To Tirzah

Literary Commentary

William Blake added 'To Tirzah' to Songs of Experience roughly a decade after the collection's 1794 title page. It has since been read as the book's spiritual key. In sixteen lines of rhymed tetrameter the speaker turns on the personified mother of his mortal body, borrows Christ's words to Mary at Cana, and declares himself free of the natural order that gives the body its senses and its death.

Tirzah is not a person but an allegory. The name sits on a biblical fault line: Tirzah is a royal city in the Song of Solomon, a rebellious northern capital opposed to Jerusalem, and also one of the daughters of Zelophehad in Numbers whose inheritance case binds the Israelites to their land. Blake combines these into a single figure, the mother of what can die, and reserves Jerusalem, in his later prophetic books, for the spiritual bride. The speaker's quarrel is with the condition of having been born into a body, not with any woman in particular.

Formally the poem is a psalm in reverse. The refrain 'Then what have I to do with thee?' closes stanza one and returns at the end of stanza four, where the final rhyme (free / thee) is the same rhyme that opened the poem. The effect is of a circle drawn tight. Between those edges, Blake catalogues how the senses are stopped, tracks the Fall through two rhymed couplets, and places on the accompanying plate a single verse from 1 Corinthians, 'It is raised a spiritual body,' that answers, without a word in the poem, everything the poem has asked.

Key themes

• Material generation versus spiritual rebirth
• The body as veil that seals the senses
• Christ's death as liberation from natural bondage
• Shame, sexuality, and the Fall
• The maternal figure as allegory of the natural world

Notable craft elements

• Iambic tetrameter in rhymed couplets, with stanza four returning to the rhyme of stanza one, a circular frame that encloses the argument
• A refrain lifted from Christ's reply to Mary at Cana (John 2:4), transplanted into the speaker's mouth
• A catalogue of sealed senses (nostrils, eyes, ears, tongue) that inverts Blake's usual praise of opened perception
• An illuminated plate whose inscribed verse, 'It is raised a spiritual body' (1 Corinthians 15:44), carries the resolution the text itself withholds

Reread prompt

When the speaker says 'Then what have I to do with thee?', what work does the New Testament source — Christ's reply to his mother at Cana — do that a purely secular version of the line could not?

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