In 1947, Northrop Frye, discussed children and childhood as two components of Blake's conception of innocence. He asserts that "real children are not symbols of innocence. . . . One finds a great deal more than innocence in any child: there is childish as well as the childlike" (235). He then progresses to a commentary on childhood, which seems pertinent when considering the "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence. Frye states that "childhood to Blake is a state or phase of imaginative existence, the phase in which the world of imagination is still a brave new world and yet reassuring and intelligible. . . . The spontaneity of life which such protection makes possible is the liberty of the expanding imagination which has nothing to do but complete its own growth" (236). This observation seems applicable to a poem in which the child moves from a mode of simply hearing the Piper's song to articulating his own perception and expression of the song (imaginative abstraction made concrete).
C. M. Bowra advocates that Blake's Songs should not be considered inferior to the prophetic books because of their simple form and subject matter, but rather should be lauded for their superior lyricism. Bowra insists that while, in the prophecies, Blake "had a great message for his generation, an urgent call to awake from its slothful sleep. . . . This is not the spirit in which Blake begins the Songs of Innocence [in] the 'Introduction,' . . . . These are the words of a poet who sings because he must, not of a prophet whose first wish is to summon his generation to a new life" (26-27). It seems telling that Bowra identifies the Piper as an adult obeying orders from a child to pipe a song, a theme which anticipates Leader in his discussion of children in Innocence.
Arthur Wormhoudt responds to an earlier commentary on the "Introduction" to Innocence in The Explicator by asserting that the second and third stanzas in the poem are distinct. Wormhoudt names the biblical allusion to Luke 7:32 as evidence of the stanza's innocent viewpoint. In the second stanza, Wormhoudt interprets the child's weeping as a response to remembering how Jesus' innocence was rejected by society, but that in the third stanza, the weeping is joyful, and is in response to a "secular poet." He concludes by claiming that Blake, therefore, seems to favor the artist (poet) and his song over that of the saint (Jesus).
Another contributor to The Explicator, Howard Justin gives a close reading of the meaning in this line of the "Introduction" to Innocence: "And I stain'd the water clear." Justin proposes two readings of this line which exemplify the line's ambiguity: he suggests that art either pollutes or clarifies nature. He also presents the poem as a "descent of Innocence into the world with the contingent loss of its ideality."
In his investigation of the "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence, Robert F. Gleckner also examines the biblical allusions in the poem (echoes of Luke 7:31-35) formerly cited by Wormhoudt, and how they exemplify the peripheral but potent traces of experience in innocence. Gleckner reads the "Introduction" as a prototypical example of the Songs of Innocence which includes innocent elements such as children, the pastoral, joy and happiness, laughter, and imaginative vision. He next examines the metrical changes in the poem as exemplary of the necessary progression for the child in the temporary state of innocence to "either . . . a higher innocence or . . . to infantilism" (87). Gleckner discusses the commingling of innocence and experience , and claims that "though the visionary inspiration (like the child on a cloud) be lovely, creation involves a knowledge of both ugliness and loveliness, joined with the imaginative ability to fuse both into a larger and higher loveliness" (88). He further comments that only a "mature conceptual creation in which both joy and sorrow are present" will produce this "higher loveliness." Gleckner disagrees with Wicksteed by explaining that it is the child's demand for a song that prompts him to play and which gives direction to his piping and not through "the aid of heaven" (89). Gleckner sees a triple unity in the third stanza of Piper, child and lamb; they are one, "poet, inspiration, song" (90). He reads the last two stanzas as "graphically represent[ing] creation, the most divine act the human can perform, a process which involves the union of poet, inspiration, song, and . . . Christ" (90). Gleckner also compares the "Introduction" to "Spring" and "Night" (similar forms of progression and structure).
E. D. Hirsch grounds his discussion of Blake's Songs by investigating the systematic and biographical influences of Innocence and the necessary completion of the collection through the Experience sequence. However, Hirsch also argues that these explanations are not without objections. He suggests that "Blake's impulse to write the Songs of Innocence came when he abandoned the limited and secular conception that connected 'innocence' with 'virtue,' and consciously embraced the wider, religious, and visionary conception of 'innocence'" (27). Hirsch posits that although the song in the "Introduction" is religious, it also retains echoes of the pastoral, though a modified pastoral. He comments that Blake considered this "new genre" as the means of being able to write poems about the city as well because "unfallen spiritual perfection [was] more profoundly portrayed in the mind and heart of a child than in fields and villages peopled by swains and maidens" (27).
In 1966, D. G. Gillham, in Blake's Contrary States, argued that Blake, in his two collections of Songs, assigns two different roles to the poet in each state. Gillham was anticipated by Bowden as he suggests that the piper in the "Introduction" to Innocence pipes his music because he enjoys making the music, and he is pleased by the children's enthusiastic response. Gillham also reads the piper as secure and confident, not suspicious and envious of the child. He gives a comparative reading of the two plates accompanying the "Introductions" to Innocence and Experience, and identifies the freedom of the piper and child in the former and restriction and non-interaction of the two in the latter. Gillham also comments that by the poem's end, words instead of sounds are used to express the piper's songs. However, the song still conveys the same song though the mode of expression is changed. Gillham concludes by asserting that "the piper's songs are simply a form of self-expression, but this manner of composition is possible only for the innocent (153). The poet is able to be spontaneous yet controlled in his expression.
John Holloway's reading of the "Introduction" to Innocence echoes Bowden's and Adams's concern with overburdening the text with images and ambiguities insupportable by the poem's language. Holloway's overarching argument is for the "harmonious oneness" (62) of the poem as exemplified through the images of "singer and stream," the piper's song and the landscape, and the stream and the rain clouds (62). This oneness will be repeated in the poems to follow in Innocence.
Alicia Ostriker comments briefly on the "Introduction" to Innocence in "Metrics: Pattern and Variation" by citing the repetition of certain words/groups of words in the poem as exemplary or the Songs of Innocence generally. She further comments on the Songs' metrical form as illustrative of the simple language and structure of the poems. She does not specifically refer to the "Introduction," but her argument seems applicable to this the first poem of Innocence.
Ronald Paulson places his discussion of the "Introduction" to Innocence in the context of examining the Sister Arts in Blake's poetry in "Blake's Revolutionary Tiger." While Experience seems to embody and emphasize the separation of the visual and verbal, in Innocence, there is no dichotomy. Paulson then asserts that in Innocence the "unity of textual meaning and literary form . . . represents the unfallen word" (130). He posits that the "poetic development" (131) beginning in Innocence and ending in Experience commences in the "Introduction" to Innocence. The piper's freely composed song is soon structured into "literary form." Paulson describes the piper turned poet as falling from innocence as he produces his art (131). Paulson considers this transformation both positive and negative. The lyric song, though now confined to a specific structure, must take on this form in order for it to be accessible to others. However, "the act of writing robs the piper of his artistic innocence--it severs him from his lyrics, when previously the artist and the poem had been inseparable and the lyric was the breath of the lyricist" (131). This idea of unity echoes In 1981, Zachary Leader traced the "early stages of the reader's visionary awakening" (61) in the course of examining Blake's Songs of Innocence. Leader closely reads some of the first several plates in Innocence, one of which is that for the "Introduction." He aims to trace the process by which the reader should "learn how, as well as why, he should adopt child-like ways of seeing" (61). Leader asserts that the enclosure and security, a predominant theme in Innocence, suggested by the intertwining trees and vines complements identical motifs articulated in the poem itself. Leader further argues that it is against Blake's intent for readers to impose actively "identity" in the poems; Blake prefers the readers be passive as opposed to active when reading the Songs. Leader also posits the "Introduction" as the model for reading the rest of the poems in Innocence. For example, the Piper remains open to the child's command; this challenge to authority reveals the way in which adults in Innocence encourage a child's ideas and desires. Leader states that the "'Introduction' implies that adults have something to learn from children and that it will be worth their while to listen attentively and sympathetically to the things children have to say" (70). Leader suggests beginning a reading of the poem on the literal level, which resists prematurely assigning identities or symbolisms in the poem. He concludes his analysis of the "Introduction" by asserting that Blake wants the reader to consider the Songs as composite parts of the whole, of a larger unity: [the "Introduction"] "unifies Innocence by encouraging us to think of each plate that follows as one of the Piper's songs 'about a lamb'" (75).
Harvey Birenbaum, in Tragedy and Innocence, asserts that "the meaning is what makes the poem happen" (98). He identifies Blake as an artist with this premise in mind for his Songs, and that innocence is defined by the "song process" (98). Birenbaum rejects ironic readings in Innocence, and posits that the reader must experience the oneness of Innocence through joining in with the songs. He also notes the spontaneity of the Piper's song and of the poem generally. Birenbaum reads the final line of the poem as a microcosmic statement for the entire poem--it is both purpose and result (101). "It is innocence, made to happen through a story-song-picture process as the realization of a desire and the clarification of an impulse" (101). Desires realized and clarified impulses, introduced and lauded in the "Introduction," continue to be manifested in the remaining Songs of Innocence.
Heather Glen's comparative study of Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads reveals Blake's departure from the Wordsworthian advocacy for a common language in poetry. Rather, it seems that Glen posits Blake as a supporter of the "language of daily life" (65). She suggests that this kind of language is found in the "Introduction" to Innocence, but is "articulated as a coherent artistic vision. The gap between actual experience and cultural definition . . . is the subject of the poem" (65). Glen reads the poem as a progression of "expressive rather than communicative" energy, but by the poem's end, it has become limited and structured. This reading is reminiscent of Paulson's argument treating the metamorphosis of piping into lyric form. Glen also reads the poem as exhibiting a more linear progression; the sense of interactive communication stops. She also suggests that the "Introduction" "explores the paradoxical nature [of Blake's suspicion of books and his belief that an illuminated book was "an enduring work of art"]" (67). Glen reads the poem as the means of telling public readers that Songs. is available to all. Glen compares the "Introduction" to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, and argues that Blake, in the "Introduction," makes his collection more accessible to adults and children, whereas Wordsworth seems to be addressing an educated, adult reader. She also highlights Blake's penchant for particulars whereas Wordsworth favored "abstraction" (80). Glen then discusses the physical, concrete elements of poetic creation in the "Introduction" which suggest that the artistic process is a struggle that sometimes concludes in doubt.
In 1985, Tillotama Rajan explains in "Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness" that Blake's Songs exemplify the "intertextualization of lyric" (201). He proposes that the Songs can be read "interdiscursively" and not just as isolated poems. Rajan suggests that the "Introduction" to Innocence exemplifies how Blake further complicated "any future attempt to bind the Songs into a book by centering the collection in single poems" (201).
Edward Larrissy echoes earlier theories by Paulson and Glen in William Blake when he traces the progression in the "Introduction" to Innocence from abstraction to form. He also investigates "And I stain'd the water clear" as suggestive of "corruption" already present in Innocence but also as exemplifying Blake's own "ambivalence about form" (27).
Stanley Gardner begins his discussion about the "Introduction" to Innocence by suggesting that the accompanying plate illustrates the freedom and playfulness found in innocence. He suggests that in this poem "Blake's initial proposition is that the nature of childhood, identified and fostered in the Songs, is both vision and reality" (18). Gardner argues that the lamb is the central image and subject of the poem; the piper is only encountered at a distance. however, there is a sense of unity between the piper (adult) and child, Gardner posits, which echoes Paulson, Holloway, and Leader in their similar discussions on oneness between adults and children.
Thomas R. Frosch also reiterates the sense of progression in the "Introduction" to Innocence that Paulson, Glen, and Larrissy have articulated in their analyses of the poem. By emphasizing the "borderline between the states of innocence and experience, Frosch shifts his focus from the states themselves to a broader understanding of the sense of tension between childhood and adulthood.
. Martin Bidney describes the Blakean influences in Harold Brodkey's "Piping Down the Valleys Wild," and suggests that by choosing the first line of the "Introduction" for the title of his book of short stories, Brodkey "will offer . . . an illustrative examination of both Blakean contrary states" (237). Bidney traces the appearances of innocence and experience in the short story by closely reading some its short passages.
--Beth Ann Neighbors (December 1995)
Bidney, Martin. "A Song of Innocence and of Experience: Rewriting Blake in Brodkey's 'Piping Down the Valleys Wild'." Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 237-45.
Birenbaum, Harvey. Tragedy and Innocence. Washington, D. C.: UP of America, 1983.
Bowra, C. M. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1949.
Frosch, Thomas R. "The Borderline of Innocence and Experience." In Approaches to Teaching Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Robert F. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg. New York: MLA, 1989. 74-79.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. London: Althone, 1986.
Gillham, D. G. Blake's Contrary States. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.
Gleckner, Robert F. The Piper and the Bard. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.
Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964.
Holloway, John. Blake: The Lyric Poetry. London: Arnold, 1968.
Justin, Howard. "Blake's 'Introduction' to the Songs of Innocence." Explicator 11 (1952) Item 1.
Larrissy, Edward. William Blake. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.
Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. Boston: Routledge, 1981.
Ostriker, Alicia. "Metrics: Pattern and Variation." In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Ed. Morton D. Paley. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969. 10-29.
Paulson, Ronald. "Blake's Revolutionary Tiger." In William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 123-32.
Rajan, Tillotama. "Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness." In Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism. Ed. Chavia Hosek and Patricia Parker. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 194-207.
Wicksteed, Joseph, H. Blake's Innocence and Experience. London: Dent, 1928.
Wormhoudt, Arthur. "Blake's 'Introduction' to Songs of Innocence. Explicator 1 (1949) Item 55.
Both groups, however, read the "Introduction" as crucial to an understanding of Blake's larger poetic vision. For the former, what the poem reveals is nothing less than Blake's conception of the powers and limits of poetry and art. For many critics of the latter group, the "Introduction," by illuminating the qualities of the state of innocence, reveals how we are to read the songs which follow.
The summary which follows will examine the critical debate within these two strains of interpretation. However, rather than examining these two strains exclusive from one another, my summary will proceed more or less chronologically. In this way I hope both to avoid a reductive approach which would sacrifice a complete annotation of each critic's work for the sake of narrative coherence, and to avoid implying that these two strains of criticism are mutually exclusive of one another. Indeed, several critics bestride both groups, and several cannot be understood without some knowledge of what has come before.
The first critic to read the "Introduction" as a Blakean commentary upon the process of artistic creation, Joseph Wicksteed claims that Blake's "main interest" in the poem is putting into exact and expressive imagery his own experience as the singer of the songs which follow (79). Thus the piper's experience mirrors the experience Blake has undergone in composing the Songs of Innocence. The piper begins upon the "wild" earth, is lifted momentarily into direct intercourse with a heavenly vision (the "child" on the "cloud"), and finally returns to earth to sing a note of "joy." This movement symbolizes Blake's--or any other poet's--own creative process: first the poet amuses himself with his craft, then becomes inspired by artistic vision, and finally transforms this vision into material art. Thus the "Introduction" expresses "the theme of all Blake's greatest work": however one explores the realms of vision, one cannot remain there, and must return to earth (81).
Howard Justin also reads the "Introduction" as Blake's recognition of the increasing materialization and humanization of art, or "the descent of Innocence into the world with the contingent loss of ideality" (1). For Justin, the poem is an elucidation of a single, necessarily ambiguous line, "And I stain'd the water clear," which should be glossed as both "by dipping my pen in the water, I stained it," and "I stained the water into clarity." Justin interprets the "pen" as art, and the "water" as nature; thus Blake is claiming that art leaves a blemish upon nature, and that art (though itself a blemish) stains nature into clarity. Material art, then, is both a corruption of "Ideal art"--which is symbolized by the "child" on the "cloud" who is himself "piping down the valleys"--and a transformative medium with the power to clarify existence (2).
In a direct response to Justin's reading, William Bowden asserts that the "Introduction" describes not the descent of ideal art into corrupted, material poetry, but the ascent inherent in the creative process: "it is not the disparagement of art, but a proud poetic credo" (41). Bowden insists that it is Blake, not the "child," who opens the poem by "Piping down the valleys wild" (1). Thus the evolution of the piper's song from pleasurable tune, to a song infused with specific meaning, to written verse addressed to "every child" symbolizes the creative process in which Blake (and every artist) participates. Blake recognizes that each artist bears a responsibility to compose not only work which is pleasurable, but work which is fraught with meaning. Moreover, this art must be disseminated and preserved for posterity, so that all "may joy to hear."
The first critic to read the "Introduction" as not primarily an exploration of the artist's creative process, but as an elucidation of the state of innocence, Margaret Giovannini claims that Blake consciously employs the style of ballad verse as well suited to his purpose: to introduce the songs which follow. Giovannini reads the "child" as a symbol of happy innocence who understands the "Lamb" only as the infant Christ, and not as the tragic figure of the crucifixion. For the child's state is one of innocence untainted by the tragic knowledge of experience; he, like all the children present in the Songs of Innocence, reflects a joy which issues from a perfectly innocent faith.
Robert Gleckner's reading of the poem both disputes the claim that the state illuminated exists free from the looming presence of experience, and affirms that Blake is graphically representing the process of artistic creation. Concluding that in the "Introduction" the "shadow of experience constantly impinges upon innocence," Gleckner finds in the child's thoughts of the "Lamb"--which symbolizes the Lamb of God, Christ--a vision of loveliness which is tinged with sorrow by knowledge of the crucifixion (84). This provides a hint that innocence is a temporary state, knowledge of which demands either a retreat to infantilism, or an advance to higher innocence through experience. In the final two stanzas--the "introduction proper to the Songs of Innocence"--the piper faces just such a choice when the child who inspires his song disappears: he may return to the state of selfish glee in which he opened the poem, or he may crystalize his vague feelings of change into a creative act (89). By composing the songs, the piper chooses creation: "the most divine act a human can perform" (90).
Donald Dike also perceives in the state of innocence illuminated in the "Introduction" an intimation of the state of experience which must inevitably come to pass. The celebrations of innocence are never complete; they are always disturbed by a sense of vulnerability which anticipates the coming of the state of experience. Even in the "Introduction" there exists a "faint elegiac strain": a clue that the freedoms present in the state of innocence cannot long be imagined (358).
Unlike Dike, John Holloway does not perceive the world of innocence described in the "Introduction" as being threatened by the coming of experience, but as a "world of harmonious oneness" (60). And unlike Justin, Holloway reads the line "And I stain'd the water clear" not as ambiguous, but as the line from which the poem's harmonious oneness springs. The phrase "the water" refers back to the child's tears; thus, since these tears issue from a cloud, they are also to be read as "joyous showers of rain" (60). The poem's harmonious oneness, then, exists in the dual image Blake inscribes: the spiritual image of a poet singing to the presence of the divine (the child), and, "different but not different," the natural image of a springtime landscape containing lambs in meadows and rain-bearing clouds above (60).
Like Wicksteed, Justin, Bowden, and Gleckner before him, E.D. Hirsch reads the "Introduction" as a Blakean commentary upon the process of artistic creation. More specifically, Hirsch reads the poem as a symbolic account of the way Blake was inspired to compose the Songs of Innocence. In the poem Blake examines both the moment of religious and artistic expression, and the process of making poetry out of this inspiration. And, although C.M. Bowra had earlier claimed that Blake makes a distinction between the lyric poetry of the Songs, which the poet feels compelled to sing, and the visionary prophecies, which are the words of a prophet summoning his generation to new life, Hirsch views the "Introduction" as both lyric and prophecy. The poem's form is simple and lyrical, but its purpose is prophetic: to directly reveal the "joy" of artistic creation that is divinely inspired to all who "may joy to hear."
Heather Glen reads Blake's attitude toward artistic creation as more problematic: rather than simply being infused with a sensation of "joy" in the moment of creation, the poet experiences a dual sensation of loss and empowerment. In the "Introduction," Blake reveals that shaping a book involves abandoning a form of communication which is constantly changing and directly heard for one which is fixed and visible. The work becomes abstracted from real life, and spontaneity and face-to-face communication are lost. However, such abstraction allows the poet to address a wider audience--allows for a potentially joyful relationship with not one, but "every child." Thus art is not a reified object, but an agent which possesses the potential to stimulate the faculties of other children. This dual moment of artistic creation is neither a paradox nor a contradiction: both attitudes are part of a "coherent poetic vision" whose implications are worked out in the following Songs of Innocence.
Stanley Gardner discovers evidence for reading the "Introduction" as a Blakean commentary on the artistic process in the poem's design. The figures within the looping tendrils of the vines which frame the plate's text illuminate "the care, the instruction, the elation, thee good seed, the inspiration, the mechanics of publishing" (18). Throughout the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the illustrations often refer back to a condition which gave rise to the poem, or provides an alternative depiction of the proposition introduced in the poem. In the "Introduction" the design accomplishes the latter function. The text describes the ways in which a divine vision (the child) motivates communication and transforms the piper's "songs of pleasant glee" into something more profound; the design reveals, by its references to publishing, that the text can be read as a commentary on the process of poetic creation.
Claiming that the piper's unhesitating response to the cloud- borne child implies that adults have something to learn from children, Zachary Leader admonishes critics who would ignore the example of the sympathetic piper and approach the "Introduction" with the "adult's instinctive desire to anatomize or abstract or categorize" (a group which would certainly include those who read the poem as a Blakean commentary on artistic creation) (72). Leader emphasizes the poem's dramatic context, and claims that a proper reading of the poem should begin on the literal level, and not with an examination of the symbolic meaning of the poem (for which he admonishes Gleckner). Read in this way, the child can be seen as divinely human, not a divine agent inspiring the human piper.
Harvey Birenbaum also takes issue with critics who would approach the "Introduction" with an eye toward analyzing its symbolic meaning. Birenbaum claims that the Songs of Innocence define innocence through the song process; that is, innocence is not just the subject of the verses, but each poem is itself an innocent song which is not to be read ironically. Read properly, the "Introduction" allows the reader to experience what it is like to adopt the persona of one in the state of innocence. Thus the reader becomes the voice of the song, and can ignore the ironic implications of certain clusters of words.
In his claim that the "Introduction" encourages its reader to abandon analysis and realize the perspective of one in the state of innocence, Birenbaum is anticipated by B.H. Fairchild. Although earlier Alice Ostriker had claimed that the meter of the "Introduction" provides enough slight variation to prevent a sing- song monotony, Fairchild argues that the Songs of Innocence all contain "time meter" which is characteristic of many nursery rhymes (136). This submerged, insistent tempo pulls the reader closer to a "child-like, 'innocent' sensitivity which appeals to the child's ear within the adult ear" (136). The last stanza especially evinces the pull of this temporal regularity.
Unlike Leader and Birenbaum, Edward Larrissy claims that with the vine-like designs which often frame the text of the Songs of Innocence, Blake is depicting the personas of the poems as limited, and thus they require an extra-textual level of interpretation to explain them. In the "Introduction," the staining of the water, the disappearance of the child (the source of the piper's vision), and the contrast between voice and writing all suggest that in writing down the songs the piper has corrupted the original inspiration of the idea. This could indicate that the state of innocence which this poem evinces--as well as introduces-- has already fallen.
By contrast, Harold Bloom insists that the child who inhabits this region of innocence exists as one as yet wholly untainted by experience. As yet, the child has no conception of one of the defining characteristics of someone in the state of experience: self-consciousness. Rather, the child's pure reactions to the piper are those of the spirit "as yet undivided against itself," and the natural world which surrounds the child participates in this unity (7).
--Mark Rollins (December 1995)
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