William Blake. A casebook Songs of innocence and experience. Ed. by Margaret Bottrall. Bristol, 1970. P. 122-135

The confusion which still obscures consideration of Blake as a serious poet is due partly to his historical coincidence with the Romantics. The teachers of literature in schools have usually found it convenient to bracket the Blake of the Innocent Experi­ences with die Shelley of inspired visionary poetry. The political and cultural isolation which forced Blake into the obliqueness of the Prophetic Boohs has been misconstrued in a way which typifies die emotional idiosyncrasy of a dominant class of untrained readers. Amongst readers of this class, it is not uncommon to find confusion existing over the distinction in consciousness between prophecy and poetry. Without prejudice to the intentions of the prophets, it can be pointed out that, whilst the vatic message is often emotionally right, it is frequently intellectually unacceptable; whilst the relevance of poetry follows from its in­terlocking emotional and intellectual appropriateness to verifiable, uninspired, human experiences. The difference, then, between the more successful and discussable poems of Blake, and his other prophetic writings, is a difference in consciousness. An examination of the Songs of Experience must be concerned with their conscious craft, with their conscious intention towards the reader, and with their consciousness of human experience, and with the level and extent of that consciousness.

The first two poems of the Songs state a number of problems radier than a formal or original theme with which the poet will concern himself, In 'Introduction', the Bard, calling 'the lapsed Soul', is aware that the Soul itself

might controll The starry pole,

and though it has, by popular acceptance, 'fallen', may still act creatively and satisfactorily,

And fallen, fallen light renew!

With the repeated fallen one is already aware that the perception lying behind so careful a use of language - a moment's considera­tion of the two different sets of associations activated in this repetition shows just how deliberately the word is selected and placed - possesses qualities quite other than those revealed b\ the romantic use of repetition. The latter is a use in which melan­choly is suggested by the sigh and catch of the breath which the repetition mechanically produces. When a writer says, 'Tears, idle tears' or 'Break, break, break', he conveys feelingly no more than a lot of tears, or a large break. But in Blake's 'Introduction', to take the repetition as a merely emphatic description of 'light' is to represent an only too common incapacity of reading.

In the two latter stanzas of the poem, the Bard is speaking tc the 'lapsed Soul'. The important qualification introduced here is two-fold. Firstly, the South is addressed as 'Earth'.

'O Earth, О Earth, return!'

Secondly, this return is defined negatively. It is a movement away from all that the following images suggest - lapsed, fallen, deny, night, worn, slumberous mass.

'Arise from out the dewy grass;

'Night is worn,

'And the morn

'Rises from the slumberous mass.'

Already the Returned Earth is associated with the morn rising The final stanza, with its Elizabethan opening, concludes th argument for Return. When the last three lines are fead proper!

'The starry floor,

'The wat'ry shore,

'Is giv'n thee till the break of day.'

it appears that Blake is not hedonistically invoking us to enjoy die starry floor and the wat'ry shore. The Return to the rising morn, 'the break of day', is the positive, while starriness and wateryness are obviously in the same sequence as lapsed, fallen, dewy, etc. It is, again, a very careful use of words, demanding a very careful reading. The sense of the stanza depends upon our reading of giv'n. Here it is used more with the force of imposed than with the idea of gift behind it. Again we may note that we already have a statement which could only by the most superficial reading be classed with characteristic romantic verse. Blake's poem rejects as finalities the sensations which a romantic poet would regard as poetic ends.

In the second poem of the Songs the 'lapsed Soul' Earth answers.

Earth rais'd up her head

From the darkness dread & drear.

Her light fled,

Stony dread!

And her locks, cover'd with grey despair

Earth raises her head from darkness, grey and despairing with absence of light - the anti-night argument of the first poem is extended here. From the speech of the Earth we are able to deduce broadly what Night stands for. We learn that Jealousy is 'the father of the ancient men', that Jealousy is selfish and cruel, and that he is associated with fear.

'Prison'd on wat'ry shore,

'Starry Jealousy does keep my den:

'Cold and hoar,

'Weeping o'er,

'I hear the father of the ancient men.

'Selfish father of men!

'Cruel, jealous, selfish fear!'

More specifically, Jealousy-Night force is condemned for its effect upon delight:

'Can delight,

'Chain'd in night,

'The virgins of youth and morning bear?'

And the importance of delight is that it is capable of bearing 'the virgins of youth and morning'. The idea of life implicit in this phase of the poem is extended in the following stanza.

'Does spring hide its joy

'When buds and blossoms grow?

'Does the sower

'Sow by night,

'Or the plowman in darkness plow?'

The honesty of bearing, the justification of fertility, is asserted here, and the association of the fertile forces with light is stated. The concluding stanza is the demand which Earth makes of the

Bard:

'Break this heavy chain

'That does freeze my bones around

'Selfish! vain!

'Eternal bane!

'That free Love with bondage bound.'

Blake makes clear, then, what he conceives the function of the poet, the Bard, to be. He must break the heavy chain of Night, which threatens to strangle fertility. Blake's readers should by now know sufficient of the poet to realise that he does not use words like free, Love and bondage loosely. They will look to him to define these experiences and others in the course of thp Songs. He has already stated several of the problems with which he is concerned. The scope of these problems entitles him to call his songs Experience.

II

Blake's 'Sick Rose' belongs to his 'Garden of Love'. There,

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green. J

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys ck desires.

The Priests of the Chapel who bind joy and desire with briars ire like Night and its attributes in the first two poems. They are black against the light of joy and desire, and their darkness is not only their own, but their Chapel's, and the society in which die institutional 'Thou shalt nots' are given rein. The joy and desire which are thwarted here are attacked by a worm in the 'Sick Rose' poem.

О Rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy;

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

Here it is immediately apparent that the rose which sickens is a zonal rose. The human rose is attacked by a worm which pos­sesses a dark secret called love, and it is an evil power which destroys the life of the rose. The flower is attacked in its bed of crimson joy, and this last imageric phrase can only stand for the sexuality of the mortal rose. The argument of the 'Sick Rose' ditlerentiates between love and sexuality. Love here is destructive, it is a night-force, one of the links in the chain which binds delight в the 'Earth's Answer'. But sexuality, the experience in the bed of crimson joy, is the very centre of the life of the rose. When it is iracked the flower sickens and dies. What then is the love which destroys it? Blake uses the word deliberately, and if we think of i: as a counter in a commonly played game of communication we •lull more clearly see his intention. He uses a personal expression to convey the experience of sexuality because it is a something ihich he has discovered, as it were, for himself. But if he has discovered it, it is in spite of love as it is commonly called. Blake is concerned in this short poem with an incredible area of experi­ence. In it sexuality is revealed as the basis of life, the social concept of love, as something destructive to life. Love in its social definition is a negative creed of secretive joyless forbidding: love in Blake's experience is a vital matter of joy, open and sen­suous. This insistence upon the need to keep sex open and honest and not 'a dirty sore', is, incidentally, just one of the points a: which Blake reminds one of D. H. Lawrence. The experience c: the sick rose is one which both men recognised, deducing from it similar conclusions.

The 'Sick Rose' poem is the concrete expression of Blake': experience of the corruptive effects of 'social' love upon crearivt sexuality. In the third poem of the Songs the paradox of lo\; against 'Love' is dealt with in the allegory of the Clod and the Pebble. Here the Clod asserts:

'Love seeketh not Itself to please,

'Nor for itself hath any care, i

'But for another gives its ease,

'And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.'

Now this is a clear account of the current idea of 'Love'. It is self-surrender, self-denial, acceptable to the Kingdom of Heaven - с the sense in which that phrase is loosely used in Christian society. But what is the fate of the Christian Clod?

So sang a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle's feet.

It is little, soft, passive, and though it could be argued that as clay it is the primal stuff out of which Man was made, we still would: find it difficult to believe that its fate - to be trodden by the feet of cattle - is anything but undignified and uncreative. The resilient Pebble, on the other hand, is far less Christian in its statement on the nature of love:

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

(let us note that Blake considers the Pebble's argument meet, appropriate to the situation),

'Love seeketh only Self to please,

'To bind another to Its delight,

'Joys in another's loss of ease,

'And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.'

This argument is not as immediately acceptable as that of the Clod. Reacting from the same ideological position as the Clod occupies we find the attitude of the Pebble aggressive and lacking in consideration and tenderness. But an examination of Blake's words reveals that his experience is something quite other than our reaction to its statement. The Pebble's love is concerned with preserving and extending itself. It binds another to Its delight, joys in another's loss of ease. The delight and the joy which are (he condition of love - the words are the same both here and in the 'Sick Rose' - follow the binding and the loss of ease. Sub­mission of another to the condition of love is the surrendering of self-interest and self-concern to die demands of relationship. The relationship is a complex experience, and for those who accept the Clod's definition it is Hell. But, one feels, it is a Hell in which Pride is scarcely culpable, for in Blake's context Pride is what preserves the Pebble whole and wholly itself; though in the brook die waters are always passing over it, it remains untouched. A great deal has been said, both to some point and for other reasons, about Blake's inverted use of the terms Heaven and Hell. For our purpose - that of adequately reading the Songs of Experience - it is perhaps sufficient to remember the poet's technique in 'The Clod and the Pebble' and in the 'Sick Rose'. Inversion there requires no philosophical formulae to aid its interpretation. It is a literary device and it yields to literary analysis; it does not necessarily indicate a completely private mythology on Blake's part, a private country from which no reader can return without the assistance of Professor Wellek or Dr Bronowski. It is more fruitful to analyse Blake's poetry locally, rather than attempt to take in his entire geography and organise it in a way in which he himself must have been too intelligent to have considered. The manner in which this technique of inver­sion operates is exemplified in the poem 'The Angel'. There a girl says,

I Dreamt a Dream! what can it mean?

And that I was a maiden Queen,

Guarded by an Angel mild.

She is a Queen, but a maiden Queen, and the Angel is, of! course, mild as an angel should be. But immediately the maidert begins to resent die presence of the angel:

I wept both day and night,

And hid from him my heart's delight

The hidden heart's delight is both the pleasure which the girl feels but feels constrained to hide, and the delight which she is capable of experiencing with the angel - we have already noted Blake's use of the word in the context of sexual experience. The maiden is prey to the worm that flies in the night, and to die briars in the Garden of Love. She is constrained by the Night which enchains the Earth. Her Angel 'took his wings and fled', and she 'arm'd [her] fears With ten thousand shields and spears'. Entrenched behind her fear of the experience which the angel represented, she successfully repulses any furdier advances he may make until 'the time of youdi was fled, And grey hairs were on my head'. Obviously the angel in this very familiar case history is no angel so far as the Clod is concerned. The Clod might even consider him diabolical, for he does not mention marriage. But to Blake he is an Angel, an instrument of creative purpose.

The virtue which the maiden Queen exhibits would be socially classified as modesty. She is very like the modest rose in the poem 'The Lilly'.

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

The humble Sheep a threat'ning horn.

This modesty produces a defence, a thorn, shields and spears, which prevent the approach of the Angel. Humility,!the Clod softness, produces aggression, a threat'ning horn. Butthe Lilly white shall in Love delight, Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.

The lily does not attempt to protect itself. It leaves itself open to love's delight, and her beauty is like that of light, the familiar image of creation. It is interesting that Blake selects the lily here as the passionate recipient of love. The selection suggests that his observation was both original and serious. The tradition of poetry which offers the lily as purity and the rose as sensuality does not operate upon an active intelligence. Blake establishes his own terms of reference in order to communicate his own per­ception of experience.

The force of Blake's light imagery is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the poem 'Ah! Sun-Flower'. Here the sun-flower becomes the sun. It is weary of time, it seeks that sweet golden clime where there is neither time nor travelling and searching. There, in the sun, the Youth who pined away with desire whilst on the night-bound earth, and the pale Virgin shrouded in snow, his frustrated tormentor and co-sufferer, feel diey will find fulfil­ment. The sun becomes in the poem, not a 'fine kissing carrion' but the creative life-source, which, without argument, it is.

III

The world in which the frustration of life the sequence of poems considered in Section 11 analyses, is expressed allegorically in the first two poems of the Songs of Experience. But Blake is too con­cerned with concrete examples to leave die allegorical analysis on its own to fulfil die poet's duty - 'Break this heavy chain'. In the poems 'The Little Girl Lost' and 'The Little Girl Found', die little girl is unable to sleep whilst her father and mother weep.* So long as weeping and the conditions which make weeping inevitable are dominant, the little girl will find die company of wild animals more gentle than that of human beings. There, in a non-human community where cruelty is natural, as it were, she and her parents are more likely to be happy than in society where 'Cruelty has a Human Heart'. There, 'in a lonely dell' they cease to 'fear the wolfish howl, Nor the lions' growl'. The beasts¹ of prey, in a sense, are not the wolves and lions, but the humans who perpetuate weeping.

This social state of weeping is considered in 'Holy Thursday'. There Blake observes that 'a rich and fruitful land' is not really fruitful if 'Babes [are] reduc'd to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand'. On the contrary, no matter how rich such a land may be, with 'so many children poor', it is in every real sense ^fa land of poverty....It is eternal winter there.' It is in this country that

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying ' 'weep! 'weep!'

in notes of woe! is an affront to the pious parents 'who have gone to praise God'. For this same 'Little Vagabond' the warmth of the ale-house appears immediately to be preferable to the cold promises of the Church. In this country Blake's 'London' is certainly the princi­pal city. There each street is charter'd, clearly defined, and like the charter'd Thames limited and confined by its definition. Even-face in this London is charter'd, marked by the same lack of scope and the same misery and woe because of it. But this charter'd quality is not only due to 'social conditions' but, as Blake says,

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Mind-forg'd is the important phrase here. The Earth is chained as much by its own psychological predisposition as by social injus­tice. The interdependent misery of the inhabitants of this London is most forcefully expressed in the poem's concluding stanjza:

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

It is important that the Harlot is youthful for it suggests that the new-born infant is itself not so far from the condition of the whore. Her curse is not only what she shouts against society, but the disease she is certain to succumb to. And this disease is not referred to show how dreadful the fate of the harlot is, but because it is effective and destructively so towards the new-born infant's generation - it is blasted - and the marriages too are infected. Not only symbolically is die marriage car a hearse. The misery of these Londoners is not simply displeasure or discom­fort. It is death following disease, disease which cannot be cured because it is neither acknowledged socially nor understood to be fundamental to society's disabilities. The mind-forg'd manacles are the more effective for not being recognized.

This incapacity to approach psychological truths is one which Blake most effectively attacks in the poem 'Infant Sorrow'. There the child speaks in a voice unsoftened by die usual sentiments:

My mother groan'd! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud,

Struggling in my father's hands,

Striving against my swadling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother's breast.

The child is born out of its mother's pain. The pain is accentuated by the misery which die father's tears suggest, a misery which is not only occasioned by the mother's pain. The inhabitants of Blake's world are used to pain in others, and can, we deduce, accept it more easily than pain in themselves. The father's tears are perhaps for the extra burden which the child constitutes. At all events it is an unwanted child, a child produced in joylessness, who is speaking. For it the world is immediately dangerous. It is energetic enough to leap into the world, and though helpless and naked, still has primal vitality enough to be a sort of fiend hid in a cloud, which suggests the swaddling bands the child struggles against (as well as the unconsciousness of both child and parent). Feeling itself in a dangerous world, perhaps feeling unwanted, at all events feeling joyless, it strives against its parents, and against die bonds which are immediately applied to it. In a short time it learns that struggle is useless. It relinquishes its fiend-like quali­ties, its energy, really its life-force, and 'bound and weary' finds it politic to resentfully 'sulk upon my mother's breast'. This is the birth of a representative citizen of Blake's London. It is al­ready in the process of forging its own mental manacles. It can look forward to a life in which 'Love! sweet Love! [will be] thought a crime'.

IV

The Songs of Experience are concerned, an analysis leads one to conclude, with experience. It is not strictly necessary to attach an adjective to the word, or would not be were the claims of spiritual, religious, metaphysical, prophetic not at all urged upon the reader. As it is it seems prudent to assert that the only adjec­tive which experience requires is human. Blake is only concerned incidentally with extra-human experience. It has already been suggested above that he is not pre-eminently concerned with home-made philosophy, or with the promotion of a new religion of inversions, or with a personal mythology. All the problems commented upon above are human and general; they need to be negotiated by every intelligent human being sooner or later. Blake's awareness of this fact is his intention to break Earth's chain, and it forms the basis of his moral intention towards the reader; for a concern with human experience is also a concern for the behaviour of human beings.

To what extent Blake was concerned with the nature of God may be debated elsewhere. The present analysis suggests! that he was more concerned with man. In fact the famous poem 'The Tyger', so often taken to be an expression of naive wonder at the greatness of a god who could create both tiger and lamb, seems to me to be more a comment on the limited capacity of man to conceive God at all. The poem consists of a number of questions posed in anthropomorphic terms - what shoulder, what art, what dread hand, what dread feet, what the hammer, what the chain, what the anvil, etc. - the cumulative effect of which is to suggest that the poet is not only unable to conceive of a god in terms other than human, but that he is unable to grasp the concept at all. The incredulity of 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?' may be an incredulity at the whole notion of an all-creating god. Blake gives a capital letter to the lamb, a reality he can vouch for. God is he, conceived only as a series of questions. Similarly the little boy who asks too many questions and is burned in a holy place, says:

'Nought loves another as itself,

'Nor venerates another so,

'Nor is it possible to Thought

'A greater than itself to know:

'And Father, how can I love you 'Or any of my brothers more?'

Man is limited to being man. Blake's most considered conclusion appears to be that Man's most creative occupation is to develop to his fullest within that structural limitation.

Source: Politics and Letters (1947).

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