Poems to Live By - Barbara Vellacott
I seem always to have known the poem, ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’, with its numinous pounding beat, and mysterious ‘fearful symmetry'. It must have seeped into my psyche very early.
Then I was given, sometime in my twenties, ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience', and read them to a man I was in love with. How the simple music of those ‘songs’ suggested huge themes!
Some years later, before leaving the house for work one day, I heard someone quote these lines on the radio:
Joy and Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul Divine.
“William Blake!’ I instantly thought, though I didn’t know the lines. I had one of those sudden realizations: these were lines I could live by. Everything, the best and worst, the joyful and agonizing, could somehow be held together in a single story. A literary friend located them for me in 'Auguries of Innocence'. The rest of that astonishing poem told me that the infinite and eternal could be experienced within a present moment, or in a wild flower. But this wasn’t simply a statement of abstract mystical unity – there was rage at the caged robin and any ill-treated living creature, judgment for human cruelties and oppressions, warnings against the corrupting of the human mind by war and denial of imagination; and there were lines about the divine image in human beings. Blake could pack everything into the simplest of poetic couplets.
Over the years I expanded my reading of Blake’s poetry and began to get the hang of the prophetic books like ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem’. This was where, in magnificent poetry and pictures, the principles of humanity were portrayed not in schemes of personality types, but in characters who communicate, rage, struggle with spectres, and create, in ‘wars of life and wounds of love.’
Along the way I realised that the poetry was best read aloud, and in company. This really brings the vision home to body and soul.
Long may the fearsome and beautiful ‘Tyger’ of the imagination burn brightly in us!
Barbara Vellacott
19 December 2014
