Poetry: British Literature after 1800
Blake: From Songs of Innocence (1789)
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Notes on:
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General Notes: This was first etched and then published by itself; later, Blake wrote the complementary "Songs of Experience" and tacked them on, and now they're considered a single title: "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." According to my boon companion, the "Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th Ed. Vol. 2," pp. 30-31, even though he presents all of these songs of innocence from the point of view of the " 'state' of the human soul that Blake calls 'innocence,' many of the poems depict "injustice, evil, and suffering"; others depict a happy world that (in the words of the introductory poem) "every child may joy to hear". These poems are expressed "in a simple pastoral language, in the tradition of Isaac Watts's widely read Divine Songs for Children (1715)." I observe that the poems experiment more with meter, as I'll note below.
These are relatively early works, though not as early as Poetical Sketches, but he reprinted them in small numbers several times, with the poems in various orders. Does this mean that there is not a specific sequential logic to these? Maybe, but I'm taking notes on them in the order they're printed in the Norton. They do have a cumulative effect.
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1. Introduction (Show the poem!)
5 verses, abab, with a strange kind of meter: it's either like an unprepared iambic tetrameter, or an incompletely-last-footed trochaic tetrameter. As in:
Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe. . .Or trimeter with one extra syllable at either one end or the other. Note: Blake seems to be reading "wild" and "Child" and such as one syllable, not as two ("Why-uld"/"Chy-uld") but set to music it might go either way. Or eether way.
This is the myth of the origin of these saccharine poems. The poet was minding his own business, or someone else's, perhaps: he was piping some tunes, when a child in a cloud started bossing him around, to play a song on his pipe that's about a Lamb--how to do that, I don't know, if he's blowin' on a pipe, he can't speak about a Lamb or a Pork Chop either. Then the brat tells him to sing a song of "happy chear" (ignorance of spelling must be bliss) and to both of the foregoing, the child weeps happy tears. Then the kid orders Blake to write these numbers up in a book "that all may read" (that, evidently meaning "so that"). Then the spoil'd chillun vanishes, with a "set and forget" mentality that is well before its time. So anyhow Blake makes this pen, possibly with a goose quill or a reed, and wrote the tunes. And "that is the book that you have just finished reading," a stunt that Roald Dahl has pulled a few times before.
Blake is by now more into the archaisms than he was in Poetical Sketches.
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2. The Lamb (Show the poem!)
This one uses two verses with paired rhyming lines, with each verse's first and last pairs the same or similar, and both indented, as a kind of bookend. The narrator in this one is a child, speaking to a Lamb. Not Charles, I guess. The interior three pairs of lines are in the same whacky rhythm as the "Introduction". First the idiot child quizzes the Lamb about who made him, speeking quite Formallee. When the lamb cannot answer the question, the child gives the quiz away, suggesting that the mystery maker (unnamed here) has sometimes been called by both their names for he was born a child but mild like a lamb. This is too sticky to talk about for long. There's a real "Child's Garden of Verses" tang to it. Nearly patronizing, almost. Not as scary as the patronizing meta-tone of the writer giving the Little Black Boy an overly-hegemonified point of view, later.
Blake uses "&" as a word in the poem: several of the "&"s in a short .
Blake uses techniques I've suggested when teaching about sonnets; using accented -eds or apostrophes for the forcing of meter. Examples:
He is call-ed by thy name.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Enough already!
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3. The Little Black Boy (Show the poem!)
Seven quatrains of abab iambic pentameter: a more regular meter, but he plays with grammar to force the scansion. Also, as in the Introduction, Blake uses "joy" as a verb, something we can't really do today, and I doubt if that was normal at the time. Well, there are several examples e'en in this little poem of twist'd grammar. Here's a good one:
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[the] "And thus I say to ^ little English boy:" |
There's more, trust me.
Again, this reads too sweetlee. Rationalizes racial prejudice, told from the point of view of the "Little Black Boy." --when we're both dead, I'll help my hero, the little white boy, to bear up against the heat of God's love till he's tuff enuff to bear it alone. "I'll. . .be like him, and he will then love me." Ugh! Too fawning for today's taste, perhaps. There's a kind of patronizing pity for those 'rustic, nearly bestial blacks." That won't help anyone to treat them equally, I ween. Did Blake really hope kids will have a diversity-rich, unprejudmental mindset, or is he full of it? The little black boy seems to hate himself: "These black bodies and this sun-burnt face is but a cloud, and like a shady grove."
The last line suggests that English children only can love what is easy to identify with. A scary thought, and maybe true. "O! My soul is white!" Imitation, hegemony, hero-worship! Run away, run away!
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4. The Chimney Sweeper (Show the poem!)
This one is a real experiment, before our dear Col's "new principle" used in "Christabel," of counting accents instead of syllables. So some lines must be read with--to use a musical allusion--duple simple meter, and some parts with triple compound, and others. . .anyway, it's essentially like iambic pentameter but sometimes the reader must have a little DIY session to try and figure out why the scansion don't work! If you normally read iambic with a "swinging eighths" rhythm it's not hard to fill in the missing "triplet" eighth in between the normal ones, as in this one:
"When my mother died I was very young"
In that line, we must have some kind of triplet or else it just doesn't scan. It seems clear that "died" must be accented, and so must "I". Or maybe he is violating the emphasis tradition: "When MY moTHER died I was VEry YOUNG"....Well, it might work in two groups, "when my mother died, I was very young" but that won't hold up in line 3:
"Could scarcely cry, " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
We'd be at least two syllables short! It really seems too short no matter how I try, unless I add a whole pair of syllables' rest to prepare for the character voice: "could scarcely cry (a-hem) 'weep weep, weep weep"
Well, maybe we should admit the possibility that it's just klutzy versification. But most lines work with a "ta tic-kit-ty ta, ta taw ta taw ta taw," as in:
"As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!"
Now, that line would have worked fine without the 'a-' into reg'lar old iambic pentameter, but Blake adds the 'a-' on purpose. Reason: To add a bit of dialect? To force us to be uncomfortable with the rhythm? Ineptitude? "The world may never know!"
As for the contents of the poem itself, such as it is, it's rather didactic. The characters are the narrator and Tom Dacre (Fr: "dark") who are both chimney sweeps and children. They are good at using floo powder, like the Weasleys. The narrator is a bit of a big brother type, who despite being wilfully orphaned as an even younger youngster, is plucky. He comforts a newbie, Tom, who is crying when his lovely curly wooly head is shorn. In a dream that night Tom dreams of all the sweeps being led out of coffins and to a lovely stream where they are washt clean. An angel tells Tom that if he's a good boy he can ...well, just look over there. It's a kind of bribe for keeping the ruling class on top. Tom takes it in earnest, as does the narrator, and so it seems does the writer, who speaks like a real father, though Blake and his wife were childless. (!)
Maybe this poem sequence was designed to help Blake in a wish fulfilling dream to adopt all his childish readers as his kids. I guess he wouldn't have abandoned his kid like the chimney sweep's father did.
This poem is 'parodied' in its companion piece, The Chimney Sweeper, in "Songs of Experience. Click the title to go to its notes, if you just can't wait for the next page.
5. Holy Thursday (Show the poem!)
There seems to be evidence that this was written earlier: about 1784. Perhaps others were also written earlier too but there's not the evidence.
More experimentation? Indeed! Actually the first line is the hardest to match with what comes. Basically we've got iambic heptameter, seven feet to the line, but line one reads funny because we naturally resist the reading "in-NO-cent", and want to adjust for it, but it's hard to find a way. I guess he wanted to get it out of the way immediately. He's using more archaisms combined with forct stress, as before but more seriously. I cannot really imagine the kids of the story--kids from charity schools of London, possibly the poor or orphans, floating up into the high dome of St. Paul's. Some DIY is needed, for words like "heaven" and "radiance" which seems to want a kind of Italian elision. Also the line "Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands" seems too long by a full foot; adjusting one or more of the underlined words would bring it back in line. I guess it's hard to backspace on brass plates. [By the way, my criticisms are tongue in cheek!]
The content seems rather bogus again, and condescending. Blake describes the procession of charity kids into St. Paul's Cathedral, on Holy Thursday, 39 days after Easter, the anniversary of Christ's ascension to heaven. Blake makes it sound festive and grand, and make the kid sound fresh and clean and angelic. Well maybe. . . . The "aged men, wise guardians of the poor" are sitting underneath the kids, according to Blake, which sounds uncomfortable. Then, the punch line, didactic again. And a bit of a non sequitur. It's a Biblical allusion but it doesn't really work, since the poor children who study at London charity schools are not likely to be the "strangers" mentioned in Hebrews 13:2.
I must mention The Divine Image as well here, because of its more explicit message of racial and religious tolerance. He emphasizes many times "Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace." Also as I observed several years earlier in the margins of my copy of the Norton, "Blake can't rhyme worth cr*p!" It's true. "Face/dress"--"dear/care"--"distress/peace." Is this, again, a sign of adventure, genius, or mental feebleness? Let's wonder together.
This poem can be contrasted with its companion piece in Holy Thursday. Click on its title if you want to See you in the next section.
End of notes on Songs of Innocence. Next: Notes on Songs of Experience!