“‘Tupelo Honey‘ has always existed and Van Morrison was merely the vessel and the earthly vehicle for it.”–Bob Dylan

You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail right around the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
She’s an angel of the first degree
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey from the bee

You can’t stop us on the road to freedom
You can’t keep us ’cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor bent on chivalry
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
She’s an angel of the first degree
She’s as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey from the bee

Dylan was not the first to come up with this idea. In 1919, W. B. Yeats wrote that Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense”) had come to the Romantic poet from outside himself, from a metaphysical place where it had always existed, which Yeats termed the Anima Mundi or World-Soul.

The two songs are very different in tone, yet they converge in theme: Morrison’s lyrics are about the joy of life, but they hint that some things are worth dying for, while Keats’s ode describes his intimation of approaching death as it celebrates the immortality of song. Both are transcendent.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

-(Stanzas 6 and 7 from Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats)