Decomposing Blake's Songs of Innocence
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DECOMPOSING BLAKE'S SONGS OF INNOCENCE By STEPHEN S. POWER A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1992 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Dr. Donald Ault for all the time, effort, and invaluable assistance he has given me over the past two years despite his constantly hectic schedule. Also, I want to thank Drs. Richard Brantley and Elizabeth Langland for reading my thesis and offering me their advice, and Drs. Patricia Craddock, Caryl Flinn, David Leverenz, and Malini Schueller for their kind words, patience, and much- needed help with my writing throughout my years in graduate school. I want to thank Kris Tortorella for her unflagging optimism and boundless support. ' * Most of all, I want to thank my family for always encouraging my academic pursuits and never losing faith in me even when I lost faith in myself. TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT V CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Reading Alternately 1 "Introduction" 5 Notes 9 2 MATURATION 16 "The Ecchoing Green" 17 "Spring" 22 "The Blossom." 29 / "The Little Boy lost" and "The Little Boy Found". 34 j Notes 40 3 HOLY PROTECTION 46 "The Shepherd." 47 "Night" 53 "Laughing Song," 58 "Nurse's Song" 61 Notes 64 4 NO EXIT 68 "A Dream" 68 "On Anothers Sorrow" 73 Notes 79 5 EN-JOYING INNOCENCE 83 "A CRADLE SONG" 86 "HOLY THURSDAY" 91 "The Divine Image." 94 Notes 97 6 "THE LAMB" 103 iii page Notes 107 7 RE-INTRODUCTION 109 WORKS CITED 112 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 118 iv Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts DECOMPOSING BLAKE'S SONGS OF INNOCENCE By Stephen S. Power December 1992 Chair: Dr. Donald Ault Major Department: English This thesis will explore the ramifications of the numerous linguistic ambiguities and anomalies in Blake's Songs of Innocence , especially those involving punctuation, diction, sentence construction, and symbols. Primarily, they offer us the quickest passage to the heart of Experience within Songs of Innocence by setting in motion an alternative reading—and rereading—process that undermines the patina of Innocence the poems supposedly sustain (according to a majority of critics) , but cannot maintain. In the first chapter, I explain my approach to the collection and the general critical resistance to such an approach, and analyze "Introduction" to indicate how Blake thematically supports my view. In the second chapter, I show that several supposed Innocents, such as the child in "Introduction," recognize and thereby finalize the loss of Innocence initiated by various aspects of maturation. The V third chapter considers the inability of the protectors in several songs to preserve Innocence, while also examining their role in their charges' loss of Innocence. Analyzing "A Dream" and "On Anothers Sorrow" in the fourth chapter, I argue that their respective speakers ' Experience seeps into their attempts to escape their state, and that, as a result, they face both the impossibility of recovering their Innocence and the impossibility of salvation from Experience. In the fifth chapter, I show that the characters whose Innocence critics often consider most unassailable are clad in it surreptitiously by characters suffering from their Experienced state. The Innocents are not naturally so nor made so by God, but are actually tabulae rasae for the world of Experience. In the sixth chapter, I analyze "The Lamb," arguing that as its language recalls the songs already examined, the poem acquires their aspects of Experience. Finally, in the seventh chapter, I present several directions in which my thesis might be taken for further study. vi . CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Reading Alternately In "Unreading 'London,'" Donald Ault notes that despite the publication over twenty years ago of David V. Erdman's The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake , which he considers the best typeset edition of Blake's work available,^ "'corrected' or 'normalized' versions of Blake's poems persist in most anthologies" because Erdman's text "acknowledges not only the radical openness of Blake's poems to conflicting readings but also, in a profound sense, the resistance of these poems to being 'read' at all, in the conventional sense of the verb" (132) This urge to homogenize Blake's heterogeneous texts is a residual manifestation of the powerful inertial (ontological and perceptual) principle Blake called "Single vision & Newtons sleep": by drawing attention away from the apparently anomalous qualities of Blake's poems, it undermines the processes through which the act of reading is able to rehabilitate "Single vision" by "cleansing" the "doors of perception." (132) I believe that editors have also obscured the troubling syntactical ambiguities and anomalies in Songs of Innocence . that is, have made what they have considered "corrupt" texts "pure," because these are the aspects of the poems that most 1 quickly offer readers passage to the heart of Experience within. "The syntactic effects of the lack of good grammar are not random," Peter Middleton notes regarding Blake's prophetic works, and therefore need careful attention in any explicit reading of these texts. Although there is no single correct reading for many sections of the poems, this lack of unanimity is not a sign of chaos. If we listen to the syntactic forms we are given, we notice that alternate grammatical constructions coexist, and all are part of the meaning. (36) Blake sets this same "alternative" reading (and rereading) process in motion in Songs of Innocence .^ especially with his ambiguous and anomalous punctuation, diction, sentence construction, and symbols. Plunging, however, "through these supposed verbal trapdoors [the ambiguities and anomalies] and follow[ing] all their ramifying tunnels and subsidiary trapdoors until the whole structure is undermined or deconstructed" (Ferber 5) will not necessarily result in an "infinite number of arbitrary readings and no basis on which to choose among them" (Ferber 6) . Instead, such a study could satisfy one of Nelson Hilton's desires: "Rather than add to the infinitely proliferating possibilities of symbolic commentary, we might strive instead to study how Blake's polysemous words and context support each other. For, at least in part, how his text works is what it means" (Literal 11) . As Michael Ferber implies disparagingly but then scrambles later to deny, this study, once begun, must inevitably reach a painful, but obvious conclusion. The poems, at the bidding of Blake's ambiguities and anomalies, call on us to wipe away the patina of Innocence they supposedly sustain but cannot uphold.^ Edward Larrissy, speaking for most critics, would agree, but only up to a point. He writes that "although readers still come to Songs of Innocence with preconceptions that rule out irony, they generally change their minds in the end. Among critics the idea that there is an ironic element commands almost universal assent" (38) . For "once one is aware of the possibility [of an ironic reading], even the most innocuous-seeming lyric can be seen to contain implications that are hard to ignore" (Larrissy 61) . At the same time, however, the poems' ironic elements, the ambiguities and anomalies, have not yet had their ultimate significance fully expressed, a critical silence that originates, I believe, in a fear of reading the poems too ironically. For if we pointed out how the children may not be entirely trusting or trustworthy; if we showed that the Innocents might suffer without being redeemed or protected; if we revealed that any redemption, protection or blessing the Innocents do receive (even if divine) could be illusory or actually malign; if we explained that the children may be aware of their Innocence as such and so cannot retain that Innocence; and if we proved that the notion of Innocence can only be fabricated by the world of Experience and that there is nothing natural or divine about it, then the songs' Innocence would disintegrate on the spot, and with it our hope (as assigned to us by some critics*) of recovering and reliving that Innocence vicariously. Thus, readers who explore the irony of Songs too deeply risk discovering, one, that the poems are not about an attainable Innocence,' an Innocence retained or a potential Innocence,* but about Innocence lost or the impossibility of Innocence at all, and, two, that the poems can offer them no salvation from their Experienced state. Naturally, I do not want to insist that a completely ironic reading of Songs is the only one possible (just as I do not want to insist that I can follow all the possible alternatives the text has to offer) and so erect another "Single vision" or what Larrissy later calls "another critical idol" (63) . Given the reader-response, Derridean and narratological theories that have allowed scholars to supplant the unironic readings of Songs some critics still plead for' with a field of polyvalent interpretations,* I certainly cannot. But neither can I ignore the evidence with which the criticism, the text and Blake himself provide me for the possibility of such an extreme reading. Although one might accuse me of only trying to fill chinks in the critical wall surrounding Blake's Songs, I would argue that I am setting the column that ends and stabilizes that wall, a task inspired in part by prior critical reluctance to do 5 so. Also, one might say that I am simply reading my own cynicism, my own Experience, into the poems —the loss of objectivity any scholar working with a primarily reader- response approach risks. For example, Lorraine Clark suggests that Blake's "obscurities" make any elements of Experience that result from them products of the readers' Experience.