Mad Song

By William Blake 1757–1827 William Blake

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 croud,

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.

Biography

In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake "neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself 'a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth." Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of men. Far from . . .

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