BLAKE STUDY GUIDE
(Concentrating on “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”)
During Blake’s own time, he was not well known. In fact, Blake was not even taught as one of the great Romantic writers until the second half of the twentieth century. Blake was often classified as a “pre-Romantic,” and that meant two things. On the one hand it meant that many of his poems were written before the great poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Blake’s were late-eighteenth-century poems. But the term also carried with it a value judgment that Blake simply wasn’t a great Romantic poet in the way that Wordsworth was.
Two things changed that: the first was that in 1947, the Canadian critic Northrop Frye published a book calledFearful Symmetry, and this was really the first book to treat Blake as if he were an absolutely first-rate artist. The other thing that helped us discover Blake was what happened in the late sixties and early seventies. That was the time of unrest on college campuses, and Blake spoke for many of that era.
Blake is very much the most modern and in many ways the most revolutionary of the Romantic writers. In fact, he’s gone from being an obscure “pre-Romantic” tobeing regarded as the standard by which all the other Romantics are evaluated. This is particularly true if you read the scholarship of the so-called Yale Critics—Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman in particular. Blake is seen now as the one Romantic poet who had confidence in the complete autonomy of the human imagination.
Remember that he was not well known in his time. There is a moving note that Blake wrote in the margins of one of his books: “I am hid.” Even toward the end of his life, after he’d written all of his remarkable works, he saw his destiny as hidden. If he was known, he was thought to be a lunatic.One reviewer of Blake’s poems wrote that “They give fresh proof of the alarming increase of the effects of insanity.” Charles Lamb, Coleridge’s friend, wrote at Blake’s death, “Blake is fled, whither I know not, to Hades, or to a madhouse.”
To read Blake, you need first to realize that he is a “visionary” in a literal sense that goes beyond the way we use that term to talk about the poetry of figures like Wordsworth. The title of Harold Bloom’s book The Visionary Company has the general meaning that the Romantics were poets who celebrated the imagination. They were visionary poet-prophets in that general sense.
In Wordsworth’s poetry, there are “spots of time” in which visions occur, where the phenomenal world is transformed in some way by the imagination.In Blake’s life, the phenomenal world sometimes completely disappeared, and he saw visions that were not reared on the basis of empirical sense data or the external world. Blake’s vision is often said to be “unmediated.”
If Wordsworth wants to experience eternity or the divine, rather than see it directly, he sees it mediated through nature, or mediated through the sensory world. Blake, in his life,apparently had experiences in which there was no mediation. That is, the world as we know it completely disappeared for him, and he saw visions. He saw angels in trees. God spoke to him. Blake said about his art that he was only the secretary—that the authors were in eternity. He spoke of his poems as being dictated to him by spirits. So we’re talking about someone as a visionary in the literal sense. (At least that’s what Blake tells us. A skeptic would probably balk at the idea; a psychiatrist might consider the visions to be delusions.)
Let’s look at a few things that Blake wrote about visions. He said that he looks through his corporeal eyes, like windows, not with them. Thus, he’s always looking with the inner eye of imagination. So for Blake, the world “out there” (the external world, the phenomenal world) is a net, a trap, a construction that we must see through.
One example of this thinking appears in the “A Memorable Fancy” section of his poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake writes,
When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock. With corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
The main metaphor here is clear. It’s like what Wordsworth says in the “Intimations Ode”: We must “obstinately question sense and outward sight.” Blake’s metaphor suggests that we must burn through “outward sight” with corroding fires to see the reality beneath, the eternity that’s behind the physical world.The corroding fire of the imagination eats through the surface to show us the true reality beneath, according to Blake. It’s kind of like the idea of classical sculpture—that the statue is already inside the block of marble. It’s the act of imagination, of seeing with expanded eyes, that chips the marble away to reveal the truth and beauty and form within.
So for Blake, the emphasis is always on the imagination, and on the ability of the human mind to construct its own reality. In a poem called “The Smile,” Blake wrote, “The eye altering, alters all.” And in a very famous proverb of the “Proverbs of Hell” in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” he writes, “Where Man is not, Nature is barren.”
Here is a good way to begin to understand the differences between Blake and someone like Wordsworth, who would hardly agree that “Where Man is not, Nature is barren.” There is for Wordsworth “a spirit that rolls through” the natural world and the human spirit. Blake, however, does not believe that. Blake attacks what was called Natural Religion. In the text “There is No Natural Religion,” for example, he argues that there is no pattern out there, in the natural world, from which we can extrapolate an understanding of God. For Blake there’s no divine pattern out there. If we see a divine pattern, it’s because we bring that to nature, to the external world, with the imagination. We project it. So for Blake, “Where man is not, Nature is barren.”
Blake also wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, until he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.” (You might have heard of the sixties rock group called “The Doors,” led by Jim Morrison. The name of the band is taken from this passage in Blake.)
This is the Romantic image of the mind as a cavern. But Blake sees the cavern as an infinite space that we ourselves have limited. Remember the Devil’s question: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
Blake wrote: “He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. / He who sees the ratio only sees himself.” The idea of “ratio” is Blake’s attack on Locke and the Enlightenment devotion to science, rationality, and reason. If you think of reality as only what the senses bring in, then all you will see is a self-imposed circle, according to Blake. God, for Blake, equates to the Human Imagination—or at least that’s the only way we can experience divinity.
Blake sometimes states his ideal in slightly different terms. He uses the concept of the “Human Form Divine.” In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” he writes that “All deities reside in the human breast.” This is a complicated subject. Blake is not saying that Man is God. He’s saying that God only has meaning to the extent that it’s a part of our humanity. The belief we have in some God who’s out there and up there is an illusion for Blake.
For Blake, a false view of God is based on our relationship with our parents, where our fathers and mothers say to us, “Thou Shalt Not.” We take that relationship with our parents and imagine that to be what God is like. This represses our sexuality and imagination.For Blake, that’s all an illusive fabrication of the human mind. It’s real in that it determines the way we think and behave in the world, but there is a more positive way of seeing God, according to Blake. He sees God in terms of the Christian concept of the incarnation. Christ is God becoming Man, taking on human form. And so for Blake, what we have to do is rediscover the divinity of our own humanity. We are not God, but we can recognize the divinity inherent in our humanity. For him, “All deities reside in the human breast.”
Blake writes in his epic poemThe Four Zoas: “Attempting to become more than Man we become less.”The problem for Blake is that we can’t conceive of the fact that we have something within us that’s divine. We suffer, and therefore we imagine that God must be something very distant and non-human. To do that, Blake argues, degenerates the concept of what God is all about, and at the same time it degenerates the possibilities for what we’re all about. So what we have to do is to discover that point at which the two meet.
For Wordsworth, on the other hand, the point of union is in the wedding between man and nature. For Blake, the point of union is between our human self and our divine self, in discovering their mutual identity.
For Blake, “Reality is a mental construction.” What he means is that we see what we believe. That is, the world is not factual. It exists of things, yes. But, in Blake’s view, what we take as having some kind of external reality is really a place onto which we project our values and our beliefs. Those values and beliefs are mirrored back to us, and we assume that these values and beliefs are an inherent part of the world. But they are not, according to Blake. They are all a creation of the human mind.
Blake is not arguing for complete subjectivity. He’s not saying that reality is whatever you see. He does believe that there is something eternal, something divine. He believes that if our imaginations are allowed to act in a completely free way, then we would see that eternal divinity, we would discover it. But he’s arguing that most people live in what he calls “the fallen world,” seeing through the narrow chinks in their cavern. They see a world of confinement, containment, of self-limitation, and they think that that’s what reality is. They are unaware that “All deities reside in the human breast.”
What links Blake to Wordsworth is that his hero is a hero of consciousness. The great actions in Blake’s poetry are imaginative acts.
One other thing to keep in mind is that Blake set out to write a rival version of the Bible. To understand Blake, you need to understand the Bible and Milton. There’s a character in one of Blake’s writings who says, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
On the one hand, though, Blake is steeped in the great myths of Western culture, particularly the Biblical myths and its vision of the designs of human life, about providential history that’s leading to paradise. Blake believed in all of that, but he said that he read the Bible in the visionary sense. He wanted to use his own terms, though. So instead of God and Jesus and Michael, he gives us bizarre names like Urizen and Golgonooza. He writes of “Nobodaddy”—“daddy” because it’s based on the “Thou Shalt Not” relationship with our father, “Nobo” because it’s nobody—it doesn’t exist apart from the way that we create him in this form. These bizarre names are Blake’s way of trying to jar us out of habit and custom and conventional understandings, and moving us toward a visionary consciousness.
Let’s look at Blake’s Songs of Innocence. What does he mean by the title? How does the title shape the way in which we read the poems?
The most important figure is the child. For Blake the world he calls “Innocence” is a world of children or child-like people. Blake is interested not so much in a literal state of childhood, but in the mental state of childhood. He’s trying to capture a child-like way of looking at the world.
Blake’s poetry is really all about POINT OF VIEW. In Blake’s poetry, what makes something a “song of innocence,” as opposed to a “song of experience,” is not the setting, but the point of view, the state of mind, the attitude that gets expressed by the poem’s speaker.
What about the word “of”? It means songs that portray the world of innocence, but it also means songs from the mouths of innocence, songs from the point of view of innocence.
The second thing to remember about Blake’s work is CONTEXT. To understand his songs of innocence, we have to put them in the context of the other songs of innocence, but also the songs of experience. Whatever innocence is, it is not experience. Its meaning is relative to the meaning of experience. Blake’s Songs of Innocence are about a world prior to a world in which most of us live. Most of us live in the world of experience, and to understand experience, we have to imagine that childhood is the opposite, or the “contrary,” of that.
One of Blake’s influences on this vision is the Book of Genesis. The Songs of Innocence represent Blake’s vision of the world before the Biblical fall recounted in Genesis. But as we will discover, unlike the Biblical form of Eden, for Blake, the Garden of Eden is not the ideal. He’s going to have an ideal that’s more demanding than that—what he calls “intellectual war.”
The world of “Innocence” is the prelapsarian world, the world of Adam and Eve. It’s about the world before perception is tainted by a fall into experience. It’s about perception before it is limited, confined, restricted, imprisoned, chained.
In the Songs of Experience, Blake will write about “mind-forg’d manacles.” This is about a world before we forge in our own mind the manacles that chain us, hold us back from an enlarged, visionary existence.
Crucial to an understanding of the Songs of Innocence, then, is point of view. Everything in these songs is written not from Blake’s point of view, but from the point of view of a child or a child-like person. The second key interpretive element is context. We have to read each poem in the context of the other poems in the Songs of Innocence, as well as in the context of the Songs of Experience. Remember:“Innocence” is not a literal place but a state of mind, a way of looking at the world.
At this point, we might play an “Association Game,” making a chart of associations, connotations, significations. What do we typically associate with innocence as a state of mind? It’s filled with trust, but sometimes ignorant trust, naivety. Optimism. Purity. Goodness. Affirmation, etc.If you analyze these words, they lead us to two different clusters of associations: on the one hand, innocence is something good and powerful, but it also signifies a lack of experience, naivety.
Let’s think of a phrase taken from “The Divine Image”: this poem is the hymn to “mercy, pity, peace, and love.” This will help us get a handle on what “Innocence” is like as a way of perceiving the world. It’s a world in which the people are child-like and filled with mercy, pity, peace, and love. That’s their point of view.
And what do you do if you’re filled with mercy, pity, peace, and love? You see that in the world around you. The world mirrors back your own state of mind. That’s what Blake means by “Reality is a mental construction.”
It is like the Biblical world of Eden. Adam and Eve are like children, filled with mercy, pity, peace and love. But this point of view has limitations, according to Blake.
These children are dependent—on their mothers and fathers, their priests, their kings, their God. They imagine a world in which they are watched over and protected. They seek to be dependent. They seek the guidance and protection and care of authority figures. And for Blake the process is passive rather than creative.
Those who live in the world of Innocence essentially accept the world that is taught to them by their mothers, fathers, priests, and kings, and God. And this is definitely not Blake’s ideal. His ideal is the artist rebel who challenges the view of reality that is presented by authority figures. The artist-rebel creates his own vision of reality. Remember the key line: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
These children then are imaginative, but their imaginations are limited in that they see what they’ve been taught to see, what they’ve been told.For Blake this is a state of mind we find especially in children and in young lovers (in the dream world they create).
For Blake, people who find consolation in the orthodox teachings of the Bible also live in the world of innocence. It is a world of brotherhood, where all people are linked, where God is present every day. It’s beautiful and positive, but for Blake, it’s not ideal, because the people do not use the potential of their imaginations in a very active way. Instead, they accept far more than they create.