Issa's Untidy Hut: Garden of Love (The)

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Garden of Love: Issa's Sunday Service #159

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There is a brand new album by Martha Redbone Roots Project - the Garden of Love: the Songs of William Blake (the entire album is available directly from the artist here). Above is the title selection and, below, Blake's original:

Garden of Love - William Blake

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 turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

A tip of the hat to Mark Forrester for recommending the Martha Redbone Project be featured on the Sunday Service. As he remarked to me in email, the blending of Blake's composition "with musical influences that lean heavily on Appalachian folk and gospel" works well. This is an album to own for fans of literary sources in unique settings.

Here's a live version of Garden of Love with lots of great energy. Enjoy.

For those with sharp memories, this is the second time this Blake 'lyric' has been featured (though with a different title) on the Sunday Service: here is the first.

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7 Birds on Quince Tree and Sparrow on Peony by Hiroshige

in the pitiful garden
no pitiful
peonies!

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,

Don

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Lillie poem archive

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 158 songs

Sunday, September 4, 2011

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