William Blake homage offers a seamless blend of music and spoken word

Experience a unique blend of music, poetry, and art paying homage to William Blake's mystic vision and mythology.

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.