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The Fly, by William Blake (analysis)

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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 THE FLY Little Fly Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And drink and sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath: And the want Of thought is death; Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die. Self-publ. 1794 -, . : . , , ? , , . , , , , , , . . 1957 ( 1963)
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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 Shakespeares 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 Blakes 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 (summers play or I dance and drink and sing). Its 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: mans 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.