![]() ![]() Brodkey, too, tells the story of a sometimes contrarious but always progressing marriage, the occasionally conflicted but still healthily loving union of Laura and Martin. ![]() “Without Contraries is no progression,” says Blake in Plate 5 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Brodkey allusively signals that in this tale he will offer us an illustrative examination of both Blakean contrary states. “Piping down the valleys wild” is the first line of the poem “Introduction,” which opens Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. As I would like to show now, the book’s penultimate tale, “Piping Down the Valleys Wild” (not yet analyzed in the secondary literature, so far as I can find) is a refreshing Romantic contrast: here Brodkey reshapes the lyric legacy of William Blake into a sophisticated study of innocence maintained not only in the face of, but precisely because of, the insights born of hard-won experience. “The State of Grace,” which opens the volume, is an ironic refashioning of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” into a psychologically probing analysis of unconsciously hypocritical narcissism (Bidney, “Unreliable Modern ‘Mariner'”). Harold Brodkey’s book of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, shows his remarkable affinity with first generation Romantic poets. A song of innocence and of experience: rewriting Blake in Brodkey’s “Piping Down the Valleys Wild.” – William Blake, Harold Brodkey ![]()
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