Enthusiasm and Divine Madness: "Nine Black Poppies" by the Mountain Goats

Here is a song that makes me dizzy: "Nine Black Poppies" by the Mountain Goats.

I'm a little surprised that the entry for this song in Darnielle's book of commentaries, This Year, doesn't go something like this:

I often wonder about the narrator of this song: who is he? Why is he so worked up about a package? What do sweet peas mean to him? Beats me! I just wrote the song.

This is another song like "Heights" that tantalizingly scaffolds a scene while withholding the details that would make of it a complete story. We can't really get answers to these questions. 

We can, however, ask, what is this Darniellean Withholding? It is not a hoarding of details and backstory, because, as readers of Darnielle's commentaries have learned, he does not have any more access to these details and backstory than we do. Then how is the song born, if there is no fully fleshed-out story in the song-writer's mind?

Plato's Socrates says that poets and rhapsodes do not work from a rational master-plan but "gather" their goods "from glades and gardens of the Muses" and carry them to the people "as bees carry honey, flying like bees." To put a finer point on it, he says of poets that

the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us.

The argument is simple: either the poet is a master of all professions and arts under the sun, or the mastery of their work comes from elsewhere besides their rational mind. In Ion, Socrates is at some pains to get his interlocutor, the rhapsode Ion, to admit that his art does not come from knowledge, but Darnielle has given away the game in advance. We already know, because he has told us, that he does not know anything about the character or their situation except for what the song says. So the remarkable thing is not how much is left out, but how much is discovered. By not planning, constructing, or world-building, by refusing to clutter his mind with information, Darnielle makes it a vessel for some muse.

We could say, then, that Darniellean Withholding is inspiration. But what is the god who inspires this song? Perhaps there is a clue in the chorus, in what YouTube user @davidcrosson5755 calls "a sick vertigo inspiring switch up rhyme." The phrase "summer sun" ends the second line, and immediately following it, with "summer sun" still lingering in our ears, we hear "Someone." This is a jarring turn, as the song so far has concerned itself only with "I" and "you," not any unnamed party. Where did this "someone" come from? Evidently, it came from the summer sun. In a kind of metamorphosis, the summer sun recurs under a small change, like an echo dropping a syllable. It is as though Darnielle heard himself sing "summer sun" and then felt the need to sing it again while still moving forward.

Why did he feel that need, then? Nothing in the form of the song established so far demands an internal rhyme here. In fact, the distinctive form of the song first comes together at exactly this moment. This is a melodic and thematic high-water mark, the kind of thing that makes us say, "So this is what the song has been driving toward all along," but at the same time nothing we could have anticipated. It comes as a surprise to us because it came as a surprise to Darnielle. "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader," as Frost put it.

The surprise, the discovery of form in this case, comes from a playful demand for repetition with a difference. "Sing that again, but don't," is the watchword of this demand. So "summer sun" becomes "Someone," and as it does so, the song's whole form announces itself. The song, then, is born of echolalial enthusiasm or divine madness that supersedes all irritable grasping after fact and reason.

As usual, I have some questions:

1. Is there any irony in this song, beyond the irony baked into Darnielle's method of singing on behalf of an invented/discovered narrator?
2. When you listen to this song, do you find that you are beside yourself and that the thoughts and feelings of the narrator are your thoughts and feelings? If so, what do you do with that sense? Do you try to find a way to integrate it into your life? Or do you distance yourself from it, taking it as a warning sign?

This post is part of the Mountain Goats Book Club.