The sightless couriers are there too, in equine form as suggested by the word “horsed.” Their eyes are closed to indicate sightlessness, though what Shakespeare probably meant—as Johnson suggested in his edition of the play—was that wind is invisible. A second cherub, with arms outstretched, looks off into the distance, half-hidden in shadow so as not to detract from the luminous central image. The celestial horses hurtle forward with immense energy, making the female cherub’s tender intervention all the more moving. Lashing rain suggests the tears that drown the wind.
The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an early admirer of Blake (and owner of his precious manuscript notebook), is an admirable guide to this picture:
Upon a green sward, wonderful in detail of form and colour, a beautiful woman lies, her stiffened body covered with a drapery of greyish white. Above her leaden clouds break in a storm of wind and rain, through which, in furious flight, rush the white “couriers of the air.” Gaunt and blind, with flying manes and tails, they sweep across the sky, while from the nearer horse a Spirit leans and snatches up the “naked newborn babe” from beside the dying mother. The more distant rider, with widespread arms and streaming hair, seems a part of the storm. . . . The flying vision is tremendously vivid in effect, seeming almost like a pale lightning flash cleaving the darkness.8
Father Thames was a more or less literal equivalent for Gray’s lines, but even there Blake was able to express not just the immediate address to the river but the mood of the poem as a whole. In Pity he goes much further. Who, after all, is the woman on the ground? There is no mother in Shakespeare’s lines. She may be dying in childbirth, as Rossetti thought; a later commentator suggests that she may represent the virtues of the doomed Duncan: “It is implicitly Duncan’s pleading virtues that give birth to the babe of Pity, and the mother in the print is indeed pleading.”9 Quite possibly Blake means the cherub’s face to resemble that of the woman below, as if a projection of her spirit; it is notable that they share the same conical hairdo. In Pity—if that is indeed the correct title—we are presented with extraordinarily complex imagery, taking off from Macbeth’s speech to create a conceptual universe that is altogether Blake’s own. As always, his goal is not to convey an explicit message but to rouse the faculties to act.
A Sunshine Holiday
With both Father Thames and Pity, Blake may have thought that he was simply bringing out the essential meaning of the words. In other illustrations he goes well beyond them, subjecting the poet’s conception to a critique that draws on his own mythical thinking. A Sunshine Holiday (color plate 2) is based on two passages in Milton’s poem L’Allegro:
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest. . . .
Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequered shade;
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.
Blake wrote a description of his picture, in which he emphasized his conception of a humanized nature: “Mountains clouds rivers trees appear humanized on the sunshine holiday. The church steeple with its merry bells; the clouds arise from the bosoms of mountains, while two angels sound their trumpets in the heavens to announce the sunshine holiday.”10
The scene is predominantly cheerful, as it should be, for L’Allegro is explicitly opposed to its melancholy companion poem Il Penseroso. The church among the trees at far left must be the source of the bell-ringing mentioned by Milton, and a musician with a rebeck—a kind of violin—accompanies the youthful dancers. But Blake has added the visionary trumpeters on high. The dancers are tripping around a maypole, traditional emblem of courtship and fertility, and the figures at the right represent the community as a whole from childhood to old age. Since the dancers are in sunlight, it must be the woods that represent the “chequered shade.” Johnson quotes Milton’s lines to illustrate “to chequer”: “to diversify, in the manner of a chessboard, with alternate colours or with darker and brighter parts.”
Everything else in the picture is entirely original with Blake, apart from adopting Milton’s rather casual reference to mountains with clouds on them, and showing an “upland hamlet” at their foot. Here his mountain is fully humanized, just as the Thames had been, and she has a city in her loins. She holds one nipple in the classical pose of Rhea producing the Milky Way, which hardly suggests a “barren breast,” and her hair turns into a waterfall.11 This becomes the source of a river that flows below, poured out of an urn by a river goddess. She is apparently drinking some of it from an upturned goblet.
What, exactly, is the vision of nature implied by these Blakean personifications? His mountain spirit looks strangely wistful or disconsolate, in no holiday mood at all, and so does her male consort, who is not mentioned by Milton. In Blake’s personal symbolism, nature as we ordinarily experience it is a trap or prison, the scene of an endless cycle of mortality from birth to death. He often depicts nature in this sense as the Mediterranean Magna Mater with a spiky or battlemented crown, and the mountain spirit in A Sunshine Holiday does indeed wear such a crown.12 Far from barren, she is fertile, but not necessarily in a positive sense. And another mountain, just above the church at the left, has the form of a pyramid. In Blake’s symbolism pyramids represent repressive geometrical order, and also the cruel bondage of the Israelites in Egypt.
The six-winged figure just above the group in the right foreground may suggest the cycle of mortality too, a humanized moth or butterfly that has emerged from its chrysalis but will soon enough die in its turn. There are other figures in the trees, and perhaps they are trapped there; in his long poem The Four Zoas Blake adapts an image from Dante’s Inferno that describes suicides who have been trans-formed into trees and are unable to speak. Strikingly, a solemn face in the midst of the trees looks distinctly like common representations of Christ. Is this the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”?13 And what gesture is implied by his dendritic hand? Is he beckoning to the dancers—who all seem to be female except for one complacent male at whom they gaze—to encourage them to break away from the celebration of fertility?
These are questions, not answers, and questioning is what Blake encourages us to do. Although he has by no means debunked Milton’s cheerful vision, he has complicated it profoundly with resonances of his own. In terms of his personal symbolism, this could be a vision of what he calls Beulah: a temporary resting place from suffering and strife, but one from which it is necessary to move either up or down. Below Beulah lies Generation, the mortal cycle that threatens to entrap us, as this picture seems to warn. But above it is Eden, a condition of dynamic activity that participates in the fullness of Eternity. In A Sunshine Holiday, that must be the destination of the diaphanous figures in the rosy sky, a realm altogether different from the scene below whose mortal inhabitants pair off, give birth, grow old, and die. One of the soaring figures seems to be bearing a basket of food on its head, destined perhaps for the communal banquet of eternity.
The skeptical philosopher David Hume thought that all religions had their origin in animist superstition, in which “trees, mountains, and streams are personified . . . while each grove or field is represented as possessed of a particular genius or invisible power which inhabits or protects it.”14 Blake describes much the same thing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but for him it is visionary insight, not superstition, that finds human value in nature.
The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity, till a system was formed which some took advantage of, and enslaved th
e vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood, choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.15
Blake was just as fierce a critic of institutional religion as Hume and the other Enlightenment thinkers were, but at the same time he believed in a nature that was not mechanistic but human. Hume thought that polytheism, followed by monotheism, were positive improvements over primitive animism, and that the logical end result should be his own kind of agnostic skepticism. Blake runs the sequence the other way. In his opinion people in early cultures were quite right to perceive “gods and geniuses” in every river and mountain, expressing their experience of belonging in the world. The transition to worshipping deities far off in the heavens was a false step, and still worse was worship of a single God. That progression could indeed terminate in skepticism, and for Blake skepticism was destructive blindness to imaginative reality.
3. INNOCENCE
Visionary Songs
THE most accessible of Blake’s poems are the Songs of Innocence, intended to be read aloud by adults to small children, and embedded in images that enrich the texts. Some of these are simple illustrations, but others differ suggestively from the words, hinting at perspectives that adult readers may ponder while the children receive a simpler message. More than in his illustrations for other poets, Blake was developing symbolic ideas that were very much his own, but the same techniques of “reading” the images are called into play.
Containing just twenty-three short lyrics, Songs of Innocence was first printed in 1789, five years before being reissued with a set of companion poems as Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The combined volume, in which four of the earlier poems were moved to Experience, is subtitled Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Experience complements Innocence rather than supplanting or refuting it, for Innocence has a hopefulness and sense of trust that it is crucial not to lose. “Innocence dwells with wisdom,” Blake later wrote, “but never with ignorance.”1
The early biographer Alan Cunningham said that “the original genius of Blake was always confined through poverty to small dimensions.” Copper was indeed expensive, and the plates were just three inches by five, but that was not necessarily a drawback. The format suited the engraving style in which he had been trained, and large plates might have diminished his intensity of focus. An art historian comments, “Blake was a miniaturist, a jeweler in his colouring, always preferring the small-scale. The movement in his art always comes from the wrist, never from the shoulder.”2
The jewel-like effect is vividly apparent in the title page, reproduced here from the late copy Z, printed in 1826 for Blake’s friend Henry Crabb Robinson and now in the Library of Congress (color plate 3). At the knee of their mother or nurse, a little boy and girl are gazing at the pictures that accompany the words. Behind them a tree laden with apples supports a climbing vine, a traditional symbol for children sustained by adults. The word “Innocence” flows in a graceful cursive script, and “songs” bursts out in leaves.
For a parent, aware of the bleak truths of Experience, the situation is poignant. “Reassuring gestures and words experienced in early childhood,” the sociologist Peter Berger says, “build in the child a fundamental trust in the world. Yet speaking empirically, this trust is misplaced, is an illusion. The world is not at all trustworthy. It is a world in which the child will experience every sort of pain, and it is a world that in the end will kill him.” The apples hanging above the mother and children may hint at the tree of knowledge—knowledge that will be acquired all too soon.3
William and Catherine Blake never had a child, and we don’t know how much unhappiness that may have caused. In any event, the Songs of Innocence were clearly written by someone deeply sympathetic to children, and in this they differ greatly from the publications for children that were widely consumed at the time. Some of those took a stern line on childish wickedness, as in a hymn by Isaac Watts:
O Father, I am but a child,
My body is made of the earth,
My nature, alas! is defiled,
And a sinner I was from my birth.
John Wesley, cofounder of Methodism, instructed parents, “Whatever pains it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running.”4 The child should cry softly because loud cries would provoke further thrashing.
13. Songs of Innocence, frontispiece, copy L, plate 1
Progressive books for children did exist, but although no longer obsessed with hellfire, they were just as didactic in their own way. A typical title was The History of Tommy Playlove and Jacky Lovebook: Wherein Is Shown the Superiority of Virtue over Vice; another was Fables in Monosyllables, by Mrs. Teachwell, to Which Are Added Morals, in Dialogues, between a Mother and Children.5 Blake wants to challenge and inspire children, not preach, and his world of Innocence is filled with beauty, tenderness, sympathy, and joy.
The title page of Songs of Innocence is not the actual first plate. Preceding it comes a remarkable frontispiece (figure 13) in which a musician gazes up at a soaring child, framed by trees and with sheep grazing in the background. The mother and children on the title page were clothed, but Blake’s more overtly symbolic figures are usually naked or wear diaphanous garments, in accordance with his conviction that in a good painting “the drapery is formed alone by the shape of the naked body.”6
Since there are no words in this frontispiece, it invites us to ponder whatever the image may suggest. The poem entitled Introduction on the third plate (not reproduced here) clarifies what we were seeing in the frontispiece:
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
“Pipe a song about a lamb;”
So I piped with merry cheer;
“Piper pipe that song again,”
So I piped, he wept to hear.
“Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,
Sing thy songs of happy cheer.”
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear.
“Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read—”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
Judging from references in poems further on, the lamb is suggestive of the Lamb of God. Weeping here expresses joy, not grief, as in one of the Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.”7
Floating above the piper’s head in the frontispiece, the visionary child tells him what his song should be. First comes melody alone, then melody with words, and finally words that are written down, using natural materials. And then the airborne child vanishes, leaving the poem on the page as his gift. It is the gift of the musician-poet too. On the title page a miniature piper is shown leaning against the sloping “I” of the word “Innocence.”
When Blake called these lyrics songs, he meant it literally. Someone who knew him recalled that he used to compose his own tunes, “and though, according to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good that his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, and were noted down by musical professors.” Alas, none of their transcriptions have survived, but in all likelihood Blake’s melodies would have resembled the hymns and folk songs that he loved. Another writer reported that he liked to compose in all three arts simultaneously: “As he drew the figure he meditated the song which was to accompany it, and the music to which the verse was to be
sung was the offspring too of the same moment.”8
Infant Joy
An expression of Innocence at its simplest is a rhapsodic little lyric entitled Infant Joy:
“I have no name;
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile;
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee.9
Unobtrusively, Blake varies the stresses from the regular underlying beat:
Thóu dost smíle.
I síng the while,
Swéet jóy befáll thee.
The language has the extreme simplicity of childish speech or of traditional nursery rhymes, which Dylan Thomas says that he loved before he was old enough to understand them: “I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. . . . And as I read more and more, my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always.”10
In any effective lyric, rhythm is as important as verbal meaning. Blake occasionally uses anapests, in which an accented syllable is preceded by two unaccented ones. If used without variation, it can sometimes sound too bouncy for serious verse, as in a poem Blake knew, William Cowper’s The Poplar Field:
Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.
By shortening the line length in another poem, The Ecchoing Green, Blake gives anapests an elegiac resonance:
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 5