“ I LAID ME DOWN…”

William Blake

I laid me down upon a bank

Where love lay sleeping.

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste,

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to be chaste.

Author: - Poem: William Blake

- Book: Jordi Doce

Title: - Poem: “I laid me down…”

- Book: “Los bosques de la noche”, edición bilingüe y anotada.

Publishing house: Pretext. 1st edition September 2001, Buenos Aires.

First of all I’m going to talk about the title of the poem. This is “I laid me down…”. The first impression I had was that the writer would speak about love or of coldness feelings. When a person lays down it doesn’t mean only that you have fallen from a high place, if you think about a poem written by a Romantic poet, it’s easier to understand that when he writes “lay down” he’s also speaking about love. After reading the poem my first impression is close to the real meaning, because we can find the theme of love, but it isn’t only love because you can see also sadness feelings, so another theme could be coldness.

When you read this poem you can imagine that the main character is himself (the author) who tells the story because he’s speaking in first person singular. It can be a personal experience or something that he had invented, but he always feels things from the same point of view.

Perhaps the poem is addressed to another person, maybe someone who he knows or he loves, but it is probably that he had decided to hide himself behind the poem, he used this trick. Doing things like that he can be anonymous and can’t be recognised by the loved person.

The author writes about a day when he laid down upon a bank. He wanted love but it didn’t appear. He says that love was sleeping, love was there but it didn’t find him or he didn’t find love. Then he heard the weep, this was produced because he felt lonely and not beloved. Time ago he had someone to love and he was in love but now he had missed her. He still remembers these days and this person. He also tells how he went to the heath and some plants told him their bad experiences. In some way the author looks his own story in the plant’s tales.

As I said before, the expression “lay down” has a double meaning because in this poem it means that the author feels down. He’s about to give up because he feels he has missed his love, his loved person and now he feels lonely and breakdown. The only thing that he’s able to listen is to the crying. The author uses a metaphor “weeping, weeping”. It refers also to the tree, the weeping willow, which is a symbolic thing to show this feeling. He personifies the love, giving it human characteristics like sleep.

The author expresses his feelings through each element he finds along his walk to the heath: thistles, thorns, waste… He only uses nouns which symbolize his sadness, his sorrow and his fears. He thinks he has been beguiled like all elements told him and he is reflected by them. He also writes about the thistles and thorns like human people, because they can speak, feel and tell stories.

The author is hopeless and I can see it in his last verse: “driven out, and compelled to be chaste”. He shows his last feelings and you can interpret this verse as how he had missed all his hopes to retrieve his lost love and another interpretation could be that in this way he had missed his life.

My personal opinion about the poem is positive. I love the drama and when a person shows this kind of feelings I can see he or she is talking from the bottom of the heart and telling the truth. If you can feel something reading these kind of poems it’s because they are well written and they are better to enjoy. In this case, I think the main character is a man because the poem seems autobiographical and he uses a rude language. Maybe if the poem would be written by a woman, the language sounds more delicate, beautiful and romantic.