"And I wrote my happy songs, every child may joy to hear": The poetry of William Blake in the middle school classroom

ALAN Review, Winter 2003 by Kazemek, Francis E

"For Mercy Has a Human Heart"

Poetry, like most good literature, has the power not only to delight but also has the potential to instruct. This is true of the Songs. By exploring the "Two Contrary States of the Human Soul," the poems embody what the imaginative psychologist James Hillman (1989) calls poetry's soul-making power. Let's look at a few of the Songs that raise questions of how we might be and act in the world.

Blake begins "On Another's Sorrow" with a series of rhetorical questions:

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief

And not seek for kind relief?

He then answers categorically: "No, no! never can it be!/ Never, never can it be!" Similarly, in "The Human Abstract" he argues:

Pity would be no more,

If we did not make somebody Poor:

And Mercy no more could be,

If all were as happy as we ....

These poems address directly the moral ties that bind all of humanity together, regardless of religion or ethnicity, Christian or Muslim, Israeli or Palestinian. They are a yea-saying to the fact that we all are not only brothers and sisters under the heavens, but that as such we have responsibilities for the welfare of one another. In today's world, this is a message that needs to be artistically, compellingly, and non-didactically affirmed in our classrooms.

Blake further develops the nature and responsibilities of humanity in "The Divine Image." The third stanza reads:

For Mercy has a human heart

Pity, a human face:

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress ....

By sharing these poems with students and by helping them relate the poems to their own lives and experiences (for example, by asking them how they feel when they see someone sad or crying and what they might do in such situations, or by having them make a collage of the "human dress" Peace), we not only are exploring great poetry with them but also are engaging in the best kind of non-didactic moral education.

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star" (Blake, 1988, p. 35).

In "The Marmalade Man Makes a Dance to Mend Us" (Willard, 1981, p. 36) Willard addresses the same concerns as Blake. She says, "Lamb and tiger, walk together./Dancing starts where fighting ends." Dancing is poetry's metaphoric partner, and Blake's work and those of the others I have presented in this essay celebrate innocence and experience, joy and sorrow, and the beauty of language imaginatively used. But more, for middle school students in today's difficult time, they affirm the necessity of envisioning, of believing in, of dancing and celebrating the possibility of a more universally peaceful world and more loving and visionary people. "Maybe we could all see such beings, if only we knew how to," Mina's mother tells Michael, tells us (Almond, 1998, p. 132). Blake can teach us how.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. (1996). Blake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Almond, David. (1998). Skellig. New York: Dell Yearling. Blake, William. (1988). "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

In The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, pp. 3345. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor Books. Blake, William. (1967). Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.