Page 35 - GALIET THE HOLY WORD: Blake IV++

The intricate synaesthesia between SEI’s Holy Word and SII’s Lamb’s song mirrors the fusion between the New and the Old Testament. To yearn for the Holy Word in SE’s Introduction, is to long for the Lamb’s song in SI’s Introduction. The Lamb’s song prefigures the descent of the Holy Word. If in innocence’s divine sphere, SI’s Piper possesses the Holy Word instinctually, intuitively, in experience’s realm, he, and humanity, have gradually lost it. And it must be recovered in experience’s sufferings, the World’s adolescence.26
The quintessential in Blake invites us to juxtapose SII’s “Piping down the valleys wild/piping songs of pleasant glee.../I wrote my happy songs” to SEI’s “Hear...the voice of the Bard/Who Present, Past, & Future sees.” And the marvelous is revealed. The tragic opposition is unified. In necessity’s wings, our gazes flee, and see little children charm, in joyous arms or wings, each dear frontispiece. On the left (SII), upon a cheery cloud, a wingless little one asks the Shepherd Piper to “pipe a song about a Lamb.” On the right (SEI), a cherub caringly handheld, carried upon the Shepherd’s head, witnesses Blake’s summons of the Prophet Bard. If SI’s wingless child seems to flee away
26 Oxford English Dictionary. From Latin adolescere: “to suffer.”
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