Blake's Use of the Natural Presents Irrefutable Evidence

In "Proverbs of Hell," Blake constructs a set of parables in what appears to be a standard moralistic style that prompts the reader to recognize "the inadequacy of conventional moral categories" (148). Blake's instructions intend to strike a kind of harmony between the age-old contraries of heaven and hell, good and evil. Rather than running wild with his material and tripping right into the satanic pits of hell, however, Blake leaves his reader with proverbs that are self-contained and almost puritanical in their diction and imagery.

In Plate 9, three of Blake’s lines exhibit his rigid purpose and thought-process especially well. He begins, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” (5). As he does frequently, Blake anchors his message in natural forms (animals, in this case). However, unlike in many of his works, the tiger in this instance is not such a direct embodiment of the devil as it is in the poem, “The Tyger.” Rather, the tiger is a natural vehicle for wrath, just as the horse in this proverb is an unnatural vehicle for direction and order. While the tiger is able to act in a biological manner stemming from impulse and fury, the horse’s natural being is stifled by instruction. This instruction may even be divine instruction. Blake conveys his disdain of religious rigid order and tyranny using two beings that are naturally symbolic.

The next line in Plate 9, “Expect poison from the standing water” (6), is perhaps an even clearer depiction of Blake’s entire purpose. Much of Blake’s work was designed to show that the traditional conceptions of good and evil are invalid. Traditionally, evil “is everything associated with the body and its desires and consists essentially of energy” (148). In this proverb, Blake uses the image of water to show the difference between states of matter and states of being. In the conventional sense, the term a state of matter could fit nicely into the confines of “what is good”; a state of natural matter is that which follows direction, that which is reasonable and restrained. Water, a natural element, is a state of matter in the realm of science. Blake uses a real-life parable about actual survival to make the connection between standing water (as a state of matter) with poison and evil. With Blake’s paradox in place, the reader then goes on to draw a parallel between moving water and states of energy or states of being. Essentially, Blake posits that to be a being, one must move, one must have energy.

Oothon's Symbolism

Blake creates a dichotomy of symbolism in his character of Oothoon throughout Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Oothoon primarily represents the oppressed woman. This is most evident in some of the early lines of the poem when "Bromion rent her with his thunders" (plate 1, 16). Oothoon is subject to the most critical form of submissiveness and yet is still deemed a "harlot" (plate 1, 18) and impure by both male figures. Blake portrays her as the portrait of women's sexuality in the 18th century and yet seeks a society resembling America in which, its citizens, both male and female, can openly express their sexuality. This is most evidently presented through Oothoon's closing remarks on "happy copulation" (plate 7, 1) and "lustful joy" (plate 7, 6).

However, while seeking the liberation that exists in America, Blake acknowledges the imperfections of a country where slavery still exists. In that regard, Oothoon represents those enslaved. This is of course brought to the reader's attention with the opening line, "Enslav'd" (plate 1, 1). Oothoon's rape by Bromion becomes an allusion to slavery. She has become "stampt" with his "signet" (plate 1, 21) in parallel context to a slave and his owner.

While Oothoon exists in this duality of oppression, she simultaneously stands for the sexually free woman. In plate one, Oothoon traverses the line between innocent and experienced, to use Blakeian terms. In a literal sense she forcefully loses her virginity; however, this loss of innocence occurs before the rape. She debates whether or not to "pluck" the flower from its "dewy bed" (plate 1, 7) which can be read as Oothoon's internal struggle with her own sexuality. However, before Bromion enters the stage Oothoon arguably takes charge of her sexuality by plucking the flower and placing it between her breasts, an overtly sexual act. This scene coupled with Oothoon's closing statements is indicative of Oothoon's dichotomous role as both the oppressed and the liberated.   

Patriarchal Systems of Power in Visions of the Daughters of Albion

            The relationships between characters in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion represent the different patriarchal systems of power prevalent during the late eighteenth century.  Oothoon, Bromion and Theotormon’s intertwining relationships symbolize to oppressive systems of power: the chattel slave system and the morals associated with Christianity. The relationship between Oothoon and Bromion represents the relationship between a slave master and his female slave. Blake’s descriptions of Oothoon reinforce the stereotypes associated with female slaves. The Daughters of Albion observed that “Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up” (2.11). During the time it was commonly believed that slaves, female slaves in particular, were immune to feeling pain, compared to white women who were perceived as being fragile and delicate. This belief strengthened the idea that slaves were merely animals and property, not humans. Bromion is also represented with the persona of a slave master. Bromion is introduced into the poem when he “rent [Oothoon] with his thunders” (1.16). He violently ripped her apart. She was simply acted upon and had no agency during the act. When describing Oothoon and others like her Bromion said, “they are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourges” (1.22). Oothoon and other slaves were represented as being subservient to their masters. The patriarchal slave-master relationship is represented both through Bromions rape of Oothoon and the language used by the Daughters of Albion and Bromion himself, which reinforced popular, preconceived notions.

            The second patriarchal system of power represented in Visions of the Daughters of Albion is the Christian Church and their ideas of morality and virtue. Theotormon was grief stricken when he discovers Bromion deflowered Oothoon. The dominating doctrine of the time was that virginity and chastity were to be protected by a young woman. Once a woman’s virginity was compromised she was considered a “harlot” (2.1) and a “whore” (5.12). In plates five through seven, Oothoon reveals the hypocrisy with organized religion. Christianity was meant to teach virtue and morality to achieve happiness. Yet, Oothoon revealed Christianity is actually quite contradictory. At the beginning of plate 6 Oothoon says “Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight/ In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking” (6.4-5), revealing how contradictory and hypocritical religion can be. Although the poem began with Oothoon distraught over her encounter with Bromion and pleads to take it back, by the end she self reflects and accepts the hypocrisy of Christian virtues. Oothoon’s idea of love and happiness transformed from the traditional views to a more self-loving and spiritual Oothoon rejected the dominant patriarchal stance on love and virtue.  

Songs of Experience: Ah! Sun-flower

What first interested me about "Ah! Sun-flower" was the immediate significance in the symbolism of the sunflower. Sunflowers are not the first item to come to mind when thinking of an object that is experienced. An image so bright and seemingly cheerful does not necessarily coincide with the more somber attitude that the majority of the poems in Songs of Experience tend to take on. The more times I read it, however, the more I began to realize that the sunflower took on the role of what could be described as the adult. The sunflower watches the sun, day after day, as it makes its journey across the sky, or heaven. "Seeking after that sweet golden clime" (3), the sunflower is forced to only watch the sun, and not make the journey itself, living its life forever hoping, but never accomplishing its goal. The sunflower becomes the experienced object in the poem in that sees its own limitations, and sees its own fate as being forever grounded.

This is further emphasized when the Blake introduces "the Youth" and "the pale Virgin" (5,6). These are two characters that are traditionally naive and innocent. It is particularly interesting that Blake makes a point of drawing attention to the coloring of the Virgin. In comparison to the Sunflower, the Virgin becomes more innocent. The sun that the sunflower aspires to be has not had a chance to affect the Virgin. In a larger sense, the world has not had a chance to influence the Virgin or make the character experienced in worldly matters.

Ultimately, it appears that Blake asserts that the Experienced cannot reach the final destination, Heaven. Both the youth and the virgin are able to "arise from their graves and aspire,/ Where my Sun-flower wishes to go" (7,8). The innocent, inexperienced characters in the poem are able to reach the goal that the experienced cannot, putting them in an Eden scenario. The characters unburdened with knowledge of the world are able to reach a place of paradise, while the knowledgable are forced to watch the innocent move forward. The inexperienced characters are the ones that are admirable to the speaker, who desires the ignorance the youth and the virgin have in the poem. The first line of the poem even shows the speaker's tiring of knowledge and experience. Blake begins by having his narrator speak what could be described as a sigh. This is exaggerated by Blake describing it as "weary of time" (1).

Proverbs of Hell

As Blake captures the voice of Satan in "Proverbs of Hell," he gives the reader a set of instructions on how to live. However, these instructions are an inversion of the standard religious advice one would expect from a text. The opening to this proverb instructs the reader to "drive your cart" (2), which read in isolation could embody a virtuous teaching. Not only could this message diverge from satanism, but it could in fact be seen as a teaching in virtue, as it could imply that every person should take responsibility for the path of their own life, and recognize that it is up to the individual to guide his or her cart in the correct path. It could instruct that one should consider his own actions, and focus primarily on driving his own life. In this world people would hold themselves accountable for mistakes that they made, and generate praise for success internally rather than relying on external forces.

However, the line continues by suggesting that the reader should "plow over the bones of the dead" (2), implying that the goal of driving "your cart" is not meant as a way of remaining virtuous, but rather is celebrating selfishness and egotistical behavior. There is room to interpret this message again as being a positive instruction. The reader could take this instruction and view it through the lens of burying the past and living life according to what the individual believes is correct. This stands in opposition to the idea that we should base our morals off of the teachings of the dead. This line theoretically could support Blake's awareness of the shortcomings that exist within the rigid structure of organized religion, which centers entirely on the ideas of people from the past. In a way, the poem's opening could be seen as a condemnation of those foolish enough to counter progress by instead obsessing over what someone from a different world believed was the "correct" way to live.

Yet, the poem  follows by suggesting that desire should be the driving force for action. The poem criticizes "he who desires but acts not" saying that this type of person "breeds pestilence" (5). This confirms that the poem is not in fact instructing the reader to hold himself accountable for his actions or instructing the reader to search for new innovations rather than hindering progress, but rather, the poem is prodding the reader to believe that his own desires should be fulfilled regardless of the desires of those around him. Reading the prior lines with this in mind, it becomes clear that to "drive your own cart" and to "plow over the bones of the dead" is meant to celebrate the individual on a level that makes the individual ignorant to those that share a common space. Blake does not say to step over the bones of the dead or even to avoid them. The choice of the word "plowing" implies destruction. Hell's proverb is the teaching that "your" wants are not just the most important, but that they are the only true entity, and all else should be crushed beneath those wants.

Religion of "The Chimney Sweeper"

Blake displays duality as a strong theme of The Songs of Innocence and Experience by contrasting poems under the same title and subject. In comparing the two “Chimney Sweeper” poems, Blake ties religion within the conflicts between innocence and experience.

Within both poems, the children speak of their woes but the first seems to be ignorant that there could be any other life for him. When he sees another child, Tom Dacre cry because his head has been “shav’d”, he comforts him, not fully understanding the other terrors around him (6). There is then imagery of other sweepers dying and “lock’d up in coffins” (12). Instead of being terrified or sad, the child believes that the sweepers are set free by an angel. This angel then tells Tom, that “if he’d be a good boy, / He’d have God for his father & never want joy” (19, 20). Blake links the boy’s ignorance and idealism to religion by showing that the boy trusts that this is the life he must lead. There is no need for joy because he will one day be brought to heaven.

The occupation of a chimney sweep is hazardous and many died either in accidents or because of their blackened lungs. The boy from the first poem doesn’t understand these dangers, but instead trusts that he must continue working everyday and he “need not fear harm” because God will eventually take care of him (24).

The second child, lives a similar life, and yet takes a different stance on religion. He resents his mother and father in their absence while they’re at church because he was once happy in ignorant but he has been taught that his life isn’t one of happiness. He has no false positivity but is openly angry at his parents and God for the life they have given him. By blaming “God & his Priest & King” for making “up a heaven of our misery”, the child shows his indignation towards religion (11, 12).

The differences between the two poems display Blake’s opinions on religion. In the first poem, ignorance is linked with the belief in God while the disbelief is tied to experience. In doing this, Blake shows that religion not only hides truth, but deceives the innocent as well.

Fearful Symmetry: Transgressing the Binary

"And I stain'd the water clear" (Introduction, Songs of Innocence, line 18). 

Collin, Brian, and I are currently reading Roland Barthes' S/Z for our Contemporary American Fiction class. Barthes, in his wild analysis of Balzac's story "Sarrasine," addresses the problem of gendered language, but also of antithesis, of opposites that remain separate and do not resolve and yet somehow allow passages to run between them. Barthes writes: "Every joining of two antithetical terms, every mixture, every conciliation -- in short, every passage through the wall of the Antithesis -- thus constitutes a transgression…it is the paradoxism (or alliance of words): an unusual figure, it is the code's ultimate attempt to affect the inexpiable" (27). He concludes by describing this transgression, this transgressive act that goes against Antithesis: "it is at the level of the body that the two inconciliabilia of the Antithesis…are brought together, are made to touch, to mingle in the most amazing of figures in a composite substance (without holding together)" (28). A composite substance, which doesn’t hold together, as an attempt to reach beyond the two opposites, to "affect the inexpiable."

Blake, by setting up his book into two strands, invites the fragments to elicit a divided reaction, to say that one poem in Innocence says this and the Experience provides a subversive corollary, or antithetical poem, which says that. I would posit, using Barthes' analysis of transgression in Balzac’s story as a guide, that Blake actually attempts to "affect the inexpiable" through transgression and co-mingling of separate substances -- that is, discussing what cannot be pardoned, forgiven, what is beyond the "thou shalt not" written on the Chapel door in "The Garden of Love" -- ultimately, what is both human (physical) and not (Godlike) (line 6). If read in terms of Blake's "All Religions Are One" this transgression against divided "thou shalt not" authority becomes clearer, but the poems in Innocence and Experience are songs concerned with the staining of the clear waters, or, by use of ink-stain, creating paradoxically clear waters – both meanings simultaneously exist and are equal. The poems are divided but, as can be superficially noted in most of the text, the Innocence poems do not shy away from woeful experience, and the Experience songs do not fail to address joy, as in spring, which does not "hide its joy" ("Earth's Answer" line 16), a "Tyger" created (fearfully? hopefully?) by the same hand that made the Lamb, the ability to tell wrath so that wrath may end ("A Poison Tree," line 2). The transgressions between the antithetical tones and subjects are not so great to overflow the overall tone of each section (else they would not be transgressions) -- the bleakness of Experience is not overcome; the joy of Innocence not overshadowed, despite parodic gesture; however, read together, passages are created between the two sections and within the individual poems themselves.

I don't mean to say that the simple presence of contrary themes creates transgression. Instead, it is the binding of disparate elements, of different bodies, of parts of nature, that beckons transgression. "Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?" the speaker of "The Fly" asks, introducing an orgy of pronouns. "Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, / Or if I die." The binding together of these elements is both discouraging -- if a man is no more than a fly, what real value does he have? -- and encouraging -- if one can see humanity in something as small and as insignificant as a fly, one, perhaps, can share empathetic feeling for all of creation, no matter how small. The point is that these two meanings simultaneously exist and one does not triumph over the other – bound together, they create an “amazing figure,” to use Barthes' phrase. They are placed side by side, not for an either/or scenario anticipating a final decision, but for the purposes of transgression to reach beyond the binary. 

Some poems do not bind together contrary elements, so it wouldn't be useful to identify this Barthesian analysis as the “primary” reading for all of the poems. Yet, even poems like "The Sick Rose" feature the flying, invisible worm mingling in the bed "of crimson joy," evil and joy for a minute as bedfellows (line 6). If the “dark secret love” destroys life, there is still a moment where the sickness and the living are bound up together, both beating at the same instant. "Is that trembling cry a song?" the speaker of Holy Thursday in Experience asks (line 5). He means to say that no, the cry is not a song, for "it is eternal winter there" (line 12), but for a moment there is a wavering, as if the trembling cry could be a song, and in fact it is a type of song in the parallel poem first seen in Innocence (as Collin mentioned in his post), singing of the "hum of multitudes" (line 7). The two pieces exist simultaneously, each one bolstering the other and also tearing down the other. The joy of the infant is first expressed as "I have no name" (line 1, "Infant Joy). Joy, nameless, flutters empty as a hum. Once named, it can be Joy; however, once named, one can ask, “is that actually joy?”

The Norton Anthology tell us: “[Songs of Innocence and of Experience] was reprinted at various later times with varying arrangements of the poems” (118). Perhaps Blake's continual fascination and re-working of this unified text (though bifurcated, yet bound, so simultaneously one text and two texts) involves a horrible anxiety in presenting one reading over another, or in finally "binding" the two texts together and presenting them in fearful (and linear) symmetry, thus ending the tension and initiating a kind of bondage found at the end of "The Garden of Love": "And binding with briars my joys and desires” (line 12). Books must be, when finished, literally bound and held together, but this submits them to the coffins of the chimney sweep boys. And yet, this allows them to be shown to others, no longer sleeping in the soot of the imagination. The child's command -- "Piper sit thee down and write" (line 13, "Introduction" Innocence) -- is actually a terrible break from the imagination. One must stop "Piping down the valleys wild," sit in the contours of a hard chair and "stain" the pure waters with a "rural pen." The pen of Blake can be the Bard's pen, the Bard's voice subjected to ink and some kind of permanence, or it can be a pen for hogs, a pen that contains the natural world and tries to subdue it for human want and desire. The only "non-equalizing" factor (an untrue symmetry) is that Innocence is followed by Experience and one cannot, like a true diptych picture or painting, see both at the same time. As readers we are trained to see the Innocence thesis and then the Experience antithesis; however, in re-reading, we can see them as two sides of the same coin, its twin Janus face flipped back and forth.

But binding can also exist positively, as all men seeing themselves throughout the universe and beyond it. "Can I see anothers woe / And not be in sorrow too…Can a mother sit and hear / An infant groan an infant fear?" starts off "On Anothers Sorrow" the last poem in Innocence (lines 1-2, 9-10) The "I" extends to a father, then a mother, then to God, all equalized in their ability to share in suffering, to "sit by us and moan." "He became a little child; / I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name," as the speaker of "The Lamb"relates (lines 16-18). Human bondage, or suffering, can be saved by a different kind of empathetic binding. "Thorns" become the speaker's "only delight" in "My Pretty Rose Tree" (line 8). And, as an extension of "On Anothers Sorrow," "London" displays the speaker's awareness that "In every cry of every man, / In every Infant's cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear." The bondages are mind-forg'd manacles, chains of the "Human Brain" (line 24, "The Human Abstract) but we are all bonded together in this cry, this wild piping, this shared song.