Nic Harding
17th February 2007
The pitying ideal in Lyrical Ballads and Songs of Innocence and Experience
In his Preface to the 1800 publication of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth chastised those
poets who “think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in
proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men.”1 His complaint
centralises upon separation – a commentary upon the nature of man (the subject that
should inform all poetry) must engage with man himself and his relations to other
men not ignore them. In contrast to the “fickle tastes and fickle habits” that
characterise so much contemporary verse, Wordsworth and Coleridge herald their
verses as “a natural delineation of human passion, human characters, and human
incidents.”2 The repetition of “human” three times certainly confirms that the
preoccupation of these poets is man himself. It is a preoccupation that Blake shares
and Songs of Innocence and Experience, like Lyrical Ballads, is an illustration of
mankind in its complicity.
For all three poets, the experience and effect of pity is part of being human and the
pitying and pitiable aspects of human nature profoundly inform the two collections.
Displaying “human passion, human characters, and human incidents” necessarily
involves a degree of pity for fellow man and Lyrical Ballads and Blake’s Songs of
Innocence both depict a longing to be compassionate and empathise with man’s
sufferings. The desire to commune with men and understand them is challenged by
the need to distinguish between real pity and the fashionable sentimentality of the late
eighteenth century. By recognising this distinction and the ironic gap between true
compassion and the pitying ideal Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge call into question
man’s capacity to pity and whether man in fact desires to pity men at all.
The principle image of pity in Blake’s Songs of Innocence is the pity that derives from
God. The narrator of “On Another’s Sorrow” is adamant that man must feel sorrow
for his fellow creatures:
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
1
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads with other poems in two volumes, (1800) as cited in
Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R.Jones, T. & A. Constable Ltd;
Edinburgh (1975) p. 245-6
2
Ibid. p.7
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
Can I see another’s grief
And not seek for kind relief? (1-4)
The tone is marked by incredulity: this narrative voice cannot conceive the possibility
than man might not have compassion on other men. His reasoning is explained in the
second half as the narrator’s attention turns towards divine compassion – the
compassion God showed to mankind by sending his Son to be “an infant small” (26).
The act of mercy God shows towards humanity: “Oh! He gives to us his joy / That our
grief he may destroy” (33-4) allows humans to pass this same joy, this same pity, onto
others. An etymological reference and a biblical one may help to demonstrate my
point. The etymology of pity is derived from the Latin pietas or piety: piety now
meaning reverence and obedience to God but originally synonymous with compassion
– the pity and sorrow of Our Lady of Piety as Jesus’ corpse is laid across her lap. Pity
is compassion towards others, as demonstrated by Mary, but it is also (at least in an
etymological sense) an expression of obedience to God. Thus Paul states in 2
Corinthians: “Praise be…to the God of all comfort who comforts us in our troubles,
so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive
from God.”3 “Pity has a human face”4 because God is within man allowing him to
comfort others.
Many of the poems in Innocence are demonstrations of this God induced pity in
action: the child narrator of the “Chimney Sweeper” is able to soothe the fear of Tom
Dacre despite his own lamentable situation: “Hush Tom, never mind it, for if your
head’s bare, / You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair” (7-8); “The Little
Black Boy”, ostracised because of his colour, aspires to comfort “the Little English
Boy” in heaven: “I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear / To lean in joy upon
our father’s knee” (25-6) and the narrative voice of “Blossom” invites the birds to
find “cradle” in her maternal bosom. Seemingly, humanity is capable of pitying each
other and effectively too but, even in the simple realms of Innocence, there is a
niggling suspicion that man might fall short at the task of “comfort[ing] those in any
trouble.” The narrative voice of “On Another’s Sorrow” repeats: “No, no, never can it
be. / Never, never can it be” (11-12) but his assertion is almost a little too emphatic -
3
4
2 Corinthians 1:3-5
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Divine Image” (10)
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
if mankind must feel sorrow and comfort why the need to be so persistent about it?
Certainly man might aspire to pity others but is he capable of it?
Wordsworth and Coleridge address the same question and Lyrical Ballads is fraught
with characters that deserve pity from narrator and reader alike. Wordsworth is often
criticised for his determination to interact with such men and in the introduction to
their edition of The Lyrical Ballads, Brett and Jones complain that “his
[Wordsworth’s] personae are never allowed a dramatic life of their own and exist only
in so far as they represent their creator’s vision.”5 These figures are made pitiable by
the gaze of the upper class observer: they are coerced into fitting the figure of the
poor rustic so an intrusive poet can offer his sympathies. This is, I think, a little
unfair, and although Wordsworth, or at least his narrator (and pointedly, as the poet
asserts in the Advertisement, they are not always the same thing6) does want to pity
the lives of the men he encounters he does recognise the gap between these lives and
his own social standing.
The gap is made particularly prominent by the sequence of the poems. “Lines written
a small distance from my House and sent by a little Boy to the Person to whom they
are addressed” directly precedes “Simon Lee the Old Huntsman, with an incident in
which he was concerned” and the intentional placement of the two poems highlights
the disparity between their content. In the first, the narrator exhorts his sister to join
him for a time of pleasant frivolity: “And bring no book, for this one day / We’ll give
in to idleness” (15-16). The “idleness” of these two correspondents is starkly
juxtaposed against the weary lives of Simon and his wife:
And though you with your utmost skill,
From labour could not wean them,
Alas! ‘tis very little, all
Which they can do between them. (53-7)
The relentless labour of the old couple achieves nothing and their empty achievement
is emphasised by comparison with the nothing that the previous narrator and his sister
5
Wordsworth & Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R.Jones, T. & A. Constable Ltd;
Edinburgh (1975) p. xxvii
6
“The poem of the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken by the
author’s own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently shew itself in the course
of the story.” Ibid. p.8
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
purposefully seek. The lives detailed in “Lines” have so much time that they can
surrender it up to “idleness” whereas the aged farmer and his wife use up all the time
they have but never quite have enough. The use of “them” and “you” further marks
the distinction between two kinds of existence and the addressed “you”, very clearly
on the affluent side of the narrative voice, is forcibly set apart from the story of Simon
and Ruth.
Wordsworth alerts us to the limitations of pity by asserting the distance between the
narrative voice and the lives he places under scrutiny. Pity is made difficult with the
realisation that we do not understand the lives of other men and Songs and Ballads
expose the consequences of wanting to empathise but failing to understand. One such
consequence is to usurp the voice of the pitiable person with your own suppositions
about their life – both Blake’s and Wordsworth’s narrators are guilty of this. In
“Infant Joy”, for instance, the voice of the mother combats against that of the child:
‘I have no name;
I am but two days old.’
What shall I call thee?
‘I happy am;
Joy is my name.’
Sweet Joy befall thee. (1-6)
Coleridge objected to the poem on the grounds that a two year old cannot speak but
perhaps this is the poem’s point. The young infant has no voice and the speech marks
do not stress the response of the child but the imagined response imposed upon him
by his mother. To her he is “happy” and thus “joy” is a fitting name: ignorance of the
infant’s mind allows her to create an idealised child she can bless and be proud of.
The narrative voice of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” does something rather similar
and after despairing to tell his readers what Johnny is doing, he blunders through his
ignorance and relates a fictional account of what might be happening:
Perhaps, and no unlikely thought!
He with his pony now doth roam
The cliffs and peaks so high that are,
To lay his hands upon a star,
And in his pocket bring it home. (327-31)
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
The narrative voice commends himself for his own ingenuity (“and no unlikely
thought!) and converts the impossibility of knowing about Johnny and his horse into a
fantastical account of their adventures. The lamentable figure of the poor lost idiot
boy is reinvented as a contented stargazer but the preceding description of Betty’s true
misery overcasts the narrator’s romantic ideal. The detached narrative voice wants
only to tell an exciting tale that will induce pity whereas Betty’s experience of sorrow,
expressed as it is in the simplest terms, is a genuine one: “Oh dear, dear pony! My
sweet joy! / Oh carry back my idiot boy!” (309-10)
The final stanza deliberately debunks the fantasy story that the narrator wishes to tell
and thwarts any expectation of a climatic revelation:
And thus to Betty’s question, he
Made answer, like a traveller bold,
(His very words I give to you,)
“The cocks did crow to-whoo, tu-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold,”
-- Thus answered Johnny in his glory,
And that was all his travel’s story. (457-63)
Johnny is finally given a voice and his words cause imagined tale that the narrator
had in mind to collapse. There is a particular emphasis, aided by the metrical base, on
“all” in the last line and the word epitomises the disappointment of the narrator:
instead of a hero’s tale he is rewarded with two lines of nonsense. An insight into
Johnny’s character affords a glimpse of understanding but it is cast aside by a
dismissive “thus.” Johnny is, to the reader at least, pitiable but not with the kind of
heroic compassion that would accompany a “dreadful hunter” (338) or “a silent horseman ghost” (335) but with a simple sorrow that laments a mother losing her child and
rejoices in their reunion.
The unknowability of the potentially pitiable is emphasised repeatedly through
Lyrical Ballads and empathy becomes tinged with condescension when the speaker
does not fully understand the object of their compassion. The fine distinction between
compassion and patronisation is depicted in Blake’s Songs of Experience, particularly
“Holy Thursday” and “The Chimney Sweeper.” The dutiful Beadles of Innocence’s
“Holy Thursday” are commended for being “wise guardians of the poor” (11).
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
Through innocent eyes their pity is of a Christian kind that instigates action but the
wiser voice of Experience quickly exposes superficial compassion for a blend of selfcongratulation and contempt:
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land:
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand? (1-4)
These men do their bit for the poor but they do so from the comfortable stance of
affluence. They are a living example of the suggestion that: “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.”7 Experience exposes these rich caregivers as begrudging scrooges who
give the minimum amount from their own “rich and fruitful” supplies. The
compassionate church fathers of Innocence are converted into misers full of contempt.
The crude distinction between those who pretend to pity (in the Our Lady of Pieta
sense of the word) but fail to do so and genuine empathy is stressed once more in
Experience’s “The Chimney Sweeper” and Wordsworth’s “Now We Are Seven.” In
both of these poems the narrative voice seems to care very little for the child being
questioned and the bystander of “The Chimney Sweeper” remains stoically silent after
his demanding question: “Where are thy father and mother? Say!” (3) The imperative
tacked onto the line end emphasises the interrogative tone of such a question – the
speaker demands an answer but once one is given he remains conspicuously silent.
Initial curiosity quickly lapses into nothingness as the narrator disappears and the
pitiful person’s complaint ends without reciprocation from the listener. A noteworthy
comparison is with the, somewhat half hearted, conclusion of “The Last of the Flock”
or the narrative voice in “We Are Seven.” In the latter poem, the narrator drills the
young girl with the same question but is unwilling to listen to the reasoning behind
her answer. The girl is a pitiful creature to him but pity does not extend into empathy
and in the final stanza he simply gives up his investigation:
‘But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!’
‘Twas throwing words away; for still
7
Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, “The Human Abstract” (1-4)
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’ (65-9)
The narrator aims to convert her to his way of thinking but will not allow her to
express her own opinion. Instead he ends with an exasperated affirmation of his view:
“they are dead.” As with Johnny in “The Idiot Boy” the reader is able to have more
compassion for the girl precisely because of the narrator’s failure to understand her.
Her stubborn insistence combines with his repeated attack to create a poignant image
that demonstrates how those we cannot empathise with warrant the most pity.
In “The Female Vagrant” and “Simon Lee” the narrative voice offers sympathy to no
avail: Simon collapses into tears and, after telling her story, the homeless woman can
only turn and wander away. Pity has not matured to produce anything more
substantial and the narrators are left leaning towards indulgent sentimentality rather
than action. There is a wish to share suffering: “to come as a brother thy sorrows to
share”8 but when confronted with such incomprehensible misery the gap between
object and viewer is too wide to be bridged. Wordsworth and Coleridge recognise this
gap and their narrative voices, albeit unsuccessfully, do try to communicate and
empathise – to stray beyond social class confines and bestow compassion. They are
blocked by condescension, misunderstanding, imposing their own views and
ultimately by impotence, but they keep trying.
In devastating contrast to these hapless idealists is the closing image of Blake’s final
poem: “A Divine Image”:
The human dress is forged in iron;
The human form, a fiery gorge;
The human face, a furnace sealed,
The human heart, its hungry gorge. (5-8)
There is no illusion about human interaction here – all are consumed by mankind’s
greatest love: himself. The vision of the face as a “furnace sealed” is confirmation that
compassion is neither given nor can be received: the human figure is a fixed lump of
metal that cannot feel and does not want to. The repeated attempts of the Lyrical
Ballads for communication and reciprocation are discarded instead for a crude realism
8
Lyrical Ballads, “The Convict” (48)
Nic Harding
17th February 2007
where man does not bestow pity on others because he cannot but because he will not.
The pitying idealists of Innocence become the hardened observer of the “London”
cityscape:
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe. (3-4)
They mark but they feel not, and failure to pity the suffering of others leads to the
precise detached separation that Wordsworth condemned.