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Songs of Innocence and Experience

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Songs of Innocence and Experience Contents General Editor’s Preface x A Note on Editions xi PART 1: ANALYSING WILLIAM BLAKE’S POETRY Introduction 3 The Scope of this Volume 3 Analysing Metre 3 Blake’s Engraved Plates 6 1 Innocence and Experience 9 ‘Introduction’ (Songs of Innocence)9 ‘The Shepherd’ 15 ‘Introduction’ (Songs of Experience)17 ‘Earth’s Answer’ 23 The Designs 30 Conclusions 42 Methods of Analysis 45 Suggested Work 47 2 Nature in Innocence and Experience 50 ‘Night’ 51 ‘The Fly’ 59 ‘The Angel’ 62 ‘The Little Boy Lost’ and ‘The Little Boy Found’ 64 ‘The Little Girl Lost’ and ‘The Little Girl Found’ 68 ‘The Lamb’ 80 ‘The Tyger’ 82 Summary Discussion 91 Nature in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 93 Conclusions 102 Methods of Analysis 104 Suggested Work 105 vii viii Contents 3 Society and its Ills 107 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Songs of Innocence) 107 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Songs of Experience) 113 ‘Holy Thursday’ (Songs of Innocence) 117 ‘Holy Thursday’ (Songs of Experience) 118 ‘The Garden of Love’ 121 ‘London’ 125 Toward the Prophetic Books 130 The Prophetic Books 134 Europe: A Prophecy 134 The First Book of Urizen 149 Concluding Discussion 154 Methods of Analysis 157 Suggested Work 160 4 Sexuality, the Selfhood and Self-Annihilation 161 ‘The Blossom’ and ‘The Sick Rose’ 161 ‘A Poison Tree’ 166 ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’ 170 ‘The Clod & the Pebble’ 173 Selfhood and Self-Annilhilation in the Prophetic Books 177 The Book of Thel 178 The First Book of Urizen 182 Milton, A Poem 187 Suggested Work 192 PART 2: THE CONTEXT AND THE CRITICS 5 Blake’s Life and Works 197 Blake’s Life 197 Blake’s Works 206 Blake in English Literature 209 Blake as a ‘Romantic’ Poet 210 6 A Sample of Critical Views 220 General Remarks 220 Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman 221 Contents ix John Middleton Murry 225 Nelson Hilton 229 Camille Paglia 232 Further Reading 241 Index 249 1 Innocence and Experience ‘Introduction’ (Songs of Innocence) When you first take up the challenge of studying his writings, William Blake seems to be a special case. He claimed to have visions, he was an eccentric (some people will tell you he was mad), and he did not publish his poems in the ordinary way by having them printed. Instead, he engraved them on metal plates using acid to eat away the designs, and each page is a sinuous, living swirl of shapes, with branches, snakes and other emblems often growing between the lines of poetry. When they had been printed, Blake, or his wife, coloured the plates carefully by hand. The finished works were sold to patrons and friends, in small numbers. You may feel that Blake was an oddity, and will be difficult to understand. If you then turn to the critics, you are likely to find them indulging a rage for symbolic interpretation that can increase your confusion. If we plunge into the longer Prophetic Books, Milton, Vala or the Four Zoas, and Jerusalem, we are likely to lose our way quickly: Blake invented so many deities and symbolic characters that it is difficult to acquire a sense of what they all signify. Also, even in Blake’s own day, few readers would have been erudite enough to recognise all of the mythological and theological references, coinages and puns in which his work abounds. However, we refuse to succumb to all the ‘expert’ pressure, and pseudo-biographic prejudice, that surrounds Blake’s reputation. We believe that we can read the poems as poems. We must not bring any 9 10 Analysing William Blake’s Poetry preconceptions to this work; on the contrary, we are convinced that a detailed, analytical study of the poems will reveal their significance. We start, then, by looking in detail at the first two poems from Songs of Innocence. We should notice, however, that the title of the collection already provides us with an aim: to find out what Blake meant by the word ‘Innocence’. Here is the first poem, ‘Introduction’: ‘Introduction’ Piping down the valleys wild Piping songs of pleasant glee On a cloud I saw a shild. And he laughing said to me. Pipe a song about a Lamb: So I piped with merry chear, Piper, pipe that song again – So I piped, he wept to hear. Drop thy pipe they happy pipe Sing thy songs of happy chear, So I sung the same again While he wept with joy to hear. Piper sit thee down and write In a book that all may read – So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed. And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs, Every child may joy to hear. (K2, 4) This clear song is not at all difficult: the story it tells is obvious on a first reading, and it has the short lines, easy rhymes, regular metre and simple vocabulary of a nursery rhyme or children’s song. Nonetheless, we will analyse the poem in detail. Innocence and Experience 11 The story is clear. A ‘piper’ meets a child who first asks for ‘a song about a Lamb’, then encourages him to pipe, then sing, and finally write down his happy songs that ‘Every child may joy to hear’. This is a simple story, but it is helpful to look at its stages or sections more closely. The music begins as non-specific ‘songs of pleasant glee’. The child then specifies a subject: the music will be ‘about a Lamb’. Next, he urges the Piper to ‘Drop thy pipe’ and sing instead, so we assume that the music ‘about a Lamb’ is no longer just a melody: it has words which fit the music and express the Piper’s meaning. Finally, the song becomes only words, which are not the Piper’s spontaneous singing any more: they are written down ‘In a book that all may read’. Notice that the child made the Piper pipe the same song twice (stanza 2), and when he sang it was ‘the same again’, so the song itself has been performed three times, becoming more and more fixed, less and less spontaneous, as it develops from a purely musical expression of pleasure (‘Piping songs of pleasant glee’) and turns into a permanent written record (‘In a book that all may read’). Blake emphasises that the final written song is unchanging, and universal, by his repetition of this idea. It is a book that may be read by ‘all’; and the songs will be heard by ‘Every child’. What is Blake’s subject? For the time being, we can only specu- late. We notice that the pure music of a moment’s pleasure changes into written lyrics. There is something about change in this poem, then. Perhaps Blake is writing about poetic creation, explaining his own natural inspiration in ‘the valleys wild’, and how he fashions and transforms this into poems for the joy of all children? So far, we have a well-defined understanding of the story and its structure; but our ideas about the poem’s overall intention are only guesswork. Now we can turn our attention to the style, hoping that details of diction, or rhythm, may give us further clues to the meaning. We have already commented that ‘Introduction’ has an apparent simplicity of style reminiscent of a nursery rhyme. There is liberal use of repetition (piper / pipe / piping / piped; happy; chear; sing / song / songs / sung; child; joy are all parts of a strong pattern of repetition in the poem); the vocabulary is simple, using common words of one or two syllables only. The metre is regularly trochaic, each line ending on the stress so that a ‘ghost’ unstressed beat emphasises the 12 Analysing William Blake’s Poetry end of the line. So, the first line goes ‘Piping / down the / valleys / wild’ and we wait for a further syllable to complete the fourth foot of the line. As we read, this has the almost-unconscious effect of sep- arating each line of the poem from the next. Only once does Blake punctuate in the middle of a line: the comma after ‘piped’ in line 8 stands out, and emphasises that this line includes both sides of the poem’s action: ‘I piped’ and ‘he wept’. However, Blake manages some very subtle effects within what appears to be a simple and regular form. It comes as a surprise, for example, that the rhyme-scheme is not regular. The first stanza is ABAB, but this is not repeated in stanzas two, three and five. In these stanzas the second and fourth lines rhyme, but not the first and third. However, Blake has created a sound-link between these stanzas because lines 6, 8, 10, 12, 18 and 20 all rhyme – indeed there are only three rhyme-words in total (hear comes three times and chear twice); and the third lines of stanzas two and three end in ‘again’. So, the manipulation of rhyme is much more complex than we notice at first, and contributes to the sense of a build-up of repet- itive events that runs throughout the poem as the piper performs his song again and again. Blake achieves a curious effect with the metre, also. It occurs because the second syllables in twelve lines of this poem are pro- nouns, either ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘thy’. We do not throw a pronoun away as we read: we naturally give it greater stress than, say, a falling par- ticiple ending (such as the ‘-ing’ on the end of ‘piping’ which is the second syllable in line 1, or the article ‘a’, second syllable in line 5).
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