Why Was I Born With A Different Face?

William Blake, a great revolutionary visionary and prophet, has left a different impression on us in the literary world. Now a variety of honors have been dubbed on him, before he was popular, however, in his whole life, he was struggling for living. Most of his works were not appreciated, and he was not accepted in his time. His poem, “why was I born with a different face”, can express the life and writing career well.“The Human Form Divine” is Blake’s self-proclaimed central image and ultimate reality. The body is basic to human experience and fundamental to Blake’s art and verse. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that “the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system”(115). Because the range of the body’s symbolism is so broad, thinking about the body involves thinking about other things. William Blake, being on the edge of life, wrote poetry with its unique perspective, and ingeniously put the body into poetry, giving different kinds of symbols on bodies to express different thoughts. He focused on the body on the “edge”. This allowed him to think about the national culture from the outside; he refused to join the mainstream culture of tradition; he refused to admit the inherent cultural identity; he broke through the traditional culture, combining with the scattered, broken, twisted, the deformed bodies, then he constructed them to give a new identity, which completed his non-personalized poetic identity. Blake’s depiction of the body communicates this: the body both provides and threatens identity.The frame of this paper consists of five parts:The introduction part summarizes the scholars and commentators on the analysis of works of William Blake. These studies can be divided into three categories mainly: topic-researching, writing skills, philosophy or religion, etc. Although there are some researches about the body in works of William Blake abroad, few concern his works from the perspective of body narrative, to explore Blake’s identity of poetics. The first chapter studies that during his lifetime, Blake did not take part in the mainstream culture at that time, and he was opposed to the ration, empiricism and the criticism of religion, revealing the body status under the mainstream culture, which was not as good as the one claimed by the mainstream culture. This makes Blake and his works be in a state of “edge”; Chapter two combines with the analysis of Blake’s works, and points out that the body of the text is presented in distortion and deformation. This method can be seen as a text rhetoric and historical discourse in the language, as well as the elements of identity body behind the cultural context; the third chapter studies that Blake sought for identification under this kind of cultural identity. Blake thought that under the mainstream culture, people could start a new identity through self-initiative, selfannihilation, self-reflexivity in mirrored writing with action. Chapter three will combine with the specific analysis of text to show how to use these methods to achieve a new identity. The conclusion part summarizes this strange but productive method used by Blake to seek for identity, which can be deconstructed and constructed. According to Foucault’s theory, Blake was concerned with the body, revealing what the body was and what it is; what’s more, he tried his effort to get a new identity through beyond the body. During the process, the characteristics of contradiction and mystery can be found.