To View "A Cradle Song" at the Blake Digital Text Project
In the detail of "Infant Sorrow", "Blake presents alternative stylistic
codes in the figures of the child and the woman. The child--drawn with
short, pulsating curved lines and turned in powerful contrapaso--appears
in Blake's relatively linear version of Michelangelo's style. ... The
woman on the other hand, is drawn largely in a two dimensional plane and
traced in a calm, smoothly flowing line. ... This stylistic opposition of
the naked, vigorous child to the clothed, static nurse/mother, whose head
is bound by a cap, may even suggest that it is the woman who is truly
'swaddled'"
(Bender 303).
"The child in plate 48 ["Infant Sorrow"] balances and protests, in an
attitude which comes near to a fall, on a curious and unprotecting couch.
The base of this dangerous piece of furniture is wickerwork similar to the
formidable cradle in plate 17 ["A Cradle Song"]. The likeness simply
points the difference in the condition of the pampered child on the
private couch of Experience. The solid, immutable chair of Innocence
is gone" (Gardner 129).
"The head-veil of the nurse in 'A Cradle Song', which so expressly matches
the screen and extends the poem, is changed in 'Infant Sorrow' for a
dutiful cap, proper in this claustrophobic bedroom, where the wearer is
brought to a function so alien to those who wear the same bonnet in
Innocence"(ibid.).
Other Comments P
"The text and illustration of 'Infant Sorrow' express the irrecoverable
loss, both of the attitude and acceptance of love
represented in 'Infant Joy', and of the benediction of day-by-day,
objective care shown in plate 17 of 'A Cradle Song'. This
alienating loss of attentive yet disinterested upbringing (or rather its
perversion than its loss) is presented in the illustrative
recollection Blake establishes, as usual developing from, but not
representing the lines he has written in 'Infant Sorrow'. So the female
in the illustration is hardly identifiable as the child's mother, her
dutiful dress and headgear seeming inappropriate to the occupant of that
heavily curtained, secretive bed in the background; and the father is
excluded from the illustration, though his aggressive neurosis is so
prominent in the text"
(Gardner 125).
On the other hand critics such as Bender and Mellor argue a divorce
between text and images:
"In this plate ['Infant Sorrow'] Blake refuses to choose between the text
and the design. He thereby revolutionizes the Sister Arts by setting
forth autonomous visual and verbal texts that are independent, equally
valid, and irreconcilable ... No visual illustration is strictly
equivalent to a verbal text, but here art delivers information that the
aesthetic code of the other would lead us not to expect. And
since Blake never published the texts of the Songs of Experience
without their designs, there is no historical authority for giving the
text primacy over the design"
(Bender 299-300).
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