Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience continues from here
AG: I’ve never set “Infant Sorrow” – “My mother groand!” – There’s Orc, also, for a while. You could take this as Orc, revolution, new-born joy. But also repression within society of the original natural tiger-emotions of the child, or the natural flame of birth. “My mother groand!” “For there the Babe was born in joy/That was begotten in dire woe.” Or was it reversed? The babe was begotten in joy and born in woe in “The Mental Traveller“?
“My mother groand! my father wept/ Into the dangerous world I leapt:/Helpless, naked, piping loud;/ Like a fiend hid in a cloud./ Struggling in my fathers hands:/Striving against my swadling bands:/Bound and weary I thought best/To sulk upon my mothers breast”
(In a way that’s also a parable of visionary experience – the birth of a visionary experience, the attempt to relate it to the world, the confusion and frustration of that, and finally the “Me Generation” – “Bound and weary I thought best/To sulk..” against the breast of social nature, in a way. There’s a mind, bound and weary, that thinks it best to compromise, in a sense. (to Student) Go on.
Student: In the (Alicia) Ostriker book, Vision and Verse … she was talking about the consonant sounds, like “b” for Blake is very often anger and sorrow.
AG: Uh-huh. Yeah. Palamabron. Bromion. Bromion is anger.
Student: And all the “b”s in this one right here, you know …. like (it’s) sorrowful and.. it’s sort of a, you know, giving up.
AG: That makes sense. “Bound and….” When I was young, I remember, in high school that was one of the most famous of the little Blake poems. “My mother groand! my father wept./Into the dangerous world I leapt.” I don’t know if that’s so common in circulation into the ear nowadays.
So it’s actually a little bit of a brief summary of the whole “Mental Traveller” cycle of “catching his shrieks in cups of gold” – (“And if the Babe is born a Boy/He’s given to a Woman Old/Who nails him down upon a rock/Catches his shrieks in cups of gold”)
Of the old woman catching the newborn revolution fury consciousness, “catching his shrieks in cups of gold” – Just (in) those little two lines you’ve maybe got a little parable of the whole cycle given in “The Mental Traveller”.
(So) these are apparently all, now, analyses of experience; the experience of repression, or the experience of subtle hypocrisy.
“I was angry with my friend;/I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe:/I told it not, my wrath did grow…”
(I’ve experienced that any number of times. The equivalent of this would be “He who binds to himself a wrath”; that is, “He who binds to himself a joy/Doth the winged life destroy.” He who binds a thought to himself, or binds an emotion to himself, or binds himself to an emotion, gets stuck with it. And remember, “Standing water breeds poison,” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, one of the aphorisms (or) Proverbs of Hell.)_
“I was angry with my friend”.. (so naturally you trust your friend so you tell your thoughts) – “I told my wrath, my wrath did end./I was angry with my foe:/I told it not, my wrath did grow./ And I waterd it in fear,/Night & morning with my tears:/And I sunned it with smiles,/And with soft deceitful wiles./And it grew both day and night./Till it bore an apple bright./And my foe beheld it shine./And he knew that it was mine./ And into my garden stole,/ When the night had veild the pole;/In the morning glad I see;/My foe outstrechd beneath the tree.”
Poisoned apple.
Has anybody got any ideas about that? It’s clear, sort of, but there’s also like, what’s that line, “stolen …
Student: What is….
AG: … joys are sweet..”
Student: … “When the night had veild the pole.”? Oh, I see. “When the night had veild the pole.”
AG: It probably has some symbolic (meaning) – “When the night had veild the pole.” When everybody was asleep. I mean when nature, when consciousness was not awake, when the mind was not awake. Related to the themes in “Europe” because Enitharmon is the heroine in “Europe”, which we’ll go to in a minute. And she imposes woman’s will on history for eighteen hundred years and creates false love in Blake’s system. And she sleeps a sleep of eighteen hundred years, and it’s the night of Enitharmon, or the night of female love, according to Blake, which is love like this poison tree of “Human Abstract“, love, that is, Christian love/guilty love. Joy suppressed and the body tormented, sort of. A little different from Oothoon. A different woman than Oothoon. I was just noticing that in “Europe”. So, “When the night had veild the pole” might relate to that sleep of female nature and a dream of false love, actually. It’s part of the same set of language that he’s using, not too literal.
to be continued