The Columbia History of British Poetry (78 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
6.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 327
Blake
Morton D. Paley
In 1783 a book called
Poetical Sketches by W. B.
was privately printed. The friend responsible adverted readers that its contents "were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye." With such an introduction, readers may have been expecting something like Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. If so, they must have been surprised to encounter a book of considerable sophistication, its poems reflecting an unusual range of the literary interests of the later eighteenth century: the Elizabethan lyric, Spenser's
Hymnes
, the Shakespearean history play, the ballads of Percy's
Reliques
, the Ossianic prose poem, and Gothic charnel house poetry. Yet these poems are by no means merely imitative. The opening addresses to the four seasons, perhaps the finest achievements in the volume, handle their central, Age-of-Sensibility personifications in such a way as to make them border on myth:
O thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro' the dear windows of the morning; turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
An "untutored youth" who could so delicately combine the abstract and the sensuous was clearly headed for a remarkable poetic career. The
 
Page 328
particular nature of that career was to be deeply affected by his "attainment of excellence in his profession."
William Blake was an engraver's apprentice for seven years, and then studied drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts. Gifted visually as well as verbally, he taught himself to combine word and image in a new formilluminated printing. After
Poetical Sketches
his books were not issued in letterpress (although a single set of printed proofs, dated 1791, exists for a poem called
The French Revolution
). Blake was himself the author, designer, and publisher of his works. Typically, he drew his designs and wrote his text (in mirror writing) on copper plates, etched the plates, inked them, printed them in relief, and painted the sheets in water colors. However, some of his illuminated books were color-printed in the 1790s, and a few were printed in intaglio. In the resulting work, design could be as important as text. We should therefore be aware that in discussing Blake's poetry out of its illuminated visual context, we are leaving out one dimension of his composite art. Nevertheless, his poetry has a rich textual existence, whether in the lyricism of the
Songs of Innocence
or in the "strong heroic Verse" of
The Four Zoas
. Those who have come to appreciate Blake's poetry have usually come to it through typographic texts, and even Blake scholars read Blake's calligraphic hand only for their own special purposes.
Blake's first illuminated book of poetry was
Songs of Innocence
, issued in 1789 and then combined with
Songs of Experience
in 1794 to make a dual volume subtitled
Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul
. The Contrary States sometimes appear overtly, as in poems paired by the same title or by obviously contrasting figures, sometimes by implication. What is common to both States is incompleteness, despite the apparent attractiveness of Innocence and the apparent wisdom of Experience. This can be seen, for example, in the two poems entitled "The Chimney Sweeper." In
Innocence
we have a poem with a beautiful surface and some disturbing moral assumptions. The speaker's attempt to console Tom Dacre "when his head / That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shaved" seems close to a sick joke"for when your head's bare / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair" (58). Similarly off-putting is the Angel's injunction to Tom that "if he'd be a good boy, / He'd have God for his father & never want joy" (1920). There is something smarmy about this Angel's endorsement of a God of good boys, and the conclusion would be appalling if taken at face value: "Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm, / So if all do their duty,
 
Page 329
they need not fear harm" (2324). This seems to enjoin the sort of contentment the child is made to promise at Confirmation in the Book of Common Prayer:
To honor and obey the king and his ministers. To submit myself to an my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters. Not to covet nor desire other men's goods. But learn and labor truly to get my own living, and do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.
(The Book of Common Prayer, 1559)
Blake knew that such carrion comfort the mind appalls, as does the Chimney Sweeper of
Experience
. This child has been reduced to a mere object, "a little black thing," but he is precociously aware of his condition. Cued by a presumably adult interrogator, he bitterly remarks that his father and mother have gone up to Church "to praise God & His Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery" (1112). In the reverberations of such a powerful statement, it is tempting to disregard the vision of the first Chimney Sweeper altogether. Yet Blake wasn't an innocent child in 1789; he was in his thirty-second year, and it's hard to believe that he was an exceptionally late bloomer who only heard the voice of Experience three or four years later. (It's true that earlier versions of three
Songs of Innocence
were included ca. 1784 in the manuscript satire
An Island in the Moon
, but even then Blake was a mature adult and presented a very Experienced portrait of himself as Quid the Cynic). The first Sweeper's vision of boys "leaping laughing" down a green plain is succeeded but not obliterated by the direct statement of things-as-they-are of the second speaker. Each version of reality is incomplete.
The oppositions and disjunctions of the two Contrary states appear throughout
Innocence and Experience
in other pairs like the two "Holy Thursday" poems, in contrastive figures like the Lamb and the Tyger, the Piper and the Bard, and in counterstatements like "The Divine Image" and "the Human Abstract." Another kind of disjunction is found in "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found.'' This pairoriginally part of
Innocence
but moved into
Experience
in later copies of the combined
Songs
may anticipate a resolution of contraries, but the resolution they present is a false one. Little Lyca, only seven summers old, wanders into the desert, where she falls asleep and is viewed by a "kingly lion" and other beasts of prey. These gambol around her and then convey her "naked" to their "caves" (5152).
 
Page 330
Here we can recognize the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences, according to which different animals represent different affections. The wild beasts have to do with the child's sexuality, something of which Blake was explicitly aware (as in
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
6:4, where he calls infancy "lustful"). The parents in the second Lyca poem search for their child, but the child "Starv'd in desart wild" is only a "fancied image" (12, 14). The reader knows that Lyca is in good hands (or paws), and therefore the parents' anxiety projects their own fear of sexuality. The irony deepens when the mother collapses into a virtual personification, carried by the father "arm'd with sorrow sore" (22); more effectual arms are borne by the lion, "a spirit arm'd in gold,'' who shows them "their sleeping child / Among tygers wild" (36, 4748). Yet this is not a true solution. The "lonely dell" they all dwell in "To this day" (50, 49) anticipates "th' untrodden ways" among which Wordsworth's Lucy lived, but even with "very few to love" her, Lucy was better off than Lyca. Lyca's sexuality has been accepted, but what is she going to do with it if she lives only with her parents and with beasts who may become spirits but not human beings? The persistent theme of the
Songs
is the disjunction of the Contraries, not their resolution.
The interplay of Innocence and Experience is also the subject of two longer works concerning, on one level at least, the descent of the soul and its vicissitudes in the lower world. These are
The Book of Thel
(1789, but with a final plate that may have been etched in 1791 or later) and
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
(1793).
Thel
begins in a pastoral landscape in which the heroine experiences intimations of mortality. She is reassured of the unity of all life by the Lilly of the valley, the Cloud, the Worm, and, finally, allowed to enter the world of Experience vicariously through the house of "the matron Clay." Thel sees nothing but sexual strife, sorrows and tears in the lower world, and she flies back to her cloistered and neglected virtue.
Visions
takes up the theme of what happens to a woman brave enough not to retreat. Oothoon, an incarnation of female desire, is on her way to make a gift of her virginity ("the bright Marygold of Leutha's vale," 1:5) to Theotormon, the man she loves. She is attacked and raped by Bromion who then, in a reenactment of the story of Amnon and Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, blames it all on her. Theotormon, truly the god-tormented man, laments, despite Oothoon's insistence that "I am pure" (2:28).
Although Oothoon, like Mary Wollstonecraft in
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, condemns "this hypocrite modesty" (6:16),
Visions
is

Other books

Her Favoured Captain by Francine Howarth
My Brother's Shadow by Tom Avery
Black Water by Louise Doughty
The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop
Driving the King by Ravi Howard
Just Business by Ber Carroll
Dangerous Magic by Rickloff, Alix
Single & Single by John Le Carré
Plague Town by Dana Fredsti