The Anatomy of a Murder
In the Poetry of William Blake
Introduction
We are gripped with a sense of horror and repulsion when the thought of murder passes through our minds. It is unnatural; it is against the laws of nature. It is an act universally condemned in the family, society, and the nation. We see it as an act of passion or a means to some form of twisted logic. For in a sense, the act on its own is devoid of reason. For what would compel a human being to strike his fellow with so great a vigor as to render him lifeless? Man’s constitution is strong—it is only with arduous and laborious blows that his body would break.
Obscured in our thoughts, however, is that murder—and most particularly ritualistic murder—is as natural to us as breathing. In a sense, the act is a striking example of the world’s natural dichotomy. While it is an ultimate expression of defiance against the natural orders of self-preservation and solidarity, it is inherent in our nature as it has been in the nature of the earth around us. Thus, in the animal world, there is prey and predator. There is the bacterium, a single-celled microscopic organism that is as natural as the animal; and yet, his presence within that animal while clustered with those of its own kind will create an uncomfortable reaction that could directly attack the components of the animal, until the latter’s constitution breaks down: disease. Even the act of the sheep gently chewing on grass, when magnified in significance, is the slow, grinding murder of plant life.
Murder, then, is an act of necessity. The sheep will commit its nefarious schemes to feed itself. The bacteria will cluster and bring pestilence, as it is inherent in their nature. To human beings, however, there are deeper implications. Like all animals, they are social creatures: they will associate, communicate among their species and mate. They will kill—they will slaughter cattle to make leather, trees to build their homes, and plants or lesser animals to feed them. These are ritualistic murders, but these are acts of necessity. Among human beings, murder has been controlled to a bare minimum. Through gradual social development, communications and complex concepts of interaction—for example, justice—have become the alternatives to murder in resolving inter-species disputes. Inter-species murder, in the ideal sense, has been rendered extinct.
Yet murder remains prevalent in the societies of men. Why? Having been blessed with a greater understanding of their relationship with the world and with each other, and consequently a deeper understanding of the dimensions of murder, it should and is deemed repugnant in its communities. To the individual human being, however, murder remains a natural, though suppressed, form of expression. The dichotomy of the natural and unnatural character of murder continues within Man, and acquires new dimensions. William Blake offers us a portrait of this through his poem, A Poison Tree. This, together with the abstract contrast of The Lamb and The Tyger, will be where we will base the analysis of this dichotomy, and how it is seen through the two dimensions.
The Repugnancy of Murder: Love versus Hate
Man generally deems himself higher (and sometimes superior) to the animal because of his intellect. The animal, he explains, acts through instincts. He has the will to act through either instinct or a deeper reasoning. This deeper reasoning stems from his better understanding of his environment: he will not instinctively drink from seawater as he has an understanding of the consequences that the salts in the water will do to his body. There is a third factor that may weigh in his decision, one that does make him superior to his animal counterparts: emotions. They are one of an aesthetic character, one that is not easily understandable if interpreted only through the scientific eye.
We act through these emotions—love, hate, joy, grief, and confusion—in our interactions with society and our environment. We shall lend our focus to two of these primary emotions in interpreting Man’s inherent repugnance of murder. Murder, in the moralist sense, revolves around a battle between good and evil. In the individual sense, however, shunned of ideology, murder revolves around a battle between the twin emotions of love and hate.
Love is the first emotion we experience in our childhood. It is an emotion connected to intimacy and harmony with the individuals around them. It is from which the positive concepts of happiness, excitement, and innocence stems and are correlated. William Blake embodies Love in The Lamb. The poet heaps it with adulation, and wonderment. There is almost an ecstatic sense to the poem. He delights in its beauty and its creation, describes it as it was nurtured by Creation (“Gave thee life & bid thee feed/By the stream & o’er the mead”), and praises it in thanksgiving (“Little Lamb, God bless thee/Little Lamb, God bless thee.”).
The Tyger, in contrast, is his harsh realization of the concept of Hate. Man espoused hate as a destructive force: the will to do harm. Yet to the Man who first experienced love and its nature, the negation of it through hate is terrifying, and disturbing. He lends six stanzas compared to The Lamb’s two, in portraying it. He almost cannot fathom, in what manner of Hell, was this hate formed. For surely, murder is the art of hate—no Man will seek the destruction of his kin unless driven by some strong, twisted passion. The Tyger is a predator seeking the destruction of lesser beasts for his necessity. This is an unnatural thought to the poet, and wonders in vain if the consequent destruction (“When the stars threw down their spears/And water’d heaven with their tears/Did his smile his work to see?”) was the will of its Creator. It thus pricks his sense of morality. For how can this be? How can there be dichotomy? “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
He embodied the act of murder through hate in the poem A Poison Tree. Fully clothed in the experience of love and hate, he acts on a choice through these two different channels. With his friend, whom he loves, he will act in the natural sense and reinforce his sense of repugnancy of murder and seek a resolution that will avoid murder (“I was angry with my friend/I told my wrath, my wrath did end.”). With his foe, with which he is driven with hate, he refuses to seek any alternative resolution. He uses hatred as a fuel to drive him away from the natural repugnance (“And I watered it in fears,/Night & morning with my tears”), until the suppressed thought of murder overpower the natural revulsion for it (“And it grew both day and night,/Till it bore an apple bright.”).
The Necessity of Murder: Power, Control, Obsession
We are driven away from murder, as it is an act of self-extinction. We, as human beings, adhere to the order of our society and shun all that will seek to disturb it. Murder, to us, is an act of disorder. It is an act of fury and passion that is bereft of reason, which understands the necessity of self-preservation. Here, however, we are quite wrong. For murder, in a sense, is an act by an individual to restore order to his sense of being.
Each individual has a sense of order around his environment. The trees will give him furniture. The animals and plants will give him food and clothing. With others in his society he will mate and have a family, and develop. There will eventually, however, be a conflict between his sense of order and another man’s. The most common of these is for the common interest to control another. The other individual might act in a way that will offend him, as it will upset his order. Those who disturb this sense of order become his enemies and he adjusts to them as a necessary evil in his world. His order is restored; he has control over his life again.
There will come a time, however, that the order will be so upset by another individual, that he will not be able to adjust to. Perhaps, the continued existence of such a person will continue to hamper his existing external order; or this person might have upset his sense of internal order and that it can only be adjusted through some radical form—eliminating the source of the order. The latter was the source that William Blake referred to (“I was angry with my foe:/I told it not, my wrath did grow”). For in being deprived of a sense of order, one loses a sense of power. To regain a sense of control, and in a sense power over the offending person, he begins to espouse hate (“And I water’d it in fears/Night & morning with my tears”). As he tries to regain some form of control and power, he feeds himself with hatred over the person. Murder, if anything, is an act to regain power. This struggle through fixation becomes obsession (“And it grew both day and night”) that unfortunately leads to a realization that there is only one way that the internal order could be restored only through some radical act (“Till it bore an apple bright.”). Only after the murder is his order restored (“In the morning glad I see/My foe outstretched beneath a tree.”)
Conclusion
Man, then, driven by a moral structure in his relationship with his community, has used the same to institutionalize his natural repugnance of murder. It is a disordered act, driven by the basest of instincts. Nevertheless, as the animals kill for food, and restore some sense of balance, so too will Man be driven to extremes if their sense of order has been so greatly upset. Fortunately, through sound intellect, reasoning and the social institutions he has created for himself, he has made sure that his state of disorder will be somehow corrected, and in less radical forms.
A final question, though, still haunts the mind: if murder is a form of disorder and some form of murder is necessary, then do we not create disorder to restore order? Such then is the form of dichotomy that we live in. A few lines from Blake would be appropriate:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
WORKS CITED
Blake, W. (1789). The Lamb. In A. Allison, et al. (Ed.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, revised (p. 219). New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. (Reprinted from Prose and Poetry of William Blake (David Erdman and Harold Bloom, ed.), 1965, New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc.)
Blake, W. (1789). The Tyger. In A. Allison, et al. (Ed.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, revised (p. 221). New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. (Reprinted from Prose and Poetry of William Blake (David Erdman and Harold Bloom, ed.), 1965, New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc.)
Blake, W. (1789). A Poison Tree. In A. Allison, et al. (Ed.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, revised (p. 222). New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. (Reprinted from Prose and Poetry of William Blake (David Erdman and Harold Bloom, ed.), 1965, New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc.)
