An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

"The Voice of the Ancient Bard" is one of Blake's most difficult lyrics and, consequently, among the least-considered. Its elusiveness has generally thwarted explication. Everything about the piece is ambiguous, from its voice and tone to its position within the Songs' rubrics of innocence and experience. Blake himself shuffled the poem through several positions in Songs of Innocence, including its conclusion, before situating it at the end of Songs of Experience. Similarly the song's critics have found it adaptable to multiple and even parallel Blakean contexts, though fully explicable in none. Most have judged what Robert Gleckner calls its "strangeness," its elusive significance, the piece's primary virtue or vice, as the case may be. They have agreed that "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" 's variant positions in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience make it a central piece and that its ambiguity qualifies the other songs and de-centers apparently "easy" readings of them, but have yet to pursue the implications.

E. D. Hirsch's early reading in Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake(1964, 1975) examines the significance of the piece's variant positions in copies of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He sees "Voice of the Ancient Bard" as "Blake's first apocalyptic outburst," a "transitional poem" whose "tone is unlike anything in Blake's earlier poetry" and which anticipates later prophetic works. For him it prophesies a "transformed world" facilitated by "the repudiation of all the old traditions, including traditional pieties." He relates the Bard's admonition to the "youth of delight" not to "stumble over the bones of the dead" to the antinomian spirit of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and its similar suggestion "drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead." Gardner cannot accept the piece in the context of Songs of Innocence. He considers its initial inclusion there "inexplicable" unless one assumes Blake's enthusiasm for this presumed break-through poem's "new and exciting vantage point" got the better of his "interest" in that work's "unity and coherence." He finds the song's final placement at the end of Songs of Innocence and of Experience more appropriate. Significantly, he considers "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" "the terminal poem of all the Songs, not merely the Experience sequence. Hirsch concludes, obscurely, that it belongs in this interpretive position because it "displays characteristics of both series," a "mediating use ... made possible by the vagueness of its prophecy." He fits the piece's illustration less ambiguously in an experiential context, even when he considers it in Songs of Innocence. The young couple's embrace "foreshadows the tenor of writings to come," he notes dryly. "His hand is on her buttocks."

Zachary Leader agrees with Hirsch that "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" is crucial to Songs of Experience, observing that "the effect it has on other plates ... is immensely important." In his Reading Blake's Songs (1981), he sees the piece as qualifying the Bardic meta-voice which, he suggests, implicitly colors all the Songs of Experience and whose appearance here and in the "Introduction" explicitly frames them. "No other experienced plate ... does more to re-confirm our initial doubts about the bard," he notes, "or to justify our discomfort with seemingly straightforward plates." His reading relates the Ancient Bard with the piper/bard figure of previous innocent and experienced plates, regarding him as "an older and wiser version of the figure we have followed from carefree piping to prophetic indignation, from growth into and out of innocence." It assumes a consistency of voice among the songs which allows him to link the Bard's prophetic entreaties to them. The Bard urges the "youth of delight" to forsake the "impediments to wisdom" which have haunted earlier pieces, including "The Fly," "The Chimney Sweeper," "The Little Vagabond," "A Poison Tree," "My Pretty Rose Tree," "The Angel," and "The Lilly." For Leader, the Bard's vacillation within the lyric between prophecy and self-doubt mirrors an experiential evolution of the meta-voice behind Songs of Innocence and of Experience which he exemplifies, a progression which "helps us to understand why he now refers to himself as 'Ancient'." "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" 's explicit admission of its status as rhetoric undercuts its function as prophecy and implicates itself as one example of the "folly" it denounces: "At the last, the Bard sees himself aright: as guide in need of guidance, a mental traveller whose prophetic certainty and optimism has been so undermined that 'care' threatens to be his only knowledge." Leader concludes that the Bard's admission calls into question any simple interpretations of the lyrics he voices.

Some critics have hesitated to embrace the implications of the ambivalence of "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" demonstrated by Hirsch and Leader and have instead tried to reconcile its self-conflicts in a way which keeps the meanings of the other songs relatively centered. Edward Larrissey's William Blake (1985) finds an "accommodation of the two contraries" in the piece, a transcendence of experience and "the discovery of a true innocence." He sees the ellusiveness of the poem and its uneasy status as either a song of innocence or of experience a symptomatic of a "fundamental instability of the contraries" he also notes in the "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found," which also migrated from Innocence to Experience. Larrissey concludes vaguely that these poems affect the way we read the others by demonstrating "the fact that both Innocence and Experience are attempts to suggest the possibilities for, and the limitations on 'innocence' ... in a world where limits are inevitable." Stanley Gardner's Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced (1986) grounds "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" in contemporary particulars. He emphasizes childhood's centrality in Songs of Innocence and of Experience and relates the piece to the growing neglect of children brought on by the start of the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth century England, reading it as "an early and still cool-headed response to this gradual withdrawal of community." The Bard's weary tone in the poem's last lines reflects a "sense of regret" that those, including perhaps himself, who "wish to lead others" have lost an innocent sense of compassion for others, particularly children, and become "obsessed with selfish care and immune to the influence of humility."

The most exhaustive discussion of "Voice of the Ancient Bard" yet offered is Robert Gleckner's "The Strange Odyssey of Blake's 'The Voice of the Ancient Bard' " (1982), a revision and expansion of his initial reading of the poem. Gleckner first treats the poem though in his The Piper and The Bard (1959). There, he reads it as Blake's announcement of "his millennium," a transformation of human sensibility at least partially made possible by the passage through "the tangled maze of experience" which Gleckner believes the combined Songs constitute. Surprisingly, he doesn't examine the Bard who gives the study half of its title, only his message. D. G. Gillham's more thorough look followed shortly and pointed the way toward Gleckner's re-consideration. Gillham's Blake's Contrary States (1966) rejects Gleckner's initial notion that the piece heralds the millenium, because "the promise made is too vague and negative." "There is not much point in attempting to find the basis of the new truth or faith sung by the Bard, because he does not know what it is," he observes. "The message he brings is a negative one denying the validity of ratiocination." The Bard's prophecy and therefore the lyric he voices are inexplicable for Gillham; they constitute a self-subverting syllogistic loop. The Bard "offers no escape from this tyranny [ratiocination]," he declares, "because his objection to theory and abstraction is, itself, a theoretical one."

Gillham's notion of "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" as a sort of coda to Songs of Innocence and of Experience which subverts answers, rather than a conclusion which provides them is the basis of Gleckner's much later reading. "Gillham's obvious confusions about the poem are, in one sense, the proper response to it," he argues, in "The Strange Odyssey of Blake's 'The Voice of the Ancient Bard.' " "Although answers and firm, confident interpretations are more comfortable, the norm as it were of explicative criticism, I propose to raise questions....." Gleckner believes that the piece's "strangeness," its general dissonance not only with the other plates in Songs of Innocence and of Experience but with Blake's canon as a whole, gives it its subversive, de-centering influence. His study offers an extensive delineation of these disjunctions. Gleckner notes that the diction of the piece is uncharacteristic of Blake: "... 22 of 39 substantive words, almost sixty percent, are unique or near unique in the Songs and even in all of Blake..." He is puzzled by the idea that the poem may be part of a framing device for Songs of Experience, "given Blake's abhorrence of such mechanical devices." He notes that "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" is, along with The Book of Thel, one of only two works Blake etched in italic font. He reads the poem as a transitional pivot between the "abstract philosophy" of early tracts such as There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One and the "particularity" of the Songs, and suggests that it cannot be fully reconciled with either mode. Gleckner distinguishes "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" from the other Songs because, he argues, it alludes to Milton and the Biblical prophets, rather than to folk ballads, hymns, and children's songs, as they do. He cites its supposed contradiction of "The Little Black Boy" 's metaphysics as an example of its de-centering influence. The Bard, he notes, rejects the "clouds of reason" which "dichotomize" the Little Black Boy into a soul/mind and body ("cloud") in that poem. Gleckner concludes that readers "confusions" about "The Voice of the Ancient Bard" are "explainable, if not reconcilable, because of its unique contextual peregrinations." He argues that these interpretive difficulties are ultimately "well and good", because they provoke reassessments of other Blakean bards, including the piper of Songs of Innocence, the "Poetic Genius" and "true man" of All Religions Are One, and the "Poetic or Prophetic Character" of There Is No Natural Religion, which raise stimulating questions about the voice in Blake's work.

--John Murphy (December 1995)

Hirsch, E. D., Jr.Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.

Leader, Zachary. Reading Blake's Songs. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Larrissey, Edward. William Blake. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Gleckner, Robert. The Piper and The Bard: a Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.

Gleckner, Robert. "The Strange Odyssey of Blake's 'The Voice of the Ancient Bard.' " Romanticism Past and Present. Vol. 6 No. 1 1982, 1-25.