My college class is doing an in depth analysis on a poem and I'm doing mine on a U2 song. I have my song picked out but it made me start thinking about what other songs people would pick. So what song would you pick?

Possibly Running to Stand Still, or Stay.

One Tree Hill

Great assignment!  Lyrics that come to mind - that might give you enough mileage for your coursework - are

Promenade
A Sort of Homecoming
Playboy Mansion
With or Without You
Please
Van Dieman's Land, esp since Edge dedicated it to an Irish poet
Sunday, Bloody Sunday

I guess it depends whether it's levels of interpretation, historical context, rhyme and meter, etc.  Good luck!

"They say that what you mock Will surely overtake you And you become a monster So the monster will not break you, Peace On Earth"

Love this Quote From Peace on Earth.

I'd say Exit, One Tree Hill, The Fly, UTEOTW, Stay, The Wanderer, Playboy Mansion (although the coke, oj amd mj lines almost ruin it!), Beautiful Day and Breathe.

easily Running to Stand Still

easily Running to Stand Still

Oh yeah I forgot that one!

Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses

If you have a chance to choose a poem for analysis, you're best off picking one that relies heavily on a variety of literary devices -- metaphor, allusion, synecdoche, etc...You really couldn't go wrong with Until the End of the World. There are many, many U2 songs that are laden with literary and rhetorical devices. Until the End is just loaded with them, which makes for easier thesis development and paper-writing.

If I had to pick a song, it would have to be With or Without You

Some others would be Beautiful Day, Stuck in a Moment and City of Blinding Lights for sure!!

My college class is doing an in depth analysis on a poem and I'm doing mine on a U2 song. I have my song picked out but it made me start thinking about what other songs people would pick. So what song would you pick?

Just out of interest, what song did you pick?
I agree, UTEOTW is brilliant for this type of stuff, you cant really go wrong with a lot of Achtung Baby now I think of it.

I can agree that UTEOTW is brilliantly written, probably Bono's most clever lyrics, but poetic wise, I don't see how anything beats "She runs through the streets, with her eyes painted red, under a black belly of a cloud in the rain. In through a doorway, she brings me, white gold and pearls, stolen from the sea. She is raging, she is raging, and a storm blows up in her eyes, she will suffer the needler's chill, she's running to stand still."

So poetic, I love how Bono describes the weather outside and then goes on to say that a storm blows up in her eyes, just brilliantly displays flowing and flawless writing that IMO, I don't think UTEOTW contains. UTEOTW is more focused on playing with cliches, and manipulating them to tell a story. It's very clever, as I previously said, but I don't think it has the poetic aspect that RTSS has. Just read the lyrics to Running, it reads like a poem.

Running always gets me lyrically, but so does Stay, and even songs like So Cruel, and most AB songs.

Just read the lyrics to Running, it reads like a poem.

I think that's a key point. What is a poem and what's poetic? When I was in high school and read The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, I thought it was absurd that such a thing could be called poetry. Akin to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain in the visual arts (which is a urinal). Then in college, by studying modern and post-modern literature intensively, I not only gained an appreciation for poets such as Williams, Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, John Crowe Ranson, Robert Lowell and many, many others, but really a preference for them (maybe I was just brainwashed! but it's been enough time now for the brainwashing to run off).

The poetry in UTEOTW is "modern" poetry in style, something you'd find in late Robert Browning through the middle part of the last century. I like Running an awful lot, but find it (as well as a lot of the lyrical content on Joshua Tree) to be overwrought, overstated, poetic-with-a-capital-P, and overtried -- if I cast a critical eye toward it. I love the songs, appreciate the words, but I really think that Bono matured between 1987 and 1997 as a lyricist. I think the more recent albums have their own sophistication, but in a different style altogether.