Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' - William Blake - Rhetoric and Poetics

Conditioning my alternative reading of the stanza are numerous instances within the scope of Blake's notoriously versatile syntax of such possible fluctuations of subject and object. In "The Sick Rose," for example, which is another "Song of Experience," the rose may be sick because its life is being destroyed by the worm's "dark secret love" or because this "dark secret love" is being destroyed by the rose's "life."

O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. (23)(4)

The factor that specifically allows "his dark secret love" to be read as the object of "destroy" and "thy life" as the subject, is the rhetorical figure of syntactic inversion called "anastrophe."

What I am emphasizing in this focus on the possible transpositions of subject and object is how the plots of these brief lyrics can be easily and totally transformed and how considerable responsibility thus devolves onto a reader who can be seen to read among opposed options. What happens to the text determines what happens in the text (this continuity is incidentally signaled by the punning title of the poem, for it names an item within the text as well as the text itself). Despite the poem's apparent invocation of a reading subject, however, this subject will not be here elaborated into the familiar and less than sophisticated concept of the naive reader who, by recognizing his or her errors, is progressively educated to become a sophisticated reader. The reading subject I characterize will be such that we would be ingenuous to describe it as either naive or sophisticated. Invoked in the first instance by the polarized interpretive choices that the poem seems to offer, my reader is only as determinate as the choice that it finally makes within this dilemma. Since such a reader is figured by the dilemma only before it is resolved, the text itself provides no indication of which choice this reader must make, or, indeed, whether it must finally make a choice at all. This figured reader could choose either way, or might choose, agnostically, not to choose. It further confounds any effort to characterize and so judge this reader that it is already characterized as a particularly complex persona by the generic identification of Blake's Songs as a children's chapbook. Projecting both an adult and infant reading persona, Blake's Songs denies a conveniently unitary figure that might thus be anticipated and judged. Since the poem refuses to delineate this reader, even as it vigorously constitutes it, and the chapbook models two readers simultaneously, the only readers of the poem available for characterization are those critics who have grappled with it on record. As part of my account of the uncertain reading position provided by the poem, I must in due course consider how other critics have tried to occupy it.

Helping to drive the prevailing interpretation of the poem, in which the fly dies and the narrator identifies with it, are some earlier literary texts that seem to be cited as prototypes by this account of the poem. Whether or not Blake is assumed to have been familiar with these texts, they are certainly available to be cited by the criticism of Blake's poem. One of these texts is William Oldys's lyric "On a Fly Drinking from his Cup":