Small Room for Judgment: Geometry and Prolepsis in Blake’s “Infant Sorrow”

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe extensive typological allusions in Blake’s “Infant Sorrow” (Songs of Experience) associate swaddling with the establishment of traditional moral-materialist culture based on sacrifice. Blake links his culture’s materialism to three-dimensional perspective, which the accompanying design overthrows in accordance with Berkeley’s contention that distance exists only in the mind. By setting the poem’s aged speaker and the design’s infant at odds, Blake undermines the received relation between these two “sister arts” and enforces a cognitive dissonance that is of apocalyptic intensity. The supercharged political context of 1792–93 adds further immediacy. The design to the poem constitutes a direct reply to Burke’s Reflections and his theatrical Dagger Speech by way of Macbeth, a regicide play. Blake recognizes the fearful symmetry of escalatory violence, but he also sees how the very language and imagery of protest are already corrupt effects of the system. Thus it remains uncertain if his preferred instrument of reform is any more cutting than angry satire, itself liable to become just another theatrical spectacle.