Essay: Change

Change

The partner poem in this essay is The Temporary Face, by Imtiaz Dharker:

I draw your face on the huge sand
in the early morning, when small crabs
run and hide in the holes
I have provided for your eyes.

I go away. Through the day
people come and go, knowing nothing
but themselves, the sun on shoulders,
salt, fish, net. They scuff

your outlines, walk across your mouth,
they put down footprints in your eyes.
This makes you real, peels back
your absence, lets your image heal

like a temporary skin. I learn to
love the thing that has to be erased,
the thing I may not be allowed to keep,
sand that runs away beneath my running feet.

Explore some of the ways poets present change

Both William Blake's poetry and The Temporary Face explore change, focussing particularly on the transition between innocence and experience. Using a variety of literary devices, the two authors show that change can be unwanted, yearned for, accepted or mourned, but is perhaps always inevitable.

Infant Joy examines the time before change. The newborn child is not branded by name, gender or class by the author, and this seems to be Blake's favourite age, anaphora emphasising the 'Sweet Joy' of the poem. 'It would be perverse', argues Punter, 'to attempt to see a dark side to this poem' - to attempt to see any hint of impending change, in other words. However, the repeated use of 'befall' might suggest an approaching end to the speaker's innocence, with its connotations of the Fall of Man. Art critic Waller claims that the angular, strained lower leaves of the poem's illustration suggest 'a hint of experience', while Paglia even goes so far as to describe the poem as an 'invitation to sadism'. Her interpretation suggests that Infant Joy is so innocent that the reader becomes a voyeur, a reader-response analysis which relies on the reader to actualise the meaning of the poem, and change it entirely. This particular view seems implausible, but there can be no doubt that Infant Joy epitomises the prelapsarian happiness of the Innocence Songs, and it might be suggested that the coming Fall lies just beneath the surface.

The change is not only biblical but highly relevant to Blake's time. In particular, he seems concerned with the Industrial Revolution and its threat to Britain's countryside, to the 'darkening Green.' The use of a present participle here is ominous due to its tense, and is underlined by its position at the end of the poem; it seems far removed from the 'early morning' when Dharker drew on sand (both poets seem to associate innocence with day and light) and the children played on the green. Another poem, The Tyger, might refer to one of the most important changes of Blake's lifetime: the French Revolution. Indeed, it might be that the Terror and tyranny of Robespierre's regime, between the publication of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, influenced Blake's more pessimistic view of human nature in his second collection.

Closer to Blake's home, two churches were built on greens near his London home. This may have been the inspiration for The Garden of Love, where the Arcadian imagery of childhood and innocence is replaced by 'tombstones where flowers should be'. The juxtaposition of death and life emphasises the horror Blake felt at this change, his sadness perhaps even seen in the metre of the last stanza, where the doubling of stresses in the last two lines lends weariness to the rhythm. The lines are lengthened too, tetrameter lines instead of trimeter lines, which has the same effect. Finally, the internal rhyme and alliteration of 'binding with briars, my joys and desires' underlines a process which has not necessarily stopped, judging by the use of the past progressive tense. Similarly, Dharker uses alliteration and continuous verbs in his last last line, in which sand 'runs away beneath my running feet.' Both poets also use motifs effectively - sand, for instance, is always shifting, used to signal the passage of time in sand timers. Blake, meanwhile, uses the archetype of the Garden of Eden to suggest innocence and and the threat of the Fall.

Both poets also explore the role of the senses in experience, and in examining change. Empiricism was highly influential in Blake's time, after Locke, Newton and the Age of Enlightenment, but the Londoner often portrays the senses very negatively. In London, for example, horrors are conveyed with aural imagery, while his vision '[marks] in every face I meet/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.' The alliteration in this passage creates a very strong image, one with a clear parallel to the 'footprints in your eyes' of Dharker's poem. This imagery, of senses having witnessed and experienced much, clearly comes after the change hinted at in Blake's earlier poetry, and for him the change is usually negative.

It is also inevitable in some of his work. In The Angel, the 'maiden Queen' of the first stanza ages so quickly that she says that 'grey hairs were on my head' by the final line, the colour 'grey' contrasting vividly with the morn 'blush'd rosy red'. The image of youth also hides change within it, with some critics suggesting that the colour red suggests menstruation . The ephemeral nature of life is hinted at with just the title of The Temporary Face, while the passage of time is also represented by enjambment (between both lines and stanzas) and the imagery of sand. Dharker's narrator learns to embrace this aspect of life, and there is evidence that Blake did too. He saw death as 'passing into another room', while The Fly implies a short existence with its form alone (the smallness of its lines). The insect itself lives a very short existence, and through  rhetorical questions Blake intends to blur the lines between him and it. But in answer to our temporary lives and the inevitability of ageing, he simply says that he is 'A happy fly', drawing comfort from the fact that 'thought is life'. This phrase, reminiscent of 'Cogito ergo sum', is a solipsistic truism not far removed from the people 'knowing nothing/But themselves' in The Temporary Face. For Blake, it seems, contentment is the remarkably simple response to unwanted change.

In conclusion, change is portrayed as inevitable and (initially) unwelcome for both poets. Writing at a time of historic upheaval, the progression of Songs of Experience is suitably cynical, yet Blake's poetry also suggests that change is what we make of it. As Dharker '[learns] to/ Love the thing that has to be erased', it is equally true that we can make change 'much worse than it needs to be', as Punter wrote of the Songs. Blake creates this impression with just one phrase. The 'mind-forg'd manacles' of London imply that we are bound by fake ('forg'd') chains, chains imposed upon ourselves through internalisation ('mind'). Despite his preoccupation with innocence turning into experience, the countryside becoming industrialised or youth giving way to maturity, there is a sense throughout Blake's poetry that he never gave upon the spirit of change and revolution which dominated the late eighteenth century.