“Songs of Experience,” by the un-pigeon-hole-able William Blake (1757–1827), appeared in 1794 as a sadder, more mature companion to 1789’s “Songs of Innocence.” At various times, in loose alternation, Blake’s songs of both experience and innocence have appeared in this space: “London,” for example, pairs loosely with “The Ecchoing Green,” while the two “Holy Thursday” poems which ran together in Holy Week this past April, bracket each other precisely.

A number of these poems take animals as their subjects, either as innocence or experience songs. Both “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” for example marvel — one in simple joy,  the other in fearful awe — at the mysterious work of creation and the mysterious God who has made both prey and predator. Meanwhile, today’s Poem of the Day, “The Fly,” invokes that most annoying of fellow-creatures, which “some thoughtless hand” is always brushing away.

Blake’s illustration for this poem depicts a nursemaid helping an infant to walk, while a little girl plays with a shuttlecock. The poem itself, in dimeter quatrains, reads as much like a nursery rhyme as “The Lamb” does. Yet its substance is the same as the blinded Gloucester’s despairing line from “King Lear”: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”  

The Fly
by William Blake

Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.