“Piping down the valleys wild” is the first line of the poem “Introduction,” which opens Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
As I would like to show now, the book’s penultimate tale, “Piping Down the Valleys Wild” (not yet analyzed in the secondary literature, so far as I can find) is a refreshing Romantic contrast: here Brodkey reshapes the lyric legacy of William Blake into a sophisticated study of innocence maintained not only in the face of, but precisely because of, the insights born of hard-won experience. “The State of Grace,” which opens the volume, is an ironic refashioning of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” into a psychologically probing analysis of unconsciously hypocritical narcissism (Bidney, “Unreliable Modern ‘Mariner'”).
Harold Brodkey’s book of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, shows his remarkable affinity with first generation Romantic poets.
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