William Blake. A casebook Songs of innocence and experience. Ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Bristol, 1970. P. 115-122

The substitution of exegesis for criticism which characterises the bulk of critical writing about the work of William Blake is only one manifestation of a misdirection of attention which has also resulted in concentration on a single fraction of his work - the Prophetic Books. In spite of their conventionally high rating, the Songs of Innocence in particular have suffered from the conse­quent neglect of that important part of his work which the inter­pretive analyst regards as 'obvious', and subsequent critics have advanced no further in their approach to them than Swinburne. 'It is indeed some relief to a neophyte serving in the outer courts of such an intricate and cloudy temple, to come upon this little side-chapel set about with the simplest wreaths and smelling of the fields rather than incense, where all the singing is done by clear children's voices to the briefest and least complex tunes.' The dismissal implied in the phrase 'side-chapel' defeats its own object. It is only in these Songs that Blake has communicated, in an unsophisticated form, the 'Divine Vision' which is central to all his work, but the only understanding which they admit is that wider understanding which poetry affords when images are realised in their peculiar context, not interpreted as universal symbols.

The problem of these Songs lies in their peculiar naivety. This is not the simplicity of childhood, the simplicity of incomplete experience, but has its origin in no experience at all. Blake's con­demnation of the 'perishing Vegetable Memory' as a substitute for 'inspiration', and his preference of 'the Eternal Image' to the actual object, are both relevant here. The images of the Songs of Innocence are seen in a vision, 'within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery'.

Such a statement can only be justified by detailed textual analysis. The 'Nurse's Song' is distinguished from the other Songs only by illustrating with greater clarity the method which is common to them all, and is therefore chosen for this purpose.

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast

And everything else is still.

'Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down

'And the dews of night arise;

'Come, come, leave off play, and let us away

'Till the morning appears in the skies.'

'No, no, let us play, for it is yet day

'And we cannot go to sleep;

'Besides, in the sky the little birds fly

'And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.'

'Well, well, go & play till the light fades away

'And then go home to bed.'

The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh'd

And all the hills ecchoed.

The immediate apparent peculiarity of this poem is die total absence of metaphor. This is a clue to its unique structure. Metaphor is not needed, because there is no web of correspon­dences to be established and secured within the poem itself. Such correspondence as it does insist upon, as that the birds and the children are both small, is in no way peculiar to the poem, and far from presenting any startling breadth of imagery it verges on the banal, as in the line:

'Besides, in the sky the little birds fly’.

Simplicity of this kind means the absence of elements of indivi­dual experience, such as it is normally the function of poetry to control, but which are present in the simplest lyrics. In Words­worth's 'Daffodils', for example, the source of the imagery in individual experience is explicit and plain, and the correspon­dences produced by means of the Pathetic Fallacy are peculiar to an individual scene and an individual observer, who co­operate in expanding and at the same time contracting the implications of the actual situation which the poem presents. In contrast with this the 'Nurse's Song' never leaves the bedtime situation with which it opens, and the reason for this is that the personality of the observer has been removed.

The laughter of the children does not 'rejoice' the hill, as it might have done for a Wordsworthian observer. It is rjierely 'heard on' it. The hill does not 'feed' the sheep: it is merely 'covered with' them. The birds merely 'fly'. The use of adjectives almost inevitably introduces the personality of the observer, but here the only adjective used is 'little', and it is applied to objects characteristically small. Even the setting sun is not invested with private significance. This refusal to endow objects with qualities which are not typical of them is characteristic of the Songs of Innocence as a whole. The grass is simply 'green'; the cock simply 'doth crow'; the fleece of the lamb is simply 'woolly'. This is simplicity of a rare order, and has been carefully achieved. The eleventh line of the 'Nurse's Song', for example, has been altered to its present form from

'The flocks are at play and we can't go away'

thus eliminating a personally created correspondence between the children and the sheep.

It is the difference between seeing 'a world in a grain of sand' and 'sermons in stones'. If the observer limits the grain of sand by seeing in it some different, specific thing, he makes it his own, and has material for poetry of the usual order, but he will not see a world in it.

He who bends to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy.

In refusing to particularise, Blake is refusing to exclude the 'Immense World of Delight, closed to your Senses Five'. 'You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting and fitted. I know better and please your Lordship,' he retorts to Wordsworth's passage in the 'Excursion' on the 'exquisite fitting' of the indivi­dual mind to die external world.

The associative use of words is dynamic, forming a poem out of their progressive inter-relation, but Blake's unambiguous, typifying use of words cuts them loose from one another, halting the usual process. Consequently, the movement of the Songs is not progressive but repetitive, a pendulum movement. Monotony is avoided in the 'Nurse's Song' by the variation in syllabic length which the use of'sprung rhythm' allows to lines of equal metrical lengm: the long, four-stress lines vary between nine and twelve syllables in length, and the shorter, three-stress lines between six syllables and nine. Rhythmically, however, the lines merely repeat each other. No line runs over into its successor, giving impetus to the poem. Rhythmically and syntactically, each line is self-contained, each pair of long and short lines is self-contained, and each verse is self-contained.

'Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down

'And the dews of night arise;

'Come, come, leave off play, and let us away

'Till the morning appears in die skies.

With the exception of the last verse, every verse is, as this, a single sentence broken into two halves, each of which halves is also halved again into the individual lines. In the long first and third lines this process is taken into the line itself, which similarly falls into two rhythmically and syntactically distinct halves, the break in sense coinciding with the caesura.

There is also the repetition of the rhyme scheme. This poem of sixteen lines contains fourteen formal rhymes, to which are added the frequent repetition of vowel sounds, as in the line:

'Besides, in the sky the little birds fly',

the partial repetition of whole syllables - 'the sun is gone down'-and the minute repetition of rhythm and vowel in the lines:

'Come, come, leave off play, and let us away',

'No, no, let us play, for it is yet day',

'Well, well, go & play till the light fades away'.

The most insistent repetition in the poem is that of the word And, with which every alternate line opens, with the exception of the last line of the second verse. This provides the tick-tock of the pendulum movement, as one moment succeeds another. It marks the separation of the lines, not their conjunction, a point which becomes obvious if comparison is made with the use of the same word in Shakespeare's 66th Sonnet, 'Tired with all these, for restful Death I cry...' In die Sonnet the opening of each line with And adds to its cumulative effect as part of a while, but in the Song it has the opposite result, and makes a fresh start within the poem, constantly renewed.

Repetition of this kind is typical of the Songs in their entirety. The rhyme is always exhibited, never concealed.

Little Lamb,

Here I am;

Come and lick

My white neck.

Words and phrases are constantly repeated.

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Emphasis is gained by this repetition, but never significance. Its effect is static. This is the result of the careful selection of images in each poem, a selection which permits no heterogeneity. The reader has only to consider the effect of a substitution such as the following:

When the voices of children are heard on the green,

And howling is heard on the hill.

Here the emphasis which 'is heard on* gains by repetition is significant, because it unites two dissimilar images. Becjause the Songs lack such heterogeneity of imagery they have no need of dynamic movement to be organised into wholes. The images are immediately related, moment by moment, as they occur, because the poem, instead of seeking to develop and unify a personal complex of impressions, presents a vision of things which relates them without reference to past and future, and is therefore im­personal. The repetitive structure is therefore functional, con­stantly holding the attention at a single point.

It is this kind of impersonality which Blake terms innocence, and the note of innocent love which sounds throughout die Songs is similarly impersonal. The Lamb is loved for being a Lamb: it is not a particular lamb, but any lamb which is loved, and the typifying use of words already noted corresponds with this feel­ing. The problem of poetic method is how to endow typical objects with qualities which will make them loveable, without depriving them of their typicality by intruding the personality of die poet. In nearly all the Songs, natural objects are made to sympathize with human feelings.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,

And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;

When the air does laugh with our merry wit,

And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

But the qualities with which objects are endowed by this use of me Pathetic Fallacy are not strange to them, and have not been imposed by an individual sensibility. It is not an example of Wordsworth's 'fitting and fitted', because it is not the product of a specific situation, and thus there is no loss of typicality.

In the first place, the attribution of human feeling is linked with the attribution of the most obvious physical characteristics, such as the greenness of the woods in the passage quoted from the 'Laughing Song'. By association, the feelings attributed gain the same typicality as these characteristics, as in the opening verse of 'The Blossom':

Merry, Merry Sparrow

Under leaves so green,

A happy Blossom

Sees you swift as arrow

Seek your cradle narrow

Near my Bosom.

The merriment of the sparrow and the happiness of the blossom have the same inevitability as die speed of the arrow and the greenness of the leaves. More intrinsic to the method is the propriety of the feelings attributed, a propriety made typical by an almost universal tradi­tion, which Blake has utilized for his own ends. Wordsworth's cloud was lonely only because he had made it so, but it was not Blake who made the birds merry, and none of the values pos­sessed by the images in the Songs of Innocence is peculiar t: them. The recurring and almost interchangeable images are the child and the lamb:

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head?

That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shav'd....

Both the child and the lamb are types of innocent love, the ail-embracing charity which does not pick and choose, but loves first and makes the particular discovery later. The Songs c: Innocence deal only with the first of these stages - the second is reserved for the Songs of Experience - and it is for this reason that the particularized image is absent.

But to justify the use of these images, and preserve their tradi­tional value intact, a highly organised context is necessary. It must be such that the one value of innocence, and no other, is permitted to them. The homogeneity of imagery already noted has a structural function additional to the immediacy of relation which it allows. Confront the lamb with a wolf, and it becomes an image of more than love and less than innocence. Any insistence to the contrary would destroy the poem's unity, for it would be an attempt to deny a relationship which the poem itself had estab­lished by bringing these two words together. For the most pan the Songs succeed in preserving unity by the strict exclusion of all images of fear and doubt. In the world which Blake has cjreated by a restriction of the Christian and pastoral traditions, there are no beasts of prey or lust, disease is unknown, and old age only means an access of dignity, not the approach of death. There is no need to exclude sorrow, for sorrow in another's distress, like joy in another's happiness, is an expression of innocence so long as it does not lead to fearful questioning.

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

is as true to the note of innocent love as:

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while.

Fear, on the other hand, comes only from experience, and only by experience can it be reconciled with love. Words cannot, of course, be cut away from experience, but by the strict control of context all reference to individual experience can be excluded, so that only the typical experience remains. Here, as has been;hown, the context is devised to cut away all conditional mean­ings. The word 'leaf, for example, stands only for something green and bright. Within the Garden of Eden enclosure of the Songs of Innocence, names have the same freshness which they had when Adam first gave them to the creatures.

Occasionally, however, as in 'Night', 'Holy Thursday', and 'The Little Boy Lost', the Songs adventure outside the charmed circle, and have to provide themselves with protection in the omnipotent image of a guardian power, or in a sudden protest, external to the world of the poem.

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,

Led by the wand'ring light,

Began to cry; but God, ever nigh,

Appear'd like his father in white.

Similarly in 'Night', although the lion can lie down with the lamb (for this is in accordance with its traditional nature), the wolf and tiger still 'howl for prey', and guardian angels are needed to keep them from the sheep. The break-down of the archetypal image results from this reference to experience outside the region of innocence. The range of association given to the words in a passage such as the following verse from 'Holy Thursday' makes necessary a reference to private experience.

О what a multitude they seem'd, these flowers of London town!

Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,

Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.

In the phrase 'these flowers of London town' the words 'town' and 'flowers' are made by their juxtaposition to stand for complex experiences, from which the reader selects and matches particular elements. Similarly, in the third line, two widely different mean­ings of the word 'multitudes' - the multitudes of the 'charter'd streets' and the multitudinous flocks - are deliberately indicated and contrasted, a form of ambiguity which does not belongs the archetypal word which is alone consonant with the expression of innocence. The use of the word 'innocent' itself in the last line serves to complete this process, for innocence is now seen from the outside; just as the offer of 'aged men, wise guardians of the poor', which the next verse makes, involves a limiting criticism of innocence rather than the expression of it. The question: 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' is reserved for the Songs of Experience, and once it has been raised, however inadvertently, the introduction of guardian angels can only be a warning to read with reserve or an invitation to sentimentality. Such failures, however, only serve to emphasise the unique achievement represented by the remaining Songs, and to illus­trate the conditions of their success.

I a child, & thou a lamb.

This line sums up the burden of the Songs of Innocence, and also their poetic method, which compels the reader to reduce complex verbal associations to essential images, and consider them mo­ment by moment, the method of the vision itself.

Source: Politics and Letters (1947).

Author's Postscript 1967. An observation on 'Holy Thursday" in the foregoing article suggests that certain words enforce a reference to empirical truth which breaks the seal that should insulate the poem from mundane reality. This is an error. In fact this element of diction is an intrinsic part of the irony which informs the poem throughout — from the first line, 'with its suggestion that only special days are holy and that faces are only occasionally clean (and innocent), to the last, with its impli­cation that the exercise of pity is a prudent precaution against the wrath of a God of thunder.

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