A seamless interfacing of song and the spoken verse marked an eclectic homage to the avant-garde poetry, mystic vision and mythology of 18th century English poet-painter William Blake in the city.
“A Golden String” featured British musician duo Susheela Raman (vocals) and Sam Mills (guitar), and poet Jeet Thayil, in back-to-back performances over the weekend at The Spot.
The trio unpacked the complex layers of a poet, visual artist and engraver, who was dismissed as idiosyncratic at best and mad at worst in his time, but has acquired multi-generational cult status.
The evening began with a rendition of ‘The Sick Rose’ from the ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’, where the poet, in his typical use of metaphorical language, portrays the rose as a symbol of purity and innocence and the invisible worm as the destructive corruptor.
This song, as Sam said in his preface, was their entry point to Blake.
London at the end of the 18th century where Blake worked as an engraver was under a government that was paranoid about dissent. This would partly explain Blake’s anti-establishment, contrarian spirit, coming couched in coded messages and allegory in his poetry.
The ‘London’ and ‘Jerusalem’ in Blake’s poems are places as he idealised in his imagination, said Mills, pointing to one of the poet’s famous utterances, “A fool does not see the same tree that a wise man sees” — essentially meaning that each person shaped their own truth in the reality that is perceived or experienced.
“What we’ve done in this work is to approach Blake through some kind of text that we think inspired him and things by artists that he inspired... his influence runs wide and deep,” said Mills.
The set, which unfolded against a backdrop of visual art imagery, presented several of Blake’s best-known works, including, ‘A Poison Tree’ and ‘London’ (‘Songs of Experience’), ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (‘Marriage of Heaven and Hell’), with its pearls such as “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” or “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough”.
Blake’s most recognised works, ‘Tyger’ and a breathtaking version of ‘Jerusalem’ (from the prologue to the epic ‘Milton: A Poem in Two Books’) completed the loop.
In between, Jeet, who has just broken a long hiatus to launch a new poetry collection, ‘I’ll Have It Here’, lent gravitas to his readings from deep observations of poets and philosophers, that virtually had the audience hanging on to his every word.
From Shakespeare’s ‘Ariel’s Song’ (The Tempest) and Giordano Bruno, 16th century Italian philosopher and occultist to ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats, searing stanzas from ‘The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah’ by William S. Burroughs and ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll.
As Sam Mills would later say, each generation has found its own meaning and resonance in its interpretation of Blake’s layered poetry, from resistance to oppression to mysticism and environmentalism.
For his generation that was raised in the crucible of the ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s, Blake was a common thread running through hippie-punk phenomena — a torchbearer-figure for the counterculture movement that challenged established order and traditional systems.
Blake’s free-spiritedness, opposition to rigid orders and dogmas and advocacy of individualism over conformity — of making one’s own meaning and not following other people or systems — has struck a chord with successive generations.
“In some of his works, Blake invented his own mythology... a map of the mind....”, he said of the Romantic period poet who saw imagination as “not a state: it is the human existence itself,” and the tension between reason and imagination as a necessary precursor for human evolution.
The last time Suseela Raman and Sam Mills were at this venue was almost two decades ago. And, their return denotes both the passage of time and how much their music has transformatively evolved — Raman’s cross-cultural collaborations with Baul balladeers, Sufi Qawwali musicians and Javanese Gamelan exponents, and Mills’s innovations in his guitarwork co-creating an edgy oeuvre.
Published - April 04, 2025 08:05 pm IST
