Reading Blake: 'The Clod and the Pebble'

Reading Blake: ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’. 1. ‘The Clod and the Pebble’. Blake’s choice of clod and pebble as mouthpieces for opposing conceptions of love is carefully calculated. Half the work of the poem is already done in the title if we allow the associations of these words to flow freely. However symbolic a poet’s use of a word may be, that symbolism retains and depends on the literal meaning and common associations. In Blake’s less successful later poems works may be given private or esoteric meanings. The clod is soft, shapeless, malleable, passive, downtrodden. The pebble is hard, shapely, impermeable. As soon as these associations are placed within a context of sexual love, the clod is the selfless female, the pebble the selfish male. They are contraries [see the previous essay], but in a fallen world where the contraries can only remain irreconcilable opposites, locked into a relationship where one does all the giving and the other all the taking. A shallow or too hasty reading of this poem might well lead us to suppose that we are intended simply to approve the clod’s innocent and Christian definition of love and reject the pebble’s cynicism and wicked selfishness, but as we have seen, this is never what Blake intends. The poem offers no possibility of a compromise. The clod tries to inhabit the world of innocence, to ignore the existence of pebbles (or even cows), to ‘build a Heaven in Hell’s despair’. The heaven built by the clod might be morally impeccable, but it is impossible to imagine much happening there in the way of delight. But even if it could find a like-minded partner in love, such selfless love could not progress towards a viable balanced relationship such as marriage symbolizes. The clod seems to have nothing to bring to the relationship but its own subjugation and degradation. A clod clearly cannot serve as an image of something we are meant to admire. Applied to a human being the word suggests a complete absence of energy, creativeness, character, self-esteem; it is lumpen, undifferentiated, spiritless. D.H.Lawrence suggests that for every murderer there is a murderee, that is, someone who, while not actively or consciously wanting to be murdered, subconsciously accepts the role and provokes or collaborates in the murder. In fact in the pebble the clod has found its ideal partner; the masochist has found the sadist. To say that Blake does not approve of the clod is not to say that he approves of the pebble. In adopting a self-sacrificial role the clod is misguided, dousing its own divine spark. The pebble glories in its own evil, like Iago. It is better to be too soft than too hard. What is perhaps surprising is that the pebble should offer its own heartlessness as a definition of love. From an early age Blake had his own highly developed sense of evil. The greatest evil seemed to him to be to deprive another of freedom. He could see around him plenty of examples of the exploitation of children and the poor. But more insidious were the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ with which men sought, often in the name of Christian love or parental care, to bind children with rules and duties and creeds to save them from their own bodies and desires, which they were taught to see as sinful. Joy in almost any form was suspect. The child was thus deprived of the freedom to be itself, the freedom to be fully male or female, and the freedom to be fully human. Blake finds the motives of parents, nurses, schoolteachers, priests, beadles, ‘guardians of the poor’, to be suspect or selfish. And sexual love is no exception when it manifests itself in the desire to possess the beloved exclusively, to ensure that the beloved has no life beyond providing whatever delights the master. At the age of fourteen Blake wrote one of the great poems of the language on this theme: How sweet I roam’d from field to field, And tasted all the summer’s pride, ‘Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! He shew’d me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow. With sweet May dews my wings were wet, And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty. Wings, the ability to fly, always in poetry symbolize liberty and the life of the spirit not divorced from but animating the life of the body. Neither clod nor pebble can fly, or even move. They are spiritless, fallen into a world of inanimate matter where contraries can relate to each other only in sterile conflict or perverse, unnatural relationships. The mature Blake produced a much more concise version of this poem: He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise. That he should have called this poem ‘Eternity’ expands the image considerably, suggesting to me that caging the loved one, binding the child, is a symptom of the larger human sickness which insists that only things which live forever have value, that the joys of this world are ephemeral and therefore delusive. For Blake it is mere selfishness, hubris, to seek to hold on to joy, to life itself, beyond its natural span. Hopkins destroyed his own ‘winged life’, his poetic inspiration and joy in life, by insisting on the religion of the diamond body. But in happier years, before he dismissed the body as trash, a mere clod, he saw that mortal beauty can keep warm Men’s wits to the things that are; what good means – where a glance Master more may than gaze, gaze out of countenance. And Lawrence praised the Etruscans for valuing the life of the present rather than wanting to build eternal cities – ‘burdens on the face of the earth’ – like the Romans, who despised and tried to extinguish the Etruscan joy in life. The Etruscans were not concerned with the pursuit of such absolutes as Heaven, Hell or Eternity, but with seizing the passing day in all its sacred joy. 2. ‘The Sick Rose’ Here again the title encapsulates the essential dynamic of the poem. The rose is an archetypal symbol, which means that it has been seized on by all cultures which have known roses as symbolizing very much the same range of human experience, and is spontaneously recognized as doing so even by those who do not know what a symbol is. [The same can be said of the tiger.] Archetypes contain the ability to release a certain range of meanings with peculiar depth and power. Things become symbols because of characteristics evident in ordinary life, and these remain the primary elements in the symbol however much it might have been elaborated in the literary tradition. We are all aware of the rose as a queen of flowers, beautiful, rich in colour (especially the red rose), heady in perfume, sensuous in texture, incurved, enfolding erotic promise. The rose activates all the senses like the body of a desired woman. Rose metaphors are part of our common language. Rosy cheeks signify health; rosy lips are asking to be kissed. Few men have never sent a woman a bunch of red roses; and even when there is no verbal message, the woman has no difficulty knowing what that means. Burns wrote: ‘My love is like a red, red, rose’. In giving a woman a red rose, a man is giving her an image of herself, or herself as he would wish her to be, rich with sexual passion. As a primary female sexual symbol, the rose in the ancient world was attributed to Aphrodite/Venus, goddess of sexual love. The book which distilled and defined the courtly love invented by the medieval troubadours was called the Roman de la Rose, where the rose symbolizes a woman’s awakening to sexual love. If we add together all the associations of the word rose, those we supply from our own experience, those common in our culture, and those we happen to be familiar with in the literary tradition, we have a very strong sense of youth, health, beauty and joy, of the feminine at its most desirable, of vitality and creativity, of the gratification of erotic desires. The last adjective we anticipate is ‘sick’. Sickness, disease, corruption, are not only contrary to all the primary meanings of ‘rose’, but strike us as a violation of them, a sacrilege. The two words cancel each other out, leaving a void, a chaos. The title enacts linguistically the degradation of the rose the poem then dramatizes. Blake was by no means the first poet to exploit this shock effect. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare, needing to convey what happens when the natural progression of the seasons is violated and Great Creating Nature made sterile, writes: ‘heavy-headed frosts / Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose’. And in Lycidas Milton wrote ‘as killing as the canker to the rose’. The poets Blake was most familiar with and most respected were Shakespeare and Milton, and he expected his readers to know them well.

Load more