"The Mad Gardener's Song" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in his two linked novels: Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (published in 1889 and 1893 respectively).
"And what a wild being it was who sang these wild words! A Gardener he seemed to beâÂÂyet surely a mad one, by the way he brandished his rakeâÂÂmadder, by the way he broke, ever and anon, into a frantic jigâÂÂmaddest of all, by the shriek in which he brought out the last words of the stanza!" (Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter V).
The poem consists of nine stanzas, each of six lines. Each stanza contains alternating lines in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, and the three trimetric lines rhyme with each other. The verses are scattered throughout the novels, eight verses in Sylvie and Bruno and one in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, as follows:
From Sylvie and Bruno:
Verse 1âÂÂChapter V. A Beggar's Palace.
Verse 2âÂÂChapter VI. The Magic Locket.
Verse 3âÂÂChapter VI. The Magic Locket.
Verse 4âÂÂChapter VII. The Baron's Embassy.
Verse 5âÂÂChapter VIII. A Ride on a Lion.
Verse 6âÂÂChapter IX. A Jester and a Bear.
Verse 7âÂÂChapter XII. A Musical Gardener.
Verse 8âÂÂChapter XII. A Musical Gardener.
From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded:
Verse 9âÂÂChapter XX. Gammon and Spinach.
The last four lines of the eighth verse are repeated just before the final verse in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.
In his Bright Dreams Journal, Gary R. Hess called the poem "the only bright part of the book."
In The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry: A Study of Children's Verse in English, Katherine Wakely-Mulroney described the poem as "an incantatory, cyclical poem which reflects and even prefigures aspects of the prose narrative."
Harold Bloom selects the poem, along with "The Hunting of the Snark," "A Pig-Tale," and "The Walrus and the Carpenter," for inclusion in The Best Poems of the English Language, calling it "unmatchable" and writing: "That presumably unopened letter starts the Gardener off on a series of hallucinations, the most harrowing of which is the last ... As pontiff, he would be unmarried: the dread letter will have to be opened."
"The Mad Gardener's Song" featured on the BBC show Play School in 1981.
Composer Stuart Findlay set "The Mad Gardener's Song" to viola, clarinet, and piano in 1994.