Little Lamb who made three?

Dost thou know who made thee?

He is called by thy name

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek and he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child and thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

The other side of the record has about half The Songs of Experience on it The "Introduction," one of the most potentially powerful songs on the album is distorted, and many of the words made incomprehensible, by lousy singing. These are the other sides of the coin, the necessary balance to the Songs of Innocence. Here, the poet wears the mask of the wise old world sorcerer, rather than that of an ecstatic child:

Here the voice of the Bard

Who Present, Past and Future sees,

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word.

That walk'd among the ancient trees.

THE SONGS on the second side are more somber in mood, and on the whole, Orlovsky's unearthly voice works to the better advantage on them. "Ah! Sunflower," one of "Blake's" original musical compositions, is not as prettily done by Ginsberg as it was by the Fugs on their first album, but after a few listening it seems more appropriately, if less melodically, tuned on Ginsberg's record.

"The Sick Rose" is one of Blake's finest poems, and it is also the short masterpiece of this album. With guitar and organ, Ginsberg performs the song with an exotic, perhaps Arabian, sound. Its simple imagery takes on allegorical power subtly symbolizing the corruption that disillusioning experience tells us must lie in every rose. Gnisberg says it nicely: "What's the Rose? Genital Flowers? Body Life? God? What's the Worm? Cancer Syphilis? Mind Time? Death?" The song suggests all of this, and much more.

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.

"To Tirzah" was put into the Songs of Experience by Blake, ten years after the rest of the poems were compiled. At first, the poem seems out of place because of its explicit metaphysical concerns and its lack of concrete visual images. However, the poem raises an essential question that mystics have been asking themselves for a long time. Granted both Blake's and Ginsberg's belief in the illusory nature of the universe, and the transience of the ego in any one incarnation, how then does one relate to other men and society? The poem is the voice of man's eternal soul speaking to the mortal body.

Whate'er is born of Mortal Birth,

Must be consumed with the Earth

To rise from Generation free;

Then what have I to do with thee?

The question of involvement was never really very difficult for Blake, however. Listen to Ginsberg's tender singing of "The Little Black Boy," and "The Chimney Sweeper." These songs tell of goodness lost and crucified in both the slums of London and the world at large. Blake's vision of the angels in the woods remains pure and intact as we are told of a chimney sweeper's dream:

As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight

That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned and Jack

Were all of them lick'd up in coffins of black

And by came an Angel who had a bright key

And he opin's the coffins and set them all free.

Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

IN ADDITION to defending human goodness in his poems, Blake also expressed, what was for his day, radical anger at the Church and the Government's role in preventing and exploit-ing man's godhead. Ginsberg does full justice to Blake's original poems in a lilting barricades-style song of "The Grey Monk" and a slow funeral dirge of "London":

How the Chimney-sweepers cry;

Every blackening Church appalls,

And the hapless soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down palace walls.

In one way or another, both Ginsberg and Blake reached the mental resolution to involve themselves in the controversies of their times. More remarkably, both managed to maintain a love of humanity and compassion for the suffering of others that Eliot, Pound, and countless other intellectuals abandoned along the way.

Blake warned Thomas Paine that the English police were going to arrest him for sedition in time for Paine to escape by boat to France. In the same tradition, Ginsberg braved clubs and mace to chant and speak at the Pentagon, Lincoln Park, and even in Judge Hoffman's Star Chamber.

The one time that I saw Allen Ginsberg was in Harvard Yard one late night last June when most of Harvard had either left for the summer or was in bed. Harvard tenants were attempting to exercise squatter's rights in the Yard and were willing to disrupt graduation ceremonies in order to force Harvard to accede to negotiations with them. The trustees were taking the episode with their usual lack of humor and there were rumors of a bust for late that night.

Ginsberg had read his poetry at Boston University that night, and at about 2 o'clock in the morning he came over to the Yard to be with the tenants for part of that long night. Sitting in the center of a circle of about fifty people, he led a chanting of Blake poems, power mantras, and other songs.

None of the newspapers knew that he had been there, and most of the tenants did not even know who he was. Still, it's one thing for a poet to chant poems and songs before an appreciative audience of middle class radicals, and quite another kind of act to go before a group of black tenants.

William Blake wrote:

"In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

Allen Ginsberg is perhaps our only poet of any considerable reputation who also sees and hears them. We should be listening both to him and to Blake more closely now than ever before.