Senghor’s Songs of Darkness
As a Revival of
Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience
by
Dr.Hind Reda Jamal Al-Leil
Associate Professor of English Lit.
English Department
Girls’ College
Jeddah
1426-2005
Abstract
Comparison and contrast enrich any literary study, but they cannot be drawn
unless one finds the basis, the point or the link, on which to establish them .In the case
of Senghor and Blake, it is the creation of Songs of Darkness and Songs of innocence
& Experience. In such great works of literature, the journey motif plays an essential
role, as both poets direct themselves towards the land of childhood innocence, then
move ahead to experience, and eventually reach a new kind of innocence marked by
peace, wisdom and harmony. In spite of their different cultural and literary
backgrounds, and in spite of their different poetical compositions, this paper aims to
assert the universality of the human conditions. Dreams and fears of all humanity are
identical whether expressed by an African belonging to Negritude in one of the thirdworld countries in the twentieth century or a European belonging to romanticism in
the great empire of the world two centuries earlier.
Leopold Sedar Senghor ( 1906-2001), the poet and statesman, was born in
Joal, a small village in north Darkar, the capital of Senegal. While his father belonged
to a noble and wealthy family, his mother had pastoral roots. At the age of twelve, he
attended the Catholic Mission School, and successfully finished his secondary level of
education in 1928. Winning a state scholarship enabled him to travel to Paris and to
graduate from Lycée – le-grand in 1931. Senghor was affected by French and AfroAmerican poets, and with his friend Aimé Cesaire he established the concept of
Negritude. It is “ defined as the literary and artistic expression of the black African
experince,”yet “ in historical context the term has been seen as a reaction against
French colonialism and a defense of African culture.”(on line1) In 1932, he becomes
a French citizen, and from 1953 till the outbreak of World War II he worked as a
teacher. During the war, he joined the French army, and fell as a prisoner of war in the
hands of the Germans for eighteen months. In such period of captivity, he learned
German and wrote poetry, which was later published in a collection entitled as Black
Offerings “Hosts” (1948). After the war, he resumed his job as a teacher in different
French academic institutions. His first collection of poetry, Songs of Darkness, was
published in 1945. During this period,Senghor's political concepts and tendencies
started to appear; hence he was elected to represent his country of Senegal in many
French political assemblies. In 1948, he married a Guyanese woman and had two
children. But it was unsuccessful experience, which ended in divorce. Senghor
remarried later but this time it had been to a French woman. In 1960, he was elected
as the first president of Senegal and enjoyed the post till 1980. Afterwards, he spent
his time moving from Dakar to Normandy and back to Paris, where he died in 2001
after winning many international awards as a writer and Politician. His poetry was
written in French, and translated into several languages, and his prose writing dealt
with linguistics, politics and sociology.
As a poet, Sunday O,Anozie believes that “Senghor's earlier observations
about traditional African metaphysics, and his attempts to formulate on the basis of
these a theory of African Creativity, constitute a major contribution to negritude.”
(Gates 113) Accordingly, Senghor had the upper hand in reviving the social and
cultural awareness in post- independent Africa. While being greatly concerned with
the essence of art in general, the content of his poetry is “ the African heritage.”
1
(Peters 225) Bearing in mind the fact that the artist in traditional African is a “poet,
musician, performer, sculptor, critic and society's transmitter of history,”(Peters 227)
Senghor believed, similar to Chinua Achebe (1930 ַ
) and wole Soyinka(1934 ַ ),
that “art must serve more than purely literary or aesthetic purpose;” ( Peters 226) thus,
art for art’s sake is not applicable to Senghor, whose poetry is not “unswervingly
dedicated to the service of artistic beauty for its own sake,[but] …. aims to serve the
cause of African liberation in its most encompassing sense.” (Niekerk103) To
construct and move forward towards a good future, Senghor believes, people need
freedom, honour and unity as a means towards integration .If the artist, in particular,
lacks integrity within himself and his world, he cannot achieve it in his artistic
creation and reveal it to his fellowmen as a part of his duty towards them. In other
words, he viewed himself as a father, spokesman, ambassador and ruler for his own
people, the Senegalese.
Senghor's poetic career can be divided into two main phases: the poetry
produced before the African independence, and the one composed after it. His first
four volumes of poetry: Songs of Darkness, Black Offerings “Hosts”, Ethiopiques
(1956) and Nocturnes (1961), belonging to the first phase, present him as a subjective
propagandist of Negritude. Consequently such volumes idealise black Africa and its
people and celebrate the nobility of its culture. Jonathan Ngate states that critics
“salute Senghor for his pioneering work in the defence of African culture and
literature,” as he “emerge[s] as a much positive force in [their] development…………
along side practitioners of ………….. social realism.” (Arnold 103) Accordingly his
role as a spokesman and ambassador for his own people is apparent more than other
roles assumed by him later through his literary career. Marked by love, passion,
regret, worries, uncertainty and agony, this phase harbours nostalgia and exile as its
main themes. Eventually his active involvement in world war ІІ drew him to adopt a
message of human love, and in a place of “disappointment and stife,” he suggested
“healing and reuion.” (peters 236)
In the second phase of his poetic career, Senghor's role as an ambassador is
“overshadowed by the sentiment of the poet- lover;” ( Peters 229) hence the role of
the master of language and lamarch (ruler of land) are assumed instead. Undoubtedly,
this phase is marked by “ the assurance of poet-lover-statesman,” (Peters 227) who
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has viewed his poetic career in the light of the actuality of the present . In such
“Edenic retreat, “ ( Peters 228) there is no reference to the black man's superiority and
Europe’s crimes, due to the newly discovered realities about Africa and African
People after independence, who prove to be capable of the same conflict, strife and
evil of their colonizers. Such disillusionment with his own people leads Senghor to
seek reconciliation of differences between the two races and to retreat to a “ world of
personal abandon to call forth his nobility and his virtue.” (Peters 229) Maturity
channels all his literary effort towards a single sacred goal that is of “ a new age of
cultural synthesis and social harmony.” (Peter 236)
According to Janice Spleth, the major themes of Senghor's poetry can be
summed up in the following:
- Destruction and Alienation (the present)
The symbol of this theme is Europe as “ a society sacrificing the macrocosm for the
microcosm,” in which reason replaces feeling and intuition, and man is alienated and
uprooted. As sterility, artificiality and warfare stamp Europe, its civilization is
condemned by emptiness and viciousness. Hence whiteness represents the resulted
and unavoidable state of man's dilemma.
- Purification and Negritude (the past)
The symbol of this theme is Africa, as it stands for men's rapport with nature and his
quest of self. To achieve his identity, man should start his journey, “ which must go
back before it can move forward”. Thus, senghor has explored his childhood and his
African past, first, to accept and be satisfied with his self, and, second, to reach his
ultimate goal of self-realization and harmonious life. Blackness, dance, drums, masks
and other African images form, according to Senghor, “ the complete man, man as a
part of all that he has experienced.”(Spleth 196) Eventually one can say that having
“the creation in the Western world of an African Diaspora” as its “inspiration,”
(Omotoso 23) Senghor's Negritude is “ this process of purification through quest, selfKnowledge and acceptance.” On having self-dignity and self- realization, only then,
man can start substantial and healthy relationship with people around him.
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- Resurrection and Synthesis ( the future)
On being assured that others have similarly succeeded in conquering their loneliness
and alienation, man starts his actual participation with such fellows to create a world
of harmony and universal brotherhood. Consequently “ ‘Africa’ (human warmth,
feeling) and ‘Europe’ (technology, reason) come into a kind of synthesis, and work
together toward a ‘ civilization of the universal.” (Spleth 196).
As a first collection of his poetic production, Songs of Darkness belongs to the
first phase of Senghor’s literary career. Being as such, its content and aesthetic
formulation draw to the mind William Blake’s(1757-1827) Songs of Innocence &
Experience (1789-1794).To elaborate, symbolic death, aspiring to purification and
leading eventually to an achievement of a regeneration, is the central concept of both
poets. Senghor’s actual exile in Europe drives him to design his spiritual journey to
the past seeking rebirth and renewal, which may help him to conquer all the evils of
the contemporary world, and to attain a kind of universal brotherhood.
An odyssey that is reminiscent in some respects of the philosophical journey of the English
poet, William Blake, moving from the pure innocence of childhood into the often repellent but
unavoidable world of experience, and finally, hopefully, into a new innocence …………….
born of experience.
Spleth 188
In relation to his Songs of Innocence & Experience, Blake believes that
though this state of childlike happiness is wonderfully charming, it is not everything
and it cannot last. To reach a higher position, man must be tested by experience and
suffering, and this is the link between the two sections of Blake’s poetic collection.
Experience is a necessary stage in the cycle of being. Though it is a much lower state
than innocence, yet it is not less necessary. These songs clarify how that what we
accept in childlike innocence is tested and proved feeble by actual events, how much
that we have taken for granted is not true to the living world. Hence experience is not
at all awful; it is something necessary in our life, as it implies both thinking and
suffering. For Blake, once man stops thinking it means death in life, and that suffering
implies energy, that leads to experience and ultimately to wisdom. Conclusively, one
can say that in this poetic collection, Blake gives the essence of his imaginative
thought about the crisis in himself and in all men.
4
Similar to Blake, who “ sought some ultimate synthesis in which innocence
might be wedded to experience, and goodness to knowledge,” (Bowra 46) Senghor’s
journey from innocence to experience, from childhood to manhood, is marked by
uncertainty and fear. Animal of prey, as symbols of nature, roar and howl reflecting
nature’s hostility towards this step of losing childhood innocence. The end of the
security of the childhood world opens the door for the world of experience, “ a world
which almost immediately threatens the close man-nature harmony, which the child
has enjoyed since birth.” (Spleth 190). What Senghor is emphasizing in his journeymotif is, first, that such rapport with nature is essential to humanity at large not only
in childhood but in adulthood as well;
Second, the hope that man can survive the threats of the world of experience and achieve a
new innocence, having its roots and its symbols in that original innocence not only of the child
but also of the ancient past which the child sometimes comes to represent.
Spleth 191
Accordingly, the child must die so that the man can be born. This draws to one’s mind
William Wordsworth’s ( 1770-1850) declaration: ‘The Child is father of the Man’
Thus, the vanishing stage of childhood does not mean death, but life, as a new
innocence will reborn instead.
Let us die, let us dance.
SD 163 (1)
meaning: let us die, let us live, promising a new life of profound creativity.
The beating rhythmical drums of Africa do not only accompany the transition
from innocence to experience, but also form innocence “ to the promise of the world
of experience, that new innocence.”(Spleth 192)In other words, drums are not against
this procedure, but assure man’s progression towards the new innocence without
being lost or alienated. Hence, man will lose his childhood innocence but
simultaneously keep his rapport with nature forever. Consequently, this transition
does not lead Senghor to despair, as he is hopefully expecting the new innocence in its
5
place, which “must not be stifled by traditional trappings and by idle and misdirected
regret for the loss of the past.” (Spleth 193)
In spite of the fact that dance “ as a mature and creative state” ( Spleth 192)
makes the death of childhood quite acceptable, yet the transition from innocence to
experience is not easy. Senghor has suffered from nostalgia for his childhood,
whenever he confronts the hardships and complications of the world of experience.
He misses the joy and grace of the earlier stage:
So many times I have wept ………how many times
for the transparent nights of childhood.
SD 164
What aggravates the situation more and more is that his totality in responding
rhythmically to nature is no longer there, as his reason replaces his intuition and
feeling. Even the beating drums are no longer there, symbolizing the loss of rhythm,
in other words, the loss of life itself. But, still, hope and promise are there for men in
general, as their fellow poet can, through the rhythm of his poem, help them to resume
successfully their rapport with nature.
The responsibilities of the poet are heavy. To prepare himself, the poet must revitalize
himself; only then can he create the poem, which is to say the rhythm, the life– giving
ministrations which will save his flock.
Spleth 194
Finally, the new man will emerge out of such combinations: innocence and
experience, feeling and reason, Africa and Europe. Only then
Phoenix rises, he sings with wings extended
Over the carnage of words.
SD 164
Such a poet cannot be called a racist due to his contribution to Negritude, as he
visualizes it as a symbol of self-identity not only for his fellows, the Africans, but for
all human beings all over the world, who are struggling to achieve their selfrealization. But it should be noted that in spite of his declaration that Negritude “ does
not preach racism,” yet it is based on one particular “ racial consciousness – the
6
consciousness of the black man that he is black and that his being black has values
which are good in themselves and which can be useful to mankind as a whole”
(Egudu 34-35). All this proves that “his vision of a civilization of universal
brotherhood obviously transgress ethnic and racial lines.” (Spleth 196).
In songs of Darkness,Senghor concentrates on his exile from his home
country, Africa, and his childhood memories over there. Through it, it is clear that
Senghor has been less obsessed with his colour than with his nostalgia for his little
village, Joal, and the simplicity, purity and sweetness of his childhood. Naturally, in
such a collection “ the two main features of Senghor’s iconology ……….. the
ancestors and the masks” (Peters 16) predominate its main theme. Concerning
ancestors, one notice a kind of “ the filial reverence towards their spirits,” (Peters17)
due to their closeness to the supernatural world of life-forces. “By devoting
themselves to reinforcing the force of living men, the ancestors continue their vital
participation. “(Ba 56) But the masks stand as a black African cult united God to land
and projected through social behaviors of singing and dancing. As a result, one finds
that Sengor’s ancestors play an essential role in the three opening poems of this
collection, while the masks preoccupy the four subsequent ones called as “ maskpoems.”
Senghor opens this collection with a poem called “ In Memoriam;” it is about
one of the poet’s sunday in Paris, where he is all alone by himself in his “tower of
glass.” Being cut off from everyone and everything there, draws the poet into reveries
of Joal and the river Sine.
Sunday
The crowding stony faces of may fellows make me afraid
Out of my tower of glass haunted by headaches and my rest
less Ancestors.
I watch the rooves and hills wrapped in mist.
SD 103
Though it is sunday, yet it cannot conquer his sense of alienation; the poet’s
tower of glass has not been the only and real obstacle, but the stony faces of the
Parisians in the street, which put an end to any of the poet’s trial to establish any kind
7
of personal intimacy. Cold, fear and apathy predominate, in spite of “ yesterday was
All saints” (SD 103) .
The title of the poem reminds one of Tennyson’s elegy: “In Memoriam” written
in the memory of his dead friend, Alfred Halem. But Senghor’s poem is not written
for the sake of a dead person but for the sake of his dead dreams. He compares these
dead dreams to his ancestors, “who have always refused to die,” ( SD 103) and
haunted him during such moments of isolation. Thus, it is noticed that Senghor
“passes and repasses from the stark waking reality of exile to the soothing assurance
of ancestral presence. “(Fraser 46) By drawing contrast between the poet in his glass
tower and the passers by in the street, his dead dreams and his eternal ancestors, the
river Sine and the river Seine, the poem concludes with the poet still in his glass tower
to prove the vicious circle, in which he has been trapped. There is only one change; it
is when the poet addresses his restless living- dead ancestors to protect his dead
dreams and the dead-living people in the street.
Guard my dreams as you have guarded your sons, your
Slender – limbed wanderers
O dead, defend the rooves of Paris in this Sabbath mist
Rooves that guard my dead
That from the dangerous safety of my tower, I may go down
Into the street
To my brothers whose eyes are blue
Whose hands are hard.
SD 103
In black Africa, death and life are two aspects of humanity; their interdependence on
one another proves that there is no apposition between them. On the contrary, both are
joined to become “one regenerating force,” resulted in making “death a form to
contribution to life.” ( Ba 58) Truth, strength and purification are the living reward of
this eternal relationship between life and death, between life-forces and the dead
ancestors. In fact, Senghor’s concepts of the black African religion, art and literature
are synthesized to form his philosophy of death and life.
Eventually, on contemplating the main ideas of “ In Memoriam,” as the first
poem in Songs of Darkness, one “discover[s] some of the themes that will recur later
8
in Senghor’s works: the decadence of Europe which needs the rejuvenating blood of
Africa……………………………………the omnipresence of ancestors ……………
and the desire for peace and reconciliation.” (Peters 19)
In Blake’s Song of Innocence , it is not a sunday preceded by All Saints’ Day,
but it is a “Holly Thursday.” An annual event at St.Pauls’is described with six
thousands children walking two by two in their coloured clothes towards the
cathedral, guided by their beadles dressed in white to sing their song of praise to God.
T’ was a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean.
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green.
Grey headed beadles walked with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of pauls they like Thames waters flow.
SIE 35
But in Songs of experience Blake shows that this song of praise raised at St. Pauls’ on
“ Holy Thursday” is now a trembling cry:
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
……………………………..
………………………………
………….. Their sun does never shine,
And their fields are black & bare
And their ways are fill’d with thorns
It is eternal Winter there.
SIE 38
Similar to Senghor, the songs and joy of childhood innocence transfer into the harsh
reality of cry, thorns and bareness.
In addressing a woman, who symbolizes his mother in particular and Mother
Africa in general, Senghor in “Night in the Sine” is recalling the idyllic atmosphere of
one of his African pastoral nights:
Woman, lay on my forehead your perfumed hands, hands
Softer than fur
Above, the swaying palm trees rustle in high night breeze
Hardly at all. No lullaby even.
The rhythmic silence cradles us.
9
Listen to its song, listen to our dark blood beat, listen
To the deep pulse of Africa beating in the mist of forgotten
Villages.
SD 104
It is a peaceful setting as it is related to Senghor’s sweet memories of childhood in
Africa. This point is reinforced in the opening lines of the poems; the hands of the
woman, whom he is addressing, are “perfumed………….. [and] Softer than fur” in
contrast to the image of “In Memoriam,” where “ the blue-eyed” Parisians have hard
hands.
The tropical images proceed to include music and dance, moonlight and
storytelling, a child on its mother’s back and the sweet aura disbursed from humble
huts. In this quiet atmosphere, people are lulled to sleep after sharing the
intimacy of such social rituals.
The close bond is suggested in part by the image of the child on the back of its mother and the
long milky cloth of night, in part by rhythmic harmony of participants and spectators and by
the very conspiratorial intimacy among the huts form which sharp and sweet smells emanate.
Peters 20
Even in this joyful pastoral night, Senghor does not forget his ancestors; he recalls
them here not to guard his dead dreams and the stony faces of his white fellows in
Paris as in “ In Memoriam,” but to converse with him under the light of an oil lamp
through these warm intimate moments before he plunges into sound sleep. Hence,
Senghor concludes this poem by expressing this wish to his woman:
Let me breathe the smell of our Dead, gather and speak out
Again their living voice, learn to
Live before I go down deeper than diver, into the light profundities
Of sleep.
SD 105
In Blake’s Songs of Innocence, one has the same atmosphere of quietness and
peacefulness of pastoral life. All Creatures, here, are innocent, pure and lovely. The
child and the lamb represent the divinity and love of Blake’s paradise, and convey a
10
special kind of existence. In such a state, human beings have the same kind of security
and assurance of lambs under a wise shepherd. In “The ecchoing Green,” Blake
converses with paradise, with heaven on earth, where the green re-echoes with the
merry laughter of the young and old alike:
The sun does rise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells sing,
To welcome the Spring.
The sky – lark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the Ecchoing Green.
SIE 31
This poem combines and visualizes all the joyful beauty of spring in nature and young
humanity. It is daylight, the sun rises, bells ring, and birds sing for hope and life. In
this earthly paradise, children play games happily, and older people sit under an oak
tree laughing and watching this beautiful scene. Even their rememberances are
pleasant recollection of their past childhood.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
Such such were the joys,
When we all girls & boys,
In our youth time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.
SIE 32
When the sun sets, the innocent children are very tired, so they stop playing
and, like birds, they return to their homes peacefully protected by their mothers, and
the darkening green is left empty and silent.
Round the laps of their mothers,
Many sisters and brothers,
11
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest.
And sport no more seen,
on the darkening Green.
SIE 32
Though it is a day activity, yet it shares with Senghor’s tropical night the same joyful
factors of singing, pleasant recollections and peaceful atmosphere. Both, similarly,
end with rest and sleep as an essential part of human life.
Again in “Joal”, one has the same old reminiscences of Senghor’s lost
childhood. His exile in Paris intensifies this feeling of nostalgia for his home village,
Joal. This lyric is a kind of quick flashback scenes one following the other:
“moonlight on the beach”, “ pomps of sunset,” “funeral feasts,” “ pagan rhythmic
singing” and “ dance of the girls who are ready for marriage”. Such scenes are
“connected with splendour and pomp, pleasure and love, feasting and the excitement
of village sport”.(Peters 21) The poet’s reveries are continually preceded by his recall:
“I remember” about seven times through this short lyric. But eventually it comes to an
end, as he is brought back to his actual sad exile in Europe by:
………………. The rhythm of the tramp tramp
So wearily down the days of Europe where there comes,
Now and then a little orphaned Jazz goes sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
SD 106
But in “Introduction” of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, the happy tunes never last. It is
a scene of a shepherd wandering and piping his flute; the child on a white cloud
laughs happily and asks him to pipe a song about a lamb:
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me
Pipe a song about lamb,
12
So I piped with merry cheer,
Piper pipe that song againSo I piped, he wept to hear.
SIE 31
The weeping of the child in this lyric is not out of sorrow and melancholy like
Senghor’s sobbing at the end of “Joal”. But it is the weeping of joy and ecstasy
evoked by these happy melodies.
The three previous poems of Senghor’s Songs of Darkness clarify the role
played by the ancestors in his life and art. But the four subsequent ones: “Black
woman”, “Black Mask”, “ Prayer To Masks” and “Totem” deal with another aspect of
Senghor’s African tradition, which is the mask. Being called mask-poems, “ they deal
with the mask as ancestral figure, work of art, symbol of a god and of spiritual
essences beyond the physical artifact.”( Peters 22)
In “Black woman,” Senghor is addressing an unidentified woman recalled
from his African past on one “sun baked noon” of summer. But different from his
woman of “Night In the Sine,” this unknown women is fully described, as all her
universal, classical and particular features are drawn throughout the poem. She is
naked black African with “colour, which is life” and “from which is beauty”.
Naked woman, black woman
Clothed with your color which is life, with your form
Which is beauty.
SD 105
In Senghor’s land of innocence, black becomes the colour of life. In this way “he
would make of the cause of oppression a source of pride, of the sign of sorrow the
mark of vitality and joy, admit as a criterion of beauty those traits traditionally the
opposite of Western ideals.” ( Anyidoho 88)
Contrary to that, in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, white is the colour of purity
and life, and black has the connotation of dimness, fear and sadness. In “The Little
Black Boy,” the black boy is conscious of his blackness, and that is a mark of
13
inferiority according to his social surrounding, but his mother pacifies him by saying
that his black colour is only a temporary cloud, which will vanish on his reaching “the
tent of God”.
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.
………………………………………..
Thus did my mother say, and kissed me;
And thus I say to little English boy:
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
SIE 33
Thus, in Songs of Innocence, if evil, as racism, is introduced, it does not last or
predominate. It is only for a while “to give a greater reality to happiness,” (Selincourd
26) and soon it is redeemed. Similarly the misery and hardship of “The Little
Chimney Sweeper” come to an end, as he is released by an angel.
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry, “ weep! Weep! Weep! ”
So your chimney I sweep& in soot I sleep.
SIE 33
In the Victorian age, the shameful use of small boys, blackened by the soot of human
cruelty, is redeemed by the appearance of an angel in the little boy’s dream.
Unlocking their coffins, such an angel releases all the chimney sweepers from their
unhappy circumstances and sets their spirits free to float on to paradise.
And so he was quiet, & that very night,
As Tom was a – sleeping he had such a sight!
That thousands of sweepers, Dick,Joe,Ned, & Jack,
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black;
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
14
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
SIE 34
So the little chimney sweeper sleeps in black soot and is locked in black coffin to
stress that, contrary to Senghor, the colour of black in Blake’s Songs of Innocence
stands for negative and adverse qualities.
In the same corresponding poem of Songs of Experience, the little chimney
sweeper is presented as “A little black thing among the snow”, but his spirit is not
wholly subdued. He tells about his exploitation by his parents, who believe that they
are not wronging him. Such pious parents go regularly to church, that has sanctioned a
society with such cruelty.
“ Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
“And because I am happy, and dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.”
SIE 39
Blake’s abhorrence of the parents’ exploitation of their child is manifested in the
subtle image referring to his job as a chimney sweeper. They clothe him in “the
clothes of death”, meaning the black soot of chimney covering him on finishing his
work.
Here, there is a clear declaration by Blake that black, for him, stands for death and not
life like Senghor, the poet of Negritude.
Back to Senghor’s “Black Woman”, there is an image, that reminds the reader
of a similar one in “Night In The Sine”.
In your shadow I have grown up, the gentleness of your
hands was laid over my eyes.
SD 105
15
It is about the effect of the woman’s gentle and soft hands on the poet’s head.
“Always responsive to the tender, soothing hands on his brow , Senghor uses the
recall of such a moment to introduce the sudden impact of beauty of the black
woman”(Peters 22) on him:
And now, high up on the sun-baked pass, at the heart of
Summer, at the heart of noon, I came upon you, my
Promised land.
And your beauty strikes me to the heart like the flash of an
eagle.
SD 105
It is a strong dazzling impact like that of the flash of an eagle, as she is not any
woman, but his “promised land”. This proves that Senghor is painting the portrait of
the universal black woman, the portrait of mother and of Mother Africa. It is validated
by the fact that in spite of the poem’s “ apparent flights of fancy and fortuitousness of
the surrealist imagery, very little if any physical passion for the woman is
manifested.” (Peters 23)
The idealization and the spiritual purity of the African Woman are expressed
through images related to nature like: gazelle, stars, night, sun, pearls and gold in the
two middle stanzas of the poem. The result “ is full of suggestions of ripeness and
maturity, of desire and embrace amid drumming and spiritual song and of cosmic
forces at work.” (Peters 24) Senghor’s main objective behind this portrayal of the
black woman is to fix her in eternity as the essence of all aspects of the human life.
Naked woman, black woman,
I sing your beauty that passes the form that I fix in the
Eternal
Before jealous Fate turn you to ashes to feed the roots of life.
SD 106
To sum up, one can say that Africa in Senghor’s poetry is “often portrayed as a
woman longingly remembered in European Exile,”(Gurnah VI) as all its attributes are
presented through woman’s spiritual and physical beauty.
16
Within the same peaceful atmosphere of “Night In the Sine”, “ Black Mask”
introduces the black mask not as a static object but as a sleeping woman, and she is
not any woman but Coumb Tam, the goddess of beauty in Senghor’s Serer culture.
She sleeps resting on the innocence of the sand.
Coumba Tam sleeps. A green palm veils the fever of her
hair, bronzes the rounded brow
The eyelids are closed, twin goblets and sealed springs.
That delicate crescent, that blacker lip barely full- where
Is the smile of the accomplice?
The cheeks like patens, the line of the chin sing in
mute harmony
mask face closed to the ephemeral, eyes without substance
Perfect bronze head and its patina of time
Defiled by neither powder nor paint nor lines, no trace of
tears nor kisses.
SD 191
It is here that the adoration rather than the sensuality of “Black woman”, that marks
Senghor’s emotional attitude in describing this woman / goddess’s superb beauty.
After portraying the symmetrical lines and curves of the woman/ goddess’s face in the
first half of the poem, she is “crystallized to form the bronze head of the mask,” which
“ is not without its ‘patina of time’ but it is not subject to human caresses and
emotion.” ( Peters 27) In spite of that, the poet begs her never to become alive and
subject him to his human sensual feelings.
Oh face as God created you before even the memory of time
Face of the dawn of the world, do not reveal yourself like a
tender passage to rouse my flesh.
I adore you, oh Beauty, with my one- stringed eye!
SD 191
Hence, “Black Mask’s ” imagery is marked with divinity, peacefulness and stability to
endow the woman/goddess with the bless of eternity.
17
Taking into consideration that masks and statues represent gods or eternal
ancestors to endow their wearers with infinite power and divine presence in African
tradition,
The paradoxes of “Masque negre” stem from the Symbiosis of three entities- woman,
ancestral mask and deity- so that the figure is both human and divine, dead and alive, form
and essence, bronze mask and human flesh. Woman as symbol of Life-giving forces and the
mask / statue as symbol of the ancestors are here combined with a third principle, the goddess,
constituting Three entities closely associated.
Peters 28
The divinity of human nature is also one of Blake’s main themes. In “The Divine
Image” of Songs of Innocence, he “expresses one of his deeply felt themes, the
identification of man with God.” ( Keynes 136) It illustrates how the divine features
light up the natural and the human worlds alike.
For Mery Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear.
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is Man his child and care.
For Mery has a human heart,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
…………………………
…………………………………
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew
Where Mery, love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
SIE 35
But in the corresponding poem of Songs of Experience, this divinity is shuttered as:
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And jealousy a Human Face,
Terror, the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.
SIE 45
18
When cruelty replaces mercy, jealousy replaces pity, and terror replaces peace in
human hearts, divinity can no longer dwell there. Consequently, man is stripped of his
divine essence, and his downfall form the Edenic innocence is fatal.
Similarly, in “ The Human Abstract” of Songs of Experience Blake elaborates
on the same topic of human divinity. He declares that if there is pity in human world,
it is because we allow somebody to be poor; if there is mercy, it is because we inflict
wretchedness on an innocent soul; and if there is peace, it is only because we are
afraid of one another. Thus, the resulted cruelty, deceit and selfishness put an end to
the sacred divinity and sympathy that unite old and young, poor and rich in Songs of
Innocence.
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace,
Till the selfish loves in crease;
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
SIE 43
“ Prayer To Masks” is more than a prayer to Senghor’s gods and ancestors, as
it embraces his beliefs both as a man and a poet. Different form his other maskpoems, it involves not only one mask but several ones called form all earth’s
directions to guard over his race.
Masks!,Masks!
Black mask red mask, you white-and-black masks
Masks of the four points from which Spirit blows
In silence I salute you!
SD 107
To reach a moment of eternity for his plea, Senghor chooses first, the traditional
colours of Africa: black, red and white; second, a silent reverned greeting; third, a
sacred place isolated from all evils of the human world.
19
You guard this place forbidden to all laughter women,
to all smiles that fade.
You distil this air of eternity in which I breathe the air of
my fathers
Masks of unmasked faces, stripped of the masks of illness
and the lines of age
You who have fashioned this portrait, this my face bent over
the altar of white paper
In your own image, hear me.
SD 107
In general masks cover faces behind and make them unknown, but Senghor’s mask is
different as it never “[disguises] the identity beyond it, the sacred African mask
reveals in its form and texture the character of deity it represents.” ( Petrs 29) Hence
they are “ masks of unmasked faces “ belonging to those eternal ancestors, who
establish the African heritage.
The rest of the poem validates Senghor’s concern for his homeland Africa as
well as for his adopted exile, Europe:
The Africa of the empires is dying, see, the agony of a pitiful
princess
And Europe too where we are joined by the navel.
Fix your unchanging eyes upon your children, who are given
orders.
Who give away their lives like the poor their last clothes
Let us report present at the rebirth of the world
Like the yeast which white flour needs.
SD 107
Though Africa, ‘the princess,’ is dying due to the white man’s colonization, yet
salvation of Europe will be in its hands. At that period, World War II was threatening
Europe, which had been torn apart by internal strife and conflict. Consequently, black
men in exile are called upon to participate in this war in order to restore peace back to
the whole world. Actually, Senghor is referring, here, to his experience as a soldier in
the French army during that war. Hence, ‘like the yeast which white flour needs’ the
black man’s sacrifice and physical death are needed for the rebirth of a new peaceful
20
world. “ This suggests that the black man will be charged with the task of infusing a
spiritual essence into a world that is for all practical purposes white-and sterile.”
(Peters 30)
To elaborate on the black man’s role in the present white world, Senghor
passes three rhetorical questions, for which answers affirm the nobility of such a role:
For who would teach rhythm to a dead world of machine
and guns?
Who would give the cry of joy to wake the dead and the
bereaved at dawn?
Say, who would give back the memory of life to the man
whose hopes are smashed?
SD 107-108
Certainly it is the black man, who would successfully accomplish all this, according
to Senghor. Natural rhythm, cry of joy and hope are invaluable presents of the black
man to the white man’s world of machine. Here, our attention is drawn back to Blake,
who has passed similar rhetorical questions. In “Earth Answer” of Songs of
Experience, Blake personifies the earth as a woman trying her best to free herself
from her “dread dreary” life, but her effort is in vain. He exploits such a
personification to reflect how darkness prevades everything in life due to people’s
vanity, selfishness and cruelty:
Earth rais’d up her head,
Form the darkness dread & drear.
Her light fled:
Stony dread!
And her locks cover’d with gray despair.
SIE 37
Consequently he exclaims:
“ Does spring hide its joy
When buds and blossoms grow?
Does the Sower
Sow by night,
Or the plowman in darkness plow?
SIE 38
21
The answer to such rhetorical questions is certainly no, unless men get rid of their
evil, only then they can enjoy spring instead of winter,fruitfulness instead of
barrenness and light instead of darkness.
“ The Sick Rose”, in the same poetic collection, elaborates also on the same
idea by projecting it even in the world of nature, where the dark secret love of an
invisible worm destroys a rose. The whole atmosphere of the poem is that of envy,
evil and destruction to the extent that even a small beautiful thing, like a rose, is not
saved from its cruelty. In fact, it suggests that most beautiful things in human life are
frequently destroyed by evil forces.
O Rose, thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy
SIE 93
The words ‘ invisible, night, dark, secret’ refer to the mysterious and hidden decay
that is inflicted upon the rose to suggest “the destruction of love …………… by
experience of spiritual death.” (Wilkinson 56)
“prayer to Masks” proceeds to clarify what prepares the black man to play
such a noble role in the contemporary world. It is his strong and everlasting
relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds. “ The assertion of the black man ’s
contribution is made with full awareness of his current existential position”. But “he
has many stereotypes, all of them revealing a bias above all against his colour, which
forces on him a myth of inferiority.” ( Peters 30) Such stereotypes are stated by
Senghor:
They call us men of coffee cotton oil
They call us men of death.
22
But, in fact, and according to Senghor:
We are the men of the dance, whose feet draw new strength
Pounding the hardened earth.
SD 108
To save the human world from destruction, and achieve a moment of resurrection, the
black man, through dancing, will teach people the rhythm of life; “ an honour he has
by virtue of his retention of the vital link with the cosmic forces ruling the universe as
he dances the dance of the world………..celebrating the renewing cycle of life and
death.”(Peters31)
In “Totem”, detachment and irony replace the seriousness, that marks the rest
of the mask poems. More importantly, the very presence of mask and its sacred
attributes are hidden to put an end to the idea of barbarism associated with black men
in the minds of the white civilized people.
I must hide in the intimate depths of my veins
The ancestors storm-dark skinned, shot with lightning and
thunder
and my guardian animal, I must hide him
Lest I smash through the boom of scandal.
SD 108
Ironically , to avoid being scandalized in Europe, Senghor has to burry his totem, i.e.
his ancestors in his veins. Yet it is impossible to extinguish their eternal existence,
which is emphasized previously in an earlier poem of this collection, “ In
Memoriam”, where he declares that they “ have always refused to die.” For more
justification, Senghor’s ancestors, symbolized by the totem and run through his blood,
do not only protect him from “ lucky races”, but from himself in exile as well.
He is my faithful blood and demands fidelity
Protecting my naked pride against
Myself and all the insolence of lucky races.
SD 108
By speculating his ancestors’ responsibility of transmitting and protecting the
life-force of their descendents, Sanghor finds that “fidelity to the forces responsible
23
for one’s very being is a moral obligation, fulfillment of which insures reciprocity and
continued protection.” Hence the totem ancestors are hidden and burried, but not in
any expected place; it is in his blood, the essence of life in any human. Within the
concept of Negritude, blood, as a symbol of life-force and nobility, joins all the black
race “through the common lineage of Mother Africa and through the common
heritage of suffering.” (Ba 49) It flows freely in the human body as water flows
through earth, both as fluid and vital forces leading to purification and regeneration. It
is apparent here that though Senghor’s blood images are mostly conventional, yet
when it is related to race “ the note of conviction, of pride and commitment” becomes
their real meaning. But it is not a racial pride, “because of the vital realities bound by
………..blood ties.” ( Ba 47). Hence, the “Totem” is elaborating on this, as Senghor
visualizes his totem in a hidden positive term contrary to his oppressors.
Though “Snow on Paris” elaborates on the positive characteristics of the black
man, yet its setting is not African but European. Its whole atmosphere is completely
different from that of “Joal” and “Night In The Sine”, where quietness, peacefulness
and human warmth prevail. In spite of the fact that it is a Christmas Day, yet
suffering, violence and conflict characterize the white-man world.
Lord, you have visited Paris on this day of your birth
Because it was becoming mean and evil
You have purified it with your incorruptible cold
With white death.
SD 194
While Senghor concentrates on Paris and on the white race, which is different from
his own, Blake, in “London” of Songs of Experience, focuses on his homeland:
London and his own people. But both have the same negative reaction towards the
bad conditions of their worlds.
I wonder thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Masks of weakness, marks of woe.
SIE 42
24
The central and recurring symbol through “Snow on Paris” is the colour white:
‘white death,’ ‘white hands’ and ‘white snow’. “Both [its] intrinsic and extrinsic
qualities are brought into play as the poet uses the snow on Christmas Day in Paris to
embody the themes of transgression and forgiveness, of impurity and purification.”
(Peters 32) The extrinsic quality of snow is whiteness, and the intrinsic quality is
“shedding its burning quality and its colour” (Peters 33) through melting. Ironically,
the whiteness of the snow is associated to Europe:“ white hands,” but stating its
crimes against Africa in the following stanza proves the contrary. Hence such hands
grow into “chalk-white hands” and “powdered painted hands” (SD 194) to check out
the purity of its whiteness. Such metaphors are “mere camouflage for the evil that
they shroud.” ( Peters 33) The intrinsic characteristic of melting while shedding heat
and colour is exploited by Senghor to describe the effect of the sun in melting the
snow of his heart, i.e. the hatred of the Europeans deep down there:
And now my heart melts like snow in the sun
I forget.
SD 194
Following Christ example, salvation cannot be achieved without suffering and
death, and this is applicable to Senghor and his hope of peace. Therefore, he focuses
on Europe’s crimes against Africa to extent of “equat[ing] the plight of suffering
Africans with that of Christ.” (Peters 33) Consequently, and in contrast to the poem’s
central symbol of whiteness, God has “brown hands”.
The white hands that felled the palm forests that once
waved over Africa, in the heart of Africa
Straight and strong, the Saras beautiful as the first men who
came from your brown hands.
SD 194
Still, his determination and his declaration to forget and forgive throughout the poem
do not diminish the bitterness he feels towards his oppressors. But in the final stanza,
one again finds the image of the sun melting the snow of his heart to emphasize
“Christ’s massage of peace and goodwill to all men,” (Peters 33) which is actually
Senghor’s message too, i.e. his “magnanimity of acceptance [and] forbearance of
hatred .” (Peters 34) Hence, he announces that to the whole wolrd:
25
My heart, Lord has melted like snow on the Paris rooftops
In the sun of your sweetness.
It is gentle toward my enemies, toward my white handed
brothers without snow.
SD 195
About more than a century before Senghor, Blake emphasizes also the bad
effect of hatred and antagonism on the human world. In “A poison Tree” of Songs of
Experience, he states that while anger with a friend fades away soon, anger with a foe
grows into a poisonous wrath, if human beings cannot open the door of forbearance
and forgiveness.
And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunn`ed it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles,
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
SIE 44
Blake waters the tree of his wrath against a foe with fear, and ‘sunned it with smiles’
and ‘deceitful wiles’. Its fruit is a bright tempting apple for the foe, whose envy and
jealousy draw him to sneak in at night and steal it. But death has been his fatal reward
on eating such a poisonous apple, the fruit of the tree of anger and hatred.
In spite of Senghor’s declaration that his poetry is a “poetry of Childhood
Kingdom,” ( Peters 34) yet Jonathan Peters divides his poetry into three groups of
themes : isolation in exile, ancestors and masks, and Negritude, which sometimes
overlap each other in his poetic volumes. As a result, Senghor’s constant nostalgia in
26
Songs of Darkness, which embraces the first theme as its main subject, has been for
his homeland Africa, for childhood innocence and for the past of his great ancestors.
Senghor as a “colonized man ………. Ought to use the past with the intention of
opening the future as an invitation to action and a basis for hope.” (Fonon 187) All
this makes the journey motif “ complements the theme of exile…… and unifies the
sub- themes in each category.” ( Peters 34) But in most of the mask poems, one sees a
concentration on the second theme : ancestors, and how they “signify dreams,
unyielding qualities of blood, guardians as well as haunting spirits.” Consequently , as
mentioned before, their representative masks stand for “sources of power and life,”
and reflect the African cultural heritage. All this arouses a kind of pride not only in
Senghor but among the poets of Negritude as well, and channels their creativity
towards the above mentioned journey motif to exhibit the greatness of their race. Thus
one can say that their “spiritual pilgrimages to the shrines of the past” are
accomplished “in wonder, love and praise”.
Other poems of Songs of Darkness, deal simultaneously with the third theme:
Negritude. “Snow on Paris”, for example, glorifies the blake race by stating that the
Africans are descendants of Christ, as they have gone through the same suffering at
the hands of the white people. In “Prayer to Masks” ,Senghor “seeks to vindicate the
black aesthetic by imploring the masks he invokes to make African’s children the
leaven of the world.” (Peter 35) According to him, the new world cannot be born
without abolishing the white man’s stereotypes of the black people as “coffee men
cotton men oily men” and acknowledging them as “ men of the dance.” ( SD 108)
By inclouding such thorough ideas , one notices a kind of logical thematic
development in Songs of Darkness .It starts with exile and alienation through
discovery of self and origin, and finally towards pride and self assertion. Such
development forms the essential parts of Negritude as a theme, and the availability of
the journey motif is unquestionable. In “ Let koras and Balafongs Accompany me”
and “ The Return of the Prodigal Son”, as Senghor’s heroic epics in Songs of
Darkness, it is proved that such journey is both physical and spiritual.
27
In “Let koras and Balafongs Accompany me”, one finds “ four major
movements, each covering two of the poems nine sections.” ( Peters 36) The first one
includes his childhood memories in Africa. In such idyllic atmosphere, nothing is
definite: “what were the months ? what was the year? I remember its fleeting softness
at twilight.”(SD 109) The second one presents the divided psyche of the poet between
two worlds: Africa and Europe, i.e . Soukeina and Isabella. But finally natural world
of Africa has the upper hand, and Senghor chooses it as his favourite world and final
destination.
I have chosen my toiling black people, my peasant people,
All the peasant race through all the world.
SD 111
Consequently, the third movement of the poem is devoted completely to the
past, and being started by the same questions ‘ What were the months?’ and ‘what
was the year?’ After praising the beauty of sira Badral, the legendary source of his
own people, the Serer people, he begs her to clean him from all the dirt of the white
civilization.
Wash me clean from all contagions of civilized man.
May your light which is not subtle wash clean my countenance,
your dry violence bathe me in tempests of sand.
SD 114
Through claiming his ancestors as scholars equal to the Egyptian hyperboreans and
himself as a royalty equal to pharaohs, Senghor stresses the nobility of his peasant
race.
this fluctuation between royalty and peasantry demonstrates Senghor’s self – conscious
wrestling with the image of the black man’s inferiority fastened on him by Europeans and with
the image of descent from a royal stock which he tries to project as best, and so often, as he can.
peters 36
In the fourth movement, one finds Senghor, similar to his earlier poems, refer
to the past crimes of Europe in Africa. Yet it is only in this epic and the other one of
Songs of Darkness that he presents the suffering of Europe during World War II. But
within this context he counts the noble qualities of his race, and announces his “final
28
redescent into the Childhood Kingdom.” The poem ends with Senghor enjoy wearing
the mask of a child and grasping his uncle: TokÔ Waly’s hand to lead him towards
comprehensive understanding of his land and race. Hence it is not strange to find that
in the last lines of the poem Senghor addressing Mother Africa through its mystical
night, “as an ancestral mask that keeps watch over” (Peters 37) the child, by saying:
Tame the child who is still a child, that twelve wandering
Years have not made old.
SD 116
Finally, one can say that in the fourth movement “ the image of the child
predominates and makes [the poem] more an ode to departed childhood splendours
relived in the imagination than a heroic legend of the African race.” (Peters 37) This
fact makes it resemble Blake’s Songs of Innocence& experience to the extent of using
the same symbols. To elaborate on this, in the last stanza Senghor addresses his
students as lambs by saying:
You, my lambs, my delight with eyes that shall not look
upon my age
I was not always a shepherd of fair heads on the arid plains
Of your books
…………………………………………….
My lambs, my childhood is as old as the world and I am as
young as the everlasting youth of the world’s dawn.
SD 111
He chooses the lambs as a symbol of innocence and purity to declare that his
childhood is eternal yet vital, i.e. as old as the world itself and as fresh as the shiny
dawn. In addressing the lamb as a symbol of innocence, Blake has also a same
declaration that he is still a child, and both he and the lamb are innocent creatures of
God:
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
…………………………
…………………………
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
29
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little lamb I’II tell thee,
Little lamb I’II tell thee!
…………………………….
…………………………….
He is meek&he is mild,
He became al little child;
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little lamb God bless thee.
Little lamb God bless thee.
SIE 32
Similar to “Let Kôras and Balafongs Accompany me,” “The Return of the
Prodigal son” celebrates Senghor’s return to his homeland but after sixteen years of
exile. This time, his reception there has not been a happy one due to his father’s death,
the deserted family house and the absence of family members except of a herdsman,
who leads him to his father’s grave:
Let me follow the golden note from the flute of silence, let
me ago follow the herdsman, my fellow-dreamer of long
Naked under his milk-white girdle, with a flamboyant flower
On his forehead.
…………………………………………
………………………………………….
……………………………………………
And my heart once more at the grave where reverently he
has laid his long genealogy to rest.
SD 117
Instead, Senghor feels the welcome of his great ancastors; hence ancestral majestic
kings and brave warriors of Sine are subject of his worship:
I prostrate myself at your feet, in the dust of my respect
At your feet, Ancestors still present, who rule in pride the
great hall of your masks defying time.
SD 118
30
By invoking the elephant of the sacred grove at Mbissel, Senghor, as an African,
“ strongly confesses to his faith in and oneness with nature.”(Egudu 40-41) Through
such an elephant, he addresses a prayer to his great ancestors as the source of all the
Serer culture and tradition.
Elephant of Mbissel, through your ears hidden from our sight,
May my ancestors hear my reverent prayer.
Bless you, my father, bless you!
SD 119
There, Senghor’s compliant about ‘his white brothers’ neglect makes him
happy on seeing the closing shops and businesses around his family house, as they
signify for him a kind of representation of the materialistic civilization of Europe.
Instead, “ the son of the soil wishes to revive the pastoral activities of the past.”
(Peters 37) Similar to Blake, he wants to “ revive [his] earthly peasant virtues!” (SD
216) To elaborate more in “Introduction” of Songs of Innocence, one sees Blake
having the same inclination. On piping down the valleys, he responds to the request of
a child on a cloud to sing a song about a lamb. The aroused happiness and ecstasy
resulted from such rural atmosphere prompt the child to ask for more:
“Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read”…………………………….
…………………………….
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain’d the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
SIE 31
Back to “ The Return of the Prodigal Son,” the elephant of Mbissel, in the
eighth stanza, is once again invoked by Senghor to grant him the knowledge, the
wisdom, the will and the courage of his old ancestors for three reasons:
31
Let me die in my people’s quarrel, if need be in the smell of
powder and guns
Keep, root in my freed heart in the first love of the same people.
Make me your master of language; or rather, let me be
named the ambassador of my people.
SD 120
But in search for the same wisdom and thoughtfullness, Blake in “ The fly”, one of his
Songs of Experience, visualizes himself equal to a helpless fly, which he ‘has brush’d
away by his ‘thoughtless hand’. But John E.Grant contradicts that by stating that “ the
reader should not assume that the speaker is ‘Blake’ in any of several personae. On
the contrary, the speaker should be identified as a man in Experience, whose voice
must be sharply distinguished from that of ‘the Bard’, the prophetic observer of the
fallen world.” (Northrop Frye 35) Any way, in addressing the fly, Blake explains how
both of them are creatures of God with similar fatal circumstances.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink & sing
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
SIE 40
Even this does not hinder him from going on in his search for wisdom, as it is the only
means for the welfare of all humanity at large:
If thought is life
And strength & breath,
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
32
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
SIE 40
To accomplish his mission, he expresses the same wish of Senghor, which is to die for
the sake of others’ salvation. All this proves that Blake has been “ a man of his time
who respond [s] characteristically and sometimes violently to the main political and
social events of his age.” (Daiches 874)
At the end of such recollections of “ the Return of the Prodigal Son,” Senghor
comes back to the present, and states his intended departure from Africa to Europe on
the following day to fulfil his dream of being the ambassador of his own people. But
even before leaving, he feels “ longing for [his] black land.” (SD 217). Thus, through
the “images related to animism, his ancestors and his rustic juvenile environment, the
poet makes the reader perceptive to the great importance in his life his return to
Africa.” (Niekerk 63)
Considering the “poem’s total meaning [as] ……….. a total image, a single
visualizable picture,” ( Frye 125) both Blake and Senghor depend primarily on
imagination in devising these poetic collections. Blake proclaims the supremacy of
imagination as the very source of spiritual energy and the most vital activity of the
mind. His aim is to cultivate man’s imagination to such an extent that it will be
capable of perceiving ultimate truth without the help of reason. Through his direct and
visionary imagination, Blake fulfils what he has felt the aim of poetry. In this respect,
visible things help Blake to reach that transcendental state, which he calls ‘ eternity’,
and feel free to create a new world.
While Songs of Innocence set out an imaginative vision of the state of
innocence, Songs of Experience prove how life challenges, corrupts and destroys it.
By considering imagination as more real than the materialistic world , Blake identifies
his ideas with symbols, which could be translated into visual images . Symbols in
these songs convey a special kind of existence; the lamb and the tiger are symbols for
two different states of human soul. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the
tiger is needed.
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Tyger ! tyger ! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immoral hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
…………………………………..
…………………………………..
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was the brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
SIE 89
No commentator or critic agrees with any other on the exact meaning of this symbol.
It may stand for the fierce forces in the soul, which are needed to break the bonds of
experience. In other words, it is a fearful animal of the night, in which sin, crime and
evil dwell, yet it is desirable and likeable. To sum up, both the lamb and the child of
Songs of innocence are symbols of divinity and all the natural qualities of the pastoral
life, but the tiger of Songs of Experience is, simultaneously, a symbol of beauty and
terror, and all prove that Blake’s art knows no abstraction due to his anthropomorphic
vision and his sensitive reaction to nature.
While Blake’s symbols in Songs of Innocence & Experience are either drawn
from the Bible or out of his own invention, Senghor’s images are either drawn from
the African tradition or out of his own invention, but all serve their central themes.
The freshness and the vitality of Senghor’s imagery are resulted from his “sensory
memory,” which has been “quite Proustian in its ability to render present some scenes
from the past.”( Anyidoho 81) The images of life-forces, in particular, explain “
satisfactorily and logically such aspects of African culture as animism, totemism, the
cult of the ancestors, the role of women, and puberty rites”.(Ba 46) Even his concrete
images of fertility, maternity and physical love should be studied within the “black
African cosmogony,” ( Ba 57)in which there is no separation between the spiritual
and physical life, as the first leads naturally to the other.
Viewed as a source of life-Forces, woman is central to Senghor’s poetry.
According to him, her image stands for the black African’s physical contribution to
the spiritual world, and as an expression of his nostalgia for unity and harmony, i.e.
for Africa at large. This validates that Africa is Senghor’s woman through all his
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poetic career, as all its attributes and merits are presented through woman’s spiritual
and physical beauty. Hence the African woman’s emotional and spiritual potentialities
feed his “concrete imagery [in] expressing [her] form and function.” (Ba 5)
Animal imagery is used both by Blake and Senghor to solidify their
philosophical vision to their reading public. In Songs of Innocence, if animals of prey
as wolves and tigers appear in this peaceful atmosphere, it is just to make an angel
descend from heaven to guard the sheep, and if one of them is attacked, his spirit goes
to God. But in Songs of Experience, such animals of prey are there to show the drastic
changes between the world of innocence and that of experience, and to reflect its
repression, cruelty and evil. By contrast and as mentioned before, Senghor’s lions and
elephants are used as symbols of force and courage according to his African heritage.
Beside their major images and symbols, Blake and Senghor depend on other minor
ones. Blake’s fly, sick rose and sunflower are good examples. In Senghor’s poetic
collection, liquids such as water, blood or human semens are exploited as images
“denoting vitality, fertility, dynamic movement.” (Ba 47) When it comes to shade and
colour, one finds that Blake ornaments his poetic composition with all colours in
nature in a kind of an impressionistic imagery. But in Senghor’s case, one finds that
his “visual impressions are [not only] conditioned …… by the coloration of nature”
but also by “the traditional colors of black Africa: red, black and white.” (Anyidoho
83) Black and white, in particular, are dealt with differently by Blake and Senghor. In
Blake’s poetic collection, black and white have their regular connotation, as the white
colour stands for purity, peacefulness and innocence, and the black colour stands for
dimness, repression and evil. But in Senghor’s Songs of Darkness, the case is vice
versa in dealing with such colours. To prove the superiority of his own race, Senghor
represents the black colour as a symbol of purity and dignity in contrast to the white
colour, that stands for the western civilization: its sterility, corruption and warfare.
In spite of Blake’s declaration that he was inspired, yet the drafts of his poetry
proved the great care he took in expressing his vision in words. “The careful,
observing eye which made Blake a cunning craftsman in line and colour was at work
in his poetry …………….. his words are exact and vivid, and make his symbols shine
brightly before the eyes.” (Bowra 12) Hence serious themes , which need comment
and explanation, are expressed simply, vigorously and effectively by Blake in these
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songs. While Blake uses the traditional meters of English lyrics in Songs of Innocence
& Experience, Senghor, mastering the French language, chooses free verse in
composing Songs of Darkness. His sensitivity to rhythm paves the way for his
originality in “adapt [ing] the harmonies of the French language to the rhythm of his
own temperament and inspiration.” (Anyidoho 129) Though rhyme does not exist in
such poetic composition, Senghor “achieve[s] musicality…. by his use of undulating
lines,” (Niekerk 103) and through the use of alliteration and assonance. He exploits
such devices to create “sound textures as well as images.” (Anyidoho 134).
In spite of being a winner of many international awards, Senghor has been the
target of different adverse critical campaigns. While Songs of Darkness attract readers
of different nationalities by its lyricism and exotic setting, it has been “ revolting to
poets and critics who view this return to the child’s world as an escape from the
present world and its very real challenges.”(Peters 38) They go further in considering
“ the idyllic world of his poetry …… a deformed image of the present instead of an
inspirational view of the past,” as they “cannot understand the value of a vision of the
past in the elaboration of the future” (Anyidoho 173) Mistakenly, they think that
Senghor cannot channel his artistic skill towards writing about contemporary issues,
and even when he has tried that in his two heroic epics of Songs of Darkness, soon he
flights back again to his idyllic atmosphere. But to be fair, one has to say that it is not
only in his two epics, but also in many of his lyrics related to this collection, like
“Prayer to Masks” and “Snow on Paris”, that he deals with up-to-date and serious
issues through speculating all the blessings of his past childhood and the human
values and traditions of his black African culture, that lead “logically to widespread
protests against the continuation of French colonial rule and the policy of
assimilation.”(Bute 152)
As an effective propagandist of Africa and its people, Senghor has been the
centre of negative criticism, because the actual circumstances of the second half of the
twentieth century prove that his overestimation of the black men at the expense of the
whites is not true or logical due to the terrible conditions of Africa at the hands of its
people after the independence of most of its countries. This leads critics to pass a
judgement that his love poems are far much better than his propagandist ones due to
36
the fact that the latter ones might be applicable only to Senghor’s personal experience
in Africa and Europe but not to all Africans as a whole.
While this plan may have been politically sound, in its place and time, its major distortion of the
true African reality strips Senghor’s poetry of the essential quality that makes great and abiding
literature.
Peters 230
But Senghor is actually a creator of a great literature. His many volumes of poetry and
prose have been and are still being translated into different languages to be sold all
over the world, because he has “ the same attachment to human existence, with the
same special vigour of communicative art, that we expect of any true literature.”(Irele
112) The sincerity of his emotion and the honesty of his human message compensate
for that error, and make his reading-public receptive to his many declarations against
racism after World War II. In one of his interviews, Senghor says: “Africans will be
touched because they will recognize themselves in what I write. But other men will
also be touched because they will have the impression that it is a new way of saying
things human.”(Egejuru 15)
Finally, Senghor is criticized for his concentration on culture at the expense of
“other facets of life” like politics, economics, religion and sociology. According to
critics, this is “ a rather narrow approach …………. since these areas often determine
the content, shape and pace of culture.” (Peters 230) But to view Senghor’s life, one
finds that he practically occupies it by working as a politician and sociologist, and he
transfers this personal experience to both his poetry and prose . A thorough reading of
his literary production guides one to know that culture for Senghor is the essence of
all the other facets of life. He differentiates between culture and civilization by seeing
culture as the spiritual force of any civilization , and hence “the common denominator
of [its] particular values.” (Ba 45) However, Senghor’s goal of universal civilization ,
beside being a far- fetched dream, has some negative after-effects, if its subtle
implications are not taken into consideration. Senghor aims at “a civilization without
racism, not
without races as cultural realities.” According to him, “ the ideal
civilization of the twenty- first century …………….. would welcome the positive
values and virtues of each civilization in a symbiosis of giving and receiving”. Human
beings, instinctively, like to have continual changes and differences, as this what
37
gives life its taste and meaning. If people have one civilization all over the world, the
result would be boredom and dullness. But it is the human essence of all civilizations,
that we should look forward to establish in our life. In other words, it is enjoyable and
enriching to have different civilizations with different traditions, rituals, celebrations
and arts, yet human concepts and values should govern them as a whole. Hence, love,
honesty, justice, freedom and democracy become their basis. Senghor affirms that by
declaring that: “ True culture is being firmly rooted and being uprooted. Firmly rooted
in ………………….. one’s spiritual heritage …………………… [and] uprooted
…………… to the enriching contributions of foreign civilization”.(quoted in
Anyidoho 179) Eventually , one can say that Senghor’s goal should not be expressed
as “universal civilization” but as “cultural synthesis and racial harmony,” as he
declared later.
To conclude, Blake and Senghors’ journey motif from innocence to
experience to a new innocence expresses the dream of all humanity of reaching a
stage of universal brotherhood and racial harmony. They prove through their literature
the universality of the human condition, and that the aspirations and agonies of
humanity are still similar whether expressed by a white European through the
romanticism of the nineteenth century or a black African through the Negritude of the
twentieth century.According to the present condition of the world, Blake and
Senghors’ journey is incomplete, as its final destination should be “New experience”
and not “ New Innocence.” The dream of new innocence marked by healing and
reunion has gone for good. Instead, one has war, nuclear weapons, strife, famine,
poverty and disease at the threshold of the twenty- first century.
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Notes
1) Senghor’s Songs of Darkness will henceforth referred to whenever quoted as SD
followed by page number.
2) Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience will henceforth referred to whenever
quoted as SIE followed by page number.
39
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