"Soul" in Blake's writing: redeeming the word

Wordsworth Circle, Wntr, 2002 by Nancy Moore Goslee

When the "soul ... defil'd" line appears in The Visions, its form is less paradoxical, but the narrative context develops ironies avoided by the schematic myth and abstract rhetoric of America. Encouraging Oothoon to pluck her flower, the marigold argues that neither she nor Oothoon will lose anything, "because the soul of sweet delight/Can never pass away" (Erdman 46, 1:9-10). Oothoon understands that her deflowering promises a rebirth of physical and emotional "sweet delight": "thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks" (1:13). Yet after her rape, Oothoon's language shatters that wholeness. She asks Theotormon's eagles to "Rend away this defiled bosom" (2:15), and when they do so, "her soul reflects the smile;/As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles" (2:18-9). In claiming that her "breast," her inner self is "pure" and "transparent," Oothoon seems to make at least a partially positive statement, yet she does so at the cost of affirming a dualism that denies her physical "bo som."

On plate 3 her long protest against the limitations of the five senses and the reduction of experience into "one law" leads her toward a more radical questioning. Affirming, "Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on & the soul prey'd on by woe" (3:17), she argues that suffering, both physical and psychological, develops a renewed and now prophetic self. Yet this drama of redemptive suffering is quite different from the claim to original, inalienable joy in her long final speech, and with its images of worm, lamb, and swan it naturalizes the sexual and racial oppression that has created her suffering. Although its range of meanings in this poem can include sexual delight and spiritual stoicism, the word "soul" cannot yet help her define her relation to society (Goslee 101-28).

Because the exuberant, corporeal monism of the soul's "sweet delight" originates in the early Tractates and in The Marriage, the almost complete absence of the word "soul" from The Songs of Innocence, engraved and printed as a volume almost at the same time, is surprising. The fluid, immanent possibilities of the pastoral world of innocence sustain on the whole a child's idea of salvation that is corporeal but not quite sexual--clean white bodies shining in the sun. Only in "The Little Black Boy," where the corporeal whiteness of such an immortality becomes a crisis for the speaker's visualized identity, does the word "soul" appear, and it does so twice. Each appearance attempts a model of salvation to overcome the child's sense of rejection. The first not only splits black body from white soul but "I"--the living self--from a distanced spiritual counter of value acquired from a Christianity enmeshed in values of light and dark that reinforce racial difference--"but O! my soul is white." The second appearance of the word makes that living experiential self an enduring consciousness, not only imitating Christ's suffering but also drawing upon the monistic continuity of the doctrine of sensibility in which psychological states are developed and revealed through the body: "when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear"--a heat that is both the sun's physical onslaught and the God's spiritual force--"The cloud will vanish." This solution also fails, in a way, because it too successfully sustains the black child's continuing identity, yet an identity gained through his now more immanent soul bearing God's "beams" of heat. (7)