William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience': Genesis and Context, Study notes of Voice

Download William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience': Genesis and Context and more Study notes Voice in PDF only on Docsity! Nelson Hilton --"William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience" in The Blackwell Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). "Read patiently take not up this Book in an idle hour the consideration of these things is the whole duty of man & the affairs of life & death trifles sports of time these considerations business of Eternity." Blake's annotations to a volume he studied in 1798 (see Blake, ed. Erdman [E] 611) can serve today to characterize the attention deserved and significance offered by the most familiar work of England's "last great religious poet" (Ackroyd 18) and "greatest revolutionary artist" (Eagleton, in Larrissy ix). What we know as his Songs of Innocence and of Experience begins in the publication, over the space of thirty-five years, of fifty copies of Songs of Innocence and twenty-eight of Songs of Experience, from which were constituted the two dozen actual sets of the combined Songs, variously ordered and with a joint title page. The work in its full form consists of fifty-four designs and poems which only in the last few copies follow the sequence adopted by almost every modern edition. These Blake etched in relief on relatively small (7 x 11 cm) copper plates, printed, often coloured, and bound: his title page gives equal weight to his labours as "Author & Printer," and expects no less of his readers.(1) Composition also was protracted -- while the poems and designs of Innocence are dated 1789, three early drafts surface in a 1785 manuscript which also reveals the 28-year-old artist's predilection for "making a fool" of the reader ( E 453); Songs of Experience and the joint title page are dated 1794, and one poem ("To Tirzah") appears a few years after that. The five epochal years between the title page dates of Innocence and Experience bracket the bulk of Blake's so-called "Bible of Hell," including remarkable works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (MHH), VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion, and, also dated 1794, The Book of Urizen. As part of the "discovery" or "invention" of childhood in the eighteenth century associated with the interest in early education shown by Locke, Rousseau, and the Sunday School movement, the decades before the Songs saw the genre of short collections of devotional and moral poems for children emerge as a "most prolific and controversial literary form" (Shrimpton 22). The genre's mainstay was Isaac Watts's Divine and Moral Songs Attempted in easy Language, for the Use of Children, 1715, influential enough to be parodied not only by Blake (in "A Cradle Song"), but still later in Alice in Wonderland; other titles could be cited, however, including Charles Wesley's Hymns for Children, 1763; Christopher Smart's Hymns for the Amusement of Children, 1770; and Anna Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children, 1781. These works make a small sub-set of eighteenth- century hymnody, itself arguably the most pervasively influential innovation of cultural discourse in Blake's time. While it has long been recognized that in terms of metrical and stanzaic variety, Blake's songs "make as clear a parallel with eighteenth-century hymns, as they make a contrast with eighteenth-century lyric" (Holloway 37), their contrast with the ideological burden of hymns has yet to be explored fully. If John Wesley could preface his brother's hymns with the hope that once children "understand them they will be children no longer, only in years and stature," then Blake might counter that if adults could understand his songs, their "doors of perception" might be cleansed (MHH 14). Following his own interpretation of the Gospel, Blake thinks "every Thing to be Evident to the Child" (E 664), and writes that "the innocence of a child" can reproach the reader "with the errors of acquired folly" (E 600). His songs "about" or "from the perspective of" a guiltless point of view offer parables to test what such pure perception might be, and how our sense might be folly. The girl and boy learning to read at the lap of their nurse or mother who appear on the Innocence title page announce recurrent concern with education in Songs. This group announces the "scene of instruction" to be found in or behind almost every song. The quintessential object of instruction is, in one form or another, language and the concomitant ability to play with the symbolic order, and Songs might be taken as evoking stations along a gradient beginning with total ignorance of that realm of symbol and culture and ending with original artistic contribution. These various stations can be shuffled in the various sequences of different copies of Songs -- there is no one developmental path, no single authorized reading. From a social perspective, the poems represent minute particulars from the spectrum of discourses across the social field. These different, often "contrary" stations or moments are rooted in the individual poems and designs themselves, making lack of single meaning a crucial point about each of the Songs. Given inescapable divisions in self and society, a Wordsworthian "common language of men" is impossible for Blake (Glen 106). There are no lyric effusions of emotion recollected, but rather dramatic stagings of language in action (see Gillham) -- as the few readings which follow hope to suggest. Many readers have found the ballad-like "Introduction" to Innocence a commentary on individual and cultural artistic development, which moves from ("pipes down") pre-verbal, pure sound inspiration to sung words to written text -- and, simultaneously, from a state of presence and mutual participation to one of absence and emphatic separateness (the penultimate four lines which begin "And I"). This process also foregrounds Blake's ongoing concern with identity (repetition, sameness) and difference, as elsewhere in the focus on "echoing": in what sense is a song "the same again" if it is rendered in words rather than sound? In Blake's time, especially with the popular "Glee Club" movement, "glee" was familiar as a song scored for three or more voices to make up a series of interwoven melodies -- a meaning applicable throughout to these "songs of pleasant glee." The poem's closing sets up the paradoxical realization that the only way "every child may joy to hear" the song is through its being sung by one who has learned to read. So we return to the issue of inspiration and transmission, of the "pipe," the conduit, the I (to represent it typographically). The engendering spring of the song-stream comes to readers via the "hollow reed" of the pipe and the pen, but for hearers requires that readers reinspire (literally, blow into again) the otherwise "hollow read" of the text. The child asks the piper to pipe then to sing about "a Lamb," and while "The Lamb" follows in one copy, "The Shepherd" comes next in most. These pastoral references, as well as the term "innocence" itself, indicate the Christian imagery and themes which saturate Songs. The complex and idiosyncratic nature of Blake's Christianity has yet to receive full consideration, but any account must reckon with his apparent childhood in a private, radical Protestant sect, the Muggletonians (see Thompson), his later involvement with Swedenborg and the "New Church," his professional connections to the Dissenters, and his own various pronouncements -- those on the equivalence of Christ and imagination not least. In annotations written around the time of Innocence, Blake argues "So your chimneys I sweep" (emphasis added). The last line then tests your response-ability, which will decide its inflection and with that, your position vis-à-vis an "all" who have not, by some reckonings, given due to the sweeps and who should perhaps fear possible harm at the hands of mobilized "thousands of sweepers." Imagine, for instance, the tone of the Blake's contemporary Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, a popular educator and pioneer in the Sunday School movement, who wrote in 1792 concerning the establishment of "schools of industry" for the "inferior sorts" of children: ... it cannot be right to train them all in a way which will most probably raise their ideas above the very lowest occupations of life, and disqualify them for those servile offices which must be filled by some of the members of the community, and in which they may be equally happy with the highest, if they will do their duty. (See Gardiner 83) "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found" are clearly to be taken together, as their shared middle plate insists. Like two other poems, "The School Boy" and "The Voice of the Ancient Bard," they appear first in Songs of Innocence, but often move to Experience in the joint collection, suggesting again the experience of changing perspective to be crucial to Songs. The two poems seem obviously allegorical, but of what? The absence of compelling interpretations -- invocations of the soul's journey, the myth of Persephone, and female adolescence notwithstanding -- suggests that the text may be a failure of obscurity. But if one sees Songs as concerned with the learning of language, which means, inevitably, wrestling with figurative language and the symbolic transferences which permit allegory, metaphor, and complex verbal meaning, then one might pause again over the protagonist's name, "Lyca." By way of context, consider Blake's treatment of another virginal figure in The Book of Thel, published the same year as Songs of Innocence: Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. And like a parting cloud. Like a reflection in a glass. Like shadows in the water. Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face (1.8-10) Here again, as with "Infant Joy," we circle around what has no name, and what in being named becomes defined and finite, subject to the limitations of our vocabulary. Lyca is like a figure for figuration -- a literalization of what happens when, in her poem, we try to grasp or impose our "fancied image" for all that might be meant by "sleep," "tree," "lion" "ruby tears." Imagine the poem itself, that emanation of the artist's mind, as "The Little Girl Lost" (just like Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray") and perhaps being found forever still the little girl is a distressing experience of innocence. Point of view and desire for certainty are also at stake in the poem which often closes Innocence, "On Anothers Sorrow." Here every reader at least considers the possibility of another answer to the excessive rhetoric: Can a mother sit and hear, An infant groan an infant fear-- No no never can it be. Never never can it be. Even William Cowper, in a hymn Blake would have known, answers the analogous question "Can a woman's tender care / Cease towards the child she bare," with an honest "Yes, she may forgetful be" (437). In Blake's poem the reiterated "Think not" collides with the concluding reality of "our grief" (not "another's" after all!) to end the poem, and Innocence, with "moan." So we confront at once our distance from such naive denial and the powerful (dare one say "innocent"?) longing such fantasy exerts for at least some part of us. It is the Chimney Sweeper's consolation for Tom Dacre writ large, and sometimes as effective. "Language is the house of Being," according to Heidegger's famous figure (see Steiner 127) but for Blake, as for Wordsworth, that structure becomes for most a prison-house maintained by "pre- established codes," by cliché and convention. The warden of the prison-house, the fashioner of "mind-forgd manacles," the force that has barred us from the play of Being in language, as from the stunning energy of true poetry, can be seen as "the bard." The fallacy in crediting such assumed authority looms in the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience, where, by the eighth line, three distinct subjects "might controll / The starry pole." With its echoes of Jeremiah ("O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord") and the God of Paradise Lost ("past, present, future he beholds"), the bard seems to command reverence -- but as in other cases, on inspection, the compelling language breaks into mumbo jumbo, etched on a plate whose vista of stars is graphically barred by the cloud of words. Students of the Bible, and of Wesley's great hymn, "Wrestling Jacob," will recognize that it is the opportunity to struggle for blessing or interpretation from a sacred messenger that is given "till the break of day." The religious references resonate with the particularly eighteenth-century, evangelical sense of "experience" as the inner history of one's religious emotion (see OED, s.v., 4b) -- indeed, "hymn of experience" appears throughout accounts of Methodism. The scene of instruction accosts the reader directly in "London," whose speaker's repeated self- reference makes him or her emphatically "here" and demanding dialogue. For "I hear" asks implicitly, "do you hear?" -- which is to say, "are you here?" "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," is one inspired teacher's reiterated elliptical comment, but the general lack of comprehension for the parables, says Jesus, fulfills the prophecy of Esaias that: "...hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive" (Matt. 13:14). So, what do we hear, here in this poem? "Mine" or "mind"? "Forg'd" or "fraudulent"? "Man" in manacles? Whatever it is, however it works, it is everywhere mined and forged in the hearth of the heard and seen in the here and now of everyday Babelondon. Amidst the din of official "chartered" ideologies and unexamined lives, the speaker strives to unlock the reader by the multiplication of significance, breaking chains of thought and speech at their weakest link, the idea of a single meaning, univocal sign. This deconstruction involves asserting a new synaesthetic logic for eye and ear. Thus we are urged to hear how a sigh runs in blood, how the sweepers' cry makes pale a blackening St. Paul's -- in short, we must learn to see, hear in a new way: The mind-forg'd manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro' midnight streets I hear The small shock of perceptual expansion occasioned by the acrostic can stand for the larger reconfiguring necessary if we are to attend truly to the voice of the barred. In the final stanza, what is heard is not the "curse" ending the second line, but, again, how it blasts the "tear" which ends the third and rhymes back to "hear." These rhymes, "... hear/ ...curse/ ... tear/," bring to bear the contrary dictions of sight and sound as we hear, see them coalesce in the final sight and sound rhyme, "hearse." The oxymoronic image of the "marriage hearse" points to the impossibility of imagining that sight and sound, sign and meaning can be eternally linked or chartered, and in its unexpected juxtaposition of "hearse" for "bed" asserts an intelligence and point of view which calls our own to account. That everyone who has stopped us with a claim to hear voices and see invisible marks can be dismissed as crazy does not mean that we are never to imagine the evidence of things unseen According to a recent collection of "the top 500 poems" as determined by computer analysis of hundreds of anthologies, the now most published poem in the language is "The Tyger." Or should we write, to follow the renaming of that anthology (Harmon 1077) and some other editors, "The Tiger"? Would it make any difference to an artist who writes "tiger" when he wishes, and who asserts elsewhere that "Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place"? (E 146) What of the asymmetrical rhyme, in the beat of the poem's dread feet, of the word "symmetry"? Shall we pronounce it to match with "eye"? And what of the notoriously toy-like, even bemused feline whose illustration seems so incongruous with the celebrated words? The poem's insistent rhetorical and figural emphasis -- beginning with the opening hurdle of metaphor, "Tyger Tyger, burning bright" -- announces a text which will test the language sensitivity Songs explores. Either we are not concerned with a conventional "tiger," or with usual "burning," or both. Before the poem beguiles us to the self-congratulation of some imaginary theodicy by the answering of its questions, consider, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, the implications: ... a question's purpose is not, as is commonly thought, to solicit information, but to elicit an answer, to establish a relation of power between questioner and questioned. It is a striking feature of questions that he who asks them establishes, by the very act of asking them, his right to question, his expectation of an answer, and his power to elicit one. (46) In "The Tyger," if we answer, we become like God -- a temptation which as proved alluring enough, it would appear, to make the language's top poem. Well might the illustrated Tyger smile over this ultimate fooling of readers. The decades of answers which make up "Tyger studies" must be passed over for a few observations. Given the expense of copper, Blake etched both sides of the plates for Songs (using small dikes of wax around each side) and exact measurements indicate that the question "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" can refer to the poem of that name only millimeters away on the flip side and a few years older. On the one hand, it is the "Author & Printer" himself who dares seize the "brightness of fancy; power of genius ... poetic inspiration" which his contemporaries characterized as "fire" (OED, s.v.). Part of that genius seems to concern with the author's appropriation of Milton, who writes in Paradise Lost that the Creator "of Celestial Bodies first the sun / A mighty Sphear he fram'd" (7.354-5). In a work dated the year after Experience, Blake's creator figure Los similarly makes a celestial body: he beats "Roaring ... bright sparks" with a "vast Hammer" on "the Anvil" until "An immense Orb of fire he fram'd," at which he "smiled with joy" (E 98) -- momentarily regaining the flow, the peak experience of the artist's unspeakable "infant joy." (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977) [includes detailed descriptions of the various copies of Songs, and an extensive bibliography of criticism] _____: Blake Books Supplement: A Bibliography of Publications and Discoveries about William Blake 1971-1992, being a Continuation of Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) [again, use the index to access criticism on particular poems] Cowper, William and John Newton: Olney Hymns (1779), Vol. 3 of The Works of John Newton (London 1826), (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1988). Gardner, Stanley: Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced ( London and New York, Athlone Press and St. Martin's, 1986). [good on London background] Gillham, D. G.: Blake's Contrary States: The Songs of Innocence and of Experience as Dramatic Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Gleckner, Robert F. and Mark L. Greenberg, ed.: Approaches to Teaching Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience (New York: Modern Language Association, 1989). [highly useful collection of materials and approaches] Glen, Heather: Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). [good on the context of eighteenth-century children's verse] Harmon, William: The Top 500 Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Holloway, John: Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968). Leader, Zachery.: Reading Blake's Songs (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Larrissy, Edward: William Blake, preface by Terry Eagleton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Lecercle, Jean-Jacques: The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1990). Lindsay, David W.: Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989) [one of the series "the Critics Debate"--will they take up the dropped preposition?] Shrimpton, Nick. "Hell's Hymnbook: Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and their Models", Literature of the Romantic Period, 1750-1850, ed. R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976), pp. 19-35. Steiner, George: Martin Heidegger (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1980). Thompson, E. P.: Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993). Viscomi, Joseph.: Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) [exhaustive treatment of Blake's actual etching process and its consequences for his work] Watts, Isaac: Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715), (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1837). Wesley, Charles: Hymns for children, and persons of riper years; 4th ed. (London, 1784) [preface by John Wesley] 1. The best generally available facsimile is that edited by Lincoln. A hypertext version, which facilitates experience of the various sequences and includes annotated bibliographies, can be accessed at this site; color reproductions will be found at the web site for The Blake Archive.