"Infant Sorrow"An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism
Perhaps because it seemingly explicates itself, the deceptively "simple" "Infant Sorrow" is among Blake's more neglected lyrics. The few full-scale readings offered address formal issues and tangents such as composition and intertextuality as often as theme or content. Critics seem to have valued "Infant Sorrow" as much as a springboard for discussing wider Blakean issues as for its own merits.
Max Plowman provides the earliest focus on "Infant Sorrow" in 1926, in a brief note in The Times Literary Supplement. He suggests that four stanzas of unpublished lyric in the "Rossetti Manuscript," Blake's notebook, commonly considered as a complete poem titled "In A Mirtle Shade" after their first line, should in fact be included with other unpublished stanzas in a longer variant of "Infant Sorrow." In his The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake (1959), Robert Gleckner judges "Infant Sorrow," "something of a curiosity." He considers the poem in "violent contrast" with "Infant Joy," its presumed counter part in Songs of Innocence. Where "Infant Joy" suggests harmony between parents and child, Gleckner reads "Infant Sorrow" as an evocation of intrinsic dissonance between them. He relates "Infant Sorrow" to the motif of patriarchal authority and oedipal rebellion against it in Tiriel. Gleckner sees Blake evoking the progression from innocence into experience in terms of the family dynamic. With maturity, he argues, Blake believes the child abandons his mother's security, but must then capitulate to his father's authority. "The mother's groans, of course, are due to the fact that she no longer has any place in the child's life," he declares. "Her role as protectress is over, and the child, though helpless, is on its own." The father , he continues, "weeps tears of jealousy" for his child's innocence, and is impelled to initiate the infant into experience by asserting his parental authority over him or her. "When the child begins to think, to reason, to identify himself as individual separate from others and from the divine, and with a will of his own," Gleckner argues, "protection and love are discarded and the father exerts his power to control the child, to bind him with the man-made laws, restrictions, duties, and morals of this world." Gleckner, also sees echoes of The Book of Thel in hints of the child's trepidation to "leap" into "this dangerous world.
Norman Nathan's brief reading of "Infant Sorrow," in his article "Blake's Infant Sorrow" (1960), centers on the new-born speaker's description of himself as "like a fiend hid in a cloud." Nathan disagrees with Wicksteed's ass ertion that the verbal image of the cloud in the poem is symbolically consistent with Blake's use of cloud imagery in his etchings and engravings. "The illustration for "Infant Sorrow" omits a cloud," he notes, "which indicates that the word in the poem is used as a symbolic and not as a visual image." He argues that the child's cloud simile signifies his or her soul's manifestation in physical matter, as it seems to in "The Little Black Boy" in Songs of Innocence, suggesting that, "the word cl oud symbolizes the human body or something physical in which the spirit is restrained. Nathan parts further with Wicksteed by concluding that the poem describes not merely the babies mounting sorrow as he is initiated into experience, but also the hardsh ips of parenthood his or her mother and father are initiated into by his birth. "Blake is also arguing, however," he writes, "that the birth of the infant brings sorrow to those already in this world," so much so that he or she "seems like a devil in hum an form," a fiend within a cloud.
In his Blake's Contrary States: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience As Dramatic Poems (1966), D.G. Gilham argues that "Infant Sorrow" cannot be spoken by a child. Instead, he concludes, it must be read as an adul t's "interpretation" of his or her own infancy, constructed from "what can normally be observed: the convulsed moments of the baby, the expression on the face of a sucking child..." The speaker's re-imaging, informed by experience, attributes a "prote st against a hostile world" to the baby which bespeaks adult pessimism. Gillham notes that the poem nonetheless includes "a recognition of the energy displayed by the child," an enthusiasm for the infant's transgressive will-to-experience which he finds absent from some other pieces, such as "The Nurse's Song." Morton Paley notes "Infant Sorrow" in passing in his Twentieth Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1969), relating its text and theme to a section of Tiriel (8:12-20), though without elaboration. He presumably draws attention to the parallel in Tiriel of the "infant in sorrow" who "springs form the womb" to confront a negligent mother and an authoritative father who "scourges of all youthful fancies from the newborn man," i nitiating him into experience. Paley's juxtaposition of "Infant Sorrow" with these lines from Tiriel seems to presuppose a reading concurrent with Gleckner's, which makes the same comparison.
Roman Jakobson's highly technical structuralist explication of "Infant Sorrow" , "On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-Painters" (1970), analyzes the poem to demonstrate parallels at the deep structural level bet ween verbal grammar and the visual, compositional "grammar" of graphic art, the "remarkable analogy between the role of grammar in poetry and painter's composition based on latent or patent geometrical order or on a revulsion against geometrical arrangeme nts." "The eight lines of 'Infant Sorrow' " are, " he notes, "remarkably rich in what Gerald Manley Hopkins infers by 'figures of grammar' and 'figures of sound', and it is to their eloquent symmetry and palpable interplay imbued with diaphanous symbolis m that this succinct, ingenuous story owes most of its mythological power and suggestiveness." Jakobson suggests that Blake implies the thematic tension of the poem's narrative conflict between child and parents through grammatical dissonance in its ling uistic structure. "In linguistic terms," he explains, "the tension is between the initial supremacy of animate subjects with finite verbs of action and the subsequent prevalence of concrete, material inanimates used as indirect objects of gerunds, mere v ehicles derived from verbs of action and subordinate to the only finite thought, in its narrow meaning of a wish conceived."
Donald Moore's "Blake's Notebook versions of 'Infant Sorrow'" (1972) offers a thorough and painstaking speculative account of Blake's composition and revision of the longer, variant version of "Infant Joy" contained in his noteb ook, a text whose divergence from the published version Moore deems "so extensive that they all but comprise a separate poem." He resolves a controversy over the composition of four stanzas of the variant "Infant Sorrow" sometimes considered, due to amb iguity in Blake's manuscript, as a separate piece called "In a Mirtle Shade," by reconstructing Blake's composition process to demonstrate that they "were never a complete and independent poem or even an unconnected fragment in the form in which they are sometimes printed and discussed....."
In his Innocence and Experience Retraced: An Introduction To Blake, E. D. Hirsch reads "Infant Sorrow" in terms of a paradigm of inverted Christian virtues seemingly derived from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . He views the infant's apparent indolence as expressive of his or her transgressive self-assertion and energy, qualities he believes Blake lauds in him or her. He writes that, "the willful perversity of the rebellious infant in 'Infant Sorrow' is his m ark of excellence and divinity." The child's "sorrow" is owing to the constriction of his energy which experiential maturity seemingly necessitate, the "repressive forces of the world into which he has thrust himself." Hirsch reads "Infant Sorrow" as co mplementary to "Infant Joy," rather than contradictory. "The new poem does not repudiate the blessedness of infant smiles," Hirsch declares, "it confronts us with the contrary to them - the divinity of infant screams." He views "Infant Sorrow" as "a hig hly affirmative poem" and values the child's resistance to parental authority as an exemplary expression of the human spirit. "Because the world is dangerous," he concludes, "the rebellious energy and self-seeking autonomy of the infant have positive val ue."
John Bender and Anne Mellor's "Liberating The Sister Arts: The Revolution of Blake's 'Infant Sorrow'" (1983) discusses the interplay between the piece's text and its illustration in terms of the eighteenth century paradigm of the Sister Arts, poetry and painting. Aesthetic theorists in the eighteenth century often discussed literary and graphic art in terms of each other, asserting, as Bender and Mellor note, that, "painting must speak in pictures while poetry must envision s cenes in words." Though some nominal arguments were made for an interdependency between the forms that eliminated the need to make evaluative distinctions between them, most implicitly priviledged literature over graphic arts. The belief that qualitativ e distinctions must be made between forms is termed the paragone, or debate by Bender and Mellor. They call the conception of mutual dependence between forms un pictura poesis the poetic picture. "Although the Royal Academy's celebrati on of the grand style in painting attempted to establish a parity between the arts in the England of Blake's day," Bender and Mellor observe, " the priority of the verbal text clearly remained in book illustration." They praise "Infant Sorrow" as revolut ionary its transcendence of both conventions governing the interplay between text and illustration. "In 'Infant Sorrow'," they write, "Blake denies the necessity of ranking the arts and thus breaks sharply with the tradition of the paragone... .. Moreover, he shows that the arts exist autonomously and thus posits an alternative to the idea of the interdependency of the arts implied by the un pictura poesis tradition." They note a "radical discrepancy between the text and design" of "Infant Sor row," which they read as "mutually exclusive," inconsistent with each other in terms of narrative and theme. With "Infant Sorrow," Bender and Mellor maintain, "the inherited hierarchical tradition of un pictura poesis effectively dies." Blake, they conclude, "revolutionizes the Sister arts by setting forth autonomous visual and verbal texts that are independent, equally valid, and irreconcilable."
Heather Glen's reading of "Infant Joy" in her Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1983) focuses on what she interprets as the poem's inversion of the process of "calling" she describ es in her reading of "Infant Joy." "Calling," for Glen, is an interactive dynamic through which an entity or object "names" itself by answering the "call" of another voice in a manner which constitutes self-definition. The child in "Infant Joy" establis hes his or her identity through dialogue with his or her mother. In "Infant Sorrow" though, there is no such interaction between child and parents. As Glen observes, ".....there is no answering recognition and nurturing of [the infant's] essential being , no space for play. Here there are no longer two chiming voices, echoing in a poetically fixed present, but a single voice which speaks in a fixed past tense." Instead of being "called" out, invited into the external world, as the baby in "Infant Joy" is, the child in "Infant Sorrow" is forced to "leap" into a "dangerous" world, which, Glen notes, is "not to be acted upon, but reacted against, and finally withdrawn from into closed-off subjectivity." In Glen's readings, "Infant Sorrow" evokes the awak ening of a child's internal self-consciousness, while its counterpart, "Infant Joy" describes the development of his or her external, social self. "This self-definition is very different from that self-realization within an interpersonal world which is p resented in 'Infant Joy'," she concludes. "Instead of an opening out, the poem depicts diminution: instead of expressing himself in response to another, this child remains infans - dumb."
Stanley Gardner's consideration of "Infant Sorrow" in his Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced (1986) situates the poem in the context of "swaddling," a practice of wrapping babies very tightly in long sheets to r estrict their movement and presumably ensure their safety. The practice was rapidly falling out of favor at the time of the poem's composition and was being vocally condemned by a number of pediatric authorities, including Dr. William Buchanan, who Gardn er cites often. Gardner argues that Blake uses the motif of the baby being swaddled to signify the restraints of convention that are imposed on individuals by society. The progression from innocence to experience is evoked by a child's gradual resignati on to the constraints of his or her swaddling clothes. Gardner cites Buchanan's description of swaddling, which echoes his notion of the practice's symbolic significance in the poem: " 'bracing and dressing an infant ... as soon as it came into the world ' was 'to mend the shape' of the child," an endeavor motivated by "the vanity of the parents." "In 'Infant Sorrow'," Gardner concludes, "we are... conscious of the personally motivated, restrictive grip of the adult, reaching out of privilege to bind the infant in time-worn swaddling bands of constraint."
Greg Crossan cites the lyric "Sephestias Song to her Childe" from Robert Greene's pastoral romance Menaphon as a possible basis for "Infant Sorrow" in his article " 'Infant Sorrow' and Robert Greene's Menaphon" (1986) a source first suggested, though not examined, by Foster Damon. In addition to noting textual similarities between the songs, Crossan notes two angles of thematic intertextuality between them. "First," he writes, " is that 'Sephestias Song' as a whole lends sup port to Norman Nathan's point that childbirth not only initiates the infant into sorrow, but also brings sorrow upon the parents." "Given that commentators now tend to read 'Infant Sorrow' both in its Songs version and in its longer Notebook version, as a poem which hints at the oedipal conflict between father and son," he continues, drawing his second comparison, " it is interesting that this is precisely what Menaphon builds up to as its climax." Thomas O'Grady's "Little Chandler's Song of Experience" (1991) notes intertextuality between "Infant Sorrow" and James Joyce's Dubliners story "A Little Cloud." In "A Little Cloud," O'Grady declares, "Joyce... seems to allude with both substantive and thematic significance, to the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience of William Blake, an important influence on his creative imagination throughout his career." O'Grady argues that both Blake and Joyce are fascinated by the image of a raging, tearful infant as evocative of a larger human sorrow, and that Joyce deliberately links Blake's earlier expression of the motif with his own use of a crying baby for the emblem of his protagonist Little Chan dler's anxiety. "...That image of a 'fiend hid in a cloud' which both Blake and Joyce found especially memorable," O'Grady writes, "has particular relevance in Little Chandler's desperate compression of his multiple frustrations into the relentless waili ng of his child; and it can be linked as well with other echoes of early Blake which resonate through 'A Little Cloud.' " He goes on to note multiple instances of distinctly Blakean diction and theme in the story and others in Dubliners. "Ultim ately," O'Grady concludes, "as both the content and the context of Blake's poem support, 'A Little Cloud' is a story not just about blindness and insight, but even more so about innocence and experience, those 'Two Contrary States of the Human Soul' that Joyce explores in various other stories in Dubliners."
Ricks Carson's very brief reading, "Blake's Infant Sorrow" (1993), deems the piece, "one of the bleakest poems in Songs of Experience because it presents a malignant view of childbirth from the point of view of the child ... eve rything about the poem alienates." He sees "Infant Sorrow" as a debunking of idealizations of children which paradoxically deepens adults' appreciation for them. "Knowing that [children] have corruption and dying born into them actually heightens our re sponse to their beauty," he decides. "We continue to bring children into 'the dangerous world' because their fatal grace helps us complete our emotional and spiritual lives."
--John Murphy (November 1995)
Bibliography
Bender, John and Anne Mellor. "Liberating The Sister Arts: The Revolution Of Blake's 'Infant Sorrow.' " ELH. Summer (1983): 297 - 308.
Carson, Ricks. "Blake's Infant Sorrow." The Explicator. Spring 1983: 150 -151.
Crossan, Greg. " 'Infant Sorrow' and Robert Greene's Menaphon." Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly. Spring 1986: 142.
Gardner, Stanley. Blake's Innocence and Experience Retraced. NewYork: St. Martin's, 1986.
Gillham, D. G.Blake's Contrary States: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience As Dramatic Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966.
Gleckner, Robert F.The Piper And The Bard: A study Of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959.
Glen, Heather. Vision and Disenchantment: Blake's Songs and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
Hirsch, Eric D., Jr.Innocence and Experience: An Introduction To Blake. 1964. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.
Jakobson, Roman. "On the Verbal Art of William Blake and Other Poet-Painters." Linguistic Inquiry. 1 (1970): 3 - 10.
Moore, Donald K. "Blake's Notebook Versions of 'Infant Sorrow.' " Bulletin of The New York Public Library. 76 (1972): 209 - 219.
Nathan, Norman. "Blake's 'Infant Sorrow.' " Notes and Queries. March (1960): 99 - 100.
O'Grady, Thomas B. "Little Chandler's Song of Experience." James Joyce Quarterly. 28.2. Winter (1991): 399 - 404.
Paley, Morton D. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and Experience: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed. Morton D. Paley. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Plowman, Max. "Blake's 'Infant Sorrow.' " The Times Literary Supplement 18 November 1926.