Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  “Can the sower sow by night,

  Or the ploughman in darkness plough?”

  In the Songs of Innocence there is no such glory of metre or sonorous beauty of lyrical work as here. No possible effect of verse can be finer in a great brief way than that given in the second and last stanzas of the first part of this poem. It recals within one’s ear the long relapse of recoiling water and wash of the refluent wave; in the third and fourth lines sinking suppressed as with equal pulses and soft sobbing noise of ebb, to climb again in the fifth line with a rapid clamour of ripples and strong ensuing strain of weightier sound, lifted with the lift of the running and ringing sea.

  Here also is that most famous of Blake’s lyrics, The Tiger; a poem beyond praise for its fervent beauty and vigour of music. It appears by the MS. that this was written with some pains; the cancels and various readings bear marks of frequent rehandling. One of the latter is worth transcription for its own excellence and also in proof of the artist’s real care for details, which his rapid instinctive way of work has induced some to disbelieve in.

  “Burnt in distant deeps or skies

  The cruel fire of thine eyes?

  Could heart descend or wings aspire?

  What the hand dare seize the fire?”

  Nor has Blake left us anything of more profound and perfect value than The Human Abstract; a little mythical vision of the growth of error; through soft sophistries of pity and faith, subtle humility of abstinence and fear, under which the pure simple nature lies corrupted and strangled; through selfish loves which prepare a way for cruelty, and cruelty that works by spiritual abasement and awe.

  “Soon spreads the dismal shade

  Of Mystery over his head;

  And the caterpillar and fly

  Feed on the Mystery.

  And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

  Ruddy and sweet to eat;

  And the raven his nest has made

  In the thickest shade.”

  Under the shadow of this tree of mystery, rooted in artificial belief, all the meaner kind of devouring things take shelter and eat of the fruit of its branches; the sweet poison of false faith, painted on its outer husk with the likeness of all things noble and desirable; and in the deepest implication of barren branch and deadly leaf, the bird of death, with priests for worshippers (“the priests of the raven of dawn,” loud of lip and hoarse of throat until the light of day have risen), finds house and resting-place. Only in the “miscreative brain” of fallen men can such a thing strike its tortuous root and bring forth its fatal flower; nowhere else in all nature can the tyrants of divided matter and moral law, “Gods of the earth and sea,” find soil that will bear such fruit.

  Nowhere has Blake set forth his spiritual creed more clearly and earnestly than in the last of the Songs of Experience. “Tirzah,” in his mythology, represents the mere separate and human nature, mother of the perishing body and daughter of the “religion” which occupies itself with laying down laws for the flesh; which, while pretending (and that in all good faith) to despise the body and bring it into subjection as with control of bit and bridle, does implicitly overrate its power upon the soul for evil or good, and thus falls foul of fact on all sides by assuming that spirit and flesh are twain, and that things pleasant and good for the one can properly be loathsome or poisonous to the other. This “religion” or “moral law,” the inexplicable prophet has chosen to baptize under the singular type of “Rahab” — the “harlot virgin-mother,” impure by dint of chastity and forbearance from such things as are pure to the pure of heart: for in this creed the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness, the one thing forbidden is to believe in the existence of forbidden things. Of this mystical mother and her daughter we shall have to take some further account when once fairly afloat on those windy waters of prophecy through which all who would know Blake to any purpose must be content to steer with such pilotage as they can get. For the present it will be enough to note how eager and how direct is the appeal here made against any rule or reasoning based on reference to the mere sexual and external nature of man — the nature made for ephemeral life and speedy death, kept alive “to work and weep” only through that mercy which “changed death into sleep”; how intense the reliance on redemption from such a law by the grace of imaginative insight and spiritual freedom, typified in “the death of Jesus.” Nor are any of these poems finer in structure or nobler in metrical form.

  This present edition of the Songs of Experience is richer by one of Blake’s most admirable poems of childhood — a division of his work always of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of words. In this newly recovered Cradle Song are perhaps the two loveliest lines of his writing:

  “Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep

  Little sorrows sit and weep.”

  Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet’s, we may notice (rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of verse) this projected Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which editors have left hitherto in manuscript:

  “The good are attracted by men’s perceptions,

  And think not for themselves

  Till Experience teaches them how to catch

  And to cage the Fairies and Elves.

  And then the Knave begins to snarl,

  And the Hypocrite to howl;

  And all his good friends show their private ends,

  And the Eagle is known from the Owl.”

  Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to take the place of instinct, reflection of perception; but the moment experience begins upon this work, men raise against her the conventional clamour of envy and stupidity. She teaches how to entrap and retain such fugitive delights as children and animals enjoy without seeking to catch or cage them; but this teaching the world calls sin, and the law of material religion condemns: the face of “Tirzah” is set against it, in the “shame and pride” of sex.

  “Thou, mother of my mortal part,

  With cruelty didst mould my heart,

  And with false self-deceiving fears

  Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears.”

  And thus those who live in subjection to the senses would in their turn bring the senses into subjection; unable to see beyond the body, they find it worth while to refuse the body its right to freedom.

  In these hurried notes on the Songs an effort has been made to get that done which is most absolutely necessary — not that which might have been most facile or most delightful. Analytic remark has been bestowed on those poems only which really cannot dispense with it in the eyes of most men. Many others need no herald or interpreter, demand no usher or outrider: some of these are among Blake’s best, some again almost among his worst. Poems in which a doctrine or subject once before nobly stated and illustrated is re-asserted in a shallower way and exemplified in a feebler form, require at our hands no written or spoken signs of either assent or dissent. Such poems, as the editor has well indicated, have places here among their betters: none of them, it may be added, without some shell of outward beauty or seed of inward value. The simpler poems claim only praise; and of this they cannot fail from any reader whose good word is in the least worth having. Those of a subtler kind (often, as must now be clear enough, the best worth study) claim more than this if they are to have fair play. It is pleasant enough to commend and to enjoy the palpable excellence of Blake’s work; but another thing is simply and thoroughly requisite — to understand what the workman was after. First get well hold of the mystic, and you will then at once get a better view and comprehension of the painter and poet. And if through fear of tedium or offence a student refuses to be at such pains, he will find himself, while following Blake’s trace as poet or painter, brought up sharply within a very short tether. “It is easy,” says Blake himself in the Jerusalem, “to acknowledge a man to be great and good while we derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness; those alone
are his friends who admire his minute powers.”

  Looking into the larger MS. volume of notes we seem to gain at once a clearer insight into the writer’s daily habit of life and tone of thought, and a power of judging more justly the sort of work left us by way of result. Here, as by fits and flashes, one is enabled to look in upon that strange small household, so silent and simple on the outside, so content to live in the poorest domestic way, without any show of eccentric indulgence or erratic aspiration; husband and wife to all appearance the commonest citizens alive, satisfied with each other and with their minute obscure world and straitened limits of living. No typical churchwarden or clerk of the parish could rub on in a more taciturn modest manner, or seem able to make himself happy with smaller things. It may be as well for us to hear his own account of the matter:

  PRAYER.

  I.

  “I rose up at the dawn of day;

  ‘Get thee away; get thee away!

  Pray’st thou for riches? away, away!

  This is the throne of Mammon grey.’

  II.

  Said I, ‘This sure is very odd;

  I took it to be the throne of God;

  For everything besides I have;

  It is only for riches that I can crave.

  III.

  ‘I have mental joys and mental health,

  And mental friends and mental wealth;

  I’ve a wife I love and that loves me;

  I’ve all but riches bodily;

  IV.

  ‘Then, if for riches I must not pray,

  God knows I little of prayers need say;

  So, as a church is known by its steeple,

  If I pray, it must be for other people.

  V.

  ‘I am in God’s presence night and day,

  And he never turns his face away;

  The accuser of sins by my side does stand,

  And he holds my money-bag in his hand;

  VI.

  ‘For my worldly things God makes him pay,

  And he’d pay for more if to him I would pray;

  And so you may do the worst you can do,

  Be assured, Mr. Devil, I won’t pray to you.

  VII.

  ‘He says, if I do not worship him for a God,

  I shall eat coarser food and go worse shod;

  So, as I don’t value such things as these,

  You must do, Mr. Devil — just as God please.’”

  One cannot doubt that to a man of this temper his life was endurable enough. Faith in God and goodwill towards men came naturally to him, being a mystic; on the one side he had all he wanted, and on the other he wanted nothing. The praise and discipleship of men might no doubt have added a kind of pleasure to his way of life, but they could neither give nor take away what he most desired to have; and this he never failed of having. His wife, of whose “goodness” to him he has himself borne ample witness, was company enough for all days. And indeed, by all the evidence left us, it appears that this goodness of hers was beyond example. Another woman of the better sort might have had equal patience with his habit of speech and life, equal faith in his great capacity and character; but hardly in another woman could such a man have found an equal strength and sweetness of trust, an equal ardour of belief and tenderness, an equal submission of soul and body for love’s sake; — submission so perfect and so beautiful in the manner of it, that the idea of sacrifice or a separate will seems almost impossible. A man living with such a wife might well believe in some immediate divine presence and in visible faces like the face of an angel. We have not now of course much chance of knowing at all what manner of angel she was; but the few things we do know of her, no form of words can fitly express. To praise such people is merely to waste words in saying that divine things are praiseworthy. No doubt, if we knew how to praise them, they would deserve that we should try.

  The notes bearing in any way upon this daily life of Blake’s are few and exceptional. In the mass of floating verse and prose there is absolutely no hint of order whatever, save that, at one end of the MS., some short poems are transcribed in a slightly more coherent form. Among these and the other lyrics, strewn as from a liberal but too lax hand about the chaotic leaves of his note-book, are many of Blake’s best things. Some of the slight and scrawled designs, as noted in the Catalogue (pp. 242, 243), have also a merit and a power of their own; but it is with the poet’s lyrical work that we have to do at this point of our present notes; and here we may most fitly wind up what remains to be said on that matter.

  The inexhaustible equable gift of Blake for the writing of short sweet songs is perceptible at every turn we take in this labyrinth of lovely words, of strong and soft designs. Considering how wide is the range of date from the earliest of these songs to the latest, they seem more excellently remote than ever from the day’s verse and the day’s habit. They reach in point of time from the season of Mason to the season of Moore; and never in any interval of work by any chance influence do these poems at their weakest lapse into likeness or tolerance of the accepted models. From the era of plaster to the era of pinchbeck, Blake kept straight ahead of the times. To the pseudo-Hellenic casts of the one school or the pseudo-Hibernian tunes of the other he was admirably deaf and blind. While a grazing public straightened its bovine neck and steadied its flickering eyelids to look up betweenwhiles, with the day’s damp fodder drooping half-chewed from its relaxed jaw, at some dim sick planet of the Mason system, there was a poet, alive if obscure, who had eyes to behold

  “the chambers of the East,

  The chambers of the sun, that now

  From ancient melody have ceased;”

  who had ears to hear and lips to reveal the music and the splendour and the secret of the high places of verse. Again, in a changed century, when the reading and warbling world was fain to drop its daily tear and stretch its daily throat at the bidding of some Irish melodist — when the “female will” of “Albion” thought fit to inhale with wide and thankful nostril the rancid flavour of rotten dance-roses and mouldy musk, to feed “in a feminine delusion” upon the sodden offal of perfumed dog’s-meat, and take it for the very eucharist of Apollo — then too, while this worship of ape or beetle went so noisily on, the same poet could let fall from lavish hand or melodious mouth such grains of solid gold and flakes of perfect honey as this: —

  “Silent, silent night,

  Quench the holy light

  Of thy torches bright;

  For possessed of day,

  Thousand spirits stray,

  That sweet joys betray.

  Why should love be sweet,

  Usèd with deceit,

  Nor with sorrows meet?”

  Verse more nearly faultless and of a more difficult perfection was never accomplished. The sweet facility of being right, proper to great lyrical poets, was always an especial quality of Blake’s. To go the right way and do the right thing, was in the nature of his metrical gift — a faculty mixed into the very flesh and blood of his verse.

  There is in all these straying songs the freshness of clear wind and purity of blowing rain: here a perfume as of dew or grass against the sun, there a keener smell of sprinkled shingle and brine-bleached sand; some growth or breath everywhere of blade or herb leaping into life under the green wet light of spring; some colour of shapely cloud or mound of moulded wave. The verse pauses and musters and falls always as a wave does, with the same patience of gathering form, and rounded glory of springing curve, and sharp sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam as it curls over, showing the sun through its soft heaving side in veins of gold that inscribe and jewels of green that inlay the quivering and sundering skirt or veil of thinner water, throwing upon the tremulous space of narrowing sea in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating hair, the windy shadow of its shaken spray. The actual page seems to take life, to assume sound and colour, under the hands that turn it and the lips that read; we feel the falling of dew and have sight of the rising of stars. For th
e very sound of Blake’s verse is no less remote from the sound of common things and days on earth than is the sense or the sentiment of it.

  “O what land is the land of dreams?

  What are its mountains and what are its streams?

  — O father, I saw my mother there,

  Among the lilies by waters fair.

  ······

  — Dear child, I also by pleasant streams

  Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;

  But though calm and warm the waters wide

  I could not get to the other side.”

  We may say of Blake that he never got back from that other side — only came and stood sometimes, as Chapman said of Marlowe in his great plain fashion of verse, “up to the chin in that Pierian flood,” and so sang half-way across the water.

  Nothing in the Songs of Innocence is more beautiful as a study of childish music than the little poem from which we have quoted; written in a metre which many expert persons have made hideous, and few could at any time manage as Blake did — a scheme in which the soft and loose iambics lapse into sudden irregular sound of full anapæsts, not without increase of grace and impulsive tenderness in the verse. Given a certain attainable average of intellect and culture, these points of workmanship, by dint of the infinite gifts or the infinite wants they imply, become the swiftest and surest means of testing a verse-writer’s perfection of power, and what quality there may be in him to warrant his loftiest claim. By these you see whether a man can sing, as by his drawing and colouring whether he can paint. Another specimen of indefinable sweetness and significance we may take in this symbolic little piece of song;