Once you've got your mind going ....
Here's the second verse. The meter works just fine:
a Facebook page, a mail account
that have been left deserted
unanswered posts on sev'ral boards
that look like ill concerted
a man who once was bustling
thriving, vivid, blithe
silenced now forever
in the prime of life
It took less than half an hour to sketch - or maybe even complete - the first verse. Possibly just thinking about the Romans has triggered my creativity?
This could be the first verse:
we speak their law, we use their words
although their buildings crumble
their ancient roads still lead the way
on which we walk and stumble
whole nations speak a language
that very much is theirs
much more than we may think
we are the Romans' heirs
I looked up rhymes for "theirs" on http://www.rhymezone.com/ to immediately spot "heirs". I had been wondering how I was to insert the term "Romans", now that was under my very eyes. Maybe I'll have to re-write this first verse - hence 'sketch' - after writing more verses that may or may not match the same meter. And - well, yes - I'm 'hearing' a tune in my mind, I always do when writing lyrics. Only very few of these 'mental' tunes ever see the light.
After outlining the basic structure and content of my song lyrics I gather material. The first verse is to deal with traces the Romans left in today's world. I therefore scanned the internet for ideas:
temples, theaters, amphitheaters, aqueducts, roads, arches, monuments, mosaics and every sort of object from daily life.
marble columns
remains of a theater from the Roman Empire
precisely engineered system of aquaducts to carry the water -- often hundreds of miles -- using only gravity and the very slightest downward grade (1mm per meter); Pont du Gard
unearthed foundations are situated all along the Limes trail
Many people feel a thrill when travelling a road first laid out by Roman engineers nearly 2,000 years ago, even when this stretch is now no more than a rigidly straight portion of modern
motorway. Far more interesting are those lengths unaffected by modernisation, and represented now by minor roads or footpaths or simply lines of hedgerows. Such stretches abound in north-west
England, and it is not surprising that they form a magnet for people who enjoy a walk with an archaeological flavour.
In fact, aerial photography and satellite remote sensing provides a mechanism to detect traces of the past, like palaeo-environmental and archaeological evidences, over small or large areas:
damp-marks, grass, weed and crop marks, soil and shadow sites, surviving elements ...
In the photo are clearly visible traces of the ancient road network, generally consisting of semi-emerging walls delimiting the edges of the streets, or consisting of piles of stones lying on the
ancient roads surface, which are the remains of collapsed houses of late construction that were built on the streets themselves, or materials that were removed from adjacent areas in the Ottoman
period so that they could be used for agricultural purposes
words
Many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin, through the medium of Old French.
The influence of Latin in English, therefore, is primarily lexical in nature, being confined mainly to words derived from Latin roots.
During the English Renaissance, from around 1500–1650, some 10,000 to 12,000 words entered the English lexicon, including lexicon. Some examples include: aberration, allusion, anachronism,
democratic, dexterity, enthusiasm, imaginary, juvenile, pernicious, sophisticated. Many of these words were borrowed directly from Latin, both in its classical and medieval forms. In turn, Late
Latin also included borrowings from Greek.
languages
Today the six most widely spoken standardized Romance languages are Spanish (c. 329 million native), Portuguese (c. 236 million native), French (c. 68 million native), Italian (c. 62 million
native), Romanian (c. 23 million native), and Catalan (c. 12 million native)
Roman law
Historically, "Roman law" also denotes the legal system applied in most of Western Europe, until the end of the 18th century. In Germany, Roman law practice remained longer, having been the Holy
Roman Empire (963–1806); thus the great influence upon the civil law systems in Europe.
*** sorry for not citing the sources (I remember Wikipedia); this is just some collection of ideas, phrases, and words - I'm not going to use any of the citiations verbatim or in a 'scientific'
manner ***
My ideas so far suggest a particular order for the verses:
1. traces the Romans left - past
2. traces on the internet (Facebook, blogs ...) - present
3. children (descendants) - future
This would lead to this song structure: verse - chorus - verse - chorus - verse - chorus
(also called the AB structure).
Content-wise the song would become what I call an 'episodical' song, i.e. a song that does not tell one particular story or describe a particular situation or mood. Instead, it tells three
different stories that deal with a similar basic concept, in this case with "leaving traces".
Adding another verse at the beginning (so the structure would become 'verse - verse - chorus...') does not work well with such 'episodical' lyrics because listeners then would expect a continuous
story. To make 'episodical' lyrics work the verses should be distinctly separated.
If or how a bridge makes sense will depend on the chorus(es). I think I'm going to leave it at the AB form.
I wrote another verse:
it's not the life I strived for
dreamed of in my pursuit of happiness
I have the foot-in-mouth disease
stumbling over my own awkwardness
... and a bridge as well:
if I tried to hang myself
I am sure the rope would tear
I have learned life isn't fair
leaving me so much impaired
this is really hard to bear
Once I've found a meter for the verses I often end up using the very same meter for the bridge. That's not exactly helpful to make the bridge stand out even if I try to make it more different by using a different rhyming scheme. When writing the bridge for "bad luck" I noticed that I was going to fall into the same pattern yet again (seven syllables in the first line) so I decided to make sure that the following lines would differ from the verses as much as possible, and to write a different number of lines as well. I know that five lines don't agree with a two or four bar beat particularly well, but then, you can always add an instrumental part that covers the gap between bridge and chorus.
