Patrick Lundborg experiences transcendence in Donovan’s psychedelic folk music for children

Sometimes it doesn’t take more than a few inspired phrases to create an otherworldly mood. Sometimes all it takes is eight words:

How sad
The farm lad
Deep in play

The image of the little farm boy is stark, evasive; its meaning refuses to stay fixed but keeps changing, like a psychedelic pattern. It is an image that appears internally, in the mind’s eye, rather than the external hallucination of a living carpet or dancing tree canopy.

With a sparseness that some might call Japanese, Donovan places a vision inside your head, then makes it psychedelic. With those eight words, at least three different emotions are evoked, pulling in different directions. As a listener I am made ready for sadness, then nostalgia, but what I finally receive is a contradictory picture of meditation and joy. The surreal ambivalence of the stanza rests upon the final word play, which becomes a pivot, a point of gravity. Replace play with grief, and the delicate balancing act collapses into sentimentality. Instead the lyric forms an endless riddle, a Moebius strip of questions involving the simple words sad, play, deep. Each word alters the emotional charge of the vision so profoundly that it adopts a state of perpetual change, ambiguously flowing back and forth between the shifting moods.

“Isle Of Islay” first appeared on the second disc of the 1967 double album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden. Released as a standalone LP under the title For Little Ones in the USA, the record was intended as a concept album for children. In spite of such humble origins, it turned out to be not only a near masterpiece (surpassed only by Sunshine Superman), but the birth of a new genre. Donovan had experimented with the marriage between acoustic folk music and psychedelic modalities on album tracks like the delightful “Legend Of A Girl Child Linda” and the visually evocative “Sand And Foam”, but with

For Little Ones he temporarily surrendered all rock ambitions to concentrate entirely on this wistful, surreal folk with an occasional Eastern touch.

During a 1967 meditation retreat in India, “Isle Of Islay” became an anthemic number among Donovan’s fellow hippies. His Indian guru recognised it as a “transcendental song”, while Donovan more modestly suggested that it might bring the listener “to the edge of transcendence”. Indeed it does. Each time I hear it, I feel as though time has ceased to exist.

“Isle Of Islay” contains only 60 words, and it is a wonder of concentrated craftsmanship. It opens with the island as seen from a seagull’s point of view, high in the sky, then shifts into the perception of a single grain of sand on the beach. The radical change of perspective is mirrored in the musical arrangement, accenting the tonal drop from the opening chords to the last ones, and enforcing this effect even more in the dramatic guitar figure between the verses. The seagulls are part of the ocean, but they are also part of Islay’s beach, where William Blake’s famous line “to see a world in a grain of sand” may invoke a view of Islay as its own world.

Further up the shore we see the farm lad in his complex, psychedelic-childlike state of mind – but Donovan does not linger here. In a manner reminiscent of the later Rilke, he sees no qualitative difference between the people on Islay, or the birds and the sheep, or the landscape itself. The isle is not a human metaphor, but something both more real and harder to grasp. We humans and our existential brooding are merely one stroke on a much wider canvas of experience. It seems almost impossible that Donovan, at the age of 21, could attain such a mature, holistic understanding.

With Zenlike economy, the second verse’s “sheepbell music” introduces animal life, a pastoral lifestyle, and a sound to augment the ocean surf and crying gulls. Donovan’s eyes (and mine and yours) fall upon a single sheep who strays towards the edge of the pasture to look out over the sea, and the singer expresses, in the most gentle way, the sense of not being free and not belonging: “The tide left me here.”

But in the third and final verse, the longing for the ocean is replaced by the comfort of the island. The shore and the pasture are left behind as we enter the forest where songbirds succeed the seagulls, while the sky’s freedom of space gives way for the joy of aesthetic creation. This music is not the ringing bells of the domesticated sheep, but spontaneous song affirming the habitat of an untouched woodland, along with words that imply a homestead: “blessed” and “neat”. Donovan’s lyrics reflect a central theme of the psychedelic experience: the enjoyment of everyday life (on Islay) while awaiting a return to higher transcendence (the ocean).

The song closes with an observation that puts the listener firmly on Islay rather than in some symbolic abstraction, and this is the peat that has been cut up into thousands of bricks to dry and later be collected. This is a late phase in the pastoral biosphere; dead moss found useful by humans after nature has discarded it. When Donovan sings of the cut peat, he recalls the seeds at the beginning of the growth cycle, seeds which in turn recall the grains and pebbles on Islay’s beach.

But the mystery of the farm boy and his inscrutable brooding – “sad… deep in play” – still remains. Donovan’s vocal performance, precise in its otherworldly melancholy, presents an ambiguity much like the image of the boy, highlighting the stroke of sadness. Is the farm lad Donovan himself, deep in play with his attempt to capture the richness of Islay, yet sad because he can never fully succeed? Or is the sadness always there, before the beginning and after the end, and the deep play out of which Donovan’s music arises his way to escape it? If Donovan did not fully mirror the transcendence of Islay, then my attempt to understand the epiphany his timeless song brings will also fail.

 Patrick Lundborg is a Swedish writer whose books include The Age Of Madness and The Acid Archives. His latest book, Psychedelia – An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life, is published by Lysergia

98 | The Wire (April 2013) | Epiphanies