What was really fun about compiling all of the quotes for today was I realized how polarizing a poet he really is. Was, and still is. Undeniably important, undeniably in the canon – but after that, everybody disagrees.
So here are two poems of the same topic – one from Songs of Innocence, one from Songs of Experience.
The Chimney Sweeper – from Songs of Innocence
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl’d llke a lamb’s back. was shav’d: so I said
“Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”
And so he was quiet & that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river. and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark.
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.
The Chimney Sweeper – Songs of Experience
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother! say!
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow. — William Blake
“He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. one obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble.” — F.R. Leavis
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. — Blake
“I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bit excessive?”
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake.”
Pause.
“William Blake?”
“William Blake!”
“William Blake???”
“William Blake!!!”
— Bull Durham
“I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse.” — William Blake
“The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life.” — Robert Graves
“In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin.” — Edward Thomas
“It is an honest against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.” — T.S. Eliot
“Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.” — Blake
“He is very eighteenth century.” — T.S. Eliot
“The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.” — T.S. Eliot on “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”
“In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a ‘dark night of the soul sort of,’ his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him – ‘I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of “Ah, Sun-flower,” and it suddenly appeared – the poem I’d read a lot of times before.’ He began to understand the poem, and ‘suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,’ he ‘heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.’ This ‘apparitional voice’ became his guiding spirit: ‘It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.’ On Ginsberg this ‘anciency fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. ‘The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.’ Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”
“a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique … individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence.” — FR Leavis
“You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas.” — TS Eliot
“Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake’s ‘The Chimey Sweeper’, written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet’s dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep’s gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”
Oh, man, now I remember the last time you posted on Blake. It’s every bit as heartbreaking the second time around […unlike a lot of dystopian fiction ;-)].
“…the Romantic cult of the child…” I really like that you pulled that Paglia passage. I’ve got–I doubt I’m the only one in this crowd–an odd mix of the Enlightenment and the Romantic running around (maybe warring) inside me: call it Locke vs. Rousseau (full disclosure: I have a low opinion of Rousseau, to say the least, but still).
But the “cult of the child” I have in spades, and it only got stronger when I became a father.
“And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.”
Powerful beyond my ability to describe.
I find it tiresome when people lead with their opinions all the time (as in: ‘I don’t agree with that philosophy, therefore the poet who espoused that philosophy is an idiot.’ Sigh – you miss so much when you do crap that like that) Not saying you’re doing that – as a matter of fact, I don’t think that at all – but I put that Paglia quote in there on purpose. Because she writes about the Romantics and Rousseau as fact, not with an editorial slant. She is interested in how that philosophy informed Blake’s work. She’s not a Rousseauist either. But that’s her main point with her recent book Break, Blow, Burn. She is so sick of politically-slanted (to right or left) artistic commentary. She wants to go back to the text, and back to the poet’s intent. That’s her whole mission in life.
Obviously everyone doesn’t think Blake is a genius – I loved looking at all of the differing thoughts about him. To me, his “marriage of heaven and hell” is almost too powerful to even read in one sitting.
I should be clear: the reason I find it tiresome, and the reason why I chase people who ONLY can talk about art that way off my blog – is that those people are more interested in theories, and concepts, and politics – than art.
Yawn.
But back to Blake! The story about Allen Ginsberg masturbating and then reading Blake made me laugh out loud.
Oh and by the way, Ken, speaking of poetry – thank you for picking up my slack 2 days ago with Paul Revere’s Ride! I just did not have the time to put it up … but lo and behold … you leapt into the void!
Here’s one I like a lot from Songs of Innocence:
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.
When the meadows laugh with the lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene.
When Mary and Susan and Emily.
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.
When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live and be merry & join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He.
Eh, how could I not? If I’da really been on the ball, I’da put up “Concord Hymn” yesterday to follow up. ;-)
I hear you. I picked up on the Paglia passage because I asked myself, “Okay, why is there a little corner of my soul howling for vengeance for the little chimney sweeps? Am I just a sappy dad, or is there more to it?”
This post reminded me of the pages in my high school textbook when we first started studying Blake. I was on an art scholarship and struggling with writing, and seeing the poems and the art together blew me away. (As if I’d never seen author-illustrators before!)
The other night my 2-1/2 year old niece asked me to read her a book–I think it was called “Time for Bed.” It was written in the voice of the mother/father animal telling the respective baby animal to go to sleep or whatever, and they’d say the name twice. The repetition kept reminding me of something. So maybe “Time for bed, little sheep, little sheep” was making me think of Blake’s “Little lamb.”
Ken – I know what you mean. I want vengeance too. Especially because the little boy lisps – he’s too small to even speak properly!
Paglia also writes a lot about the filth of Blake’s time – the uninterrupted filth of London – so Blake’s walled garden was like a little Eden … but just imagine the stench of that time, the battle with human waste … everything just exploding. Beginning of industrial revolution, all that.
Kate – I know, it’s just so powerful to see the poems along with his illustrations – I actually just have a pretty prosaic copy of his collected works, no engravings … It would be nice to at least have some facsimiles. I LOVE the one of Christ and the sepulchre and the 2 angels. To me that’s what God feels like.
The illustration from Dante reminds me of Goya a little.
It occurs to me that a lot of why critics diverge so sharply on Blake is that he was so uncompromisingly himself as to evade all their clever taxonomies. Mystic? Madman? Genius? Fiend? Perhaps like each of us he encompassed many qualities – yet his was such a heightened awareness of the imaginative spirit, so much so that his wife remarked, in effect, “I miss my husband. He is so often in paradise.”
Robert – I had not heard that quote from his wife! I love that!!
Robert – quite. Great quote.
We had the really big genius/madness conversation when Sheila posted on Virginia Woolf; I wish I’d remembered Blake during that discussion because of the sharp contrast in opinion about him, from some very intelligent critics.
Since I’m on a Chesterton kick, I may as well quote him from Orthodoxy – “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens; the madman tries to get the heavens into his head, and it is his head that cracks.” Both ends of that quote seem to apply equally to William Blake, though he never puts a name to it.
His whole seeing angels in the trees at age 8 started him off. His first vision.
And Robert- yes, I agree with you about avoiding other taxonomies – his comments about Dryden and Pope show his feelings on that. He was a leap forward, he refused the influences of the past.
He’s also one of those poets (well, most of the ones I’ve chosen this month are) where I can recognize one of his poems just from seeing what it looks like on the page. He’s immediately apparent, to me … something in even the shape of the words says “BLAKE”. Like the line breaks in Marriage of Heaven and Hell … it’s unmistakable.
Check it out – see what I mean?
I’m reading it way too fast–it’s astonishing.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain’d it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.
The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.
And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call’d the Devil or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death.
But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.
steve – thanks for posting your favorite. I meant to mention that earlier. I love the “Ha ha ha” repetition – it’s so innocent.