This is a reposting of an earlier post, with some further thoughts.
I have been working on the British Library’s English
Online project, researching for a hypertext
contextualisation of English Literature between 1780 and 1900. Recently I was
working on William Blake, whose work has been challenging me since I was at
school. Some recent work based on Michael Phillips’ admirable examination of
Blake’s writing processes (William Blake, The Creation of the Songs, British Library, 2000) has fixed one poem in my
mind. It’s in the notebook that Blake used for thirty years, which is currently
on display in the British Library exhibition Writing Britain until 25th September. Here is the poem:
The Fly
Little Fly,
Thy
summer’s play
My
thoughtless hand
Has brushed
away.
Am not I
A fly like
thee?
Or art not
thou
A man like
me?
For I dance
And drink,
and sing,
Till some
blind hand
Shall brush
my wing.
If thought
is life
And
strength and breath
And the
want
Of thought
is death;
Then am I
A happy
fly,
If I live,
Or if I
die.
Nothing is there in the poem that doesn’t need to be there, and everything that
needs to be there is there. As Michael Phillips writes, ‘Blake’s choice of
language [is] as spare as anything written since the seventeenth century,
apart, perhaps, from the Jubilate Agne
of Christopher Smart.’ It was probably written after 1791, deduced from
analysis of Blake’s handwriting. ‘Will Blake’, as he signed his name in some of
his letters to his friend George Cumberland.
Following a reference to Blake’s engravings made in the
previous decade I looked at Joseph Ritson’s Select Collection of English
Songs (1782), for which Blake did eight
engravings. The first section of the songs covers drinking songs, not what I
would immediately associate with Blake. Song XIX goes as follows:
Busy, curious, thirsty Fly,
Drink with me, and drink as I;
Freely welcome to my cup,
Could’st thou sip, and sip it up.
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short, and wears away.
Both alike are mine and thine,
Hastening quick to their decline;
Thine’s a summer, mine no more,
Though repeated to threescore;
Threescore summers, when they’re gone,
Will appear as short as one.
It is marked “Made extempore by a Gentleman, occasion’d by a
Fly drinking out of his Cup of Ale.”
Similar thoughts, occasioned by the visitation of a fly. And
there is the couplet:
For I dance
And drink, and sing,
referring
us back to the drinking song. Were dancing, drinking and singing ‘play’ for
Blake? We know for certain that he sang, since there are references to him
performing his songs at gatherings. The British Library also has a
letter written by George Cumberland in 1815, in which he mentions visiting the
Blakes, drinking tea with them, and Mrs Blake uttering seditious comments.
Looking at the poem again I notice that Blake has used the
same metre as the earlier song, but has split the line in two, making it
smaller and jerkier, like a fly and its movements. I’d also propose that the
arrangement of five stanzas in four lines makes us look closer at the twice
mentioned action of the hand brushing, the hand with five fingers, of which
four do the brushing.
The third stage of writing the poem includes the lines:
The cut worm
Forgives the plow
And dies in peace
And so do thou
which were removed, as Blake writes a poem which is based on
an act, an observation, questioning, reasoning and finally a hypothesis. It is
an extraordinarily concentrated and dense poem, with no place for the statement
of the rejected stanza, as the repetition of ‘if’ in the last two lines calls
the reader back to the ‘If’ that begins the fourth stanza. What may look like a
definitive statement in the last stanza is actually dependent on that ‘If’. The
earlier drinking song is a statement,
and the move from this closed pronouncement to the questioning of Blake’s
version is an act of invitation to participate in the ‘thought’, the act of
thinking, which is underlying subject of the poem.
