I was recently asked to write about a "presiding spirit", to choose a
poem and then talk about why it was personally influential. I found
it unexpectedly interesting to do, and thought maybe poetryetcs might
want to post favourite poems and short essays on why that particular
poem matters. I'd certainly be interested in reading them. Mine is
below to get things started -

Now off to get ready for the anti-war rally -

Best

Alison

The Tyger

by William Blake

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when the heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame they fearful symmetry?

When I was asked to speak of a presiding spirit, I spent some time in
a quandary. How could I choose between all the poets who mattered so
much to me? Between those constellations I steer by, those
constantly shifting galaxies of poems, how could I pick out one
single star?

In the end, the question answered itself. My mind kept returning to
William Blake, just as I return to Blake when I feel tattered and a
little soiled, when the world of poetry seems so far from poetry that
I no longer understand why it is that I write it. We all live in the
world, and the world is full of the transactions of survival, and
sometimes they are grubby and disappointing. Sometimes it is too
easy to forget the complex innocence of poetry, its darknesses and
vital light, the strange purities of its nightmares and dreams. When
I need to remember, I always read Blake.

The Tyger was my favourite poem when I was ten years old. It is
still one of my favourite poems, 30 years later. The reasons may
have mutated over the years as I have found different depths and
excitements in my reading, but in the end, I think they are basically
the same. Blake's ferocious energy, his audacity, the colour and
freedom of his works, excite me as much now as they did when I was a
child. When my daughter Zoe started writing poems I gave her Songs
of Innocence and Experience, and I was moved to see how he answered
the wild Other in herself, how her passionate desires flared in
response, just as mine did at her age. At ten, I was enchanted by The
Tyger's insistent, bold rhythms, the vividness of its imagery, how it
summoned what was at once frightening and dreadful and beautiful and
fierce within me. It quickened my own animal heart. And this still
happens to me when I read it. Now I think I value Blake's freedom
more; as you grow older you realise how difficult it is to maintain
this kind of liberty, this untrammelled mind, unfraid of joyousness.
And the technician in me admires the way Blake takes such a simple
ballad form and breaks and distorts it without ever compromising it,
injecting it with a wholly original energy. I love, for example, the
rhythm of the line "what dread hand? & what dread feet?", how it
shifts from the previous line, which is a simple iambic with four
beats, to a line with six equal beats. It's an audacious shift, the
sort of movement a timid poet would never make, scornful of prosodic
rules, full of Blake's intuitive expressiveness, raw with a kind of
primordial beauty.

Blake articulates a politics of the heart: he expresses that which
will not be denied, that which is only dangerous when it is oppressed
and forgotten. He is, in the proper sense, a radical poet still, and
political in a profoundly poetic sense. He is the archetypal rebel
angel, fighting for the vitality and contradictions of love in a
world which seeks to tame and destroy its power. It's why he has
been, and continues to be, so important to so many different kinds of
poets. He imagines the free human being, and so frees me to imagine
I am free. I think this desiring imagination, which I first saw
manifested in Blake's poems, lies behind everything I write.



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Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/

Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/