"To The Muses"

This poem is a lament by William Blake. On it, as we will see later on, he asks the muses to go back to him : he has lost his inspiration and wants it back because if not, he will not be able to write poetry anymore.

The author uses a special language to talk about this topic: it is the literary language of metaphors, comparisons and contrasts, examples that we will see in more detail on a further and closer analysis.

The words he is using are easy to understand isolated, but the metaphors are more complex, the way in which these words interact is harder to understand, as there is a network of meanings that are characteristic of Blake, who mainly used images that would complete his poems and give them their whole meaning. What we could say about this piece of poetry is that it mainly has descriptive passages, making reference to physical places like “shady brows”, “chambers of the sun”, “heaven”, “green corners of the earth”, “blue regions of the air”, “crystal rocks”, “the bosom of the sea”, “coral grove”… which give the image of something ethereal, magic, we can imagine by ourselves the fairy muses wandering along these places in an elegant way, playing their lyres that would bring the poet his inspiration. The fact that the poem is so descriptive has a lot to do with the fact that he also was an ingraver. He thought that every poem should bring with it an ingraving and, although the poem may come to us with no picture attached, it is not difficult to have a mental idea of what these places described by Blake where the muses rove look like.

It is like a description of paradise, where king images can be found, “where the melodious winds have birth”, this means, where the inspiration begins. “Paradise” is an important concept for Blake, as he was a very religious man; allusions to heaven and hell are a constant in his poetic production.

The poet might have written this poem as an attempt to have his inspiration back. What he let us see in this piece of poetry is that the muses are not with him anymore. This can be seen through the reading of verses as “Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry” (where there is an allusion to the nine planets of the Solar System, which have since ancient times been a source of inspiration) and the complete last stanza, which is like a complaint about the situation: “How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoy’d in you! The languid strings do scarcely move, the sound is forced, the notes are few”. First, he’s directly addressing the muses, asking them why they have left him alone, although he loved enjoyed their company. In the last two verses he describes how they have left him, “the languid strings do scarcely move”: this is a reference to the lyres played, this is an old myth, a metaphor about the way poets are inspired by a muse playing her instrument, letting a kind melody sound, which gave the author his inspiration. But it doesn’t come to Blake anymore, and he’s trying to have his inspiration back, but it comes artificial, not natural, and the results are not good, “the sound is forced, the notes are few”.

The writer’s background is very important to understand the poem: he was a very religious man. Visions and dreams were for him as important as life itself, so he really took the result of his imagination into consideration: the vision of the muses playing their lyres for him, endows great importance.

Like most of the Romantics, he stressed emotions. That is why he’s writing about his own feelings and experiences here. He didn’t like the intellect; for him, what people felt was much more important than what people thought or what they were made to think. He also shared with the Romantics the idea of the truth of things being able to be explained through his own emotions and in the context of nature and, as we have seen before, the action of this poem occurs in the open air, surrounded by nature.

The poem is addressed to the muses, creatures which won’t be able to take the paper and start reading this piece of poetry which is for them. Muses are not even creatures: they are a feeling, so Blake is dedicating the poem to a feeling, which comes to stress again the importance that Romantics and himself gave to feelings.

The reader’s answer, from my personal point of view, may really depend on his or her relationship with poetry. I think that the only people that will fully understand Blake’s poem are those who have had the same experience, I mean, poets who have also lost their inspiration at some stage of their literary production, poets who have also felt the despair of not being able to write anymore.

This is not like what any other man would feel if he lost the ability of doing his job, because he would always be in time for changing his job. Poets don’t normally consider their poetic work only as a job, although some of them may live on that: it is like a way of life for them, the need to write, to express themselves, to free their emotions… and if they are incapable of doing this anymore, it’s not only their job they are losing. They are losing part of their essence, part of their lives.

Oscar Fernández Adrià

Academic year 2005-06
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Óscar Fernández Adrià
Universitat de València Press
osfera@alumni.uv.es