In Our Time - Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Episode Date: June 23, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's collection of illustrated poems "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." He published Songs of Innocence first in 1789 with five hand-coloured copies and, five years later, with additional Songs of Experience poems and the explanatory phrase "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Blake drew on the street ballads and improving children's rhymes of the time, exploring the open and optimistic outlook of early childhood with the darker and more cynical outlook of adult life, in which symbols such as the Lamb belong to innocence and the Tyger to experience.WithSir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of OxfordSarah Haggarty Lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queens' College, University of CambridgeAndJon Mee Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the artist and poet William Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. He was 32. Five years later, he added songs of experience, and from that point produced them together in the volume we have today. Together, the songs entertain themes such as childhood, education, free will, free love and the role of established religion, all in lines of apparent simplicity. And we know them now for some of the best loved poems in the English language, such as Tiger, Tiger, the Sick Rose and London. In Blake's lifetime, though, these poems were largely unknown, partly as he made only 50 copies, each coloured painstakingly by hand and circulated by friends like Coleridge and Wordsworth.

At his death in 1827, Blake was known for his art, not for his poetry. With me to discuss William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, As Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College University of Oxford. Sarah Haggerty, lecturer at the Faculty of English and Fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, and John Me, Professor of 18th Century Studies at the University of York. Jonathan Bate, what was William Blake's early life like? Well, it's very important to remember that Blake came from a rather different background from the other famous Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

He didn't go to university, so he's a Londoner through and through, born in Soho, the son of a hosier, a small businessman, a shopkeeper, lives in London all his life, apart from a short period down in Sussex. Leave school at the age of 10. Which school did you go to? He just went to a local school, not one of the big public schools. Down the streets in Soho. Exactly.

But then at the age of 10, his parents saw that he had a real talent for art. and so he went to a drawing school in the strand and then when he was 14 So four years at a drawing school Four years at a drawing school Then at the age of 14 apprenticed to an engraver and printmaker Of course an apprenticeship is seven years

of technical training So he gets to the age of 21 and he then gets a job as an engraver So he's very much in the art world, but at the same time he is writing poetry. He's in the art world as an artisan, though, isn't it? As an artisan, yeah. I mean, he becomes a member of the Royal Academy,

but only as an engraver, which is a kind of second-class citizen there. Starts nevertheless to read voraciously. I'd just like to go back to the childhood. Do we know much more about the childhood? It's an unusual childhood for the poets at the time. The English school at 10, 4 years, This is a poor year studying drawing, then an apprentice at Graver seven years.

Do we know any more than that? Did you friends, brothers, sisters, accidents, incidents, what? Interesting. Seemed to have been siblings who died young. But it's quite clear that from an early stage, he's quite a strange child. He's a loner. He goes walking a lot. Allegedly he starts seeing visions of angels over Peckham Rai at the age of eight.

when he's training, when he's being apprenticed as a teenager, his master man called Bazir takes him into Westminster Abbey to sort of copy stained glass windows, statues and so on. And some of the Westminster schoolboys are there and they start teasing him and Blake loses his temper. He was obviously... What did they chase him about? Do we know? Well, one suspects the fact that he didn't speak

in a posh voice. He wasn't educated and he's there with his master working at that young age. You began by saying it was not like let's take them Wordsworth and Coleridge as they're best known. Can you just in two or three strokes tell us the big differences? Well the big differences are to do

with the university education Wordsworth and Coleridge of course both went to Cambridge but I think they're all to do with the way that one relates to the poetry and the culture of the past. Because of course Wordsworth and Coleridge, having been educated all the way through, would have been educated in the classics. Blake was very against the classics, very against, you know, the reading of Virgil, the study of Latin and so on.

And very importantly, his family, are dissenters. So they're lower middle class, they're not part of the established church, and the Bible is absolutely crucial to them. And all of Blake's writings are infused with the language of the Bible. Religious dissent very much bound up with radical politics at the time as well. And that enormously fruitful, vigorous radical dissenting implant into English society and English letters and English thought at that time. Sarah Haggerty, what was Blake his reputation as an artist in London society when he got going? Well, Blake's work as an artist took mostly the form of reproductive engravings from about 1779 to 1799.

And by reproductive engravings, I mean work for a commercial publisher that would often be designed or invented by one artist and then executed or engraved by another. So it was a division of labour. And often engravers, manual engravers like Blake, was seen just as mere copyists who didn't have. any creativity or inventiveness. And add to that the fact that Blake's style was quite unfashionable, his lines were sometimes crudely cut, but often kind of violently and determinedly struck in a way that wasn't as fashionable at the time. And he also stuck to a very linear style of engraving when often small points or crosshatching

and tones of light and shade were a lot more common. Can you tell us a bit more for those of us who don't know much, or let's start again. now nothing about engraving. Can you tell us a bit more what you would actually do in this process because Jonathan's pointed out to a seven-year apprenticeship, taken very seriously. What did you do? What you would be doing, you would be doing a lot of engraving from models. So that would involve looking at paintings

and sometimes also lumps of the body, a human foot, for example, some statuary. And you'd be copying down what you could see immediately. What would you copy on? So when you're engraving, you're engraving onto metal. You're engraving onto copper plate. And that's something that Blake was to do with his poetry, as we'll come to, but was also doing in his commercial work. So you would often be cutting down in what's known as intaglio

into the surface of the metal. And the hollow would then be filled with ink, and then the paper pressed down in the ink transferred onto the paper. So you'd go to say Westminster Ravi, look at some of those statues, make drawings of them? Well, this actually opens up quite a thorny issue. So he's sketching in pencil, and he does continue to sketch and even draft some poems in pencil. But what we'll see when we come to talk about poems like songs is that we come to think of Blake composing directly onto the copper plate.

So we're not just looking at a medium of reproduction anymore. We're actually looking at composition, creativity, directly onto the copper plate. Well, we can't wait for this. How he made his book? So let's do it now. How did he make his own books? When you look at them, the works, I'm looking at the cover from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the two contrary states of the human soul,

and it's as much a painting, drawing as it is, a declaration of the intent for what's inside the book. So how did he do that? Okay. Because he insisted that the two were together, which is why he only managed to do about 25, 50 of these altogether, didn't he? Yeah.

So one of the striking things that Blake does is he produces texts and images in the same way. So when you look at the book, you can see these very highly coloured plates and the writing's calligraphic, it's handwriting. And you can often see illustrations on each of the pages and wonderful borders, creeping vines, tendrils, tiny figures, children playing games. He makes them then. Usually at the time, printing type and printing image. was done by two separate processes. Blake treats words like images. So he took a copper plate. He wrote backwards in mirror writing

using an acid-resistant varnish. And then he would wash the surface of the copper plate with acid, which melts the surface down. And then Blake, who incidentally is working with his wife Catherine throughout this printing process, daubes the raised surfaces with ink, runs it through his rolling press with a sheet of dampened paper on top,

transfers the image later after it had dried he'd add watercolour washes and so forth, sometimes gold leaf. So long and complicated and by-hand painting process, yes. John Me, can we do we know what was preoccupying Blake in the 1780s

when he was getting cracking on this? Yes, I think early in the 1780s he's trying to establish a place for himself in the engraving world. Hopefully I think it's almost to become a creative artist as well, but that wasn't going particularly well. establishing himself. He works mainly he ends up over his career,

engraving 100 plates for a publisher called Joseph Johnson. It was a Unitarian, a friend to radical and progressive opinion. Mike Marry Wilsoncraft and Thomas Brown. He was kind of the main mentor of Mary Wilson. Blake does end up engraving one of Mary Wollstonecraft's books for children. Johnson was an important

children's publisher and Blake's clearly interested in education and a kind of new wave of thinking about education that goes back at least to Rousseau, but he's also people like Anna Leticia Barbe Holder's Unitarian Educational Writers, who are interested in children's innate capacities, especially for play and pushing the boundaries of constraint

and what they would seem as a very conservative education based on wrote book learning. In a sense, going quite against the idea, the Christian idea, of original sin. Very, very much so, yeah, that he sees play as something. Original innocence takes its place. Yes, it's true. Although he does see innocence as a developing state that can learn identity

through play, through interacting with others. It's not that you're born with a pure sense of who you are. It's actually, in a world that was free from negative constraints, we will grow into who we were by our interaction with others, by being open, if you like, to the other, although that sounds very trendedly modern phrase. But that's a theme that recurs through the Songs of Innocence and Exhibit. There are even poems about naming,

when naming seems to be about an interaction between the child and the mother. Where is he getting these ideas from? Is he getting them from Johnson and that radical circle? Is he trickling through, percolating through from Rousseau? What's going on? He's definitely, I think, read Rousseau. It's that dissenting tradition that Jonathan...

The noble savage and the innocent child. Yes, exactly. But that dissenting tradition is increasingly kind of liberalising, getting away from its own kind of puritan background and kind of developing ideas that we would think of as liberal, a word that starts to echo around culture at this period. He's very much more.

enthusiast for the American Revolution. He probably has a sense, he doesn't know the French Revolution's going to happen, but he probably has a sense that change is going to come, that the world is improving for the better. Whether that hope survives the 1790s is another matter. There's another aspect of his character, which you can't admit,

which we have from his wife, Catherine Boucher, seems a remarkable woman indeed, helping him, and he taught her to read and write, and he taught her to help him with engraving, which he said, I have very little of Mr Blake's company. He is always in paradise.

Now what does you mean by that? I think part of what she means is actually not perhaps the obvious point about thinking about angels, but actually in the paradise of creativity. We talked about the way that the creative process of Blake is painstaking. Another way of thinking about that would be absolutely absorbing. The process of thinking about what you're going to do, perhaps turning to the copper and the paper without absolutely knowing what you're going to do, experimenting with form, thinking about developing colour processes.

I think he probably was absorbed in a kind of paradise of his work. But there wasn't another sort of paradise. I mean, he was to go set up on a war and go for 40 miles. He used to set himself up for a week and paint. He had used to, Jonathan, what's Sarah? One of you told us when he was eight, he saw angels at Peckham Riders. That's going on, isn't it, as well?

I think it's true, yeah. But I think the thing to say about Blake, it's an idea of paradise that's not completely, otherworldly. He's very much to do, I think, I mean, Jonathan mentioned quite rightly, he was born and bred Londoner. Four years only outside the city, really. And he didn't like it much.

He didn't like, Sussex by the Sea was not a holiday for Blake. It was one second, Jonathan. Just, Phil us in, he started reading very early, big reader, Orta Dido, and so on. Before we come to the songs, experience, what had you written before then? He'd written, he was, very,

the 1780s, or a decade when the vogue for Untutored genius, hits among the polite classes and for a while in the very early 1780s he seems to be taken up by a group associated with the clergyman the Reverend Matthews and his wife Harriet and seems to be entertained

there as a sort of kind of untrude to genius he would sing he would entertain their circle with his poetry and they helped him privately print a book called Poetical Skechers which is the only thing that was printed in a traditional form during his lifetime

Okay Jonathan Bade in In 1789, Blake produced songs of innocence. What kind of innocence is you talking about? Well, it is the essential innocence of childhood. I mean, there's a... What is that? Well, there's a tradition of writing poetry for children, often of a didactic form, Isaac Watts's...

Telling them to be good. Telling them to be good, exactly. And songs of innocence, the great majority of the poems, just have children in them. They have titles like Infant Joy, or there's one called The Echoing Green about children, playing on the green. Such with the joys.

Exactly. But what he tends to avoid is that didactic idea, the purpose of the song for a child being to teach them to be good. But innocence, associated with childhood, also associated with green spaces,

just going back to that idea of the importance for Blake, of imagination and vision. There's a wonderful passage in one of his letters. where he says the tree that moves some to tears of joy is to others a green thing that stands in the way. And I think for Blake, there's always two ways of looking at the world. There's a sort of rational, materialistic way of looking at the world,

and then there's an imaginative way of looking at the world, where everything around you shines with some kind of divine light, some kind of divine vision. And he believes that the child has a particular connectedness to that sense, of imagination and divine vision. Sarah, Haggerty, five years later, we have Songs of Experience. I'm obviously going to ask what does it mean by experience, but does this come out as a direct follow-up counter to Songs of Innocence?

Since he's sitting there and I've done that and now I'm going to do the other side. And is Songs of Experience, the other side, if so, can you say that better than I've done? I'm sure you can. In 1794, he produces a complete. title page to both songs, and he calls them the contrary states of a human soul. And there are lots of paired poems between the collections. So very deliberately, experience is a response. Lots is happening between 1789 and 1794. We'll probably talk a bit more about France soon. Blake is also putting our agenda forward, so.

Blake is composing absolutely loads as well. He's writing many more poems such as the marriage of heaven and hell in this time. So he's not kind of deferring any more creativity until experience. When experience comes along, the mood is much darker. There's a general movement from enchantment in innocence to disenchantment and experience. There's an idea of growing up very simply. We no longer have children but young adults. The title page to experience shows two teenagers really grieving over the death of their parents.

Now, Jonathan described how we often have open green spaces in innocence. In experience, sometimes we have the enclosed space of the garden, but we also have city streets, chapels, schoolrooms, confined indoor spaces. And there's also a move from the main narrator in guiding spirit of each collection. So Songs of Innocence opens with a piper, and songs of experience opens with a bard. And there's something about the freedom of creativity and play in innocence that moves to

a critique of authority in experience but also quite an authoritative way of putting things. Do you know enough about his life at that time to be able to track how what happened to him or what happened to his thought made that change? That's a really hard question. I don't think we do know enough. No. I mean, I think there would be one way of reading experience

quite simplistically as a response to the French Revolution. So you start off with... Yeah, but yourself have made it simplistic. Is there any evidence of that? Oh, there's the French Revolution. I'll write something else. I think... John? Well, he does write a poem called The French Revolution.

He does write a poem called The French Revolution that we have only in proofs and with Joseph Johnson's name on it as publisher. So we know he did respond positively in the poems in the notebook, which didn't make it into experience and there are even drafts of poems that didn't make experience

which have more contemporary reference so in London the very famous phrase of mind-forged manacles which seems to speak to that sense of an internalised system it's not just external politics it's what seems a very modern idea of an external system having been internalised

and been psychologically crippling but that original line was German forged manacles and it's worth pointing out that two radicals in 1793 around the time that poem was published, were arrested for calling George the third a German hog butcher. And you can see why he might have decided

to cross the word German out, because describing something of German forged, if it was seen as an attack on the Hanoverian monarchy, it would have been very dubious. But I think to go back to your question as well about what happens in between, some points we moved from innocence to experience, like the schoolboy.

And it's not that the innocence poems were entirely without darkness. The Innocence's poems to have quite a few poems where we see that the possible of play and expansion that should be part of a portion of a childhood are actually being cramped and confined.

Can you give us an example of that? The schoolboy is a good example. This is in innocence. Yeah, it's in innocence and to use a phrase series you used as a this is written, it bounces around for the whole of the rest of his career. It moves backwards and forwards. And that's a poem about

somebody, a child who's compared to the freedom of a bird, being confined in a schoolhouse and what that's like. Holy Thursday, which is a poem about a child who was effectively trafficked by his father, where his mother was young, my mother died when I was very young, my father sold me while yet my tongue. He's somebody who's sold into the trade of chimney sweeping,

which my children died before they reached 14. So the word of innocence is not without its darkness. There are elements of social critique in that part of the collection. Jonathan. I think the biographical answer to the question is that in that period, in the early 1790s, he is very much in the circle of Joseph, Johnson, this key radical publisher.

He spends time in conversation with Tom Paine, the great apologist for the French Revolution. As John has said, he illustrates a work by Mary Walsdencraft. He saved Tom Paine's life, didn't he? He tipped Tom Paine off. If he stayed in London for one or two more hours, he'd be put on trial. Allegedly. Allegedly. The government let Paine go.

The government let Paine because they'd rather him be out of the country so they could put him on trial in up. But Blake did go to him and say, move. on, didn't he? Possibly. Possibly. About some of the myths around. Sorry, it's a digression. It's unworthy. Right. Get on with Blake. So he's

deeply in that world of radical politics and a big part of what people like Godwin, you know, the sort of leading intellectual in the Johnson Circle are saying is it's the institutions of society. It's institutions like the law,

the church, the institution of marriage. These are the things that cause oppression. You know, if one goes back to the idea of the, you know, the innate innocence of the child, through the process of institutionalisation and socialisation. And that's really where

Songs of Experience is different. I mean, could I just read my favourite of the Songs of Experience, the Garden of Love? It's only a couple of standards, because I think it illustrates it very well. I'd like to read that later. But while you're on this business, which John introduced, one direct example

is the chimney sweeper, where we have, in innocence, we have a one boy chimney sweeper and they experience of another. And the same title, different stories. Can you read a couple of lines from each of those?

Yeah, that's a very good example because what happens in the innocence, in the innocence chimney sweeper, you have the idea that an angel frees the chimney sweeper. This is child labour, we're talking about. And of course, the chimneys are like coffins. and so he imagines an angel

liberating a chimney sweeper whereas in the experience chimney sweeper let's just have a couple lines to show what he was saying then you can do the other because at the end of the chimpanzee I'm reading

he says though the morning was cold Tom was happy and warm so if all do their duty they need not fear harm we're back to the little morality aren't we? And then in experience then in experience

it's a savage indictment of the idea of the parents go off to pray in church and neglect the child who is the child labourer up the chimney. Yes. One of the interesting things about Blake, I think, is when those closing

moral couplets appear, which would seem to be at odds with what Jonathan was saying about the lack of moralising, they're often quite complicated, a lot more complicated than they seem when you try and work out their relevance to the poem. Because it looks like you're being told, so if all do their duty, it's a doctrine of obedience, everything will be right. But if you look at the poem,

who's done their duty, not the father, sold the child, not the reader even, because it says in the fourth line, so your chimneys I sweep. The reader doesn't get away with it. The only person that does anything like their duty are the two chimney suites with each other who comfort each other by offering themselves visions of how their lives may be better. And whether or not it kind of endorses a certain childish idea of heaven, what it really shows is the way that they come together to create an idea of heaven in line with their capacities in order to provide each other with some. solace. And you can almost read that

last line as a kind of threat to the reader to the father who have failed to do the duty that they really owe the child. Sarah, while we let's stick with the poems for a while. Sarah Hagerde. Let's look at the tiger. What's Blake doing there? So this is

probably one of the most well-known of the lyrics in this book. It appears in Songs of Experience. And a crucial line it's really about the fear, the dread of this tiger. There are heavy four-beat lines. There's lots of repetition. Then there's the line... Could you read a few of them? Of course. So if we take the beginning,

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or I could frame thy fearful symmetry? So we trip slightly over that rhyme of symmetry, perhaps. It probably was pronounced symmetry in Blake's time. But apart from that, so we have a not quite symmetry in the rhymes there, but we also have that repetition, bright night, eye. Next stands a skies, eyes, aspire, fire. One of the questions of the poem that comes near its end is,

did he who made the lamb make thee? So there's an immediate reference there back to the lamb, a poem from innocence, which is spoken by a child speaker, they're catechising a tiny woolly lamb who can't answer back. With the lamb and inexperience and innocence poems in general, we've got mercy, sometimes justice, but now we have with the tiger a kind of dread and fear

that can't be harmonised with any benevolent view of the world. So he's presenting these two different. He himself is not trying to harmonise them. He's not trying to harmonise them. He's not trying to harmonise. them. He's not saying the line the tiger can lay down with the lamb, is he? He says this and does that. Yeah, absolutely.

And in other poems like the little girl found, we do actually have tigers who are kind of converted and lie down with the lambs as it were, but the tiger in this particular poem continues to be fierce at least in the verse. There are lots of efforts in the verse

to contain it. There are images of making, often forging like a blacksmith, working like a rope maker, but there's something that exceeds. There's something that exceeds that containment, something sublime. There's something about the drawing of the tiger that slightly gets under people's skin, because it looks like a teddy bear, doesn't it?

It does. Is that because he can't draw tigers or because he wanted it to be a teddy bear? It doesn't look quite like a teddy bear in each version of the poem. Does it ever look like a tiger? No. So why is that?

Well, in some of Blake's other works, he does draw more realistic and more ferocious tigers in his name, Dante. Not in the same. this poem, he might have known what a tiger looked like. There are natural historical engravings around that show them ferocious. There is a political reading of this.

So in the 1790s, when you mention tigers, you're at the same time talking about French revolutionaries and you're talking about them in a counter-revolutionary sense. So somebody called Samuel Romilly, who used to support the French Revolution, turns against the terror and the bloodshed, writes in 1792 that it would be as ridiculous to imagine a republic of tigers as it would be that the French could govern themselves with a free government. So, why do we have this cuddly tiger?

Perhaps it's saying, well, your French revolutionary is your hope for a republic. It's amazing the lengths we go to defend our heroes. Maybe you could just do a tiger. It might be not a terrible thing, is it? I mean, it's a wonderful poem. It doesn't have to be a wonderful tiger as well. Anyway, never mind, that's maybe.

But it isn't much of a tiger, is it really? John Me, we talked about him being born in Soho went to a drawing school around the corner and went to an academy and so forth, hating the countryside when he got there. And he wrote London, which is one of his major poems. Can you tell us about that poem? I can't forbear telling you, though,

that the tiger in the Encyclopedia Botanicca at the time is also rather cute. But anyway, about that poem. Two wrong tigers don't make it right. 1791, he moves from Parliament State in the north. to Lambeth. That poem maybe about, that, maybe very much

situated in that kind of river-side part of South London. I wander through its chartered street near where the chartered Thames does flow. A mark in every face I meet, marks of weakness, marks of woe, etc. It talks about what the mind-forged Manacles is the great line, and it is a poem

In every cry, the whole stanzas worth it. No, you do. I don't have it in front of it. In every cry of every man, in every infants cry of fear in every voice, in every band, the mind-forged manacles I hear. It's a tremendous poem about the way, I'm just what Jonathan

was saying, this sense of institutional oppression, oppression being internalised. It seems a great kind of breakthrough. It should be said that this is a period when people like Godwin, as Jonathan mentioned, are talking about the way that so invasive does governmental control seem to become, that that

internalisation, the paranoia is almost the order of the day. A lot of writers are afraid that what they were published will get them in trouble, even though in some ways they've got no cause. The government doesn't really want to have show trials of what might seem ineffectual poets who claim to have seen angels. But there comes a pervasive sense of this. So in November 1792, an organisation called the Association of Protection of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levelers as form. And people who work in the book trade, people who work in the opinion trade, as it were,

are particularly under their gaze. So I think that's, I mean, we've already talked about the way Blake may change a line in the poem. But more generally, this sense of oppression moving inward so people are becoming paranoid about their freedom of expression. The other thing, we talked about dissonance between illustrations or the designs and the poem, in the design for that poem, there's a child. And it may be one of the things that poem suggests is that this, the old aged figure, who's imagined, I think, saying the poem, has internalized this urban alienation. But for Blake, Babylon could always become Jerusalem. and the child seemed to be pointing him

to another way to see the city. So innocence has never entirely escaped. Can I get back to Jonathan Beatt, who I rudely prevented reading a poem earlier on because it wasn't where we were in the programme, but now's your chance. I'd tackle this question. Very often the poems appear very simple indeed,

and people like your three selves tell us, yes they are, but also no, they aren't. Can we do this with one of his marvellous poems, I think, the great poems, the Sikh Rose? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is a remarkable poem. And if you can tell listeners what it says. Very simple poem. Just two stanzas. It goes like this.

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. About one level, that's a poem about a rose. A rose flowers for only a short time, but a canker in a rose destroys it. But if one starts looking closely at the language, the invisible worm in the night, finding out the bed, the sense of crimson joy, the dark secret love, one sees this is also a poem about sex and sexuality. There's no doubt that a key aspect of Blake's radicalism as a religious thinker

is that he believes, as he says somewhere, that energy is eternal delight. He believes that sexual passion comes from God and is a good thing. And one of the worst things about the established church is its attitude to sex. in later years, long after his death, Blake was taken up as a kind of apostle of free love. Is that plausible? Well, it is, but I think this poem reminds us that the idea of sexual delight

is something that can be destructive. So I think that sometimes Blake is misread as a kind of 1960s hippie before his time. because actually the imagery here of the loss of virginity and the destruction of the rose and the sense of darkness, the dark, secret love, suggests that sexual desire can rebound upon one in a very destructive way. But the extraordinary thing about the poems,

the simplicity of the image, the rhythm, the rhyme, the language, and yet it repays. endless deep attention. Talking, in one of you, I think it's in your notes, Jonathan, you say that it is alleged that he and his wife Catherine used to be naked in their gardens, singing his poems. They are called songs.

Sarah Haggerty, can you sing one of them? Well, I could, but I don't know whether people would appreciate it. Oh, that's a shame, isn't it? We've talked a lot about words and images so far, and we tend to think of this, Blake's artist's composite art as word and image combined.

But we need to think not just about the look of the books, but how they sound. And they are, after all, called songs rather than poems. And as songs, one of the things they're doing is revitalising that immediate connection you have between a speaking poet and a listening audience. And that lack of intermediary

as you're communicating your verse seems very important to Blake. In terms of the kinds of songs that were influencing him, nursery rhymes really seem to have been a particular influence. And generally in Blake, you've got four beat lines in these songs and a lot of repetition and refrain, which will help to remember the poems.

Blake himself is reported to have sung these. So in the 1780s, in the Matthews Salon that John was describing earlier, yes, Blake sang poems like the tiger. And then later in life you have John Linnell, one of his young artist disciples, reciting. And then another person, Henry Crabb Robinson, picking this up. Blake said to have composed tunes to these songs, but they haven't survived. Who else has composed tunes to these songs which might have survived?

Apart from yourself, but you're too shy. Well, the first one, the first one extant is in 1876, but then there are a lot of the 20th century settings that are better known by. Vaughan Williams by Tavernor by Britain. Then there are folk settings, heavy metal. Also, a great variety of different music. There's a very interesting recent collection by an American folk singer called Martha Redbone, I think it is, who's claiming that appellation sort of blues tunes are from English folk song

and may be what they sound like. So it's appealed to lots of contemporary musicians to try and set them to song or to make their own. own versions of them. But one thing I would just like to add quickly is that it isn't allied to a skepticism about writing and books

in Blake, because you might think of orality as being more flexible and what's being written as being set in stone, but you don't have that same kind of idea of fixity. In the introduction to innocence, you have songs written that every child made joy to hear. So we have books that are being

read aloud. And throughout this is writing that plays to the ear and to the eye. And Blake can reconcile all those different media. John, John Me, are there some ideas that are more difficult, he finds more difficulty in expressing. I'm looking at a poison tree. Can you talk about that? And that's quite a difficult idea is expressing there. It is. It's basically psychology, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think. And you want to do the first answer? I'm not sure. I brought a book. I'm sorry to at this ridiculous advantage, but that's not it might be useful.

Well, the first answer says, I was angry with my friend. I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe. I told it not. My wrath did grow. And then the rest of the poem is saying, what happens when he lets his wrath grow,

which is murder. Yeah, a simple count on that, which does look like preempting modern psychology, although it's an old idea, is that it's about the return of the repressed. You keep your emotions back, and what happens, and your sexual desire, and what happens is it returns in a violent and awful form.

But I think Jonathan got to the heart of it earlier when he said that Blake, he thinks there should be more room for sexual expression than there has been in his society, but he has got no doubt that that is a complicated thing that has pain involved. His view of innocence and the growing intersexuality that changes to that is a difficult course, difficult enough, we might say,

without institutions then making people feel guilt about it. So he's very interesting in the way that individual psychology is all the time bound up in desire and a desire that wants to possess the object of its desire and the problems about being open that and allowing the object of your desire to have its own freedom. And at the same time, interested in the way that that is worsened, by the way, institutions are making people feel guilty

to start with about having those feelings. I mean, it's very, the clarity is wonderful again, John Newcombe, and basically saying institutions repress you, these Church of England people, these schools nurturing, festering your wrath, repress you and it ends in violence. Exactly. That's exactly it. And that in a way is why he has been taken up

by free thinkers and radical thinkers over the years. I mean, again, we need to remember how little known his poetry was, how little influence he had in his own time. Few people in the literary world read him. Wordsworth said, people say Blake is mad, but I'm more interested in that man's madness than the supposed sanity of Barron or Shelley.

But generally, this is kind of a kind of underground writing until later in the Victorian period, where the pre-raphalites, the Rosetti is taking up, the Victorian freethinker and sort of apostle of sexual liberation, A.C. Swinburne becomes a huge fan of Blake. And then the poet W.B. Yates edits his work. is it really. That's right. The collected edition didn't you. Yeah, exactly. And so he has been regarded as a sort of extraordinary forerunner of free thinking

and sexual liberation. And around that time, that turn happened to Whitman in America. Blake's always been very big in America. And there's a line from Whitman to Ginsburg. You know, Ginzburg and that's all Blake there. And that American tradition of Blake has been a very powerful one. But it does go back to Whitman at that late 19th century

moment. Sarah, can I give you another slightly hard question later on, because you haven't much time less. How do you do the words and the paintings, the illustrations we can't really call them, how do they interreact? Yeah, we can't call them illustrations precisely because they're not subordinate. They tell a different story. They can clash with the text in the way that we've talked about with the tiger. They can produce alternative readings as a poem called The Little Blackboard. that really talks about a colour-blind future

in which the white child will somehow still have to protect the black child. Blake shows us in his colouring that you can never get rid of colour. So he can critique the poems in the verses. Even though these two media are inextricable, well, one of the ironies of Blake's mode of production is that he can't produce enough books

to reach a wide enough audience. And another irony was that well on into the 20th century, we tended to have just the same. the texts produced typographically. So we don't look at the designs. We don't look at the pages teeming with life. And we don't look at his handwriting. And we don't think of the uniqueness of copies of this book anymore.

We just see them as they're reproduced. So we know all the four of us, because we're readers, we know what it means to read. What is it added by these paintings, the paintings of the words as well? Jonathan, do you have a punt at that? Jonathan first. Well, if we go back to that idea,

of two ways of seeing, a rational way of seeing and a sort of glorious colour-filled way of seeing. The colour seems to be crucial. It's, you know, ink is black and white. Ink on paper is black and white, a black and white way of looking at the world. What Blake offers is a visionary, coloured way of looking at the world. John.

And then the other thing to say is that a key Blake catchphrase is the idea of rousing the faculties to act. And in a way, it's the dissonance between them. It makes you read actively. You can't read these texts passively. You've got to make sense the relationship. Sometimes it's like an illustration. Often it's a much more complicated relationship.

Thank you very much, John May. Sarah Haggerty, Jonathan Bait. Next week we'll be talking about the history of the idea of sovereignty from the Fulverente, from the ancient Greeks onwards. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Now then tell it all, John, grouse the way they're listening.

Millions of people are listening to this postscript and they want to know why you're grouching away. Well, my own digress, you stopped me from reading the Garden of Love, which is my favourite moment. So I'm going to read it now. No, you read it now. I just thought the chimney sweeper was such a good example. It's a good example of the innocence versus experience.

Strutcher took over. I repressed you. You did, you did. Well, here's the return. You've got murdered somebody now. You're a fool. You're a murder me. So here's the return of the repress,

because it's the best example of this idea of the kind of innocence idea of a a garden, being hemmed in and destroyed by the experience idea of institutionalised religion, and particularly its oppression of desire, of the body, of passion. 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 turned to the Garden of Love that so many sweet flowers bore

and I saw it was filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires I mean I think that just sums up all our themes Yes it does It's good that it comes now

For the select audience It's worth saying about that poem I mean we were talking about green spaces. It's probably very likely that the, I mean, it's a very pastoral collection with a pastoral meaning. It's kind of literary. It's not kind of words worthy in nature out there.

I never got around to that, don't it, did we? And the second point, it's almost certainly, these greens are not really village greens. They're greens in London, especially parts of London, they're being urbanised, and it's very likely, there's a kind of factoid that people are. In Lambeth, there was a green in April 1793.

There was, there was a subscription chapel was built, which precisely would not only be repressive in many ways but it was also exclusive. You had to pay to get a pew and it was built over what had been a green, more or less opposite Blake's house. So it's a kind of, Blake's London is a place where there are

green spaces and even as it is expanding rapidly out and it's a period of great expansion, it's leaving these little spaces which are being colonised if you like by things like the subscription chapel. So I think there may be particularly biographical background to that poem.

What questions did I not ask Well, I can think of a few, but more immediately, I was thinking, was it Samuel Palmer who said something about walking with Blake through the countryside was to perceive the soul of beauty and the forms of matter? And I was thinking back to some of those questions about Blake's religion and how you really do get a hostility towards any deferring of change or deferral of hope until an afterlife. There's always possibility for change now. And that seems to be important. And what also seems to me to be important with Blake, I was thinking about the images again, is that even if we're looking with imaginative vision

in the way that Jonathan described so well earlier, all matter can be kind of creatively organised. So we're not thinking about some abstract, floaty spirit realm. We're thinking about very precisely organized forms that Blake has drawn in this way on a page and a book made in this way too. And the other thing I was thinking was how attracted we all seem to be to the social protest of experience and that critique of false consciousness in particular. And I always go back to innocence whenever I've finished experience

because there is something transcendent and I think about the communal song of the kind of the thunderous harmonising of the children's Thanksgiving in Holy Thursday. But there's also something about, there's something hopeful in innocence that's lost, I think, in experience. But is that deliberate? Yeah, I think so. I mean, the whole point about

contraries, which is something that Blake will write about in between in 1719, the marriage of heaven and hell, is that both need to coexist, both are necessary to human existence. And you do get that idea with innocence and experience. And crucially, in innocence.

I mean, we ran past infant joy earlier, John, that poem from innocence. But there's something about the hope that's imminent in human relationships. There's a mother speaking to her two-day-old child in that poem.

And there's a kind of an open, free conversation between them. And there's a kind of an almost a disinterested creativity. Well, I think there is that thing about openness to the other, although I do think that things aren't entirely closed off

an experience. I mean, one of the things that follows from what you were saying about matter is that he never you know, Babylon can always become Jerusalem. The two things are always open to one being transmuted into another. There's always this sense the possibility of a redemption. So it's just like

the innocence poem where you start to see the potential darkening and you're countrywise there are experienced pines where there still is a moment of hope or some kind of possibility. It's not completely it's not shut down, I think. I mean, on the subject of Babylon and Jerusalem, one of the things that struck me just preparing for the program

just going back looking through the complete works is it's surprising how few poems in this style of songs, of lyrics, he wrote after experience. I mean, there are some in the notebooks that weren't published. But we do know when he was down in Sussex that a visitor heard him singing what were described as devotional songs. one would guess that one of those would be the song or

him and did those feet in ancient times which of course was not part of his epic called Jerusalem it was part of his epic called Milton but it's one of the very few later poems that is really in the style of the songs of incident experience I think a lot of people would have imagined it was in the collection I think there is

a song moment I mean so he engraves a select collection of English songs Joseph Ritson's kind of collection of folk ballads for John so I think there is a 1780s night when people are very interest in song, the interest in popular culture. It gets into lyrical ballads in a way. And that interest, Ritson, I think, is very important actually

for Wordsworth as well as Bishop Persson. And there's an argument about, between Bishop Persson, about whether this is a trickle-down culture or a culture up from the people. And there's a lot of argument about what's the appropriate form of song come before the people, what's the difference between folk song and songs you're here on the street, which might be songs from very recent plays

that's going to become popular. So I think there is a 1780s, early 1790s moment where song is at the forefront of people's thinking about literature. It's bound up with an attempt to find an English burners, isn't it? Burns were so influential. Oh, damn, I always should mention burns as well. Yeah, yeah. Not making words, it's not.

There's something, I always think, though, about ballads hiding in some of those longer lines. So if you think about the ballad stanza, you have, it's four-line stanza, four beats, three beats, four, three. four and three add up to seven and there are often seven beats, 14 syllables even in the longer lines of Blake's later mythic writings. In fact, isn't Holy Thursday of Innocence

also in these 14ers? So even in these longer lines you've still got that popular measure of the ballad men. I think these are songs rather than ballads. Here's the producer with news from the front. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we've got to give up the studio. Who'd like to your coffee?

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