William Blake. Osbert Burdett
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for a moment, and the voice of play seems naturally to sing, are absolutely childlike. There are others, however, in which the poet allows a glimpse of his hand to appear, as in “The Divine Image” and the haunting stanzas of “Night,” which Swinburne declared to be of the “loftiest loveliness.” There are poems which tell stories and poems which speak of religion, making simple lessons to explain a child’s feelings about sorrow and pain. So finely are these verses adjusted to their end that we hardly know whether the mother or her infant is reflecting. Indeed the second childhood of humanity is the blessing of those who have children of their own and are deeply connected to them.
Perhaps only a poet such as Blake, who had read no fine literature except through childlike eyes, could have written such things. There is in them an innocence of heart that is not to be found in Shakespeare. A few have the quality of children’s hymns, in which God appears as a loving Father, and mercy, pity, peace, and love, the virtues of childhood at its rare best, become the lineaments of His “divine image.” The occasional moral, as at the end of The Chimney Sweeper, is transformed by the poetry into an exquisite platitude of the world, as it can be represented to children in the school-room. This completes the nursery atmosphere. Note, too, that the shepherd, the sheep, the cradle, and the rest are nursery symbols, thus enabling Blake to pass from the lamb to “Him who bore its name” without any change of tone. The emotions aroused by this poetry are instinctive and almost as characteristic of animals as of men. Indeed, it celebrates the life, motions, and feelings of all young things, with the apparent artlessness of a lamb’s bleat or the cry of a bird, or a baby’s shout of astonishment or pleasure. By returning to these elements, poetry seems to return to its own infancy, and the language is almost as free from meaning, apart from emotion, as a child’s prattle.
Both meaning and observation, even of social life, appear in Songs of Experience, the companion volume of 1794. These darker songs, along with the group often called Ideas of Good and Evil, or the Rossetti MS., are a convenient bridge between the simple lyric poetry with which Blake began and the complex prophecies that were to follow. The scene tends to shift from the nursery to the school-room, from the green to the church, from the open country to the city. We pass from feeling to observation, and the poems that touch on love reveal its pitfalls. Jealousy and prohibitions, whether personal or ecclesiastical, are illustrated in their lines. Mr. Ellis has reconstructed a situation that would explain the references to those who are curious of Blake’s erotic life. The famous “Tiger” is of course here, and with Mr. Sampson’s aid we can trace every variant in its gradual composition. The number of revisions reminds us of the care that Blake would spend upon his form, and which he claimed to have spent later on his prophecies, where the ending of his lines can, in fact, be shown to depend upon the decoration surrounding them. In his own work, poetry was to yield to decoration, and there can be no doubt that design was the principal preoccupation of his mind. The first ecstasy of conscious life is complicated with a growing knowledge of good and evil, and the music of the verse will bear the burden of this trouble without caring to assign a cause. Such lines as: “Ah, sun-flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the sun” are the music of heaviness of heart, as the lines to the infant had been the music of gladness. When he observes his fellow-men fallen into the bonds of cold reason and dull experience, he wonders “How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” And he finds the explanation not in their circumstances but in themselves: “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 6, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.8 × 10.4 cm.
The British Museum, London.
All forms of external control were to Blake the enemy of imagination, and he was right in so far as the dictates of wisdom have little use until justified by personal experience. All the rest is morality, which, so long as it remains repressive and external, is always accompanied by secret satisfactions and deceit. In the age of experience, as Swinburne finely puts it, “inspiration shall do the work of innocence,” and the “Introduction” to the Songs of Experience tells us that it is by listening to the Voice of the Bard that innocence can be renewed. It is, in fact, the inspiration to be derived from Blake, and not the particular instructions in which he sometimes phrased the call, that we should take from him. The loved disciple is not he who slavishly mimics any master, but one who by embracing his master’s example is inspired to make the most of his own gifts and to follow the way of his own understanding.
The best of the second group of songs present us with rudiments of thoughts dissolved in music, and it is the strange magic of this music, by leading us to think for ourselves, that we should carry away from them. Their intellectual fascination consists in suggesting rather than in defining their meaning. They make the intellect a thing of beauty by lending it an air of darkness, and the readers, like bats awakened by falling shadows, find in the darkness the opportunity for the most crooked of their flights. Blake loved to put his feelings into intellectual forms, but he achieved greatness when he let his imagination run free with lines like, “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d Heaven with their tears”, “The lost traveller’s dream under the hill”, “Nor is it possible to thought / A greater than itself to know”, or the splendid:
For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 5, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.1 × 11.8 cm.
The British Museum, London.
William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, Preludium, plate 2, 1794.
Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 16.9 × 10.4 cm.
The British Museum, London.
All Blake’s emotions, and many of his images, were “intellectual things” to him, but for the reader who would do the poet justice, it is the poetry and not the cloudy forms in which it is often presented that is the truth of Blake’s writing. Here is the vital energy that was the foundation of Blake’s creed, and for this essence to be separated and praised in poetry it was indispensable that it should not be limited to the very bonds and definitions that are more coherent than itself. Blake’s way of attempting to defend intellectually a vitality that is its own defence has misled his less lyrical readers, who forget his relation to his age and the fact that he was protesting against an over-intellectual tradition. Law was his particular enemy, and to apply anything like logic to his lyrics, or to the lyrical prose that was soon to overflow from them, is to confuse his tactics with his genius. Blake was to stand or fall by his own inspiration, and there are very blank lines here and there. The reader should not shut his eyes to them, though quotation would be ungracious, for they will lead him to study the almost verbal revisions of “Tiger,” the only example we have of Blake’s tireless revision of verse. That this was abundantly rewarded, and that Blake remained to the end impatient even of self-criticism, shows how much his mind and work suffered from being continuously in revolt. His storehouse of ideas was the cosmogony of Swedenborg and the sculptured figures of the Abbey from which he had shaped his ideas on the fathers and heroes of human history. We respect this for the courage in regard to worldly things that accompanied it, which makes the home of Blake a sanctuary for those whose gifts are unwanted by the world. The following lines might have been written on any day of his long life, and since cheerfulness is the best evidence of courage, the courage of Blake is unusually moving in them:
For everything besides I have;
It is only for riches that I can crave.
I have mental joy, and mental health,
And