William Blake: a source for 'The Fly'?

I have been working on the British Library’s English Online project, researching for a hypertext contextualisation of English Literature between 1780 and 1900. Recently I have been working on William Blake, whose work has been challenging me since I was at school. Some recent work based on Michael Phillips’ admirable examination of Blake’s writing processes (William Blake, The Creation of the Songs, British Library, 2000) has fixed one poem in my mind. Here it is:

The Fly

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life

And strength and breath

And the want

Of thought is death;

Then am I

A happy fly,

If I live,

Or if I die.

For me this is about as good as it gets for the English language, and poetry, and much more besides. On a very basic level, every time I feel I have to kill a fly, and most times I see one, it comes into my mind. Nothing is there in the poem that doesn’t need to be there, and everything that needs to be there is there. As Michael Phillips writes, ‘Blake’s choice of language [is] as spare as anything written since the seventeenth century, apart, perhaps, from the Jubilate Agne of Christopher Smart.’ It was probably written after 1791, deduced from analysis of Blake’s handwriting. ‘Will Blake’, as he signed his name in some of his letters to his friend George Cumberland.

Following a reference to Blake’s engravings made in the previous decade I looked at Joseph Ritson’s Select Collection of English Songs (1782), for which Blake did eight engravings. The first section of the songs covers drinking songs, not what I would immediately associate with Blake (I also looked at a letter by Cumberland written in 1815, in which he mentions visiting the Blakes, drinking tea with them, and Mrs Blake uttering seditious comments). Song XIX goes as follows:

Busy, curious, thirsty Fly,

Drink with me, and drink as I;

Freely welcome to my cup,

Could’st thou sip, and sip it up.

Make the most of life you may,

Life is short, and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine,

Hastening quick to their decline;

Thine’s a summer, mine no more,

Though repeated to threescore;

Threescore summers, when they’re gone,

Will appear as short as one.

It is marked “Made extempore by a Gentleman, occasion’d by a Fly drinking out of his Cup of Ale.”

Similar thoughts, occasioned by the visitation of a fly. Maybe the same fly landed on William Blake’s cup of tea eight years later?