Page 15 - GALIET THE HOLY WORD: Blake IV++

Blake’s Synergy • Poetic Structure • Imagery. Before we enter Poiesis’ lovely Gate, we must courageously journey Tragedy’s Way and find, amidst the tensions between the real and the ideal, the irrational and rational, and be filled by Margarita de Bayle’s verse, by her living quill, her pearl and her flower, all divine gifts, before we journey like her to the heavens to reach for the holy star that makes us yearn. For just as she has sought, Blake also sought.
Blake’s Introductory poems affirm his emancipating dialectics 3⁄4 the symmetries and asymmetries of tragedy’s strife energize life. Though both poems confabulate their songs in twenty verses, the Introduction in Songs of Innocence (“SII”) consists of five, four-line strophes, while the Introduction in Songs of Experience (“SEI”) consists of four, five-line strophes. Blake’s confabulation suggests that both introduction poems are stunningly symmetrical in their twenty-verse lines when read independently, and cleverly asymmetrical in their strophes when juxtaposed. Thus wedded, their symmetry and asymmetry mirrors heaven and hell, innocence and experience, in their astonishing dialectic strophic synergy.
Their opposing synergy, too, mirrors Blake’s contradicting ideology. Where SII’s Introduction becomes pure harmony and music to innocence’s spirit
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