William Blake and the Human Abstract Author(S): Robert F
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William Blake and the Human Abstract Author(s): Robert F. Gleckner Source: PMLA, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Sep., 1961), pp. 373-379 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460620 Accessed: 09-10-2017 20:01 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA This content downloaded from 37.8.43.189 on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:01:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE HUMAN ABSTRACT By Robert F. Gleckner "A Little Boy Lost," "The Little Girl Lost" be? IT several IS well-known of the poems that arein Songsdirect of contraries Experience comes to "A Little Girl Lost," and "The Divine some of the Songs of Innocence, the precise Image" nature becomes, individualized and separate, "A of this opposition being reflected in the subtitle Divine ofImage." Finally, those poems whose titles the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experi?are completely transformed in Songs of Experience ence: "Shewing the Two Contrary States introduce of the the reader immediately to thematic Human Soul." And Blake emphasized this essential changes consonant with the change of scene or organic unity of the contraries by giving four state?for of unlike innocence, experience is a raven- the opposing poems identical titles: "Holy ing Thurs- world of the devourer; an adult world of respon? day," "The Chimney Sweeper," "Nurse's sibility,Song," decisions, sex, and disease; a dark, confined, and "A Cradle Song."1 Occasionally he changed dirty, urban world of palpable, not evanescent, the title almost imperceptibly: "The Little blackness; Boy a world of wandering and lostness, ale- Lost" becomes "A Little Boy Lost," "The housesLittle and churches; a world of "humanity caught Girl Lost" becomes "A Little Girl Lost," and in the "The act" with none of the defiant joy of Burns's Divine Image" becames "A Divine Image."2 Jolly The Beggars. great majority of Songs of Experience, however, The three major kinds of title change, then, sug? have either totally new titles or changes gestof thea good deal about Blake's poetical strategy in Songs of Innocence titles which make more Songs ex?of Experience, his shift from "open" narra? plicit the nature of the opposition between the tive twoor song to irony and parody, his turning away states. Thus in the two introductory poems from the the representative to focus sharply on the piper yields to the bard, in others "The Lamb" diverse be? particulars, and his crucial manipulation of comes "The Tyger," "The Blossom" becomes key "The symbols. Of all the songs of experience the one Sick Rose," "The Ecchoing Green" becomes which "The provides the greatest insight into Blake's Garden of Love" or "London," "The School concern Boy" with his titles, his struggle to define the becomes "The Little Vagabond," and "The twoDivine contrary states of the human soul, and his Image" becomes "The Human Abstract." poetic technique (especially in Songs of Experi? Admittedly it is dangerous to set up explicit ence), con? is "The Human Abstract." Although he trasts in this way, but such a procedure canapparently pro- had little of the philosophical difficulty vide valuable clues to part of Blake's poetic he tech?experienced in shaping "The Tyger,"3 he had a nique in Songs of Experience. Where the titles good are deal of trouble hammering the idea of "The identical with those in Songs of Innocence Human Blake Abstract" into a satisfying poem. For in clearly intended the song of experience additionto be ato the finished product there are extant a parody of its counterpart in Innocence ("Nurse's manuscript draft of it called "The Human Image," Song" and "A Cradle Song") or to be a direct the per?fairly superficial "A Divine Image" (which he version ("Holy Thursday" and "The Chimney etched but did not include in Songs of Experience), Sweeper"). In either case the point of view and hasanother manuscript poem which begins, "I obviously changed (reflecting the shift from heard piper an Angel singing." to bard), the characters of the respective speakers In "The Divine Image" (Innocence) Blake set have been altered to reflect their fall from inno? forth his four great virtues, mercy, pity, peace, and cence into experience, and the vision has shrunk love, the last of which is the greatest including as from an imaginative "whole" view of the world it does the other three. More important, he identi? to a sense-bound, limited, partial view. Those songs fied man and God (the four virtues "Is God" and of experience which have only a change of article "Is Man," the ungrammatical singular verbs ac- in the title dramatize the move away from an es- sentially homogeneous, unified, individual-less 1 "A Cradle Song" appears in Blake's notebook along with world to one over-run with egocentric individuals; drafts of other songs of experience, but he never etched or or, to put it another way, from a world of uncon? included it among the Songs of Experience. scious selves to one of conscious selves whose a"A Divine Image" was etched by Blake but never in? cluded among Songs of Experience. sense of differentness is acute and militant. Thus ?See Martin K. Nurmi, "Blake's Revisions of The the generic little boy lost of Innocence becomes Tyger'," PMLA, lxxi (1956), 669^-685. 373 This content downloaded from 37.8.43.189 on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 20:01:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 374 William Blake and the Human Abstract centing the fusion)4 and emphasized of the poemthe ("Thefunda- Human Abstract") engraved mental humanity of the virtues: for Songs of Experience. Before he was satisfied For Mercy has a human heart with the total poem, however, he tried a number Pity, a human face: of other experiments. And Love, the human form divine, The key to the problem Blake faced lies in the And Peace, the human dress. (117) poem he clearly intended originally for Songs of Experience: In the world of experience such a human-divine imaginative unity is shattered, for the Blakean A Divine Image fall, as is well known, is a fall into division, frag- Cruelty has a Human Heart mentation, each fragment assuming for itself the And Jealousy a Human Face importance (and hence the benefits) of the whole. Terror the Human Form Divine Experience, then, is fundamentally hypocritical And Secrecy the Human Dress and acquisitive, rational and non-imaginative. In The Human Dress is forged Iron such a world virtue cannot exist except as a ra- The Human Form a fiery Forge tionally conceived opposite to vice. There are no The Human Face a Furnace seald longer single entities participating harmoniously in The Human Heart its hungry Gorge one divine unity; there are only, in effect, pairs, (221) opposites, contraries, and they are at war. To dra- matize this vividly Blake was faced with the prob? An alignment of the lucid antitheses in this poem lem of making the virtues at once less human and and "The Divine Image" has been made compe- more human. That is, if in the world of innocence tently by Stephen Larrabee.5 Of much more sig? "all must love the human form" and all pray "to nificance, however, is an understanding of how the human form divine," in experience all must "A Divine Image" is complexly operative in "The love only part of the human form, what I have Human Abstract," the poem Blake finally settled called elsewhere the "human form human." It is a upon for Songs of Experience. dissociated form, a collection of fragments that no Although the order of composition of the four longer informs (in the fullest sense of that word) "drafts" of Blake's idea in the final analysis may the human but rather deforms it. Thus, in The be less important than we might expect, some Book of Urizen, the fallen "Eternals" are seen ascomment on the problem is in order here. In vast enormities Blake's notebook, which he used as a workbook for Frightning, Faithless, fawning about eighteen years (1793-1811), "I heard an Portions of life: similitudes Angel singing" is the eighth entry and hence clear? Of a foot, or a hand, or a head ly Blake's first attempt to write the contrary to Or a heart, or an eye. (234) "The Divine Image."6 Seven pages and about twenty poems later in the same notebook appears But, and this is the important point, the human "The Human Image," from which "The Human form still pretends to be integrated, to be "or- Abstract" is directly taken. "A Divine Image" on ganiz'd" as Blake himself called it, to be "The the other hand does not exist in any manuscript Divine Image." This pretense involves the viciously form known; according to Geoffrey Keynes it was hypocritical and rationally conceived plan of in- etched about 1794, well after Blake had begun venting "vices" so that equally artificial virtues writing in his notebook. Several alternative con- may oppose them. As Hobbes, Mandeville, and others had shown, virtues, "selfless" and charitable 4 Similarly in his Annotations to Dr.