The Voice of the Ancient Bard Flashcards
“Youth of delight!”
The voice is that of the Bard of the Introduction, addressing the ‘Youth of delight’. So it is therefore the second person that is being addressed, although this word ‘you’ is never used.
We can assume that the ‘Youth’ represents all young people.
Emotive punctuation ! = celebration/ excitement for the
youth
Blake speaks here as the Ancient Bard and the Prophet (who also appeared in the Introduction to the Songs of Experience), trying “to reassure the ‘Youth of delight’ that the morning of regeneration is at hand, when the doubts and disputes of mortal life will be dispelled, even though many have fallen on the way.”
On one hand, it seems to circle back to the beginning of the Songs of Experience, where the Introduction opens with “Hear the voice of the Bard!” But it also appears to circle back to the Songs of Innocence, promising a return to the joys of youth, a rebirth where one is once again freed from the doubt, despair, and torment that dominates the state of experience in the cycle of spiritual development.
“Image of Truth new born”
Blake or the speaker seeks to present to them hope and opportunities expressed in the ‘Image of Truth new-born’. As the overall theme is of the songs is of innocent childhood growing to face painful experience, the idea of ‘new-born’ is apt. At this stage nothing has tainted those whom the speaker is addressing.
The five lines of the quintrain are split into two clear sentences, to highlight the contrast of innocent hope and dangerous experience; an important thematic juxtaposition.
Reflects the beginning of the line, no longer living their lives by reason, (positive) however “clouds” is ambiguous
“Transcendental period” – experience leading to knowledge.
At 4 years old Blake claimed to see “God press his head to the window”. Four years later he saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings
decorating every branch like stars”.
“Doubt if fled and clouds of reason / Dark disputes and arftul teazing”
Though innocence in this context means hope, the reality is presented in terms of ‘doubt’ and ‘dark disputes’. Note the alliterative heavy ’d’s.
The idea of ‘artful teazing’ as a negative is interesting. What we might today think of as humorous, intelligent banter is in this context seen as dangerous and deceptive. The archaic word ‘artful’ could be translated as ‘sly’ or fraudulent.
The poem commences in light – the dawn of the ‘opening morn’ - but soon there are ‘clouds’, then ‘dark’ arguments, until the blackness of ‘night’ makes people blind (by allusion
We should always be vigilant to not allow reason to cloud our ability to see and experience life’s beauty, or allow reason to cloud our understanding of the divine source from which we all have come.
“Folly is an endless maze / Tangled roots perplex her ways”
Folly is personified as a woman, echoing the biblical metaphor of Proverbs 9:13. The metaphor of the maze and ‘tangled roots’, representing the dangerous world, over which an innocent person can stumble is particularly memorable.
OR “Folly” meaning foolishness
“endless” the youth can never escape from “folly” and their naivety
Similar to “endless”, “roots” suggests the youth are already embedded with difficulties during adulthood
Hard T and plosive P consonants are repeated in l.7 (‘Tangled roots perplex’)
Like “Eve” women were seen to be sinful
and “foolish” (folly). They lured men into
temptation.
For Blake, this folly is people’s perception that:
The truth about reality is known solely through the senses (as rejected in To Tirzah)
Everything can be quantified through ‘reason’, ‘disputes’ and ‘artful teazing’.
Like a maze, such folly gets people lost in any number of dead ends.
This is an allusion to the valley of dry bones seen by the prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament. (Ezekiel 37:1-10). Blake’s other poems indicate that the ‘dead’ are those who have been trapped in laws and prohibitions, so that their bodies are like coffins. Their bones, therefore, would be whatever remains of them, their legacy
To stumble over these suggests losing balance, being unable to progress because of their lasting effects, through their teaching and influence. The foolish people of Blake’s day are totally imprisoned and made wearisome by their entrapment in folly. They are dead to any feeling except worry (‘care’)
Nevertheless, such ‘fools’ still desire to lead in society, despite the fact that they have greater need to be led and enlightened themselves. This alludes to the criticism made by Jesus about the religious leaders of his day, that they were ‘blind guides’ (Matthew 15:12-14).
The image of the maze here works both at a physical and symbolic level. Being in a maze suggests wandering lost among multiple possible paths. Seeking the ‘right’ path is a metaphor in the Bible for finding God / Christ. So Blake may be suggesting that traditional religion, with what he felt was its man-made ‘mystery’, is ‘foolish’.
The language regarding roots implies the image of the tree, which, in The Human Abstract, Blake identifies with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. In Blake’s view, this tree actually grows out of the human brain. It produces fruit such as cruelty, tyranny, sexual repression and the repression of creative imagination. It is the tangled roots of this tree which trip those already wandering in the maze of folly
It is a difficult journey that the soul must take, and many do not make it to the point where they are returned to the Edenic state of innocence and connection with the divine source..
“stumble all night over bones of the dead”
The ‘bones of the dead’ is a powerful image of those who have been caught up in life’s difficulties and not survived. The ‘night’ is, of course, a metaphorical night of cruel reality.
“stumble”=confusion/ lack of experience. “they know not what” in comparison to “and see” “opening morn” able to grasp knowledge for themselves
During his childhood Blake claimed to experience visits
from his dead brother.
“wish to lead others, when they should be led”
Those who ‘wish to lead others’ could be a metaphor for the established Church in England, of which Blake was deeply critical. He disagreed profoundly with the punitive, hypocritical brand of harsh Christianity. If this is so, Blake is saying that the restrictive conventions of the time stunt the imagination and creativity of the young, inherent in the ‘opening morn’ of the second line.
Bard
a poet, traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular oral tradition.
“And feel – they know not what but care;
And wish to lead others, when they should
be led.”
Pause disturbs iambic pentameter,
creates uncertainty/ doubt
“And” repetition emphasises structure. Begins with discovery “and see” Ends with disappointment
“and wish”
Cyclical structure of innocence to experience
Structure
The rhyme scheme ABBCCDDEFEF suggests a predictability which is undercut by the final three lines, whose extra syllables cause the rhythm to stumble. Until these last three lines, the closing rhymes are open vowel sounds: ‘born’ / ‘morn’, ‘maze’ / ‘ways’. The caesura in l. 1 and 4, and repeated structure between l.4 and 5 give the lines a spaciousness and balance.
The disturbing vision of the Bard is suggested by sudden changes in the underlying metre. It shifts from iambic in the first three lines (with an initial inverted foot in l.1 and 3) to trochaic for the next two rhyming couplets, which increases the emphatic tone of the Bard. This is then disrupted by the exclamation of l.8, followed by a shift to anapaestic, then iambic, then anapaestic tetrameter again. The overall effect is unsettling.
Attitudes to the body and the life of the senses
They believe that their bodies are purely physical and that reality consists solely in what can be understood via the senses. In this way, their senses trap them in a materialist approach to life and they are unable to experience themselves, including their bodies, as spiritual beings. Those who believe this are the blind guides who are lost in folly’s maze.
Snares, confinement
It was because fallen humankind could no longer see truly that Blake the visionary needed to illustrate what he perceived as the truth about the creation and humanity’s role within it, hence the prophetic tone of the Bard.
Context and plate design
“The Voice of the Ancient Bard” (E 31-32) reaches toward an epic vision that encompasses experience as well as innocence.5↤ 5. “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” was composed and etched no later than 1789 and was included in most separate copies of Songs of Innocence. In later copies of the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience, printed 1818-27, Blake moved “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” to the Experience section, which the poem anticipates. The “Bard,” who “Present, Past, & Future sees,” is invoked in the “Introduction” to Experience (E 18). For printing dates, see the chart in Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 376-81. In the design above the text, the bard strums a triangular harp even larger than the one played by his younger counterpart in the verso sketch (illus. 2). Poised chronologically between Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence, the drawings reproduced here show Blake experimenting with visual representations of the two poetical modes, and the states of consciousness they embody, in which he worked throughout most of his career.
“Blake has even taken the trouble to give him [the Ancient Bard] a smile in copy Z (in other copies he looks worried), in contrast to the blank impassivity of the child led.” For the most part, however, he settles for “the oddly remote, generalised placidity of the faces of Blake’s figures.
