“To Tirzah” by William Blake — Literary Analysis

Historical Context

Songs of Experience carries an etched title page dated 1794, but 'To Tirzah' does not appear in the earliest copies of the book. Scholars who have studied the plate's style and the order of copies believe Blake engraved and inserted it around 1803 to 1805, during the years of his work on the long prophetic poem Milton. The lyric therefore belongs to two moments at once. It takes its place inside a bound sequence Blake had finished years earlier, and it carries the mythology he was then writing into the form of a four-stanza song.

That mythology gave Tirzah a larger role than the Songs alone suggest. In Blake's mature mythology, Tirzah is commonly paired with Rahab and read (by Frye, Mellor, and Erdman among others) as a personification of material generation, the force that gives the soul a body and fixes it there. Blake drew the name from two biblical sources, brought together: Tirzah is one of the five daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 27), whose legal case binds inheritance to the father's line, and she is also the rebellious Canaanite city of 1 Kings, once the capital of the Northern Kingdom, set in opposition to Jerusalem. Reading the lyric through the mature mythology, the speaker's farewell to Tirzah is a farewell to material generation itself.

Formal Analysis

The poem is four quatrains of iambic tetrameter rhymed in couplets: AABB, CCDD, EEFF, GGBB. The last rhyme is the signature. Stanza one ended 'To rise from generation free: / Then what have I to do with thee?'; stanza four lands on 'The death of Jesus set me free: / Then what have I to do with thee?' The fourth stanza's rhyme, in other words, is the first stanza's. The poem's final couplet is its opening one, said differently, so that the whole song closes on itself and makes the refrain feel inevitable rather than repeated.

The diction holds to a scriptural register (whate'er, thou, didst) and the rhythm keeps close to a psalm cadence: short lines, end-stopped, with few enjambments to slow them. The effect is liturgical. The speaker is not arguing but reciting what he has come to know, and the tightness of the form is part of its argument, not a frame around it.

Thematic Analysis

The first stanza states the premise flatly. Whatever is born of mortal birth has to die with the earth, and only then does it rise 'from generation free.' 'Generation' is Blake's term for the cycle of sexual birth and bodily death that constitutes natural existence; to be free of it is to be released into what Paul, on the plate's inscription, calls the spiritual body. The speaker's rejection of Tirzah at the end of the stanza is therefore not a rejection of a woman but a rejection of the condition she personifies.

Stanza two reaches back to Genesis. 'The sexes sprung from shame and pride' summons the fig leaves of Eden; 'blowed in the morn, in evening died' carries the shape of a day as the shape of a life. Yet the stanza does not stop at judgment. 'But mercy changed death into sleep,' and the sexes rise again, this time 'to work and weep.' Generation, in Blake's reading, is both the consequence of the Fall and the concession that makes a story of redemption possible.

Stanza three is the poem's strongest accusation, and it is directed at what a reader's ear first takes as a mother. The speaker's mortal part was 'moulded' in 'cruelty'; the senses (nostrils, eyes, and ears) were stopped by 'false self-deceiving tears.' The catalogue is deliberate: Blake's usual praise of perception — the doors of perception cleansed, every thing appearing as it is, infinite — is here inverted. The senses here do not open; they close. Stanza four completes the closure with the tongue sealed in 'senseless clay,' then pivots, in one line, to the poem's one act of grace: 'The death of Jesus set me free.' That freedom is the ground on which the refrain returns, no longer a cry but a settled conclusion.

Language & Imagery

Blake's imagery in 'To Tirzah' is built almost entirely out of closure. The mother's cruelty 'moulds' the heart, implying clay under pressure; tears 'blind' the nostrils and eyes; the tongue is shut in 'senseless clay.' Clay is the body of Adam in Genesis, but also, for Blake, the stuff of Urizenic fixity, solidity where there ought to be vision. The speaker's body in this poem is a kind of tomb he walks around in, which is why the plate's inscription ('It is raised a spiritual body') matters so much: the text says the body is closed, and the design above it says the body will be opened.

The maternal figure is not quite a person. 'Mother of my mortal part' is a precise formulation: she is the mother of what in the speaker can die, not the mother of who he is. 'False self-deceiving tears' is likewise precise, naming tears that deceive themselves — not cynical manipulation but the unknowing bind of natural affection. Blake is personifying an order of existence in which the senses are given and then sealed, and giving the speaker a figure to address rather than a woman to blame.

Intertextual Connections

The refrain quotes the Gospel of John. At the wedding at Cana in John 2:4, Christ replies to Mary: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.' June Sturrock, in a Blake Quarterly essay on the line, argues that Blake is importing the full weight of that biblical moment — a son refusing the mother's request at the threshold of his ministry — and letting it sound in his speaker's mouth. The allusion complicates any reading of the poem as private resentment; the words are Christ's before they are the speaker's, and the refusal they enact is directed at the natural order, not at Mary.

The other scripture is on the plate itself. Inscribed on the elderly figure's robe in the illumination is 'It is raised a spiritual body,' from 1 Corinthians 15:44, Paul on the resurrection: 'It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.' The plate completes what the text withholds. Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1947), read Tirzah as the personification of worldliness and the five senses — five, he suggested, because the biblical daughters of Zelophehad are five — and that reading has shaped modern criticism. Sheila Spector, in a later Blake Quarterly essay, extended the biblical mapping by tracing Hebrew roots in the name.

Within Blake's own work, 'To Tirzah' speaks to several companion pieces in the Songs. 'Earth's Answer' gives voice to the trapped natural world; 'Infant Sorrow' stages the soul's arrival in the body as a struggle and a bondage; 'The Human Abstract' shows how the mind weaves its own cruelty from the materials of virtue. 'A Divine Image' in Experience draws in blunt lines the body that 'To Tirzah' here refuses to inhabit. Read alongside these, the late lyric is less a departure than a summation, the argument of Experience carried into a single closing song.

Critical Reception

Modern reception has turned largely on the question Frye first sharpened: is Tirzah only worldliness, or something more particular? Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 1947), read the five daughters of Zelophehad as the five senses and identified Tirzah with material generation. His reading has shaped modern criticism. Sheila Spector's essay in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (volume 23, issue 4) follows Blake's etymological habits back into Hebrew roots and argues that the name carries materiality, will, and violation inside it. June Sturrock's 'What have I to do with thee?' in the same journal (volume 28, issue 3) uses the Cana allusion to push back against purely negative readings of the maternal figure. Anne Mellor, cited by Sturrock, reads the plate's design as an iconographic fusion of the descent from the cross and the raising of Lazarus, iconography that does work the text alone cannot do. Reception has, broadly, moved from seeing the poem as a harsh rejection to seeing it as a lyric that places rejection and resurrection in the same frame.

Discussion Prompts

1. Why does the poem end on the same rhyme (free / thee) that it began with? What does that circular frame do to the force of the refrain?
2. The refrain 'Then what have I to do with thee?' echoes Christ's words to his mother at the wedding at Cana (John 2:4). How does knowing the biblical source change your reading of the speaker's attitude?
3. In stanza three, the senses — nostrils, eyes, ears, tongue — are stopped one by one. Blake elsewhere writes that when the doors of perception are cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. How does this catalogue compare?
4. The accompanying plate is inscribed with a single verse, 'It is raised a spiritual body' (1 Corinthians 15:44). The text does not mention resurrection; the image does. How should a reader weigh what the poem says against what the plate shows?
5. Tirzah is personified as a mother, yet Blake insists she is the mother only of the speaker's 'mortal part.' What distinction is the poem asking the reader to hold between the allegorical figure and an actual mother?