Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Týger Týger búrning bríght

  Īn the fórests óf the níght. . . .16

  Blake was an exacting reviser. Multiple drafts of The Tyger can be discerned in the notebook known as the Rossetti Manuscript. He once wrote, “Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words,” and the pains he took with The Tyger reflect that conviction. In preliminary versions the tiger was conventionally scary. Near the bottom right-hand side of the notebook page reproduced here (figure 19), some almost obliterated lines suggest a really horrible beast:

  Could fetch it from the furnace deep

  And in thy horrid ribs dare steep

  In the well of sanguine woe

  In what clay and in what mould

  Were thy eyes of fury rolled

  Englishmen who had lived in India regularly described man-eating tigers as remorseless. According to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The tiger is more ferocious, cruel, and savage than the lion. Although gorged with carnage, his thirst for blood is not appeased; he seizes and tears to pieces a new prey with equal fury and rapacity, the very moment after devouring a former one.” But the tiger in Blake’s poem is no naturalistic beast, and whatever the forests of the night may be, they are not an ordinary Indian jungle. Blake’s tiger dwells in mysterious distant deeps or skies, not on earth at all.17

  The companion poem to The Tyger is The Lamb, as is implied in the question, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The Lamb asks a single question that yields a single answer: “Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee.” The Tyger is all questions and no answer, with a driving, accelerating tempo. In The Lamb creation is imagined as a loving gift of life to children and lambs by a God who is himself a shepherd and a lamb. In The Tyger creation gives form to a majestic tiger, a labor that requires titanic daring and strength.

  In Genesis, “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” For creators in Blake’s poems—and he has many versions of them—it is not so effortless as that. Often, as here, they are blacksmiths heating resistant material to be hammered into shape. The chain probably refers to the vertebrae, and the product is organic as well as metallic, with twisted sinews for the beating heart.

  Critics who look for irony in Blake’s poems sometimes claim that the speaker of this one is deluded, foolishly worshipping a phantom of his own imagination. But the awesome power of the tiger’s creator simply cannot be dismissed. The questions are challengingly open, for as David Fuller says, “The poem wonders at; it does not explain or expound.”18

  19. Manuscript page from Blake’s Notebook

  Not only does The Tyger question what kind of creator makes predators as well as their prey, it hints as well at other myths that suggest further lines of questioning. Intoxicated by the driving verse, readers may not stop to ask what is meant by “When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears.” The spears are presumably rays of starlight, and they also recall the weapons of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, cast down after the Almighty crushed their rebellion; it is their bitter weeping that waters heaven. A clear hint in The Tyger does indeed point to Satan as the creator in the poem. “On what wings dare he aspire” recalls his flight through chaos to destroy the newly created Adam and Eve, as narrated by Milton: “Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars / Up to the fiery concave towering high.”19 Blake knew Paradise Lost practically by heart, argued with it throughout his life, and eventually summoned Milton back to earth to unite with him in a poem called Milton.

  In Blake’s wonderfully condensed lyric, yet another rebel is invoked in “What the hand dare seize the fire?” The striking resemblance of Prometheus to Satan was well known to the early Church fathers. Zeus punished Prometheus with eternal torture for disobeying the commandment that no god should give the gift of fire—in effect, civilization—to the human race. Not surprisingly, Christian theologians held that Prometheus was right to rebel whereas Satan was wrong. For Blake, however, both rebellions are equally justified, since in his opinion the God of Genesis is just as tyrannical as Zeus. That is why Blake claims in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “Milton was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”20 Milton rebelled against the earthly tyrant Charles I, but in Blake’s view, he tried in vain in Paradise Lost to justify the tyranny of a patriarchal God.

  This doesn’t mean that Blake was a Satanist. His meaning is that Christian doctrine has confused two very different things, wrongly calling them both by the name of Satan. One is resistance to tyranny, whereas the other is sadistic cruelty. The Satan who revenges himself on God by tempting Adam and Eve to sin has nothing in common with the heroic rebel at the beginning of Paradise Lost. Blake thought it outrageous to believe that an omnipotent, all-knowing God could first prohibit the fruit of knowledge and then allow an immensely powerful fallen angel to tempt the just-created Adam and Eve to pluck it and incur damnation.

  Finally, what is one to make of the picture of the tiger? Although in the original format it would be seen simultaneously with the text, it strikes most viewers as bizarrely incongruous. In addition, it differs markedly from one copy to another, depending on how it is colored and how the tiger’s expression is rendered. In the first of the two copies reproduced here (color plate 9), the scene is dark and rather ominous. In the second (color plate 10), the wide-eyed tiger looks merely anxious or bemused, in a bright daytime scene—hardly forests of the night. Erdman describes the single tree as “scared leafless.” This tiger is certainly not burning bright, and there is nothing to suggest fearful symmetry.21

  Many commentators have complained that the image is miserably inadequate to the poem; one calls this tiger “mild and silly,” another “simpering.” It has even been suggested that Blake wasn’t any good at drawing animals, but that’s absurd. He was perfectly capable of drawing fierce tigers, and there are two of them in a page of his notebook.22

  There is another possibility. From the perspective of Experience, whatever seems overwhelming in existence should arouse fear and awe. Innocence sees it differently. Not only did the same God make tigers and lambs, but both of them inhabit the world we live in. Predators exist that seek to kill us, just as we ourselves kill trusting sheep and lambs. But an animal that can suggest nature as threat may also symbolize nature as our proper home. In a beautiful lyric in Songs of Innocence called Night, “wolves and tygers howl for prey,” but a tender lion stands guard:

  And there the lion’s ruddy eyes

  Shall flow with tears of gold,

  And pitying the tender cries,

  And walking round the fold:

  Saying “Wrath by his meekness

  And by his health, sickness,

  Is driven away

  From our immortal day.”23

  The Tyger doesn’t answer the questions it poses. The picture reminds us that there can be more than one way of trying to answer them. Experience speaks in the text; Innocence responds in the picture. Thus Innocence and Experience continue to be in dialogue, and although the poem is filled with challenging questions about what a creator might be like, it is also an eloquent celebration of creativity and life.

  Social Protest

  The Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence hinted strongly at social protest, both against the exploitation of small children and against the religious ideology that teaches them to accept their lot. A poem in Songs of Experience is also entitled The Chimney Sweeper, and here the political issues are explicit.

  A little black thing among the snow,

  Crying “weep, weep,” in notes of woe!

  Where are thy father and mother, say?

  “They are both gone up to the church to pray.

  Because I was happy upon the heath,

  And smiled among the winter’s snow,

  They clothed me in the clothes of death,

  And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

  And because I am happy and dance and sing,

  They think they
have done me no injury,

  And are gone to praise God and his priest and king

  Who make up a heaven of our misery.”24

  The picture (figure 20) presents what for Blake is an unusually three-dimensional, naturalistic scene. The boy, carrying his bag of soot on his back and a wire brush (not easy to see in this copy) in his right hand, looks anxiously up into the pelting snow as he passes houses that are closed against him. He believes that he has been forced to suffer simply “because I was happy upon the heath,” and his blackened garments are indeed clothes of death.

  One might suppose that churches in Blake’s day would have seen it as their mission to relieve such suffering, but far from it—they taught that child labor of every kind was a moral obligation. Chimney sweepers, owing to their filthy appearance, were forbidden even to enter a church. If they did try to go in, a reformer said, “They were driven out by the beadle with this taunt, ‘What have chimney sweepers to do in a church?’” Even when churches promoted charity, Blake saw it as hypocritical evasion of responsibility for the injustice that makes charity necessary. The Divine Image in Songs of Innocence declares optimistically:

  20. The Chimney Sweeper, Songs of Experience, copy L, plate 41

  Mercy has a human heart,

  Pity, a human face,

  And love, the human form divine,

  And peace, the human dress.

  In Experience the corresponding poem, The Human Abstract, is bitterly disillusioned.

  Pity would be no more

  If we did not make somebody poor,

  And mercy no more could be

  If all were as happy as we.

  It may be worth mentioning that “poor” still rhymes with “more” in the speech of many British people, as it does in Mark Twain—“drot your pore broken heart.”25

  Besides The Tyger, the other masterpiece in Songs of Experience is an overwhelming indictment of social injustice. It is entitled simply London.

  I wander through each chartered street,

  Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

  And mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  In every cry of every man,

  In every infant’s cry of fear,

  In every voice, in every ban,

  The mind-forged manacles I hear.

  How the chimney sweeper’s cry

  Every blackening church appalls,

  And the hapless soldier’s sigh

  Runs in blood down palace walls.

  But most through midnight streets I hear

  How the youthful harlot’s curse

  Blasts the newborn infant’s tear

  And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.26

  Blake was a lifelong Londoner. As he imagines wandering through his native city—there is nothing to suggest that the poem’s speaker is different from himself—he is assaulted on every side by sights and sounds of human suffering. Men and children cry aloud (“bans” are curses); chimney sweeps call, “Sweep! Sweep!” in search of work. Indeed, sounds are heard so intensely that they can become sights, in the synesthesia with which Blake seems to have perceived the world. The sighs of soldiers drip like blood on the palace that orders them abroad to die for the British Empire. The cries of chimney sweeps are likewise made visible, in the soot that covers churches like a funeral pall (there may also be a suggestion that the churches should grow pale with horror or shame). James Joyce put it well: “Looking at St. Paul’s cathedral, Blake heard with the ear of the soul the cry of the little chimney sweep. Looking at Buckingham Palace, he sees with the eye of the mind the sigh of the hapless soldier running down the palace wall.”27 It is probably no accident that the initial letters of the third stanza of London spell out the word hear, just as the “newborn infant’s tear” near the end of the poem echoes “every infant’s cry of fear” near the beginning.

  Like The Tyger, London has an urgent, driving rhythm. The underlying meter is iambic, but so passionately indignant that it often surges into a trochaic drumbeat:

  Hów the yóuthful hárlot’s cúrse

  Blásts the néwborn ínfant’s téar. . . .

  The accusation is repeated with hypnotic intensity: “in every—in every—in every—in every—in every.” And in the intensity of visionary perception, verbs can become nouns: “Mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” Blake is thinking of passages in the Bible such as the Lord’s command to Ezekiel: “Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof.”28

  The streets are “chartered” because charters played an important role in an intense political debate at the time. London radicals, with whom Blake identified, hoped that a revolution like the one in France could establish liberty, equality, and fraternity. Conservatives, Edmund Burke for example, countered that the English people had more than enough liberty already, guaranteed by legal charters that went all the way back to the Great Charter, the thirteenth-century Magna Carta. But the radicals, such as Thomas Paine, saw this legal system as narrowly restrictive, prohibiting whatever it did not specifically permit. In Blake’s London the very streets are legalistically defined, and even the flowing river is confined between man-made walls.

  London is a political protest in a profoundly moral sense, not in a programmatic way. Orwell said, “There is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each chartered street’ than in three-quarters of socialist literature.” Michael Ferber remarks that near Westminster Bridge today, Blake’s London can be seen chiseled into the stone pavement. Across the river are the Houses of Parliament and the Ministry of Defense, twin strongholds of the very power structure that the poem was written to expose.29

  The picture for London (figure 21) complements the text. An aged man on a crutch is being led by a small boy, passing a door closed tight against them. It is evidently winter, since another boy is warming his hands at a fire in the street. The old man may well be blind, as he is when a similar image is invoked in the late poem Jerusalem:

  I see London blind and age-bent begging through the streets

  Of Babylon, led by a child. His tears run down his beard. . . .

  The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street languishes

  To Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn, all is distress and woe.30

  In his later poems Blake imagined an ideal London as Jerusalem, and the actual London as Babylon. He was born in the family shop in Broad Street, Poland Street was right around the corner, and Great Queen Street is where he spent his seven years’ apprenticeship to James Basire. Close by is Lincoln’s Inn where lawyers were and are trained. In a number of copies of the Songs, the undulating border at the foot of the page in London resembles an earthworm, emblem of mortality; in the copy reproduced here it is a hissing snake.

  21. London, Songs of Experience, copy N, plate 21

  All of these victims have internalized a cruel ideology, crystallized in the brilliant expression “the mind-forged manacles.” In an earlier draft Blake called them “German forged links,” with the Hanoverian monarchy in mind (see figure 19, page 82, above), but that was too reductive. A generation later Shelley too spoke of fetters that bite “with poisonous rust into the soul,” but he suggested that they might turn out to be “brittle perchance as straw.” Blake’s metaphor is suggestive of manacles made of iron or steel, not straw, and in later poems he often acknowledged how hard it would be to shed them: “He could not take their fetters off for they grew from the soul.” The South African martyr Steve Biko said memorably, “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”31

  Finally, it is in “midnight streets” that the most harrowing sound is heard. The plight of the youthful harlot forms the culmination of this amazing social indictment, for it gathers together all of the themes of the poem. In Jer
usalem Blake speaks of “a religion of chastity, forming a commerce to sell loves / With moral law.” Marriages were regularly arranged between families for financial considerations, wives were encouraged to be chastely asexual, and divorce was virtually unobtainable. So a subculture of prostitution, officially condemned but in practice condoned, grew up for dissatisfied men; women’s needs were not considered. In Jerusalem Blake poses a telling question:

  What is a wife and what is a harlot? what is a church? and what

  Is a theatre? are they two and not one? can they exist separate?

  Are not religion and politics the same thing?

  Conventional marriage was thus institutionalized prostitution, and conventional religion was a theatrical performance for a passive audience. Blake would have heard the voice of Satan in T. S. Eliot’s remark, “The only dramatic satisfaction that I find now is in a High Mass well performed.”32 Religion and politics are the same thing because the Church of England is a tool of the repressive state. For Blake the mission of religion should be to inspire change in the world we live in right now, not to preach resignation while awaiting the hereafter.

  The most startling thing in the poem is its very last word. In the opinion of the poet and critic John Holloway, “It gives to London the most powerful closing line of any poem known to me in any language.” “Marriage bed” would be the expected idea: the husband contracts a venereal disease from the harlot and then transmits it to his wife, who in turn infects their child (symptoms of gonorrhea, potentially fatal, could show up in a newborn’s tears). In that sense the carriage that bears them away from their wedding is really a hearse in disguise. But society is diseased at a more profound level than just the literal infections that a prostitute might pass on. As with the mind-forged manacles, the implications are all-embracing. “Blake is talking about every marriage,” Bloom says, “and he means literally that each rides in a hearse”—a kind of living death.33