250 Years of William Blake
January 17th, 2007
‘Tyger, Tyger’ was my first experience of Blake’s poetry. I was ten years old and our table in English performed it to the beat of a drum, which we had pinched from the music room to reinforce the trochaic rhythm–or what we knew as the “tum-ta” sound.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
I admit I had no idea whatsoever what the poem meant at the time. But I can remember being chastised by our English teacher whenever we pronounced symmetry as “symme-trigh”, to rhyme with the “eye”.
I was reintroduced with this poem in my current English class, as part of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. I hadn’t looked at the poem seriously since I was ten and at first it was just lovely to reacquaint myself with the rhythm and pronounce the “trigh” as much as I wanted. I can’t think of a better context in which to study Innocence and Experience than those memories of enjoying the poem when I was completely innocent: to me the sole instance of a teacher correcting my “mispronunciation” of symmetry perfectly embodies the “Contrary States of the Human Soul”.
Blake used a special technique called relief etching that allowed him to couple poetry and drawings on a single page. You can enjoy his poetry without seeing them in their original context, but once you have seen his “illuminated books”, there is a clear feeling of seeing a truly completed thought. “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” on seeing the etching of the tiger, becomes Blake’s hand and how he feels about “framing” the tiger in such a way.
I bought the Oxford illustrated book of his poems, which I highly recommend: the paper is wonderfully white and crisp and really do the illustrated plates justice. Interestingly, when I was searching for the “Tyger” plate on the web, I found some alternative versions that portrayed the tyger like a smiling house-cat, rather than the fearsome creature in the book. I thought it was a modern joke, but it seems the following excerpt sheds some light on the matter:
In some copies of the book the animal is a ferocious carnivore painted in lurid colours. In others it appears to smile as if it were a tame cat. Perhaps Blake did not intend to dispel the mystery of his poem by painting an animal of consistent or obvious character.
–Sir Geoffrey Keynes “Songs of Innocence and Experience” (Oxford University Paperback)
The individual poems ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’, ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ and ‘The Lilly’ become a stream of consciousness when viewed in that order on the etchings. Love creates the jealous Rose. The Sunflower is forever trying to reach the unobtainable. Just like the youths who try to reach their unobtainable love, but pine “away with desire” only reaching “Where my Sun-flower wishes to go” in death. ‘The Lilly’ is Blake giving their cause hope: that love doesn’t have to be distorted in jealousy, or in inequality as in ‘My Pretty Rose Tree’. He says that you can “in Love delight” without the “thorn nor a threat” to “stain her beauty bright”.
Blake’s prophetic views: on the acceptance of love, freedom and oppression, religion and faith have endured because they are as relevant today as in his age. However only relatively recently, with his poem ‘Jerusalem’ being put to music by Hubert Parry in 1916, and his full collection being published in 1925 has Blake achieved widespread acclaim.
He largely shunned the academic institutions and students of his time, whom he saw largely as suffering from false pretences. He was schooled at home and took responsibility for his own learning from then on, which may account for some of his eclectic spelling & punctuation.
His uncompromising attitudes were directed foremost at the hypocrisy of the church, most apparent in such poems as ‘The Garden of Love’, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Experience) and ‘The Little Vagabond’. He abhorred slavery, conveyed in ‘The Little Black Boy’ and shows contemporary views on sexual equality in poems such as ‘A Little Girl Lost’. The most scathing attacks in the Innocence and Experience collection is on poverty, a theme that occurs frequently, but most powerfully in ‘London’.
Nevertheless his poems were not very popular in his time and were only circulated amongst a frugal group of friends. He had to scrape together a living etching commercially, which was something he continued to do until he died a relative pauper, to be buried in a common grave. His appal at so many areas of society was evidently not shared by the majority in his time.
Blake’s prescience is something I am particularly drawn to, which made ‘A Little Girl Lost’ and early favourite of mine:
Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.
He is hoping that things in the future will be different, which granted has happened to a certain extent. However you can still empathise with his sentiment, as many of the problems of his time continue to manifest themselves in our present. Reading it, knowing that I am one of the “Children of the future age” he was thinking about, affected me on a rather personal level. I have had that feeling with other poetry, but I don’t think it has ever been so direct; I think it’s because he states it so explicitly.
When Blake was young he saw angels in some trees in London, these visions were to be pervasive in many parts of his later life, inspiring him to create works which seem opaque to the casual reader. I don’t think I’m qualified–having read only one book of his poems–to make any extensive commentary on his more existential works, but I do see an allusion to these higher ideas in his poem ‘Infant Sorrow’:
My mother groand! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.Struggling in my father’s hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
The infant already has consciousness at the moment of birth; therefore there was a time before birth when we existed in the ether, with a wholly formed consciousness. The often cited analogy is to the prelapsarian state (the state before the fall of Adam and Eve in the Christian religion). If you want to see some further illustrations that show Blake’s “higher” ideas, then I recommend you have a look at the scans of his notebook, which have been put online as part of his 250th anniversary.
To me the enduring appeal of Blake is that while he has the ability to soar, he retains an acute ear and empathy for the everyday. Reading his Innocence and Experience collection, it is clear that while he can exist on a higher planes, he never loses sight of what is endearing to us as humans. Forgetting this is something that I think even the greatest artists and philosophers can be accused of, at some time or another.
I’ll read and–no doubt–enjoy further Blake poetry, but for me the most endearing qualities will remain with ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’…
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice…
January 21st, 2007 at 12:18 am
Paris and any other place they may or may not decide to take me to
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:06 pm
i like the piccies… they’re cool!
February 13th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Hi, share your interest in Blake. Have you checked out http://www.friendsofblake.org
There was a lovely feature on BBC Inside Out London on Fri in which the couple Luis and Carole Garrido described how they found the actual last resting place of Blake and now wish to put up a ‘proper’ memorial!
Also check out http://www.sahajayoga.org where you can experience what Blake was talking about in his work, self realisation - actual the connection to the Divine!!
Let me know how it goes..
catherine
cath [at] cekelly [dot] u-net [dot] [com]
ps there is also a nice Blake evening at the British Library on 5 March with other aficionados of Blake there to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his passing. see link: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/london/news/ART42734.html
February 13th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
Wow, thanks for all the information Catherine.
I’ll definitely spend some time looking into your links.