The Fly: A Poem by William Blake
A look at one of his “Songs of Experience”
The Fly is one of the “Songs of Experience” written and etched by William Blake (1757–1827) between 1789 and 1794. These were published alongside his “Songs of Innocence” with the aim of “Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”. Several of the poems, in both sets, use images from the natural world to symbolise human characteristics, and The Fly is one of these.
The poem is very short, consisting of five short-lined stanzas with a total word-count of only 69. Of these words, only four have more than one syllable, with all of these appearing in the first stanza, one to each line. The whole poem reads as follows:
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
