Blake the Terrible

Dawn Potter

[first published in New Walk, autumn/winter 2011]

This morning, very early, as Monday light insinuated itself among the reddening maples and dour pines that imprison my yard, I took down my frayed Norton edition of William Blake’s poetry and opened it at random. For the past several days, I had been toying with writing about Blake, which was strange because I had not lately been reading his poems or even consciously thinking about them. Merely the idea of Blake had begun to rise in my imagination, rather as recalcitrant bread dough rises in a chilly room: irresistibly yet with a laborious pessimism.

When I opened my Blake anthology this morning, the words I happened upon did not ease my ambivalence about the undertaking, for I immediately tumbled into a section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell innocuously titled, as many of the sections are, “A Memorable Fancy.” Memorable indeed. Blake writes: “As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity, I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.” Following in short order are the “Proverbs of Hell,” two pages of aphorisms that fill me with dread. I understand, when I read these proverbs, that Blake is messing with me, but I don’t always know why, and I don’t always know how.

For instance, here is the first proverb: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.” What makes this proverb hellish? Though didactic, it otherwise seems harmless enough, and I feel my sons may once have owned a picture book on the subject, perhaps one of those tales that feature friendly mice industriously collecting kernels in the autumn and tuning their fiddles by the fireside in the winter.

But Blake doesn’t allow me to waste time pondering the harvest proverb; he instantly undercuts it with a second one: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” At this point I stop reading and put my head down on the desk.

I think I never knew what a poem was until my father read Blake to me. I was very young, barely a reader myself. My literary mother, of course, read aloud very often, so I knew a good deal about nursery rhymes. But no one dignified them with the word poem. A poem, I now began to gather, was different. It was far graver, far more formal. It should not be read cozily in a lap but was rather like the Bible, requiring a deep voice and special, hushed family attention. The implication was “Sit up straight. You are learning something here.”

            My father, who was not a subtle scholar, chose first to read “The Lamb” from Songs of Innocence.

            Little Lamb who made thee?

            Dost thou know who made thee?

Gave thee life & bid thee feed

By the stream and 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 discovered instantly that, for a well-loved child, this is a very embarrassing poem. My father’s seriousness of presentation interacted almost chemically with the verse’s sugary diction. It was all too obvious that my father was peering at Blake’s lyric through his own caretaker eyeglass and that the tender-voiced, “wooly bright” lamb was a stand-in for my little sister and myself. I may not have been clear about what exactly God-as-lamb was up to in the final stanza, but unquestionably “meek and mild” equaled “little child” equaled “blessed lamb” equaled me.

            Like most children, I was perfectly aware that I was not at all meek but a bastion of wickedness. I picked my nose and bit my nails and told lies. I hated cooked carrots and washing my hair. I didn’t put away the doll town that was taking over the living room until my father threatened to throw it out, and I told my sister she was fat even though she wasn’t. Clearly “The Lamb” had nothing to do with me. What’s more, being the granddaughter of farmers, I knew “The Lamb” had nothing to with real lambs, who as a class were loud, muddy, and dimwitted. My father, the farmer’s son, also knew about real lambs and presumably about real children too since on most days he found himself yelling at me about something or other.

            In short, there was nothing I could call truth in “The Lamb,” except for the way in which it revealed my father’s vast and painfully abiding love for his daughters. But this was truth in the way a boil in the armpit is truth—a throbbing rawness that no one should be allowed to see. I certainly didn’t want any part of this weighted, embarrassing knowledge. I wanted my father to “act regular,” by which I meant serene and briskly self-confident. I wanted to walk down the street chattering and swinging from his hand. I did not want to know that he needed me desperately, that he was using his daughters to fill a hole in his heart.

But I begin to think now that the boil’s exposure was more Blake’s fault than my father’s. Even the collection’s title, Songs of Innocence, is a setup, as if Blake had chosen it for the sole purpose of pasting wool over my father’s innocent spectacles. For though he had unaccountably grown up to be a college professor, my father remained, in his clothes, his eating habits, and his comprehension of art, nearly as unsophisticated as the Presbyterian farm boy he once was. How could he know he wasn’t supposed to take “The Lamb” at face value? It appears to be a tender, sentimental, spiritual lyric, childlike in execution and intent. It paints a Sunday-school picture, using Sunday-school language. My father therefore took it to be a Sunday-school poem.

Whether or not he believed that his love for his daughters was equivalently childlike, I cannot say. The poem took the words out of his mouth.

As I sat at my desk this autumn morning trying to figure out “The Lamb,” I found myself writing, “I would not call it a lie, but it is, and very deliberately, I think, a manipulation.” Yet as soon as I hemmed and hawed my way into that tenuous assertion, I wondered if I might be misreading the situation. Blake, like Robert Frost, chooses to assume an innocuous demeanor, and often enough readers enjoy falling for it. Maybe there’s some truth in that persona. Why shouldn’t a masked man occasionally be reliable?

Floundering, I turned for advice to Peter Ackroyd’s Blake: A Biography. And I discovered that, as regards Songs of Innocence, Ackroyd and I share a similar suspicion. The poems are not to be trusted.

These are often poems with an argumentative or satirical intent, and they are emphatically not expressions of lyrical feeling or the spontaneous overflowing of emotion in the conventional “romantic” mode. That is why the Songs aspire to be as formal and as impersonal as the folk ballads and nursery rhymes from which Blake borrowed; he could thereby dramatise the spiritual significance, as well as the possible deficiencies, of “Innocence” itself.

Ackroyd is right: there is precious little spontaneous overflow in “The Lamb.” It sits primly on its page, as tidily awkward as a paint-by-number. Exhibit 1: fake sheep. Exhibit 2: fake child. Do they naturally lead to Exhibit 3: fake savior? I’m not so sure. For when I reread the second verse, the sentences throw me into confusion. Who is Blake talking about? Who is the child? The infant Jesus? Humankind as the collective child of God? Who is the lamb versus the Lamb? Does the final repeated line, “Little Lamb God bless thee,” imply that God is blessing himself? Faced with my questions, the smug little verse coils up around itself, defeating syntactic logic. Somehow, despite the poem’s lack of spontaneous overflow, ambiguity manages to rise like floodwater.

Yet I’m surprised, when I recall my docility to instruction, that I didn’t resign myself to accepting “The Lamb” as truth. I was a young female accustomed to assuming that her father’s opinions were universal: in that regard, I could have stepped out of a Victorian bandbox. My distaste for the poem might have centered on the mealy-mouthed falsity of the characters, but I was also a devotee of fairy tales, which overflow with falsity. It was the emotional fraudulence of the poem that distressed me, but how did I know enough at age six or seven to recognize its presence?

I think I knew because “The Lamb” wasn’t the only Blake poem that my father read aloud that evening. He chose also to read that other standby, “The Tyger.”

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?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Since the moment in which I first heard this poem, on that faraway winter evening under the lamplight, the tyger has glittered behind my eyes, always changing but never eroding. The poet’s tyger is no more a real tiger than the lamb is a real lamb, but my thoughts never carp at this as they do at the priggish lamb. For the tyger is sensation; he is seducing and dangerous; he has dragged me into his lair and I will not try to escape . . . though, in truth, there is no escape. And Blake did not escape either. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Who can doubt that “The Tyger” is a Song of Experience because the poet capitulated to his own invention?

But why would the tyger’s inventor choose to write a poem as cloying as “The Lamb”?

Innocence connotes a milk-white purity; yet it is also inexperience, also naïvété, also ignorance. If experience tarnishes us, it enriches us as well, not least because it forces us to confront the fact of our immorality. It may prove that a tyger will indeed tear apart a lamb, but it also presses us to admit that perhaps we don’t care overmuch about the lamb’s bloody fate.

According to Peter Ackroyd, poems such as “The Lamb” allowed Blake “to dramatise . . . the possible deficiencies” of innocence. And in this particular case, I begin to see that the poet created his drama by way of a speaking persona who is both parson and sugar-tongued serpent. Try reading the poem with that voice in your head, and the malevolence becomes breathtaking. Because now it seems clear that the poem really doesn’t make any sense. One sentence doesn’t lead to the next, to the next, to the next. Merely “The Lamb” is a stack of well-worn phrases and images, a homily designed to stupefy, not illuminate.

“For he calls himself a Lamb.” How easily a poet can employ words as bait; how sleekly he borrows from his own experience to prey upon a reader’s innocence. Such revelation chills both reader-victim and poet-predator, for what lover of art cares to acknowledge that she’s been gulled? Worse, what bard wants to admit the pleasures of inflicting damage? And there may be a third party in unwitting collusion: the listener. I was that listener, unsophisticated in the ways of poets but with a child’s alarmed antennae attuned to any shift in her father’s mood. In a voice thick with love, he read aloud “The Lamb,” but “The Lamb” did not return his love. It stood apart from him, it mocked him, and I winced. Nearly forty years later, I undergo that identical twinge of guilt, that prick of serpent knowledge, each time I reread the poem.

Poetry can be a cruel art, and Blake is its most pitiless practitioner. In the “Proverbs of Hell,” he tells me:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

I sit at my desk reading a sheaf of printed words, but all the while Blake the terrible puppet master jerks the strings. This time he does not allow me the predatory pleasures of the tyger. I cannot leap into the heavens alongside him, seizing the fire, twisting the sinews. Again, and yet again, he requires me to document my unveiled ignorance. For I cannot dredge up anything coherent to say about these proverbs—except that they frighten me. They seem to exist in order prove that I am a trapped animal, a doomed beast, a burden of dust, who knows nothing, nothing at all, of death or life, good or evil, hell or paradise.

 “Where man is not nature is barren,” Blake declares. Outside my window, a small wind clatters among the dry leaves and raps against the pane. Tomorrow is my forty-fifth birthday, and all have I learned about myself is to keep reading. I look down at my book, and Blake says, “He who has suffered you to impose on him knows you.” For a moment the wind quiets, and now a single car sifts past, tires sighing on the damp tarmac. I don’t know what the poet wants from me. But if nothing else, I can be sure he intends no comfort.