Posts Tagged ‘London’

How Much Did Jim Morrison Know about William Blake?

Everyone knows the Doors are named for the doors of perception – but that phrase comes from Aldous Huxley’s book on hallucinogens as well as from Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison quotes ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in ‘End of the Night’ on the first Doors album: ‘Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night’. But that is the only direct Blake reference in Morrison’s recorded lyrics. Is that it? Did Morrison only do a little vague and random dipping into Blake? Or was Ray Manzarek right to think of him as an authority on the visionary poet? ‘I wonder what Blake said… Too bad Morrison‘s not here. Morrison would know’ (Manzarek, as recorded by Joan Didion in The White Album, passage reprinted in Rocco’s Doors Companion, p. 13).

In interviews, Blake seems to come readily to Morrison’s lips. He demonstrates a basic acquaintance with famous lines from Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a 1968 interview with John Carpenter for the Los Angeles Free Press, he remarks (without attribution), ‘Opposition is true friendship, ha!’ (in Hopkins, Lizard King, p. 205). Speaking with Lizze James in 1969, Morrison’s thoughts go to Blake when asked about the ‘apocalyptic vision’ of his work on the first Doors album (1966-7): ‘It used to seem possible to generate a movement… they’d all put their strength together to break what Blake calls “the mind-forged manacles” … The love-street times are dead’ (Lizard King p. 279). They also turn to Blake when the topic is erotic mysticism: ‘Blake said that the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the “windows of the soul”. When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience’ (p. 281). Though initially this seems not the most subtle reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell‘s cleansing of the doors of perception, it picks up on the implications of ‘sensual enjoyment’ (MHH 14) carried forward into Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and detects Blake’s odd slide from windows to doors as transparent inlets of perception. A fuller knowledge might underlie these fairly obvious quotations: Blake actually does call the senses ‘This Lifes dim Windows of the Soul’ in The Everlasting Gospel, just before the more widely known lines, ‘And leads you to Believe a Lie / When you see with not thro the Eye’.

Manzarek, in his autobiography Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, recounts his memories of Jim Morrison’s book collection: ‘very eclectic, but also standard… we were all reading the same thing… Except Jim had more! A wall of books’ (p. 78-9). Though he doesn’t list Blake specifically, his omission from such an impressively full, typically bohemian bookshelf would be remarkable. Beyond his own collection, Morrison could also find Blake in the libraries of the colleges he attended. When Howard Smith asked him his opinion of the value of university, Morrison says, ‘If they have a good library, that’s about it… the main key to education is reading, basically. You could do the same thing on your own’ (in Lizard King p. 296). At UCLA, as well as having access as a student, he would have spent steady time in the stacks when he worked in the Powell Library from early 1964 until he was fired in August of the same year for lack of punctuality (as Davis narrates in his biography, p. 55). Unfortunately the library no longer has shelf lists to recreate the holdings from that time, but a look at the current collections shows that there may have been a good deal of Blake available: of pre-1964 editions, not only the Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1957), but also Poems of William Blake edited by W. B. Yeats (1938), Prophetic Writings of William Blake edited by Sloss and Wallis (1926), and further selections by Amelia H. Munson (1964), John Sampson (1960), Alfred Kazin (The Portable Blake, 1946), and Frederick E. Pierce (1915), plus in the way of criticism, The Divine Vision and Ruthven Todd’s Tracks in the Snow. The reference department at UCLA’s College Library were very kind in response to my queries, and shared the information that the Powell building housed the undergraduate College Library collection as well as the research collection while a new library was built for the latter (completed in 1964). My assumption, without being able to check acquisition dates, is that pre-1964 items in the College Library collection would have most likely been found in the Powell Library stacks where Morrison shelved books. (If the search is opened beyond the undergraduate to the research collection, there are of course many further possibilities; for instance, that is where Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is.)

Morrison may have done some purposeful Blake research in the library, since he wrote an essay on Blake for an English class in Romanticism. This was English 154, Spring Semester 1965. I am very grateful to the instructor, Fredrick Burwick, for sharing his memories of teaching Morrison. (And I want to credit and thank David Fallon for pointing out the connection.) Burwick recounts, ‘He showed me a paper on Hieronymus Bosch that he had written for a community college in Florida and wanted to know whether he might submit a similar paper on Blake. His Bosch paper focused on the visionary/hallucinatory experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights. I agreed that a similar approach to Blake’s illuminated works was possible. I remember that he wrote on MHH and referred to other Blake plates, but I can’t recall any details of the work he submitted’. One of Morrison’s main interests in Blake, then, was vision and intoxication: ‘Jim asked me if Blake did drugs. I told him that I didn’t think so’. (Burwick later wrote about Blake’s imagery of ergot poisoning from rotting grain – there is lysergic acid (LSD) in ergot fungus – in his book, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996), a fascinating and thoroughly researched account of Blake’s insight into the significance of this illness, and its dual potential of vision and suffering.)

It was in the previous summer, 1964, while Morrison was working in the library, that he began to write in his ‘Notes on Vision’ notebook that became The Lords, half of The Lords and The New Creatures, the one book of his poetry to be commercially published in his lifetime (by Simon & Schuster in 1969). Though it owes much to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Rimbaud’s principle of the derangement of the senses, there are specific Blakean echoes. It owes much to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are formal parallels: The Lords is a hybrid collection of verse and prose, veering among literary composition, philosophical musing, sensory exploration, and cultural commentary. Morrison’s ‘Cure blindness with a whore’s spittle’ (p. 37) sounds like it could be a Proverb of Hell. A description of a ‘happening… in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people through air vents’ breaks down the borders between audience and performer, while ‘the gas acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body’ (p. 39), tempting comparison with Blake’s Illuminated Books as multimedia experiments in composite art, dominated by the expressive Human Form Divine (which sometimes inhabits the words themselves, especially in titles), and demanding active participation from their readers.

As the passage goes on, it becomes evident that not only form, but also concepts and vocabulary are shared with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison writes,

The aim of the happening is to cure boredom, wash the eyes, make childlike reconnections with the stream of life. Its lowest, widest aim is for purgation of perception. The happening attempts to engage all the senses, the total organism, and achieve total response in the face of traditional arts which focus on narrower inlets of sensation. (p. 39)

In The Marriage (5), ‘that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age’. The aims of Blake’s artistic project are also described in terms of washing, purging, and bringing about ‘an improvement of sensual enjoyment’:

This I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. (MHH 14).

Morrison’s lines,

When men conceived buildings,
and closed themselves in chambers,
first trees and caves (p. 36)

are comparable to Blake’s lines following the cleansing of the doors of perception: ‘For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’ (MHH 14).

As well as the resemblances to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a passage on shamanism in The Lords makes use of the phrase ‘mental travels’, suggesting Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’. There is also a distinctly Blakean physical and metamorphic version of expanded perception in The Lords.

The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance (p. 24)

recalls the ‘two little orbs… fixed in two little caves / Hiding carefully from the wind’ in Blake’s Book of Urizen (11:13-15; also see Milton 3:15-16, and Four Zoas Night IV 54:21-2), and the apocalyptic ‘Expanding Eyes of Man’ that ‘behold the depths of wondrous worlds’ in The Four Zoas (Night IX 138:25; also the ‘eyelids expansive as morning’, Four Zoas Night VI 73:36).

In the summer after working in the library and taking the Romanticism course, Morrison threw away all of his notebooks except for his recent work toward The Lords. The summer of 1965 was also the time when he lived on a roof in Venice, California, hardly ate but took plenty of acid, and began writing the songs that would be the spark of the Doors’ creation when he sang them to Ray Manzarek in their legendary encounter on the beach.

secondary sources:

Davis, Stephen. Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend. New York: Gotham, 2005.

Hopkins, Jerry. The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Revised and Updated. London: Plexus, 2006.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009. First published 1954, 1956.

Manzarek, Ray. Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors. New York: Berkley Boulevard, 1999.

Rocco, John M. The Doors Companion: Four Decades of Commentary. London: Omnibus, 1997.

Tags: Jim Morrison, London, Milton, music, poetry, The Doors, The Four Zoas, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Posted in Arts and Culture |

L. A. Woman, A City Yet a Woman: Blake, Jim Morrison, and Prophecy

Morrison, ‘An American Poet’, and ‘English Blake’ are popularly espoused as voices of their nations. Both saw themselves as prophets, claiming at least to comment on and at most to influence the political and cultural events surrounding them. As part of their prophetic personae, they both invented new lineages for themselves, mystically adopting chosen ancestors that would tie them tightly to the kind of historical and creative inheritance they wanted for themselves and their countries.

Morrison tells a powerful memory of childhood trauma in ‘Dawn’s Highway’, one of the poems he recorded on his last birthday (it was put to music by the surviving Doors on An American Prayer):

Me and my – ah – mother and father – and a grandmother and a grandfather – were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truckload of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just – I don’t know what happened – but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta been about four – like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man.
The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back – is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians… maybe one or two of ‘em… were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they’re still in there.

Morrison’s personal mythology here is an attempt to attach himself to the shamanic traditions of native Americans, and also to opt for a more ‘authentic’ American identity than the one of oppressive white power that his biological lineage dictates (considering his father was an admiral in the US Navy, and very much involved in Vietnam).

In Milton, Blake describes becoming one with John Milton, Britain’s most imposing national poet:

The first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift;
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus enterd there;
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe
(Milton 15[17]:47-50)

Milton had used his writing talents to support the English Revolution (including defending the regicide), and suffered for holding to his beliefs in the Restoration. Blake is asserting radical political authority as well as literary prowess by identifying with Milton.

Blake’s possession by Milton apparently has wide repercussions (‘spread over Europe’ – like Morrison, Blake is writing in wartime). The most conspicuous appearance of Morrison’s recurring lines, ‘Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind’, is in ‘Peace Frog’ on Morrison Hotel, a prophetic, apocalyptic song with its own specific geography: ‘Blood on the streets / in the town of New Haven’, where Morrison had become the first rock star to be arrested on stage (as Fong-Torres notes, p. 112). Like Blake, he takes elements from his own biography and mythologizes them on a global and cosmic scale. And like Blake he creates catalogues of places to illustrate the national reach of his prophecy: ‘Blood in the streets / of the town of Chicago’, ‘Blood stains the roofs / and the palm trees of Venice’, ‘The Bloody red sun / of phantastic L.A.’. In such a visionary city, he combines literal and figurative geography: ‘blood on the streets / runs a river of sadness’, and most remarkably, ‘The river runs red down / the legs of the city’, recalling Blake’s imagery of birth trauma and miscarriage (in Morrison’s notebook these verses were titled ‘Abortion Stories’, according to Jerry Hopkins in The Lizard King, p. 129). Compare also the ‘unborn living living dead’ of ‘The Unknown Soldier’, and

Catacombs
Nursery bones
Winter women
growing stones
Carrying babies
to the river

in ‘The Soft Parade’. However, the lines could also suggest loss of virginity (which has revolutionary force in the case of Orc and the Nameless Shadowy Female in the Preludium to America); or menstruation as the simultaneous potential of fertility and infertility, life and death; or indeed human sacrifice as practiced by women in Jerusalem. ‘Blood hath staind her fair side beneath her bosom’ (Jerusalem 67:43) in the extended narrative of the Daughters of Albion ‘drunk with blood’ (Jerusalem 68:12), while for Morrison the blood is also the woman’s as victim:

Blood! screams her brain
as they chop off her fingers
Blood will be born
in the birth of a Nation

These lyrics are juxtaposed with a parallel set dominated by the repeated line ‘She came’: female orgasm is apocalyptic and violent for Morrison as it is for Blake at the end of The Song of Los, where

The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes
Her hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:
Her bosom swells with wild desire:
And milk & blood & glandous wine
In rivers rush & shout & dance,
On mountain, dale and plain (7:35-40)

In ‘Peace Frog’, and more clearly in ‘L. A. Woman’, Morrison also creates ‘a City yet a Woman’ (Four Zoas, Night IX:223) as Blake does in the figure of Jerusalem, with a kind personification which perceives both simultaneously – ‘I see your hair is burning / Hills are filled with fire’ – and mixes both, blurring external and internal – ‘Drive through your suburbs / Into your blues’. (Note how personification is used toward social commentary: the suburbs are a direct route to depression.) They draw on a collective origin in Biblical prophecy, and partake of its depiction of Israel as a combination of innocent wife and abandoned harlot: ‘Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light? / Or just another lost angel’. Like Blake’s persecuted Jerusalem, ‘Never saw a woman so alone’. (Oothoon also, as rejected but righteous harlot / wife, and as ‘the soft soul of America’ (Visions of the Daughters of Albion 1:3), is a precursor of ‘L. A. Woman’.)

Both Blake and Morrison proceed from this kind of imagery to imagery of male power: as in Blake the call, ‘Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time’ (Jerusalem 97:1) leads to the predominantly phallic imagery of Albion’s awakening and reuniting with the Zoas, Morrison also moves from the L. A. Woman to the combination of resurrection and erection in his anagram, ‘Mr. Mojo Risin / Got to keep on risin’ / Risin’, risin”. Morrison sings, ‘L. A. Woman, you’re my woman’, while for Blake Albion’s rising also is catalyzed by union with the feminine personification of nation: ‘England who is Brittannia’, who is also Jerusalem, ‘enterd Albions bosom rejoicing’ (Jerusalem 95:22, 32:28). Morrison once said, ‘Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and the Doors are looking for a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding’ (quoted by Federica Pudva, p. 133), like the ones evoked by Blake at the end of Jerusalem, and in the title of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In her essay on Morrison and Blake, Federica Pudva points out that ‘London was for Blake a real city and at the same time a spiritual and symbolic reality, part of a broad divine vision’ while in Morrison’s vision, Los Angeles was ‘the umbilicus of the world’ and a microcosm of fragmented modern society (p. 132-3, my translation). Morrison called Los Angeles a ‘”genetic blue-print” for the United States’ (Lizard King p. 301). In a poem, ‘The Guided Tour’, he writes,

“I am a guide to the labyrinth”
city is inside of body made manifest
meat organs & electrical
power plants (American Night p. 143)

reminiscent, in reverse, of Los searching ‘the interiors of Albions / Bosom’, which involves coming ‘down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London’ (Jerusalem 45[31]:3-4,14). Though the alienated modern city in Morrison owes much to Baudelaire and, as William Cook examines in detail, T. S. Eliot, Pudva finds that Morrison’s flâneur-like observation of prostitution in the city in his poem The Lords – ‘a ring of death with sex at its centre’ – is rooted in Blake’s ‘midnight streets’ and ‘Harlot’s curse’ in ‘London’ (p. 127-8).

We might see Morrison grasping more than content in the Songs if we take ‘People are Strange’ as commenting on the contingent voice of Songs of Experience and playing with the use of persona it offers.

People are strange
When you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you’re alone

emphasizes the kind of interior realities which may contribute to the compulsion of the speaker in ‘London’ to ‘mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. ‘Women seem wicked / When you’re unwanted’ distils the combination of blame and pity in the ‘Harlot’s curse’ seen as infecting the city and blighting both birth and marriage with death. ‘Faces come out of the rain / When you’re strange’ is like the fragmentation of faces and voices without bodies in ‘London’, and ‘Streets are uneven / When you’re down’ is a direct statement on psychogeography. If the song was inspired by an enlightening Laurel Canyon sunrise, as Robby Krieger narrates (in Fong-Torres 95-6), then it is located (or projected) on Morrison’s home territory as ‘London’ is on Blake’s.

secondary sources:

Cook, William. ‘Jim Morrison: A “Serious Poet”?’ Literary Kicks: Opinions, Observations and Research. 12 July 2003. http://www.litkicks.com/JamesDouglasMorrison

Fong-Torres, Ben, and the Doors. The Doors. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Hopkins, Jerry. The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Revised and Updated. London: Plexus, 2006.

Pudva, Federica. ‘The Devil’s Party: Jim Morrison e William Blake’ Anglistica Pisana 2:1 (2005) 119-37.

Tags: America, Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Jim Morrison, London, Milton, music, nationalism, poetry, politics, Song of Los, Songs of Experience, The Doors, Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Posted in Arts and Culture |

The Verve – History

1995 single from the band’s second album, A Northern Soul, with opening lyrics based on Blake’s London.

Go to the next video from the William Blake Jukebox:

Tags: London, music, The Verve, YouTube
Posted in The Blake Jukebox |

Songs of Innocence and of Experience 3

Chapter 3: Songs of Experience

When Blake began etching the plates of Songs of Experience he and Catherine had moved south of the river Thames to Lambeth, beginning one of the most productive periods in his life for his illuminated poetry. As well as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake produced the “Continental Prophecies” of America, Europe and The Song of Los, and was to continue with the strange and disturbing series of Urizen books that would detail the titanic struggles between Urizen, Orc, Los and Enitharmon.

Northrop Frye once made the astute remark that it was foolish to see the relationship between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience as reflecting a transformation in the author’s own sensibilities, “for when Blake engraved the latter he was no longer a child of thirty-two but a grown man of thirty-seven.” (Frye 4) Nonetheless, if it was not Blake who had transformed, then London and the world around him certainly had. In 1789, many liberals in England had looked optimistically to the early events of the French Revolution, but on February 1, 1793, France declared war on Britain, a conflict that was to last twenty-two years, and between the summers of 1793 and 1794 Paris ran red with the blood of the Terror.

Revolution & Reaction

After a period of enthusiasm in Paris following the fall of the Bastille, tensions increased throughout 1790 and 1791. Factions in the French National Assembly were also beginning to form, between those who supported a constitutional monarchy along the lines of that in Britain, and a radical group known as the Jacobins who spread their ideas throughout the country. It was against the backdrop of these conditions that Louis XVI attempted to flee the country, being arrested at Varennes on July 21, 1791. As France declared war on Austria, Prussia and then Britain, waves of violence and massacres shook the French capital in September 1792. Attempts to find a constitutional compromise failed and, on January 21, 1793, Louis Capet, no longer King of France, was executed in Paris and the country became a republic.

Many features of government had now passed to the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, and for a year the Terror was instituted in an attempt to suppress counter-revolutionaries at home and ensure support for the war abroad. The Jacobins were able to avoid defeat and expand the military capabilities of France, but Robespierre was now accusing many former companions of being counter-revolutionaries and, on July 27, 1794, the Thermidorian Reaction saw his arrest and execution.

Fear of revolution in Britain led the government of William Pitt to a loyalist reaction, first felt in Scotland a series of sensational trials for seditious libel took place in 1793, the results of which were draconian sentences against Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer. Historians are divided about the extent of the British government’s reaction, figures such as Boyd Hilton (2007) seeing this period as an extension of the coercive powers of the state while Edward Royle (2000) has argued that it was a reasonable reaction to a genuine threat. In 1794, as members of the London Corresponding Society called for an English Convention, Pitt suspended Habeus Corpus and ordered the arrest of its leading members, as well as those of the Society for Constitutional Information. The radical Thomas Paine had already fled the country at the end of 1793, and although the three men finally brought to trial were acquitted there could be no doubt that Britain was a dangerous place for those with radical sympathies.

It was against these events of 1792-4 that Blake composed and published one of his most famous poems, “London”:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 
And mark in every face I meet  
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.  

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,  
In every voice: in every ban,  
The mind-forg’d manacles I heart 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry 
Every blackning Church appalls, 
And the hapless Soldiers sigh 
Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear 
How the youthful Harlots curse 
Blasts the new-born Infants tear 
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse (E26-7)

For E. P. Thompson, “London” is “among the most lucid and instantly available of the Songs of Experience” (Thompson 174). As he and several critics have pointed out, the drafts of the poem in the Notebook show how Blake was responding very directly to the events of his day. Thus the “mind-forg’d manacles” were originally “german forged links”, a reference to the Hanoverian dynasty of George III and the billeting of Hessian mercenaries in London to maintain order in the capital. Similarly, the change of “dirty street” and “dirty Thames” to “charter’d” was a direct allusion to Paine who, in The Rights of Man, had argued that charters granting liberties actually worked by taking away intrinsic rights of the people so that they could be permitted only by those in power. 

Babes Reduced to Misery

While the first three stanzas of “London” allude to the fierce conflicts and political situations created by the French Revolution, the “youthful Harlot’s curse” of the final stanza refers to the blight of child prostitution that had existed (and was to exist) in London for a much longer period. Stanley Gardner observes that in Lambeth a group of “noblemen and gentlemen” had converted the old Hercules Inn into the Female Orphan Asylum “to save girls between the age of nine and twelve from ‘the guilt of prostitution’.” (Gardner 128) The lives of these so-called “chicken prostitutes” was brutal and fatal, with many not surviving into their twenties as they suffered from violence and those sexual diseases such as syphilis that blasted substantial sections of the metropolitan population.

It is this condition of the young that provides part of the strong sense of anger in Songs of Experience and contrasts so clearly with the state of childhood in Innocence. If the earlier collection had been a golden, Arcadian vision, Experience depicts the city of dreadful night that London could become at the turn of the nineteenth century. The line “Babes reduced to misery” is taken from “Holy Thursday”, and the contrast between this and the earlier poem in Innocence will be considered in the next chapter. What is significant about the later volume, however, is how it depicts innocence corrupted by those who should be its protectors.

In some cases, that corruption was already implicit in Songs of Innocence. Thus, for example, the version of “The Chimney Sweeper” that appears in Experience makes explicit the sense of anger at injustice that had been left unsaid in the song included in Innocence. It could be argued that the clarity of this wrath removes some of the complexities of the earlier poem, replacing it with more straightforward denunciation that exemplifies Blake’s outrage towards his contemporary society:

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. (E23) 

Chimney sweeping as an apprenticeship was increasingly rejected during the late eighteenth century, and in 1788 the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed restricting the ability to recruit apprentices. However, professional sweeps continued to use their own children to climb the narrow chimneys, made even dirtier by the increased use of coal, and the practice of sending children up chimneys was only made illegal in 1875 (Nurmi 1964). As such, while the poem ends with a general denunciation of God, priest and king who allow such atrocities, the origins of the degradation lie with those parents who seek to exploit, rather than protect, their own children.

The theme of adults conspiring in the abuse of their wards is a familiar one throughout Experience. In the second version of “Nurses Song”, for example, the supposed protector of the young is motivated rather by a sense of envy that results in repression of those in her care:

When the voices of children, are heard on the green 
And whisprings are in the dale: 
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.  

Then come home my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise 
Your spring & your day, are wasted in play 
And your winter and night in disguise. (E23) 

There is a subtler evil at play here rather than the outright degradation of the young presented in “London”, “Holy Thursday” and “The Chimney Sweeper”. Rather than crimes such as prostitution, immiseration and slavery, the narrator of this short lyric insinuates her way into the children’s consciousness, working against their simple desire to play and, instead, deviously implanting suggestions of guilt that will become mind-forg’d manacles to bind their joys.

If Blake had a very clear idea of the evils that adults do against their children, he could also present in Experience a view of innocence that could confuse his early readers, most notably in “The Little Vagabond”:

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, 
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; 
Besides I can tell where I am use’d well,
Such usage in heaven will never do well.  

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale.
And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale; 
We’d sing and we’d pray, all the live-long day; 
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray[.] (E26) 

Coleridge was one of the first to express his disquiet at the vagabond’s satisfaction with base natural conditions, as did later critics such as Swinburne and the Rossettis. Deborah Dorfman suggested that Blake’s own attack was on both institutions, church and alehouse, where the “ossifying” merges with the “stupefying” (1969 22), but it is hard not to smile at the comical vision presented in the final stanza:

And God like a father rejoicing to see,
His children as pleasant and happy as he: 
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel
But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel. (E26) 

There is hardly any glory to this sodden deity, and yet while I believe that Blake was angry with a world that produced any vagabonds there is something in these lines that conjures up the old, antinomian visions of seventeenth-century ranters such as Abiezer Coppe, who preferred to drink and be merry rather than kill for king or parliament in the name of righteousness.

The Garden of Love

If sex is absent from Songs of Innocence, it is very much present in the later Songs. Nowhere, however, in this collection does Blake evince the pleasantly pastoral delights of sexual love: the sexuality of experience is, rather, that of loss, rape, restriction and fear. This is not to say that Blake saw sex as something intrinsically sinful: rather, from his early poetry onwards, desire when freely expressed was an essential part of our humanity. “A Little Girl Lost” begins with the lines:

Children of the future Age, 
Reading this indignant page; 
Know that in a former time. 
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime. (E29)

As with several of his contemporaries, notably William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake believed that it was the treatment of sexuality as a crime and its repression that led to future perversions. One of his Proverbs of Hell made the point pithily: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” (E35) While the causes of such repression were manifold, including social, familial and political power relations, unsurprisingly Blake identified religion as the main root of this distortion of human desire, as in “The Garden of Love”: 

I went to the Garden of Love,  
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst, 
Where I used to play on the green.  

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door; 
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.  

And I saw it was filled with graves, 
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, 
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. (E26) 

The poem uses an anapaestic metre, modulating this with a headless foot at the beginning which cuts short the line: the first ten lines are written in trimester, with the final two lines extended to tetrameter, this extension adding a finality to the entire poem – an interruption into the garden of love of alien figures who “bind with briars” the flowers of the narrator’s desire. The contrast with the Songs of Innocence is a powerful one: play, love and the green are all elements of a past that has not been superseded as a natural consequence of development and growth. They have, rather, been vandalised, suppressed by the grim command “Thou shalt not” (which also, significantly, breaks the rhythm of the poem). If it is sometimes possible to read Songs of Experience as a necessary corrective to the ignorance of Songs of Innocence, that is not at all the case here: the destruction of the Garden of Love is, rather, its own form of wilful ignorance and there is nothing but a sense of lament for what has been lost.

The consequences of repression finding expression in perversity is the theme of one of Blake’s most powerful, and most famous, lyrics, “The Sick Rose”:

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm:  

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:  
And his dark secret love  
Does thy life destroy. (E25) 

These two short stanzas have attracted considerable critical comment. Jon Mee (1998), following Northrop Frye’s observation that the poem was one of those few lyrics that was popular because it provides a direct key to poetic experience for educated and uneducated alike, notes that it is a poem that appeals to generations of readers in an intensely personal way. Critics such as Michael Srigley (1992) have pointed out that the sickness caused by the “invisible worm” is that of the transmission of disease, but Elizabeth Langland warns against traditions of prescribing how the poem should be read, taking Harold Bloom to task, for example, for seeing pity in the opening line where the tone may even be condemnation of the rose. Langland draws attention to the ambiguity of the words of the poem, which do not clearly express where guilt lies (with the rose or the worm). Yet the illustration that accompanies the text does, it seems to me, evoke something of the pity that Bloom expresses, with images of women falling, many of them pursued by this invisible, rapacious power.

That sex so often brought with it death at the time Blake was writing, whether the plagues of sexually transmitted diseases referred to in “London”, or even, as Tristanne Connolly (2002) points out the more mundane, but no less terrible, mortality associated with childbirth that made pregnancy so dangerous for Catherine Blake and did kill Mary Wollstonecraft, is an unfortunate commonplace. What is so effective about these later Songs, however, is that rather than simply adopt another commonplace, on the sinfulness of sexuality, Blake addressed rather the terrible, sad and angry wisdom which experience brought.

Next – Chapter 4: Contrary States of the Soul

Tags: London, Songs of Experience, The Chimney Sweeper, The Garden of Love, The Little Vagabond, The Sick Rose
Posted in Files |

Zoapod 8: Blake’s Poems – London

Zoapod 8: Blake’s Poems – London
Length: 7 min 19 sec.

“London”, from Songs of Experience is one of Blake’s most popular and widely-anthologised poems, and this podcast provides some context for the poem.

To read the transcript of this podcast click here.

Tags: iTunes, London, poetry, Songs of Experience
Posted in Podcasts |

Zoapod 8: Blake’s Poems – London

Transcript of Zoamorphosis podcast. To listen to the full podcast click here.

1. Welcome to Zoamorphosis Podcast 8. Continuing the irregular series looking at William Blake’s poetry, this podcast will focus on one of his most popular lyrics, “London”, from Songs of Experience.

2. Published in 1794, “London” has become one of Blake’s best-known and most widely-anthologised poems. The simplicity of the ballad form, an extremely popular type of poetic format, is used by Blake to deliver an intensely powerful critique of his contemporary society, one in which sophisticated condemnation of political, religious and sexual mores is presented with remarkable brevity and compression. My own reading of Blake’s Song, is very conventional in terms of following critics such as E. P. Thompson (Witness Against the Beast, 1993) and Edward Larrissy (William Blake, 1988), seeing the poem as one of social critique. Harold Bloom’s comment in David Erdman’s edition of Blake’s Complete Poetry & Prose, which sees the poem as operating as a response to the tradition of biblical prophecy, seems rather obscure to me – something rather typical of Bloom’s criticism.

3. I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

4. A heavily corrected copy of this poem exists in Blake’s Notebook, offering considerable insight into the gestation that “London” underwent. Probably the most famous line from the poem, its reference to the “mind-forg’d manacles”, was originally written by Blake as “german forged links”. The original scans more regularly as iambic verse than his more famous amendment (with “forged” being pronounced on the second syllable), and drew attention, as Thompson observed, to the billeting of Hessian troops in London in the early 1790s in response to fear at social unrest in the capital, as well as the German origins of the Hanoverian dynasty and George III. The modification to “mind-forg’d manacles” forces the reader to slow down slightly with the spondee “mind-forg’d”, and the abstraction of oppression away from a particular incident and situation has led various critics to see in Blake’s phrase a powerful and effective illumination of the effects of ideology.

5. Another change that the poem underwent from Notebook to publication was the modification of “dirty Thames” in the second line to “charter’d”, repeating the word from the first line. Paine, writing in the first part of The Rights of Man (1792), denounced charters as a post-Norman trick to bribe the populace into submission: “William the Conqueror and his descendants parcelled out the country in this manner, and bribed some parts of it by what they call charters to hold the other parts of it the better subjected to their will. This is the reason why so many of those charters abound in Cornwall; the people were averse to the Government established at the Conquest, and the towns were garrisoned and bribed to enslave the country. All the old charters are the badges of this conquest, and it is from this source that the capriciousness of election arises.” The use of the word charter in “London” is literal in the first line, but metaphorical in the second, placing even the free movement of the natural world under the restriction of government.

6. After a period of enthusiasm in Paris following the fall of the Bastille, tensions increased throughout the 1790s, especially following the execution of Louis XVI and the Terror of 1793. Fear of revolution in Britain led the government of William Pitt to a loyalist reaction, first felt in Scotland as a series of sensational trials for seditious libel which took place in 1793, the results of which were draconian sentences against Thomas Muir and Thomas Palmer. In 1794, as members of the London Corresponding Society called for an English Convention, Pitt suspended Habeus Corpus and ordered the arrest of its leading members, as well as those of the Society for Constitutional Information. Thomas Paine had already fled the country at the end of 1793, and although the three men finally brought to trial were acquitted, there could be no doubt that Britain was a dangerous place for anyone with radical sympathies.

7. These are the events alluded to in the third stanza of “London”, in which soldiers’ blood stains the walls of palaces (almost certainly a direct reference to the events of August 1792 when a mob stormed the Tuileries and massacred the Swiss Guard defending the royal family). Amid this political storm, the hypocrisy and degradation of the poor is also dealt with by invoking the conditions of children chimney sweepers, the subject of two other poems in Blake’s Songs, as well as child prostitution in the final stanza. Stanley Gardner (The Tyger, The Lamb and the Terrible Desart, 1998) observes that in Lambeth a group of “noblemen and gentlemen” had converted the old Hercules Inn into the Female Orphan Asylum “to save girls between the age of nine and twelve from ‘the guilt of prostitution’.” The lives of these so-called “chicken prostitutes” was brutal and fatal, with many not surviving into their twenties as they suffered from violence and those sexual diseases such as syphilis that blasted substantial sections of the metropolitan population.

8. Within four, short quatrains, Blake delivers one of the most savage visions of the city ever written, and for this reason alone it is unsurprising that the poem has become so well-known. To read it is to experience the shock of an explosion among the familiar platitudes and hypocrisies of church, priest and king. Yet there may be something even more subtle going on here. Larrissy is correct to point out that it is a misconception – even if a common one – to assume that the voice of the narrator is that of Blake’s. The speaker in “London” marks those all around him: the word “mark” here functions in different ways – as a unit of currency (an old term used to refer to 8 ounces of gold or silver), as a blemish or sign, and as the verb “to mark”, as in to identify or characterise something or someone. The narrator, then, sees these marks and he sees them everywhere: “And mark in every face I meet \ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

9. These spots and stains of weakness and woe are inscribed on these faces by the weight of capitalism and power that emphasise the poverty of those who live in London, but Larrissy draws attention to the fact that it is also the speaker who is marking these faces – observing and characterising them as weak, woeful. That this voice of experience is potent should not blind us to the fact that it is also a single vision: there is no alternative, no innocence, in “London”, and in a scene of such potential violence and depravity it is not hard to see why. And yet, as with Terry Eagleton’s criticisms of Theodore Adorno’s concept of ideology, this is to give the powerful too much power, to assume rather defeatedly that there is no alternative. Sometimes such single, purposeful vision is necessary, to clarify and explain the social conditions in which we find ourselves, but for the possibility of something better, the voice of experience must also be matched by that of innocence, the belief that things can be changed.

Tags: London, poetry, Songs of Experience
Posted in Podcasts (Transcripts) |

Mark Linkous – Sparklehorse

Mark Linkous, the lead singer and musician for the indie band Sparklehorse, who tragically took his own life on March 6, was a thoughtful and highly original performer who had a strong and deeply personal interest in Blake’s work.

Linkous, who was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1962 and was a member of the Dancing Hoods during the 1980s, formed Sparklehorse in 1995. Although Dancing Hoods failed to land a deal, Sparklehorse released a number of critically acclaimed albums and his last, Dark Night of the Soul, recorded with producer Danger Mouse, will come out this year having been delayed from its 2009 launch after a legal dispute with EMI.

Linkous’s most explicit connection to Blake was the single, “London”, released in 1995 on Capitol Records, the label for all Sparklehouse’s work. The original seven-inch was a limited edition of 1600 hand-numbered copies, but Sparklehorse frequently performed it at gigs (it also appeared on The Basement Tapes Volume 2 compilation) and became something of a cult hit for Sparklehouse fans.

In an interview for the BBC Culture Show, broadcast in December 2008, Linkous spoke at length of his affinity with Blake as an artist working against his upbringing and background (Linkous came from a mining family and turned to music to avoid going into the mines). He was also drawn to Blake in the way that the slow and gentle atmosphere of Songs of Innocence, with its hope and optimism, gave way to darker and more aggressive themes, with which he saw parallels in his own music.

Linkous’s music is often described by the rather lazy catch-all of “surreal”, but the delightful performances in horse-heads, but Wayne Coyne (with whom he worked on Dark Night of the Soul) emphasised that he was at heart “a gentle and pleasant” man. Linkous himself said that what he most enjoyed was a performance where the audience “really appreciate the slow songs. When you can get 500, 200, 2,000 people to be totally silent, and they totally get it, and it’s not just like a social situation where everyone’s going out to drink and talk and socialize.”

Despite his obvious anger or frustration at times, then, it was also as a singer of songs of innocence that Mark Linkous should be remembered.

Interview for the BBC Culture Show, December 2008:

Tags: London, Mark Linkous, music, Sparklehorse
Posted in Arts and Culture |