The Tom O' Bedlam Poem

 

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Random blog day boo yah. As you should know Fridays is random blog day were we talk anything and everything and pretty much run with it. Today's blog is on the Poem Tom O' Bedlam.

Tom O' Bedlam is the title of an anonymous poem from the “Mad Song” Genre, written in the voice of a “Bedlamite” whose homeless. The poem was most likely composed at the beginning of the 1600's/17^th century. In How to Read and Why Harold Bloom called it “The Greatest Anonymous lyric in the (English) Language”.

The Terms “Tom O' Bedlam” and “Bedlam Beggar” were common terms to describe beggars and vagrants who'd suffered or feigned mental illness, Abraham men is also another term. Aubery writes that beggars could be identified by “An armilla of tin printed, of about three inches breadth” attached to his left arm. It was claimed or assumed that inmates would be released with some authority to make their way to begging, though this is most likely untrue. It it did happen, numbers were undoubtedly small, though there were possible large numbers of mentally ill travellers who turned to begging, but had in fact never been near Bedlam. It was adopted as a technique of begging or a character. For example in King Lear, edgar disguises himself as mad “Tom O' Bedlam”.

Tom O' Bedlam

From the hag and hungry goblin

That into rags would rend ye,

The spirit that stands by the naked man

In the Book of Moons defend ye,

That of your five sounds senses

You never be forsaken,

Nor wander from your selves 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.

Of thirty bare years have I

Twice twenty been enraged,

And of forty been three times fifteen

In durance soundly caged

On the lordly lofts of Bedlam,

With subtle soft and dainty

Brave bracelets strong, swept whips ding-bong,

With wholesome hunger plenty

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 a thought I took for Maudlin

And a cruse of cockle pottage,

With a thing thus tall, sky bless you all,

I befell into this dotage, I slept not since the conquest,

Till then I never waked,

Till the roguish boy of love where I lay

Me found and stript me naked.

While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing:

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

When I short have shorn my sow's face

And swigged my horny barrel

In an oaken inn I pound my skin

As a suit of gilt apparel;

the Moon's my constant mistress,

And the lowly owl my marrow:

The flaming drake and the night crow make

Me Music to my sorrow.

While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing:

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The palsy plauges my pulses

When I prig your pigs or pullen,

your culvers take, or matchless make

Your chanticleer or sullen.

When I want provant with Humphrey

I sup, and when benighted,

I repose in Paul's with waking souls

Yet never am affrighted

But I do sing, Any food, any feeding

Feeding, drink, and clothing;

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing/

I know more than Apollo,

For oft, when he lies sleeping

I see the stars at bloody wars

In the wounded welkin weeping:

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 darrier

While I do sing, Any food any feeding,

Feeding, drink or clothing:

Come dame or maid, be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The gypsies, Snap and Pedro,

Are none of Tom's comradoes,

The punk I scorn and the cutpurse sworn,

And the roaring boy's brovadoes,

The meek, the white, the gentle

Me handle, touch, and spare not;

But those that cross Tom Rynosseros

Do what the panther dare not.

Although I sing, Any Food any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing;

Come dame or maid be not afraid,

Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a host of furious fancies

Whereof I am commander,

With a burning spear and horse of air,

To the wildness I wander.

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I summoned am to tourney

Ten leauges beyond the wide world's end:

Methinks it is no journey.

Yet will I sing. Any food, any feeding,

Feeding, drink, or clothing;

Come dame or maid be not afraid,

Poor Tom will Injure nothing,

The original ballad was popular enough that another poem was written in response “Mad Maudlin's Search” or “Mad Maudlin's search for Her Tom of Bedlam”, she is supposedly supposed to be the Maud whose mentioned in the third verse/stanza. The first verse/Stanza of this poem goes:

For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam,

Ten thousand miles I've travelled,

Mad Maudlin foes on dirty toes,

For to save her shoes from gravel.

Mad Maudlin was originally published in 1720 by Thomas d'Urfey in his Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy “Maudlin” was a form of Mary Magdalene. Due to various variants of each poem with much confusion between the two, neither “Tom O' Bedlam” and “Mad Maudlin” can be said to have definitive set texts.

A version of “Mad Maudlin” was recorded by Steeleye Stan and called “Boys of Bedlam”, which was released in their 1071 album Please to see the King. Steeleye also recorded another version which held a different arrangement on Dodgy Bastards in 2016 which included a rap section and a bassline that set the song in the Phrygian mode.

The remaining Stanzas of “Mad Maudlin” Include:

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.

There I took a cauldron

Where boiled ten thousand harlots

Through foull 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.

No Gypsy, slut or doxy

Shall win my mad Tom from me

I'll weep all night, with stars I'll fight

The fray shall well become me.

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