Brooke Chappell on Tom O'Bedlam.

My sources have been W. H. Auden's Book of Light Verse and Robert Graves' article "Loving Mad Tom" in his book "The Common Asphodel." Do you know Graves? He's the author of "The White Goddess" and the "I Claudius" books, and sort of specializes in mindboggling scholarship and audacious--mostly unsupported--leaps. Case in point: he suggests that the anonymous, fragmented ballad of Tom of Bedlam was actually written by Shakespeare (yes, that Shakespeare) for "King Lear," inspired by the popular songs of the traveling madmen beggars(and con artist beggars who were only pretending to be mad, but that's another story). Not that that's impossible, but...um. Very interesting article, anyway, and I recommend it highly.

I was kind of wondering about the way you've got the verses arranged. They seem sort of...mixed. My understanding is that there are basically three Tom-songs. The first, earliest published (1615) starts off:

From the hag and hungry demon
That into rags would rend ye
All the spirits that stand by the naked man
In the Book of Moons defend ye
That of your five sound sound senses
Ye never be forsaken
Nor wander from yourselves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon
While I do sing, "Any food, any feeding,
Feeding, drink, or clothing?
Come dame or maid, be not afraid,
Poor Tom will injure nothing."

With variable spelling and punctuation, obviously. You can see the beggar's appeal very clearly. The last four lines are a refrain, repeated at the end of each stanza. These are octets composed of the quartets starting:

Of thirty bare years have I/ On the lordly lofts of Bedlam

With a thought I took for Maudline/ I slept not since the Conquest

When I short have shorn my sowce face/ The Moon's my constant mistress

The palsy plague my pulses/ When I want provant with Humphry

I know more than Apollo/ The Moon embrace her shepherd

The gypsies Snap and Pedro/ The meek, the white, the gentle

With a host of furious fancies/ By a knight of ghosts and shadows

Tom has come from confinement at Bedlam ("Bedlam" is a contraction of "Bethlehem" hospital), having been driven mad by his scorned love for Maudline. In 1683, we've got quartets, and a new refrain, in "Loving Mad Tom":

I'll bark against the Dog-Star
I'll crow away the morning
I'll chase the Moon till it be noon
And I'll make her leave her horning.
But I will find Bonny Maud, merry mad Maud
And seek whate'er betides her
Yet I will love beneath or above
The dirty earth that hides her.

I'll crack the Poles asunder

I'll search the Caves of Slumber

I'll sail upon a millstone

So. Who's Maudline? Well, there was a St. Magdalene's hospital for madwomen (and prostitutes)...so apparently they were well suited(!) Maudline has her own song:

To find my Tom of Bedlam
Ten thousand years I'll travel
Mad Maudlin goes with dirty toes
To save her shoes from gravel.
Yet will I sing, "Bonny boys, bonny mad boys,
Bedlam boys are bonny.
They still go bare and live by air,
And want no drink, nor money."

And then:

I now repent that ever

My staff hath murdered giants

My horn is made of thunder

...and those are all the verses I knew. Maudline's a bit more...um...dark, so my guess is that the verses you've got starting

I went down to Satan's kitchen

There I took a cauldron

No gypsy, slut or doxy

And then that I'll be murdering

are hers. (Graves only quotes the first three verses) The record for these is later, 1699, so we don't know if any of these are by the same author, or several, or what. We know the traveling madmen did sing a begging-song, or several. But some of the references are typical of the countryside, while others are very clearly London...sleeping in St. Paul's Cathedral (the old medieval one, ruined in the 1666 fire, where transients did sleep at night) and dining with Humphry (some Elizabethan worthy who ran sort of a soup kitchen arrangement in the City). And then of course, some of the lines are full of elaborate classical references, and some...aren't. So lots of scope for speculation. Hey, it *could* be from "Lear"!

Anyway. I don't know if any of this will be news or of interest to you...I see it's been a while since you updated the site, and all. But I love Poor Tom (obviously) and I was really pleased to get more verses...and I really enjoyed the original poetry, as well. So I just thought I'd share what I knew.

Thanks again, and all the spirits that stand by the naked man in the book of moons defend ye. (I think I'm going to start using that instead of "Sincerely," or "Best Wishes" in *all* my letters...should make my cover letters for job applications much more interesting.)

The "Loving Mad Tom" verses are:

I'll bark against the Dog-Star
I'll crow away the Morning;
I'll chase the Moon
Till it be Noon,
And I'll make her leave her Horning.
But I will find Bonny Maud, Merry Mad Maud,
And seek whate'r betides her,
Yet I will love
Beneath or above,
The dirty earth that hides her.

I'll crack the Poles asunder,
Strange things I will devise on.
I'll beat my brain against Charles' Wain,
And I'll grasp the round Horizon.
But I will find Bonny Maud, etc.

I'll search the Caves of Slumber,
And please her in a Night Dream;
I'll tumble her into Lawrence's Fenn,
And hang myself in a Sun Beam;
But I will find Bonny Maud, etc.

I'll sail upon a Millstone,
And make the Sea-Gods wonder,
I'll plunge in the Deep, till I wake asleep,
And I'll tear the Rocks asunder,
But I will find Bonny Maud, etc.

Don't ask me what Lawrence's Fenn is, I haven't the foggiest. A fen is a marshy area, I know...I can only assume this is one of those sights of Elizabethan London that we had before. Charles' Wain is one of the many names of the constellation Ursa Major. Lots of astronomy in this one, what with Sirius the Dog Star, and Maud being associated with the Moon. Passionate astronomy! Horning, you know, because a crescent moon is a horned moon, and also because if a woman cuckolds a man she is "horning" him. So she's being changeful and inconstant. Remember, in the first Tom poem, that the Moon's his "constant mistress." And of course the Moon has always been connected with madness, and love.

[Side note, speaking of madness: I've spent way too much time worrying about the lines:

The Moon embrace her shepherd
And the Queen of Love her Warrior,
While the first doth horn the Star of Morn
And the next, the Heavenly Farrier.

At first it seems all fine and dandy, as classical references go. Diana, goddess of the moon, loved Endymion, a humble shepherd, and kept him asleep, forever young and beautiful. (Tom lets her have a little more fun than the usual story does...since the reason he's asleep is that she's supposed to be a *virgin* goddess...nevertheless.) And the Queen of Love is Venus, who was always driving her husband Vulcan (the blacksmith, i.e. farrier god) crazy by fooling around with Mars. All very fine and classical and astrological, right? Except...since when is Diana married to the Morning Star? She's not married to anyone! Virgin goddess! And if she were...well, the Morning Star is Lucifer...so is the Moon married to Lucifer? Is this medieval witchcraft mythology getting mixed in here? And then, if you think about it, the morning star is actually Venus. So...I just don't know. I've actually stayed awake nights trying to figure this out. Yes, I probably am insane. At least I'm in good company.]

I do definitely recommend you read Graves' article, if you're interested in Tom O' Bedlam. A most of what I've written here I've based on his writings, and he goes into a lot of this stuff much more thoroughly. The book it's in, "The Common Asphodel," is out of print, but if you have access to a good library, especially a university library, you should be able to borrow a copy, as it was pretty influential as a work of literary criticism.

(Plus you can enjoy Mr. Graves being snarky about Yeats and Auden and Eliot and other contemporaries of his, generally considered nowadays to be standing on some untouchable cliff-height of Parnassus. As I recall, at one point he absolutely shreds Yeats' much anthologized "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," asking things like, "why 'nine bean-rows will I have there'? Why nine? What does nine mean, here, symbolically? It doesn't mean anything: you just picked nine because you thought it sounded good, you didn't even consider the Pythagorean association of..." blah blah how dare you, and these are the people we're calling our great poets these days? It's pretty funny, as lit crit goes. He's so scholarly and yet so curmudgeonly. And at the age of thirty-something, he always seems to be saying, like the Professor in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," "Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?" I, for one, wasn't taught Graves; I found him on my own reading. If I'd been forced to read him, I'd probably hate him, but as it is he's one of my pet writers.)

Anyway, there are the verses. Hope you enjoy them...they're among my favorites.

Brooke