A Song to David, a 1763 poem by Christopher Smart, was, debatably, most likely written during his stay in a mental asylum while he wrote Jubilate Agno.
The poem focuses on King David and various aspects of his life, but quickly turns to an emphasis on Christ and Christianity.
There is no evidence proving that Christopher Smart wrote A Song to David while locked away in a mental asylum for seven years.
[1] However, John Langhorne claimed, in the 1763 Monthly Review, "that it was written when the Author was denied the use of pen, ink, and paper, and was obliged to indent his lines, with the end of a key upon the wainscot.
"[13] It was this important detail that encouraged many critics to try to decode the "seven pillar" section of A Song of David along the lines of Freemason imagery.
Appearing for the first time in Robert Dodsley's periodical, The Museum, in 1746, which is 17 years before "A Song To David," it follows exactly the same rhyme scheme and structure as the aforementioned work.
It is a fine piece of ruins, and must at once please and affect a sensible mind" but brought up the "[im]propriety of a Protestant's offering up either hymns or prayers to the dead" like a Catholic would.
[25] The Monthly Review felt that the poem was "irregularly great" although a few stanzas showed "a grandeur, a majesty of thought, not without a happiness of expression.
"[5] Later, when the text was recovered and reprinted in 1819, John Scott viewed the poem as proof that Christopher was both insane and a poet:[5] the poem was had the benefit of "originality" and "beautiful and well selected imagery" but there were "symptoms of the author's state of mind, in a frequent vagueness of meaning, in an abruptness of transition, and sometimes in the near neighbourhood of the most incongruous ideas.
"[33] Two years later, Francis Palgrave wrote that the Song exhibited "noble wildness and transitions from grandeur to tenderness, from Earth to Heaven" and it was "unique in our Poetry.
"[34] Seven years after Palgrave, John Churton Collins agreed with Rossetti and Palgrave, but not to the same degree, when he claims, "This poem stands alone, the most extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps, in our literature, the one rapt strain in the poetry of the eighteenth century, the work of a poet who, though he produced much, has not produced elsewhere a single line which indicates the power here displayed.