0832705 600d1 blake william the fly analysis ui (1)
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ФГБОУ ВПО
«Кемеровский государственный университет»
Факультет Романо-германской филологии
Кафедра английской филологии №1
The Fly, by William Blake
(analysis)
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checked by …………………….......
2012
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"The Fly" is a poem by William Blake(1757-1827), written in 1794 and
published in the poet's well-known collection of poetry, "Songs of Innocence and
Experience". “Songs of Experience” were published alongside his “Songs of
Innocence” with the aim of “showing the two contrary states of the human soul”.
Several of the poems, in both sets, use images from the natural world to symbolise
human characteristics, and The Fly is one of these.
The poem is comprised of five short stanzas.
In this piece, Blake uses a trimeter rhyme scheme and loose and open
structure. The whole poem is very short, consisting of five short four-lined stanzas
with a total word-count of only 69. Of these words, only five have more than one
syllable, with all but one of these appearing in the first stanza, one to each line
(little, summers, thoughtless, away, happy). This therefore has the appearance of a
very simple poem, but it is one with hidden depths. The poem reads as follows:
Blake МаршакTHE FLY МухаLittle Fly Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away.
Бедняжка-муха,Твой летний райСмахнул рукоюЯ невзначай.
Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me?
Я — тоже муха:Мой краток век.А чем ты, муха,Не человек?
For I dance And drink and sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.
Вот я играю,Пою, покаМеня слепаяСметет рука.
If thought is life And strength and breath: And the want Of thought is death;
Коль в мысли сила,И жизнь, и свет,И там могила,Где мысли нет, —
Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die.Self-publ. 1794
Так пусть умру яИли живу, —Счастливой мухойСебя зову. Опубл. 1957 (Версия 1963) 2
The first stanza describes the death of a fly, caused by the careless swipe of a
human hand. While a fly lives its life happily and innocently, its fate can be
ruthlessly determined by the action of a more powerful being. In this way, Blake
conveys the innocence and fragility of the fly's existence, and the devastating
indifference of a higher force.
The act of brushing aside a fly, with a “thoughtless hand”, inspires the writer
to consider his own place in the scheme of things and to wonder whether he is just
as inconsequential as the fly which also reminds of the lines spoken by Gloucester
in Act 4 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to
the Gods. They kill us for their sport”. The same sense of pessimism and
realisation of reality is apparent in Blake’s poem: the correspondence between a
man and a fly, as being on the same level on a cosmic scale, is expressed in stark
simplicity by the two questions in the second stanza in which Blake makes the
comparison between fly and man. Here, the reader is lead to understand that
Blake's first stanza should serve as a metaphor for man. The death of a fly is
relevant in stressing man's equally powerless existence, in that man is also
governed by the inevitability of death.
In the third stanzas, the poet explains why fly and man are similar. Both fly
and man are described as being at play (“summer’s play” or “I dance and drink
and sing”). It’s a hint that man lives his life as fly does. So, there is no difference
between the values of the activities of a man and a fly. The same is about their
death: man’s fate is settled by “some blind hand” (metaphor) (of fate? or God?)
which can take away human life or inspiration (“brush my wing”, metaphor) with
a single swipe, as his “thoughtless hand” (metaphor) similarly and suddenly takes
the life of a fly. In this way, the innocence and powerlessness of a fly provokes
Blake's realization that human is innocent and powerless too.
In the fourth stanza Blake seeks to develop in this poem the concept of the
lack of thought behind the fateful actions. Had the man given thought before
brushing aside the fly he might not have done so, and he might have realised that
he had the power of life and death in his hand. However, the fly does not know
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this, and its behaviour is unchanged because it has no way of knowing that its life
could be about to end.
The hero finishes with the affirmation that he is indeed like the fly as if he has
resigned to the truth of his realization. Through the poet's words, the weakness of
man and the inevitability of death are illuminated. When a man realises that his
fate is just as easily settled and his death could come at any moment by “blind”
fate interference, he has no reason to be less happy than he is now. There could be
a second interpretation of this poem, which is to appreciate that thinking is
something that a man can do but a fly cannot. When a man thinks, his actions
preserve not only the life of flies but his own. When he stops thinking, he causes
his own death, maybe not in the physical sense but in that of the things that make
life worth living. A thinking man can bring happiness to himself and to other
human beings, but an unthinking man can only bring misery, which is death in a
mental or spiritual sense, and it is his own such death as well as that of others that
results.
As part of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience", the "Fly" plays on
both themes. The poem highlights the innocence of man, while man's realization of
his own innocence places him in the realm of experience.
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