On Blake's Poem "The Fly." Part 2/3

The Fly - Engraving by William Blake (1794) - Public Domain Image

The speaker in “The Fly” compares himself to the insect; after all, at least to his own understanding, they seem to act alike, just as the poem says.

How does this work for the reader?

In rhetoric we understand that an analogy is an extended form of comparison. Analogies are useful in the illustration of complex processes by means of the exposition of much less intricate procedures. We may say raising a child is like watering a plant, for example, and of course, we are expected to elaborate. But an analogy is not always about a process and is not always an elaboration, for this latter might be implicit, which is, by the way, why there are so many false analogies in the history of human speculation, I think; people may just state the correlation without previously examining all the particulars—and you’d say about Blake.

Fly and man are the same in the poem, each of them an inferior being in relation to a greater power: fly is to man as man is to God? Do we smell and incoherence? How can two things be the same but at the same time, one is superior to the other? The analogy is there; let us work it out.

Man and fly are the same. Man’s blind hand brushes away the fly’s wing. Man is given superiority under this circumstance.

Let us walk backwards now:

God is given superiority under the analogous circumstance (of his blind hand’s brushing away the metaphorical wing of man). God’s blind hand brushes away man’s wing. God and man are the same.

God and man, the same? Well, yes. There is no incoherence at all. William Blake’s poetry and artistic work in general exposes his particular metaphysical view of religion, and by extension, of existence in general, for he was an achieved Christian, although obviously severely critical of the Anglican Church. This view holds that good and evil coexist in a dialectical equilibrium; one cannot exist without the other. If there is good and evil in all things, all things are the same, so to speak.

An important question remaining, among many others, is whose blind hand it is that which brushes away God’s wing.

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To be discussed in the third and final part:

We may think analogies may not repeat itself ad infinitum, but we may also think that the correlation has been stated, but to our disgrace, we have not been equipped with the divinity required to examine the particulars. Only God knows, they say.

However, who says we cannot “dance and drink and sing” around this matter!