Summary of Blake

How do I interpret William Blake? The general stuff seems pretty easy.
Blake hated institution for the sake of institution. He valued oppositions,
even though he usually came out in favor of one of the opposites. He
believed both reason and imagination necessary but grew angry when reason replaced imagination for a function imagination could easily do. He was a fan of revolution, an enemy of passivity. But notice, these are things we could say about a lot of us. The problem with Blake’s confusing prose is
that it’s so much harder to get into the specifics of his belief. Blake seems good at opening the doors to new interpretations, theories, beliefs,
revolutions, but he isn’t great at (or wasn’t trying to) showing a specific
interpretation. And his views on women and slaves are tricky at best. It’s
tough not to fight for the argument that Blake wasn’t a racist, that he
wasn’t a sexist. But it may be that in his time he was considered radically
liberal even though we would set him on the far right today (in respect to
gender and race).
So what do I do about it? I try to avoid the "every interpretation is
right" approach. Blake is certainly vague enough and confusing enough that you can make a wide range of arguments about most of his poems. But I think it’s important now to start choosing one of those arguments or looking for my own. That’s my goal for my final paper: find something I actually
believe about William Blake’s poetry. It’s important because regardless of
whether I’m right, I will learn more by defending an argument (and possibly being wrong) than I will by accepting every argument. Blake would want me to be active.

Intro to 'The Bird and the Snake'

This poem is my attempt at writing my own ideas in Blakean form. I took an
event that really happened to me and tried to make it mythological. The
three agents are, of course, the snake, the bird, and the Boy. The snake
represents a lot of things. In Blakean terms, the snake is the Child of
Innocence corrupted by experience. The child runs into 'industrial-strength
fate.' What if God is just a boy with a lawn mower? He's all-powerful, but
certainly not all-knowing. And only questionably all-benevolent. My
question of God has always been, if he has all of this power, why would he
possibly care what I do? Thus, why should I really care about him? This
poem gives one possible answer, in that God does care, but just doesn't have
the capacity to prevent all of the harm his creations (lawnmower, Industrial Revolution) create. The bird is simply a natural predator.

I like the bird as the predator, snake as victim, because it's an inversion
(and thus in my mind Blakean) of the usual roles. I suppose it would have
been more effective if it had been a mouse that attacked the wounded snake.
But the bird was there in my real life incident. Birds are cute. Birds go
'chirp chirp.' But, in terms of the poem, and in terms of Blake, the bird
is only acting according to it's nature, just like the lawnmower is only
acting according to its nature, which (hopefully) makes us wonder, "If we
are created in His image, just what is His nature?" This poem was meant to
explore the limits of the God that Humans can create, in conjunction with
limitLESS technology we also create.

The Bird and the Snake

On a green dome inverted,
With floor of blue sun,
When perspective perverted
Shows lawnmowers run

Concentric in swaths,
Spiraling in but not down.
Spinning blades carving paths
Artificial groomed ground.

An amphitheater, a lawn
Anxious firs on each side.
All humane features gone
Save past destruction, the guide

Our protagonist young,
Steers chaos-covered steel
A serpent soon flung
Sees an oncoming wheel,

The creature dark brown
Too confused to move
Meets industrial-strength Fate
Functioning, smooth

The serpent slides under
The four-wheel parade
And Ascended into heaven
Of murderous blades

Next instant the snake
Hears angels no more
It lay upside down
(Red blood decorating)
softer green blades with gore.

The boy unknowing
Cycles inward more

Until contrast kidnaps
His attention
each revolution displaying
His victim, still living
still-life.


Each revolution displaying
The thin patch of skin connecting
The snake’s now-divided torso

Each revolution displaying
The snake’s struggle to regain
Mobility.

One half of the
semi-carcass finally flips
the snake multi-tasking.

The motor’s roar dies
Before the snake.
The boy leaves,
adding distance to guilt.
But
He watches His created destruction

Robin enters the scene
Stilted feet approach in thunders
Warning the crippled victim
Who once again cannot escape

Vision filled with now-diving
Predatory beak
ripping reptilian
Flesh.

Christmas colors strike
The boy,
The snake rights itself
And drags Robin’s meal
Eight inches away.

Fowl follows and
Carnage continues.
Until divine intervention.
The boy casts the snake out
Of His kingdom.

Into the surrounding wilderness.
And peaceful death

Peter Mullenix