We come today to transcription of the last moments of Allen’s 1980 Naropa summer “Basic Poetics” course. He concludes with (who else?) William Blake
AG: Well what we’ve got in here – a couple of them here – [Allen, accompanied by harmonium, begins singing] – “Hear the voice of the Bard!/Who Present, Past and Future sees/Whose ears have heard,/ The Holy Word,/ That walk’d among the ancient trees./Calling the lapsed Soul/ And weeping in the evening dew:/That might controll,/The starry pole;/And fallen fallen light renew! /O Earth O Earth return!/Arise from out the dewy grass;/ Night is worn, /And the morn/ Rises from the slumberous mass./ Turn away no more:/ Why wilt thou turn away /The starry floor/ The watry shore/ Is giv’n thee till the break of day” – (I don’t know if you noticed, prosodaically, the “watry shore”, the “starry floor”, “The watry shore/ Is “giv’n” thee till the break of day”, (it’s not “The watery shore/ Is given thee till the break of day”- he got rid of.. he elided the “e’s”, so we go trippingly on the tongue – the “starry floor”, “the watry shore”/ Is giv’n thee till the break of day” – So those contractions are intentional for singing or for speaking.
AG: Yes… There’s a country ‘n western version of [“Holy Thursday“] – “Is this a holy thing to see,/ In a rich and fruitul land/Babes reducd to misery,/Fed with cold and usurous hand?/Is that trembling cry a song?/ Can it be a song of joy?/ And so many children poor?/It is a land of poverty! /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./For where-e’er the sun does shine,/And where-e’er the rain does fall:/Babe can never hunger there,
(ok, now, but, speaking of “The Tyger”, I don’t know if we went over this but, Los, the imagination – “the terrific portal” opened the gates, opened the bars to the northern gate – that’s Los, the imagination – Los, that is Los, Los, the human representative of the imagination, Urthona. Los has as his symbols.. the instruments and symbols, the hammer, the anvil, the chain, the forge. So that the meaning of the poem is that the “forests of the night” are the ancient order, the “forests of the French nobility actually, or superstition, going along with absentee landlordism and authoritarianism, the “forests of the night” – (the forests in Blake generally is (are) the landholdings of King Louis). The “mortal hand or eye” that “framed thy fearful symmetry” is our own imagination, that is to say, we, plutonium, the bomb or the tyger, or the “terrors”. The “hand” that “dare seize the fire” is the hand of Los, the imagination. “The “shoulder” and “art” is Los’ art, that “twists the sinews of the heart”, that creates the.. it was our own imagination that created the tyger. “And when our heart began to beat/What dread hand and what dread feet” – it is the dread hand of the imagination of Los. The hammer is Los’s, the chain is Los, that is to say, poetic imagination – the hammer and chain of poetic imagination creating the appearance of terror. The furnace is Los’s, Urthona’s, Los’s furnace of the imagination. The anvil…. [tape ends in mid-sentence]
[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately eighty-three-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at the end of the tape]