ANNOTATIONS TO BIBLIOGRAPHY
One of the primary questions in the "Introduction" to the Songs of Experience is the nature of the Bard’s (or the Holy Word’s, depending on the critic's viewpoint) address to Earth. From the title, "Earth’s Answer," the primary question in this poem would seem to be Earth’s response to that call. The tone of Earth’s answer is loud and clear; she answers with words that explicitly express her bitterness. But she does not respond to the call to return. Whether she is able to return is the question that many of the following critics have addressed. Some believe that she has it in her power, if she will only see it and use it, to break from her bondage. Others believe that she does not have the power and the call for her to do so is hypocritical. One critic sees the situation as a mutual trap in which neither can respond. In addition, some critics have addressed other subjects such as symbolism and illustrations.
The summaries are grouped according to the following broad headings: (1) Earth’s powerlessness, (2) Earth’s power, (3) Mutual powerlessness, (4) Earth’s response, (5) Symbolism, and (6) Illustrations. In some cases, the critic addresses several of the issues and the summary is placed in the one with greater emphasis.
Earth’s Powerlessness
Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant: "Benighted Earth experiences her condition beneath the stars and beside the ‘watry shore’ as bondage." Considering the Holy Word in the "Introduction" to be the Son and the Bard to be his prophet, their message does not seem to be transmitted clearly because Earth says she hears "the Father." Earth’s judgment of the "father of men" as "selfish" and "cruel jealous" links him to other repressive figures in Blake’s work (41).
"Earth demands to be liberated rather than liberating herself." If the Holy Word and Prophet are indeed all-knowing, their call may well be hypocritical as Johnson and Grant say that some critics suggest. Knowing that Earth will not make the essential distinction between Father and Son, they are offering help to which she cannot avail herself. A clue to the origin of this mistranslation is in Milton 9:23 which describes the purpose of the creation of the "Seven deadly Sins" and "Of Moral laws and cruel punishments": "To pervert the Divine voice in its entrance to the earth" (41).
Wolf Mankowitz: The "Introduction" begins an "anti-night argument" that continues in "Earth’s Answer." "Her light fled," Earth exemplifies the damage done to her by night. The "darkness dread & drear" is imposed on her by the "Selfish father of men" inspiring fear in her and preventing delight. Blake associates light with delight, "with the virgins of youth and morning," and with the sower and the plowman. All of these "fertile forces" are lost without light (125).
Blake considers the poet, or the Bard, to be the one to "break the heavy chain of Night which threatens to strangle fertility." Terms used in this poem, such as free, Love, and bondage will be defined in the Songs that follow (126).
Harold Bloom: The Bard in "Introduction" is more optimistic than "a reprobate prophet" causing Earth, in her experience, to react with bitterness. Bloom compares her "stony dread" to the Earth of Act I in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: "I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven’s fell King / Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain / More torturing than the one whereon I roll" (lines 140-142). Earth’s despair comes because she knows that the "Selfish father" is more than a "usurper of power"; yet she still can question in Stanzas 3 and 4 as does Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion: "How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys / Holy, eternal, infinite! And each joy is a Love" (lines 5,6); "Why does thou seek religion? / Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude, / Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire. // Father of Jealousy. Be thou accursed from the earth!" (Lines 9-12).
Bloom responds to Northrup Frye’s remark that "Earth is not saying, as some critics accuse him of saying, that all would be well if lovers would only learn to copulate in the daytime." One should not abandon that image too quickly since Earth’s dark, secret, destructive love must be contrasted with a "bright, open one" that would combat the dark associations to the sexual act.
In the last stanza, Earth refuses the burden of achieving her own freedom; she cannot "break the freezing weight of Jealousy’s chain" so she returns the responsibility to the Bard and all men. She will respond, but the initiative must be taken by and between humans (16-17).
Northrop Frye: Earth is not imprisoned by the God of the Gospels; she is imprisoned by the false father, the "Selfish father of men" that man sees when he takes his mind off the Incarnation. Earth represents everything and everybody that Christ is trying to redeem. She rejects the Bard’s words because of their blind optimism. She sees that she will remain imprisoned until man’s creative life, which is shrouded in darkness, is brought to light and, thus, love will be open and not a secret, jealous possession. Man’s responsibilty for his own evils leaves Earth helpless; the Bard must appeal to Man not Earth (36-37).
Robert F. Gleckner (in The Piper & the Bard): The two symbolic acts of being lost and being found are quite different in innocence and experience. Both are possible in innocence, which means, then, that one can never be truly lost. In experience, however, one is never found, "experience is the state of being lost." In "Earth’s Answer," Earth is lost at the hands of God, but she, as the lost soul, cannot rely on an angel or God to be found, but, because she now through experience has self-identification and self-realization, she must rely on herself to be found and be free of her bondage (102-103).
If Earth should heed God’s call from the "Introduction," she would be returned to a self-exile to the vales of Har, to Thel’s throne. Her answer instead protests against the bonds of "free Love," and she denounces "Jehovah-Urizen . . . : ‘selfish.’ ‘cruel,’ ‘jealous,’ . . . and ‘vain.’" She is right to turn away because joy, love, and creativity will never live in the secret, imprisoning dark. "She can return, but only through the medium of a Christ, a Milton. . . . Like Oothoon, Earth must realize her own purity despite the whoredom of experience. It is this vision that forms the essence of the voice of the Bard. That Earth hears it not is tragic; that she must hear it is certain as long as the cunning and hypocrisy of Urizen is not submitted to. . . . The listener is Earth, and we too listen, not to joy, as in Songs of Innocence, but to find our way" (236-239).
Kathleen Raine: Blake’s The Book of Ahania and The Four Zoas expand on the themes in "Earth’s Answer"; however, in Raine’s interpretation, Earth does not have the power within herself to regenerate. "Starry Jealousy" becomes Urizen who berates Ahania: "Thy passivity, thy laws of obedience & insincerity / Are my abhorrence. . . ." He casts out Ahania who falls "far into Non Entity"; her last speech in The Book of Ahania is very similar to "Earth’s Answer": "But now alone over rocks, mountains, / Cast out from thy lovely bosom, / Cruel jealousy! Selfish fear! / Self-destroying, how can delight / Renew in these chains of darkness, / Where bones of beasts are strown / On the bleak and snowy mountains, / Where bones from the birth are buried / Before they see the light?"
According to Raine, Ahania, and likewise Earth, in a passive relationship to Urizen cannot restore herself but her regeneration depends upon him. In The Four Zoas, Urizen as if in response to Earth’s questions regarding the sower and the plowman in "Earth’s Answer," first plows the earth, then sows the seed: "He turnd the horses loose & laid his Plow in the northern corner / Of the wide Universal field, then Stepd forth into the immense // Then he began to sow the seed." The harvest comes and "in her apotheosis Ahania emerges as the great goddess Ceres, or Juno, . . .or the Blessed Virgin" (154-162).
Earth’s Power
Leroy Searle: Earth, in her current state, is unable to pull herself up out of her dismal fallen state; "In this self-transforming process, the movement from loss to recovery mediated only by the active imagination" will be doomed if the imagination fails. She must hear and she must engage the message with her imagination in order to recover "felicity and joy " Just as the Holy Word or the Bard, if heard, can show the way, so Blake’s art can succeed for his readers, but the readers are responsible for their own imagination and cannot be given everything in the pages of the books (44).
Stephen C. Behrendt: Earth has it within her power, indeed she is the only one with the power, to break her own chains. She does not see this fact because she, like many others in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, has been "saturated with [the] party line" that to oppose authority is sin. Earth’s plight is the same as "the mortal world" (70).
Hazard Adams: In a brief discussion of "Earth’s Answer" in connection with "Introduction," Adams, like some other critics, believes that Earth has the power within herself to use her imaginative powers in availing herself of God’s gift of mercy (27).
Nelson Hilton: Imprisoned Earth implores someone to release her from the chains that hold her down. Both "the coldness of her keeper and the freezing power of her chains" invoke "winter locking everything in ice." The first stanza's "locks cover’d with grey despair" linked to the images of cold and ice are another image in the cluster of chain images--her "mind-locks" (cf. Eur 10.29). The serpent at the bottom of the illustration for this poem recalls the "bound form of free love" and another chain: "men bound beneath the heavens in a reptile form," "Like a serpent! Like an iron chain" (Tir 8.10, BL 5.16). Because Earth can still use language to cry out against her restraint, as she does in the third stanza, she shows she has the potential for liberating herself from these locks (66-67).
Mutual Powerlessness
John Beer: The figure of the Holy Word is both God and Adam who weeps because he cannot regain his fourfold vision without Earth’s aid. She, however, cannot respond to his call by rising because in her fallen state she can recognize only the god of Law and Jealousy. The two are "mutually trapped. The tyrant cannot be the true light because he lacks the love that would renew his vision; Earth cannot give him true love because she is held by the dark iron law of jealousy" (80-81).
Earth’s Response
Diana Hume George: Perhaps Thel was wise in rejecting the world of experience considering the repressive restraints imposed by "parental figures in the form of priest, father, nurse, and mother." Earth suffers at the hands of the "selfish father of men" which George relates to "Freud’s primal-horde father" (98).
Martin Price: The Holy Word in "Introduction" should be seen as the "Poetic Genius" rather than as the Son or the Father. Earth in her answer responds to the God that she has created for herself, which presumably in her current despair and lack of imagination is all that she can see. Price sees Earth as comparable to Adam and Eve who resent their condition in their fallen state before they recover their ability to love and recognize that God is their judge but also their redeemer (105-106).
S. Foster Damon: Many of Blake’s poems, such as "Earth’s Answer" and "Ah! Sun-flower," end with "invocations to love" in which the questions implied in the beginning of the poems are answered (98).
The Poet, according to Damon, is calling upon Fallen Man (Earth) to rise and and take back control of the visible universe. She is ruled by Fear and Jealousy, which are other names for Reason. He ends the poem with an appeal for Free Love because he believes that to be the best road to Eternity.
Damon also says along with Frye that Blake does not mean that "acts of love should be performed in open daylight." He sees Night as symbolic of spiritual darkness. He quotes Shelley in "The Two Spirits": "Within my heart is the lamp of love, / And this is day!" (274).
In looking at the plate with "Earth’s Answer," Damon notes that the vines point downward toward a "mottled snake," which he says always in Blake’s work represents the priesthood. He also calls it "the serpent in Eden" (284).
Michael Ackland: "Earth rais’d up her head" in the first line of "Earth’s Answer" providing a very brief hope that she will respond to the Holy Word’s call; but from the second line to the last, her situation in "darkness dread & drear" is utterly hopeless and what should be her sensuous locks are instead "cover’d with grey despair." She is "prison’d" by "Starry Jealousy" or ""Selfish father of men" who, as her questions imply, neither generates nor sows and ploughs. "Bondage bound" fittingly has the last word in this dark dialogue. Blake’s recasting of the story of the Fall presents a Holy Word, whose hypocrisy is revealed by Earth’s response, for He torments her with thoughts of freedom whilst keeping her chained without providing the preconditions for arousal (4-10).
Robert Gleckner (in "Blake’s ‘The Voice . . . ‘"): Earth turns away from the Bard’s call and, in fact, even misses the point of the message. The Bard announces "the break of day" but she hears only "the Father of the ancient men." This father is clearly not the "ancient Poets" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1. In "A Song of Liberty) but the "ancient fathers in regions of twilight" or the "ancient Kings " in The French Revolution (lines 14 and 32,59 respectively).
In the illustrations, Gleckner finds clouds and night on the "Introduction" plate but "insistent vegetal life" on Earth’s plate—from which she is missing unless she is to be connected with the serpent at the bottom of the plate (104).
Symbolism
Robert Gleckner (in "Point of View . . ."): When the beadles’ "wands as white as snow" in "Holy Thursday" are recognized as sceptres, emblems of imperial power, the beadles’ true identity is also recognized and linked with Tiriel, the "selfish father of men" in Earth’s Answer"; the pebble in "The Clod and Pebble"; the "cold and usurious hand" of "Holy Thursday"; God in "The Chimney Sweeper"; the mother, parson, and dame Lurch in "The Little Vagabond"; Cruelty, Humility and the Human Brain in "The Human Abstract"; and Tirzah in "To Tirzah." (197).
Mark Schorer: A chilling observation of Schorer’s is that in the lines, "Break this heavy chain / That does freeze my bones around," "the chain grows into the bone, becomes the bone, which is to say that restraint becomes the character." The only hope is love, and the poem has already addressed "repressed fruition, in the sower and the plowman."
A poem that Blake did not include in the final manuscript elaborates on the role of love: "Love to faults is always blind, / Always is to joy inclin’d, / Lawless, wing’d, & unconfin’d, / And breaks all chains from every mind" (239).
Illustrations
Jean Hagstrum: The Songs of Experience are "weak in illumination" (unites border and design in a single visual motif, which represents figures and scenes both literally and metaphorically) but break new ground in decoration (uses only text and border usually in the same color, which reinforces the abstract, metaphoric meaning). In the "Introduction," "Earth’s Answer," and "The Fly," the simple use of a dark shade of blue (Hagstrum terms it "Urizenic blue" standing for "Urizenic night") and clouds superimposed on that blue is not only beautiful but is also pertinent to "the dying dispensation of the god of this nocturnal world " (81, 86).
Experience is not horrible and to be avoided; it is a necessary "purgatory" on the way to heaven. The vegetation is not portrayed by Blake as lush and attractive as in Innocence; but although it appears to be "dry and dying, its withering branches" forming arches around the text, it also has some shoots that "recall its primal vigor" (83).
F. W.Bateson: Blake’s revisions to "Earth’s Answer" and "The Tyger" actually spill over on to the illustration. (184). This comment of Bateson’s reminds one of Blake’s own remark: "As Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant, so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass Insignificant—much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark." ("A Vision of the Last Judgment").
Stanley Gardner: Blake illustrates Earth’s dead spirit with a dark blue which becomes even darker over and around the word Earth’s, almost obscuring it. The vines move downward to the head of the serpent, which is framed in a pale light at the bottom right-hand corner. The serpent faces eastward toward the source of light of which Earth is deprived by the "Selfish father of men." Gleckner notes that the figure in the illustration for Introduction is also looking "eastwards toward the deceptive, invisible promise" (94-95).
Morton D. Paley: The landscapes of Innocence and Experience differ: the delicate, leafy designs in Innocence become thick, leafless trees in Experience. When a vine does appear that is similar to those in Innocence, its significance to the poem’s theme is made clear. For example, In "Earth’s Answer" the vine that climbs up the edge of the page has a "vine-like serpent, spoiling this potential paradise" (23).
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