“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.