Infant Sorrow by William Blake
My mother groand! My father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud;
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.
When I first read this poem, the line that immediately drew me in was “into the dangerous world I leapt.” I thought Blake had captured in a few chilling words the terror of being alive. Life is filled with disappointment, frustration, physical decline, regret, loss, and grief. The world is a dangerous place, yet the best we can do is to live, to throw ourselves into our lives, as the speaker here suggests with the word
L
E
A
P.
The poem’s language suggests all at once our innocence, our vulnerability and our hope.
But after thinking for a while about "leaping" and what that word suggested, I considered the “I” of the poem. I leapt. In fact, even though the struggle to be alive is a struggle, the “I” takes the leap and says yes to life. Despite being bound and weary and constrained and held back, the “I” does LEAP. So the end of the poem suggests to me that-- despite everything --the “I” does move forward. And yet, who is this I? How does one become an I?
In one scene in Billy Elliot, Billy has shared with his dance teacher the things that are important to him. One item is a letter his mother wrote to him. While the teacher reads it aloud, Billy says the words aloud, too. Clearly he has memorized the letter. What his mother wrote was: Be yourself. Just like that. A good piece of advice, yes, but given the context of what Billy is trying to do--be a ballet dancer in working class Durham--pretty tough. Billy is doing just that--being himself--despite the many obstacles he faces. He makes it look easy. It's not.
The truth is that it’s as difficult now to be true to oneself as it was in the days when Polonius advised Laertes in Hamlet: “And this above all. To thine own self be true.” A person must know who she is first and then be willing to express that sense of self in a world that would like to keep her constrained and limited. The texts from the first semester show us there is nothing so difficult but so essential to one’s happiness in life than being yourself. I know this truth for myself. In that last year I have come to grips with the challenge of fully expressing who I am for fear of being rejected by my peers. Like the characters in the texts we read, I have wrestled with the finding the courage to be who I really am.