engleski

READING W. BLAKE'S "THE CLOD & THE PEBBLE" AS INTRODUCTION TO BLAKE, AND TO POETRY

"The Clod & the Pebble", one of the poems belonging to William Blake's Songs of Experience, besides being very Blakean verse, offers excellent opportunities as an introduction to poetry in general. Its heterogeneous quality, as well as an unexpected quantity of relevant features (considering the relative shortness of the poem), qualify it as a particulary well-chosen sample of poetic speech and, more specifically, of its Blakean variant. Aspects considered are not only of an immediately practical nature, but can occasionally be of a wider, theoretical import. The first to be tackled is the most obvious: the relationship between the oral and the written word, plus, as is regularly the case with Blake, the constitutive status of the visual element (both artistic, orthographic and structural). This more than just touches on issues of complex interrelationships between individual arts, and of an individual work as a Gesamtkunstwerk (the more so in the light of Blake's lost music, creating an ulterior dimension of any single poem). Starting from the established practice of a poem being read rather than heard, the presentation then continues with what can be gathered from the poem even before we have understood its meaning: first from what we can see, and secondly from what we can hear (especially if we read it aloud). Metrics, rhyme, diction, syntax – all can be shown to participate in the basic poetic purport. A semantic analysis finally inserts the poem into the Blakean imaginative universe and, even more comprehensively, into the world of poetry.

Blake; poetry; Gesamtkunstwerk; levels of interpretation

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