Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/23

 SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE.

"Songs of Innocence," like the book of "Vala," begin with Tharmas. But it is the innocent Tharmas whose face Vala blesses, whose flocks give her companionship and whose rivers grow reeds well fitted for the pen that should write what "every child may joy to hear." He is now quite different from the "false tongue" or "sense of touch" to whom the spirit of Forgiveness and Imagination was sacrificed. The portion of "Vala" which begins with Night IX., l. 384, shows the return of nature, now the "sinless soul," to the state of innocence.

The symbolic element in the songs is slight, delicate, evanescent. Here, more even than elsewhere, the heavy tread of the interpreter is oppressive. Even the "Little Black Boy," however, cannot be understood, unless it be taken as part of the general mystical manifesto that runs through all the work. In this poem Man's heart and imagination need, we are told, to be exercised for a while on the dark things of the five senses with their seemingly solid and opaque world around. Man is then the little black boy, taught by mother Nature underneath the tree that is the Vine in its good aspect, and becomes Mystery when Priesthood perverts this teaching. The mother, who is the "vegetative happy,"—Mnetha herself,—points to the East while she teaches symbolism. The sun is the signal of Love, that paradoxically manifests itself by giving us a cloud, the dark body, to screen us from Himself. By death or by inspiration we shall presently be free of it, and then it will be seen that the white boy is also the inhabitant of a cloud as