William Blake: the Creation of the Songs: from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. - book review

Criticism, Fall, 2001 by Michael Ferber

Bogen suggested that Blake thought of the Ohio River because he had been reading Gilbert Imlay's A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, published in 1792. What Phillips has discovered is that the book did not appear until the end of the year; he has located its first advertisement in The Public Advertiser for 12 December, in a column next to one that was likely to capture Blake's attention: a warning "to certain Print-shops wherein libellous Pictures and Engravings are daily exhibited" that their owners may be prosecuted. This is a nice piece of research, and it is certainly possible that Blake was pushed and pulled toward the thought of the Ohio by these two articles. Yet the Ohio was so well known and so frequently cited in poetry that Blake hardly needed to see it again in print. Major battles with the French had taken place along its banks, battles celebrated in many a verse. If he wanted a contrast to the Thames, the Ohio was almost inevitable. Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1787), which we know Blake read, mentions it five times. Dyer mentions it in The Fleece (1757). A trawl through the English Poetry Data-Base will produce many more instances.

Phillips extends the date later still by citing a poem by John Thelwall of April 1793 where "charter'd" is used rather as Blake used it (though not of a river); here the same point can be made: the term had been widely deployed for several years, as Phillips acknowledges. He wants to extend the date well into 1793 because by then the anti-French reaction had taken hold and Blake's fear of it may have registered in his work, but it is difficult to see what is really gained by a later date, for none of the evidence he has found, it seems to me; counts as an unequivocal source for any of the drafts, let alone an allusion that might alter the way we read them. He cites, and reproduces, a ledger of the accounts of the Parish of Lambeth, where Blake was then living, where it is indicated that an unknown child was found dead in February 1793; the news would have been "the catalyst for the bitter irony of Blake's railing satire" of "Holy Thursday" in Experience. This may well be so--though it is the design, not the text, that presents a dead child--but was it not common in London for children to die of malnutrition?

In general Phillips sees Blake as highly suggestible along a narrow register of subjects, largely social and political. Building on the argument of Nurmi, Erdman, and Paulson that Blake's tyger owes its birth less to a cosmic blacksmith than to the September Massacres, which several British observers likened to tigerish behavior, Phillips concludes, "`The Tyger' may be a metaphor for the forces of revolution in France." Yet the fact that tigers were sometimes enlisted as metaphors for events in France does not make every tiger French. The tiger has been an emblem of cruelty since the Aeneid. The poem is highly resistant to any single line of interpretation and seems to shrug off political allusions with ease; they would only diminish it in any case. When Phillips then goes on to say that Blake might have taken the local reaction against the revolution as itself tigerlike, he is building on air.