From Silent Shades and the Elysian Groves is one of eight songs by Henry Purcell published in 1683 in the fourth book of Choice Ayres and Songs to Sing to the Theorbo-lute or Bass-viol, and one of the most striking. Also known as "Mad Bess" or "Bess of Bedlam" (referring to an insane asylum in London), it belongs to a traditional genre known as the mad song, with its characteristic depiction of a woman driven insane by lovesick grief. (This genre has enjoyed a postmodern revival in certain works of contemporary British composer Peter Maxwell Davies.) Purcell's song combines a preexistent tune, Gray's Inne Masque, with a story inspired by a popular ballad of the day, Tom of Bedlam. The text used by Purcell describes one of poor Bess' hysterical delusions, imagining the hospital grounds as an Elysian glade filled with crystal streams, bounteous flora, and cavorting gods and fairies. She has come here to grieve her departed lover and hopes to die there in the enchanted wood as well, the animals of the wood to provide her elegy. Her hallucinatory bliss, and her flashes of memory, offer ample expressive breadth for Purcell's evocative melodic lines and poetically paced declamation.

Scholars have observed in Purcell's songs from this period a certain Italianate element, particularly in the way in which this and other multi-sectional songs somewhat follow the episodic contours, changes of narrative voice, and contrasts of mood and texture often found in the Italian cantata. This approach is particularly well suited to From Silent Shades in that the text shifts back and forth between sympathetic observer and delusional subject (or, perhaps, Bedlam and Elysia), as well as between Bess' dreamy recollections and her underlying sorrow. The narrator opens in plaintive, ebbing recitative, setting the scene for the entrance of "poor senseless Bess, cloth'd in her rags and folly." Subsequent sections vary widely between rhythmic fluidity and metrical stability, each contrasting section exaggerated in its mood and gesture. Purcell utilizes some obvious pictorial devices—the descending line on "I'll lay me down and die," for example—but relies more on expressive melodic shapes and intriguing shifts of mode and key to engage the listener with Bess' tragic musical portrait. Both narrator and subject impart their wisdom, Bess warning the ladies not to be ensnared by men, the narrator observing that "Bess...in her thought is as great as a king."

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