A Close Reading of William Blake's "The Fly"

In many of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, the innocent activities of animals or children are viewed through the experienced lens of a world-wise adult. The Piper or Bard - or whoever else is singing these songs - often seems to be vicariously re-experiencing the untainted joy of an innocent child or lamb, while knowing that s/he can never fully return to such a state of innocence after going through the travails of life experience. In this theme of the contrasting states of innocence and experience, "The Fly" can be said to follow in the same vein, but there is a notable difference. The experienced speaker in this poem compares his present state to that of an inoffensive fly - a unique approach among the Songs. Rather than implying a difference between the fly's state of innocence and his own state of experience, he calls himself a "happy fly" and muses on how both their lives are somewhat thoughtless, merry and haphazard. In fact, as the poem progresses, it almost seems that the man and fly fuse into a single blended entity combining both states. Through this progression, Blake's idea of contraries is evident: in "The Fly," innocence and experience appear as opposed, yet interrelated, forces in the poem's speaker, who can be seen as both man and fly by the end of the poem.

As with many of Blake's other poems about innocent topics, there is a darker, more experienced message lingering just below the surface. The initial two lines are childlike and unthreatening, with this innocent tone emphasized by the nursery song-like rhythm and rhyme. The third line, however, brings in a sharp juxtaposition with death through an inadvertent swing of the narrator's hand, which instantly ends the fly's "summer play." This hand is described as "thoughtless," for there was no ill-intention in its deadly brush with the fly. It was a random motion, an unfortunate swipe, which became fatal because of the immense weight and power of the hand compared to a tiny fly. A fly is too weak and frail compared to a human hand. It is no contest. Zooming out from the microscopic to the macroscopic, Blake asks the reader to consider the man as the fly, now overshadowed by the infinitely more powerful hand of Death. From this grand view, man is just as much a fragile, ephemeral creature as the fly was, flitting around making merry until the moment Death takes him by surprise. Interestingly, here the "thoughtless hand" of man is replaced by the "blind hand" of Death. While the fly was killed through an oblivious human gesture, the substitution of "blind" for "thoughtless" suggests that perhaps Death does not work quite so randomly -although we as humans may not always see the patterns. The personified "blind hand" brings to mind the blind seers of ancient Greek mythology, such as Tiresias, who foresaw the demise of mortal men more clearly than his normal-sighted counterparts. While Death's unsought calls may seem blind and inscrutable to mortals, the power behind it is not thoughtless like Man's, but perhaps a much wiser force. (It is true that Blake does not draw extensively from Greek mythology in Songs, but it is not warrantless to consider "blind hand" a possible mythological reference. There are other instances where he makes allusions to classical times, like the mention of the Bard - who, incidentally, is traditionally blind - in the Introduction to Songs of Experience.)

In the first three stanzas, the subject of the speaker's musings is first the fly, and then the speaker himself. The speaker transitions between the two with the questions: "Am not I/A fly like thee?/Or art not thou/A man like me?" (lines 4-8) In this egalitarian view, the speaker suggests that before the great equalizer that is Death, all creatures and men are similarly powerless and unprepared. This idea that the man's and fly's lives are parallel and related continues in the next stanzas, with the speaker in his own mind becoming increasingly fly-like. At the end of the third stanza, the speaker describes his inevitable death as a blind hand that will "brush my wing" (line 12), showing that he sees himself as the fly, and also that he knows his own flight through the mortal world is precarious, held aloft by a tilt of fate that is fragile like the paper-thin wings of a fly.

The fusion of the man and the fly becomes complete in these final two stanzas. Earlier, the speaker had drawn parallels between his own merriments and that of the fly, but it is a simple comparison; there is no indication that the man is actually the fly or vice versa. For the first three stanzas, the man and fly are distinct entities, with the man as the speaker, and the fly as the directly-addressed object of the man's musings. However, in the last two stanzas, it is no longer explicitly clear who the speaker is. While it could be assumed that the man is continuing to speak, these lines could conceivably be spoken by either the man or the fly, or some anthropomorphic man-fly that is somewhere in between the two. The fact that these eight lines are set in a separate column on the colored plate make it conceivable that there is a break of some kind here: a shift in speaker, or at least a shift in perspective.

The last two stanzas could be seen as the response of the fly to the man (if you take literally the assertion in the last stanza, "Then am I/A happy fly"). The fly is basically saying that it is not a thinking creature like the man, but in its innocence, it is happy. It is not grieved about dying, for it was oblivious at the moment the man killed it. The fly lacked both the time and the capacity to consider its death the way humans can, and it is perhaps the happier for it. The primary speaker of these lines, however, is probably the man, who has the choice to live a thoughtless life of dance and drink and song, or to live a more thoughtful life, since "thought is life/And strength and breath" (lines 13-14). Ironically, the man is living both these scenarios already, for even as he asserts that he lives a merry, oblivious life like the fly, he cannot help thinking about his death upon the inconsequential event of killing a fly. Thus, these two states of innocence and experience are co-existing in the speaker, just as the speaker can be both the fly and the man. The speaker comes to the conclusion that whether he is thinking or not, living or dying, he shall be a "happy fly." The dual reading that Blake made possible gives this conclusion multiple layers of meaning.

In creating the Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake etched his poems onto plates, intertwining them with illustrations into a single piece of artwork. These pictures hold clues to the meaning of his poems. At first glance, the scene illustrating "The Fly" appears so serene and peaceful that the poem seems to belong better with the poems of innocence than with those of experience. A nurse and two children are playing in a quiet field. However, just like with the words of the poem, the threat of death is lurking invisible just below the bright colors. It seems that the girl is trying to swat at something with a racket - which could either be a shuttlecock or a fly. As in the poem, here the ideas of innocent play and imminent death are somehow linked. If the older girl represents the "thoughtless hand," then the young boy watched over by the nurse can be seen as man in danger of the "blind hand." The serene-faced toddler is happily at play, but he is vulnerable, still unsteady on his feet. The nurse holds him up as he walks. His outspread arms could be seen as resembling the wings of a fly, or, perhaps, that ultimate symbol of innocent sacrifice, Jesus Christ. Either way, the viewer knows that the nurse cannot protect the boy from the hand of Death, despite her sheltering stance. He is happy and innocent, but the poem is ultimately one of experience. "The Fly" is about knowing that this peaceful scene must be viewed with a bittersweet irony, for the lives of these children, as well of humans in general, are as ephemeral and precarious as that of a fly.