The Language of Paradox in William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker who lived from 1757 to 1827.  Blake is now considered quite an influential poet of the Romantic Age. The uniqueness of his poetry makes it difficult to classify him. His notable works include Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, and Milton. 

The poem Auguries of Innocence is a poem from one of William Blake's notebooks now known as The Pickering Manuscript. Assumed to have been written in 1803, it was not published until 1863. The poem is basically a string of paradoxes which juxtapose innocence with corruption. It can also be seen as a paralleling of innocence and experience, an important theme in Blake’s poems. The poem is 132 lines and has been published with and without breaks that divide the poem into stanzas. An augury is a sign or omen.

The poem begins with these memorable lines allegedly defining imagination:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

At the beginning itself a parallel of the spiritual and the trivial is perceived. The poet takes trivial objects like a grain of sand, a wild flower, a hand, and an hour and compares it with lofty ideals. It is impossible to perceive an entire world in such an ordinary thing as a grain of sand. The heavens and the crude wild flower are at first glance diametrically opposing and unrelated things. ‘Infinity’ and ‘eternity’ are metaphysical, abstract concepts that one cannot sense with the human form. But the poet juxtaposes both the fundamental and trivial in four pairs. Thus at the onset itself, the reader finds himself on a sort of bridge linking the material world and the spiritual world. Seen in the light of Blake’s recurrent themes and the title of the poem, it may be perceived more accurately as a link between innocence and experience – the innocence of childhood and the experience of a perhaps blemished adulthood. These four lines thus set the stage for the numerous later contrasts.

The next 42 lines deal with various images related to a wide array of twenty-four birds, animals, and insects.  We see caged birds, starving dogs, misused horses, hunted hares, wounded skylarks, lions’ howls, wrens in pain and oxen in wrath. The consequences of such cruel imagery are the other half of the imagery – such deeds result in heaven’s rage, God’s vengeance, and the cherubim ending his song. Blake probably draws on such imagery to build up a narrative of childlike innocence, as he is wont to do. In each case, he shows that innocence being wounded or made captive. In the later lines Blake wanders into the realm of man.

Two imageries show beautiful innocent birds caged. The consequence of each is what seems to be at first a far-fetched conclusion, but this language of paradox makes the initial imprisonment of such innocent birds a vile deed. Caging a robin redbreast, Blake says, ‘puts all heaven in a rage’; dove-houses filled with birds shames evil itself. Read in the context of the American and French Revolutions, it is seen as a denouncement of slavery.

We shall see three of these metaphors as juxtapositions of extremes.

A dog starv'd at his master's gate

                               Predicts the ruin of the state.           (Lines 9-10)

Before delving into the paradox of a starving dog resulting in the ruin of an entire country, the background for this prophetic statement is required. Blake lived shoulder to shoulder with the two great Revolutions of the time, and he witnessed the rebellion of the common man against unjust dominant classes. He saw an entire civilization fold into itself in neighbouring France. Blake allegedly regretted that the same rebellion did not happen in England, where similar injustices against the poor were happening. In England at the time social status was still the rule of the day; the poor were always poor and the rich were always rich. 

In this line Blake brings to the reader’s mind the innocent picture of a dog who is unwaveringly loyal to his master. But the picture is shattered it is realized that this devoutness is not reciprocated. The master doesn’t care for the dog – he lets it starve. He is indifferent when he sees it just outside his gate. This indifference to the dog’s loyalty is of course a cruel and inhumane thing to do. But the consequence of such a deed seen in ordinary light is that the dog dies, the master gets away with this deed perhaps with a slightly wounded conscience, and from the moral perspective it may be imagined that the man would later in life face the consequences for the misdeed. But Blake almost indifferently avoids all of them and arrives at what seems to be an entirely unrelated conclusion - the starved dog foretells the destruction of the entire state. This is reminiscent of the line ‘What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?’ from John Donne’s Canonization. A starved dog cannot logically result in a ruined state in the same way the Donne’s sighs cannot drown merchant’s ships. There seems to be an invisible chain of events resulting in the said conclusion resembling the ‘Butterfly effect’. Such a deed makes considerable changes in the spiritual realm and will end in the fragmentation of the State. The reader may think that such a statement is rather far-fetched, but this unequal juxtaposition hints at the underlying admonition of the poet that such a deed will shatter the existing societal structure just at the same way one flap of a butterfly’s wings in one place supposedly sets off a tornado in another place.

Through this statement Blake sets off a silent warning to the dominant classes of 19^th century England. If they continue to oppress the lower classes, they would see their world crumble to pieces. The lines can also be seen as the perception of the starving of a dog from an innocent child’s point of view, the child would prophesize grave consequences. It can also be seen as an attack on slavery, which was abolished in Britain only three decades after the poem was penned.

A skylark wounded in the wing,

                               A cherubim does cease to sing.   (Lines 15-16)  
  
 These lines similarly draw a link between a skylark that is wounded in the hunt and a cherubim that ceases to sing.
Later lines abruptly start on a set of philosophic reflections. The next paradoxical statement that can be seen is

The beggar's rags, fluttering in air,

                                Does to rags the heavens tear.     (Lines 75-76) 
   
Here another contradiction is seen. How can the fluttering rags of a beggar tear the heavens to pieces? The implications of the impoverishment of the roadside beggar on the heavenly realm are startling. But the ethical and spiritual perspective is violently forced upon the reader, and there is a final reconciliation; there is an acceptance on the part of the reader of the truth behind the statement. Finding the sudden combination of the imageries of a beggar’s rags and a torn-apart heavens is startling, but it is necessary in Blake’s language of poetry.

Later on in the poem after numerous other proverbial paradoxes Blake returns to his meditations on life, destiny, and grandly ends stating that in the spiritual realm God appears in human form, possibly referring to Jesus Christ.

The poem is a delightful example of coherently simple but transcendentally beautiful poetry. Unfortunately it lacks unity on the whole. The beginning four lines set the tone for the entire poem and each of the following separate ‘proverbs’ may each be seen as illustrations of ‘the world in a grain of sand’ or ‘a heaven in a wild flower’. They are picture-perfect images, but nothing links them together except perhaps the title of the poem. It is only at the end of the poem that the poet shakes himself from the monotony of recurring proverbs and arrives at a reconciliation.

Read in the light of Blake being considered both a madman and a visionary, it is interesting. At the end he seems to be wanting the reader to understand and imbibe his own spiritual worldview. The poem can also be seen as a pointilistic portrait of individually coherent but collectively incoherent images. But then, most critics are of the opinion that the poem is a collection of unorganized poetic drafts that was never really meant to see the light of publication.