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The cambridge companion to british roman 112

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andrew elfenbein The tone of this dialogue hinges on a tiny detail that is easily missed: Blake’s second-person pronouns The Angel addresses Blake with “thou” and “thyself,” while Blake addresses the angel with “you” and “your.” In earlier centuries, “thou” and its derivatives had been used for the second person singular; “you,” for the second person plural and as a formal, elevated marker of the second person singular Yet by Blake’s day, “thou” and its derivatives had largely fallen out of common usage except in two cases: in exalted poetic language, and in debased language used to inferiors A 1754 grammar, for example, described using “thou” as an “ungenteel and rude” form of address.26 Blake’s dialogue teeters between the different possibilities for employing the second-person pronoun Initially, it may seem that the angel employs a formal tone by using “thou.” But Blake’s response, in which he uses “you,” may suggest retrospectively that he, at least, has heard the angel’s “thou” as an insult, so that his “you” appears exquisitely polite At the same time, his “you” could also be a refusal of the angel’s formality, an insistence on moving the dialogue to a more demotic idiom Blake adapts the uncertainty around the tone of the second-person pronoun as a metaphor for what he calls the marriage of heaven and hell, the coexistence of contraries that refuses absolute solutions His adaptation reminds his audience of possibilities of nuance and register in English that standardization was erasing In Blake’s hands, it is as if English, by becoming more standard, had become less English, because less able to contain the interpretive freedom represented in miniature by his ambiguous pronouns In his poetry’s non-standard English, he wages a one-man campaign to maintain English liberty Byron occupied a social position as far removed from Blake’s as possible; where Blake was a poor, radical artisan, Byron was a baron with wealth, education, and social connections Yet, with regard to standard English, it might seem that extremes met: Byron, like Blake, was notorious for his offenses against the language Yet the stakes were quite different for the two poets Blake’s unusual English was a sign of his independence, like his control over book production: since he (with the help of his wife) created, produced, and marketed his work, he could adopt whatever punctuation, spelling, and grammar he chose Whereas Blake painstakingly constructed his illuminated poetry, Byron, as an aristocrat, made sure that he did not seem to work too hard: to so would be to lower himself to the status of a mere craftsman Early in his career, he took no money for his poetry, to signal that, for him, it was not work, but a hobby A bourgeois work ethic would demand grammatical exactness; an aristocratic one would not In Byron’s hands, if a particular phrase or word choice did not follow the standardizers’ rules, too bad for the rules 90 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

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