[In the following review, Nurmi assesses the success of Ostriker's metrical analysis in Vision and Verse in William Blake, revealing the limitations of her technique.]

The analyst of Blake's prosody, in dealing with almost any of his lyrics after Poetical Sketches, operates under more than the usual handicaps, because the sound of the poems can only with great difficulty be directly connected with the meaning. In a symbolic poem like “The Tyger” especially, the sound is hard to associate with anything but the surface meaning of the words, and the surface meaning is only the starting point. A subtle prosodic study of the poem could be conducted within the limits of what we are given in the text, to show us how the sound patterns help to create the powerful symbol of the ambiguously dread tiger. But Miss Ostriker in her prosodic analysis [Vision and Verse in William Blake] does not seem satisfied to do this, and we are told that in the first stanza “Almost every word is knit up through sound with every other word, and this in itself suggests the idea of the demiurge's infinitely painstaking design” (p. 86). This seems to me rather far-fetched and to claim much too much for what sound alone can tell us—even if one grants that the tiger is the creation of a demiurge.

Miss Ostriker, who writes poems herself, approaches Blake with something of the attitude of a fellow professional, interested in technique. There is perhaps nothing wrong with this in a book on his verse. But Miss Ostriker puts too much emphasis on technique. She would reduce the complexity of “The Fly,” for instance, by saying it is “an excellent example of a poem which achieves its ends through surface manipulation” (p. 70). Her reading of it doesn't bear her out. And what seems like a technical point of view of the professional craftsman who artfully manipulates his matter as materials in a construction gets developed to an extreme when she says, “As he proceeded in his Prophetic Books, Blake pushed God, his idea of ultimate unity, ever further back from the fallen world, apparently the better to enjoy the reunion of God and Man when it came, as it does on the final plate of Jerusalem” (p. 121). If I don't misread this, she comes dangerously close to denying the poet-prophet his prophecy and making him into a mere craftsman instead.

Much of Miss Ostriker's prosodic analysis is sound, though severely limited by her decision to stick almost exclusively with two degrees of accent. It points out sound effects in somewhat the way the program notes for a symphony concert descriptively direct the listeners' attention to rhythmic motifs, thematic entries, and orchestration. But occasionally we find some serious lapses. “Spring,” for instance, is said to “jingle” like “Jack and Jill.” It seems to me almost impossible to read this poem aloud without feeling that the lines form pulses of a rhythmic phrase extending through to the last line of the stanza and producing something of the musical effect of a bourée: “Sound the Flute! / Now it's mute. / Birds delight / Day and Night / Nightingale / In the dale / Lark in Sky / Merrily / Merrily Merrily to welcome in the Year.” Surely Blake, who earlier had sung his lyrics to tunes of his own composition that were good enough to be “noted down by musical professors” (see Symons, William Blake, p. 360), would have heard the lines of this song as impulses within the larger rhythmical unit of the stanza and not as discrete rhyming jingles. And one can't help but be puzzled, at least, to be told that the following passage from The Four Zoas is an example of the “lyric” style from the prophecies used for matter that is “mild and gentle”:

In pits & dens & shades of death in shapes of torment &
woe
The plates the Screws and Racks & Saws & cords & fires &
floods
The cruel joy of Luvahs daughters lacerating with knives. …

(p. 175)

Miss Ostriker's scheme for analysis, which is the conventional one of scanning lines and feet, works about as well as this kind of analysis can when Blake writes in conventional feet or modulates his rhythms in a way that allows noting inversions or substitutions of conventional feet. And she does a good job, especially with inversions and substitutions, in the Songs. But she becomes troubled by passages where ordinary scansion doesn't yield regular results, as in the opening of The French Revolution:

The Dead brood over Europe, the cloud and vision descends over
chearful France;
O cloud well appointed! Sick, sick, the Prince on his couch, wreath'd
in dim
And appalling mist. …

She is bothered because Blake does not at once establish the anapests which will come later. In general, she finds The French Revolution to have “many smooth sections, but it also has many instances of rhythmical confusion” (p. 156). “Smoothness” seems a strange thing to require of a poem that shows the beginnings of apocalypse in revolution.

Miss Ostriker's discussion of the later prophecies makes a noble attempt to deal with the complex style of these works without forcing them either into prose or conventional verse. But she doesn't allow herself enough space to do much more than make a few general observations. She affirms but doesn't adequately illustrate the metrical richness of The Four Zoas and fails to note the dramatic character of this work, which has a great effect on its verse techniques.

Miss Ostriker seems to feel defeated by her task at the outset, remarking in the preface, “If you write about Blake, you cannot expect to please everyone,” and “if you write about metrics, you cannot expect to please anyone.” I don't think failure to please is quite so inevitable in a metrical study of Blake or anyone else. Miss Ostriker doesn't succeed as well as she might, it seems to me, because she limited the subtlety of her analysis by choosing tools that are not precise enough, because she sets too much store by technique in itself, and because she sometimes expects things of Blake's verse that he wasn't trying to supply.