Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' (William Blake)(Rhetoric and Poetics)

From: Style | Date: June 22, 1996| Author: | Copyright information

A reader-response approach to William Blake's poem, 'The Fly' would reveal that the nihilistic destructiveness previously read in the poem is sourced not from the poem but from the reader. The poem's syntax is such that the subject-object relationship and identity is ambiguous and shifts between the narrator and the fly. This renders the death of the fly at the hands of the narrator doubtful and the latter's later identification with the former makes it even more complex. It is the reader's moral agency, then, that determines what happens within and to the text, i.e., who does not kill the ...

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