Shudders Hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state;
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to Heaven for human blood.32
The plain meaning of the first lines is that robins fly free and ought not to be caged, whereas domesticated doves come home willingly to their dovecotes. But the reason Hell shudders may be that the harmonious friendship of humans and doves is only apparent—people kept doves in order to eat them. There are religious echoes as well. In folk tradition, the robin got its red breast—much redder in the little British robin than in the American thrush also called by that name—for having done a kindness to Jesus on the cross. And Hell shuddered with earthquake when Jesus harrowed it to redeem the souls of the just.33
Innocence, as Blake imagines it, is trusting but not naïve, inexperienced but already anticipating immersion in Experience. He was apparently willing to sell separate copies of Songs of Innocence to purchasers who didn’t want Songs of Experience, but in the combined Songs he achieves an extraordinary extension of imaginative insight. And with few exceptions, the poems in the second set are ones that nobody would want to read to small children.
4. EXPERIENCE
Contrary States
WITH Songs of Experience—clearly aimed at adults, not children—we enter an altogether different imaginative world, one haunted by loneliness, frustration, and cruelty. Sometimes a poem in the second series corresponds directly to one in the first; there is a Chimney Sweeper in both sets, and The Tyger makes a direct allusion to The Lamb. For other poems, the brilliant London for example, there is no corresponding poem in Innocence, whose imagery is usually rural rather than urban.
Songs of Experience has a separate title page of its own (figure 15) that shows leaves and tendrils sprouting from “songs,” but the stiff block letters of “experience” might be chiseled on a tombstone, and indeed, two mourners bend over bodies or funerary effigies that probably belong to their parents. Experience may believe that death is final, but Innocence is more hopeful, and the little figures in the air suggest that the spirit does not perish with the mortal body. That is not to say, though, that Innocence is entirely right. Blake did believe that the human spirit lives on, but not in the orthodox sense of reanimation in an otherworldly heaven altogether different from the life we know. In Europe, published in the same year as Songs of Experience, he contemptuously called that heaven “an allegorical abode where existence hath never come.”1
The frontispiece for Songs of Experience (figure 16) echoes, but also contrasts with, the one in Innocence. In this one the man no longer carries a musical instrument, the sheltering bower has been replaced by a thick trunk close by and another tree far away, and the winged child is seated oddly on the man’s head. Are the child’s hands being held to help him balance there or to prevent his escape? Both man and child stare directly at us, with expressions that are hard to read—questioning? coolly challenging? In some copies the sky glows golden, in others red, suggesting that the sun has set. The landscape in this frontispiece seems barren, and the flock of sheep has been replaced by two, or possibly three, grazing in a single shadowy mass.
15. Songs of Experience, title page, copy L, plate 30
16. Songs of Experience, frontispiece, copy L, plate 29
There is also a new title page for the combined volume (color plate 7), and in this one Experience is dominant. Fig leaves conceal the genitals of a couple who are prostrating themselves and are unmistakably Adam and Eve just after eating the forbidden fruit. Sex, which was innocent before the Fall, now provokes shame, and flames of divine wrath blaze above. But since Blake rejected the concept of original sin, the guilt must be their own projection, and so are the punitive flames. In Blake’s view, the story in Genesis that an angel was stationed to bar the reentry of Adam and Eve into Paradise is likewise false. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, probably printed in 1793, a year before Songs of Experience, he proclaims, “The cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life.”2 If Adam and Eve have been expelled from Paradise, it is because they mistakenly expelled themselves.
Patriarchy and Repression
There is an explicit counterpart to Infant Joy in Songs of Experience, entitled Infant Sorrow.
My mother groaned! 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 mother’s breast.
All of the sounds are distressing: a mother groaning in childbirth, a father weeping (at her anguish?), and a newborn infant squalling like an alarming fiend. In the earlier poem “joy” was an emotion and also a name. “Sorrow” here is not an identity, just a condition of sadness and pain, and the infant might be either male or female. After its spirited leap into the dangerous world, it finds itself frustrated by helplessness and confined in swaddling clothes. The only choice open to it is “to sulk upon my mother’s breast.”3
The picture (figure 17) is ambiguous. Does it suggest maternal love or maternal control? Beneath heavy curtains, the child—bigger and more robust than an actual newborn—seems to be recoiling from the mother rather than reaching out. Her expression is sternly determined, perhaps irritated. Though the room is well furnished and comfortable, this is indeed going to be a dangerous world, and from the very outset the child is conscious of threatening emotions that are very different from the mood of Infant Joy.
Fathers were barely visible in Innocence. In Experience they are patriarchs who impose repression even when they mean well. A Little Girl Lost begins with a vehement declaration:
Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love! sweet love! was thought a crime.
Then comes a frank celebration of nakedness:
In the age of gold,
Free from winters cold,
Youth and maiden bright
To the holy light
Naked in the sunny beams delight.
They dally innocently in a garden, like an unfallen Adam and Eve, and agree to meet again at nightfall. But the patriarch intervenes:
17. Infant Sorrow, Songs of Experience, copy L, plate 39
To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his loving look,
Like the holy book,
All her tender limbs with terror shook.
“Ona! pale and weak!
To thy father speak:
O the trembling fear!
O the dismal care!
That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair.”
It is a loving father who creates guilt, blaming the daughter for provoking his own fear, and recalling the “holy book” that teaches guilt for sin. According to Saint Paul that is precisely what the Bible is for: “I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”4
Institutional religion, Blake thought, had a wicked commitment to promoting sexual repression. Innocence exists in a world of nurturing gardens; Experience is haunted by memories of the lost garden from which Adam and Eve were ejected—or ejected themselves.
I went to the garden of love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And “thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to the garden of love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be,
And priests in black gowns were walking their ro
unds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.5
The picture (not reproduced here) shows an open grave and a boy and girl kneeling nearby in prayer while a monk reads from a black book.
Another garden poem suggests how deeply repression can be internalized.
Ah sunflower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveler’s journey is done;
Where the youth pined away with desire
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my sunflower wishes to go.6
Sunflowers are heliotropes, turning to follow the moving sun across the sky, and therefore weary of time in a cycle that never ends. The frustrated youth and the pale virgin are wasting their lives in needless self-denial, waiting for eventual reward in an unreal heaven instead of seizing pleasure here and now.
The Sick Rose
These poems may suggest that a hopeful resolution could still be possible, but a central theme throughout Blake’s work is the persistent conflicts that seem inseparable from sexuality. One of the most memorable Songs of Experience, just eight lines long, is filled with disturbing implications. It has, Harold Bloom says, the “ruthless economy of thirty-four words.”
O rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The picture (color plate 8) shows a crimson blossom bent down to the ground, with a worm wriggling into it while a terrified female figure tries to escape. Above, a caterpillar is feeding, and two more females—withered blossoms, perhaps—huddle on bare stems. The big thorns are no help in protecting the rose from blight. A critic comments, “Attack is a worm’s form of ‘love.’”7
However one chooses to interpret this enigmatic poem, it is clearly concerned with corrosive sexual guilt, and also with the excitement that taboo and secrecy provoke. Roses were an age-old symbol for the transitory nature of beauty, as in Robert Herrick’s “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” In addition Blake is likely to have had two recent texts in mind. One is scribbled by the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s popular novel Clarissa, after realizing that her frustrated seducer had raped her while she was drugged unconscious: “Thou pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of virgin fame, and poisonest those leaves which thou canst not devour! . . . Thou eating canker-worm that preyest upon the opening bud, and turnest the damask rose into livid yellowness!”8 Convinced that she has been defiled, even though against her will, Clarissa wastes away and dies as a saint who is too good for this world.
The other text is a jeu d’esprit by Matthew Prior entitled A True Maid (“maid” meaning “virgin”):
“No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that,” says Rose, “I’ll die.”
“Behind the elms last night,” cried Dick,
“Rose, were you not extremely sick?”9
This is a girl who is literally named Rose, and she has escaped the fate worse than death, but just barely—the poem is a knowing dirty joke, with an aptly named Dick. Blake evidently had the inspiration of taking Prior’s last line and making it his first: “O Rose, thou art sick.” The implication is that there is something very wrong with a culture that chuckles at Prior’s sly innuendo.
In Blake’s poem, who is saying, “O Rose, thou art sick”? Unlike the other Romantics, he rarely uses a confessional first-person style. His lyrics reflect what Susanne Langer calls “impersonal subjectivity,” as in hymns, where a whole congregation can sing, “Jesu, lover of my soul.”10 Richardson’s Clarissa is a character in a realistic narrative; Prior’s Rose and Dick are protagonists in a joke. Blake’s poem is about universal experience.
Goethe does something similar in the remarkably “Blakean” Heidenröslein (Little Heath Rose), which was set superbly to music by Schubert. It needs to be read in the original, because the lyric beauty evaporates in translation. A boy reaches down to pluck a rose, it warns that it will prick, and he plucks it all the same:
Und der wilde Knabe brach
’s Röslein auf der Heiden;
Röslein wehrte sich und stach,
Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,
Mußt es eben leiden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
And the rough boy picked the rose,
Little rose on the heath;
Little rose defended itself and pricked,
No “woe” or “alas” was any use,
It simply had to bear it.
Little rose, little rose, little red rose,
Little rose on the heath.
But Goethe’s poem is tender and sad, acknowledging the way things always are. Blake’s is indignant, indicting the way things are.
The Sick Rose has often been interpreted as a call for sexual liberation. If priests would stop enforcing “thou shalt not,” and if naked love were indulged instead of prohibited, wouldn’t erotic liberation ensue? Blake does sometimes talk that way: “This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”11 But since the worm is just as much part of nature as the rose, the problem seems deeper than an effect of repressive ideology. And some of the songs of Experience suggest a much darker possibility: that inhibition and frustration are so deeply bound up with sexuality that they are impossible to transcend. That will form a major, even an obsessive, theme in the later poems beyond the Songs.
The Clod and the Pebble
In another song of Experience the speakers are inanimate objects, presenting contrasting philosophies of life in a symmetrical format.
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.
So sang a little clod of clay,
Trodden with the cattle’s feet;
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight:
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.12
Not only are Innocence and Experience contrary states of the soul, but from the perspective of Experience they are irreconcilable. The pebble here is obviously selfish and sadistic, but critics disagree about the clod. Some have argued that it is noble in its self-sacrifice. It is true that selfless love is praised in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, and that according to one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” However, a consciously chosen action on someone else’s behalf is very different from continuous self-abnegation, and Blake never approved of turning the other cheek:
Was Jesus humble or did he
Give any proofs of humility?13
It is often assumed that the clod is female and the pebble male, but they could perfectly well be the same sex, if indeed we should see them as gendered at all. And what kind of relationship do they have, if any? Are their two songs going right past each other, or are we overhearing a dialogue? If we do imagine them together, then their relationship would be profoundly sadomasochistic, and Blake can hardly be recommending that. The poem is like a miniature diagram of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which a pious woman suffers tragically for giving herself to a narcissistic Don Juan. Bloom says succinctly, “The clod joys in its own loss of ease, the pebble in another’s loss, but there is loss in either case.”14 And if one does imagine a relationship, the clod’s self-abasement might just stimulate the pebble’s selfish desire.
In the picture, once again, Blake neglects to illustrate, inasmuch as the clod and pebble aren’t shown at all (figure
18). We see sheep drinking from a stream, together with two impressively horned bovines. All of them are oblivious of both the clod and the pebble, who are presumably conducting their little psychodrama below. So the hard pebble, just as much as the soft clod, is “trodden with the cattle’s feet.” Meanwhile a duck drifts placidly on the stream, and a frog reposes while another frog jumps into the air with an earthworm beneath. These are creatures at home in their world, as if visitors from pastoral Innocence. But then, the clod and the pebble are at home here too.
The Tyger
Two of the Songs of Experience are masterpieces. The best known, and deservedly so, is The Tyger.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
18. The Clod and the Pebble, Songs of Experience, copy Z, plate 32
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?15
The final stanza is a verbatim reprise of the first—except that contemplating this formidable being has led the speaker to replace “could frame” with “dare frame.”
Alexander Welsh, noting the similar metrical pattern in “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day,” says that Blake has managed to combine “the rhythms of innocent nursery rhymes and game-songs and the rhythms of magical incantation, epiphanic invocation, and prophetic hymn.” The standard poetic meter in English is iambic, stressing every second syllable, as in Milton’s “I may assert eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” Throwing the accent on the first syllable instead of the second, in trochaic meter, accentuates the stresses as Blake does here. If the phrase “in the forests of the night” appeared in a piece of prose, one would probably hear just two stresses: “in the fórests of the níght.” But cast into pounding trochees, there are four powerful stresses in each line:
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 7