Bryan Djunaedi

02/13/2012
ENGL 331
Essay #1

Come to the Dark Side: The Necessity of Experience for the Rediscovery of Innocence in Blakes
SongsofExperience and Coleridges The Nightingale
In Ovids Metamorphoses, Tereus the King of Thrace rapes his sister-in-law Philomela, a
princess of Athens, and then cuts out her tongue. Held hostage both physically and vocally by
Tereus, Philomela discreetly weaves the story of her plight and sends it to her sister Procne,
Tereus wife. Incensed, Procne collaborates with Philomela to kill Tereus son Itys. When the
sisters reveal their deed to the king, he pursues them in a rage until Procnes prayer for help
turns Philomela into a nightingale (Cornell College). The violent metamorphosis of a human into
a bird that sings prominently at night is echoed in the poems of William Blake, who voices the
opinion that night is the harbinger of perversion in his poetic collection SongsofExperience.
Though Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem The Nightingale seems to oppose this stance, the poet
gradually reveals his support of the same position. Through metaphors that illustrate the
corruption of youth, Blake and Coleridge place night at the center of perversion and urge the
reclamation of innocence despite the darkness of experience.
Blakes SongsofExperienceexplore the parallel dualities of day versus night and
innocence versus experience, which act as a central tenet to Blakes ideology. In Songsof
Experience,Blakes The Sick Rose essentially narrates the act that causes Ovids Philomela to
lose both her virginity and her voice; the dark secret love of an invisible worm./ That flies in
the night destroys the life of the now sick flower (7, 2-3). While the worms corrupting origins in
the darkness, compounded by the violence of the howling storm clearly indicates the
alignment of night with perversion, the Roses position is less certain (3). Like Philomelas loss of
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voice, the Rose could be read as losing the power that virginity provides to women in 18
th
-
century British society; the poems first line seems to directly condemn the Rose as a sick
individual. However, this interpretation does not hold true to Blakes other portrayals of virgin
women, as he strongly condemns the societal norms that restrict them from expressing their
sexual freedom. In A Little Girl Lost, the relationship between lovers in a garden where the
holy light,/ Had just removd the curtains of the night ends suddenly when the maidens father
expresses his displeasure (9-10). The lovers meetings in a daytime garden expresses an Eden-
like quality and contrasts sharply with the worms nighttime violation in The Sick Rose,
reinforcing the correlation of day with purity and night with corruption. In fact, Blakes
introduction to this poem deplores the thought of Love as a crime. As the opposing force to the
youths daytime alignment, the fathers allegedly loving look equals the worms destructive
intrusion. As shocking as his denunciation of a fathers protective nature is, Blake firmly
establishes his belief that any suppression of desire leads to a fallen state by using the equation
of repression and rape.
With the establishment of this tenet comes a quandary: how does Blakes Rose reclaim
her lost innocence, having been brutally brought into the dark violence of experience by events
outside of her control? The description of the Roses rape as a bed/ Of crimson joy seems to
indicate that all innocents seek experience, despite the deplorable means by which the Rose is
brought to it (5-6). If experience ends all innocence, do the experienced thus die in darkness?
Only some do. Blake explores the return to innocence in The Little Girl Lost, where he
prophecies that the desart wild, a Blake-ian symbol of experience in which the girl Lyca
becomes lost, will become a garden mild, an Eden which mirrors that in A Little Girl Lost (7,
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8). He goes on to describe the journey of Lycas parents from said desert in The Little Girl
Found. In woe,/ Lycas parents go across the desert until they are confronted by a frightful
lion who [bears] them to the ground. However, their fear of this beast is misplaced, as he leads
them to Lycas side in a dell where they no longer fear the wolvish howl,/ Nor the lions growl.
Lycas parents reclaim their lost innocence by confronting their emotions: their sorrow at having
lost a child, their desire to be reunited with her, and finally their fear of death, represented by
the simultaneously terrifying and angelic lion messenger in the poem. By abandoning their
apprehension of death, they enter a secondary, more profound state of conscious purity than
even Lyca can claim, whose unconscious form betrays the vulnerabilities of her state of primary
innocence. Blake portrays the progression from innocence to experience then back to innocence
as the ideal completion of a life journey, one which rids the pilgrim of the negation of fear and
enables understanding of, and hence dialogue with, the emotional and reason-driven poles of
Blakes ideology.
Coleridges The Nightingale not only more subtly promotes a similar message of
redemption but also argues that experience is a necessary step for the journey back to
innocence. In contrast to Blakes stormy darkness, Coleridge begins his poem with the
description of a calm night, even halting to find/ A pleasure in the dimness of the stars (10-11).
When the poems namesake begins to sing, Coleridge laments mans attribution of melancholy
to a creation of nature, of which nothing [is] melancholy (15). Contrary to Blakes direct
aversion to darkness, Coleridge pauses to consider the life-giving properties of the clouds that
dim the light of the stars. This interpretation extends to Coleridges acceptance of darkness as a
necessary aspect of mans journey through experience: as the earth depends on the sky-
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darkening clouds for rain, so too does the rediscovery of innocence first rely on the gloom of
experience. Similarly, the Nightingale relies on the darkness to cue its most beautiful melodies.
Unlike Ovids nightingale, which was born from violence and thus sings out Philomelas pity-
pleading strains, Coleridges Nightingale has an opposite genesis: man has made its song
sorrowful (39). Thus, the Nightingales affiliation with evening is not inherently corrupt; instead,
the strictures on poets imaginations initiated by some night-wandering Man has confined and
corrupted the birds song to an expression of sadness (16). Coleridge continues to expound on
the virtues of the Nightingales sweet voicealways full of love, which pours forth as if a single
night would be insufficient for the Nightingale to disburthen his full soul/ Of all its music (42,
48-49). Following Blakes loyalty to desire, Coleridges Nightingale ignores societys perception of
his sadness, allowing him to express the emotions of a soul far more complete than that of his
observers. Coleridge argues that in order to reap the full benefit of hearing the freedom of the
Nightingales voice, one must venture out into the night.
At this point in the poem, it is easy to ask what makes Coleridge so sure of his
Nightingales affiliation with the light. What gives him cause to disbelieve mans interpretation of
the nightingales song: that the Nightingale sings not out of love but out of sorrow? Coleridge
points to a grovewild with tangling underwood in which so many Nightingalesprovoke
each others songs (52, 56-58). Though a far cry from Blakes light-dominated gardens, this
groves dark tangle belies its abundance of musical beauty. Once again reinforcing the idea that
revelation relies on obscurity for its definition, when these Nightingales sing, you might almost/
Forget it was not day! (64). Even the glow-worm in the shade/ Lights up her love-torch in
response to a burst of the Nightingales songs, which are triggered by the emergence of the
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moon from behind a cloud (69). Coleridge finally directly equates the beauty of the Nightingales
music with the essence of daytimes clarity: it is so powerful that it can make a person forget the
darkness surrounding him/her. By this comparison Coleridge hints that rediscovering innocence
is an equally powerful experience that rivals the trauma of experience. In an allusion to The Sick
Rose, Coleridge reverses Blakes shade-worm by transforming it into a creature of light and love
in the presence of both the brightness of the moon and the Nightingales songs, sending the
message that even the most perverse acts of experience can be redeemed by a return to
innocence.
This change is far from easy. Coleridge identifies himself as one who has learnt/ A
different lore which does not profane/ Natures sweet voices with thoughts of melancholy
(40-41, 41-42). In doing so, he claims that those who fail to recognize the fetters that experience
has placed upon their view of innocence are doomed to failure and death without redemption,
much like the fallen in Blakes The Voice of the Ancient Bard; so blinded are they by their
perceived knowledge that they wish to lead others when they should be led, and are thus
forever lost in the endless maze of Folly (11, 6). Much as Philomela ascended to the immortal,
musical memory of man by a journey through violent experience, both Blake and Coleridge
recognize that only by accepting the darkness of experience as an imperfection of perception
can one transcend its bonds.

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Works Cited
Blake, William. SongsofInnocenceandOfExperience. Ed. Andrew Lincoln. N.p.: Princeton
University Press.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ColeridgesPoetryandProse. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson and
Raimonda Modiano. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Cornell College. Different Ancient Versions of the Myth of Philomela. MetamorphosesProject.
Cornell College. 13 Feb 2012. <http://www.cornellcollege.edu/classical_studies/CLA216-
2-A/philomela/partone.htm>