An Imitation Of Spenser - Analysis

A prayer for poetry that can carry truth

The poem’s central move is an ambitious one: Blake asks the classical gods to make his writing worthy of truth, not just ornament. He opens by addressing Golden Apollo, not merely as a sun god but as a force that Scatter’st the rays of light, and truth’s beams. The speaker wants those beams to enter his own work—In lucent words my darkling verses dight—as if language itself needs to be sunlit from within. The request is both artistic and moral: Apollo should wash my earthy mind so that wisdom can descend in fairy dreams. Even the dream-life is asked to become a channel for wisdom, not escapism.

Sweet “fairy dreams” versus the “earthy mind”

One key tension runs through the prayer: the poem wants enchantment, but it distrusts mere prettiness. The speaker loves the idea of jocund hours scattering fancies at the poet’s feet, yet he keeps pulling the poem back toward ethical clarity—Let rays of truth enlight his sleeping brain. That line matters because it imagines the mind as most vulnerable in sleep: inspiration should not just decorate waking skill; it should re-form the unconscious. The word earthy admits heaviness, limitation, even dirt; the poem doesn’t pretend the poet begins pure. Instead, it insists on a cleansing that makes imagination answerable to truth.

Pan, Midas, and the poem’s contempt for empty sound

The strongest shift in tone arrives with brutish Pan. The prayer turns into a small satire on bad poetry and bad judgment. Pan’s music becomes an emblem for art that is only surface: tinkling sounds that would dash the poem’s nervous verse, producing Sound without sense. Blake’s speaker is not neutral about this; he frames emptiness as a social disease, bred by ignorance—a leasing nurse that feeds Folly. Then he brings in Midas, who hath gain’d of lengthen’d ears and can sit in council with modern peers, judging tinkling rimes and elegances terse. The insult is pointed: modern taste-makers are imagined as Midas-like—rewarding noise, mistaking polish for meaning, and being proud of the very ears that mark their failure to hear.

Mercury’s “golden rod”: eloquence as a civilizing force

After the scorn comes a different kind of hope. The poem invokes Mercurius, defined by motion and mediation: he mount[s] aloft into the yielding sky, enters where Jove weighs the counsel of futurity, then drops like a falling star and skims o’er the surface of the silent deep. This god of passage becomes a figure for the poet’s own desired range: the mind that can travel between heaven’s counsel and the world’s mute ocean. When Mercury reaches a shore where envious hissing adders dwell, he throws down his golden rod and can charm to harmony. Blake glosses the symbol directly—Such is sweet Eloquence—but the force of the passage is that eloquence is not just persuasive; it is anti-violent. It can dispel Envy and Hate that thirst for human gore, and even make vile savage minds capable of sweet society. In other words, the poem’s ambition is public: language should change what seems unchangeable.

A mind that refuses fences, even “Alpine hills”

When the speaker asks Mercury to assist my lab’ring sense, the metaphor expands into a fantasy of intellectual flight. The mind wants to circle the world like an eagle that scorns the tow’ry fence of Alpine hills. The image is not gentle; it is exhilarated by danger, wanting to hear the thunder’s sound and watch wingèd lightnings. Yet the flight ends not in storm but in a strange, luxurious shelter: the eagle is bosom’d in an amber cloud and then seeks Sol’s palace high. That movement—through thunder into amber—suggests what the poem thinks a poet needs: fearlessness in the face of power, followed by a calm, clarified return to the source of light (Sol/Apollo). The contradiction is telling: the poem craves wild experience, but it still wants that experience refined into radiance.

Minerva: the final demand is moral courage

The last invocation, to Pallas, Minerva, brings the poem’s values into focus. If Apollo gives illumination and Mercury gives eloquence and movement, Minerva adds judgment and courage: she is warrior maid invincible, Arm’d with the terrors of Almighty Jove. The questions the speaker asks her are carefully chosen. Does she prefer the peaceful solemn grove with its solemn gloom, or does she carry the AEgis over the burning field where battle moves like the sea? And can she be moved by the weary wanderer and th’ afflicted man? The poem ends by widening its ethical lens: true art is not only enlightened and eloquent; it must also be willing to look at suffering without turning away, and to bring protective force (the aegis) where harm is real.

The poem’s hardest question

If sweet Eloquence can turn envious hissing adders toward harmony, what excuse remains for poems that settle for tinkling rimes? Blake’s speaker treats bad taste as more than a private flaw: it is a council decision, a public misjudgment, a kind of civic danger. The invocations finally imply that writing is accountable to something higher than fashion—light, justice, and the courage to stand in the burning field rather than merely praise the grove.