The Fly (poem)

For I dance And drink & sing: Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

[3] Blake printed the poem with the text set in the branches of trees, an image of a nurse and a toddler in the foreground, and a girl with a racket about to hit a shuttlecock in the background.

[4] G. S. Morris notes that "the lines 'Till some blind hand / Shall brush my wing' seem to follow the feathered shuttlecock directly into the little girl's racquet".

This humbling simile has caused the narrator to move from thoughtlessness to thought, and, as "thought is life", from death to life, allowing the conclusion, "Then am I / A happy fly / If I live, / Or if I die", a conclusion to which Paul Miner comments: "Brain-death is real death".

[6] "The Fly" tells of the ways of life and how to live impactfully because one never knows when a "blind hand shall brush [one's] wing"; that is, death.

The illustrated version of "The Fly" from Copy F of Songs of Innocence and Experience currently held at the Yale Center for British Art [ 2 ]