The Voice of the Ancient Bard
Blake speaks here as the Ancient Bard and the Prophet (who also appeared in the Introduction to the Songs of Experience), trying “to reassure the ‘Youth of delight’ that the morning of regeneration is at hand, when the doubts and disputes of mortal life will be dispelled, even though many have fallen on the way.”[4] The illustration shows the Bard, a gowned bearded old man, playing a large celtic triangular harp to the listening youths and maidens: two children standing in the middle of the group, and six older youths.
Swinburne was one of the first reviewers of the poem in his Critical essay (1868), speaking about Blake as a voice of the ancient bard, who “summons to judgment the young and single-spirited, that by right of the natural impulse of delight in them they may give sentence against the preachers of convention and assumption”.
Stanley Gardner, stressing the double character and function of it in the collection of the Songs, notices that “the morning promise to the ‘youth of delight’, and the dispelling of doubt and despair, are accessories to Innocence: but the tone of the lines does not belong to the lightheartedness of true Innocence... Then in the last six lines the poem shifts towards Experience, identifying the ‘folly’ with perplexity among ‘roots’ that recollect ‘the forest of affliction’... and, in the end, a sense of regret is expressed that those who ‘wish to lead others’ are obsessed with selfish care...”[6] This ‘forest of affliction’ we encounter in the Song of Enitharmon from the poem Vala, or The Four Zoas: I wake sweet joy in dens of sorrow & I plant a smile In forests of affliction And wake the bubbling springs of life in regions of dark death[7] However, there is another opinion introduced by E. D. Hirsch, Jr, that the poem “belongs neither to Innocence nor Experience”.
[10] The new and better world is not a traditional Eden or the pastoral Heaven of the Songs of Innocence, but “a repudiation of all the old traditions”,[10] and its dawn is quite similar to that in A Song of Liberty (1793): Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more!
[11] It is a significant fact that the poem is dated by 1789, the year of French Revolution, that “was the occasion for a radical change in Blake’s valuation of actual life”,[12] and the reviewer sees this dawn, though “ambiguous and unspecific”, as a prophecy of “the dawn of an entirely spiritual and inward Jerusalem which prefigures the final, spiritual Eternity that will end time and death forever.”[13] The poem has been set to various different musical scores:
