William Blake's The Fly - reposting and some further thoughts

This is a reposting of an earlier post, with some further thoughts.

I have been working on the British Library’s English Online project, researching for a hypertext contextualisation of English Literature between 1780 and 1900. Recently I was working on William Blake, whose work has been challenging me since I was at school. Some recent work based on Michael Phillips’ admirable examination of Blake’s writing processes (William Blake, The Creation of the Songs, British Library, 2000) has fixed one poem in my mind. It’s in the notebook that Blake used for thirty years, which is currently on display in the British Library exhibition Writing Britain until 25^th September. Here is the poem:

The Fly

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath

And the want

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live,

Or if I die.

Nothing is there in the poem that doesn’t need to be there, and everything that needs to be there is there. As Michael Phillips writes, ‘Blake’s choice of language [is] as spare as anything written since the seventeenth century, apart, perhaps, from the Jubilate Agne of Christopher Smart.’ It was probably written after 1791, deduced from analysis of Blake’s handwriting. ‘Will Blake’, as he signed his name in some of his letters to his friend George Cumberland.

Following a reference to Blake’s engravings made in the previous decade I looked at Joseph Ritson’s Select Collection of English Songs (1782), for which Blake did eight engravings. The first section of the songs covers drinking songs, not what I would immediately associate with Blake. Song XIX goes as follows:

Busy, curious, thirsty Fly,

Drink with me, and drink as I;

Freely welcome to my cup,

Could’st thou sip, and sip it up.

Make the most of life you may,

Life is short, and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine,

Hastening quick to their decline;

Thine’s a summer, mine no more,

Though repeated to threescore;

Threescore summers, when they’re gone,

Will appear as short as one.

It is marked “Made extempore by a Gentleman, occasion’d by a Fly drinking out of his Cup of Ale.”

Similar thoughts, occasioned by the visitation of a fly. And there is the couplet:

For I dance

And drink, and sing,

referring us back to the drinking song. Were dancing, drinking and singing ‘play’ for Blake? We know for certain that he sang, since there are references to him performing his songs at gatherings. The British Library also has a letter written by George Cumberland in 1815, in which he mentions visiting the Blakes, drinking tea with them, and Mrs Blake uttering seditious comments.

Looking at the poem again I notice that Blake has used the same metre as the earlier song, but has split the line in two, making it smaller and jerkier, like a fly and its movements. I’d also propose that the arrangement of five stanzas in four lines makes us look closer at the twice mentioned action of the hand brushing, the hand with five fingers, of which four do the brushing.

The third stage of writing the poem includes the lines:

The cut worm

Forgives the plow

And dies in peace

And so do thou

which were removed, as Blake writes a poem which is based on an act, an observation, questioning, reasoning and finally a hypothesis. It is an extraordinarily concentrated and dense poem, with no place for the statement of the rejected stanza, as the repetition of ‘if’ in the last two lines calls the reader back to the ‘If’ that begins the fourth stanza. What may look like a definitive statement in the last stanza is actually dependent on that ‘If’. The earlier drinking song is a statement, and the move from this closed pronouncement to the questioning of Blake’s version is an act of invitation to participate in the ‘thought’, the act of thinking, which is underlying subject of the poem. 

The survival of First World War slang

In my school years, if a group of kids were caught doing something that necessitated a hasty exit, we would ‘scarper’. It was it seems a London dialect expression, derived from the Italian scappare (to escape) in the nineteenth century, but I suspect that its survival was strengthened by the rhyming association with ‘Scapa Flow’, which would have come into general consciousness after the end of the First World War, when the German fleet was scuttled there in 1919.

This is connected to my interest in the persistence of Franglais and other soldiers’ slang in the years following the end of the First World War; I recently came across a cartoon in Punch from April 1919, two labourers talking to each other:

Alf: Ain't you goin' to eat anyfink 'Erbert?

'Erbert: Well, my old fam ain't turned up with my bit of dayjerny.

The questions I am thinking about are:

Which terms survived and for how long?

How did they correspond to the terms actually used in France and Flanders by British soldiers – did they change their application over time?

And are there corresponding inter-language survivals in other languages – particularly French, German and Flemish?

Cartoons, reflecting the speech of people, would appear at first to be a good source, but of course they are in this case reflecting the language (supposed) of one socio-economic group (labourers) to a different group (middle class Punch- readers). Does this matter, since the joke depends on recognising and understanding rather than actively using?

Onions in the Garden of Health (1578)

Looking today through Langham’s Garden of Health (1578) for delightful remedies for the forthcoming book, I am taken by the straightforward and easy arrangement of the material. The format is an alphabetical list of several hundred ‘simples’, plants mostly, each of which has a compilation of numbered uses, followed by an index of conditions to which the simple is to be applied. At the end of the book there is a page index by condition, each one listing alphabetically the simples to be tried.

Thus mugwort has dozens of applications, the 133^rd of which is ‘Joyntes out, stampe Mugwort with Vineger and swines grease, and apply it.’  The ‘easy solution’ manner of the writing – ‘Nostrels stinke, boyle Roses with hony in wine, and put them in’ – is reminiscent of the ‘Frisky, fly-away hair? Try Xbrand hair-spray’ style of disingenuous advertising of the 1970s.  Got a problem? Deal with it this way. What could be simpler? A problem is not a problem. Got the plague? Drinke as much powder of the roote of dog-fennel as will lye on a crowne with vineger – problem solved. I smile while I am reading. I'll buy it.

I smile until I am pulled up short by wince-inducing entries (maybe not the best word) like ‘An onion put in as a suppositorie, purgeth the emerods, …’  I don’t really want to know any more, but am drawn to read on; in the section on onions, it seems that the insertion of an onion is a practice applicable to more or less any disease involving one of the body’s openings:

‘Nose bleeding, put in an Onion.’ 

‘Lethargie, put the juice of an Onion into the nostrells.’

‘Urine stopt in Agues, roste an Onion, and apply it to the bladder.’ 

Now, a few questions arise. For the nose-bleed, is the onion being used primarily as a stopper? For ‘lethargie’, is the onion juice a sign of desperation, something you might use on a teenager still in bed at lunchtime? Is the ‘roste Onion’ still piping hot when it is to be applied to the bladder? How is it to be applied, or am I better off not knowing? I want to know, and I want there to be a simple and pleasant answer. But I suspect that there’s more than one way of interpreting that well-known statement, ‘onions make you cry’.

Mythmaking as tidying up: the cremation of Shelley

There is a marked disparity in the versions of Byron’s words at the site of the cremation of Shelley as they appear in the writings of Edward Trelawny and Leigh Hunt. Shelley, along with Edward Williams and Charles Vivian, a young sailor, drowned when their boat sank in a sudden squall off the Italian coast in July 1822.

The sparsely punctuated manuscript of Trelawny’s handwritten account of the cremations is in the British Library. The much-disfigured body of Edward Williams had been washed ashore and buried in a shallow grave - after some days in the water, not much remained of the outer parts of the unclothed parts of the body; in fact Trelawny relates that the hands were ‘wanting’. When the body and some pieces of cloth were retrieved from the grave in the sand prior to cremation, according to Trelawny in this manuscript (Ms Add 35251) Byron looked at the ‘livid mass of flesh and blood’ and said ‘are we all to resemble that – why it might be the carcass of a sheep for all I can see – and pointing to the black handkerchief – said an old rag retains its form longer than a dead body’.

The account by Leigh Hunt is from the same year, but written in the hand of his wife Marianne (Ms Ashley 915), with corrections and additions in his own hand. It contains a version of Trelawny’s text, substantially the same, but with a few alterations, such as Williams’ hands being ‘fleshless’ rather than missing. In this manuscript Byron says: ‘What is a human body! Why it might be the rotten carcase of a sheep for all I can distinguish,’ and further continued, pointing to the black handkerchief ‘Look an old rag retains its form longer than he who wore it. What an humbling & degrading thought that we shall one day resemble this!’

Intriguingly, Byron identified the body of Williams by his teeth, as he had earlier asserted he would be able to (Trelawny Manuscript): ‘the moment he saw the teeth he exclaimed that is him’. Trelawny is quoted in Hunt’s version as identifying Shelley’s body by ‘the dress and stature; Mr Keats’ last volume of poems ‘Lamia & Isabella’ open in his jacket-pocket confirmed it beyond a doubt.’ Trelawny’s version of this is ‘The poems of Lamia & Isabella which had been found in Shelley’s jacket Pockett and had been buried with him I was anxious to have but we could find nothing of it remaining but the leather binding’.

Trelawny was criticised for tidying up and augmenting the story several times over the years, but the immediacy of his description in his 1822 manuscript gives a context to the pouring of wine, oil and spices over what was left of Shelley’s body as they cremated it, a need to mark the passing in a way that is in marked contrast to the expediency of the on-the-spot cremation. The version of the text as relayed by Hunt shows tidying and elaborating happening at this stage. Another detail shows Byron in a better light as the story goes through Hunt’s hands: Hunt states that Byron ‘wished the skull [of Shelley] to be preserved’. Trelawny’s direct version states ‘Lord Byron wished to have the skull, which I endeavoured to preserve …’

Do we find this apparent souvenir taking disappointing, perhaps distasteful?  Remembering the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, exhumed and kept in a  museum for 80 years, it is perhaps fortunate that, in Trelawny’s words, as he tried to retrieve Shelley's skull ‘it almost instantly fell to pieces’.

The Fleet and squash

There is a widely believed story that the precursor of squash, rackets played against a single wall instead of over a net, was invented at the Fleet Prison for debtors in the early nineteenth century. While looking at medical adverts from around 1700 today I came across a handbill for a gentlewoman selling skin-conditioning washes from her house ‘in Racket Court near Fleet-bridge’. Clearly something to do with rackets was going on in the immediate area. Maybe the historical presence of rackets courts nearby, as well as a sturdy wall, led to this being the obvious choice of game to play in the prison.


Maybe the influence was directly from the sound of people 'making a racket' - a variation of the phrase is first used in the sixteenth century, and appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2 'But that the Tennis court keeper knows better than I, for it is a low eb of linnen with thee when thou keepest not racket there.' 'Keeping a racket' would now be 'making a racket', which dates from 1644. The OED gives the source of 'racket', first noted from 1565, as 'perhaps imitative'; 'racket' the game was documented from c1425, so maybe the sound being imitated was the sound of the ball game with paddles played in an indoor court.


So did people making a racket around Racket Court inspire the debtors directly to play rackets against the wall of the Fleet Prison? It must have been a penetrating noise to make it through the general hubbub of early-nineteenth century London over such a high wall.

Carved tablets

As none of these works is on show at the moment, now is a good moment to bring them together. They all are hand-carved tablets - paracetamol, Rennies, and erectile dysfunction tablets.

100 Headaches

A Month of Excess

 Little Boys Blue

The sampler as advertising

In this one I'm exploring the nature of self-promotion that the sampler involves; children advertising their skills, showing off what they can do in a way that says basically 'look at me'. I have been reading J G Ballard's Kingdom Come while I've been making this.