Blake's "How sweet I roam'd": the dangers of love

William Blake's first book of poetry, the Poetical Sketches, shows his visionary power at work before it had been focused on the elaboration of a particular system. In contrast to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, where the dialectical ordering of lyrics makes seemingly artless verse into the vehicle of prophecy, the Poetical Sketches appears to be a rather disordered collection of Blake's childhood writings. Even here, however, one can see not only his great powers of assimilation but also the concentrated power of his “poetic genius,” which could invest a simple form with deep layers of meaning.

The first poem in the collection called simply "Song," which is often called "How sweet I roam'd," first captures the reader's imagination through its simple yet powerful imagery and narrative conciseness. However, as one considers the poem more closely, it becomes difficult to determine precisely to what actual situation the metaphorical language of the poem corresponds, and what attitude Blake takes toward this situation. Considered the distaste for simplistic allegorizing which Blake later expressed, it is unlikely that he would have wished critics to resolve the poem’s ambiguities, making it an unequivocal statement on matters outside the world of the poem. Blake, as Hazard Adams writes, considered the world to be created by imaginative vision, although he did not mean this in a vulgarly pantheistic sense (60). In “How sweet I roam’d,” Blake creates a enigmatic world of his own, inviting his readers to find for themselves how it is analogous to the external world of their experience. The poem’s meaning is overdetermined by the simplicity of the images which it employs. Therefore, it can be appreciated by the widest possible audience: children, who Blake explicitly invites to hear his works in the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence; uncritical adult readers, who read his works for aesthetic pleasure without seeking to assign definite meaning to them; and finally critics, who can begin to grasp the web of allusions that were in Blake’s mind as he was writing and to recognize the vastness of the interpretive field which the poem’s ambiguity opens up. The reading of “How sweet I roam’d” which follows must therefore be considered as one among several significant and productive interpretations – a clarification of a point within the field of interpretation, rather than a narrowing of that field.

This reading will proceed in layers, since the poem’s brevity makes it likely that readers will look over it more than once before finding an interpretation of it which they find both plausible in light of the poem’s own terms and meaningful in light of their own experience. The first layer of this reading, therefore, offers an account of the poem’s narrative structure, which is fairly undisputed among critics. The first four lines, beginning with “How sweet I roam’d from field to field,” are a reminiscence of the speaker’s former happiness, the exclamation mark at the end of line four suggesting the force of the speaker’s emotion. The other significant character of the poem, the “prince of love,” is first mentioned in line three. The word “Till,” which begins the line, immediately suggests only temporal succession – the speaker enjoys roaming the fields alone, then meets the “prince of love” – but once the third stanza has been read, takes on a more sinister significance. The second stanza, in which the speaker is given “lilies” and “roses” by the prince (ll. 5-6) and led through “his gardens fair” (l. 7), suggests that meeting him only added to the speaker’s joy. However, line eleven marks a dramatic turn in the poem’s narrative, as the prince, who at first seemed so generous to the speaker, captures him. The parallel structure of lines eleven and twelve stresses the entrapment of the speaker – first in a “net” (l. 11), from which one could possibly break free, and then in a “cage” (l. 12), from which one cannot. The last stanza of the poem is the only one in the present tense, showing that the speaker’s entrapment is a continuing state. It also suggests the speaker’s passivity, since the active verbs in the stanza all refer to the prince. Only in the first two lines of the poem, in fact, is the speaker described taking independent action, roaming the fields and tasting “all the summer’s pride” (l. 2). As soon as the speaker sees the prince of love, he has in a sense already been caught by him, since, rather than experiencing nature directly, he allows the prince to lead him through it.

On the second layer of this reading, a meaning must be assigned to the relationship between the speaker and the prince of love. In order for the poem to have its full aesthetic effect, these figures and their relationship must be regarded metaphorically. The most common reading of this poem stresses the speaker’s entrapment, although not the speaker’s possible culpability in it, and so interprets the poem as a critique of either the institution of marriage or possessive love in general. In this reading, the speaker is usually identified as female, though this is not directly stated in the poem. Henry Summerfield is typical of critics who develop their interpretation along these lines, writing that the poem shows Blake had an early awareness of the “cruelty of possessiveness in love” (42). Some critics, such as Summerfield himself, perhaps deceived by the poem’s lyricism, think this reading so obvious that it needs no justification.

David Punter develops a provocative argument for this reading from three fairly uncontroversial assertions about the text: the last stanza of the poem is more distanced in tone than those that precede it, even puzzlingly so; the concept of goldenness, found in each stanza of the poem, becomes increasingly identified with the speaker; and the speaker is dehumanized by being consistently described as a bird, beginning in line nine. Based on these judgments, he writes, “Blake is clearly saying that men entrap women, in the name of love, and make them sacrifice their liberty” (482). In reducing the poem’s imagistic narrative to this bald statement of moral indignation, however, one might wonder whether Punter is imposing an ideological framework on the poem which diminishes the immediacy of its aesthetic impact. Blake notoriously detested allegories that said nothing which could be said equally well in literal language. The enigmatic relationship between the speaker and the prince of love in “How sweet I roam’d” cannot be paralleled to relationships between men and women in such an unequivocal way as to deny the validity of other interpretations. However, a close study of the support Punter gives for his conclusion shows that the poem can speak to the relationship between men and woman, though its point is more subtle than Punter thinks.

David Crisman interprets “How sweet I roam’d” the poem along quite different lines; however, like Punter, he finds the tone of the poem’s last stanzas to be strangely lacking in bitterness, if the poem is ostensibly about being trapped (621). The speaker at the end of the poem has been reduced to such passivity that she cannot even tell the reader how she feels about her captivity, though an implicit contrast could be made with the sweetness with which she once roamed the fields (l. 1). Punter writes that the poem’s final stanza is unsatisfactory – “curiously inconclusive” – in light of what the poem seems to offer at its beginning (482). However, it might be argued that after the speaker has been captured by the prince of love, who is by this point the only actor in the poem, it would be impossible for the speaker to criticize her condition explicitly. Indeed, an implicit criticism would provide a closer parallel to the situation of women in the eighteenth century, if that is what Blake intends. When around her love, the speaker pretends to be untroubled by her captivity, continuing to sing; only inwardly can she complain about her condition, and even then the criticism remains implicit, as if she were afraid of her own thoughts. The apparently objective tone of the last stanza of the poem, which Punter dislikes, actually makes the poem’s critique more powerful, since it does not impose a judgment upon the reader.

Punter’s assertion that the language of the poem subtly shows the progressive dehumanization of the speaker is more convincing, though the use he makes of this assertion is questionable. This part of his argument, using a similar strategy to the argument about active verbs discussed earlier, asserts that the poem’s use of adjectives suggesting goldenness in the successive stanzas of the poem is significant. Punter does not develop this part of his argument as fully as he could. He only finds the concept of goldenness in the last two stanzas of the poem, contrasting the “golden cage” in which the prince of love entraps the speaker in line twelve to the “golden wing” which the speaker is described as possessing in line fifteen. Actually, this goldenness is present from the first stanza, though there it is a property of the prince of love, who glides in “sunny beams” (l. 4). In the second stanza, it becomes a property by extension of the prince’s fair gardens (l. 7), “where all the golden pleasures grow” (l. 8). Line ten could be seen as the point when this goldenness becomes a principle of bondage, through the action of Phoebus, the sun god, who is likely to be identified with the prince of love since the prince is described as gliding in the sunny beams (l. 4). The speaker notices too late that the gardens of pleasure which she enjoyed could potentially becoming a “golden cage” (l. 12). Similarly, a woman of Blake’s day might find a relationship with a man enjoyable before marriage, while she was not yet under obligation to him, but once she had become an object in his possession she would feel like she was under confinement.

In his last major assertion, which is related to the one previous, Punter claims that the speaker of the poem is increasingly dehumanized, not only by being described as golden, but by being described in the latter half of the poem only as if she were a bird. Both in lines nine and fifteen, she is described as having wings, and the idea of her singing inspired by Phoebus (l. 10) also suggests that she has become a song bird. Through this consistent use of metaphor, Blake has made the cage in which she is enclosed seem quite literal. Punter does not explicitly contrast this state to that of the speaker before her captivity, although the first stanza, considered alone, contains nothing to make one doubt that the “I” of the poem is human. The poem would be deprived of its allusive power if it were an allegory about falconry. Lines five and six mention the speaker’s “hair” and “brow,” thus showing that the language later on in the poem is part of a comparison rather than a literal description. However, it is significant that the language of the latter part of the poem is entirely metaphorical; if the concept of implicit critique advanced above is plausible, then the speaker’s insistence upon metaphor is yet another sign of her passivity. It is a way of veiling the truth, making it more palatable perhaps then a direct statement in the vein of the 20th-century confessional poets would be. It also indicates a psychological truth about the speaker’s condition: she has indeed become less than human in the eyes of the one who possesses her. By continuing to “sing” (l. 13) and allowing the prince to sport and play with her (l. 14), she acquiesces in his judgment of her. Punter argues that the dehumanizing language used in the latter half of the poem suggests that the speaker has become a kind of monster beyond Blake’s comprehension. “The poem cannot end convincingly,” he writes, “because there is nothing recognizably human to grasp on to” (482). This argument, however, forgets that if the speaker is dehumanized, it is her own language which makes her so. In this Blake shows how she has tragically accepted her subhuman fate.

It could even be argued that she actually brought this fate about, since, as was said near the beginning of this essay, the speaker is only the actor in the first two lines of the poem. Her attention, though not her person, is immediately captured by the prince of love. The exclamation mark after the word “glide,” in this interpretation, stresses the speaker’s rapture at seeing the “sunny beams” in which the prince moves. Though in the first stanza of the poem, she tastes the “summer’s pride” on her own volition (l. 2), in lines five and six she merely accepts the “lilies” and “blushing roses” which the prince offers her. She has exchanged “pride” (l. 2) in her own identity for the “blushing” of female modesty (l. 6). Furthermore, while in her original state, she roamed through fields of her own choosing, owned presumably by no one, in line seven she permits herself to be “led” by the prince through “his gardens” (l. 7). Already she has chosen to live within his world, and so has set herself up for that world to be more narrowly circumscribed.

In this reading of “How sweet I roam’d,” Blake does not simply criticize the aggressive male – represented by the prince of love – but also the passive female, who allows herself to be brought into subjection and submits to the other’s dehumanizing definition of her. A Blakean view on gender relations shows the matter is not as simple as feminists would suggest; there are failings on both sides. Only when men and women can achieve the kind of mutuality found in “Love & harmony combine,” the third song in Poetical Sketches, can their state be truly happy.

Works Cited

• Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: U. of Washington, 1963.
• Crisman, William. “Songs Named ‘Song’ and the Bind of Self-Conscious Lyricism in Blake.” ELH 61.3 (Autumn 1994): 619-633.
• Erdman, David V., ed. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.
• Punter, David. “Blake, Trauma, and the Female.” New Literary History 15.3 (Spring 1984): 475-490.