William Blake
(1757-1827)
[Marinoni Mingazzini,
Salmoiraghi, A Mirror of the Times, Morano
Editore, 1989, pp. 442-449]
Blake was a great mystical and
visionary poet, who found himself in opposition to nearly all the prevailing
beliefs and attitudes of the 18th century. He hated the rationalism and
materialism of Locke and Newton; he hated the reductive Deism and atheism of
the Enlightenment philosophers, and the tepid, moralistic Christianity of the
contemporary church; he hated the timid conservatism and conformity of
respectable middleclass society and the commercial system that was the foundation
of the prosperity of the period; he hated the realistic art and literature of
the 18th century, which regarded art as "imitation".
Since Blake hated all these things,
he found it necessary to create a philosophy of his own, in opposition to the
basic tenets of the 18th century.
His own "system" or
philosophy was a visionary exaltation of the spirit over the body, of instinct
and intuition over education, and of spiritual vision over the impressions of
the physical sense. He asserted that it was possible to see the infinite and
the eternal beyond the material appearances of the finite world, and declared:
"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it
is, infinite".
Blake expressed his ideas mainly in two kinds of poems.
The poems of the first type are usually short, written in
simple and popular metres (usually the ballad stanza, but sometimes in
octosyllabic couplets). These poems tend to make use of uncomplicated language,
and their symbols and images, though often complex in their range of possible
interpretations, strike the reader's imagination strongly and directly. Of this
kind are the poems in the Songs of
Innocence and Experience, which are all short lyrical poems of great
intensity.
The poems of the second type are long, complex and
obscure works with an arcane and allegorical meaning, which are difficult to
interpret. They are usually written in blank verse, and Blake himself regarded
them as his "prophetic works", like the prophetic books of the Bible,
in which he expounded his philosophy in great detail. Most of these have been
ignored by the general reader, and Blake's reputation rests mainly on his
lyrics.
Blake's lyrical poems deal with
both the realities of the contemporary
world and the potentiality of the
spiritual world. They therefore alternate between harshly realistic and
satirical descriptions of the squalor of the contemporary world, attacks on the
thinkers and concepts which Blake hated, and visions of the spiritual world
which is the ultimate reality, and is infinite and eternal.
In many ways Blake anticipates the themes of Romanticism; for
example, by his exaltation of art, in
which he anticipated the aesthetic movement; in his social conscience and sympathy with the sufferings of the poor (in
which he anticipated one of the major Romantic concerns), with social justice
and reform; in his belief that art is
creative vision (in which he anticipated Coleridge's description of the
psychology of the artist); and in his attack
on the values of the 18th century (which was the necessary prelude to the
creation of the new Romantic sensibility).
Another theme was freedom. Blake was a man who lived all
the contradictions of his time. Like Rousseau, he believed that "man is
born free and everywhere he is in chains"; so he hailed the American and
the French Revolutions and rebelled against any form of oppression and slavery,
either social, political or religious. His love
for justice and democracy led him to oppose any type of institution,
including Church and State, to beware of rising capitalism, to sympathize with
the downtrodden classes and even to support the vindication of women's rights.
As an engraver Blake was
unparalleled, and as a colourist he was a master of water colour. But he was
greater as a poet than as an artist. A self-taught man, he found the models
that appealed to his own genius in the Bible and in
Though deeply religious, Blake was
not orthodox. He denied the existence
of God separated from man, since God to him was the Imagination, i.e.
the creative and spiritual
power in man, which he often referred to as "the divine" [1].
He believed in the biblical Fall of
Man, which, however, in his opinion, was not caused by the eating of an apple (i.e. disobedience), but occurred when
reason revolted against God (i.e. against the Imagination). The revolt led, as a
consequence, to this world in which we live, limited in time and space through
our five senses and peopled by individuals at war with one another, a world of
illusion, which is but a faint shadow of the real eternal world of the
Imagination.
In the name of the Imagination,
Blake, dismissing materialistic science dominated by reason, always tried to
discover the reality beyond the visible world. He considered ordinary living
things as symbols of greater eternal values and powers, which could be
described in one way only, i.e. through a metaphorical language. Hence the need to find
a system of myths and symbols for portraying spiritual reality which, though
invisible to men, is perfect "harmony", in contrast with our physical
world which, being dominated by reason, is perfect "chaos".
“The Songs”
The Songs of Innocence were published in 1789. It was Blake's first
volume to be printed from copperplate and decorated by hand. In 1794 Blake
reissued it with the same Illuminated printing process, but with the addition
of Songs of Experience, to form a
single book under the title Songs
of Innocence and Songs of
Experience, Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Easier and more lyrical than
the Prophetic Books, and less committed than the poems of revolt, the Songs should first of all be enjoyed
more for their musicality than for their possible symbolic meaning. Each one of
the two sets, written in simple, almost naive language rich in monosyllables,
contains from twenty to twenty-five short poems, sometimes different in form
and content, but united by a common inspiration and by a single design.
The first set is a poetical description of man's state of
"innocence" which, in the second,
is replaced by "experience".
Yet, though the loss of
innocence is traditionally identified with the loss of childhood, in Blake
childhood represents not so much a particular age as a state of the soul, a
childlike view of life, which may persist in maturity, too. So the children who
people the Songs of Innocence symbolize
the ideal condition of man who still feels close to his divine origin and
partakes of eternal truths.
But man cannot remain a child
for ever: in order to grow and develop his vital energies, he must know not
only joy but also sorrow, and must be tested by experience. So, though paid for
with suffering, experience becomes a necessary stage in the cycle of life,
since, as Blake himself stated, "without Contraries is no Progression.
Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to
Human existence".
Bearing in mind these ideas,
we can appreciate the clear, pastoral symbolism of the Songs of Innocence, mainly drawn from the Bible, as opposed to the
symbols of the Songs of Experience, which
are more elusive in meaning.
The Lamb and the Tyger
These two poems are usually
read together, since they are both about the problem of Creation and the
identity of the Creator. They are therefore joined together by the same main
theme, (which is summed up in the questions "Did he who made the Lamb make
the Tiger?") as well as by the same devices, i.e. the use of questions and
repetitions.
At a first superficial
reading they may appear as the pictures of two real animals, each one with its
own features (woolly soft fleece and tender voice vs. burning eyes) and set in its natural
habitat (stream, mead and valley vs. forest). But it is soon clear that they hold a deeper
meaning and that the Lamb and the Tiger are symbols open to manifold
interpretations.
The Lamb may in fact
represent the perfect innocence of childhood (emphasized by the identification
of the animal with the child), while the Tiger symbolizes the evil that comes
from worldly experience. In the Bible Christ is also defined as a Lamb.
Moreover, the pronoun "I", in the first poem, may refer either to an
imaginary child or to the poet himself. The number of identifications thus
increases, so that "childhood" assumes a wider meaning than
"infancy", and symbolizes a state of soul which may also be present
in an adult.
In the second poem the
symbolism becomes even more complex, since each word should be analyzed first
in itself and then in relation to the others.
For example, the word burning
", referred
to the Tiger, may evoke the image of the animal's eyes burning with rage and
violence, but the addition of "bright" ("burning bright,) (I. 1)
turns the Tiger into something shining, which may also symbolize the light of
the spirit or of the genius, overcoming error and ignorance represented by the
"forests of the night" (I. 2), (an image that reminds us of Dante's
"selva oscura "). The
same happens with the binomial "fearful symmetry" (l. 4), the second
term of which modifies the first, arousing admiration for the strength and
beauty of the animal and for the daring of its creator.
Creator and creature end
therefore by defining each other by their particular nature [I].- the
tiger is so beatiful and powerful that it must have been created only by a God who,
in his turn, reveals himself through his terrible creature. So, if the Lamb
partakes of the nature of God, the Tiger, too, represents a quality of the
divinity. And if the Lamb represents the sweetness and meekness of Christ, the
Tiger, which consequently is not the negation of the Lamb, represents the
"other" Christ, who descended among men offering them a revolutionary
and violent message of love which is hard to understand and accept (that's
probably why the "stars "(1. 17), symbols of reason and order, threw
down their spears, defeated) [2]
The Lamb and the Tiger
therefore symbolize two different aspects of the same subject, be it Christ
(shift from gentleness to violence), or man (shift from innocence to
experience), two aspects which do not destroy but complete each other.
Blake certainly wanted the
two sets of the Songs in parallel. To this purpose he introduced in both of
them a number of parallel poems, alike in the titles and themes but different
in the form, language and slant, as we can see in the poems given below for
study and analysis.