Little Fly,
Thy summers play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
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"The Fly" Notes
This poem is in the Songs of
Experience section of Songs of
Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the
Human Soul (1789).
2 summers:
summer's; summer, in western culture and literature, is often associated
with sun, fun, laughter, being lazy, living the good life; it often
symbolizes life at its fullest bloom, youth or young adulthood, hope,
heedlessness, abandon, frivolity, plenty, beauty, richness
summer
Oxford
Dictionaries
the warmest season of the year, in the northern hemisphere from June
to August and in the southern hemisphere from December to February:
this plant flowers in late summer
a long hot summer
[as modifier]: summer holiday figurative
the golden summer of her
life
(summers) literary years,
especially of a person’s age:
a girl of sixteen or seventeen summers
William Blake, "To
Summer," Poetical Sketches
(1783)
O thou, who passest thro' our vallies in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer
Oft pitched'st here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
5
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.
Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o'er the deep of heaven; beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy vallies, on
10
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:
Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.
Our bards are fam'd who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains: 15
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.
3 thoughtless:
Oxford
Dictionaries 1 (of a person or their behaviour) not showing
consideration for the needs of other people:it was thoughtless of her to
have rushed out and not said where she would be going
it was thoughtless of
her to have rushed out and not said where she would be going 2 without consideration of the
possible consequences:
to think a few minutes of thoughtless
pleasure could end in this
13 If
thought is life: Note that in a draft of the song as found in the
Rossetti Manuscript, this line is written without "If."
15 want: lack; so "want of
thought" is to lack thought or have no thought, that is, to be
thoughtless, unthinking, careless, unconscious or unaware
Prose
Paraphrase
Paraphrase 1
Little Fly, my unthinking hand has brushed away your
summer's play. Am I not a fly like you? Or are you not a man like me?
Because I dance, drink, and sing until a blind hand brushes my wing.
If thought is life, strength and breath, and the absence
of thought is death, then I am a happy fly no matter whether I live or die.
Paraphrase 2
Little fly, my hand which has no thought has taken away
your fun life. Aren't I a fly like you are? Or, aren't you a man like I am?
Because I (too) dance, drink, and sing until a sightless hand takes away my
fun life.
If thought is life, and strength and breath, and having
no thought is death, then I am a happy fly regardless of whether I live or
die.
Paraphrase 3
Little fly, my hand, without thought, has taken away your
happy life. Don't you think I'm a fly like you? Or, don't you think you're a
man like me? Because I dance and drink and sing until a hand with no sight
takes away my happy life.
If thought is life, and strength and breath, and having
no thought is death, then I am a happy fly whether I live or die.
Blake's
Poem
Prose
Paraphrase
Some
Interpretation
Comments
Little Fly,
Thy summers play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
Little fly, my hand, without thought, has taken away
your happy life.
Little fly, I have thoughtlessly killed you.
How important is the inversion in the original? Does
the loss of the light and careless "brush" in the paraphrase
matter?
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
Don't you think I'm a fly like you? Or, don't you
think you're a man like me?
Don't you agree that I am an insignificant and
heedless being like you? Or, that you are a being like me?
For I dance
And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
Because, like you, I dance and drink and sing until a
hand with no sight of some larger being takes away my happy
life.
Because just like you, I live a life of carefree
enjoyment until death strikes.
If thought is life
And strength & breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
If thought is life, and strength and breath, and
having no thought is death,
Is thought a crucial ingredient in life, strength or
breath? Is there a difference in "life" with vs. without
thought?
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
then I am a happy fly whether I live or die.
If being "a happy fly" means being thoughtless, then
the happy fly (or human) is as good as dead, regardless of the
actual physical state it is in.
But this might not be the case, if one disagrees, or
if this is not true. Being conditional, it is open to unsaid
possibilities, more than is explicitly given here. What might
those be?
The Songs of Innocence
are indeed "of" and not "about" the state of innocence. There is much
critical debate about Blake's Innocence,
and little that is definitive can be said about it. The reader should know
that the root meaning of innocence is "harmlessness," the derived meanings
"guiltlessness" and "freedom from sin." But Blake uses the word to mean
"inexperience" as well, which is a very different matter. As the contrary of
Experience, Innocence cannot be reconciled with it within the context of
natural existence. Implicit in the contrast between the two states is a
distinction Blake made between "unorganized innocence," unable to sustain
experience, and an organized kind which could. On the manuscript of The
Four Zoas, he jotted down: "Unorganized
Innocence: An Impossibility. Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but
never with Ignorance."
Since Innocence and Experience are states of the soul
through which we pass, neither is a finality, both are necessary, and
neither is wholly preferable to the other. Not only are they satires upon
one another, but they exist in cyclic relation as well. Blake does not
intend us to see Innocence as belonging to childhood and Experience to
adulthood, which would be not only untrue but also uninteresting. [...]
Innocence satirizes Experience just as intensely as it itself is satirized
by Experience, and also...any song of either state is also a kind of satire
upon itself.
--Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, "Songs
of Innocence and of Experience," Romantic
Poetry and Prose (New York: OUP, 1973): 17–18.
"Read patiently take not up this Book in an idle hour the consideration of
these things is the whole duty of man & the affairs of life & death
trifles sports of time these considerations business of Eternity." Blake's
annotations to a volume he studied in 1798 (see Blake, ed. Erdman
[E] 611) can serve today to characterize the attention deserved and
significance offered by the most familiar work of England's "last great
religious poet" (Ackroyd 18) and "greatest revolutionary artist" (Eagleton,
in Larrissy ix).
[...]
"Language is the house of Being,"
according to Heidegger's famous figure (see Steiner 127) but for Blake, as
for Wordsworth, that structure becomes for most a prison-house maintained
by "pre-established codes," by cliché and convention. The warden of the
prison-house, the fashioner of "mind-forgd manacles," the force that has
barred us from the play of Being in language, as from the stunning energy
of true poetry, can be seen as "the bard." The fallacy in crediting such
assumed authority looms in the "Introduction" to Songs
of Experience, where, by the eighth line, three distinct subjects
"might controll / The starry pole." With its echoes of Jeremiah ("O earth,
earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord") and the God of Paradise
Lost ("past, present, future he beholds"), the bard seems to
command reverence—but as in other cases, on inspection, the compelling
language breaks into mumbo jumbo, etched on a plate whose vista of stars
is graphically barred by the cloud of words. Students of the Bible, and of
Wesley's great hymn, "Wrestling Jacob," will recognize that it is the
opportunity to struggle for blessing or interpretation from a sacred
messenger that is given "till the break of day." The religious references
resonate with the particularly eighteenth-century, evangelical sense of
"experience" as the inner history of one's religious emotion (see OED,
s.v., 4b)—indeed, "hymn of experience" appears throughout accounts of
Methodism.
Who
or what is the speaker of the poem addressing?
Though
Blake's poem "The Fly" is quite short (both in length
and in line) and the vocabulary looks simple, there are
some archaic words like "thee," "thou" and "art" as well
as phrasings and sentence structure that may make the
poem difficult to grasp. A prose
paraphrase may be a good way to straighten out the
grammar of the sentences and make the meaning and
arguments of the poem easier to see. Try rewriting the
poem in paragraph form, rearranging the word order and
sentences so that the parts of speech fall in their more
usual places, and replace any difficult word with a
simpler one, including "your" for "thy," "are" for
"art," and so on.
Think
about the connotation of summer, the meaning of
"brushed" and the sense of "thoughtless" and "blind."
What significance do you find in the way Blake uses
these words to set up the argument in the last two
stanzas?
What
does "thoughtless hand" mean?
What
does "blind hand" mean?
Consider
some other fly-human comparisons below. How are Blake's
analogy and argument in "The Fly" similar to or
different from these other versions?
As
flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
(Gloucester, in Shakespeare's King
Lear, act 4 scene 1; c. 1606)
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.
(Footnote: “Made extempore by a Gentleman, occasion’d
by a Fly drinking out of his Cup of Ale.”; Joseph
Ritson, "Song XIX," Drinking Songs. Select
Collection of English Songs, 1782)
The
wanton Boy that kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spiders enmity
(William Blake, "Auguries
of Innocence" ll. 33–34)
The
second stanza invites a provocative identification or
affinity between a fly and a man, the speaker. Yet it is
phrased as questions. Are the two questions asking the
same thing? Is likening a man to a fly the same as
likening a fly to a man? How would you respond to this
query?
For
Blake, happiness, unlike joy, seems to be a little
superficial and ironic (see Concordance).
Think about the implied comparison between "dance,"
"drink," and "sing" on one hand, and "thought" (along
with its associative life, strength, and breath) on the
other in terms of the fulfillment in happiness suggested
in each. How desirable a state is it to be "a happy
fly"? What bearing might this juxtaposition of thought
and want of thought conditions have on the definition or
meaning of life?
Sample Student
Responses to William Blake's "The Fly"
Response 1:
Study Question:
Student Name
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
