Glee: The Voices Behind the Innocent and the Experienced in William Blake’s Songs
Carinn Caldelaria
When a song is catchy enough, it’ll stick, leaving the listener to recite its words until a catchier tune takes its place. Such was the strategy of eighteenth-century songs for children, also known as hymns. Hymns were intended as “constant furniture for the minds of children,” words for them to ponder as the songs lingered. Inspired by the simple format of Isaac Watt’s children’s literature of the late eighteenth century and John Locke’s prevailing views on education, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience invite readers of all ages into his obstruction of familiar moral concepts. In his own Songs, Blake takes on alternate identities, exposing his readers to various voices not often expressed by his contemporaries. As Blake assumes the role of woman, blossom and himself, he blurs the distinction of perspectives, suggesting readers (the upper class English) should concern themselves with the stories of folks regardless of their potential bond of identity, because each identity is fluid and often overlapping, anyway.
In eighteenth-century England, children’s literature was limited to hymns. Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715), Anna Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), and, of course, Christopher Smart’s The Parables of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1768) were each popular choices for families to use in introducing their children to both language and religion. The simple literature followed a familiar format. The books begin by introducing the collection of songs with a few words from the author, assuring the readers that their purchase was worth it, for the children will find “great delight in the very learning of truth and duties” and that composition of the songs will be of “universal use and service”. Blake engages with these tropes in his own introduction of Songs of Innocence with his poem Introduction. The poem follows the poet as he delights children with his “happy songs” who beg him to repeat his songs and “write/ In a book, that all may read,” encouraging for the accessibility of Blake’s lessons and the validation from children themselves. Following these authorial thoughts are the songs, which is where Blake starts to swerve from the traditional content. The hymns are generally composed of a few stanzas of abab rhyme scheme celebrating a “Lord and Saviour” through tales of joy and sorrow. Blake, however, uses his songs to celebrate free love, rather than a savior.
Influenced by Watts’s stylized approach to offering information, Blake found inspiration to share what he considered to be necessary lessons. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were intended less for children, and more for the ongoing debate on how children should be educated. Whereas Jean Jacques Rousseaus believed in the innate goodness of children, John Locke argued that children were a tabula rasa, or “blank slate,” believing education would determine the character of the child, not nature. In his landmark piece, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke asserts how children “love to be treated as rational creatures.” As a result, despite the hymns being intended for an inexperienced audience, the content of the songs wouldn’t shy away when confronting the wrath of the Lord. In being treated as adults, children were reminded by their hymns of the “dying pains/ that [their] redeemer felt” and how, “He let his blood wash out my feigns/ and answer for my guilt,” pressuring children to atone for sins they haven’t even had time to commit. Blake implements this treatment of children as he offers a similar exposure to adult themes in Songs. Although Blake never assumed a side in the debate on education, he delivers his Songs with a childish simplicity of language, juxtaposing their adult profundity of insight.
This juxtaposition can be seen in Nurse’s Song, a version that can be found in both Innocence and Experience. Blake places his two collections of Songs in conversation through these takes on the nurse’s song. Innocence’s Nurse’s Song, is four stanzas and from the perspective of a nurse who looks after children romping around outside. When she realizes the sun is setting, she advises the children, “Come, come, leave off play, and let us away/ Till the morning appears in the skies,” knowing, in her older age, her end is near and she should be settling in. However, the children argue, “No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,” resisting the nurse’s attempt to squander their youth only because she has already lost her own. The nurse, recognizing the children’s wisdom, knows they must take advantage of their day in the sun and that the day, indeed, still shines. She agrees to allow them play on and enjoy their time, or rather, their youth. They must take advantage of their free play before a church is built upon the hill on which they laugh and religion enforces restrictions on their pleasure.
Half the length of Innocence’s version, Experience’s Nurse’s Song is sung by a nurse who looks after teenagers. Instead of “laughing… heard on the hill,” now “whisp’rings are in the dale,” suggesting the children are too old to be amused by gamboling and have become content to gossip, probably about the nurse. The nurse is reminded of her own youth, at which her “face turns green and pale” with jealousy as she projects her regrets about her own failure to take advantage of youth onto the children when she says their days are “wasted in play.” She wasted her own youth with only flirtations of pleasure, rather than gratifying her desires openly. In taking on the voice of a woman, Blake tries to embody her oppression. Although his attempt is limited to misogynistic views of Romantic women longing for their youth, his effort encourages empathy on behalf of his readers. Children, as tabula rasa, must be taught empathy and virtue. Through poems of other people’s experiences, Blake aims to encourage compassion and love. As a poet, he exercises the power of language to call into being alternative worlds. Taking on the voice of a woman encourages the start of an exploration and investigation into the complexity of an adult female consciousness, albeit an imaged one.
Queering Blake begins with recognizing his refusal to accept a binary. Blake’s own identity as a poet is precarious and queer. He is set between two eras, and pushed into the realm of the Romantics. For a writer to be a Romantic, they must signal an interest in nature, childhood, and imagination, each are aspects Blake certainly familiarizes himself with in Songs. However, Blake himself was a loner, a mystic, a figure outside history, mostly associated with the Romantics because his friends felt obligated to keep up his reputation. English Romanticism offered a deep commitment to individual identity and artistic originality. Blake approached his poetry with a sense of what he referred to as his “Public Duty.” Certainly, he was a protector of his own integrity, wary against “selling out” to his audience, but he also suspended his hostility to recognize in his unknown audience a potential bond.
Blake’s potential bond of identity can be seen in his A Little Girl Lost as he writes a note to his future readers recognizing that with time would come the development of social understandings, just as he had experienced. Blake hoped to create a piece for “shewing the two contrary states of the human soul” recognizing that a whole person has more than one side. However, in his effort to accomplish a presentation of the contrary states, he identifies an essential third: the speaker. In Songs, Blake often plays with perspective. He wonders how a transformed object is “the same” as the other, so his collection explores an individual’s progression of self-understanding through various identities. With Songs, Blake embraces glee, multi-part songs which stipulate several different voices singing jointly. Despite the various voices, they all come from Blake. Blake’s fluidity in representing additional identities in his work stands as a projection of his imagination drawing from his personal identity. As a result, when Blake writes with the voice of a woman, he speaks, still, from his self, which is why the experiences and struggles of the women characters he creates are often limited to lamentations of lost youth.
Songs of Innocence’s The Blossom allows Blake’s characters to take on maternal roles, and exercise a feminine identity. This two-stanza poem is ambiguous about the gender and identity of the speaker. The poem is not explicitly about a blossom, but rather of the blossom’s perspective of the relationship between a sparrow and a robin. The robin takes on a feminine role as it becomes an object of beauty. She is described as a “pretty, pretty robin,” who is “sobbing, sobbing,” exemplifying feminine expectations of beauty and exaggerated emotion, specifically sorrow. Meanwhile, the Sparrow is “merry, merry” and “swift as arrow” presenting masculine traits of unperturbed bliss and athletic skill. The blossom, as a flower that refers to its bosom, assumes a feminine identity. Blake’s interest with this bosom is reflected in an engraving he completed for the piece, which depicts a mother holding a child to her bosom. Blake confronts the domination of men over women through the productive sparrow, a hardworking husband, and the sad robin, a homemaking mother, comforted only by the blossom, who understands the feeling of being rooted, being stuck, in one spot. The speaker assumes a feminine role supporting and acknowledging the empowerment of relationships between women.
Presenting his work in the format of children’s rhymes, Blake already aligns himself with a maternal persona. Previously, Blake had been routinely identified as “William Bloke,” a macho man, safeguarded from the contamination of a feminized sensibility. In Songs, Blake transitions his authorial identity into one that floats between the separate spheres of gender models as he writes from the perspective of feminine characters. His poetry permits fluidity for Blake to explore “erotic amorphousness” and transcend expectations of 18th century masculinity. Blake explores the fluidity of his identity further as he takes on the role of a maiden queen in Songs of Experience.
No book of hymns is complete, of course, without a song on angels. Blake uses The Angel, in Experience, to play with his audience’s expectation of gender roles. The poem is a recollection of the speaker’s dream. The hymn begins with high energy and bewilderment as the baffled speaker shouts, “I dreamt a dream! What can it mean?” Immediately, the reader is urged to help the speaker make sense of their situation. The poem goes on to reveal that the speaker, who the reader assumes to be male, was “a maiden Queen” and guarded by an angel who “wiped my tears away.” This eruption of a transgender character intensifies the moment further. The gender of the speaker is never revealed, but this ambiguity lends itself to possibility. The reader assumes the speaker to be male by default because that is the identity of the author of the poem, and of most popular poems in Blake’s time. If the speaker identified as a man, then his interest in the meaning of being a maiden queen would suggest an insecurity in identifying with with his inner feminine. A male speaker’s identification as a woman also suggests an unconscious sympathy for the repressed status of women. Blake confronts socially determined behaviors of women further in Sick Rose and Nurse’s Song, taking on ailments of a feminine identity in an effort to encourage empathy and fluidity of love in his hymns.
If the speaker in The Angel were a man, he would, still, be taking on a passive and submissive role as the male angel comforts him. Watts’s hymns speak of folks falling asleep letting “angels guard my head.” While angels were expected to keep the faithful safe from nightmares, Blake’s angel is the source of both anxiety and peace, reflecting the confusion of experiencing homoerotic desire in the 18th century. Situating the poem within a dream allows the speaker to be removed from the circumstances, as if they had no agency in identifying as another gender and calls for an interpretation of perhaps a deeper and truer desire. The source of the speaker’s weeping and unhappiness is the hiding from and resistance of the natural joy that is brought about through his homoerotic desires.
Blake explores homoerotic desires further in Songs of Experience’s Sick Rose. The poem describes a rose that is infested by an “invisible worm.” The poem’s insistence on the sickness of the rose being due to the intrusion of the worm reinforces Blake’s role as an ally in the reaction against orthodox heterosexuality as it rejects the penetration of heterosexual relationships. The poem recognizes the subordination of the female as a vessel and the unwanted, yet unavoidable, presence of masculinity, which is only ever sickening. This poem lends itself, also, to ideas of female auto-erotic self-sufficiency, as this interaction only hurts the rose while she is already pleasured in her “bed of crimson joy.” The image of a rose enjoying herself also encourages female sexuality separate from any male intrusion.
The sickness is the center of the poem, however its symbolism is not specific. The sickness may refer to the worm as a phallus tainting a woman (rose) once she has her virginity (beauty, purity) penetrated. The sickness could also refer to the rose’s indifference to the worm’s intrusion in the first place. The rose accepts the “dark secret love,” recognizing a love that is repressed and perverted. The action happening at night calls back to Watts’s hymns for children that remind us that our “most secret actions” occur under the cloak of darkness. Children are aware that the “shades of night” bring about trouble. Blake encourages all love to be in the open, so that no actions of affection are deemed dirty. The sickness is a result of a love enjoyed in secret, like the lament of the Nurse, instead of in the open. Blake’s concept of humanity’s varied erotic and emotional tendency is explored using Blake’s sick rose. Blake introduces a space in 18th century England to discuss self-pleasure and the patriarchy.
Locke writes that an educated person is able to “deny himself his own desires.” Blake refutes Locke’s declaration through his poetry, proving that denial of desires leaves the subject more hurt than she may have otherwise felt. Locke encourages to “purely follow what reason directs as best, though the appetite lean the other way,” recognizing the discomfort so often found in 18th century relations. Blake presents the dissatisfaction of the rose who experiences the intrusion of the worm (heterosexuality), even though that may be what was considered “natural.”
Blake understands that whenever he addresses his audience, he is doing so through an adult reader who will relay his message to the children. In A Little Girl Lost from Experience, Blake addresses his young readers directly.
Children of the future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime
By addressing the children directly, his audience is immediately engaged. He breaks the fourth wall by calling attention to the physical “indignant page” that will last long enough for a “future age” beyond his years to read it. He places himself as an authority from the “former time” outraged by his contemporaries. In his time, publicly expressed views of homosexuality were “varied only in nuances of execration.” Blake, himself, had only recently become increasingly accepting of alternative identities as he explored other options of experiencing life. Blake goes on to describe the love that was “thought a crime” in the following stanzas. He tells the story of a “youthful pair” meeting during the day when they didn’t have to worry about parents or strangers. One part of the pair is a “maiden,” but the gender identity of her partner remains vague, however, the omission of the partner’s gender paired with the description of the two as sharing the “softest care,” suggests that she is a woman. Further, the couple wouldn’t have to worry about being seen together during the day because they’d have been assumed to be platonic. Had her partner been a male, the character wouldn’t have “forgot her fear” because she would have no fear to forget, because her love wouldn’t have been condemned by her world, governed by God.
Experience chastises the limitations of identities in religion through The Garden of Love. This pastoral poem tells the story of a person who goes to the Garden of Love and finds that a chapel has been built on the grass where he used to “play on the green,” harckening back to Innocence’s Nurse’s Song. On the closed gates of the Chapel is a sign declaring, “Thou shalt not.” The poem reminds the reader of Blake’s interest in the innocence of free love as he connects with younger readers by mentioning the delight found in playing on the grass. By noting how the chapel, or Christ, has put himself where people are intended to play, Blake criticizes social energies that are denied outlet in public life. Blake’s very audience would fear the effective expression of love. In England’s repressive command, one could not approach Christ emotionally, or God sensually. Watts wrote in his hymns for children that God “writes down every fault,” but he neglected to declare if His actions were good or bad, only necessary.
Blake reconciles religion as a repressive command with the tension of the liberty of seemingly unlimited potential. Blake concludes Garden of Love by lamenting how the church was “binding with briars my joys and desires,” which juxtaposes religion with pleasure, as it simultaneously associates the two with the catholic clergy’s list of perversions related to these figures of constraint. The line also recalls an earlier poem in Experience, called Earth’s Answer, which ends by declaring how the night is her “eternal bane/ That free love with bondage bound” suggesting that one can only express their true desires at night, under the same cloak of darkness from Watt’s hymns. The ability to express oneself freely when they aren’t seen, recognizes that the social stigma is what prevents them from exploring these feelings in the daylight. Blake’s reference to repressive religion highlights the 18th century’s tendency to channel sexual energy channeled toward spiritual purposes.
Blake ends his Songs of Innocence with the poem On Another’s Sorrow. The nine-stanza piece asks endlessly about the speaker’s capacity for compassion as it wonders, “Can I see another’s woe/ and not be in sorrow too?” The poem, which would be read aloud to a child, allows the speaker to listen and reflect on Blake’s words. After reading the experiences of various voices in Innocence, the reader is signaled to ask himself if he is satisfied with his complicity. Filtering his message through children’s literature, Blake avoids direct confrontation with adults, allowing for an easier reception of his message. Instead of feeling accused, the reader holds the authority as he professes the songs to his child.
Art, Blake believed, requires equality between artist and audience on the basis of mutual love. Just as Locke would never condescend to a child, Blake would not flatter his audience. Instead, he would challenge them. He would “surrender himself to his own nature” and try not to lie. The Romantic poet must confess the ultimate inaccessibility of what he most wants. He must make a virtue of this necessity, or “subside into a terminal melancholia” as the majority of Blake’s female characters experience. In his honest exploration of ultimate inaccessibility, Blake tries on roles of women. Blake seized the popularity of children’s literature to introduce future generations to the kind of critical thinking beyond what Locke had advocated. Under the guise of a non-threatening lyric, Blake instilled his own educational ideals of universal self-acceptance, love, and compassion. Poetry, like the grassy hills of the Garden of Love, allowed him a freedom to roam and explore other voices and invite readers to identify and sing along.