The Fly (poem)

The Fly is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794.

It was set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.

The Fly

The illustrated version of "The Fly" from Copy F of Songs of Innocence and Experience currently held at the Yale Center for British Art

Little Fly
Thy summer's play,
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength & breath;
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

Interpretation

Blake printed the poem with the text set in the branches of trees, an image of a nurse and a toddler in the foreground, and a girl with a racket about to hit a shuttlecock in the background. G.S. Morris notes that 'the lines "Till some blind hand / Shall brush my wing" seem to follow the feathered shuttlecock directly into the little girl's racquet.'

The poem catches the narrator in an act of thoughtlessness that leads to the contemplation of the act and its implications. The fly suffers from uncontrollable circumstances, just as the narrator does. This humbling simile has caused the narrator to move from thoughtlessness to thought, and, as "thought is life", from death to life, allowing the conclusion, "Then am I / A happy fly / If I live, / Or if I die", a conclusion to which Paul Miner comments, "Brain-death is real death."

References

Other sources

• William Blake, The Complete Poems, edited Alicia Ostriker, Harmondsworth, England (Penguin, 1977).

External links

• A comparison of extant copies of The Fly: from the William Blake Archive.
• Esperanza Spalding's presentation of the poem (YouTube.)
• The Fly. Music composition by Dmitri N. Smirnov (YouTube.)