Dance of the Hopping Mad: Issa's Sunday Service, #117

This week's selection on the Sunday Service comes from a recent email by a reader (who received two free copies of Lilliput Review for the suggestion - so can you!) who pointed me to the song "Dance of the Hopping Mad" by The Raincoats and what a delight it is. The song incorporates lyrics from William Blake's poem "The Garden of Love, which follows:



The Garden of Love
  I laid me down upon a banks
  Where Love lay sleeping;
  I heard among the rushes dank
  Weeping, weeping.
  Then I went to the heath and the wild,
  To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
  And they told me how they were beguiled,
  Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.
  I went to the Garden of Love,
  And saw what I never had seen;
  A Chapel was built in the midst,
  Where I used to play on the green.
  And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
  And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
  So I turned to the Garden of Love
  That so many sweet flowers bore.
  And I saw it was filled with graves,
  And tombstones where flowers should be;
  And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
  And binding with briars my joys and desires.


(NOTE: the first 8 lines transcribed here are actually a separate Blake poem entitled "I laid me down upon the banks.  Thanks to Mark for pointing that out - see COMMENTS, below.)


And here's a musical rendition of the original Blake:

The Garden of Love by William Blake Music by Rodney Money



Let's finish up where we began, with the Raincoats, performing "Don't Be Mean," a little song describing something we've all experienced and hardly ever talk about:




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This week's feature comes from Lilliput Review #72, in August 1995, and is a little duet, a pas de deux, a neat little dovetailing, a fancy twin step ... call it what you well, Beaird Glover and Daniel DiGriz do it and they do it well. Their selection is serendipitous, to say the least, and in that they go out to Tom Clark, who will understand I didn't go looking for these; they found me, 16 years later, almost to the day of our discussion.

Enjoy.

Faces
  in the ancient early beginning
  of humankind
  all people had only 1 face.
  then, thousands of years later,
  there were 2 faces.
  the idea that everyone looks
  differently
  is a fairly new one

        Beaird Glover

mocking myself
i see
both faces

Daniel DiGriz

in lightning's flash
faces in a row...
old men

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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