Poe says the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic
in the world, but I’m not buying it. There are a lot of topics
more poetical than the death of a beautiful woman—actually,
there’s just one, which is the unattainability of a beautiful woman

or man or even a man or woman who is not exactly an oil painting,
‍as they used to say back in the day, and if this is true for poems,
how much truer is it for songs, starting with today’s and going back
to the old ones and then the really old ones, the songs that don’t

seem to have an author, that just seem to flow up out of our need
for sadness, for the pain that, if handled right, in the end
becomes pleasure. My question is, are these songs outside of us
and do they arise only when our hearts are broken, or are they inside

us already and require little more than a mild shock to lurch into life
like a distraught monster, howling with pain as it throws the furniture
through the window, burns the house down, and heads out to trample
civilization as we know it under its hobnailed boots? When you

think of heartbreak, your first thought might be of a girl sobbing
in her bedroom as her mother calls from downstairs and begs her
to eat something, but “monster” is an apt synonym for “heartbreak”
given the thin line between love and not just hate but the kind

of rage that just makes you want to obliterate the person you adored
five minutes earlier, the one you idolized, loved to distraction,
doted on, were charmed and fascinated and bewildered by.
Once two fans who loved NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon so much

that they dressed themselves in outfits that duplicated his—
boots, gloves, helmet, fire suit festooned with his sponsors’
logos—and leaned from the rail of a crosswalk over the track
and tried to get Jeff’s attention as a reporter was interviewing him,

but the sound of the engines was so loud that Jeff never heard
them, never even looked up, and in a heartbeat the young men
turned on him and began to curse and shake their fists and spit
at Jeff Gordon, who didn’t even know they were there. You say

well, that’s NASCAR for you, but it’s as bad or worse when
the subject is Irish politics, as in “Pretty Peggy-O,” an anonymously-
authored ballad in which troopers arrive in a town
called Fennario, and their captain falls in love with a lady like a dove

and calls her by her name, Pretty Peggy-O, but she won’t
marry him even though he says he’ll set her cities free if she does
and then, when she jilts him, says if ever I return / your cities
I will burn and destroy all the people in the area-o, but the next

thing you know, he’s the one who dies, who falls right over when
Pretty Peggy-O tells him to get lost, hit the bricks, beat it,
amscray. I guess he wasn’t so hard-hearted, after all. So you’re
looking at a captain who’s as mad as a frustrated Jeff Gordon fan

and announces that he’s going to burn down an entire country
and everyone in it if a maid doesn’t yield to him as well as a maid
faced with a classic dilemma: should she remain chaste
at the expense of everyone else or spend the night with the captain

and save thousands from a fiery death? Happily, she doesn’t have
to decide, since the jilted captain dies of disappointment before
he can find his box of matches. And that, you’d think, would be that
except for one thing, which is that the song doesn’t really end,

it just starts over: instead of a concluding stanza that ties everything
up as neatly a festive ribbon in a bonnie lass’s hair, the song’s last
stanza is the same as the first, meaning that the captain falls
in love with a lady like a dove all over again, and off they go

for a second round of failed love and heartbreak or as many rounds
of failed love and heartbreak as you and your Irish pub buddies want,
the captain cajoling and threatening and dying
as Pretty Peggy-O flirts and rejects and mourns anew, the scene

rolling out again and again over the years, over the beers, over
the centuries, the epochs and eras and eons, the geologic periods
of time from the Cambrian through whatever they call the one
we’re living in today. There’s a reason why some of the songs

that get under our skin the most aren’t so much written
as assembled: one songwriter’s ideas and images and feelings
might be his or hers alone, whereas when a song’s authors
are as many as the entire population of Fennario (or actually several

multiples thereof), that means thousands of us are pouring
our hopes and fears into a seven-stanza (or eight-, if you count
the repeated stanza twice) song. Journalist Ted Anthony
writes of what he calls “handmade music” or “mongrel music,” which isn’t

a negative description at all, because our mix of “heritages
and experiences and outlooks and travails makes us stronger
and healthier both in our culture and in the music,”
he says, for “we come from what we believe is a single world,

but it is so many, all existing at once.” What rough beast
sleeps within you, reader, its one eye about to open?
No single person wrote “Pretty Peggy-O” and a million songs like it.
Another way to say it is, you did, and you there, and you, and you.