The Clod and the Pebble

Now that we’ve covered a lot of Blake’s overtly dark and depressing poems, we’re moving onto a more quirky sad one. The Clod and Pebble is a Song of Experience exploring two contrary views on love from the perspectives of Innocence and Experience in the two separate stanzas. In more than half the copies of the Songs, this poem featured as the first of the Songs of Experience.

The Clod and the Pebble

Love seeketh not Itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care;

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.

So sang a little Clod of Clay,

Trodden with the cattles feet;

But a Pebble of the brook,

Warbled out these metres meet.

Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to Its delight:

Joys in anothers loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.

Form and Structure

The poem consists of three quatrains, the first and last following an ABAB rhyme scheme, showing how they are composed of self-contained and undisputed opinions, whereas the second quatrain is jolted out of the expectations of a pattern by following an ABCB rhyme scheme. The poem mainly follows iambic tetrameter with the exception of trochaic metre in “trodden” which highlights the battered state of the clod.

The structure is more unusual for an Experience poem as it has a dialogue-like form despite not really being a conversation between two speakers, but neither is it a monologue. It also features singing which you would only find in Innocence.

Stanza One

This poem seeks to explore the different contraries of love, and in this stanza the first contrary of love is real love that only cares about others, which is the only way it can get pleasure.

The sibilance creates a soft and innocent caring tone, symbolising the selfless nature of love explored in this stanza.

The idea of building a “Heaven in Hells despair” would have resonated with Blake’s contemporary readership, whose lives were hellish at the time.

Stanza Two

By symbolising love as a “Clod of Clay”, it shows its soft and malleable nature. “Clay” is what breaks the rhyme scheme, thereby emphasising the split away of the 2^nd stanza from its predecessor and successor.

The verb “trodden” breaks the metre by being trochaic, showing how impressionable love in human beings can be.

The verb “warbled” demonstrates the hard and unchanging nature of the “pebble”, symbolising the change into Experience in the third stanza.

Stanza Three

The third stanza echoes the first in a tone of mockery, thereby serving as mockery of the “Clod” as opposed to engaging in a dialogue.

The plosive sounds of “please” “bind” and “build” is harsher as love is presented as a restriction on freedom similar to that in Earth’s Answer.

“Its” is capitalised in this stanza to indicate the possessive nature of love, as in Experience love becomes a means of self-interest, driven by jealousy. This is what Blake believed to be antithetical to free love, and despite the poem ending on this note, it does not necessarily reflect Blake’s own beliefs.

Rather, Blake is warning his reader of how an idealised love can be degenerate and a disguise for possessiveness and self-interest, but this does not reflect the nature of true love. But there is the threat of once entering Experience, love becomes corrupted by the “waters of materialism” as pictured in his illumination, and love becomes self-serving.