William Blake

Thinking back, I remembered again a long dead wordsmith by the name of Malcolm Muggeridge. I think, once his libido had weakened somewhat he became a Catholic convert, inspired by an interview he had with Mother Teresa, which he called "something beautiful for God". Anyway, Mr Muggeridge was someone I admired in my late teens. As I say, a wordsmith; he had a way with language, and I read one or two of his books.

At school, poetry had bored me. In those days there seemed to be no Children's Poetry as such, not like today, and the only poems we were introduced to were hoary old nonsense of historic British valour, Trafalgar and Agincourt and suchlike. So I left school with no love of poetry. But Malcolm Muggeridge often quoted a couplet or two of William Blake in his own books, and these always took my fancy. Then one day, while browsing in a bookstore I spied "The Portable Blake". It was cheap so I bought it. The section that really caught my attention was Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience", simple poems that yet held profound meaning, like "The Tyger" (which up until then I thought was about the river, not knowing about Blake's eccentric spelling)

Well, the love of Blake led me towards other poets, those who until then - if I thought about them at all - I saw as old fogies sitting at desks in musty old garrets, waffling on about the Western Wind ("thou breath of autumns being") and other such irrelevant nonsense. One day I drifted into the British Museum and there was an exhibition on, I think of the Romantic Poets. I remember idling along the exhibits and a small notebook caught my eye. It was the actual notebook of Percy Shelley and was opened at the page where he had composed the poem beginning "When the lamp is shattered." My own mind was shattered, to see the actual notebook that had been on the desk where Shelley sat, the ink on the page that Shelley had put there - there were crossings out where better words had come into his mind, better expressions, and it shocked me into knowing Shelley as a human being, alive, vibrant, just like myself. Seeing that exhibition led me to the love of biographies, biographies of literary figures of the past, Wordsworth, Keats and so forth.


Eventually I found myself picking up the biography of Wilfred Owen, known for his poems of the First World War, of his experiences on the Western Front. This led to Seigfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg, two other poets associated with WW1. Up until then the subject of war, any interest in it at all, had not been part of me. But after this while browsing in the local library I came across a little book that was the diary kept by a soldier during his time in the trenches in WW1. Not a literary figure at all, but I read the book with relish. Which in turn led me to others on the Great War and the experiences of the soldiers who had fought and died in it. Of the terrible fate of many in the so called "Pal's Battalions" of Kitchener's New Army. The promise had been that if you joined up together you would stay together. And fight together. And die together. On the first day of the Somme one sweep of a machine gun and all the men of a whole road (or whatever) were swept to their death. Which by then, reading about it, made me think of a poem by one of my favorites, Philip Larkin, "MCMXIV", which among other things speaks of the death of innocence, of how the Great War swept away so much.

There are poems of WW1 that dress up the soldiers as virtual people of a world apart - I suppose much like my own idea of poets in musty garrets - and they are spoken of as almost ethereal beings as in the lament of Wilfred Gibson:-

[i]We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings -
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
[/i]

All well and good, but I prefer to think of those men as marching along singing some of the more down to earth songs, such as "Do Your Balls Hang Low?", apparently sung often by the men of the Great War. (Just looking it up, once General Douglas Haig heard the song being sung and immediately rode to the head of the column to remonstrate with the battalion commander, only to find the Colonel singing as heartily as his men)

Keeping with William Blake, I tend to relate "holistically" to all posts here, the unfolding of the threads. OK, that sounds fancy but I really have no other way of saying it.

Just three examples of Blake's poetry that came to mind this morning as various threads were absorbed...

On Another's Sorrow (it is a Song of Innocence)

[i]Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear -

And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
[/i]


Related, at least in my mind, a few lines from "Auguries of Innocence":-

[i]God Appears and God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
[/i]

Maybe this leads to these lines from "The Divine Image:-

[i]And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
[/i]

I'm not really that strong on "pity" myself, it suggests a looking down from another state of being. I prefer "compassion", a reaching across.....as from Pema Chodron..

[i]Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognise our shared humanity

[/i]

But hey, no one is perfect, Blake can have his "pity". Perfection is overrated anyway, "there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" (now where have I heard that before?)

Rambling on about William Blake, he [i]was[/i] seen as a bit of a nutter during his lifetime. I'd like to be thought of as such a nutter myself.......hey, come to think of it....

Anyway, he wrote some pretty deep poems, very turgid most of them, though some passages have a certain ring. But it is his lyrical poems, often short, that I particularly love, especially the "Songs of Innocence and Experience" [i]showing the two contrary states of the human soul[/i].

Each song of innocence has its counterpart. For instance, The Lamb (innocence) and the Tyger (experience)

[i]Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
[/i]

Innocence indeed!

And "The Tyger"....

[i]Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
[b]Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
[/b]
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
[/i]

Experience indeed! With one relevant line highlighted.

Other poems, other contrasts. One couple, of innocence and experience, has often grabbed me, the ones both called "Holy Thursday".

It was the custom in Blake's day (the early 19th century) for the children of the poor house to be paraded through the streets and taken to a carol service at St Pauls. The "good people" of the time would shepard them, taking pride in their own benevolence and charity. Blake captures it well, the "innocence" of it all.

And here is "Holy Thursday", Blake's song of experience, a simply lyrical poem, yet a cry almost of rage....

[i]Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill'd with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e'er the sun does shine,
And where-e'er the rain does fall:
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.[/i]


Still relevant today of course.

But as I say, Blake was a nutter.

I think on another thread I quoted the first few lines of Blake's "The Everlasting Gospel":-

[i]The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.[/i]

I have never really fully understood Blake's implied rejection of the "friend of all Mankind", although I have seen the value of the indirect parable, which tends to creep upon us unawares, bypassing the logical mind that seeks to plot its own course.

But I have been re-reading Thomas Merton's "A Study of Chuang Tzu and found this:-

[i]It is precisely this unconditional character of wu wei (effortlessness) that differentiates Chuang Tzu from other great philosophers who constructed systems by which their activity was necessarily conditioned. The abstract theory of “universal love” preached by Mo Ti was shrewdly seen by Chuang Tzu to be false precisely because of the inhumanity of its consequences. In theory, Mo Ti held that all men should be loved with an equal love, that the individual should find his own greatest good in loving the common good of all, that universal love was rewarded by the tranquillity, peace, and good order of all, and the happiness of the individual. But this “universal love” will be found upon examination (like most other Utopian projects) to make such severe demands upon human nature that it cannot be realized, and indeed, even if it could be realized it would in fact cramp and distort man, eventually ruining both him and his society. Not because love is not good and natural to man, but because a system constructed on a theoretical and abstract principle of love ignores certain fundamental and mysterious realities, of which we cannot be fully conscious, and the price we pay for this inattention is that our “love” in fact becomes hate.[/i]

So, the "mysterious realities" of which we are never fully conscious.

Anyway, simply to share.