English Poetry

English Poetry

Detailed Study Notes

Part One—William Blake

PARTII— UNIT II P. B. Shelley: 'Ode to the West Wind'·'Ozymandias' John Keats: 'Ode to a Nightingale'·'Ode on a Grecian Urn'·'To Autumn'

Every poem explained in continuous prose — context, movement of the poem, close reading,themes, form and devices, comparison, and how to write the answer.

PARTI WILLIAMBLAKE

one. Blake, his moment, and the two contrary states

William Blake was born in London in seventeen fifty-seven and died in the same city in eighteen twenty-seven, having left it almost never.This matters more than it might seem, because the London he never left was the London of soot,chimneys, street-cries and children for sale, and those things are not merely the backqround of his poems but their whole subject. At fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire, for whom he drew the tombs and monuments of Westminster Abbey, and it is worth saying plainly that medieval art rather than classical art became the shape of Blake's imagination. He later studied at the Royal Academy, quarrelled with its president Sir Joshua Reynolds, and wrote furious marginal notes against Reynolds's doctrine that art should generalise and idealise. Blake believed the opposite with his whole body: that the particular, the minute, the individual and the sharply seen were the only things worth drawing or writing about, and that any doctrine of the general was a doctrine of the dead. He married Catherine Boucher, taught her to read and to help him in the printing, and lived in poverty for most of his life. His contemporaries thought him mad. Wordsworth's remark is often quoted, that there was no doubt the poor man was mad, but that there was something in the madness of this man which interested him more than the sanity of Lord Byron, and a contemporary diarist recorded Blake as an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inofensiveness secured him from confi nement. He claimed to see visions, angels in a tree on Peckham Rye, the ghost of a fl ea, the spirit of his dead brother Robert, and the honest way to take this is not as fraud or as pathology but as evidence that Blake did not draw a line between imagination and reality. For him the imagination was the real. Whatever else a student writes about Blake, this is the assumption underneath every line he wrote.

The historical moment matters equally. The year 1789, in which Songs of Innocence appeared, is the year of the fall of the Bastille, and Blake was among those Londoners for whom the French Revolution was not foreign news but a release of energy in the universe. Legend has it that he wore a liberty cap in the street. The same decades brought the Industrial Revolution and the child labour that ran it, and in particular the trade of chimney-sweeping, in which small boys of four and five were sold or apprenticed to master sweeps and sent up narrow flues to scrape soot, sometimes naked, sometimes with a fire lit beneath them to make them hurry. They suffocated, burned or were crushed, and those who survived developed the cancers that the trade made famous. In 1788 Parliament passed an Act intended to regulate the trade, and it was very widely ignored. Blake's two chimney sweeper poems are therefore not sentimental sketches of childhood but pieces of reportage written the year after a useless law. Meanwhile Pitt's government was prosecuting men for sedition and suspending habeas corpus, so that to speak directly about liberty in Britain was dangerous. Blake's solution, and it is one of the great tactical inventions in English poetry, was to put the most dangerous political and religious observations of his age into the mouths of children and into poems about lambs and tigers, where the censor does not think to look.

The form in which he published these poems is part of their meaning. Blake invented a method he called relief etching, sometimes described as illuminated printing, in which he wrote his poems backwards in acid-resistant varnish directly onto a copper plate, etched the plate, printed from it and then coloured each copy by hand. Words and images were cut on the same plate, so that the picture is not an illustration of the poem but part of the poem. The practical consequences are three. First, every copy of the Songs differs from every other in colouring and sometimes in the order of the plates, so that there is no single authoritative text in the way there is for Wordsworth or Keats. Second, the poems are short, sharp and song-shaped because they were made to sit inside an image on a page. Third, and most useful for criticism, Blake was a craftsman whose hands worked metal and acid, and this is exactly the Blake who imagines God in 'The Tyger' as a blacksmith with a hammer, a chain, a furnace and an anvil. The smith-god of that poem is not a decorative choice; it is the imagination of an engraver.

The doctrine that organises the two books is stated in their full title, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The operative word is states. Innocence and Experience are not childhood and adulthood, and they are not good and evil. They are two modes of perception, two conditions through which every human soul passes, and the poems are dramatic utterances made from inside each condition rather than moral judgements delivered from outside. This is the point on which most student answers fail, because the temptation is to say that Blake prefers innocence and regrets experience. He does not. His own formulation, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is that without contraries there is no progression, and that attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. Because the contraries are necessary, innocence is beautiful but blind, and experience is painful but seeing. Innocence is a world in which nothing is hidden because nothing is withheld, and its characteristic mark is that questions have answers. Experience is a world in which the answer has been withdrawn, and its characteristic mark, as the chimney sweeper of 1794 shows, is that the sufferer can now describe exactly who is profiting from his suffering. A good answer therefore holds both states at once and refuses to sentimentalise either.

Two further convictions run through the volume and should be named in any answer. The first is that energy is holy. Blake's aphorisms in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell make the case repeatedly: energy is eternal delight, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, prisons are built with stones of law and brothels with bricks of religion. What Blake hates is never passion but repression, never desire but the machinery, in priests and laws and fathers, that polices desire. The lamb's joy and the tiger's fire are both divine; what is demonic is the system that shuts a child up a chimney in order to pay for a prayer. The second conviction is that the God of the churches is a false god. Blake called the remote law-giving deity Old Nobodaddy, and in his longer prophetic books he called him Urizen, from your reason, the cold maker of moral prisons. For Blake the divine is not above the human but is the human imagination at full stretch, and Jesus is the Divine Humanity. This is why the line in 'The Lamb' about God becoming a little child is not a piece of Christmas sweetness but the whole of Blake's theology compressed into five words.

Finally, a word about the pastoral, because it gives a student a vocabulary for describing what Blake does across the volume. Innocence is written in the pastoral mode, the convention that runs from Virgil through Spenser and Milton and that supplies shepherds, meadows, streams, green plains and sun, together with the Christian overlay of Eden and the Good Shepherd. Experience does not simply abandon the pastoral; it breaks it. In the first chimney sweeper poem the green plain survives only inside a dream, and in the second it has vanished altogether, replaced by snow and by a church. Naming this movement from pastoral to anti-pastoral, and showing that the green plain migrates from landscape to dream to nothing, is one of the strongest analytical moves available in an examination.