Blake and Wonderland

Rifle through Songs of Innocence and you’ll discern both a literary and artistic analog in the well-known children’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Though written some tens of years apart, the former in 1785 and the latter in 1865, one encounters undeniable parallels in both works. These similarities vary from the more obvious, such as each texts’ accompaniment by engraved fascimiles or illustrations—the inclusion of which is necessary in making the work comprehensible and less cryptic—to the more complex, entering the commentative realm. Carroll, based on his incorporation of the imaginative, particular thematic elements, and critical analysis and allegory, is unarguably a contemporary of William Blake and, by Blakean definition, an exhibitor of Poetic Genius. Carroll evidently turned to Blake as a source of inspiration and possibly even reinforcement as he embarked on a seemingly controversial and unorthodox literary and artistic journey, weaving the vividly eccentric, or at least seemingly so, account of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

 

Moravian Motherhood

I find it quite ironic that Moravian spirituality centralized sexual experimentation, most especially during the Sifting Time, while simultaneously placing much emphasis on female figures, principally the mother,and “aiming to become ever more childlike and simple” (Podmore, 132). While it is obvious that sexual desire and passion precede motherhood and that these two feelings enter the vein of childhood during the end stages of innocence, it baffles me that these wholly divergent facets are upheld and revered so equitably. Herein lies an intermingling of contraries that perhaps aims to reach followers at different stages of development, maturity, and, dare I say, corruption (i.e. experience). Perhaps this is the Moravian Church’s goal: to provide such a broad and accepting platform and appeal to a larger audience that otherwise may have been ousted or stigmatized by other churches whose dogmas were strict and were what we may in modern times deem “stringently conservative.” I’d like to focus for a moment more intently on the importance of female figures and the influence of the mother. Blake’s very upbringing echoes this aspect of the Moravian religion in that his mother, Catherine Wright Armitage, was a faithful Moravian along with her first husband, Thomas Armitage. Blake’s connection to the religion and its values is tied to the fact that a devout Moravian reared him. The mimetic quality of a child’s religious and moral beliefs during the period of innocence definitely exposed Blake to the sexually explicit and viscerally energetic Moravian religion. His transition to form his own religion or, arguably, a religion-less world in which each individual seeks his/ own Poetic Genius through artistic expression and self exploration, fastens Blake firmly in the world of Experience described in his “Songs.”

Plant Love of “Innocence and Experience”

In “Songs of Innocence and Experience”, Blake, of course, employs natural imagery and themes throughout. In “Blossom” and “My Pretty Rose Tree”, he goes so far as to personify individual plants and place them in the context of very different manifestations of love. As one is inclined to guess, the joyous love the blossom has for the birds in the first poem reflects the blissful ignorance of innocence praised in those songs. Though the quick-flying sparrow seems to ignore the blossom (in what I read as a brief shift of voice in the final two lines of each stanza), the little sprout just wants the bird “Near [its] Bosom”. In the second stanza of the poem, the “Pretty Pretty Robin,” though sad, is again offered a place of comfort near the bosom of the “happy blossom.” The blossom, therefore, must signify the joyous and free-flowing love of the innocent. Often, among the precocious Don Juans one will find the common trait of a certain eagerness to bestow their attention upon any fleeting fancy.

This haphazard allotment of the naïve individual’s emotional investment has its response in “Songs of Experience”, where “My Pretty Rose Tree” introduces those aspects of love and the relationship that are so often looked over by the young lovers described in “Blossom.” In this poem, the speaker is presented with a flower “as May never bore” in the first line, but in his loyalty to his rose tree, he declines. When the speaker returns home to his “Pretty Rose-tree” after this exchange “To tend her by day and by night” (as one does in a healthy relationship) to find the Rose’s love to be soured. It turns away “with jealousy” and the speaker’s only delight is her thorns. The rose tree should be understood as the ‘experience’d manifestation of love. For reasons left to the imagination, the rose has come to embody jealousy, bitterness,  and malcontent, three common descriptions for the kind of love one sees described on Springer. Is Blake saying that one gains worldly experience to the detriment of pure love? I’d have to say that that certainly seems to be the precise direction he’s heading towards when one considers these two poems together. Thoughts?

Trees as Models of Experience

In Songs of Innocence, Blake integrates text and image to express his understanding of the dichotomy of Adam and Eve’s fall told in the book of Genesis. By representing trees and foliage around the poems themselves, Blake manipulates the evident theme of the text, undermining the establishment of any one conclusion. On the title page, the tree grows from the right side of the page, engulfing the words “Songs” and “of” while only circling the word “Innocence,” indicating there was a state of innocence before the Fall. In the opening poems,  however, the tree (assumed here to represent the biblical Tree of Knowledge) becomes less upright as on the title page and instead looms heavily over the figures—a physical reminder of the burden of knowledge and experience. In “The Little Black Boy,” two trees sprout from each side of the composition, so even as the mother comforts the worries of her enslaved son, the branches reach toward the pair, omnipresent and dark foreshadows of reality. By analyzing the progression of the foliage from the cover page onward in Songs of Innocence, one can see how Blake imagines the progression of experience—first from a visible temptation to an interactive and inescapable part of human existence.

Race and “The Little Black Boy”

"The Little Black Boy"

Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” appears, on face, to be a kindly demonstration of how race doesn’t really matter since one day all    Christians will be free from the “cloud” of skin color and equal in the eyes of God. However, upon further examination, the poem contains statements about race and how it affects both our mortal and immortal lives that do not quite jive with the idea that race is a temporary burden.

In the first stanza, the black child who is the narrator of the poem cries, “I am black but O! my soul is white” and “I am black as if bereav’d of light.” Blake immediately associates whiteness with goodness and innocence, and even if he is correct in asserting that outward skin color doesn’t matter in light of the state of a person’s soul, it is a rather hard judgment upon a small child to inform him that his skin color is associated with evil and judgment.

Blake continues to develop the idea of “light,” as the boy recounts his mother’s instructions: “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 receive / Comfort in morning joy in the noon day.” Here God is associated with heat, light, and the Sun – physical entities that all convey the presence of God to man. The mother instructs her child to “receive comfort” from the rising of the Sun  (which is the verbal equal of Son, or Christ) when he is tiring from his work in the “noon day.” When we compare this stanza to the first, in which whiteness has been set up as the opposite of blackness’s being “bereav’d of light,” then light and white emerge as the same thing. In other words, the boy’s white masters become symbols of God. Thus he is to obey them and even rejoice in serving them, despite their enforcing difficult labor in the “noon day.” Moreover, the mother says, light (or whiteness) is a gift from God – which seems to imply that God has chosen to give the “gift” of whiteness to the boy’s masters and withhold it from him.

Blake continues: “And we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love, / And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face / Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.” Though Blake seems to innocently connect warmth and light with God, this stanza supports the symbolism of the above paragraph, noting that the “beams of love” (the prosecutions of the white master) are to be borne, rather than joyfully received as they might be if they were from God. The mother argues that black skin and the heritage with which it is associated, “like a shady grove,” enable the little boy and others of his race to withstand their earthly trials and comforts him by telling him that their outward appearance “is but a cloud.”

 Following his mother’s lead in anticipating the joy of eternal life, the boy contemplates what heaven will be like, discussing his position in relation to that of a white boy: “When I from black and he from white cloud free, / And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: / Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, / To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. / And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, / And be like him and he will then love me.” The irony in this childlike contemplation is twofold. First, even in heaven, the black boy is subservient to the white, “shad[ing] him from the heat” that in this sense appears to stand for the heat of God. If the boy’s “white cloud” has not prepared him to stand in the presence of God, then how is it good or innocent or pure? Blake’s point is that yes, perhaps outward appearances are misleading – but that is because often the white man’s soul is the most corrupt. Second, Blake presents the futility of the black boy’s subservience throughout his life on earth and in heaven: it will never be good enough to earn the white boy’s acceptance. Even in heaven, where race is apparently nonexistent, the little boy suggests that he will be distinct from the white boy by the appearance of their souls. And even if the black boy’s is purer than that of the white, he will still be forced into a position of submissiveness to his former master. Though the black boy anticipates that “he will then love me,” why should his efforts in heaven gain any more acceptance than those he put forth upon earth? Contrary to the initial perception of Blake’s point here, his argument is that race is more than skin-deep and encompasses actions, beliefs, and behaviors that will not disappear upon the removal of skin color. Carried to its logical conclusion, Blake’s poem might urge a revolution of sorts, as his work usually does, though in this case it is one of the black slaves against their white suppressors. This is a prime example of the religious Blake rejecting the popular notions of his faith (that endurance and good work lead to a reward in heaven) in favor of supporting human actions to redeem the human condition.