William Blake

“ Those whose feelings are expressed in some such words as these always utter their view with an emphasis and a determination which shows that any attempt to differ from them would produce only anger, and would lead to no change in the attitude of their minds. And yet they are people with whom it is impossible not to sympathize. Their error and their anger spring from a true love of poetry, a love that is jealous of the entrance of symbolism into verse, as though this were an intrusion. ”

“ Should anyone be depressed by the faded and scentless rhymes of a teacher here, or a teacher there, until he is inclined to become himself the worst and most prosaic of all by giving forth as a critical law the absurd maxim that poetry should not teach, because teaching is unsuited to poetry—Blake is here to put him to shame and silence. ”

“ No one willingly or cheerfully proposes to a reader and lover of Blake to turn away from the pleasure of the poetry and harass his mind by studying a prose explanation of the meaning. Yet such annoyance as is felt in the study of the vast net-work of myth and symbol to which every phrase is more or less related, turns to greater pleasure in the end. ”

“ It is our danger as well as our delight. Through it our emotions take on an intensity needful for our eternal growth, while our minds are apt to succumb to the deceit of Reason (as we arrogantly call the mere "ratio of the Five Senses") until we "forget eternity." This narrow bodily or restrictive portion of mind will die and be dissipated with our decomposition after death. It is not wanted in eternity. Here Blake spoke with the materialists who consider thought as a function of the brain. But an effect remains. There is a something in us, not our temporary reason or senses. ”

“ It bids her cease to know good and evil,—to disgorge from the spirit's choked throat the deadly apple that stops the pure breath of eternity. The starry floor—thought, and the watery shore,—emotion are given to the lapsed soul. ”

“ This one Man he calls Christ, for Christ when viewed as "The Door" is Imagination, while he is Emotion when viewed as "The Vine." Every mood and every truth within each of us is also a man, and when perverted from eternal purpose fights for its own little life and seeks to master its fellows and us, just as our selfishness would, if it could, teach us to master each other and God.
Many people have held views not unlike these. No other but Blake vivified the divided portions as a great myth, and lived for the uniting portion as a great purpose. ”

“ But the process of making songs does not tell us all about them. We should know something of the ancestry of the convictions and emotions from which the very meaning has its birth. The reader takes the songs first, and if he enjoys them, may perhaps care to look for a meaning afterwards. But the poet began with the meaning, which first took the form of songs by love of the musical impulse, itself a part of the same mind,—an Eve of the otherwise childless Adam. In Blake's poetry the meaning is easy to find when once we know the man. ”

“ But emotions, though also temporary, live, by means of their effect in producing sympathy, for sympathy is the apprenticeship through which we go before our pre-natal state regains its power of merging the One in the Everyone. Meantime we suffer, as well as enjoy. Our mortal part is framed in "cruelty" as well as in "deceit." The main business of life is to keep our minds open to imagination and brotherhood while going through the experience whose danger is that it leads to materialistic reason and jealous individuality. ”

“ In truth there is no book of Blake's so difficult to thoroughly understand as this collection of songs. The difficulty is increased by the sweetness and charm of the poetry. It seems almost a sin, and surely a folly, to awake ourselves with an effort of will from the half-dreamy enjoyment which we can receive here at our ease, and begin the serious task of giving ourselves an exact account of every word. The Introduction says that the Songs are addressed to children. To look deeply into them would be anything but a proof of profundity in the critic. ”

“ Do all poets with a purpose allow their songs to grow into existence through this healthful and natural order of change? Do they not habitually begin with the pen? The secret of the difference between Blake and so many others is not far to seek. ”

“ Symbolism, as they know, often springs from a systematic use of metaphor, persisted in until figures of speech become technical terms, so that what was once a beautiful image and a vivid illustration descends into a slavery of repetition and becomes—or would become but for its beauty—little better than an addition to that degraded language of the illiterate classes called slang. Symbolism is, indeed, all this, and more. ”

“ We are from eternity, Blake believed, real spirits—so independent of the sequence of Time and Space that the very word from, when used before eternity, is almost a mistake. We have in us a capacity of vitalizing a portion of ourselves, not used before birth, called the Body—actually a phase of mind fathered by Time and mothered by Space, solidified by the Five Senses. ”

“ Then, instead of finding that the poetry of the poems has been frightened away by the symbolism, the reader perceives it to sing with a triple music; for now to the melody of the words and of the images is added a newer, sweeter, deeper cadence of magic potency.
Innocence and Experience are contrasted with one another because Blake's religious feelings forbade him to contrast Innocence and Guilt. To do so was to take up the method of Satan—the Accuser. There is no sin like the sin of accusation, because there is nothing so truly characteristic of the great Enemy. ”

“ In "London" the failure of restrictive law to give any energy to the real life or love of the soul is indignantly declared.
The "Human Abstract" is a lyrical epitome of many pages in the prophetic Books. The story and meaning of the person called "Urizen" in the myth is here to be found foreshadowed, but without the name. The "Book of Urizen" has the same date as the Songs of Experience.
Infant Sorrow is the companion to Infant Joy and repeats the story of the "Human Abstract" in its infantile form. This is the Natural Man, the mortal. His personality is purely selfish,—a fiend. ”

“ Earth demands to be relieved from the restrictions of the body that oblige her spirit to know of love through the flesh—an evil as great as though the ploughman were compelled to plough in darkness and the seedsman sow by night. ”

“ Meanwhile, one evil breeds another. Dark flesh breeds dark law, and the chain of jealousy, called morality, even freezes around the bones in whose cage we must needs learn what of love we may. Naturally, there are two sorts of love in us, as there are two selves. The clod and the pebble, soft dark earth and hard dark earth, tell each other of the two loves in the next poem. Even children are made prisoners to cold charity, as our infant emotions are to the chill restraints that hardly allow them food. ”

“ God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But doth a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day." ”

“ The "Human Abstract" is not a soothing song, nor is the "Divine Image." Even the "Little Black Boy" is no nursery rhyme. The words of the Bard to Earth, and Earth's Answer, are weighty with some intention that does not at first appear. ”

“ From the body springs egotism of all kinds, for this is born with the limited personality, and must die with it. Conscience, as a restrainer of this personality, and law and all that belongs to the Fall,—which was a fall from the eternal into the temporal state,—die with the phase of life with which they deal. ”

“ In the end Blake utters his favourite claim for poetic inspiration as being a better and truer guide for life than argument and troublesome searchings into natural fact. In his essay on Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, printed in the Descriptive Catalogue, he describes how, in his own picture, he represents Chaucer riding beside the Clerk of Oxenford "as if the youthful clerk had put himself under the tuition of the mature poet," and adds, "Let the Philosopher always be the servant and scholar of inspiration and all will be happy." ”

“ In "the Angel," the story of youth arming itself with modesty and hiding from its own spirit the delight of its own heart, until the helplessness of old age makes all arming and hiding unneeded, requires no explanation. ”

“ The doctrine is the reverse of the preaching of asceticism or of Puritanism. The change in the "new worlds" does not merely regenerate the lion. It justifies him in having been first generated. Each "world" is a mood, one of those personal "states" into which the soul enters as it goes on its eternal voyage. In this poem, the sun descending in the West, and the golden tears of the re-born lion, are related to the mystic and mythic system of all the later books ”

“ Those who would break through the bondage are lost. A little girl—a soft, feminine emotion—goes wandering among the wild-beast passions. But they are good to her, for she is no accuser of sin. Yet her parents mourn and seek her, believing that evil will come to her. ”

“ The "Little Vagabond" with its audaciously prosaic and bewilderingly blunt language, is cruelly placed below the finest of all the designs, representing the great reconciliation, that of God and Adam, in whose bosom is the "Devil" to whom the poem wishes "drink and apparel." They kneel to each other, one in contrition, the Other in pity.
"London" shows London personated as an old man "blind and age-bent, begging through the streets of Babylon, led by a child." Instinct or innocence guiding worn-out reason through the mazes of morality, one of Blake's favourite subjects. ”

“ The poem "To Tirzah" ends with a design that continues it—two females helplessly supporting a dying man. They are in red and grey, and show the temporary emotions, sad and glad, that are now of no avail. God the father brings him the waters of life. That there might be no error as to the effect the draught will produce, Blake has printed on his garments the warning of St. Paul against all misconception about the resurrection: "It is raised a spiritual body." ”

“ It is not certain that Blake himself knew, when he wrote the first portion of these Songs, what most of the names in his great myth would be. He never seems to have been proud of his own wonderful capacity of giving names to visionary forms. On the contrary, he seems to be surprised when one appears without telling its own name, as in the song "Infant Joy." ”

“ Yet when they go where she is (when do parents in real life make this journey?) they also find that what was called evil and destruction is neither the one nor the other. But when once they have allowed sympathy to take them to the desert, there must be no return if they are to live fearless, while the wolves and lions howl and growl. ”

“ Which if Man ceases to behold he ceases to exist."
In passing now to the Songs of Experience we enter altogether a new region. It is understood now that we are in the state when the soul has "lapsed" in the evening dew. Five years have passed since the Songs of Innocence were written, perhaps even more, for the date, 1789, on their title-page represents the year when the plates were engraved, not necessarily that of the composition of the poems. The Songs of Experience bear date 1794. ”

“ The serpent at the foot of Earth's Answer is almost an additional sentence to the song, so clearly does it show the source of all bondage. In the "Clod and the Pebble," the symbolic sheep and cattle that tread the clod are easy to understand. The frogs, worm, and duck drawn below, are elementary inhabitants of the watery world. ”