Songs named "Song" and the bind of self-conscious lyricism in Blake. (William Blake)

From the Greek Anthology to the present, lyric poems commonly go untitled, becoming popularly known by their first line elevated almost to a title's status. Often a lyric poem will carry only its particular formal name, like the poems simply named "Sonnet" in Keats's volumes. The intent of such a title is a least partly to stress that the poem is supposed to be a fine or unusual exercise in the specific form named. Much more rarely do poets follow a third course of giving a work an extremely general name like "Poem," which would have the effect of a novelist naming his book Prose, like a generic grocery item; an even more rarely do poems named "Poem" follow one another in a concentrated sequence. Something very like this, however, occurs in William Blake's first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, in which seven poems merely named "Song" run one after another, broken only by the titularly related "Mad Song." "Song," unlike "Sonnet," names no strict form and hence does not seem to announce the following poem as a bravura exercise. Rather, a compact series of elements generally named "Song" calls attention to itself as an equally general reflection on poetry, a reflection the puzzlingly identical titles lead the reader to think somehow united.

In the aftermath of Robert Gleckner's 1983 study of Blake's Prelude, the importance for the rest of Blake's career of his earliest poems, collected in Poetical Sketches, is hard to deny.(1) Still, as Irene Chayes points out in her review, Gleckner's book leaves untouched the question of "pairs or suites" amon the poems, an omission that is strange, since Gleckner elsewhere talks about Blake's poem sequences "as not merely a collection of poems but as, in a sense, one poem."(2) Paul Youngquist feels on the whole that "critics have tried but generally failed to find some principle of order among the scattered pieces of Poetical Sketches."(3)

The eight "Songs" in question, capped by an envoi "To the Muses," would seem as likely a candidate for such an ordered sequence as the volume's much more famou four seasons group.(4) As Zachary Leader points out, the designation "Songs" without any article ("the Songs," "a Song") signifies "careful organi[zation and] a larger artistic unity," although even Leader in his study of Blake's "Song" form barely mentions the group in Poetical Sketches and certainly does not treat it as a group. Some critics who take the "Songs" as a suite, like Joh Ehrstine and James D. McGowan, do so on loosely thematic grounds related to Blake's later poetry and do not emphasize the "Songs"' own sequence in the collection. The sole critic to propose the poems as an independent group to be "taken together"--L. C. Knights--ends his account self-dismissingly as a mere inspiration to future study.(5)

Given the self-conscious reference of a lyric poem to itself by its generic name--a song simply named "Song"--the reader has to wonder to what extent this group forms a unified statement about lyric poetry and its potentials, especially since, in Mark Schorer's phrase, the collection as a whole displays "lyric triumphs... an exquisite form of its own." Precedent exists for finding such genre statements in the collection: Geoffrey Hartmann sees the collection' more famous seasonal poems as "about ... poetry's higher destiny"--the prophecy.(6) Might the songs named "Song" not correspondingly concern poetry's "lesser" destiny--the lyric?

That the group should be read as a group emerges fairly clearly, in spite of th collection's spottily known printing history.(7) In most general terms, the whole group opens with a pair of happy, then sad love poems and closes with a pair of happy, then sad love poems. The poems in between trace the descent from happiness to sadness in a way that is much more gradual and less shockingly contrastive. The sequence, that is, has a noticeable balance: an opening illustration of erotic unhappiness suddenly entering the speaker's experience, an intervening segment slowly retracing and expanding on such emerging unhappiness, and a closing redramatizing of the sudden unhappiness.

To start with the opening and closing "Song" pairs, "Song" 1 explicitly links t "Song" 2 through the "silken net" in which the love god catches the speaker ("Song" 1, line 11) and the "silks" that "by love are driv'n away" in "Song" 2 (lines 1 and 3); "Song" 6 links with "Song" 7 through the common figure of the "black-ey'd maid."(8) Moreover, these opening and closing song-pairs seem to establish their own sequences. The grim "loss of liberty," with which "Song" 1 ends, is a fitting prelude to the "mournful lean Despair" with which "Song" 2 begins (line 4). So the strolls with the "black-ey'd maid" of "Song" 6, during which "nothing impure comes near" (line 14), seems a stage prior to the couple' more advanced affair in "Song" 7, with its "bitter grief and woe" of obsession, frustration and jealousy (line 15). This continuous progress of love tends to set up a parallel with the collection's acknowledged seasonal series, in that the season poems too are a "cycle of love."(9)

Furthermore, taking the two pairs of "Song" 1-"Song" 2 and "Song" 6-"Song" 7 as the opening and closing of a series makes sense from a standpoint of symmetry. Both pairs project a fall from a position, in "Songs" 1 and 6, of Edenic bliss with latent ominous overtones to overt, suicidal depression in "Songs" 2 and 7. "Song" 1 portrays "how sweet [the speaker] roam'd from field to field" toward "the prince of love" (lines 1 and 3), a conflation through the prince's name of Cupid and Christ. The threat of the situation itself appears in superficially positive terms with the silken net, the "golden" cage (line 13), and the "laughing" "play" that shades into "sport" and "mock[ery]" (lines 15 and 17). A one critic says, "Song" 1 "is remarkably free from bitterness" for a poem ostensibly about being trapped.(10) The poem feels too exaltedly happy, in preparation for a too exaggerated collapse. "Song" 6, too, is apparently "merry on a "dewy lawn" (lines 1 and 5), with a mixture of Classical "feet... wing'd" and Christian "angels' feet" (lines 5 and 7), and ends with only a hint of danger as the "black-ey'd maid" appears "beneath night's shade" (lines 17-18), surely resonating with poison "nightshade." In parallel positions, "Song" 2 plummets instantly to a desire for "my grave" and "a winding sheet" (lines 5 an 14), and "Song" 7 ends with a desire to "die in peace, and be forgot" (line 21)