"NURSES Song"Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry, classifies the Songs of Experience as satires (235), and innocence is that which it satirizes. He also points out that "the pastoral is congenial to satire . . . because the life which it idealizes points up the artificiality of the court or city which it leaves behind" (235). Again, though "NURSES Song" is not specifically discussed, the implications of this statement seem applicable because remnants of the city such as "wasted" and "disguise" are found in this poem.
C. M. Bowra gives a brief comparative reading of the two "Nurse's Songs" to demonstrate how this pair, like others in the collection, shows Experience's destructive forces. The Nurse's voice in Experience "speaks . . . of sour age, envious of a happiness which it can no longer share and eager to point out the menaces and the dangers of the dark" (39), and is not the reassuring, maternal voice of Innocence. Bowra asserts that experience stifles the imagination and "substitutes a dark, cold, imprisoning fear" (39); this kind of imprisoning is found in "Nurse's Song."
Robert Gleckner, in The Piper and the Bard, names "NURSES Song" as an example of how Blake manipulates points of view (65). A discussion regarding the two contrasting points of view of the Piper and the Bard prefaces this statement, but Gleckner does not elaborate on "NURSES Song" in light of this idea. However, he does mention that "whispering" in "NURSES Song" for example, is a symbolic act which "takes on a different significance as it is viewed from different points of view" (72). In a peripheral comment, Gleckner compares the child in "Infant Sorrow" with that of the nurse in "NURSES Song;" he suggests that both child and nurse suffer from a helplessness that "will become . . . [their] damnation" (240). In his discussion about desire and restraint in Blake's Songs, Gleckner gives a comparative reading of the two "Nurse's Songs" in the context of this duality (265-69). Gleckner concludes by stating that the restraints of experience are not avoidable, but they can be invalidated by 'the lineaments of gratified desire,' by 'an improvement of sensual enjoyment'" (269). He also points to the discrepancy in Blake's professed reluctance to associate children, symbols of innocence, with poems of "non-innocence," and of the power that just such an anomaly created in a poem like "NURSES Song" (146). In an endnote, Gleckner includes comments on the illustration accompanying "NURSES Song" (315-16, n.8).
E. D. Hirsch Jr. also does a comparative reading of the "Nurse's Songs" in Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake in which he discusses the song in experience as a parody of the song in innocence (232). As Gleckner previously noted, Hirsch also identifies the contrasting language of each poem (compare "laughing" with "whisperings"). Hirsch suggests that "NURSES Song" is "a satirical exemplum against the repression of the natural instinct" (233), which echoes Gleckner's ideas of restraint and desire as well as Frye's exposition on the pastoral as a vehicle for satire.
Donald Dike argues that in experience "love . . . is cramped and perverted from having to be a dark secrecy; the figurative time of the entire sequence is a long winter night" (353). Although Dike does not refer to the "NURSES Song," his idea seems applicable to this poem of "whisperings and "disguise." As Gleckner also suggested in his analysis of points of view, Dike also asserts that Òwhat comes to pass in Songs of Experience [is] the virtually inevitable development of the necessary guardian, moral or political, into the 'selfish father of men,' or the rough awakening to his 'really' being this all along" (366). Dike does not mention "NURSES Song" in his particular discussion, but the nurse in experience seems to embody this development.
D. G. Hirsch, compares the language of the poems and their differing meanings or implications (again, a comparison with "laughing" and "whisperings"). The nurses in each poem are compared regarding their roles as guardian (protective and nurturing versus "interfering and dictatorial"). He concludes his analysis by claiming that "man is what the nurse, in each case, is capable of making him" (38). This study emphasizes contraries in the poem, and Gillham ultimately asserts that "we are left with both notions [of man] as true. . . . Blake, unlike his predecessors, does not aim at psychological finality" (38).
Hazard Adams analyzes the two "NURSES Songs" by using what he terms "various clod- and pebble-like attitudes and variations upon these attitudes, ranging from forms of innocence to forms of experience" (101). [For the clod "only in giving is there love" and for the pebble "giving becomes keeping or taking."] Adams pairs the nurse in experience with the pebble; "her mental state is completely egocentric" (102).
Zachary Leader in Reading Blake's Songs, identifies the nurse as responsible for the "dispiriting and isolating consequences of adult instruction" (176) in "Nurses Song." The children are separated in the plate (176); a sense of community is not found as in Innocence. This commentary is followed by Leader's exposition on educational practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The heavy reliance on books, writes Muriel Jaeger, "from which every imaginative stimulus had been carefully removed" (qtd. in Leader 177) seemed terribly ironic to Blake. "Instead of freeing and respecting children, the educational progressives robbed them of what he considered their most cherished qualities" (177). Leader concludes by positing Blake as an advocate for children (184) and suggests that Experience alludes to "key motifs and presuppositions of late eighteenth-century children's books and educational theory. Its focus . . . is . . . on [the] supposed antagonists [of Locke and Calvin]. The problems its speakers pose for us are precisely those raised by progressive children's books" (184). Leader also demonstrates the sense of "isolation and self-absorption" (153) of Experience by pointing to the "brother and sister [in "NURSES Song" who] seem wholly oblivious to each other's activities" (153). He describes such isolation as almost "Grecian" (154), which is reminiscent of Keats's imagery in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Leader also argues that the Nurse's arm in the plate for "NURSES Song," though reaching out to comb the boy's hair in a usually nurturing act, seems threatening with its knife-like teeth. Again, this seems indicative of the threatening restriction and control so prevalent in Experience.
Heather Glen situates her analysis of the two "Nurse's Songs" in Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in the context of her discussion on children's verse and Blake's Songs. She claims that these two songs exemplify how Blake suggests "not [only] a subversion of a familiar mode of seeing the world [in his Songs, but these poems also offer] a subtly articulated alternative vision" (19). Glen further asserts that the Nurse's seeming irresponsibility as an adult guardian challenges and satirizes the status quo of authority (20). However, Glen also suggests that the nurse in experience is "at the mercy of uncontrollable anxieties, which . . . imprison her within a closed circle of egocentric disguise" (20). Glen briefly mentionsthe two plates for each poem, and concludes her discussion of "NURSES Song" by positing that the Nurse, though and authority figure, ultimately is unable "to change that which [she deplores]" (31).
Edward Larrissy, in William Blake, repeats the idea that Gleckner forwarded by analyzing the songs as possessing differing points of view. While he does not do a reading of "NURSES Song," Larrissy does structure his argument by the idea that "the system of parallels, where an Experience song has the same title as an Innocence one with which it is contrasted, makes this a natural reading" (39). This idea seems pertinent to understanding the pair of "Nurse's Songs."
Stanley Gardner, in Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced, emphasizes the Nurse's dissociation from the children that leads to establishing an exclusive existence opposing the more open community in innocence. Gardner highlights the sense of wasted play and the theme of "a disabling sophistication which a parent's sensually expectant touch breeds into the infants 'in their very cradle'" (134).
In 1987, Harold Bloom contrasts the two "Nurse's Songs" by showing parallels between the change in the nurse's vision and the change in the lines in the two poems (18). Bloom suggests that "this is neither realism nor cynicism replacing Innocence, but an existence both higher and lower, less and more real than the undivided state of consciousness" (18). Bloom concludes with the reminder that the "final waste [in Experience] will be in the disguise of death" (18).
In the same year that Bloom published the above conclusions, Harold Pagliaro investigated Blake's Songs through character study and psychological development and analysis in Selfhood and Redemption in Blake's Songs. He posits the Nurse in Experience as a character who cannot find a means of self-discovery (13). She "identifies herself not only as confining in her treatment of the children who are her charges but as defeated in her view of life and of herself" (13). Pagliaro also argues that she uses the knowledge that her own life is "controlled by suppressed desire" (13) as a threat to the children about their own future. In this discussion, Pagliaro ultimately concludes that the past controls the Nurse, and that she actually becomes her past by asserting that "they neither rationalize evidence about their troubled lives nor come to grips with the problem it represents. They have so thoroughly incorporated their problems that they have become them" (53). This is particularly applicable to the Nurse in "NURSES Song" who seems trapped in her egocentric world, an idea formerly argued by Adams. Pagliaro also investigates the idea that characters in Experience suffer from "depressed or mutilated sexualities" (54), and he specifically cites the Nurse in Experience as one such character. His suggestion that the Nurse's remembrance of the past as a negative experience directly contrasts with the Wordsworthian association of the past as restorative and rejuvenating. She seems to equate her past with her present and future (59). Pagliaro does a comparative reading of some lines in the two "Nurse's Songs," and posits that the stark difference lies in the way in which expectations are fulfilled (Innocence) or dashed (Experience), though initially rooted in the same sentiments (61). Pagliaro continues his discussion of the psychological confinement from which the Nurse in Experience suffers through sexual repression and unfulfilled desires from youth. He also reads the plate which accompanies the poem as reinforcing the sense of the Nurse's only seeming control of the situation (62-63). However, he concludes that "she will never control the youth she could not manage . . . when she was young" (63).
David Lindsay seems to be implicitly referring to "NURSES Song" when he, though preceded by Frye and Hirsch, states the close relationship between pastoral and satire because satire exposes "the negations which undermine [pastoral]"(17). Lindsay further explains in William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience that an "embittered speaker responds to the cruelties of fallen existence by remembering an Arcadian or Edenic experience which he has lost" (17), which seems to describe the nurse's feelings in experience. Lindsay analyzes the poem in the context of other critics' readings, including Hirsch's, which involve considerations of parodic contrasts between parallel songs as well as of the nurse's destructive anxieties about the future (44).
Mary Lynn Johnson'sFeminist Approaches to Teaching Songs investigates the attitudes toward women in Blake's Songs. She posits that there is a "sense of hostility toward women in general in Songs of Experience" (60-61), and that the nurse or mother's influence that was once nurturing and loving is now "sinister and oppressive" (64). Johnson also suggests that women become men's allies in experience as they seek to ruin the children's lives. These general observations could be directly applied to "NURSES Song" in investigations of the female and the female's roles as nurse and authority figure.
Stephen Cox centers his discussion of "NURSES Song" in Taking Risks in Teaching Songs by asking "What is responsible for the 'evils of life'?" (91). His conclusion is the vague answer of "'the nature of things'" (91). Cox also asserts that this question reveals an advancement from "problems of evaluation to problems of literary evidence" (91).
Wallace Jackson's "The Grounding of the Songs" privileges issues of division and separateness in discussions of Songs of Experience and also the resulting envy, for example, of the Nurse in "NURSES Song" for her lost innocence (112-13). Jackson investigates the idea of pastoral and antipastoral and the unavoidable results of "disillusionment and cynicism" (114) from the progression of the former to the latter. Though not explicitly discussed in light of this conclusion, the Nurse in "NURSES Song" seems to exemplify these results.
Joseph Viscomi discussion on color printing in Blake and the Idea of the Book notes that "Blake's mode of color printing [represented] printing's most dramatic contribution to the composing process, allowing him actually to reinvent designs by transforming outline drawings meant to receive light water color washes into full-bodied paintings" (119). This concept of reinventing designs seems to parallel the way in which pairs of Blake's Songs undergo reinvention between Innocence and Experience.
--Beth Ann Neighbors (November 1995)
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