Moping Melancholy Mad!

Norman Lindsay, Tom O'Bedlam Number 2.  1920.

 

I went down to Satan's kitchen

To break my fast one morning.

And there I got souls piping hot

All on the spit a-turning.

I seized a hissing cauldron - where boiled ten thousand harlots -

Though full of flame I drank the same

to the health of all such varlets.

My staff has murdered giants, my bag a long knife carries -

To cut mince pies from children's thighs, for which to feed the fairies.

With a host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and a horse of air,

To the wilderness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I summoned am to tourney.

Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:

Methinks it is no journey.

Yet will I beg for kindly aid -

I'll take any alms or drink or clothing.

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

This is a a combination of two old songs, Tom O'Bedlam's Search and Mad Maudlin's Search, both first recorded in Thomas d'Urfey's Wit And Mirth, or Pills To Purge Melancholy, 1720.  The verses refer to beggars that are feigning mental illness or are actually mad who have been discharged from Bedlam Hospital.  Bedlam was and is an asylum for the mentally ill, Bethlem Royal Hospital, founded in 1247.  Until 1770 one could view the inmates upon the payment of a fee, and it was a popular destination for the middle and upper classes.  Conditions were horrible and physical abuse commonplace.  You would much rather be sentenced to a Texas work farm, and Texas feeds it's inmates entirely upon it's own produce.

I have altered a few words because I felt like it an' it please your worship.

The madman in the center writing calculations on the wall is trying to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea, impossible before the invention of the chronometer.  

Engraving by William Hogarth, c. 1734.

Post title stolen from Terence This Is Stupid Stuff, A. E. Housman.  1896.