When I was a kid we would drive from north Mitcham to Bellenden Road in Peckham, near my mum's old house, to buy Jamaican patties, hard dough bread, and guava jelly. There was a mural at Goose Green in East Dulwich, near journey's end - not that weird, there's obviously plenty of graffiti in London - that always gave me the creeps. It seemed to be a depiction of a normal village green, much like the one it stood upon, but there was something distinctly Wrong with it. The simple, bright colours read as completely unnatural, almost sickly, and for some reason an explosion of light emanated from the tree at the centre. It didn't help that the mural was scarcely visible from Adys Road as we drove to the bakery, partially shrouded by a couple real trees, bathed in amber from the old sodium streetlights you used to get (because by the time we got to Peckham it was always night). It made the mural feel like something I had imagined or fever-dreamed, half-asleep and up past my bedtime. I can't say it proper haunted me or owt, but it was always a curiosity, especially as it receded into memory and became even less real. When I was much older, probably at uni and feeling extra disconnected from South London and from my childhood, I absentmindedly fired up Google Maps and typed in Goose Green to see if it was still there, and the lightbulb went off: at the bottom corner of the mural, in a spot that I wouldn't have been able to see from the car, lay three simple words, painted in a white infinity sign. "Remember William Blake".
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| this is the mural! it gets fucked up from time to time but i think the original guy, Stan Peskett, still maintains it |
The mural's a stylistic tribute to the illuminated paintings Blake would marry to his poetry, and it memorialises perhaps his most iconic life story, his Establishing Character Moment: as a child he walked 6 miles from his Westminster home to Peckham Rye, back when that would've been the countryside, when he suddenly stopped and saw a chorus of angels and holy light in the branches of an oak tree, "bespangling every bough like stars". That's not part of a poem in the collection but it summarises the overall tenor of the book perfectly.
It's not a long collection - I fear that if you added up the word count of all 30ish poems, and of this review, I would come out ahead - and it uses simple rhyme schemes and simple vocabulary to suit its conceit of folksongs to be belted out by children gaily as they scamper over the North Downs. You absolutely can't see, for example, his followers like Wordsworth, Coleridge et al show his influence on their long ass poems replete with fancy bullshit words, from the language of these works alone. Its effectiveness only shows itself in the production and maintenance of an (horrid) atmosphere, and only when the poems are all read together; this is why "The Tyger" looks dumb as hell when excerpted on twitter, as it sometimes is, and I think why reading "London" in Year Ten English did absolutely fuck all for me. That and school sucks, as Blake illustrates in "The School Boy". "How can the bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?" He was so real for that. They absolutely should've let me out of class to write Nirvana ripoffs like I wanted to at age 15.
The effect, then, is this potent combination of childlike wonder in the foreground and the tiniest, most subtle suggestions absolutely evil shit lurking beyond, moreso in the Innocence than in the Experience, actually (I think if I were rating them separately Experience would only get a 7 or 8 out of ten but Innocence is so good at making me feel slightly queasy and slightly awestruck that it hauls them both to perfection).
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| *desperate to get my class of year 8s to pay attention voice* you know, lads, some people might say William Blake is the Messi of poetry! Now doesn't that sound bussin'? |
Consider "The Little Black Boy" in the Innocence. I've never read a more unsettling piece of work in my life! "White as an angel is the English child, but I am black as if bereav'd of light." What? You're like five! How do you already hate yourself! And so the mother tells him we are dark because we have actually been exposed to more of God's light, and satisfied, our protagonist imagines himself and his English friend as lambs, just like The Lamb Blake has already written a song for (you see the interconnectedness), playing together in God's light once the clouds part. It's just that you know, metatextually, with the "benefit" of experience, that the clouds are not going to part, and that one of these lambs will grow up peacefully on some remote farm and the other one is about to be made into metaphorical döner kebab. And you want to howl this at the boy, tell him to wake the fuck up, to take his mother and run far away, get the English boy's parents to do SOMETHING, but he can't hear you, because he has his airpods in, wait, no, because he's not real, and the poem is 235 years old anyway. But you know that it did happen to millions of African children over a sustained period of time, and it definitely happened to your family, and that's the only reason you're now here reading this poem in the United Kingdom with your Godburnt skin, shading your English friends from the sun, loving them as they love you. And this makes you feel incredibly ill.
And then the next poem is straight in like "I love the sun, he is my friend, how I wish summer, would never end", and you cough and splutter like Idris Elba on Hot Ones, "what the, what the fuck?", how could he switch up so violently?, and this is the beauty of the Songs of Innocence. The Songs of Experience are more of a constant downer, on school, on organised Protestantism, on London, on growing up, and as such lose their potency a little. It mirrors how I come to his writing now - as a cynical drunkard trying to look smart on a blog - versus how I came to "his" art (the mural is obviously a homage long after the fact) as that eight-year-old - a contented young boy undertaking his favourite activity (being driven places by my dad), yes, but along the exact route my father would've once taken to see his now-dead wife. There was darkness on the edge of town, it just hadn't quite gotten past the South Circular yet.
(That's how good guava jelly is btw it will make you act up and forget you are a depressed widower single parent on god no cap please go find some)
Some critics may balk at my assertion that William Blake was, in fact, the very first Quirked Up White Boy With Just A Little Bit Of Soul (it's probably Milton but still), but his writing here lays the groundwork not just for the Romantics and their rejection of the British orthodoxy, but pretty much every Anglophone weirdo there has ever been since. I catch shades of Daniel Johnston's childlike but mental-illness-addled naiveté; the whimsical, pastoral, particularly British strains of psychedelia (your Sgt. Peppers, your The Zombies, your The Pretty Things, your the other Nirvana); and the surrealism of TV shows like Adventure Time and anything Noel Fielding (fellow graduate of the Having To Grow Up In Mitcham Academy) has ever made. In short, Blake was the blueprint, and as artists we will spend the rest of our time on earth trying and failing to conjure vibes even a tenth as fucked as those contained in the Songs.
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