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Zoamorphosis | The Blake 2.0 Blog: the reception of William Blake in art, music, film, literature | Tag Archive | Songs of Innocence
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Though Dickens has been accused of being pejoratively “sentimental,” (Kaplan 37) we should take into consideration what “sentimental” meant to Dickens and his contemporaries or the philosophical tradition that argues that the sentiments were inherently “moral.”(Kaplan 37) According to Fred Kaplan, the eighteenth century writers who imposed moral value on “sentiment” were David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume argues that “the ultimate ends of human actions can never…be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on the intellectual faculties….” (Kaplan 37) Hume’s optimistic definition of human nature is complemented by Adam Smith who created the genial metaphor of the “internal…impartial spectator,” the “man within the breast,” a second self that we all possess, against whose altruistic and benevolent standards we judge our thoughts and actions. (Kaplan 37) Dickens, who inherits this tradition, by describing humiliated children, social outcasts and their cruel fate, provokes sorrow and anger towards social injustice.
This “sentimental” tradition can apply to the case of William Blake who, like Dickens, depicts people at the bottom of the social scale and arouses readers’ grief and wrath upon social evil and hypocrisy. Blake and Dickens can be said to have the same interest which is not in accurately representing society but in creating a social world within their works that accurately embodies “the moral paradigms.” (Kaplan 59) To represent their concern and anger, they both unnaturally amplify “the voice of the artist” substituting a personal vision for mimesis. (Kaplan 59) In other words, they by substituting a secular text for what had once been the mission reserved for scripture, run the risk of compounding “the potential blasphemy and hybris.” (Kaplan 59)
To prove their “moral” sentimentalism, we will examine Dickens’ Bleak House and Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper” which will help us to understand how their sentiments are deeply related to morality. First, let us turn to Jo, a crossing sweeper in Bleak House. Next is a citation of a passage in which the state of Jo is described: “It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!” (274) Here Dickens describes Jo’s utter ignorance about reading and writing in a comical yet pathetic way and brings our attention to the result of a lack of education.
This condition also leads Jo to religious ignorance. Though Jo admires the size of the edifice of “the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” he has no idea what it is all about. (274) Jo’s ignorance symbolizes the fact that the Society, which tries to perform the mission of doing good to people abroad, never extends aid to Jo, however near its building may be to him. Furthermore, Jo’s ignorance about the religion is also described as “[i]t must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands.” (274) It is noteworthy that “the great Cross of the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral” (326) is degraded just as “the crowning of the great, confused city” in the eyes of Jo, which is “so far out of his reach.” (326) Mark Spilka points out that “Dickens satirizes the senselessness and futility of contemporary faith.”(213) Dickens’ satire is even more effective as it is mingled with moral compassion and sympathy for Jo.
A sharp attack on the established church is also delivered in “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. A striking difference with Dickens’ depiction of Jo is that poems are narrated by a sweep so that we can share the same point of view with the victim and feel the same pain and sorrow: “When my mother died I was very young, / And my father sold me while yet my tongue, / Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. / So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.” It is likely that Blake’s contemporary readers also “weep” and “cry” in the bottom of their heart, as the sweep does.
Blake depicts not only the sweeps’ miserable lives but also a false picture of the promised afterlife in Tom’s dream of an angel. In Tom’s dream, the sweeps begin “lock’d up in coffins of black.” Then “And by came an Angel who had a bright key,/ And he open’d the coffins & set them all free./ Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run/ And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.” The angel of this poem is “unable or unwilling to alter the harsh facts of life of this world, only active in an idealistic afterlife.”(Marsh 111) Thus we are faced by scandalous cruelty and injustice, and the religious propaganda that sustains injustice. Blake urges us to change things and help the sweeps gain their freedom, to attack their father, employers, and the “angel”-Church. When we pay attention to the ironic tone of the last line “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm,” our wrath towards the social injustice is aroused.
Next, let us turn to “The Chimney Sweeper” in Songs of Experience. Here is a citation of the first stanza: “A little black thing among the snow: / Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! / Where are thy father & mother? say? / They are both gone up to the church to pray.” Blake attacks the hypocrisy of the Church and also the parents’ collusion with it. The parents don’t have to feel guilty because they are persuaded that their son will go to heaven. They are grateful to the whole establishment, Church and state. It is clear that Church, state and parents collude in “a hypocritical lie.”(Marsh 115)
Blake also concentrates on problems of understanding, which is crucial in social reform and improvement: “And because I am happy, & dance & sing, / They think they have done me no injury: / And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery.” The sweeps are ignorant because of a lack of education, therefore they can believe they are “happy” and can “dance & sing.” In spite of this cruel fact, employers and parents “think they have done” them “no injury” thanks to the false system of religion and faith. As Karl Marx identifies education as a crucial stage in a society’s progress towards equality, Blake brings our attention to the importance of education.
The sweeps’ lack of education is reminiscent of Jo in Bleak House. Let us look at the scene in which Jo is compared with a drover’s dog: “He [A dog ] and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction; likewise, as to awakened association, aspiration or regret, melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par. But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute! Turn that dog’s descendants wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their bark – but not their bite.” ( 275) Here Dickens suggests as dogs will lose their “bark,” Jo lacks the ability to utter words loudly to resist the social evil. However, it is also implied that Jo should have the potential for violence against social injustice by the word “bite,” though Jo himself never show any revolutionary power to the end.
In conclusion, both Blake and Dickens are sentimental in that “sentiment” means a radically “moral” feeling and they both try to arouse feelings such as anger, sorrow, and sympathy in readers and incite them to reform society. This sentimentalism we can also find in their depiction of the deaths of victims. Just after Jo’s death the narration continues: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.”(705) Dickens is attempting purposely to arouse his readers’ innate moral sentiments, reminding them that “the more emotionally sensitive they are to death the more morally attentive they will be to the values of life.” (Kaplan 50) This is exactly the case with Jo. It goes without saying that Blake’s depiction of the deaths of the sweeps has the same effect.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1971)
Kaplan, Fred. Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Penguin: Princeton University Press, 1987)
Marsh, Nicolas. William Blake: The Poems (Houndmills: Palgrave: 2001)
Spilka, Mark. Dickens and Kafka: a mutual interpretation (Gloucester: Indiana University Press, 1963)
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My attention has just been brought to Jeff Gillett’s setting to music of the forty-six poems from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (including “A Divine Image”). The Songs have, of course, been a popular source for many musicians, and you can read about a few versions in articles by Keri Davies on Benjamin Britten and John Sykes, as well as a more recent entry by me on Fernand Péna. These particular versions offer renditions accompanied by guitar, cello and other stringed instruments that draw strongly on folk traditions.
Jeff Gillett himself has performed in folk clubs around the UK, working in particular with Ron Taylor on releases such as Take Off Your Old Coat (1992), Fair Length and Share (1995) and Both Shine as One (2006). Some of Jeff’s work has also provided inspiration for the ceilidh group The Downfielders. Performers on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience include violinist Cathy Brown, pianist/cellist Alison Gregory, and Jeff’s partner Elaine.
The starting point for this particular CD was initially an educational one (as a teacher, Jeff wanted to help his students prepare for an examination and so use music to help them remember the poems). As such, the project is as much a pedagogical one as musical, but plenty of the tracks that be heard at www.myspace.com/blakesettings demonstrate the sensitivity of accompaniment for which he is best known. Jeff’s voice in particular is especially suited for creating sympathetic renditions, his version of “The Sick Rose” being a favourite of mine.
You can buy the CD, as well as read Jeff’s comments on the poems, view videos (and even book him for a performance) at www.blakesongsettings.co.uk.
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This month sees the release of a two-year project by Fernand Péna, a privately released CD based on Blake’s poetry and titled Ode to William Blake.
Péna, who has been a musician and singer since 1968 in bands such as ETC and Climats Sonores, released his last album – Rien à comprendre (Nothing to understand) – five years ago. This also included two tracks inspired by Blake: “The Mother Said” (drawn from Blake’s lyric “I saw a monk of Charlemagne”) and “Get thee away” (from “I rose up at the dawn of day” in the Rossetti manuscript). Ode to William Blake, however, is – with regard to Blake – a much more extensive and ambitious work, including some sixteen songs taken from Blake’s poetry.
Many of these take their inspiration from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but others come from other Blakean lyrics such as “William Bond”. You can hear these, as well as the earlier Blake inspired tracks, at http://www.myspace.com/fernandpna/music. The CD also comes with a selection of Blake’s poetry in the form of a booklet, some samples of which can also be seen on his MySpace page. As Péna remarks of his latest release:
The songs on this disc have been made very spontaneously, therefore very quickly. [Yet] working-out, registering, programming and mixing asked for hundreds of hours. Each song, each note (even the wrong ones!) were only kept after many rejected versions. The respect toward Blake’s ideas was always there. I chose, most of the time, this rasping voice, that is for me the best way to fit with what I feel toward Blake. But this was not systematic or conceptual. As I do it for yoga I avoided overthinking and looked for the most difficult thing: conscience in the instant. I do not pretend to have succeeded in it.
Péna worked previously with David Tootill, artistic director of Southbank Mosaics, whose Project Blake (to install Blake-inspired mosaics in Lambeth) led the singer to compose music for the project. He will also be singing at Tate Britain on November 28 at the invitation of the Blake Society.
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The music critic Andrew Porter said of the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, that “there can be few English-speaking composers who … have not contemplated setting all forty-six of the poems”. Though, as Donald Fitch points out, few have actually realised any substantial part of that dream. Only the American composer William Bolcom has succeeded in setting all 46 poems as a single sustained composition. Many others have set substantial numbers of the poems, though not often as a connected set. A relatively unknown composer, John Sykes, came close. A provisional list of Sykes’s songs, compiled by Stephen Banfield, shows settings of all but nine of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Sykes eschewed commercial dissemination of his work to the extent that he published none of his songs and gained no professional performances of them in his lifetime. There may well have been others like him, personally modest, content to write for themselves alone or for a few intimate friends; in Sykes’s case these included the pianists Mary and Geraldine Peppin and the latter’s husband Randall Swingler. A Blake-inspired poet active in the British Communist Party and a flautist of professional standard, Swingler wrote (with Auden) the libretto for Britten’s Ballad of Heroes, and supplied Sykes with some of his song lyrics. It is unclear if Sykes himself was a Party member.
John Austen Sykes was born in India in 1909. In 1928 he went up to Oxford as organ scholar at Balliol, where he was a contemporary of Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis. One contemporary considered him to have been the most distinguished music undergraduate of his time. After Oxford, he went to London, to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition under Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob. In 1936 he was appointed to the staff of Kingswood School, the Methodist boarding school in Bath, founded by John Wesley in 1748, and there he stayed, except for war service in the Pioneer Corps (he was a conscientious objector), until he died of cancer in the school Sanatorium in the summer term of 1962.
His only two published works were a Christmas anthem, The Child of the World (O.U.P., 1958)—a setting of words by Randall Swingler, and “Disposer Supreme”, a hymn tune published in the supplement to the old Methodist Hymn Book.
Most of his music was written either for the school or for a small group of friends. Over the years, he wrote something like twenty anthems for the chapel choir. A former pupil recalls
From the experience of my own lessons with him, where I learnt from him, rather than was taught by him, I have to say that Sykes was not all that brilliant a teacher: but he was far more—he was an inspiration. Without ever forcing it on us, he filled the school with music so that it was a natural and exciting part of our lives—and I don’t just mean those of us who eventually were to become professional musicians: it was for everybody.
Readers of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) must have been puzzled by his digression into an irrelevant denunciation of Kingswood School. The puzzlement increases when it is realised not just that Thompson was a pupil at that school (omission of such data is typically Thompsonian mauvaise foi) but that his discovery of Blake must owe much to a charismatic, left-wing, Blake enthusiast on the staff—John Sykes.
As Stephen Banfield has pointed out, Sykes’s Blake songs (two sequences of 16 and 20 songs, the one from Innocence and the other from Experience) are uneven; the simpler (though later composed) Songs of Innocence in particular, often relying too much on unmemorable ostinati and strophic repetition. The best perhaps show the influence of Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) and his admired Elizabethans. Banfield continues
One wishes [Sykes] had allowed himself more broad unfolding canvases, as in ‘Hear the voice of the bard!’. But when, as in ‘The little black boy’ or ‘Nurse’s song’, an extremely graceful melody is supplemented with unobtrusive harmonic colouring, the outcome is exquisite. ‘London’ is an isolated essay in dissonant modernity; but what concerns us here is his distancing himself backwards, like Warlock, to the renaissance. Although some of his later songs, notably the Homage to John Dowland, whose texts are even more of a referential tribute than the music, he consolidated his neo-Elizabethan manner, the one wholly outstanding example of it comes rather unexpectedly in the last of the Songs of Innocence, ‘On another’s sorrow’. It is perhaps unnecessary to comment at all on such a perfect song … except to say that with its wonderfully crafted melody and plastic metre, its sensibility of both romantic refinement and archaic artifice, and its transfixing marriage of an 18th-century text with a 16th-century manner, it seems the perfect encapsulation in English song of one era’s transmutation of another.
Blake settings by John Sykes
“Ah! Sunflower” (song for high voice and piano). Apparently an early work. A later setting is Songs of Experience, IV. [Fitch 1216]
“I love the Jocund Dance” (choral setting for SATB unacc.)
“Jerusalem” (unison song with piano, January 1939)—presumably an arrangement of Parry’s tune.
Songs of Experience (song cycle for voice and piano, ca 1931). [Fitch 1217]
I. “Introduction: Hear the Voice of the Bard”.—II. “Earth’s Answer”.—III. “My Pretty Rose Tree”.—IV. “Ah! Sunflower”.—V. “The Lilly”.—VI. “The Poison Tree”.—VII. “The Sick Rose”.—VIII. “The Fly”.—IX. “Holy Thursday”.—X. “The Tyger”.
Banfield and Fitch list further settings of “The angel”, “The garden of love”, “The little vagabond”, “London”, “The human abstract”, “Infant sorrow”, “To Tirzah”, “The schoolboy”, “The clod and the pebble”, and “The voice of the ancient bard”; these do not appear to form part of the Sykes Archive at Kingswood.
Songs of Innocence (song cycle for voice and piano, June 1935—March 1936). [Fitch 1218]
1. “Piping Down the Valleys Wild”.—2. “The Blossom”.—3. “The Shepherd”.—4. “The Ecchoing Green”.—5. “The Lamb”.—6. “The Little Black Boy”.—7. “The Little Boy Lost & Found”.—8. “Laughing Song”.—9. “A Cradle Song”.—10. “The Divine Image”.—11. “Holy Thursday”.—12. “Spring”.—13. “Nurse’s Song”.—14. “Infant Joy”.—15. “A Dream”.—16. “On Another’s Sorrow”.
“The Tyger” (duet, TB + piano). An arrangement of Songs of Experience, X, with lower voice part added. [Fitch 1219]
“To The Muses” (for SATB unacc.)
Further Reading
Donald Fitch, Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake. Catalogs and bibliographies; 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge: The University Press, 1985)
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Transcript of Zoamorphosis podcast 13. To listen to the full podcast click here.
1. Welcome to Zoamorphosis Podcast 13, which will take a look at the 1996 album by Jah Wobble, The Inspiration of William Blake. Jah Wobble, born John Joseph Wardle, first came to the attention of a wider public when he joined John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd as bass player in 1978. Although he left after only two years, the combination of post-punk and dub music was to have an important influence on Wobble’s subsequent career.
2. After a period as an underground train driver, that career was revived with the 1989 release of Without Judgement, and Wobble engaged in a number of projects, becoming quite prolific from the mid-90s onwards, experimenting with a number of cultural influences including Chinese music and English folk songs. It is that willingness to experiment that makes The Inspiration of William Blake much less an unusual choice than it may first appear. Taking his cue from that other Londoner (Wobble was born in Whitechapel in the East End), Wobble is clearly attracted by the combination of antinomian politics, metropolitan nous and visionary experience. As he writes in his commentary on Blake’s The Good and Evil Angels which prefaces the lyrics to The Inspiration of William Blake, Wobble is attracted to the earlier artist’s contrary vision:
3. Blake demonstrates the perfect balance between heaven and earth, good and evil, man and woman, yin and yang; two archetypal forces moving against each other and yet in harmony. Both are separate yet contain each other. Neither can live without the other and therefore, nor could human life. Both inform one another as they move into each other, unconscious into conscious and back again. What would light be without dark, and when all is dark where is wisdom?
4. The thirteen tracks of Inspiration were recorded at 30 Hertz Studios and The Chapel, Wobble working with Jackie Liebezeit on drums, Justin Adams on guitar, Neville Murray on percussion, and a number of other musicians throughout the album. Wobble mixes relatively straight adaptations of Blake’s poems – primarily from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but also The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Auguries of Innocence – with tracks that take Blake more loosely as their inspiration, such as “Bananas” and “The Kings of Asia”. Here, I’ll look briefly at a selection of the tracks, beginning with the second on the album, “Lonely London”:
[music]
5. Leibezeit’s and Murray’s percussion on the track creates a wonderful feel to this vision of London, reminiscent of Samba or perhaps even the Burundi drumming that Malcolm McLaren impishly poached from Adam and the Ants to promote his 1980s new wave group, Bow Wow Wow. After the multicultural, exotic London marked in the vibrant opening to the track, the mood shifts strongly as Wobble’s sinister voice recites Blake’s “London” and lines from the Proverbs of Hell over Mark Feda’s synthesised atmospheres. After the gentle (and, unfortunately, slightly tedious) voice of childhood in the first track, “Songs of Innocence”, Wobble is much more effective as the voice of the devil. However, lest we become too tempted by such diabolism, the following song, “Bananas”, offers a delightfully light, nonsensical and rhythmic dance track.
6. The dub strain evident throughout the album is used to particularly impressive effect on “Tyger Tyger”:
[music]
7. The lyrics of this track are pretty much straight Blake, but Wobble’s musical interpretation is one of the boldest and most original ever to be released. This Tyger is a jaunty beast of the jungle, one confident enough to declaim in a Cockney accent against a calypso chorus. The answer to Wobble’s ever-so slightly adapted question, “Did he who make the lamb really make thee”, cannot be anything other than yes, but this is a creator laid back and poised in a laconic universe in which tigers are a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man to see. This is, quite rightly, the track from Inspiration that is most widely known.
8. The last track to be considered here, and also the last track of the album, “Auguries of Innocence”, lacks the easy familiarity of “Tyger Tyger” but is a resounding and remarkable climax to the album.
[music]
9. Wobble’s dramatic – even melodramatic – declamation of Blake’s couplets embellishes the powerful lines of the Auguries over an extraordinary soundscape. Again, Wobble’s Cockney voice is confident, proud, defiant and also sympathetic, immensely flexible as it performs Blake’s verse. It is a fallacy, of course – though, I am sure one that also occurred to Wobble himself – but listening to his melodic speech one is tempted to believe this would be as Blake would sound were he to speak those words. The musical textures that interweave the lyrics are hypnotic, intricate, sometimes soothing, sometimes menacing, creating a sense of space and time beyond words that intimates the eternity and infinity with which Blake begins one of his most popular poems. Perhaps what is even more astonishing is the fact that, by the end of the track, that wonderful music disappears and we are left where Wobble himself must have begun, with the words and inspiration of William Blake.
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Joel Bocka’s short film, Songs of Innocence and Experience (2006). Shot in Prague and inspired as much by Jan Svankmajer as William Blake (a marriage made in heaven – or hell).
Go to the next video from the William Blake Jukebox:
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is the best known of William Blake’s works in illuminated printing, the art form with which he is particularly associated. The Songs were not Blake’s first production using the technique of relief etching, the earliest known examples being There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One. These were probably produced in 1788 (according to a reference made by Blake in his late work, The Ghost of Abel), that is a year before he published Songs of Innocence.
Commercial Printmaking & Relief Etching
As Joseph Viscomi points out: “No printmaker before Blake had incorporated the tools and techniques of writing, drawing, and painting in a graphic medium, though the materials and tools were commonplace.” (Viscomi 2003 42) At the time when Blake worked, most commercial engraving on copper plates was via a process known on intaglio engraving, where lines were cut into copper directly or alternatively through a waxy varnish, with acid then eating into the copper plate before the lines were then worked over and enhanced with the engraver’s burin, a fine steel cutting tool.
This was how Blake produced most of his commercial work, but it was an extremely laborious process and the delicate lines produced with a burin were not suitable for substantial amounts of text. As such, intaglio engravings were typically combined with type set into blocks, Blake himself using this method on his designs for the publisher Francis Edwards’ version of the long poem Night Thoughts.
For Blake, then, relief etching offered possible commercial advantages over traditional methods, allowing him to combine text and image without the expense of hiring additional typesetters. Because Blake controlled the means of his own production, it also enabled him to pursue highly idiosyncratic art forms, although this should not be interpreted as a desire on his part to ignore commercial considerations. During the nineteenth century it became fashionable to see Blake deliberately opposed to profit, but the Songs in particular were printed to take advantage of a growing market for children’s books (Darton 108-13).
Relief etching (which Blake also referred to as “stereotype” in The Ghost of Abel) was intended as a means for producing such books much more quickly. Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast from a wood engraving, but Blake’s innovation was somewhat different. Drawing his lines with acid-resistant varnish, the plate was steeped in acid so that the exposed areas of copper were etched away, leaving raised lines that could receive ink. John Jones points out that relief etching “would appear crude compared to regularized typesetting and intaglio line engraving”, something that did not appeal to conventional publishers. For Blake, however, the handmade look of his prints could also appear much more artistic than the “perfection attained through mechanization.” (Jones 30)
The Creation of the Songs
In William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (2000), Michael Phillips provides a comprehensive account of how the Songs came to be composed and printed. Phillips points out that there are two surviving manuscript sources for some of the Songs of Innocence: an early version of “Laughing Song” written in his 1783 book, Poetical Sketches, and the manuscript of An Island in the Moon, written some time between 1782 and 1785 and which contains versions of “Holy Thursday”, “Nurses Song” and “The Little Boy Lost”. For the later Songs of Experience, Blake worked on versions of poems such as “The Tyger” in his Notebook, revising them again and again until he was satisfied with them enough to prepare them for printing.
When working on the copper plates, Blake’s technique was somewhat different to the usual one employed by engravers. Typically, the artist would cover the entire plate with acid-resistant varnish (also called the “ground”) before using his tools to score or scratch lines through that varnish down to the plate. By covering the plate with nitric acid, or aqua fortis, the exposed lines would be eaten away, creating grooves in the plate that would hold ink while the level surface of the copper was cleaned for printing, a process reversed by Blake:
Instead of covering the entire plate with a varnish or ground and cutting his design into it with engraver’s tools, he used the varnish like ink and the copper plate like a sheet of paper. Dipping his quill pen or fine pencil brush into the acid resistant varnish he wrote his text and drew his design directly on the polished surface of the plate, just as a writer would write out fair copy and as an artist would draw. All of the surfaces that were not protected were then corroded or eaten away by the acid, leaving raised lines which would be inked for printing. (Phillips 15)
Joseph Viscomi, in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), emphasises just how important this technique of drawing was to Blake, allowing him to compose freely on the plate rather (than as was previously thought) creating designs first of all on paper before transferring them to the plate. “While Blake often used tools of the printmaker in addition to the tools of the poet and painter, the initial design was executed like a pen and wash drawing.” (Viscomi 1993 64)
While some of the early versions of the Songs in particular were printed in monochrome, several of them also show signs of Blake’s experiments in colour printing. The ability to print colour directly onto a page was an incredibly difficult process that was only gradually improved during the nineteenth century, yet some of Blake’s copies of the Songs show that rather than just hand-colouring the plates afterwards he also sought to use colour during the printing process. Here Phillips and Viscomi (the latter supported by Robert Essick) part ways: Phillips has argued that Blake used a “two-pull” printing process, using registration pinholes in the paper to allow him to pass it through the printing press twice, once with a monochrome print that was then overlaid with colour. Viscomi and Essick, by contrast, argue that Blake printed his pages just once, mixing different colours onto the same plate. Most Blake scholars working in this field agree with Viscomi and Essick that Blake used a “one-pull” process to print his plates.
Copies of the Songs
Songs of Innocence was first printed in 1789 and, when he composed Songs of Experience in 1794, Blake typically issued them in combined form as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, though he also made the Songs of Innocence available on their own until 1818. There are 32 surviving copies of Songs of Innocence and 29 copies of the combined Innocence and Experience.
While Blake scholars had been aware for years of the different versions of individual copies of the Songs (whether Innocence alone or combined with Experience), it was Joseph Viscomi who, in 1993, most clearly emphasised the importance of these variations from copy to copy. In Blake and the Idea of the Book, Viscomi pointed out that Blake most likely worked on print runs, or editions, of his individual illuminated books, making a series of prints over a short period of a few days that could later be coloured, bound and sold to prospective buyers.
Songs of Innocence has thirty-one plates, with twenty-two copies in existence including all the plates (and eight comprising only twenty-seven plates, when Blake moved “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” were moved to Experience). Some of the copies still extant, such as Copy T of Songs of Innocence were printed posthumously, probably by Frederick Tatham who had befriended Blake towards the end of his life and took care of Catherine Blake after his death (Viscomi 1993 248-9). Blake had also taught his wife how to print and colour the copies of books they made together so that she could help him with his work, both of them sharing the task of illuminating the prints.
As Viscomi observes, Blake had a very relaxed attitude towards the Songs (1993 274-5). As well as transferring “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found” poems, he also alternated “The School Boy” between Innocence and Experience, and although “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” was nearly always treated as a song of innocence, Blake did present it as a song of experience in Copy O. In 1793, as Phillips points out, Blake had advertised Innocence and Experience separately (Phillips 109), and it may have been his intention for them to be available as separate books but he decided against this (at least for Songs of Experience) after printing up copies of his new work. By considering individual copies as print runs or editions, it is easy to see that there are distinct phases in the production of the Songs that very often makes them appear to be very different books – for example between the delicate washes of early copies of Songs of Innocence produced in 1789 in contrast to the more vividly colour printed versions of the mid 1790s and heavily hand-painted copies from the second decade of the nineteenth century. Viscomi warns against seeing each individual copy of the illuminated books as a revision: they were not meant as unique versions but rather copy-editions, reflecting Blake’s attitudes to his Songs at different periods in his own life (Viscomi 1993 374).
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Chapter 2: Songs of Innocence
When Blake decided to compose Songs of Innocence, he had already been involved in the market for children’s books as an engraver, making reproductions of designs for a children’s anthology The Speaker (1780) and Laetitia Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). As Andrew Lincoln observes, he “probably had little sympathy with the education aims of these books, or indeed with much of the children’s literature written for the polite market. But he seems to have known the market well.” (Lincoln 14).
Such books were often illustrated with engravings or woodcuts, some even being coloured, their designs often demonstrating a familiar vocabulary of images: sheep and shepherds, children playing, mothers with their young children. These children’s titles almost inevitably emphasised the religious and moral nature of their compositions, being designed to improve the character of their young readers as well as their education, but Alexander Gilchrist was one of the first to draw attention to the special nature of Songs of Innocence as presenting us instead with childhood as a “Golden Age” (Gilchrist 61).
Visions of Childhood
The poems presented in Songs of Innocence are some of the simplest and clearest poems that Blake ever wrote. Many commentators have remarked that this simplicity masks often considerable irony and complexities of thought. While this is true, particularly when the poems are considered against those in Songs of Experience, the reader should not rush too quickly to look for hidden depths and subtleties of meaning beyond their gentle, pastoral depictions. Throughout life we are encouraged to view the world through the eyes of experience, and Blake (as he later indicated) understood the importance of this; yet his radicalism as a writer at the end of the eighteenth century was also due to his belief in the power and importance of innocence as a fundamental perspective of humanity.
Blake’s ideas on the nature of childhood were not restricted to him alone. In his 1762 novel Émile, or On Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered an opinion on raising children that ran counter to many of the ideals of the eighteenth century, arguing that they are ready to learn from their surroundings but prevented from doing so by the malign influence of a corrupt society that wishes to distort their natural values to its own ends. Although Blake was later to show himself very hostile to many elements of Rousseau’s philosophy and religion, “The School Boy” indicated considerable sympathy to the Swiss philosopher’s educational values:
How can the bird that is born for joy,
Sit in a cage and sing.
How can a child when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring. (E31)
Nelson Hilton has suggested that Songs of Innocence may be “imagined as a series of vignettes concerning the psyche’s birth into language” (Hilton 198). This is complicated, as he points out himself, by the varying order of poems in different copies, so any clear pattern of a child’s growth and development must be inferred rather than being explicitly stated, but certainly some poems such as “Infant Joy”, “The Lamb” and “The Chimney Sweeper” can be seen as moving us from child as incapable of speech (from the Latin infans, non-speaking) to the more ambivalent realisation that while children may be innocent, that is not necessarily the case of their supposed guardians.
One of the most astonishing effects of these early Songs, and one that appealed to Blake’s contemporaries such as William Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as Victorian commentators such as Gilchrist and Algernon Swinburne, is the sheer delight taken in musicality for its own sake, for example in the poem “Spring”.
Sound the Flute!
Now it’s mute.
Birds delight
Day and Night.
Nightingale
In the dale
Lark in Sky
Merrily
Merrily merrily to welcome in the Year (E15)
“Spring” has attracted less attention from critics than many of the other Songs, perhaps because it is concerned less with those semantic and symbolic complexities found in other poems than the much simpler pleasures of rhythm, capturing song and dance in its evocation – both textually and visually – of a rejuvenated natural world.
Pastoral Traditions
The natural world has an important part to play in Songs of Innocence, which can sometimes appear strange to experienced readers of Blake considering his constant inveighing against Nature in the later works. Kevin Hutchings has criticised the commonplace view that Blake is the poetic adversary of nature. The lines and illustrations of these songs (as well as many more of Blake’s illuminated books) burst with living creatures and natural settings: it was the abstract conception of Nature as iron law, which he saw in the philosophy of Bacon, Locke and Newton, to which Blake was opposed (Hutchings 4-5).
Even the most cursory reading of Songs of Innocence cannot fail to draw attention the pastoral nature of this poetry. Although (as Hutchings remarks), Blake only lived properly in the English countryside at one period during his lifetime, from 1800-1803 when he and Catherine resided at Felpham, the London of the 1780s and 1790s was very different to the vast metropolis that it was to become in the later nineteenth century. Though north London could be a dirty and ill-favoured place, south of the Thames was still largely rural and much less developed and, according to Stanley Gardner, Blake often took long walks to Peckham, Dulwich and Camberwell: “From Golden Square, Westminster Bridge led into the country” (Gardner 43).
The pastoral, then, while a popular poetic form in the eighteenth century, was not simply a literary experience for Blake but one that he was easily able to encounter even in London. That Blake was influenced by pastoral poetry, however, is not to be doubted. Pastoral poetry in western literature began with the Idylls of Theocritus in the third century BC, and was established as a classical genre via the highly influential Eclogues of Virgil. Works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and John Milton’s Lycidas (1637) transferred this poetry to England and, in the eighteenth century, many writers invoked the ideal and romanticised imagery of pastoral poetry, most notably in Alexander Pope’s Pastorals (1709) and James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), a collection which had greatly affected some of Blake’s verse published in the Poetical Sketches (1783).
Thus the familiar motifs of shepherd and flock, Arcadian fields and a leisurely ideal, all find a place in Songs of Innocence, as, for example, in “The Shepherd”:
How sweet is the Shepherds sweet lot,
From the morn to the evening he strays:
He shall follow his sheep all the day
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.
For he hears the lambs innocent call,
And he hears the ewes tender reply,
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their Shepherd is nigh. (E7)
This simple verse, written in a lilting, anapaestic metre, emphasises the peaceful calm and joy of the pastoral ideal. Nicholas Marsh suggests that there is some uncertainty in the poem, for example that the sheep may be terrified at night when the shepherd is not there (Marsh 15-16). While this undoubtedly may be true, Marsh, like many critics in my opinion, is seeking complexity and ambivalence because radical simplicity is too challenging to the status of many readers, particularly professional readers. If the meaning of such a poem is, after all, open to all, whether children or the uneducated, then what role do critics have to determine – and thus control – meaning?
What cannot be denied is the Christian symbolism contained in this poem. The role of the shepherd reminds us of that of Christ as the good shepherd, who “giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11), and the implicit religious symbolism of “The Shepherd” is made explicit in “The Lamb”:
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. (E9)
Mother and Child
Significantly, Blake does not call upon another important tradition of pastoral poetry in Songs of Innocence, that of sexual love. The Songs are full of love, but it is the love between parent and child, or child and the natural world, that is more important than that between lovers. In “The Lamb”, as in “The Little Boy Lost” and “The Little Boy Found”, as well as “The Divine Image”, it is the love of the father for his children that is most clearly expressed, following the convention of Christian love from God the Father towards his creation.
And yet, throughout Songs of Innocence, it is the love of the mother that is more often given primacy. The Little Boy poems, as we have already seen, were later transferred to Songs of Experience, and – unlike “The Shepherd” and “The Lamb” – it is impossible to miss the anxiety and ambivalence caused by the father’s love, even when they are read as texts of innocence. By contrast, in Innocence at least, there is no such ambivalence between a mother and her child, even though that position may be complicated by the later addition of Songs of Experience.
In “The Little Black Boy”, the poem begins with the relation of the speaker to his mother:
My mother taught me underneath a tree
And sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And pointing to the east began to say.
Look on the rising sun: there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat away.
And flowers and trees and beasts and men recieve
Comfort in morning joy in the noon day. (E9)
At the end of the poem, this mother’s tender concern is replaced by that of God the Father, and there may indeed be some hint of anxiety here, for the illustration to that poem shows Christ gazing intently at the little white, rather than little black, boy. In the mother’s words, however, there is no doubt that her child, like all flowers, trees and beasts, receives God’s love equally and without discrimination.
The protective, nurturing role of mothers is evident in many other poems in the collection. The “Chimney Sweeper” begins, “When my mother died I was very young, \ And my father sold me while yet my tongue, \ Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.” (E10) Paternal love can be fickle but the maternal is constant and needs no explanation for its existence in Innocence, as when a mother sings “A Cradle Song” to her baby:
Sweet dreams form a shade,
O’er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams. (E11)
The importance of this relationship between mother and child, and Blake’s recognition of it, cannot be overstressed. Keri Davies (2006) has drawn attention to some of the female collectors of Blake who were attracted to this feminine strain in his early work, while Helen Bruder (1997) argues that it is in books such as Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel that we see most strongly the influence of women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft on Blake’s ideas with regard to proto-feminism.
The sustained role of maternal love in Songs of Innocence may be complicated in Songs of Experience, and critics may be correct to see a mother’s love as restrictive as well as protective, but to race towards this conclusion too quickly, as with the desire to problematise simplicity is, in my opinion, a serious error. Love may sometimes be a cover for exploitation and the will to power, and innocence may frequently be no more than gullibility, but to assume that both love and innocence have no reality in their own terms is to give too much power to the world of experience the demands for which, as we shall see, Blake fully understood.
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Though Dickens has been accused of being pejoratively “sentimental,” (Kaplan 37) we should take into consideration what “sentimental” meant to Dickens and his contemporaries or the philosophical tradition that argues that the sentiments were inherently “moral.”(Kaplan 37) According to Fred Kaplan, the eighteenth century writers who imposed moral value on “sentiment” were David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume argues that “the ultimate ends of human actions can never…be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on the intellectual faculties….” (Kaplan 37) Hume’s optimistic definition of human nature is complemented by Adam Smith who created the genial metaphor of the “internal…impartial spectator,” the “man within the breast,” a second self that we all possess, against whose altruistic and benevolent standards we judge our thoughts and actions. (Kaplan 37) Dickens, who inherits this tradition, by describing humiliated children, social outcasts and their cruel fate, provokes sorrow and anger towards social injustice.
