BLAKE'S FLY

 

 

                                                 Little Fly,

                                 Thy summer’s play

                                 My thoughtless hand

                                  Has brushed away.

 

                                 Am not I

                                A fly like thee?

                                Or art not thou

                               A man like me?

 

                                 For I dance,

                                And drink, & sing

                                Till some blind hand

                                Shall brush my wing.

 

                                 If thought is life

                                 And strength & breath,

                                And the want

Of thought is death;

 

Then am I

A happy fly

If I live

Or if I die.

 

 

One of the great things in writing about Blake is that you can often quote one of his poems in full.  If poetry compresses thought, then Blake compresses poetry.

            Blake’s fly poem has always made me somewhat uneasy.  Is it mawkishly sentimental, or ruthlessly cynical?  What’s going on?

            For a start, the whole tone of the thing would make much more sense if the creature were a bee.  When De La Mare speaks of the “honey fly”, that is presumably what he means.  Unless they sting you, bees are nice; and you can eat what they produce with impunity.  Eating what a fly has produced can make you ill.  That is why bee swatters don’t exist as far as I know, whereas fly swatters do.  Orwell’s Benjamin the donkey doesn’t have any complaints about bees, but he does have something to say about flies.  It is not for nothing that Beelzebub was also known as ‘Lord of the Flies’.

However, given that Blake drew the ghost of a flea – interestingly, in a human form: and splendidly muscular at that – we must allow him his penchant for insects that the rest of us are inclined to think of as antisocial.  Let’s assume, then, that when Blake says a fly that is what he means.  And there the trouble starts.  Summer’s play?  For a start, a fly only lasts about thirty days if something else doesn’t get it first.  It doesn’t have time to play.  It’s too busy growing up, mating in whatever way flies do, and foraging for food in ways that humans would not countenance.  Then, in my experience, flies move so fast it’s very hard to kill them by accident.  And if you do get one, it’s an occasion for celebration rather than regret.  That’s why a “thoughtless hand” is very rare in regard to flies: they’re too noisy and irritating, second only to a child in a supermarket. Usually it’s a determined and purposeful hand, with some kind of implement attached.

Of course, when Blake says a fly that isn’t – or isn’t just – what he does mean.  At the back of the poem is presumably the thought from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

That’s the pagan take on things: the gods exist, but they are cruel.  Blake’s view – or rather the view expressed in the poem: Blake’s own take on things seems to have been Gnostic, with a complicated personal twist – is much more typically modern.  What kills the fly and the human is not something deliberate, but a completely random act of nature.  There is no special dividing line between humanity and the rest of the breathing world.  Fly or human – what’s the difference? – you follow your instincts, and have fun with whatever gives you a buzz until something gets you.  Or, as Paul Simon put it in a later age: “That’s all there is, and the leaves that are green turn to brown.” 

If the poem had ended after the third verse, it would have held together beautifully.  In the last two verses, however, a completely new idea enters that seems to be a sort of take on Descartes, in which thought and instinct seem interchangeable. Whether you’re a man or a fly the message is the same:  keep thinking and you stay alive; stop thinking, and you die.  Thinking and breathing, so Blake explicitly suggests,  are one and the same.

Lots of problems with that.  I can’t speak for the thought processes of flies – I’m generally too busy trying to swat them to attempt a conversation with them – but what about all those humans who are healthily and happily alive without any apparent evidence of thought? You can, after all, breathe without thinking; but not the other way round.  Or not for very long.  And what about the hand that can brush away a thinker – human or fly variety – still busily engaged in pondering the big questions?  As so often happens when thought gets involved, everything seems to become a little muddled. The first part of the poem suggests that it’s chance that gets you, and that’s an idea that anyone – thinker or otherwise – can relate to: even if the idea is rejected.  “Till some blind hand/Shall brush my wing” is, for me, the outstanding concept in the poem, and perfectly expressed.

 

Man as an animal in a random universe has become almost axiomatic since Darwin.  It’s interesting to see the idea so well established – Blake’s Songs of Experience came out in 1794 – long before The Origin of Species.  Actually, it goes back to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and – before that – to Democritus via Epicurus.  The problem with the whole tradition for me, whether in its Epicurean, Blakean or Darwinian version, is the thoughtless hand.  What has simply been left out of the picture is the purposeful hand with the fly swatter.  And that’s a fairly serious omission.