Little Fly
William Blake (1757-1827)
Overview
Bloody flies, always sitting on our food and making irritating buzzing noises. Squashing or swatting one of these buggers is normally one of the happiest moments of our lives, making us feel like untapped ninja talent, but Blake spoils all this by getting philsophical about it.
This poem is about the meaning of life and recognises the fragility of our own mortality. He sees himself and his aims in life in the flies actions and contemplates what makes life worth living.
Context
Blake is regarded as one of the big boys of poetry, but sadly that reputation largely grew after he’d died and his work was not widely read beforehand.
This poem was published in his ‘Songs of Experience’ collection in 1794 and as with all these poems was accompanied with the etching underneath. This collection of poetry was published at the same time as his ‘Songs of Innocence’. While ‘SOI’ explores the purity, joy and naivety of childhood, our ‘SOE’ is more focused on the harsher realities of life and the loss of innocence.
Around the time this was published, Blake was a vocal supporter of the American and French Revolutions and in particular their aspirations towards more equal societies (before the French went crazy with the guillotine and lost the plot a little). You can see those ideas in this poem as even the lowly fly is seen in human and relatable terms.
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life,
And strength & breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
The am I
A happy fly,
If I live
or if I die.
Themes
I’d argue this poem isn’t really anything to do with flies or nature, but is rather about the human condition and the way we view our lives, the world and our place within it. There is clear connection with the idea of class and cultural status, but primarily he is concerned with the notion of mortality and what it means to be alive.
Content
In terms of a narrative, this poem is pretty simple: a man squashes a fly that is buzzing around his head and then regrets it as he ponders on the similarities between him and the fly in terms of both what they do with their life and the suddenness of death.
The poem opens by addressing the fly (as it continues to throughout), elevating it from a nuisance to be squashed into something of an equal. The fly’s actions are sympathetically equated with those of a child and the poetic voice’s swatting is seen as mean and unthinking.
In the second and third stanzas, this equivalence continues to be drawn between human and fly, noting they have similar aims in life, playing or finding enjoyment and they face a similar suddenness of death. For the fly this death is brought about by the poetic voice, whereas Blake relates human mortality to the ‘blind hand’ of God or fate acting in much the same way. Just as the fly is struck out of its revery without warning, our own deaths are not something we are able to predict.
The fourth and then the final stanza make the leap into the more philosophical. Blake sums up what it means to live as ‘thought… strength & breath’ and death being the end of thought. Here the connection with the fly is less clear, but he means to link thought to the concept of having a purpose and consciousness of what brings one joy. There is also an acceptance here of the beauty and worth of life, with certainty of death, but suddenness of it not detracting from this.
You might be wondering where any concept of class, culture or status comes in here, but think of the fly as a symbol or metaphor for anyone who is other to us. If we recognise the sacrosanct qualities of life in a flies existence and value it in a similar way to our own, do we not also move to a feeling of regret for mistreating the fly? So, in class terms, rather than swatting away the irritating moaning of those lower down the hierarchy than ourselves, we should recognise equivalence and equality in life and experience, which has broad implications in terms of thinking about how a society should be ruled or how people from other cultures should be treated. See: anyone below French aristocracy, the slave trade.
Language and Techniques
Okay, so the title is interesting in that we are elevating an insect simply making it the subject and by using the definite article ‘The’ here. Rather than just generalising about flies and how annoying they are, Blake recognises this one particular fly and treats him as an equal.
Not just that but his initial address infantilises the fly as ‘Little Fly’ and through referring to its ‘summer’s play’. This makes the reader perceive the fly in a sympathetic manner as something innocence, joyous and good – as opposed to viewing the fly’s buzzing around as annoying and inane, irritating the hell out of people. You can make a clear connection here again to the concept of class or culture, with the idea of perceived inferior cultures or classes being seen in these terms as less important. However, Blake’s analogy of the fly being squashed by ‘my thoughtless hand’ could be related to governments dismissing the concerns of lower classes and lower cultures as irritations that would get in the way of their own desires with the idea of them being ‘brush’d away’ an indication of the power imbalance in these relationships (i.e. man vs fly + aristocracies/monarchies vs the people).
The second stanza uses two antithetical rhetorical questions. The first questions whether the poetic voice is not a ‘fly like thee?’ and then whether the fly is not ‘A man like me?’. Both questions serve to draw parallels between human existence and desires with those of a fly. Through posing these questions in antithesis to each other, the poet forces the reader to acknowledge that this is not just a cursory comparison of a tiny element of their identities, but instead is a more intrinsic and fundamental similarity.
The point is made decisively in the third stanza as the fly’s ‘summer’s play’ is compared to the poetic voice’s ‘dance and drink, & sing’. Just as the fly’s life is about enjoying itself, so too is the poetic voice’s. All these verbs represent enjoyment and thus finding meaning in life. Blake also shows this equivalence in death, with the fly extinguished by the ‘thoughtless hand’, while the poetic voice will too die unpredictably. Blake uses the metaphor of the ‘blind hand’ to represent the concept of fate or God determining our destiny without us knowing our futures. ‘Blind’ works similar to ‘thoughtless’ here in that there is no deliberate decision to end the life, but it is just a whim of the universe that you will get cancer/be hit by a bus/get pecked to death by an angry crow.
Whether the dead fly was paying attention to the first three stanzas or not, Blake keeps on going, but this time gets a bit abstract and removed from the incident in hand (i.e the murder of the fly). Now he is just contemplating what it means to be alive. The fourth and fifth stanzas act as a conditional statement. Blake sets up an ‘if’ and answers it with a ‘then’. His ‘if’ statement equates life to ‘thought… strength and breath’, which conveys an idea of life being about conscious thought and engagement with the world, while death is ‘want of thought’, the opposite.
In the fifth stanza, we see an acceptance of this. The poetic voice is ‘a happy fly’ on these terms. This reflects an idea that happiness is not about material wealth, status or success, but about conscious enjoyment of the world and an acceptance of our mortality.
Structure
The key here is the simplicity of the structure. We have a regular pattern of four line stanzas consisting of two rhyming couplets. Each of the lines is either 3 or 4 syllables and this simplicity helps reflect the simplicity of the message and the meaning of life.
Rather than overcomplicating the way we look at existence and what it means to be alive or placing value on certain lives or achievements over others, Blake simplifies it for us. Our lives are meant for enjoying ourselves and being conscious of that and in that we are no different from anyone around us or any other forms of life.
Tone
This poem has a contemplative tone throughout. We begin with the poet considering the implications of their actions and then he relates this to the bigger picture of existence and the meaning of life.
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