Responsibility and Thought in William Blake’s “The Fly”

This article is an analysis of William Blake's poem “The Fly” from the angles of Responsibility and Thought. The article agrees with much of the secondary literature that “The Fly” introduces an attempted identification between an inattentive philosophizing narrator and fly in the first three stanzas and then challenges it in the final two. However, the article makes the novel case that the narrator's initial attempt at contemplative union with the fly is not completely rebuffed by the quizzical non sequitur contained in the final two stanzas. Blake's oblique allusion to God is connected to the narrator's recognition that he and the fly share a real and significant union, even if the two parties interpolate each other in completely alien forms.