There’s a fragment from a song that has stayed in my memory: “You turn all the lead sleeping in my head to gold.” It comes from the first album by Arcade Fire, called Funeral (2004). It is a beautiful metaphor, and I’m happy to find poetry where I can.

Such fragments are sometimes the work of no single lyricist, having been mauled by transmission, like the words of any folk song. Bob Dylan was fortunate in that way with a couple of lines from his version of “Man of Constant Sorrow”: “Through this open world I’m a-bound to ramble / Through ice and snow, sleet and rain.” This sounds age-old, echoing from a land far, far away. But I think the second line was a filler to supply for words he’d forgotten when rearranging the lyrics. The song, which he put on his album Bob Dylan in 1962, had, as far as I can tell, been written by Emry Arthur, who had recorded it only 33 years earlier, in 1929.