Songs

chapter 14 Songs Steve Newman William Blake begins and ends in song. ‘Song’ is the first genre he names in his first published volume, Poetical Sketches (1783), and songs are plentiful in An Island in the Moon, the riotous and polymorphous satire composed about the same time. The last plate with text in the last of his prophetic books tell us that we have reached ‘The End of The Song / of Jerusalem’ (99: 7–8, E 259). The works he produces between Poetical Sketches and Jerusalem are filled with songs and singing, not only Songs of Innocence and of Experience but also The Song of Los, and ‘the Song of Spring’ in Milton (31[34]: 29, E 130). Blake’s life, too, describes a song-filled arc. The recent discovery of his mother’s Morvaian affiliations bolsters the conjecture that as a child he heard Moravian hymns, their rhythms and figures finding their way into Songs of Innocence and of Experience.1 Then there are the songs he might have heard growing up in London, including the multifarious broadsides then sold on the streets and the songs performed at the pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Add to this the songs he may have read, such as those in Joseph Ritson’s A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), for which he supplied nine engravings. Later in life, he is remembered to have been ‘very fond of hearing Mrs. Linnell sing Scottish songs’ and he ‘sang, in a voice tremulous with age, sometimes old ballads, sometimes his own songs, to melodies of his own.’ As he expired, he is reported to have ‘burst out into singing of the things he saw in Heaven’ (Gilchrist 294, 362). If songs form a key context for Blake’s life and work, his work also shows how songs can transform contexts; and in what follows I will sketch how he revises Street Cries, hymns, and songbooks, and how this bears on his representation of one specific context – the city where he spent almost all his life. In so doing, Blake poses trenchant questions about the emerging elite interest in collecting popular texts, about the role political hierarchy and cultural capital play in this attraction to ‘the low’, and, more broadly, about the transformative power of songs. 129 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press 130 steve newman An Island in the Moon presents a farrago of songs as the Islanders travel from one parlour to another, ranging from a satire on the profession of surgery to a ribald piece in which Scipio Africanus tells Dr Johnson to ‘kiss my Roman anus’ to the precious pastoral of ‘the song of Phebe and Jellicoe’ (E 455, 458, 457). The city outside asserts itself when they are interrupted by the sounds of ‘1st Vo[ice]’ asking if anyone ‘Want[s] matches’ and a ‘2d Vo[ice]’, a fickle customer, replying ‘Yes’ and then ‘No–’. What is the effect on the Islanders as this uninvited snatch of song moves from the street into their polite parlour? Here was Great confusion & disorder Aradobo said that the boys in the street sing something very pritty & funny about London O no about Matches Then Mrs Nannicantipot sung I cry my matches as far as Guild hall God bless the duke & his aldermen all. (E 458) As I have discussed elsewhere, this song mimics the Cries of London, which date from the fifteenth century and which remained much in vogue in the streets and on the stage of eighteenth-century London.2 Representing the patter of those seeking custom in the city, they are re-packaged as a textualised and often-illustrated slice of urban sound by turns cacophonous and euphonious, reduced to quaint order for the reader. Similarly, the matchseller’s song enters into the refined domestic space of the Islanders, travelling without respect to social boundaries as songs in the city are wont to do. As one song often evokes another, Aradobo remembers one ‘about London’; that Blake washes out this phrase does not erase the sense that these Cries are indeed ‘about London’ in the sense of being both ‘on the subject of’ and ‘in the vicinity of’ the city. For the alternate Cry that Arodobo remembers and Mrs Nannicantipot then sings shows how the chaotic energy of the metropolis can be contained. Her Cry infantilises the singers – the initial Voices are not assigned an age, and not all matchsellers were children – and also places specific geographical and sociopolitical boundaries around the Cry, as it reaches only to an urban sign of great commercial power (‘as far as Guild hall’) and blesses the representatives of the ruling class. In this way, without apparent design, the unruly sounds of the city are contained. For Blake, children are not so easily confined, and pat judgements about songs, the city, and political power cannot stand. This is born out in a song that appears a couple of scenes later in An Island in the Moon, what would in Songs of Innocence be titled ‘Holy Thursday’. Against the disorder of the https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press Songs 131 matchsellers we have neat rows of clean-faced children filing ‘two & two’ into London’s grandest monument to Church and State, ‘the high dome of [St] Pauls’ on a particular day set by the liturgical calendar (ll. 2, 4, E 462). At first glance, this orderliness does not seem oppressive. ‘Flow[ing]’ like ‘thames water’, ‘these flowers of London town’ have an organic life that springs from the city, the ‘of’ in ‘of London town’ signifying as both of-asfrom and of-as-metonym (ll. 4, 5). But if they are unlike the restricted, commercialised ‘charterd Thames’ of a darker ‘London’ that appears in Songs of Experience, they are also well ordered: ‘Seated in companies’ and marked out by clothing in particular colours, they resemble the livery companies that organise and rule the economic life of London. Yet if the children have ‘innocent faces clean’ (l. 1), this only highlights that the forces responsible for arraying them so neatly are not innocent, whether or not the speaker is aware of this. In a deft re-contextualising of the poem within the history of charity schools more broadly and charity schoolchildren singing on Holy Thursday in particular, David Fairer homes in on the explosive implications of the term that the speaker uses to characterise them: ‘The hum of multitudes were there but multitudes of lambs’ (l. 7). Well before Burke’s infamous stigmatising of ‘the swinish multitude’, the word ‘multitude’ had already emerged as a condensation point for anxiety about an unruly urban mass, and the reassuring qualification that these are ‘multitudes of lambs’ shows how easily ‘on another occasion the “hum” might figure differently. How easily their voices could become those of a disorderly mob if left unregulated.’3 Instead, they are arrayed to voice their thanks for the self-congratulatory benefit of those who rule over them. This historicist account must be supplemented with one that acknowledges more clearly the power of song to transform context; the control of this ‘multitude’ is challenged when its ambient ‘hum’ comes into focus as song: ‘Then like a mighty wind they raise to heavn the voice of song / Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heavn among’ (ll. 9–10, E 463). The phrasing of ‘the voice of song’ calls attention to the specific act of singing. Again, we have the subtle intensification that comes with ‘of’ – ‘voice’ might be read to be from song but also the epitome of song within a wider set of vocal possibilities. Here, the particular type of song is the hymn. Blake’s era is particularly rich in hymnody, from Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs Attempted in Easy Language, for the Use of Children (1715) to the Wesleys’ Methodist hymns, to John Newton and William Cowper’s Olney Hymns.4 At this point, hymns were sung either in the older form of the metrical psalm, enshrined in Sternhold and https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press 132 steve newman Hopkins’s Psalter of the mid-sixteenth century, or the more recent form of Anglican chant. The metrical psalm, while often scorned by those higher in the status hierarchy, encouraged ‘the congregation to take an active part in worship’ while Anglican chant was limited mostly to the performer(s).5 Blake, for his part, sets the poem that represents the hymn in the common meter of the metrical psalm, and this commonality is a sign of and source of their power. As the ‘[t]housands [. . .] rais[e] their innocent hands’ (l. 8, E 462), they push against the physical and metaphorical bounds of the institution that would contain them and display them for the glory of the ‘beadles’ and other ‘guardians of the poor’ (ll. 3, 11). In the Island manuscript, Blake continues in this vein, the speaker likening the children to angels and also possibly eliciting a response from them: ‘Let cherubim & seraphim now raise their voice high’ (E 850). But he deletes these lines, coming back down to earth, as it were, and focusing instead on how the voices of the children, ‘raise[d] to heavn’, elevates them above ‘the revrend men’ who are supposedly their ‘guardians’ but who appropriately sit ‘[b]eneath them’ (ll. 9, 11, E 463). The bringing of heaven into touch with earth carries over to the conclusion as the poem turns to the audience and concludes with the proverbial: ‘Then cherish pity lest you drive an angel from your door’ (ll. 11–12). Depending on how innocent we think this speaker is, we may or may not attribute him the consciousness that this line critiques ‘the revrend men’ whose charity is merely formal and thus cannot recognise angels when they see them, or, more radically, as an attack on the very idea of ‘pity’ as requiring a status difference predicated on an unjust economy (‘Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor’, we are told in ‘The Human Abstract’ (ll. 1–2, E 27).) But however we read the last line, this song illustrates with particular clarity the power of song itself to alter and perhaps fundamentally critique the context that commands the singing. In Songs, the social loci of singing present in Island are fainter. Largely absent, too, are the more extended experiments in Poetical Sketches with amatory song, ‘mad song’, and antiquarian stylings along the lines of Chatterton and Macpherson that are part of the elite collection of popular song in the era. What we do get is a profound exploration of the power of song in shaping the identity of singer and audience and the political effects of that power; and a key vehicle for that exploration is Blake’s experiments in the visualisation of song. Elizabeth Helsinger has usefully observed that Blake’s ‘composite art’ brings his songs closer to illustrated collections such as Ritson’s; Blake ‘seems to have shared Ritson’s more generous attitude towards the varieties of print that might serve diverse audiences for song, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press Songs 133 more generous than Percy and other gentleman antiquarians.’6 But then illustrations were still present in the ballads being sold on the streets of London and throughout the British Isles; although woodcuts had generally decreased in size and complexity in the move to slip songs in the eighteenth century, most ballads still carried some sort of illustration; and eighteenthcentury ballads typically recycled older images, sometimes, it appears, to ironically juxtapose past and present.7 Indeed, the elaborate illustrations in antiquarian collections themselves, such as A Collection of Old Ballads, might be recycled by enterprising low-end printers such as the Diceys.8 So whether more directly from the streets or mediated through antiquarian collections, Songs is clearly affected by the visual and verbal elements of popular song. Consider how ‘Holy Thursday’ is transmuted in its move from Island to Songs. The text is framed above and below by files of children (boys on top, girls below) led by adults, a visualisation of the order imagined and maintained by the authorities of school, church, and state. But the vibrancy of the colour and the turning of some of the children towards each other, rather than only facing front, pushes against the pious rigidities of officialdom, just as ‘the interlinear vegetation, animals, birds, and human figures’ are thicker here than in any other poem in Songs, a visual pun on the Living Word suggesting the vitality of the children’s song echoing in St Paul’s.9 Of course, what Songs also gives us that Island does not are Songs of Experience. For the speaker of this ‘Holy Thursday’, there is no joy to be taken in the sight of the children as he exposes the false kindness of charity: ‘Babes reducd to misery, / Fed with cold and usurous hand’ (33: 3–4, E 19). As for their song, he hears it as ‘a trembling cry’, since ‘a song of joy’ would be impossible in the ‘land of poverty’ in which they dwell (ll. 5–8); he elaborates on this geographical reading of their suffering: And their sun does never shine And their fields are bleak & bare And their ways are fill’d with thorns, It is eternal winter there. (ll. 9–12) Conversely, there can be no hunger or ‘poverty’ that ‘appall[s] the mind’ in a place where the sun shines and the rain falls (ll. 13–16, E 20). The Innocence of seeing the children as ‘flowers of London town’ is revealed to be the worst kind of naiveté. If we occupy this position uncritically, we are complicit in their suffering, conveniently obscured by the machinery of the ritual of their song in St Paul’s. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press 134 steve newman But ‘appall’ – a pun on St Paul’s? – is a tip-off that the speaker’s eyes and ears are not the unerring guides he thinks they are, and this, in turn, brings us back to the power of songs to create, not just reflect, contexts. That the speaker of ‘Holy Thursday’ imagines the children’s world as one where poverty ‘appalls the mind’ suggests that he may suffer from the same limitations in the way he hears and sees their song in his song. For him, their song becomes literalised, concretised as the sound of those trapped in an eternally wintry landscape. This literalism is then reiterated in the companion claim that where the sun shines, no appalling poverty can be found. Like so many other speakers in Songs, this one is struggling to make sense of an intolerable situation, and one response Blake is aiming to elicit through his songs is what Helsinger, drawing on Bruce Smith’s groundbreaking analysis of broadside ballads, resonantly calls ‘empathetic mimesis’. Just as Blake’s songs are ‘full of the line and phrase repetitions and structural symmetries’ typical of broadside ballads, they also ‘offer the singer and the listener [. . .] the possibility of becoming many subjects, by internalising the sounds and rhythms of those subjects’ voices’.10 But the way that the speaker of ‘Holy Thursday’ (Experience) hears the charityschool children’s song also reveals that ‘empathetic mimesis’ may itself mask a sort of mimetic violence. In the prophetic books that follow, Blake repeatedly stages scenes in which characters ‘become what they behold’, transformed usually for ill by the limited and limiting evidence of their senses, dominated by their context (see Jerusalem 39[44]: 32, E 187; 66: 36, E 218). Then there is the converse dynamic: we are prone to transform the objects of our vision or hearing to conform to our presuppositions and thus distort them to our ends. By assuming that the children’s song could be nothing but the sign they dwell in a land of ‘eternal winter’, even if he can imagine some alternate sunny place, the speaker/hearer of ‘Holy Thursday’ overlooks that the children’s song right now renovates the space they are in, a transformation audible to the ears of the Innocent speaker who has a more flexible stance towards the interaction of song and space, even if he, in turn, misses the oppression that places them where they are. Songs, through its composite art and its exploration of the dialectic of innocence and experience, uses song to enliven our eyes and perk up our ears to the way musical language enunciated by speakers not often afforded that privilege might reveal the relationship between ‘the people’ and the contexts that shape them and that they might shape. However, if Blake’s songs transform their contexts, they also must contend with the contexts of their own production and reception. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press Songs 135 The labour-intensive methods Blake employed to elicit this response and his marginal place in the elite cultural economy of his time meant that his work circulated in his own time and for many decades thereafter much less widely than a broadside ballad of even limited popularity, pointing to the limits of song to transform material contexts. Though his work has the power to alter how we think of book and song, politics and vision, it cannot on its own rewrite the history of the media in which it is enmeshed. Blake continues to rely on song both thematically and formally for the rest of his career, sometimes reminding us of the dangerous power of songs, especially when sung by women, to make listeners become what they behold/hear; for example, the lulling ‘nightly song’ that helps keep Enitharmon passive for ‘[e]ighteen hundred years’ in Europe (9: 5, E 63). Songs echo in the city of Blake’s senses and vision, especially in Jerusalem, where the narrator reports that ‘The Shuttles of death sing in the sky to Islington & Pancrass / Round Marybone to Tyburns River, weaving black melancholy’, a darkening vision countered by ‘the Song that [Los] sings on his Watch’ drawing on the calls of the watchmen who nightly patrol the streets of London (Jerusalem 37[41]: 7–8, E 183; 85: 21, E 244). By far the best known of his later songs, and one that gives us a vision of a city renewed, is the hymn detached from the Preface to two of the four known copies of Milton, given the title ‘Jerusalem’ in the early twentieth century. Here, after Blake urges his audience in oratorical prose to resist ‘the hirelings’ in ‘the Camp, the Court & the University’, which all seek to ‘depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War’, he moves back into the rhythms and images of the metrical psalm (pl. 1[i], E 95). He begins with a question: is it possible that ‘the Holy Lamb of God’ and ‘the Countenance Divine’ graced the ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’, the same place dominated now by ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ (1[i]: 3–8)? The present thus seems to be a blighted urban landscape, though this is not an anachronistic reference to industrial mills but rather to a self-limiting restriction of one’s sight to the ‘same dull round’ (There Is No Natural Religion [b] iv, E 2), the mill of a universe dominated by those who would deny holy vision to embrace the empiricism of Newton and Locke. But the speaker’s vision is not bound by or to ‘the mill’. He launches into a series of imperatives that presuppose the agency to transform this state of affairs, beginning with ‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold’ (l. 9). This expanded present makes space for a future redemption that returns us to ‘mountains green’ and ‘pleasant pastures’, as the speaker declares: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press 136 steve newman I will not cease from Mental Fight Nor shall my Sword sleep in my Hand Till we have built Jerusalem In Englands green & pleasant Land. (ll. 13–16, E 95–6) Drawing on the collectivising power of the hymn, the ‘I’ of the speaker expands into a ‘we’ who will rebuild Jerusalem, telescoping place and time into a redeemed city envisioned in the singing itself. Despite its transformative promise, the circumstances of its production means that ‘Jerusalem’ has even less of a chance to circulate its vision during Blake’s lifetime than ‘Holy Thursday’, limited to two copies of a large and expensive work of consummate visual and verbal art, their early provenance unknown. Yet the longer history of ‘Jerusalem’ also confirms how songs are frequently not contained by their initial modes of production and circulation. Key to its popularity has been Hubert Parry’s setting of it in 1916 at the request of Robert Bridges, which began its ascendance as an unofficial English national anthem. It has since been used by groups with a wide range of political orientations,11 and the apex of this enshrinement, at least in terms of the sheer size of the audience, was its integration into the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, directed by Danny Boyle. There, in the midst of the contemporary city, it begins Boyle’s extravaganza of British history, as the pastoral English countryside is displaced by the emergence of smokestacks and bowler-hatted Victorian gentlemen – and then later by the National Health Service and the World Wide Web. Blake might recoil from his hymn being pressed into service for an event dominated by the hirelings of great nations who see sports as war by other means, saturated in corporate sponsorships that enrich the International Olympic Committee and the media conglomerates that broadcast it worldwide. But it is worth noting that Boyle, at least, hopes that a utopian message will survive the cacophony, that ‘that through all the noise and excitement you’ll glimpse a single golden thread of purpose – the idea of Jerusalem – of the better world, the world of real freedom and true equality [. . .]. And that it will be for everyone’.12 Or, as Blake writes underneath the verse in Milton, quoting Numbers 11:29, ‘Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets’ (pl. 1 [i], E 96). Boyle thus takes his place amidst the thousands who have made Blake’s songs their own, ranging from the rich, dark art-songs of Benjamin Britten to the goofy ecstasies of Allen Ginsberg to the invigorating roots music of Martha Redbone.13 These diverse re-inscriptions of Blake lead us back to the attractions and complications of songs as context. Despite the work of musicologists, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press Songs 137 cultural historians, and those focusing on the history of the print trade, especially its lower reaches, we do not yet fully understand the processes behind the persistence or disappearance of songs, and the ways they are valued or not.14 Songs may endure for centuries, such as ‘Children in the Wood’ or ‘Auld Lang Syne’; or they may disappear quickly, such as topical ballads by Grub Street hacks or the seasonal songs at the pleasure gardens (though these, too, may have long lives). A broadside purchased for a penny not only costs less but also carries less cultural capital than that same song in an up-market song-book such as George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Scottish Airs (1793–1818), or in an antiquarian collection such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which Blake owned (Stranger 26). The valuations themselves change over time – for instance, as folklorists began in the later nineteenth century to prize the authenticity of oral recitation over print and even manuscript. Similarly, the particulars of a song’s performance – a dimension too-often forgotten in the focus of literary scholars on text – also mark differences in cultural profile. Hearing a ballad sung in the street is not the same as hearing a ‘Border Melody’ performed by Mrs Linnell, the wife of one of Blake’s patrons, on that relatively new and genteel instrument, the pianoforte. Even when ambient rather than foregrounded, like a song heard faintly echoing down a street, even when silent, like the ‘files of ballads dangl[ing] from dead walls’ in The Prelude,15 songs shape the texts that incorporate them in complex ways. Notes 1. See K. Davies, ‘William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification’, Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly, 33.2 (Fall 1999), 36–50. 2. On Street Cries in eighteenth-century England, see S. Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002). See also S. Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 141–54. 3. D. Fairer, ‘Experience Reading Innocence: Contextualizing Blake’s “Holy Thursday”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35.4 (Summer 2002), 535–62 (p. 555). 4. On Blake and hymns, see J. R. Watson, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Wholly Spirit’, in D. Barratt, et al. (eds.), The Discerning Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), pp. 195–217, and N. Hilton, ‘What Has Songs to Do with Hymns’, in S. Clark and D. Worrall (eds.), Blake in the Nineties (New York: St Martin’s 1999), pp. 96–113. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press 138 steve newman 5. W. H. Stevenson, ‘The Sound of “Holy Thursday”’, Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly, 82 (Spring 2003), 137–40 (p. 138). 6. E. Helsinger, ‘Poem into Song’, New Literary History, 46.4 (Autumn 2015), 669–90 (p. 680). 7. A. Franklin, ‘Making Sense of Broadside Ballad Illustrations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in K. Murphy and S. O’Driscoll (eds.), Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), pp. 169–94. 8. See D. Dugaw, ‘Popular Marketing of “Old Ballads”: 18th-Century Antiquarianism Reconsidered’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 21 (1987), 71–90. 9. ‘Illustration Description’ to Songs of Innocence and of Experience, obj. 19, WBA. 10. Helsinger, ‘Poem into Song’, pp. 682, 681. 11. J. Whittaker, ‘Mental Fight, Corporeal War, and Righteous Dub: The Struggle for “Jerusalem”, 1979–2009’, in S. Clark, T. Connolly, and J. Whittaker (eds.), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth Century Art, Music and Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 263–73. 12. For the text, see Riz Ahmed (@rizmc), tweet, 27 July 2012, #olympics2012, https://twitter.com/rizmc/status/228929779917807616 13. D. Fitch, Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Fitch issued a supplement in the Fall 2001 issue of Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly. For a useful survey, see K. Davies, ‘Blake Set to Music’, in Clark, Connolly, and Whittaker (eds.), Blake 2.0, pp. 189–208. 14. See C. M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), and R. S. Thomson, ‘The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and Its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs’, Ph.D. diss., Queens’ College, Cambridge, 1974. See also K. D. Murphy and S. O’Driscoll (eds.), Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013). 15. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (eds.), William Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850 (New York: Norton, 1979), (1805) VII. 209. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316534946.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press