William Blake

We know relatively little about Blake’s life (1757-1827).

He was an engraver by profession, a poor working-class Londoner.

He was a radical all his life, - opposing all forms of authority, rationalism and materialism.

Blake formed part of the same circle as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. - Blake provided illustrations for Joseph Johnson’s edition of Mary

Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1791).

In contrast to Wordsworth, his genius went largely1 unrecognized during his lifetime. - Wordsworth thought Blake was mad.- Blake read some of Wordsworth’s poetry and didn’t think much of it.

However, his reputation has risen almost continuously since his death.

He is one of the few people considered a great artist and a great poet. - One of the very few who fully integrated his two art forms.

1 largely – mostly, more or less

Innocence & Experience

Notice the (usually omitted) subtitle of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience:Shewing2 the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794)- in innocence we look at things freshly - with experience our perception is darkened by adult fears and anxieties

(the effects of alienation). We see the world more deeply but we feel it more painfully.

The combination may lead to3 some higher truth.

For Blake innocence can be reborn at any point in time - to provide an alternative to the bitterness4 and oppression which

Experience critiques.

For Blake the innocence of a child could be superior to the errors of acquired folly.

But without perceiving the barren world of oppression the potentiality of Innocence cannot be grasped.

2 shewing – (archaic) showing 3 to lead to (lead-led-led) – result in 4 bitterness – resentment

Melting Surfaces

Blake in many senses connects more closely to mediaeval art than to his contemporaries.- His pictures are mystic and Gothic (in the pictorial sense). - His poems are ‘illuminated’ – like mediaeval manuscripts. - His poetry has much more to do with sermons than neoclassical poetry.

At the same time his figures are muscular and monumental like Michelangelo’s.

His tetrameter – favoured in Songs – links this collection of poetry to hymns, nursery rhymes and ballads.

Blake places himself squarely5 in the popular tradition.

Blake designed Songs to look like a child’s picture-book.- He did this to subvert the genre – to challenge those writers whose

intention was to shape and control children’s minds through books of ‘instruction and improvement’.

By contrast, he aimed to6 allow7 the child (and adult reader) to engage imaginatively with texts which were open-ended and uncertain of reference.

This is Blake’s ‘infernal method’ (recommended in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) “melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid(den)”.

Notice that few of the illustrations simply show what the poems they accompany tell. - Rather8 they enter into a debate with them – prompting us the think

further9.

5 squarely – unambiguously 6 to aim to – try to 7 to allow – enable, permit 8 rather – (in this case) by contrast 9 further – (in this case) more, more deeply

Infant Joy

BABY: I have no nameI am but two days old.—

PARENT: What shall I call thee?BABY: I happy am assonance

Joy is my name.-- pararhymePARENT: Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!Sweet joy but two days old.Sweet joy I call thee;Thou dost smile,I sing the whileSweet joy befall thee.

For the Calvinists babies come into the world contaminated by Original Sin and have to be cleansed10 by baptism.- For the Romantics, babies came fresh from God and retained a memory

of Him.

For Blake, we are all born innocent.- However, whether we remain innocent depends on how we are treated.

Initially, the infant has no name – except perhaps “I am”- at Exodus 3:13-14 Moses asks God his name and God replies “I am”- at John 8:58 Jesus adopts the name “I am”.- this initially tenuous connection is strengthened by the illustration.Is Blake saying that every baby is potentially divine?

This baby is the perfect innocent who, when left alone to determine its own nature (the baby names herself), find joy rather than11 guilt12 or repression within.

The infant is the embodiment13 of innocent happiness but she needs succour and reassurance

both verbal (“Sweet joy befall thee!”) and non-verbal (euphony of the song and poetry).

Here she receives both from the narrator.

10 to cleanse – purify 11 rather than – as opposed to, instead of 12 guilt – culpability 13 embodiment – personification, incarnation, incorporation

Is this joyous innocent simply the lack of14 cruel experience of the world? Is it possible to maintain a childlike innocence throughout15 one’s adult life?- If so, is the birth of this life-long joyous innocence the result of vital

succour and reassurance from a very young age?

The poem is open to interpretation from the very title. Does it mean:the joy of a newborn baby?the joy produced by a newborn baby?a baby called ‘Joy’?the infancy (= origins) of happiness?

or does it mean all this at the same time?

Notice the level of repetition: joy (x6), I (x6), thee (x4), sweet (x4)The poem is almost hypnotic in its simplicity, its limited range of language.Notice the long vowels and the diphthongs ending in semi-vowels/glides (especially dark ‘l’):name (x2), am (x2) shall (x2), call (x2), befall (x2), while, smile

This is the language of nursery rhymes, lullaby, prayer and incantations- a type of magical blessing that the

narrator recites or sings over the infant.

Clearly, the dialogue between a mother and a two-day-old baby is fanciful16

- however, Blake is suggesting that they can effectively communicate without language (though sounds, song and love).

14 lack of – absence of 15 throughout – during all of

Infant Sorrow

My mother groaned, my father wept,Into the dangerous world I leapt;Helpless, naked, piping loud,Like a fiend17 hid in a cloud. pararhyme

Struggling in my father’s hands,Striving against my swaddling bands,Bound and weary, I thought best alliterationTo sulk18 upon my mother’s breast. assonance

Again is this:the sorrow19 of a newborn baby?the sorrow produced by a newborn baby?the infancy (= origins) of sadness?

or does it mean all this at the same time?

Immediately the infant is fearful of the future,oppressed by the role of the father, andfinally he settles down into20 hypocritical sulking.

His negative experience of the world leads to21 a reaction that contributes to the world’s ills.

It is our perception of the world and that of those around us that makes the world safe or dangerous – innocent or cruel.- the baby quickly learns to play one parent off against the other

(“Struggling in my father’s hands, /... I thought it best / To sulk upon my mother’s breast.”)

Here the infant receives and absorbs the perspectives of its parents, from which it has little chance of escaping.

The child is bound like Prometheus but it doesn’t have the energy or even the motivation to break its bonds through imagination.

16 fanciful – unrealistic, imaginary 17 fiend – demon, devil, enemy 18 to sulk – be resentfully silent 19 sorrow – sadness, unhappiness 20 to settle down into – adopt a stable state of 21 to lead to (lead-led-led) – provoke, cause

It takes on the defensive role of a fiend in a cloud. The cloud hides the infant’s true nature from itself and its surroundings, - allowing and forcing it to maintain its fiendishness.

The first quatrain and half of the second include words full of energy, such as:‘groaned’, ‘leapt’, ‘piping’, ‘Struggling’, and ‘Striving’, - while the last couplet gives up in defeat with the words ‘Bound’, ‘weary’, and ‘sulked’.

The lively child has given way to a tired, world-weary infant in mere moments.

The poem appears foreshortened, unfinished. But this makes it universal.- It is the start of so many life stories that end in violence and pain.

However, one reason for this is that in the first draft22 the poem continued for another six stanzas, all much revised in the manuscript before they were abandoned, in which Blake developed the theme of rivalry between father and son.

In the illustration the father is simply absent.

The poem could be seen as a poetic restating of Rousseau’s famous comment, “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains”.

22 draft – preliminary version

The Tyger

Blake’s best-known poem – with the possible exception of ‘Jerusalem’.

It is ruled by symmetry: symmetry between stanzas, symmetry between lines, andwithin lines

For this very reason the asymmetry between the first and last verse – ‘could’ being replaced by ‘dare’ – stands out. - Ironically, the only possible break in the rhyme scheme is precisely on

‘symmetry’ (though it rhymed with ‘eye’ in Early Modern English).

Notice that the poem is made up entirely of23 questions.

Here again we confront Blake’s ambiguity that forces us to interpret the poem - we are not told what to think, our imagination is stimulated.

For instance24, ‘dread’ in line 12 is a contradictonym (like ‘cleave’ or ‘sanction’) – it has two opposite meanings (‘fearful’ and ‘fearsome’).

Similarly, ‘to frame’25 could mean = ‘to shape/make’, = ‘to imagine’ or = ‘to describe/turn into a work of art’:= ‘to control/restrain’

Is the poem asking about the nature of the god who has made such a beautiful, deadly26 beast?

Is the poem asking about the nature of the poet who dares/is able to describe such a perfect creature?

- Elsewhere Blake – like Coleridge – suggests that the human creator (i.e. the poet) is simply a version of the divine creator.

Does the tiger represent the untameable materials of the imagination?

23 to be made up of – be composed of 24 for instance – for example 25 in most dictionaries you will find the transitive verb ‘to frame someone’ (e.g. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

meaning to fabricate evidence against someone (incriminar). However, the first recorded use of this verb was in 1910 as part of US slang.

26 deadly – lethal

Does the tiger represent the indomitable in the natural world outside and the untameable desires and drives of the human mind?- Can these urges and instincts be ‘framed’ (= controlled, limited)?

Much of Blake’s poetry describes the perennial battle between the expanding forces of energy and the restrictive, numbing death-dealing force of reason.

How does the Tyger of the imagination compare with the tiger of Indian forests?Why is there such a juxtaposition between the tame-looking, often smiling tiger Blake illustrates at the bottom of the page and the Tyger of the poem?

Can the artist really frame something as physically alive and three-dimensional as a tiger in words or ink?In his/her fear of trying paralleled by our fear of the beast in the dark?

This is meta-literature as it reflects on the creative process in poetry, especially visionary poetry (the kind of poetry that communicates deep truths about the universe, often concerning the divine or a higher power).

Are the stars abandoning their weapons or defending themselves in the fifth stanza?- if you automatically thought the stars were hurling their spears, notice the

line from Blake’s The Four Zoas, “The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.”, which is unambiguous.

Do the ‘cold’ stars recognize that they cannot compete with the beast that ‘burns bright’?

Who is in control of the poem – the artist, God, the Tyger?

Who smiles? - if we only had the poem we would say God or the artist but in the picture

it is the tiger who is smiling.

The Metaphorical ‘Tiger’

The Tyger is clearly not a real tiger in that he is made using very human apparatus – a furnace, an anvil, a hammer and a chain: those of a blacksmith.- Is he a symbol of the industrial revolution?- Is the Tyger equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster – a creation that

threatens to destroy its maker?

Blake saw artisan work – such as his own – as creative and fulfilling - he saw the new kind of work (or ‘toil’) resulting from the industrial

revolution as quite literally soul-destroying.

Was the Tyger created by a Promethean figure, challenging God and the stars?

Is the Tyger the creation of a Miltonic Satan in the same way as the Lamb (Christ) is a creation of God?

Does the Tyger represent French Jacobinism?- the French Revolution and the ‘Terror’ were described with tiger similes

in The Times on 7 January 1792 and 26 July 1793.

In 1792 Samuel Romilly of the French Republic: “One might as well think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forest of Africa.”[He doesn’t explain why the republican tigers might live in Africa!]- there were newspaper references to “the tribunal of tigers”. - At a later date Marat’s eyes were said to resemble “those of the tyger

cat’”.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes post-revolutionary Paris as ‘a place of fear […] Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam’.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) wrote in an undated letter: “I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person.”- We don’t know who the letter was addressed to (Blake’s friend Thomas

Paine has been suggested) but the metaphor was clearly floating in the (New Historical) atmosphere.

Blake’s brilliant contemporary George Stubbs painted several versions of a white horse being attacked by a lion and Blake later wrote,

“The tygers of wrath27 are wiser than the horses of instruction”, which seems to almost anticipate Marx’s, “Philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it”.

The Tyger is also echoed in Yeats’s Easter, 1916, “A terrible beauty is born”.

Ultimately28, the Tyger can represent anything that is fascinating and dangerous:from revolution to sexual passion to drugs. - all these things cause us to lose control.i.e. we are talking about sublimity

27 wrath – fury, anger 28 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis

Sublimity

Edmund Burke distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful in A Philosophical Inquiry (1757).

Beauty is associated with brightness, smoothness and smallness

Sublimity is associated with the infinite, solitude, emptiness, darkness, terror, powerful emotions, spiritual and religious awe, and the grandeur of nature.

Burke associated the sublime with ‘delight’ – a feeling of intense relief.- after an initial response of fear before something that could kill us (e.g.

The Grand Canyon), it is the relief of remembering that our vantage point is comparatively safe.

For Burke the great English writer of the sublime was John Milton- Remember that Milton turned Satan into a tiger in the Garden of Eden

when he was stalking Adam and Eve (Bk IV: l. 401).

But the tiger represents more than something that could kill, but won’t.- tigers were killing British colonists with certain regularity.

Perhaps the last man-eating carnivores left in the experience of modern man.

The fear of depredation in the dark is perhaps our most primeval fear dating back to Dinofelis, a predatory cat specialized in hunting hominids.

Theodicy29

Nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator.

The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also horrific in its capacity for violence. What kind of a God, then, could or would design such a terrifying beast as the tiger?

What does the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell us about the nature of God?

The speaker stands in awe30 of the tiger as a sheer physical and aesthetic achievement, even as he recoils in horror from the moral implications of such a creation; - the poem addresses not only the question of who could make such a

creature as the tiger, but who would perform this act.

This is a question of creative responsibility and of will, and the poet carefully includes this moral question with the consideration of physical power.

The use of the word ‘dare’ to replace the ‘could’ of the first stanza introduces a dimension of aspiration and wilfulness into the sheer might31

of the creative act.

The perspective of experience in this poem involves a sophisticated acknowledgement of what is unexplainable in the universe.

The open awe of The Tyger contrasts with the easy confidence, in The Lamb, of a child’s innocent faith in a benevolent universe.

Incidentally, The Tyger was engraved on the back of the copper plate on which The Lamb had been etched.

Notice however the false dichotomy: the Lamb may represent the benevolent God but how does the Tyger represent the retribution of a just God?

29 theodicy – the problem of the existence of evil in a world created by a benevolent, omnipotent God.30 in awe – astonished, amazed, dumbstruck 31 might – power

In form and content, The Tyger also parallels the Biblical Book of Job. - Job, too, was confronted by the sheer awe and power of God, who asks

the suffering man a similar series of rhetorical questions designed to lead Job not to an answer, but to an understanding of the limitations inherent in human wisdom.

This limitation is forced into view by the final paradox: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Can the God of Innocence also be the God of Experience? - If so, how can mere mortals, trapped in one state or the other, ever hope to

understand this God?

The Tyger in the Context of Blake’s Work

Another way of trying to make sense of this poem is to look at it in the context of Blake’s other poems.

To start with, it is clearly paired with the ‘song of innocence’ The Lamb.

The innocent sacrificial lamb is a symbol of God’s love.In this context, the Tyger seems to be a symbol of God’s wrath32

- Or they could relate to nurturing Christ vis à vis the cruel desert God of the Old Testament.

- Can the two divinities coexist (“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”)

The innocent lamb is a reflection of its creator, the Lamb of God- What deity is the Tyger a reflection of then?

The child in The Lamb in his/her innocence can answer all the questions - however, all the questions in The Tyger are left unanswered.

In Auguries of Innocence (1803?) Blake wrote “God is Light / To those poor Souls who dwell in Night”.- Those who live in the darkness of ignorance (the forests of the night),

who cannot satisfactorily integrate the various aspects of their experience (as the child in The Lamb can), come to see that experience as controlled by some frightening force.

In Europe, a Prophecy (1794) the coming to power of reason spreads33

darkness and creates forests of error:“Thought changed the infinite [i.e. God] to a serpent... and man fled from its face and hid in forests of night...

In Vala, or The Four Zoas (1795-1804) Urizen’s “tygers roam in the redounding smoke / In forests of affliction.”- Urizen represents reason and in Blake’s theology is paired with Los,

imagination.

It the forest of the night simply our sleeping nightmare in which we are the prey of experience?

Ultimately34, The Tyger is a great example of T S Eliot’s claim that

32 wrath – fury, anger 33 to spread (spread-spread-spread) – propagate 34 ultimately – (false friend) in the final analysis

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

The Indian-ness of the Tyger

The imagery of fire with its simultaneous connotations of creation, purification, and destruction.

These are the attributes of Shiva (Cf. Shelley tutorial notes)Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita was welcomed by London radicals (such as Blake’s friends Fuseli and Johnson).- is the Indian-ness of both the tiger and Shiva important?

David Weir35 links The Tyger to revolutionary currents in India. Encouraged by the power vacuum left by the French Revolution, the Muslim leader Tipu Sultan (1750-99) – self-declared “Citizen Tipu” – began to attack the British. - Tipu was known as ‘The Tiger of Mysore’ and the tiger was his symbol.- He was a pioneer in the use of rocket artillery. - Even though he was overwhelmed by General Munro in 1792, a different

kind of defeat was noted by the British public when it became known that the general’s son had been killed by an Indian tiger in the same year.

Weir’s neat conclusion is that The Tyger was not only written in response to young Munro’s death, but that its tiger was also partly Indian.

35 in Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance (2003)

Extension

Find out about Tipu’s Tiger (a.k.a.36 Tippoo’s Tiger) a contemporary (c. 1795) India objet d’art in the Victoria & Albert Museum. - How does this visual artistic rendition of a tiger compare to Blake’s

poem?

36 a.k.a. – also known as

The Tyger

Tyger37! Tyger! burning bright alliterationIn the forests of the night, assonanceWhat immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? alliteration, iambic tetrameter

In what distant deeps or skies assonance, alliterationBurnt the fire of thine eyes? assonanceOn what wings dare he aspire38?39 What the hand dare sieze40 the fire?41

And what shoulder42, & what art,Could twist the sinews43 of thy heart? assonance, iambic tetrameter And when thy heart began to beat, pararhyme, iambic tetrameterWhat dread44 hand? & what dread41 feet? polysyndeton

What the hammer? what the chain? polysyndetonIn what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp polysyndetonDare its deadly terrors clasp? alliteration

When the stars threw down their spears45, alliterationAnd watered heaven with their tears, alliteration, iambic tetrameterDid he smile his work to see? alliterationDid he who made the Lamb make thee? internal rhyme, iambic tetrameter

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright alliterationIn the forests of the night, assonanceWhat immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? alliteration, iambic tetrameter

37 this spelling of ‘tiger’ was already old-fashioned. Blake presumably chose it because it looks more mysterious.

38 to aspire – a. rise up, b. have a burning ambition 39 a reference to Icarus?40 Blake’s spelling of ‘seize’41 the hand that dare seize the fire could be a reference to Prometheus 42 shoulder – (in this context) strength43 sinews – muscles, tendons 44 dread – a. fearful. b. fearsome45 threw down their spears – a. abandon one’s weapons. b. defend oneself from on high

Form

The poem is comprised of six quatrains in rhymed couplets.

Does the meter imitate the hammering beat of the smithy that is the poem’s central image orthe unstoppable advancing tiger?

It certainly imitates nursery rhymes:

Twinkle, Twinkle, little star Jack be nimble, Jack be quickHow I wonder what you are Jack, jump over the candlestick

Notice how Blake expects us to treat ‘fire’ as two syllables in line 6 but as a monosyllable in line 8.

Bibliography

The Poetry of William Blake by Michael Ferber [Penguin Critical Studies, 1991]Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Richard Willmott [Oxford Student Texts, 1990]Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Dominic Hyland [York Notes, 1982]Songs of Innocence and of Experience by Alan Tomlinson [MacMillan Master Guides, 1987]Songs of Innocence and of Experience by David Punter [York Notes Advanced, 2003]Songs of Innocence and Experience by Margaret Bottrall [MacMillan Casebook, 1970]Romantic Literature by John Gilroy [York Notes Companions, 2010]

INTERNET

- BBC4 In Our Time: Songs of Innocence and Experience - Songs of Innocence and Experience (GradeSaver)- Songs of Innocence and Experience (Spark Notes)- Songs of Innocence and Experience (Shmoop)