The Dens of Gin Lane: Mark Knopfler’s “Madame Geneva’s”
Courtesy Wikimedia
Hogarth’s Well
This summer I spent several days scraping paint at the cottage. I used to dread this sort of labor – toil in service of more labor – but this year, oddly, I enjoyed it. What I like is the feel of the putty knife when it slips beneath a layer of paint and keeps going – the unexpected satisfaction of prying a long strip and feeling it widen into other areas that might also yield to the blade. Maybe I feel something similar when I peel at the lyrics of certain songs, which I did as I scraped paint. I’d been listening to Knopfler’s “Madame Geneva’s” rather a lot. The friend from Marquette I mentioned in my last post sent me a mixtape (actually, a CD), which includes Knopfler’s ballad about a balladeer. Though there wasn’t any music actually playing when I angled the putty knife under old paint, I scraped away at the song as much as I scraped away at the cottage, thinking how much of Hogarth’s world is exposed in “Madame Geneva’s,” as it is Knopfler’s “5:15 a.m.,” which I wrote about last April.
Really, “Madame Geneva’s” ghosts the ballad form. It is constructed with two four-line verses and four five-line verses, alternating (mostly/loosely) between five beat lines and four beat lines with a (mostly) alternating rhyme pattern. From a narrative perspective, the song is constructed as a dramatic monologue voiced by a tormented ballad writer who frequents “the dens of Gin Lane.” With its references to broadsides, printers, hangings, cobbles, and coffins, the song feels squarely located in Hogarth’s England, when the gin epidemic raged.
Hogarth’s 1751 engraving Gin Lane might very well have served as Knopfler’s ekphrastic inspiration. Look closely and you’ll see a lot: a pawnbroker, a distiller, a syphilitic woman with a baby falling off her lap, another woman pouring gin down a baby’s throat, a violent crowd, a man and a dog sharing a bone, a dead person in the middle of the lane, a baby speared on a stick, a dead man hanging from a beam, a ruined chimney (bricks dropping through the air), and a distant church – too far away to do its work? In the bottom left corner, note the sign on the cellar door, “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing.” And there, in the bottom right, you’ll find a dying balladeer.
