William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789) is a collection of illuminated poems
separated into two groupings, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience,
that engage with their respective, eponymous forces and ostensibly present them
as a dichotomy, or perhaps rather as a linear transition, with innocence giving way
to experience. But to consider the poem a presentation of binaries or opposing
forces, discounts much of the Blakean aesthetic. For me, it wasn’t just the
text and the accompanying illustrations that helped to frame and reify the
dialectical counterbalance between innocence and experience in Blake’s work,
but rather the addition of a third dimension: Allen Ginsberg’s musical renditionof the work, available through PennSound. It’s through Ginsberg’s off-key, warbling, sometimes out-of-time,
performance of the lyric that we get a simultaneous embracing of the Romantic
ideology and the Modernist rejection of it, coexistent and counterbalanced to
great aesthetic effect.
Content and form of
the original poems
First, a little on my view of Blake’s work. The presentation
of Blake’s poem, the separation into groupings of innocence and of experience,
would imply that each grouping is discrete and addresses solely its own force.
But that’s not how Blake’s collection works. It begins with the presentation of
innocence, focusing on youth and pastoral imagery as a kind of thesis, but
intersperses challenges to the purity of innocence, such as slavery and child
labor. Through this impingement of Experience upon Innocence’s textual ground,
it would be tempting to assume that Blake would chart a linear
progression, with an inverse relationship between innocence and age (for which
experience is an ostensible proxy or metonymy). Similarly, in Songs of Experience, we see the focus shift to the apparent corruption of
innocence: the turn toward death of the vegetal imagery (a symbol of innocence)
in “The Sick Rose,” a formerly fertile pastoral space turned fallow in “The
Garden of Love,” etc. But the balancing factor of this antithesis is the form,
both the poetic and visual form of the work. The ballad-esque forms that
project the feel of a soccer supporters club singing in a crowded pub and the
bright, Technicolor images that display a kind of childlike, Crayola vibrancy
even in their depiction of dark subject matter both serve to illustrate
(literally) the encroachment of Innocence upon Experience.
When I first read the work, I was expecting to see a kind of
Hegelian dialectic take shape: thesis (Innocence) collides with antithesis
(Experience), with the residue of the collision, the synthesis (death?), resolving, in time, the conflict. But what we actually get is a non-Hegelian
dialectic, similar to the way Henry Sayre describes William Carlos Williams’
dichotomy between reality and the imagination. It’s not that one force is the
established hegemony and a challenger will seek to supplant it, but rather that
the two forces can and do coexist symbiotically, even if ostensibly opposed.
Innocence needs Experience to care for it. We see this repeatedly throughout
the poems—imagery of shepherds and mothers and nurses representing Experience’s
nurture of Innocence. Later, we see the content turn dark, toward Experience,
but the form seeks to counterbalance it through interspersed innocence, including youth as a palliative presence in “London," and the persistent presence of vegetation as a symbol of innocence. Through this
disjuncture, Innocence offers its help to Experience. It seeks to show that
reality is constructed through perception, through the imagination (as WCW
would claim over a century later), and that Innocence is ever-present and can
be invoked at any point to act as a counterbalance. In this manner, we get two
contingent and interdependent forces, which can never devolve into one
superseding the other, nor a Hegelian synthesis. It’s perhaps Kantian, in that innocence is tied to perception (phenomena) and experience gets bound up in an
immutable reality, a progression toward death (noumena). We can’t altogether
avoid the noumenal reality of things, but we can and do construct a phenomenal
reality through perception. Blake suggests that this process can be
conscious—innocence can be recalled and applied to temper experience—in much the same way Williams calls upon the imagination to temper reality.
Ginsberg’s
performance of the collection
While Ginsberg offers a unique interpretation of the Songs through his musical renditions, I
find that listening while looking at the original illuminated texts provides
the best feel for how Ginsberg extends and complements the content and form
aurally.
Starting from the first song, the introduction to Innocence, the poem describes a biblical
divine inspiration, wherein a piper meets a messianic child on a cloud who is
moved by his song. The child asks the piper to “pipe a song about a Lamb”—note
the capitalization here, likely an allusion to the Christian “Lamb of God” and
reflexive to the child who requests it. From there, the child asks the piper to
sing, and then finally to write. The order here should not be overlooked. This
subordination would be echoed by poets from Ezra Pound (“music begins to
atrophy when it departs too far from the dance…poetry begins to atrophy when it
gets too far from music”) through Olson (written poetry as derivative of kinesis
and human breath) through Vachel Lindsay (who saw written poems as librettos to
sung/performed poems). So the progressions goes: melody to song to text, the latter
being necessary for preservation, though inferior to the former options. This
framing works well for Ginsberg’s performance, where he becomes the inspired,
revitalizing the textual representations of the Songs into their intended sung forms. As discussed in the PoemTalk on this work, he becomes the bard
who composes and sings these songs to us, through a divine inspiration.
In addition, the musical choices made throughout Ginsberg’s
interpretation of Blake intertwine with the content and form. Starting from the
introduction to Innocence, we hear
the choice to include a flute, which seems meant to evoke the piper’s pipe. The
flute exists throughout the Songs of
Innocence, and seems to become an aural symbol of innocence. Its presence
in poems where Experience impinges upon Innocence, such as in “The ChimneySweep,” begin to create an aural disjuncture parallel to that created between
the darkening theme of child labor against the images of children embracing and
perhaps celebrating their liberation by the angel. The flute all but disappears
as we progress into Experience (save
for “To Tirzah.”)
Most interesting to me in terms of musical arrangement is the
lack of drums in Innocence, and their
appearance on certain tracks in Experience.
To me, this is a crucial detail, as drums mark regular time and evoke the
metronome, an anathemized symbol in the
modernist aesthetic—“compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the
sequence of the metronome,” said Pound—for its association with mechanized
poetic forms. The introduction of drums in “The Garden of Love” and culminating
in “The Grey Monk,” (though this work is not part of Blake's Songs of Experience) with drum legend Elvin Jones playing on the latter, to me
connotes a conscious aesthetic choice to chart a course toward the Romantic aesthetic of poetry, as innocence becomes background to experience. To counterbalance the Romantic
ideology, we have Ginsberg’s warbling, whimsical, out-of-key vocals continuing
to evoke Innocence, now impinging upon Experience, through their association
with childlike revelry. Herein do we get an aural, non-Hegelian dialectic
taking shape.
Finally and most importantly, I would note the increased
degree of production and polish we can perceive when we arrive at the final
song in Ginsberg's Songs of Experience, “The Grey Monk.” The fact that this track is appended to the album is an interesting aesthetic decision itself, as "The Grey Monk" is not part of Blake's Songs of Experience. Ginsberg's decision to include it as a conclusion seems to signify where he thinks the Songs' logical end-point lies should innocence be depleted: violence and renewed tyranny. Only an "intellectual thing" like a tear, which also has religious connotations of contrition, forgiveness, and thus return to innocence, can restore balance.
The music that started out sounding like a ragtag group of folk musicians in
the introduction to Innocence now
takes on a much more professional and produced feel, even moving toward
including professional musicians like Elvin Jones on the track. This move
toward a manicured production is directly in parallel with the Romantic
aesthetic of attempting to reach a kind of purity through form. At the same
time as the we reach the (overwrought?) zenith of this formal trend, we reach
the nadir of the darkening of the content. So the Romantic aesthetic seems to
chart a linear course with the growing hegemony of Experience. At the same time, Ginsberg’s out-of-key vocals conjure
the modernist aesthetic—the kind of beauty-in-the-broken aesthetic captured so
well by William Carlos Williams, a primary inspiration of Ginsberg’s. So here
we have the Blakean concept of Innocence merging with the modernist aesthetic
of Ginsberg's time, present and acting as a counterbalance to the Romantic Experience
that has come to the fore.
And so I propose that, not only do we get a dialectical
balance between innocence and experience in Ginsberg’s rendition of Blake, but
so too an interplay between Romanticism and Modernism. And all of this is made
present by the aural facets and production choices made in the creation of the
album. In this way, Ginsberg helps us to perceive both the complexity of Blake’s
work and Blake’s position as a proto-modernist.
