Mad Song

The English poet and painter William Blake (1757–1827) claimed from a young age that he had prophetic dreams of God, Satan, heaven, eternity, and dead friends and relations, pouring the spiritual and emotional energy of these reveries into his literary and artistic works. His visions helped him develop a singular voice and aesthetic philosophy, but they also created a distance between him and other writers of his era, like William Wordsworth, who was fascinated by Blake but said, “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad.”

Blake’s “Mad Song,” originally published in his 1783 volume Poetical Sketches, is written from the perspective of someone who has known ostracism and isolation. Initially, the speaker presents as a tortured insomniac, expressing dread about the approaching dawn as a storm rages in the background and “the wild winds weep.” In the middle stanza, he reveals his agency, acknowledging that it is his own cries that “make mad the roaring winds.” By the third and final stanza, the speaker displays an understanding of his own idiosyncratic point of view, identifying himself as “a fiend in a cloud” and explaining that he turns his back on the clarity and brightness that gives others comfort because “light doth seize my brain / With frantic pain.”

“Mad Song” is full of sounds — the “rustling birds of dawn” and the speaker’s “howling woe,” to name two — and the throbbing resonances of the text make the poem a particularly fruitful site for musical adaptations. Several composers over the years have set the text for voice, but in his 2020 concerto Mad Song, American composer Geoffrey Gordon chose to represent the guttural cries of the poem’s subject with the reedy sound of an English horn.

In a 2024 recording of the concerto with soloist Dimitri Mestdag and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gordon recalls in the liner notes how “William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience lit my love of poetry in college. I have been looking for a way to write a Blake-inspired work ever since. … The text of this Mad Song speaks for itself — riveting, harrowing, full of passion and madness. Who wouldn’t want to score that? Seize my brain, indeed.” In many of his works, Gordon chooses underappreciated members of the orchestra to tackle literary and mythic source material. The English horn is strongly associated with pastoral contexts; for example, it plays a lonely shepherd’s call in the third movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (“Scene in the Country”). It is haunting to hear this instrument of forests and fields instead embody the crazed subject of “Mad Song,” who scorns the comforts of such bucolic imagery and wishes to remain ensconced in night and misery.

Gordon uses the three stanzas of the poem as inspiration for the concerto’s three continuously played movements. In the opening, he writes violent swells in the percussion and brass, along with swirling sweeps and trills in the winds, bringing the stormy scene to life. The English horn’s entries are obsessed with a nagging, lamenting, falling half step. Even when the soloist has explosive figures that traverse the range of the instrument, these moments of turbulence often come to settle on that simple, narrow interval. Close to the end of the first movement, the harp offers a few consolatory arpeggios, glimpses of dawn that only drive the music further into darkness.

The second movement starts with a swaying, slow dance in a lopsided 5/4 time. Bass pizzicatos, loose pulses from the cellos and violas, and a sweet melody from the soloist give the music the slightest hint of pastoral calm, but the percussion and brass continually interrupt with menacing chirps, those desperate notes that “strike the ear of night.” These cries eventually take over the texture, leading to a thunderous climax and a cadenza in which the soloist develops the half-step idea, presenting it more and more frantically.

The orchestra reenters for the third movement, which begins with violent statements from the timpani and, after a section of glassy stillness, builds to a final, desperate expression of “howling woe.”

— Nicky Swett

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Scholar. He serves as a regular program annotator for concert presenters across the US and UK, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York Philharmonic, Music@Menlo, the BBC, and Wigmore Hall.

“Mad Song”

By William Blake (c. 1783)

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 paved 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.