The Complete Poems

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The Complete Poems Page 70

by William Blake


  Poetical Sketches

  A collection of Blake’s earliest known work, printed for him by his wealthier friends John Flaxman and the Rev. A. S. Mathew in 1783 but not publicly distributed. There are twenty-two known copies, some containing corrections in B.’s hand. The ‘Advertisement’ (p. ii) reads:

  ‘The following Sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.

  ‘Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.’

  B.’ literary models include Elizabethan poetry, Shakespearean drama, Milton, Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30), Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1756), Gray, Collins and the then popular archaic forgeries of ‘Ossian’ and Chatterton. His antipathy is the elegant Augustan couplet and its imitations.

  MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

  TO SPRING

  The metre of this and the following five lyrics is irregular blank verse.

  13–16 pour… modest tresses The imagery recalls Collins’ ‘Ode to Evening’: ‘While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont/And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve.’

  15 languish’d head A phrase from Milton: Comus 744 and Samson Agonistes 119.

  TO SUMMER

  6 thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair Reappears in the Notebook epigram ‘Abstinence sows sand all over/The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,’ p. 153 below.

  TO AUTUMN

  The close of this poem parallels that of Milton’s Lycidas: ‘Thus sang the uncouth swain…’

  TO WINTER

  11 and his hand] Printed ‘and in his hand’, corrected by B. in some copies.

  16 mount Hecla An Icelandic volcano mentioned in Thomson’s Winter 888.

  TO MORNING

  1 In Spenser’s Epithalamion 151, Phoebe rises at dawn ‘Clad all in white, that seems a virgin best’.

  FAIR ELENOR

  This poem and ‘Gwin’ (p. 32 below) are in the archaizing and sensational ‘Gothic’ style popular in the late eighteenth century. Both are ballads.

  34–5 the arrows that fly… destruction Psalm 91:5–6: ‘the arrow that flieth… the destruction that wasteth’.

  61 behold] Printed ‘I am’, corrected by B. in some copies.

  68 to bereave my life The usage occurs in Spenser, Faerie Queene 1.iii.36.2: ‘He to him leapt, in mind to reave his life’.

  SONG: ‘HOW SWEET I ROAM’D…’

  B. is supposed to have written this lyric before the age of fourteen (Bentley, Blake Records, 428). The ‘prince of love’ is Eros or Cupid, and the winged victim suggests Psyche (Gr. ‘soul’), who was depicted as a young woman with butterfly wings, or simply as a butterfly, in books B. might have seen during his apprenticeship.

  SONG: ‘MY SILKS AND FINE ARRAY…’

  This poem is a pastiche of Elizabethan imagery. For example, the clown’s song in Twelfth Night, 11.iv.52, ‘Come away, come away, death,’ has a dying lover, yew, and a true lover weeping over a tomb. The grave-digger in Hamlet (v.i.94–5) sings of ‘A pickax, and a spade, a spade,/For and a shrouding sheet’. The female lover, however, is not typically Elizabethan.

  SONG: ‘LOVE AND HARMONY COMBINE…’

  16 his] Printed ‘her’, corrected by B. in one copy.

  MAD SONG

  Percy’s Reliques contained six ‘Mad Songs’ and a note that ‘madness’ seemed to be a peculiarly English theme.

  2 the night is a-cold In King Lear III.iv.152, ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold.’

  4 infold] Printed ‘unfold’, altered by B. in one copy.

  7 birds] Printed ‘beds’, corrected by B. in some copies.

  17 Like a fiend in a cloud This line reappears in ‘Infant Sorrow’, SE, p. 129 below, and the image of the ‘cloud’ as the fleshly body which hides and imprisons the essential spirit is also in ‘The Little Black Boy’, SI, p. 106 below.

  SONG: ‘WHEN EARLY MORN…’

  1 Resembles Lycidas 187, ‘While the still morn went out with Sandals gray.’

  TO THE MUSES

  Solicitations to the muses were an eighteenth-century commonplace, probably derived from the unsatisfied search in Lycidas 50–55, ‘Where were ye Nymphs… For neither were ye playing on the steep… Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,/Nor yet where Deva spreads her wisard stream’.

  GWIN, KING OF NORWAY

  13 Gordred the giant Probably from Chatterton’s ‘Gordred Covan’ (printed in 1778 in Chatterton’s Miscellanies, but in magazine form earlier).

  65 like balances The image of heavenly scales as a sign before a conflict is from Paradise Lost iv.1011–14.

  75–88 Addison’s The Campaign 11–12 has ‘Rivers of blood… and hills of slain,/An Iliad rising out of one campaign’. ‘Hills of slain’ is a repeated phrase in Chatterton.

  83 Like blazing comets In I Henry IV I.i.10–13, armies ‘like the meteors of a troubled heaven… Did lately meet in the intestine shock/And furious close of civil butchery’.

  AN IMITATION OF SPEN[S]ER

  An early attempt on B.’s part to define his poetic vocation. The title is printed ‘Spencer’, and is uncorrected. B. uses Spenserian archaisms and a nine-line stanza, but does not attempt to reproduce Spenser’s rhyme scheme.

  10–15 brutish Pan… Midas Midas carelessly judged Pan superior to Apollo in a singing contest, and was rewarded with ass’s ears.

  13 leesing B. takes Spenser’s ‘lesing’ or ‘leasing’ (lie, falsehood) as an adjectival form.

  18 tinkling rhimes, and elegances terse Criticism of the ‘elegant’ eighteenth-century couplet.

  19 Mercurius Mercury, messenger of the gods, and god of Eloquence.

  33 B. idealistically attributes to Eloquence what Richard Glover in London: or, the Progress of Commerce (1739) attributed to Commerce: ‘Thou, gracious Commerce, from his cheerless caves/In horrid rocks and solitary woods/The helpless wand’rer, man, forlorn and wild/Did charm to sweet society.’

  46 Pallas, Minerva Greek and Latin names for the goddess of Wisdom.

  BLIND-MAN’S BUFF

  Metre, tone and opening image are from the song in Love’s Labour’s Lost v.ii.922–3, ‘When icicles hang by the wall/And Dick the shepherd blows his nail’.

  KING EDWARD THE THIRD

  An unfinished dramatic fragment inspired by Shakespeare’s history plays, especially Henry V. The metre is blank verse, but extremely loose. The play combines an ironic treatment of military values urged in the name of high ideals, with an attempt at Shakespearean ‘sympathy’ even for villains and misled men, and an apparently genuine admiration for bravery. B. might have found both the historical details and his critical approach to Edward and his conquests in Thomas Cooke’s Life of King Edward III of England (1734), which saw Edward as a ‘gallant and illustrious Murderer’.

  SCENE 1

  9 Liberty The major ideal invoked by patriotic English poets throughout the eighteenth century. In the most famous example, Thomson’s poem Liberty (1735), ‘Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt proclaim/What Kings supported by almighty love/And people fired with liberty can do’ (Iv.865–7).

  19 triple steel The demons in Paradise Lost 11.569 are armed ‘with stubborn patience as with triple steel’.

  SCENE 2

  16 first to commerce? The virtues of Commerce were celebrated in a large body of eighteenth-century Whig poetry, including Young’s The Merchant (1729), dedicated to ‘His grace the Duke of Chandos’ (Chandos is one of B.’s characters here), Glover’s Progress of Commerce (1739) and Thomson’s Liberty.

  36–7 The Druids of anc
ient England are supposed to have worshipped in oak groves. Hence the Bishop’s ‘wisdom’ is ironically more heathen than Christian.

  52 ’tis with princes as ’tis with the sun King Henry gives Prince Hal similar advice in I Henry IV III.ii.29–91.

  SCENE 3

  154ff. Dagworth’s conversations with the common soldiers parallel those of the young King in Henry V Iv.i.

  272–4 but the pure soul… heaven of glory The headstrong Hotspur in I Henry IV I.iii.201–2 cries: ‘By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap/To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon’.

  SCENE 4

  Stage direction William his Man Presumably the mouthpiece of William Blake; hence the scene is ironic.

  SCENE 6

  1 Trojan Brutus The legendary Brutus who was supposed to have escaped the fallen Troy and founded the British nation.

  51 prevented Prefigured and eclipsed.

  DRAMATIC FRAGMENTS

  PROLOGUE… KING EDWARD THE FOURTH

  1 O For a voice Parallels the prologue to Henry V.

  4 Who can stand? The ‘who shall stand’ formula is used in Nahum 1:6, Malachi 3:2, Revelation 6:17.

  PROLOGUE TO KING JOHN

  The form of the prose-poem was popular in B.’s day. B. wrote five other experimental pieces in the same style: ‘The Couch of Death’, ‘Contemplation’ and an unfinished ‘Samson’ (not reprinted here) which conclude PS; and the MS.fragments ‘Then She Bore Pale Desire’ and ‘Woe Cried the Muse’.

  1 Albion’s breast Albion here is female: she is the soul of England which must be redeemed from Tyranny and War. In B.’s later work Albion is a male figure whose female counterpart is named ‘Jerusalem’.

  A WAR SONG TO ENGLISHMEN

  Possibly the second mistrel’s song promised to Dagworth in King Edward the Third sc. 4. If so, the promise of ‘glorious’ death should be taken ironically.

  POEMS WRITTEN IN A COPY OF POETICAL SKETCHES

  These three poems were written in a copy of Poetical Sketches inscribed ‘from Mrs Flaxman May 15, 1784’. ‘Song 2nd by a Young Shepherd’ is an early version of ‘Laughing Song’, SI, p. 109 below.

  SONG BY AN OLD SHEPHERD

  I Compare the opening of ‘Blind-man’s Buff’, PS, p. 37 and n.

  Songs from ‘An Island in the Moon

  Date of composition: c. 1784. ‘Island’ is an untitled and unfinished MS. burlesque on a lunar society which ‘seems to have some affinity to England’. The characters, parodies of Blake himself and his circle of friends, meet in a salon-type setting and occasionally break – sober or drunk – into song. The ‘three philosophers’ are Quid the Cynic (William Blake), Suction the Epicurean (Robert Balke) and Sipsop the Pythagorean (probably the Platonist Thomas Taylor). Steelyard the Lawgiver is B.’s friend John Flaxman. There is a full discussion of the work by M. W. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’ in D. V. Erdman and J. E. Grant (eds.), Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, Princeton University Press, 1970.

  CHAP 3

  12 Honour & Genius Parody of a song in James Harris’s Daphnis and Amaryllis (1762).

  CHAP 6

  13 When old corruption Suggested by John Gay’s ‘On Quadrille’ (1727), ‘When as Corruption hence did go/And left the nation free… Then Satan, thinking things went ill/Sent forth his spirit, call’d Quadrille.’ As a satire on the medical profession, this song may have been suggested by the play The Devil Upon Two Sticks, currently on stage. It also parodies the genealogy of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost 11.

  CHAP 8

  4 John Taylor Probably the dissenting minister (1694–1761), author of The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, 1740.

  CHAP 9

  3 Lo the Bat A combined parody of Pope’s ‘Lo, the poor Indian’ (Essay on Man 1.99) and Collins’s ‘Weak-eyed bat’ which ‘with short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing’ (‘To Evening’ 9–10).

  58 This frog From a popular nursery-rhyme.

  116–17 Doctor South/Or Sherlock Dr Robert South (1634–1716) and Dr William Sherlock (1641–1707), author of A Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689), were writers of religious tracts. They are here contrasted with the philanthropist Thomas sutton (1532–1611). founder of Charterhouse, a charitable boys’ school and hospital for the aged.

  147 This city & this country A parallel to the popular song ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ from Fielding’s Grub Street Opera.

  CHAP 11

  1 Upon a holy thursday First version of ‘Holy Thursday’, SI, p. 111 below.

  20 When the tongues of children First version of ‘Nurse’s Song’, SI, p. 114 below.

  38 O father First version of ‘The Little Boy lost’, SI, p. 109 below.

  103 A crowned king This song is unfinished; a leaf is missing from the MS.

  There is No Natural Religion [a, b] All Religions are One

  These three series of aphorisms, etched in 1788 on tiny copperplates, form B.’s earliest work in illuminated printing. They also constitute his first attack on deism, and his first apologia for the Poetic or Prophetic Character as the source of all religion and philosophy. The ideas, the mockery of rationalism and the insistence on Man’s potential infinitude are further developed in MHH.

  The Book of Thel

  Date: 1789 for most of the text, but Erdman and others agree that ‘Thel’s Motto’ and the conclusion (Pl. 6) are no earlier than 1791. Fifteen copies of this illuminated book are known.

  Thel (Gr. ‘wish’ or ‘will’) may be understood equally as descending to earthly life, to death or to the state of Experience. Like the virgin-goddess Persephone, she undertakes a descent to the underworld; but she fears and rejects the impending transformation. The metre is iambic septenary, B.’s adaptation of ballad form into long lines.

  THEL’s MOTTO

  P1. i LI. 3–4 form a deleted line in Tiriel, and appear to allude to ‘Or ever the silver cord to be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken’, Ecclesiastes 12:6. But the silver rod and golden bowl here evidently stand for male and female sexual organs.

  I

  P1. I.I Mne Seraphim An obscure name, not used again. The term ‘Bne Seraphim’ (‘Sons of the Seraphim’) occurs in the Occult Philosophy of the alchemist philosopher Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), and is associated with concord, cure of melancholy and barrenness, and increase of fruitfulness in men and animals. Alteration to ‘Mne’ puns on ‘Mnetha’ (see Tiriel) to produce ironic associations. Thus Thel remains lonely and virginal, rejecting fruitfulness for herself.

  4 river of Adona Probably from the river Adonis in Paradise Lost [1.450–52, hence associated with rituals of fertility and of death and rebirth.

  13–14 the voice/Of him that walketh ‘And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,’ Genesis 3:8.

  P1. 2.1 the vales of Har See Tiriel 2.4ff,. The Song of Los 4.5–16.

  II

  P1. 3.8 Luvah A sun-god of Love. This is the first mention of any of the FOUR ZOAS.

  IV

  P1. 6.1 In the cave of the Naiads (Odyssey, XIII) there are two gates, one towards the north, for men; one to the south, for gods. The neo-Platonists explained this passage allegorically as a descent of the soul to matter. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene 111.vi.31 the Garden of Adonis, in which all souls grow, also has ‘Double gates… th’one fair and fresh, the other old and dried,’ and a porter, ‘Old Genius, the which a double nature had’.

  9 her own grave plot Her own body, or her own potential Experience. In neo-Platonic theory, what we call ‘life’ should be understood as death or imprisonment to the soul.

  & there she sat down ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion,’ Psalm 137:1.

  19–20] Lines deleted in two copies.

  Tiriel

  Date: c. 1789. An eight-page manuscript, never published, written in a fair hand except for the conclusion (8.4ff.), which is hastily written and may be some years later. Deletions of lines and
passages occur throughout. The theme is Tyranny. The manner is Gothic. The metre is septenary.

  1

  1 Aged Tiriel The name is found in Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, associated with the planet Mercury and the base elements sulphur and mercury. It also suggests ‘tyrant’, ‘ritual’ and the Prince of Tyre denounced by Ezekiel for assuming the role of God. Analogues to Tiriel’s obsessively tyrannical and blind personality include Oedipus, King Lear and possibly George III of England, some years later described by Shelley as ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King’.

  3 Myratana… western plains In the antiquarian Jacob Bryant’s New System (1774–6), Myrina is a queen of Mauretania (West Africa).

  22 Serpents not sons ‘Tigers, not daughters,’ King Lear Iv.ii.40.

  25 Heuxos or Yuva The source of these names is unknown.

  35 son of Zazel Zazel, a rejected and enslaved brother of Tiriel (section 7). The name occurs in Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, associated with discord and loss of honours (Damon), and in occult Hebraic-Christian tradition as an earth demon who presides over corpses (Stevenson). Azazel is Heb. ‘scapegoat’.

  2

  4 vales of Har Since Har is Heb. ‘mountain’, ‘vales of Har’ is ironic or pathetic.

  5 Har & Heva Tiriel’s parents, a degenerated and senile Adam and Eve representing the failure of Natural Law.

  6 Mnetha Compound of Athena (Wisdom) and Mnemosyne (Memory, mother of the muses), the nurse or foster-mother of Har and Heva.

  3

  14 the cage of Har This and ll. 22–3 are literary satire, with ‘great cage’ suggesting the heroic couplet and ‘our singing birds’ and ‘fleeces’ suggesting domesticated neo-classical lyric and pastoral.

  4

  3 Ijim In Isaiah 13:21, this is a collective term meaning ‘creatures of the wilderness’ or ‘satyrs’. The figure here represents savage superstition – an alternative to Tiriel’s civilization, but not an acceptable one. He may be a satire on Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’.

  40 bore him on his shoulders Ironic inversion of Aeneas bearing his father Anchises on his shoulders from the burning Troy (Aeneid 11.705–29).

  50–61 The transformations resemble those of Proteus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses VIII.734–8.

 

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