The Mad can be analyzed from several points of view. Let's look at the poem from the angle of New Criticism. New criticism focuses on the aesthetic adornment of the poem. The poet says that their language is not of dreams but of moonlight and it overflows on the full moon day. The poet is adorning language with the aesthetic of a hyperbole of imaginative literary fantasy. They see Gods which we have never heard of. Here the poet ventures into a realm of space where the mad can see the autochthonous deities through the workings of their inner consciousness. Their visions are more surreal than ordinary human beings. They are shaking their wings when they are shrugging their shoulders. Shaking their wings is a metaphoric hyperbole. The hold to the belief that flies have souls and the Green God of Grasshoppers leaps upon wings. The language used here is personification. Trees bleeding are also a personification. Heaven gleaming in Kitten's eyes and ants singing in chorus is also the language of personification.
In the language of psychoanalysis the poet gazes upon the mad as objects of speculation. The poet goes well to the extent of portraying their psychotic and neurotic symptoms. They are not conscious of race, religion, gender or ideology. Do the mad live in a subjective state of consciousness? The mad people have an imagination that is surreal, a consciousness that is fictional. Moonlight and its affinity becomes a consciousness imagination soaring like a bird. The archetypal God that they see is beyond imagination. Is the poet rendering poetic justice to the mad? The personification of trees bleeding and flies having souls could be a referral to the opening up of the poet's own subconscious. Nature is humanized through the language of poetic expression. The seeing of Heaven's in Kitten's eyes and ants singing in chorus depict the bringing out of the poet's consciousness the language of the repressed. Is the poet a pantheistic nihilist? While patting the air the poet mentions that they are taming a cyclone and this suggests that the poet's own mind in obsessed with the portrayal of language as the neurotic. Time becomes an internal journey where a century for the normal human is a second for the mad. Christ, Buddha and the Big Bang are all mixed up in the mind of the mad as an eclectic syndrome of neurotic consciousness.
The poet also goes to the extent of politicizing the mad and making them alien in the desert of consciousness. Thus the made have no race, religion and gender. When the poet says we do not deserve their innocence, he is being frozen to their feelings. The poet is narcissistic and does not empathize with the mad. Why is the poet being a sadist of words? Why can't the poet leave the mad to their independent world of existence?
For the Philosopher Foucault there is no madness but only alienation. Does the poet justify madness, their living existential reality through the construction of the architecture of the language? The gaze of the poet shifts on to the mad as the gaze of the other. The other is a stranger, an alien and the poet is confronting him or her with semantic cruelty. The poet is rendering the mad with the absurd and portraying words through the lens of surreal fetishism.
How can we deconstruct the language of madness? The language of madness is sedated with a mobile army of fiendish personifications. Democracy is subverted to the authoritarianism of the poet who speaks for the language of the mad. The binary divide of being mad and not mad is so starkly depicted. The poet does not become their advocate but poisonous devil who invokes language to deride madness and inflict its trespasses with the consciousness of semantic adultery.
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