frye1957

Blake's "Introduction" to "Experience"
Author(s): Northrop Frye

Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1, Blake Bicentennial Issue (Nov., 1957), pp.
57-67
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3816292
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Blake'sIntroductionto Experience
By NORTHROP FRYE
S TUDENTS OF LITERATURE often think of Blake as the author of

a numberof lyrical poemsof the mosttransparentsimplicity,
and of a number of "prophecies" of the most impenetrable com-
plexity. The prophecies are the subject of some bulky commen-
taries, including one by the present writer, which seem to suggest
that they are a special interest, and may not even be primarily
a literary one. The ordinary reader is thus apt to make a sharp
distinction between the lyrical poems and the prophecies, often
with a hazy and quite erroneous notion in his mind that the proph-
ecies are later than the lyrics, and represent some kind of mental
breakdown.
Actually Blake, however versatile, is rigorously consistent in
both his theory and practice as an artist. The Poetical Sketches,
written mostly in his teens, contain early lyrics and early prophe-
cies in about equal proportions. While he was working on the Songs
of Innocence and Experience, he was also working on their pro-
phetic counterparts.While he was working at Felpham on his three
most elaborate prophecies, he was also writing the poems in the
Pickering MS, which inclade such pellucid lyrics as "Mary,"
"William Bond," and "The Smile." The extent to which the
prophecies themselves are permeated by a warm and simple
lyrical feeling may be appreciated by any reader who does not
shy at the proper names. Hence the method adopted in some criti-
cal studies, including my own Fearful Symmetry, of concentrating
on the prophecies and neglecting the lyrics on the ground that they
can be understood without commentary may have the long-run
disadvantage of compromising with a thoroughly mistaken view
of Blake.
What I propose to do here is to examine one of Blake's shortest
and best-knownpoems in such a way as to make it an introduction
to some of the main principles of Blake's thought. The poem
selected is the "Introduction" to the Songs of Experience, which
for many reasons is as logical a place as any to begin the study
57
58 HUNTINGTONLIBRARYQUARTERLY
of Blake. I do not claim that the way of readingit set forth here
is necessaryfor all readers,but only that for those interestedin
furtherstudyof Blake it is a valid reading.
Hear the voice of the Bard!
WhoPresent,Past &Future,sees;
Whoseears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees . . .
This stanzatells us a greatdeal aboutBlake'sview of the place

and function of the poet. The second line, repeatedmany years
later in lerusalem ("I see the Past, Present& Futureexisting all
at once Before me"), establishesat once the principle that the
imaginationunifies time by makingthe presentmomentreal. In
our ordinaryexperienceof time we are aware only of three un-
realities: a vanished past, an unbornfuture, and a present that
never quite comes into existence.The center of time is now, yet
therenever seemsto be such a time as now. In:theordinaryworld
we can bind experiencetogetheronly throughthe memory,which
Blake declares has nothingto do with imagination.There is no
contactwith any other points of time except those that have ap-
parentlydisappearedin the past. As Proustsays, in such a world
our only paradises can be the paradises that we have lost. For
Blake, as for Eliot in the "Quartets,"there must also be another
dimensionof experience,a verticaltimelessaxis crossingthe hori-
zontal flow of time at every moment,providingin that momenta
still point of a turning world, a momentneither in nor out of
time, a momentthat Blake in the propheciescalls the momentin
each day thatSatancannotfind.
The worst theological error we can make, for Blake, is the
"Deist" one of puttingGod at the beginningof the temporalse-
quence,as a FirstCause.Sucha view leads logically to an absolute
fatalism, thoughits devoteesare seldom so logical. The only God
worthworshippirng is a God who, though in his essence timeless,
continuallyenters and redeemstime, in otherwords an incarnate
God,a Godwho is also Man.Thereis a Trinityin Blakeof Father,
Son, and Spirit, but Blake takes very seriously the Christiandoc-
trines that the Spirit proceedsfrom the Son and that no man can
BLAKE'S INTRODUCTIONTO EXPERIENCE 59
know the Father except throughthe Son, the humanityof God.
Attemptsto approachthe FatherdirectlyproducewhatBlake calls
"Nobodaddy,"whom we shall meet again in the next poem
"Earth's Answer," and who is the ill-tempered old man in the sky
that results from our efforts to visualize a First Cause. Attempts
to approach the Spirit directly produce the vague millennialism
of the revolutionaries of Blake's time, where human nature as it
exists is assumed to be perfectible at some time in the future. What
Blake thinks of this he has expressed in the prose introduction to
the third part of Jerusalem. For Blake there is no God but Jesus,
who is also man, and who exists neither in the past like the his-
torical Jesus, nor in the future like the Jewish Messiah, but now
in a real present, in which the real past and the real future are
contained. The word "eternity" in Blake means the reality of the
present moment, not the indefinite extension of the temporal
sequence.
The modern poet or "Bard" thus finds himself in the tradition
of the Hebrew prophets, who derive their inspiration from Christ
as Word of God, and whose life is a listening for and speaking
with that Word. In the Christian view, as recorded in Paradise
Lost, it was not the Father but Jesus who created the unfallen
world, placed man in Eden, and discovered man's fall while
"walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Gen. iii.8), the
passage alluded to in the last line of the stanza.
Callingthe lapsedSoul,
And weepingin the eveningdew;
Thatmightcontroll
Thestarrypole,
And fallen, fallen light renew!
"Calling" refers primarily to Christ, the Holy Word calling
Adam in the garden, and the "lapsed Soul" is presumably Adam,
though the epithet seems curious, as Blake did not believe in a
soul, but only in a spiritual body, as far as individual man is
concerned. The word "weeping" also refers primarily to Christ.
Neither in the Biblical story nor in Paradise Lost, where we might
expect it, do we get much sense of Christ as deeply moved by
man's fate, except in theory. Blake is making a much more definite
identification than Milton does of Adam's "gracious Judge, without
60 HUNTINGTONLIBRARY QUARTERLY
revile," with the Jesus of the Gospels who wept over the death
of man as typified in Lazarus. Both the calling and the weeping,
of course, are repeated by the Bard; the denunciations of the
prophet and the elegiac vision of the poet of experience derive
from God's concern over fallen man.
In the last three lines the grammatical antecedent of "That"
is "Soul"; hence we seem to be told that man, if he had not
fallen, would have had the powers as well as the destiny of a god.
He would not now be subject to an involuntary subordination to a
"4nature"that alternately freezes and roasts him. On a second look,
however, we see that Blake is not saying "might have controlled,"
but "'mightcontroll": the conquest of nature is now within man's
powers, and is a conquest to which the poets and prophets are sum-
moning him with the voice of the Word of God. We are very close
here to Blake's central doctrine of art, and the reason for his in-
sistence that "Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists."
The ordinary world that we see is a mindless chaos held together
by automatic order: an impressive ruin, but a "slumberous mass,"
and not the world man wants to live in. What kind of world man
wants to live in is indicated by the kind of world he keeps trying
to create: a city and a garden. But his cities and gardens, unlike
the New Jerusalem and Eden of the Biblical revelation, are not
eternal or infinite, nor are they identical with the body of God.
By "'Artist"Blake means something more like charitable man or
man of visible love. He is the man who lives now in the true world
which is man's home, and tries to make that world visible to others.
"Let every Christian," urges Blake, "engage himself openly &
publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the
Building up of Jerusalem."
The second stanza particularly illustrates the fact that what is
true of time must be equally true of space. Just as the real form
of time is "'A vision of the Eternal Now," so the real form of
space is "here." Again, in ordinary experience of space, the cen-
ter of space, which is "here," cannot be located, except vaguely
as within a certain area: all experienced space is "4there,"which
is why, when we invent such gods as Nobodaddy, we place them
"up there," in the sky and out of sight. But as "eternal" means
really present, so "'infinite" means really here. Christ is a real
presencein space as well as a real presentin time, and the poet's
imaginationhas the functionof bringinginto ordinaryexperience
what is really here and now, the bodily presenceof God. Just as
there is no God except a Godwho is also Man, so there is no real
man except Jesus, man who is also God. Thus the imaginationof
the poet, by makingconcreteand visible a hidden creativepower,
repeatsthe Incarnation.
If all times are now in the imagination,all spaces are here.
Adambefore his fall lived in a Paradisalgarden,a gardenwhich
is to be one day restored to him, but which since his fall has
existed, as Jesus taught,within us, no longer a place but a state
of mind. Thus Blake begins Milton by speakingof his own brain
as a part of the Gardenof Eden, whichhis art attemptsto realize
in the world. In the Bible the Gardenof Eden is the imaginative
form of what existed in history as the tyrannies of Egypt and
Babylon. Similarly the Promised Land, flowing with milk and
honey, is the imaginativeform of what existed historicallyas the
theocracy of Israel. England, along with America, is also the
historical form of what in the imagination is the kingdom of
Atlantis,whichincludedboth,butnowlies underthe "Sea of Time
and Space" flooding the fallen mind. We begin at this point to
see the connection between our present poem and the famous
lyric, written much later as a preface to Milton, "And did those
feet in ancient time." As all imaginative places are the same place,
Atlantis, Eden, and the Promised Land are the same place; hence
when Christ walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day
he was also walking on the spiritual form of England's mountains
green, among the "Druid" oaks. We note that Blake speaks in the
first line of this poem not of a poet or a prophet but of a "Bard,"
in his day an almost technical term for a tradition of British
poets going back to the dawn of history. "All had originally one
language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the
Everlasting Gospel."
O Earth,0 Earth,return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberousmass.
62 HUNTINGTONLIBRARYQUARTERLY
The first words spoken by Jesus through the mouth of his
"Bard"are, appropriatelyenough,quotedfromthe Hebrewproph-
ets. The first line refers partly to the desperatecry of Jeremiah
faced with the invincible stupidity of his king: "O earth, earth,
earth,hear the word of the Lord!" (Jer. xxii.29). A centuryear-
lier Milton, after twenty years spent in defending the liberty of
the English people, helplessly watchingthem choose "a Captain
back for Egypt," could express himself only in the same terms,
in a passage at the end of The Ready and Easy Way that may
have focused Blake's attentionon his source:
ThusmuchI shouldperhapshavesaid,thoughI weresureI shouldhave
spokenonlyto TreesandStones;andhadnoneto cry to, butwiththe
Prophet,0 Earth,Earth,Earth!to tell the very Soil itself,whather
perverseinhabitants aredeafto.
There is also an echo in the same line from Isaiah (xxi.11-12):
He callethto me out of Seir,Watchman, whatof the night?Watchman,
whatof thenight?Thewatchman said,Themorningcometh,andalsothe
night:if ye willinquire,inquireye: return,come.
Both in the Hebrewlanguageand in Blake's, "cometh"could also
be rendered by "has come": the light and the darkness are
simultaneouslywith us, one being "here" and the other "there,"
one trying to shine from within, the other surroundingus. Hence
a third Biblical allusion appears dimly but firmly attached to
the other two (John i.5): "And the light shineth in darkness;
and the darknesscomprehendedit not." The "fallen light," there-
fore, is the alternatinglight and darknessof the world we know;
the unfallen light would be the eternal light of the City of God,
wherethere is no longerneed for sun or moon, and wherewe can
finally see, as Blake explains in the prophecies,that no creative
act of man has, in fact, really disappearedin time.
We notice in this stanzathat the "Soul" is now identified,not
as Adam,but as "Earth,"a being who, as we can see by a glance
at the next poem, is female. Thus the "Soul" is a kind of anima
mundi;she includesnot only the individualman andthe "Church"
but the totality of life, the whole creation that, as Paul says,
groanethand travaileth in pain togetheruntil now. She is also
Nature red in tooth and claw, the struggle for existence in the
animalworld, of whichman, in his fallen aspect,forms part. The
prophetsees in every dawn the image of a resurrectionthat will
lift the world into anotherstate of being altogether.He is always
preparedto say "the time is at hand." But every dawn in the
world "out there" declines into sunset, as the spinning earth
turns away into darkness.
Turn away no more;

Why wilt thou turn away?
The starryfloor,
The wat'ryshore,
Is giv'n thee till the breakof day.
Thereare two ways of looking at the "fallen" world: as fallen,
and as a protectionagainstworse things. Man might conceivably
have fallen into total chaos, or nonexistence,or, like Tithonusor
Swift's Struldbrugs,he mighthave been forced to live withoutthe
hope of death. This world is pervadedby a force that we call
naturallaw, and naturallaw, howevermindlessand automatic,at
any rate affordsa solid bottomto life: it providesa sense of the
predictableand trustworthyon which the imaginationmay build.
The role of naturallaw (called Bowlahoolain the prophecies) as
the basis of imaginativeeffort is what Blake has in mind when
he calls creation "an act of Mercy"'; the providential aspect of
time, in sweeping everything away into an apparent nonexistence,
is brought out in his observation that "Time is the Mercy of
Eternity." In the Bible a similar sense of the created world as a
protection against chaos, usually symbolized in the Bible by the
sea, as a firmament in the midst of the waters, comes out in the
verse in Job (xxxviii.1): "Hitherto shalt thou come but no
further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." It is this
verse that Blake has in mind when he speaks of the "wat'ry shore"
as given to Earth until the Last Judgment; it is the same guaran-
tee that God gave to Noah in the figure of the rainbow. Similarly
the automatic accuracy of the heavenly bodies, of which Earth
of course is one, affords a minimum basis for imaginative effort.
Newtonian science is quite acceptable to Blake as long as it deals
with the automatism of nature as the "floor" and not the ceiling
of experience.
64 HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY
In Blake's prophecies there are two perspectives, so to speak,
on human life. One is a tragic and ironic vision; the other sees
life as part of a redemptive divine comedy. The usual form taken
by the tragic vision is that of a cyclical narrative, seen at its fullest
and clearest in The Mental Traveller and The Gates of Paradise.
Here there are two main characters, a male figure, the narrator in
The Gates of Paradise and the "Boy" of The Mental Traveller,
and a female figure who, in the latter poem, grows younger as
the male grows older and vice versa, and who in The Gates of
Paradise is described as "Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the Tomb."
The "Boy" of The Mental Traveller is struggling humanity,
called Orc in the prophecies. The female figure is nature, which
human culture partially but never completely subdues in a series
of historical cycles. The relations between them are roughly those
of mother and son, wife and husband, daughter and father. Very
roughly, for none of these relations is quite accurate: the mother
is an old nurse, the wife merely a temporary possession, and the
daughter a changeling. The "Female will," as Blake calls it, has
no necessary connection with human women, who are part of hu.
manity, except when a woman wants to make a career of being a
"harlot coy," or acting as nature does. The female will is rather
the elusive, retreating, mysterious remoteness of the external
world.
The "Introduction" to the Songs of Experience, despite its
deeply serious tone, takes on the whole the redemptive or prov-
idential view. Hence the relation of the two figures is reversed, or
rather, as they are not the same figures, the relation of a male and
a female figure is used to symbolize the redemption of man instead
of his bondage. The two characters correspond to the Bridegroom
and Bride of Biblical symbolism. The male character is primarily
Christ or the Word of God, which extends to take in the prophets
and poets, and is ultimately Christ as the creative power in the
whole of humanity. The "Bard" is called Los in the prophecies,
the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Son. The female character
Earth embraces everything that Christ is trying to redeem, the for-
given harlot of the Old Testament prophets who keeps turning
away from forgiveness. She has no name, as such, in the proph-
ecies, though her different aspects have different names, the most
importantbeing Ahania and Enion. She is in generalwhat Blake
calls the "emanation,"the total form of what man, or ratherGod
in man, is trying to create. This total form, a city, a garden, a
home,and a bed of love, or as Blake says "a City, yet a Woman,"
is Jerusalem.But just as the female will is not necessarilyhuman
women, so Earth, the Bride of Christ, includes men, as in the
more conventionalsymbol of the Church.
In her "Answer"Earth rejects with bitternessand some con-
tempt the optimistictone of the Bard's final words. She does not
feel protected;she feels imprisoned,in the situationdramatizedin
Blake's poem Visionsof the Daughtersof Albion. She recalls Jo,
guardedby the myriad-eyedArgus,or Andromeda,chainedon the
seashoreand constantlydevouredby a possessivejealousy. Earth
is not saying, as some critics accuseher of saying, that all would
be well if lovers would only learn to copulatein the daytime.She
is saying thatnearly all of man'screativelife remainsembryonic,
shrouded in darkness, on the level of wish, hope, dream and
privatefantasy. Man is summonedby the Bard to love the world
and let his love shine before men, but his naturaltendency,as a
child of fallen nature, is the miser's tendencyto associate love
with some private and secret possessionof his own. This "dark
secret love," or rather perversionof love, is what Blake means
by jealousy.
The "Selfishfather of men"who keeps Earthimprisonedis not
Godthe Father,of course,but the false father that man visualizes
as soon as he takes his mind off the Incarnation.To make God a
Fatheris to make ourselveschildren:if we do this in the light of
the Gospels,we see the world in the light of the state of innocence.
But if we take the point of view of the child of ordinaryexper-
ience, our God becomesa projectionof ordinarychildishness,a
vision of undevelopedhumanity.If we think of God as sulky,
capricious, irritable and mindlessly cruel, like Dante's primal
love who made hell, or tied in knots of legal quibbles, like
Milton'sfather-god,we may have a very awful divinity, but we
have not got a very presentablehumanbeing. There is no excuse
for keepingsuch a creaturearoundwhen we have a clear revela-
tion of God'shumannaturein the Gospels.
The source of this scarecrowis fallen nature: man makes a
66 HUNTINGTONLIBRARY QUARTERLY
gigantic idol out of the dark world, and is so impressedby its
stupidity,cruelty, empty spaces, and automatismthat he tries to
live in accordancewith the drearyideals it suggests.He naturally
assumes that his god is jealous of everythinghe clings to with
secretlonging and wantsit surrenderedto him; hence he develops
a religion of sacrifice. There are two other reasons for Earth's
calling her tormentorthe "father of the ancient men." In the
first place, he is the ghost of what in the New Testamentwould
be called the first Adam. In the second place, he is the god to
whom the "Druids" sacrificed human beings in droves, as an
eloquentsymbolof their belief, quite true in itself, that their god
hated human life. This false father still exists as the shadow
thrownby Newtonianscience into the stars, or what Blake calls
the "Spectre."He is the genius of discouragement,trying to im-
press us with the reality of the world of experienceand the utter
unreality of anythingbetter. His chief weapons are moral con-
formity, sexual shame, and the kind of rationalitythat always
turns out to be anti-intellectual.If we could only get rid of him,
"everything would appearto man as it is, infinite."
In the three charactersof these two poems we have the three
generatingforces, so to speak, of all Blake's symbolism.First is
the Bard, representativeof the whole class that Blake in Milton
calls "Reprobate,"personifiedby Los, and includingall genuine
prophets and artists. They are given this name because their
normalsocial role is that of a persecutedand ridiculed minority.
Earth includes the total class of the "Redeemed,"or those cap-
able of responding to the Reprobate. In the later prophecies
Blake tends to use the masculine and purely human symbol of
"Albion" as representing what the prophet tries to redeem. We
can see part of the reason for this change in the poems we are
studying: the Bard appeals to Earth, but Earth reminds him that
man is responsible for his own evils, and that he should talk
only to man if he is to do anything to help her.
The father of the ancient men is what in Milton is called the
"Elect," because the idolatry of fallen nature incarnates itself
in all natural societies; that is, the tyrannies of warriors and
priests. In Milton too the Reprobate and Redeemed are called
"Contraries," because the conflict between them is the "Mental
fight" in which every man is obligatedto engage. The Elect con-
stitutesa "Negation":he is the aspectof the law that the Gospel
annihilates,as distinctfrom the "starryfloor,"or basis of imag-
inative order which it fulfills.

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Blake's "Introduction" to "Experience"

Author(s): Northrop Frye

S TUDENTS OF LITERATURE often think of Blake as the author of

This stanzatells us a greatdeal aboutBlake'sview of the place

Turn away no more;

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