Sunday, November 09, 2008
Poem by William Blake
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a lamb!"
So I piped with merry cheer.
"Piper, pipe that song again."
So I piped: he wept to hear.
"Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer."
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
"Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read."
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
William Blake
This is one of Blake's most beloved poems, from his "Songs of Innocence and Experience." In that collection, he deliberately used the childlike, almost nursery rhyme form to suggest the innocent nature of the speaker. Blake himself was, as most of you know, one of the great mystics. He had many visions, including several of angels and another of his brother's spirit clapping his hands and ascending to heaven when he died. He even drew a picture of his own spirit guide (who was not a human, more like an extra-terrestrial.)
Many of his later works, by contrast, are extremely complex and difficult to comprehend. To unravel them is virtually a life's work.
Blake was very much in touch with the "other realms" and so he is, I feel, very much "one of us," those of us who today also feel the presence of a reality beyond the manifest world. In other words, his kundalini was extremely active, at least in my view, though he never spoke in those terms.
He also was very poor, and his wife sometimes had to place an empty plate before him at dinner to remind him that there was no money in the house. Ah, well, mystics and poets always have a hard time, don't they?
(Image is of William Blake in an 1807 portrait by Thomas Phillips. Photo of painting from Wikipedia.)
