I am a huge fan of Blake. Both his literature and his art. Reading his early poems, I came across “Mad Song” and memorized it. I also set it to music. I conceived a late 18th-century Classical art song arrangement for it, accompanied by harpsichord and viola da gamba. In a minor key, of course.
Lately I’ve been playing and singing it a lot, which is great fun, but when I start to examine what the words are really saying, it isn’t “fun” at all. It’s extremely dark and tormented. 
Blake was, there is no doubt, a friggin’ genius. As Salvador Dalí once said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” Blake was sane but in his poetical imagination he was able to enter into the insane person’s mind and tell what it was like from their perspective.
“Mad Song” portrays a horribly distressful, disturbed mental state in bold, vivid lines. I don’t even want to quote it here because I’m worried about the effect it might cause on the mind. Having been close to a person who suffers from severe suicidal depression, I can tell you that Blake caught the reality of it quite accurately.
The English author, poet, and critic Charles Williams believed in the incantatory power of poetry as a form of Magick. He chanted poetry as a ritual invocation of Power. (I’ve just been reading about his poetical theories in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography The Inklings.) I just caught myself running through “Mad Song” in my mind for the upmteenth time. Having set it to music, and a damn fine tune if I do say so myself, gives it that much more power to fix itself in the mind. Do I have reason to be concerned that continually going over such upsetting lyrics will do me some psychological damage? I mean, there’s no telling how much of an effect the power of those repeated lines may have on you.
Maybe I should stick to the light, cheery stuff from Songs of Innocence. I once saw in a film Allen Ginsberg playing a harmonium and singing
- Pretty Joy!
Sweet Joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!*
Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s got to be much healthier.
I would have to say that obsessing on anything is not good, be it a minor work by Blake or Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech.
Posting it probably won’t drive anyone mad. If one were already on the brink of going mad, that one little additonal weight would probably not keep you out of heaven(or your person choice of eternal resting places).
Given that most long-term posters here are certainly mad, you would be doing the community a service. It only feeds our jones.
*The wild winds weep
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.
Lo! to the vault
Of pavèd heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.
Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe,
After night I do crowd,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas’d;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain. *
Maybe when you write it out like that, it doesn’t look so bad after all. It opens with the early Romantic Sturm und Drang stuff (as though it came from Germany), but then it brings out the inner state as only Blake can do. I’ve gotten over obsessing this poem (for now); it was brought on by reading the great new biography The Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake by Gerald Eades Bentley (Yale University Press, 2001). You know how a tune gets stuck in your head and you just can’t get rid of it? That’s all it was.
This morning the tune going incessantly through my head is another favorite poem that I set to music: the long poem “Woodnotes” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. One section of it. I made a slow jazz/blues/folk arrangement for this part. I can type it from memory!
In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers’ gang,
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;
He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnea hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.
Through these green tents by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed content alike with man and beast.
Where evening found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roamed at will the boundless shade.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,
To fear what foe in caves and swamps may stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
No so the wise: no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps.
Go where he will, the wise man is at home;
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road
By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.
Now that is much more wholesome for the soul. This poem always makes me feel all better. :):)
Hi Jomo. I gotta agree that the mere written words don’t look so bad. (Of course, I’m not singing it in my head.;))
I didn’t want to respond negatively to the poem immediately, so I read it through a few times yesterday and again this morning. I think you’re right about the “incantatory” nature of the poem: it has good rhythm and it builds to its end. The words themselves don’t seem as compelling as the beat. Also, it doesn’t feel long enough, whether you read “mad” as psychologically troubled or angry (and I’m pretty sure that neither usage would be anachronistic). Both states, if serious, tend to last a long time, and it seems odd to find a very short poem trying to capture that type of feeling.
I like the Emerson a lot; it does have that American Romantic quality about man as a natural hero which can be annoying (Whitman does this to me too), but I like it anyway.
Thanks for the insight, Humble Servant. I appreciate being able to bounce ideas off intelligent, literate people.
I know what you mean about the annoying theme of the Great White Male Hero. Whitman did a lot of self-boasting, but then poetry has always had a lot of self-boasting. I read Emerson’s forest philosopher differently though, as an idealization of human potential. Emerson was a New Age guru ahead of his time.
Emerson’s poems are notoriously clunky. He absolutely had a tin ear for verse. Most of his lines don’t flow as well as the ones I just quoted. But his essays are just magnificently constructed. There was a well-known jibe that Emerson’s prose read like poetry, and his poems read like prose.
