The Duality of Love and Strife, Innocence and Experience

In Canto XII of Inferno, Dante makes an enigmatic reference beginning in line 40:

……the steep and filthy valley
had trembled so, I thought the universe
felt love (by which, as some believe, the world
has often been converted into chaos);

These lines refer to the Greek presocratic philosopher Empedocles, whose most famous conception was that all matter was formed of four primary elements: fire, earth, air, and water. These elements existed independently of one another, and the varying degrees to which they intermixed determined the different physical natures of things. The moving powers that managed their mixture and separation were the forces of Love and Strife. Human beings, comprised of all four primary elements, saw these powers played out in their relationships with each other; all human interaction manifests degrees of love and strife, and to have too much of one or the other could prove disastrous to a harmonious life. The universe also must maintain a balance of the two, risk descent into chaos. If there were ever too much love, all elements would draw irrevocably towards each other, differentiation would cease, and chaos would ensue. If all elements drew irrevocably away from one another, through a preponderance of strife, the result would be the same. Dante’s reference is to the former situation.

Dante made Love ultimately victorious through his conception of the spiritual variety, in which ultimate Love for God opened the door to salvation. His views of the dangers of material love resemble more closely the dangers of imbalance perceived by Empedocles. For example, in Circle Seven, a lack of love felt towards oneself or others caused the Suicides and the Wrathful to land in their present predicament. On the other hand, too much love damned the Lustful. The larger significance awarded by Empedocles to Love and Strife as prime movers was seen as heretical by Dante; for him, God was the only prime mover, and his chief duality governing the universe was Good versus Evil.

Dante would define Good as that which followed God. Evil was that which turned away from God. Those who pursued evil lives without repentance would be forever separated from God and placed in Hell. Those whose repented could find salvation. Evil was essentially an act of rebellion against the ultimate good, God. Therefore, the ultimate evil was the ultimate rebellion: that of Lucifer against God. Since Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, humanity has knowledge of evil, and therefore the ability to rebel against God. The ideal life in the Christian tradition is one lived in allegiance to God, either through the denial of evil or the repentance of evil acts. Dante’s point is that humans are a manifest duality, containing both light and dark; we are left with the choice. It is interesting to note that many of the souls in Hell seem perfectly unrepentant of their choice. Also, the character Dante affords several of them a great deal of respect, if also pity for their final predicament.

The duality explored by Blake is his most famous work, Songs of Innocence and Experience, was a bit more complicated. Blake rejected the classic Christian duality of good and evil. For him, life was a composite of these things, and the Poetic Genius shied from nothing in its expression of life. Innocence and Experience were for Blake a necessary duality because the one led to the other and back again, a journey that represented a life lived fully. Put simplistically, one could say that pleasure cannot be appreciated without knowledge of pain, and that the path through pain leads to pleasure. Innocence can be equated to the halcyon days of youth, in which there is no knowledge of life’s pain. Adolescence brings it with it a first taste, and maturity can be seen as the struggle against it. The purpose of a life well lived is the return to a state of innocence, lost with the first knowledge of pain, but regained through the acceptance of it.

The poems in Innocence showcase the joyful time, those of Experience the painful; both at times present the struggle towards acceptance. The duality of the two is presented by Blake through his juxtaposition of similarly titled poems. For example, consider “The Lamb”, from Innocence, and “The Tyger”, from Experience. What Blake seems to be saying, first and foremost, is that the Poetic Genius can render equally the pacific and the ferocious, and that both are beautiful. Furthermore, while we accept wholeheartedly the nature of the lamb, we shy from that of the Tyger. We are born into the lamb, and seek to live through the example of the Lamb; yet the dread question posed in “Tyger”, “Did he who made the lamb make thee?”, reveals the reality of life’s dual nature, contained in God and given form in his creation.


The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.


The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Poem XLVII

There's no hope for a modern romance
We're distrustful of sentiment, our own and others'
And rightfully so, since it's so easily manufactured
Pandered and peddled, greeting cards, romantic comedies
The empty words of shopgirls who love you in that shirt
An eviscerated vocabulary beaten down through overuse
Can communicate only the trivial

And love is never trivial

Even once understood beyond all language
In the depths of the heart, the bottom of the gut
We still refuse to pay homage dearly enough
Because we dismiss it as a feeling
And feeling is not the same as knowing, we are told
By the parents and advisers who feel that they know
What is best for us

Think about your future, prudence over immersion
Into the warmth and excitement of something
That belies all logic and rules of syntax
Prepares not in the least for the workforce
Or the predeath twilight of retirement

Think of your future, keep your mind off the moment
When you might feel something beyond scant notions of time
A connection to the eternal through another's eyes and touch
An escape from your mundanity where the days are suffused
With the baited breath of expectation like the salt in the air
On some lonely beach astride an ocean
Or the dark musk of a bedroom heavy with love

Turn away from this and call yourself responsible
Or call yourself pathetic
The coward offspring of therapies and savings plans
At once secure in your emotional disfigurement
And again secure in your long life
To pass by joy when a timid soul offers it

Poem XLVI

I mostly sit by the window on quiet days
And look into my backyard at the grass and birds
Feeling like each time I relearn the simply joy
Of doing nothing with an afternoon spent alone

My thoughts are as innocuous and unbidden
As the movements of the birds in the grass
Ambling along, stopping briefly to investigate
Something curious that revealed itself to be left
Unmolested for harder days of concentration

Often my thoughts alight on you, whoever you are
Woman of the moment eternal in my questing
Whom I may or may not have seen the night before
When we made love sweetly for the first time in months
Perhaps I will see you again the evening after
This quiet afternoon spent before my window
Regardless I know that the most I can hope for
In my long life to follow intermittent with crises
Is the next quiet moment and the one to follow
Alone with myself content to wonder

Poem XLV

Grecian bird
I'd like to pluck
Your song from the air
To cup in my hand
And hold close to my ear

Poem XLIV

In your darkest moments
You are always alone
Enslaved to isolation

I love humanity abstractly
And beauty minutely

But moments of darkness
Leave me groping blind
For guidance and comfort
From those ghostly proxies
Of a warm and living hand

Poem XLIII

You beautiful afflicted girl
Tortured in the remnants of spilt passion
Caught in a cup tasted once
Then handed over to be left
Placed forgotten on a sideboard

I see in your eyes the hope for all things
Eternal unchanged trustworthy and raw
To be enjoyed passive to the flux
Of life and occasional abuse

I am the mirror of your solvent anguish
The effigy of your dreams fashioned and burnt
In the shadow of an idol remote and senseless
Erected and worshiped in sterility
While breathing behind you stands your loss

Poem XLII

You were my last chance for refuge
From the consummation of my labor
In the fire and anguish of inspiration
Cast like an ashen cross on my brow
The mark of those cursed by obligation
To a fate of envy, pursuit, and solitude
An emptiness that seeks fulfillment
In the incorporation of a human element
Once nurtured but effaced too often
Until the song of the hunt became the psalm
To honor the vestige of a final defeat