Culture
What Kind of Lover Are You? This William Blake Poem Might Have the Answer.
Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.
William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.
“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.
The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.
“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.
In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d
In milky fondness
“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.
Question 1/6
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.
First, the Clod’s perspective.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
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