Today’s Poem: The Fly

Some blind hand

William Blake, illustration from Songs of Innocence and Experience, 1794 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Fly

by William Blake

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.
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Songs of Innocence and Experience, by the un-pigeonhole-able William Blake (1757–1827), appeared in 1794 as a more mature, sometimes sadder expansion of 1789’s stand-alone volume, Songs of Innocence. At various times, Blake’s “Songs,” largely of “Experience” rather than “Innocence,” have appeared in this space: “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Tyger,” “The Sick Rose,” and, in both categories, the two “Holy Thursday” poems.

A number of these poems take animals as their subjects, either as innocence or experience songs. Both “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” for example, marvel — one in simple joy, the other in fearful awe — at the mysterious work of creation and the mysterious God who has made both prey and predator. The created order encompasses both these things, and the life and death that attend them. Somehow, mysteriously, all of this is good.

Thomas Phillips, William Blake, 1807 (Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Today’s Poem, “The Fly,” invokes that most annoying of fellow-creatures, which some “thoughtless hand” is always brushing away. Blake’s illustration for this poem depicts a nursemaid helping an infant to walk, while a little girl plays with a shuttlecock. The poem itself, in tick-tock dimeter quatrains (as Joseph Bottum has noted, a difficult meter to render successfully in English), reads as much like a nursery rhyme as “The Lamb” does. It sounds, as it appears on the page, at least superficially like a Song of Innocence, an effect reinforced by the meter, making use here of one of its own potential pitfalls. But all the while, what this innocent voice articulates, in substance, is an echo of the blinded Gloucester’s despairing line from “King Lear”: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

The poem begins with the injuring, if not the actual killing, of a fly, and in this moment, its speaker connects the fragility of his own life, at the mercy of a capricious or unseeing divinity, with the fragility of this winged thing. All the same, Blake’s speaker declares himself to be — in his consciousness which is his “life and breath,” but also in the eventual cessation of “thought,” in which case the tenuousness of his existence will have ceased to worry him — living or dying, a “happy fly.”

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