FWP:
SETS
BONDAGE: {1,5}
DESERT: {3,1}
The lover's solicitous friends have become concerned about his erratic behavior. They've found it necessary, for his own sake, to have him imprisoned-- so he won't be a danger to himself or others, no doubt. They visit him; but when they try to restore his sanity, they always fail. Even the presence of companions can't relieve his solitude. Even the confinement of his body can't stop his (semi-personified) 'Thought' from wandering off into the desert.
The multifarious meanings of va;hshat (see the definition above), all of them appropriate here, are at the heart of the verse. In some ways, a prison cell is in fact like a desert. Companions don't really exist, they are shadows or irrelevant distractions. The mind can roam freely in a cell, uncontrolled by the imperatives and pressures of the human social world-- just the way the body can roam freely in a desert.
Someone with such 'wildness' may or may not be a madman; his friends might think so, but there's nothing in the verse to compel that reading. All we know is that he's obsessively given to 'desert-wandering', but that may be a sign of his 'wildness' in the sense of 'solitariness' or 'sadness' or 'desolateness', rather than of actual madness. He might even be a kind of hermit, finding mystical insights in his desert solitude.
And then-- in this verse, who's speaking? We feel that it should be the lover, but nothing in the verse itself requires us to think so. The speaker appears in any case to be a reliable reporter-- someone
who sounds both well-informed and sane. Does the lover's 'madness' exist
only in the eye of the beholders? In our Lit Hum class this past semester
we read the book of Job, and this verse makes me think of the relationship
of Job with his 'comforters'.
Nazm:
That is, I was confined in a cell, but my thought was in the desert. Imprisonment brought no remedy for madness. (8)
== Nazm page 8