Allen Ginsberg on William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence continued from here
“The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar/Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore”
So this goes back to the, the “Every Wolfs & Lions howl/Raises from Hell a Human Soul.”
So he’s saying all these bleats, all these wild calls, all this call of the wild is a, you know, is part of the, part of, a wave on heaven’s shore, or, or, it’s a heavenly world when you’ve still got bleat, bleat, wild animals that bleat bark bellow and roar. Bleat, lamb; bark, dog; bellow, ox; roar, lion. So while you’ve still got lambs, dogs, oxen and lions able to sound their voices vigorously, you’ve got, you’re at the edge of heaven.
“The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath/ Writes Revenge in realms of death”
Boy, that’s true. How many kids have been beaten up and violated and are now on the warpath to take revenge on the whole world for what their mothers and fathers did to them?
“The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air/Does to Rags the Heavens tear.” – We’ve gone through that, in the case of America.
Then the next is really funny.
“The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun/Palsied strikes the Summers Sun”
You know, what can he do to the vastness of nature except wreck his own body or the body of his society – palsy.
“The poor Mans Farthing is worth more/Than all the Gold on Africs Shore”
Now, how do you interpret that? If you’re a poor man and you’ve only got a dollar or a dime, that means a lot. At least you can get a bowl of soup or something, or half a bowl of soup, whereas if you’ve got all the gold on Africs shore you don’t give a shit whether you eat or not – you’re shooting that cocaine and having a ball in the airplanes in the sky and getting insensitive. After a while you start taking dope and the next thing your daughter’s committing suicide. So “The poor Man’s Farthing is worth more/Than all the Gold on Africs Shore.”
“One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands/Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands
That’s a good one. “One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands/Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands.” How would that work?
Student: (Can you tell us) what a “mite” is?
AG: A little money. No, I think it’s one, one, a little bit, a little bit of, you know, like a …coin, yeah. But how could a penny taken away from a laborer or given from a laborer to buy and sell something, how could that buy and sell the miser’s lands?
Student: Because he’s a laborer. He can work it.
AG: Yeah, and his mite is born, because “Throughout all these Human Lands/Tools were made & Born were hands/Every Farmer Understands.” So that’s sort of the ground or basis, but still, how, in what literal way could you say that one mite shall buy and sell the miser’s lands? Is there any literal interpretation …
Student: (The laborer’s contribution..)
AG: Yeah, okay, yes. So it’s really the laborer’s labor that creates the superfluous wealth of the miser, but still it’s just his one mite that can buy and sell ’em.
Student: People who have money to speculate on property got it by jacking up the rents on their tenants.
AG: Yeah, but how does it, how does that one penny from the laborer confute all that, or overcome all that?
Student: Well, the miser is someone who’s ungenerous (one lacking in) generosity …
AG: Except here we say “one mite wrung from the labrers hands.” You know, taken unwillingly in a way, or spent parsimoniously to buy some bread. Well, I guess if the laborer is so ill-paid, sooner or later the whole state will fall and the miser’s lands will be bought and sold. Well, look at (Donald) Trump. [sic – this is 1991] Yeah. The miser’s lands are being bought and sold now, partly because he was sucking up all that money from Atlantic City laborers coming in to gamble, or something like that.
But the greater thing is what comes next, when he supplements this statement and makes it even greater and weightier and vaster and more penetrant and more tearful. “Or,” (that mite)..”,
“Or if protected from on high/Does that whole Nation sell & buy”
Well, dig how we got the homeless, we got Blacks dying early and America is being bought and sold by the Germans and Japanese. They are simultaneous and interrelated. The exhaustion of America in war wringing the might from the laborers hands has resulted in the miser’s bankruptcy and the stock market crash, and the buying and selling of America from, uh, from the nations we conquered, actually. So that’s in a very literal application now. You can see visible in the world.
to be continued