The Complete Poems

by William Blake

  6 Then siezd the Sons… Plow Man’s Reason begins the final cycle which ends in a last harvest and vintage, and a feast of bread and wine.

  19–21 ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4).

  30 the Seed of Men Ploughing is finished; sowing begins. The seeds are all men’s souls; and ‘that which thou so west is not quickened, except it die’ (I Corinthians 15:36).

  P. 125.8–10 warriors… Kings & Princes Soldiers and nobility have no place in Eternity. Therefore they fall on infertile ground, as in the Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:5–15).

  P. 126.4 the flaming Demon & Demoness As Orc at last is consumed in his own flames, Luvah and Vala reappear.

  29 And thus… renewd Luvah and Vala return to their original lives as the Eros and Psyche of Man. Their golden age is also the ‘golden age’ of Arcadian Mankind. Thus the style of the following interlude is ‘idyllic’, and the details follow the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’ Golden Ass.

  34 B.’s retranslation of Aeneid VII. 808–9. Pope’s more famous version is ‘… when swift Camilla scours the Plain/Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the Main’ (Essay on Criticism, 372–3).

  P. 127.6 O thou creating voice Luvah is Vala’s creator, just as Eros is in principle the creator as well as the lover of Psyche.

  14–27 thou art as the grass… survive An apparent inconsistency, not a real one. Luvah first addresses Vala as a mortal body, and teaches her that ‘All flesh is grass.’ As body, she has been wakened by the sun, is nourished by it, but will die. Vala mourns for herself. But Luvah then addresses her as immortal ‘Soul’ (1. 24). As soul, she does not depend on the sun, and will live for ever.

  P. 128.3 a new song arises to my Lord ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song’ (Psalm 96:1; 98:1).

  P. 130.7 Tharmas and Enion appear in the first stage of their renewal. Vala (Nature) is the foster-mother of Sensation.

  P. 131.30–31 Then Urizen… Cried Times are Ended The angel in Revelation 10:6 swears ‘that there should be time no longer’. Urizen returns to his work of the Last Harvest.

  P. 132.23 For Lo the winter melted away ‘For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone’ (Song of Solomon 2:11).

  P. 133.21 In Ephesians 3:10 Paul says his task is to show God’s wisdom to the heavenly powers through the church. Thus the Eternals learn brotherhood by seeing Man grouped into families.

  25 Man liveth not by Self alone ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ (Matthew 4:4).

  P. 134.1 And all Nations were threshed The flail threshes the harvest and separates good grain from worthless chaff; the winnowing fan blows away the chaff. The scene suggests Matthew 3:12. where Christ’s ‘fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire’.

  5 The fate of the ‘chaff’. Mystery is the Rahab of Night VIII, whose cup is ‘full of abominations’ (Revelation 17:4). She is overthrown, as in Revelation 18, along with all who serve her.

  18–24 Lines repeated from America 6.6–12. As the chaff is cast off, the wheat is uncovered. As the oppressors vanish, the oppressed are liberated.

  31 Sing a New Song ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song’ (Psalm 96:1; 98:1).

  P. 135.5 the Vintage is ripe The vintage follows the harvest in Revelation 14:19–20: ‘And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden… and blood came out of the winepress.’

  P. 136.16-P. 137.4 The Vintage of Love is a Dionysiac orgy of ecstatic ruthlessness, reminding us that ‘passion’ means ‘suffering’. The passage is repeated, with additions and alterations, in M 27.3–41.

  P. 138.20–21 Two lines taken from America 6.13–14 begin this final chorale.

  ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS

  These passages appear on two small sheets of paper, and are not incorporated in the text of The Four Zoas.

  Three Poems,? c. 1800

  ‘A FAIRY SKIPD UPON MY KNEE…’

  An undated lyric, written on the blank side of a drawing depicting the infant Hercules.

  ‘AROUND THE SPRINGS OF GRAY…’; TO MRS ANN FLAXMAN

  Two sets of verses inscribed in a volume of B.’s water-colour illustrations to Gray’s poems, presented to Mrs Flaxman. The illustrations may have been done in 1797, but the ‘transplantation’ image apparently refers to Flaxman’s influence on Blake’s move to Felpham in 1800 (see Poems from Letters, p. 481 below).

  Poems from Letters

  TO JOHN FLAXMAN, 12 SEPTEMBER 1800

  According to Gilchrist, B. met Flaxman, a Swedenborgian and fellow-artist, c. 1780, and Henry Fuseli, a painter and intellectual, at about the same time. Flaxman was in Italy from 1787 to 1794. In January 1800 he introduced B. and his work to William Hayley, poet and connoisseur of art. At the time of this letter, the Blakes were preparing to move to Hayley’s cottage in Felpham. They did so on 18 September.

  TO MRS FLAXMAN, 14 SEPTEMBER 1800

  Written at the close of a letter from Catherine Blake to Mrs Flaxman, again just before the Blakes’ departure for Felpham.

  7 the Turret Hayley’s house.

  15 the blessd Hermit Hayley himself.

  TO THOMAS BUTTS, 22 NOVEMBER 1802

  The vision of Los recorded in this poem may also be a basis for that of B.’s prophetic poem Milton.

  14–15 Brother Robert B.’s favourite, ten years his junior, whom he nursed on his deathbed in 1787, and with whose spirit he said he conversed often afterwards. B.’s Notebook was originally Robert’s.

  Brother John According to Tatham, John was a rival of William, ‘a dissolute disreputable youth’ who ‘lived a few reckless days, enlisted as a soldier, and died’ (Blake Records, 508–9).

  27 double the vision B. cultivated ‘double vision’, ‘threefold vision’ and ‘fourfold vision’, states of altered perception which would commonly be considered hallucinatory.

  29 an old Man grey An image of Prudence, which B. despised.

  31 If thou goest back B. was considering a return to London, to escape his patron’s insistence that he confine himself to ‘the meer drudgery of business’ (letter to Butts, 10 January 1802).

  88 Newtons sleep Both the kind of sleep Newton had, and the kind which his philosophy would impose on us.

  TO THOMAS BUTTS, 16 AUGUST 1803

  Written just before B.’s return to London, in September 1803. The opening line comes from ‘Mary’, Pickering MS., p. 503 below.

  Notebook Poems, c. 1800–1806

  This period of Notebook writing covers Blake’s association with Hayley, his trial for sedition and his depression over the Napoleonic Wars, which were raging both before and after the temporary Peace of Amiens (1802–3), and for which B. had given up hope of a political solution. Concurrently, he was writing Milton, and (c. 1804) beginning Jerusalem.

  ‘WHEN KLOPSTOCK ENGLAND DEFIED…’

  The German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) was critical of English poetry, which he considered coarse, and blamed this on Swift’s influence. In an article in the London journal The German Museum, August 1800, which Hayley might have shown to B., he compared German and English translations of Homer, deprecating the English. Blake’s counter-attack may date from 1800 or earlier, and is of a super-Swiftian crudity.

  3–4 Lines quoted from ‘Let the brothels…,’, Notebook, p. 159.

  ON THE VIRGINITY OF THE VIRGIN MARY & JOHANNA SOUTHCOTT

  Johanna Southcott (1750–1814) was a semi-literate servant girl turned prophetess. She announced in 1802 that she was the woman in Revelation 12 who would be the mother of the coming Messiah, in 1813 claimed to be pregnant with this child, and in 1814 died of a dropsy. B.’s squib probably dates from 1802.

  ‘BENEATH THE WHITE THORN LOVEL
Y MAY…’

  A finished copy, entitled ‘The Golden Net’, is in the Pickering MS., p. 498 below.

  ‘I SAW A MONK…’

  Possibly dates c. 1804, the period of Blake’s sedition trial; also the year of Richard Warner’s famous pacifist sermon (see f, Pl. 40, n.) which the Monk seems to echo. From this rough and much-revised draft, B. extracted seven stanzas for f Pl. 52, and nine stanzas for ‘The Grey Monk’ in the Pickering MS., p. 505 below.

  18 A line drawn in the MS. connects the poem at this point to stanza 12 (‘Untill the Tyrant himself relent’) omitting the interlude with the Mother.

  28–31 In part an autobiographical complaint. B.’s patron Hayley did not appreciate his writing, and tried to bend him towards more conventional pursuits. See Bentley, Blake Records, 72–120 passim. There is some evidence that Hayley tried to work through Catherine; B. may have associated Catherine’s illness at Felpham with this spiritual browbeating as well as with the bad climate.

  36 A reminiscence of ‘Gwin, King of Norway’, PS, p. 32 above. There, too, vengeance is enacted on a tyrant, yet the conclusion implies that vengeance is sad, not sweet.

  MORNING

  West, in B.’s symbolism, always implies liberation and the opening of a new world. At sunrise, the sun is moving westwards with the speaker.

  7–9 The war of swords & spears… Exhales The stars (of Reason) fade as the dew falls. The same imagery is in ‘The Tyger’, SE, p. 125 above.

  EACH MAN IS IN HIS SPECTRES POWER

  LI. 1–4 appear in f Pl. 32, in mirror-writing.

  ‘MOCK ON MOCK ON…’

  Thus Job (21:3) to his comforters: ‘Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock on.’

  1 Voltaire Rousseau Attacked by B. as rationalists and Deists.

  9 Atoms of Democritus The Greek philosopher Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) held that all things were composed of tiny atoms in constant motion. He is the first consistent materialist in western thought, and hence offensive to Blake.

  10 Newtons Particles In Newton’s optics, light takes the form of tiny corpuscles or particles emitted from a luminous body.

  ‘MY SPECTRE AROUND ME…’

  Dialogue with a coy mistress – or wife. The man speaks stanzas 1–8, the woman stanzas 9–10, the man stanzas 11–12, and both together may speak the final two stanzas.

  1–3 My Spectre… My Emanation These are B.’s terms for ‘male’ and ‘female’ fragments of a human personality, here enacting a drama of pursuit and rejection.

  34 Seven… loves The ‘loves’ conceived as Cupids here and in the following stanzas, are the man’s own amorous desires and impulses.

  58 Female Love Mistaken adoration of the female. Compare Milton’s condemnation of courtship, with its ‘starved Lover’ and ‘proud fair, best quitted with disdain’ (Paradise Lost IV.770).

  59 root up the Infernal Grove From Micah 6:14: ‘I will pluck up thy groves out of the midst of thee.’ ‘Groves’, throughout the Authorized Version, occur in connection with worship of the Canaanite goddess Asherah, condemned by the prophets.

  ‘GROWN OLD IN LOVE…’

  B. here is presumably forty-nine, and the year is 1806.

  Poems from the Pickering Manuscript

  This MS. (owned by B. M. Pickering in 1866) consists of eleven leaves containing fair copies of lyric and ballad pieces, primarily on the themes of sexuality, politics and the nature of visionary experience. Most editors date it c. 1803; Stevenson conjectures 1805.

  THE GOLDEN NET

  An allegory of male entrapment by females. A draft of this poem is in the Notebook, p. 489.

  THE MENTAL TRAVELLER

  This is one of B.’s most difficult short poems. It is an allegory of mankind’s history, represented as a process of alternating dominance of male and female principles. The male, beginning as a babe and becoming a youth, mature man, old man and finally babe again, is a Jesus–Prometheus–Everyman figure who embodies the potential genius and energy of Mankind. The female, variously manifested as old woman, virgin, female babe and finally old woman again, embodies all that may control, thwart or reject him. Comparable figures in B.’s longer works are ORC (Revolution) and VALA (Nature).

  In the opening sequence, the babe is nailed down and tormented by Mother Nature, who may also represent any Church or State founded on Nature. He subdues her as he grows to maturity, and becomes a source of joy to others, but in old age is driven out by a female babe sprung from his hearth – possibly a Church founded on his deeds, which gains ascendancy and forgets its source. In the final sequence, his pursuit of a new maiden returns him to infancy and her to old age. A whole civilization has been formed from their distress, and the whole cycle resumes.

  7–8 Reap in joy… sow In Psalm 126:5, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’ But a joyous birth after a woeful begetting implies that something is sexually amiss in this world.

  11–16 These torments suggest the fate of Prometheus, that of Jesus, and that of sacrificial victims in Mexico. Similar tortures are inflicted by females on male victims in FZ VIII.105.31–53, IX.136.21–137.1, M 19.44–55, 27.30–38, 67.24–5, 67.41–62, 80.81–2.

  23–4 he rends up… binds her down See the story of Orc and the ‘shadowy female’ in the preludium to America, p. 208 above.

  51 aged Host Puns on the ‘Host’ of the Eucharist, Christ’s body, now rejected.

  56 a Maiden The Maiden resembles the elusive mistress of ‘My Spectre around me’, Notebook, p. 494, and the artful virgins of ‘The Golden Net’; in the end she is revealed as another manifestation of the Woman Old.

  57 to allay his freezing Age Similarly, when King David ‘was old and stricken in years; and… gat no heat’, his counsellors brought him a fair damsel to ‘lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat’ (1 Kings 1: 1–2). What follows, however, is squabbling over David’s throne among his heirs; as here, the world is turned to a hostile desert.

  63–4 As male vitality and all that it represents declines, perceptions become narrow and the world becomes alien. B. thought that the flatness or roundness of the earth depended on one’s vision, and believed that a flat earth implied expansiveness in an ‘infinite plane’, while a round globe separated from other globes implied limitation.

  69–81 The infant lovers Los and Enitharmon, FZ 1.9.24, p. 284 above, are likewise tormented by ‘Alternate Love & Hate… Scorn & Jealousy’.

  95 the Babe is Born Blake proposes that the birth into this world of Jesus, or any form of human energy, is greeted by society with terror, not love, for it is a true threat to the status quo.

  MARY

  21 Blake uses this line, but applies it to himself, in the verse conclusion of a letter to Butts, 16 August 1803, p. 487 above.

  THE CRYSTAL CABINET

  The experience of love as a delightfully beautiful yet imprisoning enclosure first appears in ‘How sweet I roam’d…’, PS, p. 26 above, supposedly written before B. was fourteen. ‘I saw a chapel all of gold…’, Notebook, p. 136, employs similar enclosure imagery to describe sexuality.

  15 Threefold Blake consistently associates ‘threefold vision’ (a physiological possibility for him) with the state of lovely and dreamy sexuality he called BEULAH. Perception is heightened in this state, yet it remains inferior to the ‘fourfold vision’ he considered fully human. In other words: sexual love can take one only so far, and no further. Another autobiographical treatment of altered states of vision – ‘twofold’, ‘threefold’ and ‘fourfold’ – occurs in the poem ‘With happiness stretchd across the hills…’, which concludes a letter to Butts, 22 November 1802, p. 485 above.

  24 like a weeping Babe became Desire is physically gratified, but full union has not been achieved. The ‘Babe’ and ‘Woman’ are also in ‘The Mental Traveller’, above, p. 499.

  THE GREY MONK

  A rough draft, with additional stanzas, is in the Notebook, p. 491.

  AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE

  These co
uplets were written as a fair copy, although the organization and grouping of ideas seem erratic. Editors have suggested other arrangements of the lines, but B.’s apparent failure to organize may have been deliberate.

  17 The Game Cock clipd Cockfighting was not legally prohibited in England until 1849.

  35 Chafers sprite A chafer is a kind of beetle.

  126 Seeing ‘through’ rather than ‘with’ the eye constituted true vision for B. The conclusion to his prose tract, A Vision of the Last Judgment, reads:

  ‘I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.’

  127 Born in a Night… Night Jonah’s gourd ‘came up in a night and perished in a night’ (Jonah 4:10). The moral is that material things are less important than spiritual.

  129–30 God is Light… Night Ironic commentary on Milton’s ‘since God is light’, Paradise Lost 111.3.

  WILLIAM BOND

  28 From the words of Jesus to Mary at Cana: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ (John 2:4).

  Milton

  An illuminated poem known in four copies. Title page date: 1804. Two copies, on paper watermarked 1808, contain forty-five plates, eight of which are full-page designs without text. A third copy, on the same paper, adds five pages of text (3, 4, 10, 18, 32) but omits the Preface. The last copy, on paper dated 1815, omits the Preface and adds one more page (5). The present text follows the page-arrangement of this copy.

  B. originally intended Milton to be a ‘Poem in 12 Books’ but altered the title page ‘12’ to ‘2’. As it now stands, the poem is just half the size of Jerusalem, and is something like a prelude to it. It tells the story of the poet Milton’s descent to earth and entry into William Blake, an event at once intimately personal and of cosmic reverberation.