Early Modern Poetry and the Uses of the Past in John Darnielle's Songwriting

In a wide-ranging catalogue of over 700 songs, John Darnielle—singer and songwriter for the American indie-rock band the Mountain Goats—has made a continual practice of inhabiting the perspectives of historical and literary figures, from the buried Neanderthal of ‘Soudoire Valley Song’ to the citizens of Roman Sicily in ‘Song for Cleomenes’, to ‘Grendel’s Mother’ in a composition referencing the Old English epic Beowulf. In 1997, Darnielle released a song titled ‘Minnesota’, which incorporates a couplet of early modern poetry. Telling the story of a romantic relationship approaching what seems to be a tragic conclusion, Darnielle’s narrator cites two lightly modernised lines from the 70th sonnet in Edmund Spenser’s sequence Amoretti: ‘All sorts of flowers that grow up from the earth | In goodly colours, gloriously arranged.’

This chapter explores the roots of Darnielle’s literary education at Pitzer College in the early 1990s, before delineating three different modes of engagement with what Spenser’s sonnet refers to as the fleeting ‘passed time’ that recur across his songwriting canon: haunting, oblivion, and commemoration through identification. It concludes by examining Darnielle’s ad-libbed quotation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 at the end of some live performances of his song ‘Tollund Man’ as a key moment of transtemporal identification.