Infant Joy, Songs of Innocence & Experience (1789)
William Blake
SPUC’s Dr Daniel Frampton encounters six compelling artworks spanning 900 years of art history, including film, and examines each work from an openly pro-life perspective in a unique cycle of short essays that aim to be educational and contemplative – revealing, too, the powerful role art can play in advocating for a true culture of life that speaks truth to power in a world that has lost its moral centre.
This week, Daniel explores William Blake’s “Infant Joy”.
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“I have no name / I am but two days old… / Joy is my name, – / Sweet joy befall thee!”, wrote William Blake (1757-1827) in his poem “Infant Joy”, published in his 1789 volume, Songs of Innocence & Experience (see full poem below). And like many of his poems, Blake, an artist as well as a poet, illustrated his verse.
For “Infant Joy”, Blake depicted a mother cradling her two-day-old infant inside the bud of a blossoming flower, vocalising the voiceless joy of a newborn child. In this sense, Blake’s simple but moving work of art, my selection this week, is powerfully pro-life.
The word “infant” is derived from the Latin word infans, meaning “voiceless”. Infants, by definition, are unable to speak – thus, in part, their vulnerability; the unborn are disenfranchised, they cannot speak up for themselves. And that is exactly why they must be granted special protection.
As history attests, individuals and groups who are unable to represent themselves are vulnerable. It is up to society, then, as well as its art and culture more broadly, to give voice to the voiceless – that includes representing the unborn as best as we can. This was what Blake did, I think, performing this vital task admirably in his own art, as we see in “Infant Joy”.
Of course, someone might ask, who are we to assume the sentiments, thoughts and wishes of the unborn; infants who are thoughtless and ostensibly incapable of deciding whether they want to live or die?
But a pro-lifer might say, justifiably, who are we to decide if we kill an unborn child?
The obvious answer here is that, until a child is intellectually capable, they must surely be protected and given every opportunity to reach that independent state of mind, which means that choice – the right to choose – must mean their choice, their enfranchisement, not ours. It’s their life. It must be protected.
Certainly, the point of view that pervades much of abortion ideology – the notion that life in the womb is not deserving of such consideration since it cannot consider itself – is highly problematic, because life necessarily insists on living, by definition, even when it is not capable of voicing that insistence.
The nihilistic assumption that an uncomprehending unborn baby wouldn’t care either way whether it is allowed to live is a pro-abortion projection that exposes a fundamental pessimism about life (about its meaning and its worth). While pro-abortion apologists may choose suicide by their own hand, to choose death for others ought to be, and generally has been, considered a crime in every sense of the word.
But what has this to do with William Blake? Well, his work “Infant Joy” gives voice to the joyful infant, answering in the only way that it surely can, that “Joy is my name”, to which the similarly joyous mother replies: “Sweet joy I call thee… Sweet joy befall thee”. That was Blake’s pro-life vision. How dare we assume anything else for this infant, he implies.
Born into a life of poverty in bleak 18th-century London, Blake was of course aware of life’s tribulations, which he had witnessed and suffered himself. Blake, both a political and artistic radical, condemned the abuses of power and the harsh effects of the Industrial Revolution, which ordinary people were then forced to endure. Blake acknowledged this in a later corresponding poem, “Infant Sorrow”:
“Into the dangerous world I leapt: / Helpless, naked, piping loud.”
Even so, Blake never stopped viewing life as the gift and true religious experience that he was sure it was – and is. Life is still worth living, he insists, as the unborn child also insists. It is for the adults to make those lives less dangerous, less sorrowful. That is our task.
This is the central assumption, dare I say faith, which we are presented with when the mother in Blake’s illustration looks on the face of her newborn – a faith that says as much about Blake’s optimism about life as it does about the infant’s. Blake and the unborn child share that same faith, as do I.
When we take up the responsibility of speaking on behalf of the voiceless, then, including the unborn, we also give voice to our own faith that life, regardless of strife and inequality, is still a good thing and worthwhile. Life absolutely insists on this. So should we, for ourselves and the unborn.
Infant Joy
I have no name
I am but two days old. –
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name, –
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee;
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
Read last week's article by Dr Daniel Frampton here.