I’ve
been re-reading a lot of that strange and manic Romantic poet, William
Blake. Almost completely isolated in his
own lifetime, his presence in modern culture is incalculable. Witness an episode of crime series The Mentalist I caught on TV the other
night, in which some grubby bunch of miscreants used “Tiger tiger” as a
password (one of them careful to explain to viewers that it was from Blake’s
poem, quoting: “Tyger tyger burning bright/ In the forests of the night”).
As
it happens, I’ve been re-reading Blake to keep up with a student who is
finishing a thesis on the animals in Blake’s poetry. Astonishingly, despite a vast amount of
scholarship on Blake, no one seems yet to have published a comprehensive study
of how he uses images of lambs and tigers, lions and wolves, eagles and horses
and foxes and worms.
All
the best “doors of perception” (Blake’s phrase) open by sheer accident, I think
– and it just so happened that I was also trawling through some long-neglected
CDs, and put on John Tavener’s Ikon of Light. Amongst the very beautiful choral works on it
are his renditions of “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”, two of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience,
written in 1794.
Maybe
too beautiful. “The Lamb” is suitably rhythmical and
repetitive, but it seems to me that the elevated refinement of Tavener’s
composition entirely misses the ferocity and roughness of “The Tyger”:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
....
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
The
whole poem is a series of these questions, never answered. If I were to hazard my own reply, though, it’s
that Blake can’t imagine that the conventional, cloudy, loving God of the Established
Church could have created this
monstrous beauty. His conclusion: the
God of the Church was a fraud, a “Nobodaddy” as he punningly called him. Blake put his faith in the fiery energy of
the independent “poetic genius”, symbolised by the untameable tiger. By comparison, then – and Blake does intend
us to compare them – the Christ-like gentle Lamb seems just self-deluded.
So
it felt inappropriate to find “The Tyger” sucked into the airy folds of Tavener’s
near-mystical church music. Just as it’s
inappropriate to find Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” sung in conventional church
services. What began as an acerbic attack on industrialising English
nationalism – the “dark Satanic mills” – was a century later amended, just
enough to smooth away offence, and suborned to Blake’s most derided opponent –
institutionalised religion.
Blake
is recorded as having sung his own Songs in company – rather well
apparently. In pubs, too, one imagines. His earliest poetic references to music occur
in The Island in the Moon, a shaggy
and silly satirical kind of play, set in a tavern, in which characters named Suction,
Quid, Sipsop and Aradobo raucously carouse.
Suction yells for “an Anthem, an Anthem”, and gets:
Lo, the bat with leathern wing
Winking & blinking
Winking & blinking
Followed
by “Grand Chorus Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Hooooo my poooor siiiides...”
And
the Lawgiver sings:
Musicians should have
A pair of very good ears
And long fingers & thumbs
And not like clumsy bears
Fa me la sol La me fa sol
And
there’s a lot more of this inebriated nonsense.
But
when we get to the more mature and refined Songs
and “The Little Vagabond”, the orphan finds the “Ale-house is healthy &
pleasant & warm” compared to the “cold” church. He wishes the Parson would just lighten up a
little. In contrast, the church depicted
in “Holy Thursday” herds the children into “companies” that seem to “raise to
heaven the voice of song”, but in reality are, as in the accompanying
illustration, regimented as a Byzantine frieze.
So
in several of the other Songs, what
seem to be superficial, innocently child-like lullabies (like “Cradle Song”)
begin to seem suffocating and even slightly sinister. In fact, several Songs are satirical rewrites
of hymns by Isaac Watts and John Wesley (several of which still find a place in
the Anglican hymnals). And in his depiction
of the “horrid labours” of industrialisation in the long poem Milton, Blake writes of music being used
to lull the workers, “thousands play on instruments/ Stringed or fluted to
ameliorate the sorrows of slavery.”
Precursor of the modern mall?
But
there are other kinds of music that liberate.
Blake’s Muses are often musical.
The opening poem of Songs of
Innocence has a piper, piping away “so that every child might hear”; and
the poem Europe has a slightly “tipsie”
Fairy singing to a “soft lute”, readying the speaker for his task. The Songs
are full of children singing with their freedoms, almost always out of
doors. They are in tune with a Nature
that also sings perpetually. Birds
particularly – the nightingale, for example, leading “the Choir of day! trill
trill trill trill/ Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse” –
but even the gorgeous Flies
that dance & sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks &meadows;
every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of
delight artful to weave:
each one to sound his instruments of
music in the dance...
And
in Blake’s vision of ultimate spirituality, the very constellations
in the deep & wondrous Night
They rise in order and continue
their immortal courses
Upon the mountains & in vales
with harp & heavenly song
With flute & clarion ...
Over time, Blake’s
poems got wilder and more voluminous, his rhythms less obviously musical. But his earlier poems have been performed by
an astonishing number of artists, from Benjamin Britten to Patti Smith. Here are just three for your delectation.
The American
Beat poet Allan Ginsberg followed Blake in his rebelliousness, his atmospheres
of urban decay, his long tumultuous lines.
He was particularly notorious for masturbating to climax while reciting
Blake’s “Sun-Flower”. But he also performed
several of the Songs with musical
backing. He couldn’t sing, really, but
the 1969 recordings recordings are historically interesting.
Also interesting
are arrangements by Belgian composer Lucien Posman and the Goeyvaerts Consort. Like Tavener, this is choral work – or very
rich a cappella – but the performances,
rather than being smoothed out into a kind of mysticism, are charged with Blake’s
own turbulence. And you can make out the
words! The Consort performs several of
the Songs of Innocence and Experience
– “The Clod & the Pebble”, “Little Girl Lost”, “The Little Vagabond”, “The
Poison Tree”, among them, though neither “The Lamb” nor “The Tyger”. Best of all, perhaps, is the longer “Song of
Los”, in which Blake was breaking out into his stranger “prophetic” poetry; Posman’s
score is masterfully matched to the poem’s turmoil of tone and meaning.
But maybe my
favourite of all those I’ve found is Blake as Appalachian Blues, unlikely but
wonderful, performed by Martha Redbone on her new album of 12 Blake poems, The Garden of Love. “The Garden of Love” itself, one of Blake’s
bitterest attacks on the Church, is suitably harshly rendered, others equally
appropriately mellow.
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