By Stuart Mitchner
One road was paved in gold, one road was just a road.
—Patti Smith, from “My Blakean Year”
Our first year as parents began in late April 1976, in the old Princeton Medical Center on Witherspoon Street. We would have left the hospital without a middle name for our newborn baby but for the arrival of a congratulatory card bearing a handwritten poem:
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!
The poem was “Infant Joy” from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and our two-day-old son had a middle name — Blake!
Hospital Music
Forty-nine years later our son has been hospitalized again and is asking me to play music for him over the phone. The songs he requests are usually about loss and loneliness. One of his favorites is “Same Old Sun” by the Alan Parsons Project, with lines like “I’ll get through the night alone” and “Now there’s nobody watching over me.” I’m fond of his music and especially susceptible to Pilot, a Scottish band that was briefly popular in the early-to-mid 1970s. But half the original group is dead. So is half the original Alan Parsons Project, not to mention the Beatles, two losses he’ll mourn all his life, George Harrison on November 29, 2001, and the most devastating of all on his personal calendar of loss, John Lennon on December 8, 1980. He’s also still mourning Brian Wilson; every member of the Left Banke is gone; and Badfinger’s co-leaders committed suicide decades ago. One of the many reasons he loves his middle name is knowing that William Blake sang on his death bed.
One Room to Another
In William Blake: A Critical Essay (Culturea reprint 2023), Algernon Swinburne says that the story of Blake’s last day, August 12, 1827, “can never be told without a sense of some strange and sweet meaning,” that as he lay, “with all the tides of his life setting towards the deep final sleep, he made and sang new fragments of verse,” which his wife heard as “songs of joy and triumph.” Swinburne adds that “Of these songs not a line has been spared us; for us, it seems, they were not made. In effect, they were not his, he said. At last, after many songs and hours, still in the true and pure presence of his wife, his death came upon him in the evening like a sleep.”
“I cannot consider death as anything but a removing from one room to another,” Blake once said, according to Peter Ackroyd’s biography, Blake (Knopf 1996). Yet six months before he died, the idea of “the removal” from Fountain Court to a house where he could be more properly looked after filled his mind with “terrible fear.” His last home was a “plain, red-brick house of three stories” adjacent to the future site of the luxury hotel, the Savoy. The Blakes had moved into two rooms on the first floor in the spring of 1820. From their bedroom they could see a section of the Thames “like a bar of gold” between the buildings on either side of the court. In the other room there was a small fireplace, a table and chairs, and the table Blake worked on. As he busied himself with sketches, watercolors and engravings to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, he looked more the working man than the artist, his clothes “threadbare, and his grey trousers … worn black and shiny in front, like a mechanic’s.” The rooms were “clean and orderly,” however, “everything in its place,” and the voices of children could be heard in the courtyard below. Listening, Blake was heard to say, “This is heaven.” One among those children, a young girl who had seen him on the street, with his “uncommonly bright eyes,” asked her father who he was, and was told, “He is a strange man. He thinks he sees spirits.”
Patti Smith’s Blake
In Just Kids (2005), Patti Smith refers to the “very pretty facsimile” of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience she liked to read to Robert Mapplethorpe at bedtime. The couple’s “most prized books” were by Blake. She also read Blake as a child, telling a Rolling Stone interviewer, “Songs of Innocence was next to Winnie the Pooh and Black Beauty.” In the same May 2004 interview, she mentions the childhood visions for which Blake was “ridiculed and even beaten” and how he held on to his visions, wherever they came from, “whether he animated them from within or they were from God.” The lesson Smith learned from Blake was don’t give up. “He never got a break in his life. His work never sold. He lived in poverty. When he spoke out, he nearly lost his life. He could have been hanged for insurrection.”
In “A Memorable Fancy” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake asks the prophet Isaiah how he dared to assert that God spoke to him and Isaiah says, “I saw no God, nor heard any, … but my senses discover’d the infinite in everything.” Being persuaded that “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God,” Isaiah “cared not for the consequences.” When Blake asks whether a firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so, Isaiah tells him, “All Poets believe that it does.”
This Blakean Year
Patti Smith’s song ends “So throw off your stupid cloak embrace all that you fear / For joy shall conquer all despair in my Blakean year.” On pattismith.net, she writes: “almost all the songs i record are collaborations but occasionally i write a little song myself. i hear the melody in my head and sit on the floor with my acoustic guitar. after a bit of struggle i work it out and bring it to my band.” After mentioning Peter Ackroyd’s “wonderful” biography, she echoes the 2004 interview, calling Blake’s life “a testament of faith over strife” and saying that “he has served as a good example in facing my own difficulties and feeling a certain satisfaction in doing so.”
Thanksgiving
William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, which falls on the day after Thanksgiving this year. You can read about “Thanksgiving at Patti Smith’s House” in an article by Patti on bonappetit.com. As she recalls, “Spiritual things aside, a child’s view of a holiday revolves around good things to eat. Though we understood the need to be thankful, the lure of sweet potatoes with raisins; succotash; pumpkin pie; the golden, crisp skin of the turkey; its wings and legs; and the pan juices thickened with cornstarch and poured over mountains of mashed potatoes was beguiling, albeit eclipsing altruism. For me, who was always hungry, Thanksgiving was all about the food.”
Patti Smith will celebrate the release of her new memoir, Bread of Angels, on Monday, December 15 at 7:30 p.m. at McCarter’s Matthews Theatre.