“The Fly” by William
Blake was a really interesting poem to analyze. Reading the poem over and over
again reminded how much poets tended to describe simple everyday actions and
then into thoughts of philosophical ideas. The first stanza begins rather
simply with the narrator enjoying a summer’s day when he notices a fly and brushed
it away. The next stanza then launches the reader into a different mindset as
the narrator contemplates what just happened.
“Am
not I
A
fly like thee?
Or
art not thou
A man like me?” (5-8)
The
narrator takes this moment to compare himself to the fly as well as to compare
the fly to him. The fly was doing what it naturally does just as he is enjoying
the summer’s day and life. In the following stanza he points out that he enjoys
to dance, to drink, and sing just like the fly. The narrator goes on further
when he says the lines “Till some blind hand shall brush his wing.” (11-12) I
feel he starts to change gears in the next stanza as he starts to realize he is
different from the fly in one important area and that is his ability to think. He
understands that, unlike the fly, he worries what might happen in the future
and that something bad could happen to lead to his death. This shows a large
contrast with the fly as it doesn’t worry about when it will die. With the final
stanza he realizes that there is no need to worry and that he should strive to emulate
fly and appreciate life rather than worrying about death.
Overall I really
enjoyed reading the poem. I liked the care free nature that it was trying to
pass on to the reader. I have noticed that many of the pomes that we have read in class
there is an abundance of simple moments in poems that conjures important thoughts
of and understanding our place in nature.
Questions:
1.
Is there another way to look at this poem?
2.
Do you think that there is significance to having the animal in question is
fly?
3.
Is the poem trying to establish a better understanding of our place in nature?
Here, you get at the poem's central crux, the difference between the human and the fly. Like Wordsworth’s “Lines written in early spring,” Blake’s speaker posits a connection between the human and insect in the second stanza—and, like Wordsworth’s use of “seemed,” Blake raises similar questions about this relationship through rhetorical questions. “Am I not” and “And art not thou” introduce the possibility of the negative answer. When the speaker turns, in the 4th stanza, to what separates the fly and man, he encounters a logic problem lodged in rhetoric. This stanza refers to Descartes’ motto “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am,” but confuses Descartes' point: the fly certainly “exists” (it *is*) even though it lacks thought and therefore should be dead. The 4th stanza confronts a philosophical problem, or more correctly, a problem with philosophy: when people lodge all of their being in thought, the similarities and empathy between human and animal disappears. The final stanza pushes back against this idea, reiterating the connection between happy fly and the joyful obliviousness of the human condition. Perhaps the significance of the fly is in its base nature: it is a pest, not worth a second thought, and thus the farthest one might imagine from the exalted state of the human as it was conceived by 17th century philosophy.
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