mysticism has mostly faded from favor in our materialistic, technology driven society. We are so very sophisticated in our tastes. We are so demanding of our comfort. We spend our lives chasing the next big thing that will finally give our lives meaning and contentment. We live in terror that something unknown will come along to knock us out of the positions that we’ve worked so hard for. We forget that these fears are part of the territory when we neglect the deeper primordial needs of the human being.

While there has always been someone ready to poke fun at folk singers and Morris dancers, the mockery only really turned hostile in the late 1970s, by which time most utopian dreams, hangovers from the 1960s, were falling permanently out of reach. (p. 8). …Folk music was, after all, first and foremost the People’s Music: harboured and preserved in the common mind through the decades and centuries, and sung and danced without the ‘permission’ of the cultural elite or the scrutiny of a trendsetting media. (p. 117). …it will continue to need the friction between conservation and progression, city and country, acoustics and electricity, homespun and visionary, familiar and uncanny. (p 9)

           Young, Rob (2011-05-10). Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music (p. 9). Macmillan.

A popular video proclaims that “The Dirty %&#@*!* Hippies, WERE RIGHT! • ¨ - YouTube.flv The video evaluates the political and ecological philosophies of the “hippies” in light of what has happened to our society in the last 40-plus years. For our own sanity, we might allow for a little more “hippie” philosophy, Donovan style, applied to our inner lives. Peace may never be possible in the outside world, but maybe viewing the world with the eyes of a child, we may find a measure of peace within.

Come close your eyes and hear
melodies from an old music box
Tinkling as tendems and years
go tumbling like tresses and small perfumed locks
sweet dreams were sewn
‘tween the years of her life
a tear in her little kerchief
waiving and fading away, with her
Bottled sands Tomorrow from the Shores of Yesterday
Oh will our visions of Tomorrow mingle with those of Yesterday?
Dry Songs and Scribbles ©1971

Bibliography

¹ Hurdy Gurdy Man: the Autobiography of Donovan by Donovan Leitch
St Martin’s Press 2005
ISBN 0312364342
p111

 ² ibid p 105

 ³ ibid p 131

Dry Songs and Scribbles by Donovan Leitch
Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1971
©1971 except for previously copyrighted items
Library of Congress Catalog Card 70-147359

Electric Eden by Rob Young (Kindle Edition)
Faber & Faber 2010
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0865478562