SONG TO DAVID, a notable lyrical poem, in 86 stanzas of six lines each, written by Christopher Smart (q.v.), apparently in lucid intervals during his mild madness and pub lished shortly afterward in 1761 It was com paratively neglected ir. its day, but since its resuscitation in 1819 it has been highly praised, and it caused Browning to introduce Smart into his "Parleying-s.° The tradition that it was written in charcoal on the walls and scratched with a key on the wainscot of its author's cell can contain but a nucleus of truth. That it is one of the noblest apostrophic poems of the language, full of Smart's piety, to which Dr. Johnson paid tribute, steeped in the sub limity of the Scriptural style and an extraor dinary phenomenon both in the poet's works and in his conventional century is scarcely to-day subject for dispute. Some of the stanzas have a swift carrying or snatching power that makes Browning's reference to Keats and Milton seem a bit awry. Smart is himself, whether or not he was beside himself when he wrote his song to the "servant of God's holiest charge."
And he was himself in a sense little perceived by his critics. There are poetic, especially lyri cal, elements in his other works that make the 'Song to David' a little less inexplicable as the production of "Kit° Smart than many have found it to be. There is, for example, a stanza in 'The Judgment of Midas,' which, with the change of °Jove° to "God," would fit into the 'Song) in such a way that few readers would notice the intrusion. This reminds one of what is practically the only serious fault to be dis covered in the poem — one not surprising when we consider Smart's mental condition — that its order of evolution is not always clear and that it might have been made longer or shorter without obvious loss. A convenient source for the text is G. W. Cooke's 'Guide-Book to the . . . Works of Robert Browning' (1901, pp. 87-98).