Going for Blake and Boethius

I was reading Northrop Fry's 1957 essay, Blake after two centuries on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is good in itself, especially in that he lets the poems speak for themselves, although always with that maddening dissatisfying absence of any explanation.

 "Such a poem.. as The Sick Rose", he says, "Has the power of speaking with the unanswerable authority of poetry itself". 

 I can imagine one of the more self-satisfied Sussex literature tutors I had leaning back with a great deal of self generated self satisfaction and quoting that sentence. (Actually to be fair there are just two tutors that I imagine doing that, there were some great tutors as well.)

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

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.

He's right of course, not to pander to the English undergraduate that I was, plundering any book for some kind of unequivocal sense of meaning so that I could write the next essay.  It's worth quoting him (good ol' Northrop) in full:

"One may always meet a poem with a set of questions designed to avoid its impact: what does it mean; why is it considered a good poem; is it morally beneficial; does it say profound things about life, and so forth"

Love that " set of questions designed to avoid its impact".  Of course in meandering though this book a bit more this morning I do of course find a detailed exposition of what The Sick Rose means that is hilarious in both  its plausibility - it is one reading I suppose, and in its wrong headed limiting of the poem. I'll have to quote the fucker  to show you what I mean. One bit will have to suffice as it's too long to tap in all of it.

"The "Sick Rose" poem is the concrete expression of Blake's experience of the corruptive effects of 'social' love upon creative sexuality"

So says Wolf Mankowitz in his essay "The Songs of Experience", in the Casebook series book "William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience", edited by Margaret Bottrall. He also says, and I quote and paraphrase, that it is "immediately apparent" that the rose is mortal, that the worm is evil and the "bed of crimson joy" is obviously the rose's sexuality etc etc. 

But I could equally make the case that The Sick Rose is, amongst other things obvs. an allegory of anal sex - i.e. rose as - well use your imagination,  "dark secret love" and so on. 

But all this is a digression from the main thing I found in another essay in this book, which must be left over from my Sussex undergraduate days in the seventies, - Kathleen Raine's rather dry essay "Blake's debt to antiquity" where she traces Blake's debt to Alchemy through such writers as Boehme and Paracelsus.  There's a wonderful bit of academic speak where she says, speaking of one of Blake's verse letters where he name checks the writers above, 

"From these passages we may gather [I just love this phrase haha ]that what fired Blake's imagination in the  Alchemical philosophy was the teaching of the famous Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus" 

But that isn't my main thing here: reading this I realised that William Blake was the missing link in two shows that I wanted to write and perform - one being The Celestial Tavern, - God's pub, me being St Peter being security on the door, an idea cooked up with Foz years ago, the other being a show based on Boethius' " Consolation of Philosophy".  I'm not sure how they will fit together in the final version, The Tyger will figure strongly - and one passage from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which is one of the most evocative and beautiful titles for a poem I know of, as Roger McGough realised as well.

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? 

But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. 

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,

And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?

Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!

And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

There's something here worth telling, worth playing with , worth putting together. Worms, eagles, tygers and a gentle mention for the horses of instruction.