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

Busy, curious, thirsty fly! Drink with me, and drink as I: Freely welcome to my cup, Couldst thou sip, and sip it up: Make the most of life you may, Life is short and wears away.

Just alike, both mine and thine, Hasten quick to their decline: Thine's a summer, mine no more, Though repeated to three-score. Three-score summers, when they're gone, Will appear as short as one. (525)

Oldys's lyric impinges specifically on Blake's text by rehearsing a plot in which the fly dies and thus becomes a determining or legitimating factor in later criticism of "The Fly." By advancing the following simile, the blind Gloucester in King Lear similarly establishes the death of a fly and one's consequent identification with it that later criticism of Blake's poem will quote specifically in the context of this passage.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to th'Gods; They kill us for their sport. (2.1. 36-37)

In their reading of Blake, Hirsch and Bloom both refer to this passage.

To quote this excerpt from King Lear as part of an account of Blake's poem is, of course, to presume that the fly dies. If, however, the fly is presumed to survive, an equally compelling literary antecedent might be invoked to corroborate this reading. In Chapman's Iliad, as the Greeks hesitate in their mission to recover Patroclus's body, Menelaus is said to have a special relation with Pallas:

. . . The king's so royall will Minerva joy'd to heare, since she did all the gods outgo In his remembrance. For which grace she kindly did bestow Strength on his shoulders and did fill his knees as liberally With swiftnesse, breathing in his breast the courage of a flie Which loves to bite so and doth beare man's bloud so much good will That still (though beaten from a man) she flies upon him still: With such a courage Pallas fild the blacke parts neare his hart.(5) (17.485-92)

Unlike the Shakespearean "flies," and for that matter Donne's' "flea," which also meets an unceremonious end, the Homeric fly is an epic emblem of action, "courage," and sheer survival. So resourceful is this Homeric fly that Pope, in his edition of the Iliad, denies that it can be a fly by effectively mis-translating the Greek word [Greek Text Omitted], as "hornet."

II.

So much for the small swarm of literary flies that may have conditioned, and in some cases have certainly not conditioned, the criticism of the poem's first stanza. Much of the criticism discussing "The Fly" has read darker, more ironic options in the narrator's apparent identification with the fly than did, for example, E. D. Hirsch, who effectively congratulated the narrator for his visionary sympathy (236-41).(6) Although Hirsch's reading also subscribes to the unnecessary assumption that the narrator has killed the fly, I want to suggest that the text can offer either the guilty narrator of critical consensus or the extenuated, even exonerated narrator of Hirsch, depending on whether we identify ourselves as unimpeachably righteous judges or as judges whose integrity can be reclaimed only by a self-impeachment for fabricating the evidence on which the judgment of the narrator was first based. Any repercussions that the latter reading might have for the former will merely disturb the moral distance that earlier criticism thinks that it can stabilize between itself and the narrator. Whether condemning the narrator from a vantage of moralistic superiority or approving of him from the perspective of a Humean sympathy, the criticism has assumed a distance between itself and the text. This distance is, however, as fictional, or otherwise, as the fly's death, because it depends on the assumption that there is a standpoint from which this death can be confidently predicated. Once the poem's grammar is seen to be at issue, this death and its judicial consequences become just as uncertain as this grammar.