Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in ‘Songs of Experience’ *

Any moral judgements directed by the reader at the narrator will, in the context of a chapbook that works to teach moral discrimination, tend to return as questions about the reader’s own ethics in making that moral judgement. William Oldys’s lyric impinges specifically on William Blake’s text by rehearsing a plot in which the fly dies and thus becomes a determining or legitimating factor in later criticism of ‘The Fly’. To quote the excerpt from King Lear as part of an account of Blake’s poem is, of course, to presume that the fly dies. Just as ‘The Fly’ itself seems to disrupt the formulation, so other works by Blake, such as the first stanza of ‘The Human Abstract’, deny both the separation and the necessity of sacrifice. The fourth and fifth stanzas can be understood to continue the attempted identification between the narrator and the fly on further grounds.