Poems
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Red Letter Library
POEMS BY
WILLIAM BLAKE
_First printed, September, 1911_
POEMS
BY
WILLIAM
BLAKE
SELECTED WITH
AN INTRODUCTION BY
ALICE MEYNELL
BLACKIE AND SON L^D LONDON
_“I amused myself this spring”, writes Henry Crabb Robinson in 1810, “by
writing an account of the insane poet, painter, and engraver, Blake.”
To-day a man of letters who should roundly call Blake a madman would be
thought to have cast away his literary reputation. Not for this,
however, should such a one be condemned, but for having thus “amused
himself”. Blake’s intellect did, terribly and portentously, overpass the
limits of normal sanity; but we must watch its distractions gravely,
with a serious thought askance upon our arbitrary or merely habitual
definitions of normal sanity—our delimitations which serve well enough
for every day, but which we might distrust in the case of Blake’s day, a
day more than naturally luminous with a more than natural sun. It is a
grave question for Blake, but a graver one for humanity, this question
whether Blake was sane. Nor is it possible to solve it, for we have at
the outset a difficulty of which his readers never can and never will be
quit: I mean the difficulty of his terms. His vocabulary has never been
interpreted for us—there is no interpreter. Or, to speak more precisely,
there are many “interpreters”, but there is no translator. There is no
one to authorize its equivalent in the speech of other Englishmen. When
Blake tells us of his great friendship with an Angel who had become a
Devil, or promises us an infernal Bible if we will deserve it, and again
tells us he has “the Bible of Hell which the world shall have whether
they will or no”, he uses substantives for which no man has a key. When,
on the other hand, he says that the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined
with him, we have the terms definite enough, but are little the wiser._
_Blake’s genius, in fact, is entangled with his insanity. A sign and
proof of the purity and singleness of that genius is precisely that it
is entangled with his high insanity, and with nothing else: with none of
the adulterations wherewith other men of name have mingled their fancy.
No slight or suspicion is cast upon the poetry of Blake by those who
have to confess that he was, in unknown measure, at undated times, in
transcendent moods, a madman; but who have not to confess that he was a
man of the world, a secondary man, a waiter upon literary fashions, a
weakling trusting to the strength of numbers of a literary company, a
wearer of other men’s passions, or so much as capable of an insincerity.
All these have been characters of poets who did not believe that they
saw Ezekiel sitting in a field, and of painters who never thought St.
Joseph had taught them how to dilute glue for water-colour drawing._
_All “interpreters” of Blake—and they have been many, and most eager,
most able—are constrained to make their own use of his terms, and
therefore in some measure to think for Blake instead of fulfilling the
harder duty of suffering Blake to think for them._
_As a philosopher, therefore—and Blake seems to be much more important
as a philosopher than as the “poet, painter, and engraver” of Crabb
Robinson’s phrase—he seized the scheme of “things entire”, not, like the
intellectual sensualist, to make the days of mortality more pleasant,
but to invert, to shatter, to re-conceive. (“Seems to be”, I have
written, because it is not for any mind, seeking to reflect his, to do
more than conjecture.) Blake recast the whole of morality, he laid his
hand upon the very inner and innermost sacred centre of right and
wrong—with what more than Satanic purpose, or to what more than
archangelic end? We know not, who know not what he meant when he wrote
“evil”, nor what he meant when he wrote “good.” We need not be among
those who have pressed their conjectures so urgently upon the reader.
Are they sincere—and, if so, is their sincerity valuable—who proclaim
themselves convinced students, thorough approvers, deliberate defenders,
of Blake’s theism and Blake’s ethics? Can there be convinced study, or
thorough discipleship, or deliberate defence? The only man who took
Blake’s theology with a seriousness worthy of Blake, and the only man
who took Blake’s terms with a sureness worthy of Blake and of the
English language, was the honest, loving, and admiring man, Tatham—who
burnt a great mass of manuscripts of Blake’s revelations. His act
seems—is—horrible; but we can imagine Blake striking a hand into his
hand rather than into that of any later man who has praised him. One
thing may be added in connexion with the poetry and the philosophy of
Blake. His greatest admirers are apt to guard themselves, to parry the
most difficult questions of the simple, by averring that his speculative
thought was “nebulous”. Now, however little or however much we may
attain to comprehend of that speculative thought, one fact insists upon
itself, asserts itself, through all our doubts, and this fact is the
absolute definition, distinctness, and certainty of Blake’s sight,
insight, thought, and speculation. No hesitation ever shakes that loud,
emphatic voice, claiming, proclaiming, announcing._
_The magic of Blake’s lyrical poems is greater than that of his
prophetical books. It is perceptible to every reader and definable by no
critic. What we cannot define, however, we may in part describe. And one
important description of his lovely song presents it as walking (as,
according to Victor Hugo, the beloved woman walks, to a man’s vision) in
light. The sun that he saw when he looked not with, but through, the eye
lights the landscape, the rivers, the forests of his dreams, the babes
and angels of his vision. Not only through the eye did he see, but
through the sun also. Not without pain do we learn that he hated and
contemned the Nature he thus transcended._
_Light, then, is Blake’s divine character, and next to light,
simplicity. With him this latter all-precious quality is a positive
thing, and no mere negation. When other poets have attempted it—poets
neither mean nor foolish, but too ambitious in aspiring to this humble
thing—we protest that simplicity cannot stand alone, and that to attain
to mere simplicity, without an implicit, or excluded, numerous company
of qualities, is to share the distinction of the village idiot. But of
Blake’s simplicity the one indescribable companion is genius; we need
give it no multitudinous names. “The Tiger” is a Sunday-school poem for
children, and it is in the crown of English literature. Nor is there any
kind of paradox in this union of lowly use and high renown._
_With regard to the choice of poems for the present collection, it may
be added that care has been given to make it generally representative,
so that the reader need not expect to find every lyric intelligible. The
dramatic poem, and a few with it, are the work of Blake’s boyhood and
early youth—“the production”, he says, “of untutored youth”; but we
might rather call it “tutored youth”. It was his manhood that was
untutored and went alone. These early poems prove the usual reading of a
boy. That Blake was well read in Swedenborg (whom he first followed and
then renounced), Boehm, Paracelsus, and a few more mystics, is the only
sign of “literature” to be found in what is more properly the work of
his life._
_William Blake was born in London in 1757, the year for which Swedenborg
had foretold the beginning of the new age of thought and vision. To this
coincidence an influence of suggestion has been assigned; but Blake’s
first vision was given to him when he was four years old, and obviously
unaware of Swedenborg: “God put his forehead to the window”. Somewhat
later he came, in Peckham Rye, upon a tree full of angels. And when he
told his mother that he had seen Ezekiel sitting in a field, he was
chastised for untruthfulness. He was not sent to school, chiefly because
he would not brook rough handling; and in the leisure of home life his
reading in the mystics began betimes. His father, a shopkeeper in Broad
Street, Golden Square, was so well and liberally inspired as to send
William to art studies. He worked for a few years at a drawing-school,
and then for two years with a good engraver, Basire. Next came a course
of drawing from the monuments and architectural detail of Westminster
Abbey. Here he learnt to love Gothic, and here he had a vision of the
Apostles. While still young he had the friendship of Fuseli and Flaxman,
and underwent the grief of a first love despised. She who rejected him,
and she who consoled him with her pity and whom, when he was twenty-five
years of age, he married, are the only women who had any part in his
life. Catherine Boucher, his wife, is believed to have been, at her
marriage, entirely illiterate. But she learnt to copy his writings, to
help him in engraving, to see visions with him, and to be in all ways
his efficient and invaluable companion. They had no children. Blake’s
visions had been withdrawn for twenty years when they were granted
again, and his career as “prophet” and mystical poet began. His brother
Robert, whom he had nursed in a last illness, and whose spirit he saw at
the moment of death “clapping his hands for joy”, visited him from
Heaven, and taught him how to engrave his poems and to print the
wonderfully beautiful decorations of the page. “The Songs of Innocence”
appeared in 1789, followed by “The Book of Thel”, “The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell”, “The Vision of the Daughters of Albion”, “America”,
“Europe”, “Gates of Paradise”, “The Book of Urizen”, “The Songs of
Experience”, “The Song of Los”, “Abania”, “Jerusalem”, “Milton”, and
“Vala”. This brings us well into the nineteenth century. By the kindness
of his friend Hayley, Blake and his wife had taken possession, in 1800,
of a cottage at Felpham, in Sussex, to which he was welcomed by angelic
visions, but in which he spent “the darkest years that ever mortal
suffered”. The incident of a scuffle with a soldier which befell there
would not be worth mentioning but that Blake took it as a symbol: the
soldier was Adam, for Blake turned him out of his Felpham garden. But
for this country interlude Blake lived his life in London, and walked in
suburban fields. His last poem was “The Ghost of Abel”, a fragment.
Thenceforward he devoted himself to design. A publisher named Cromek
commissioned him to illustrate Blair’s “Grave”; and out of a subsequent
enterprise, “The Canterbury Pilgrims”, rose one of Blake’s numerous
quarrels. He was a most quarrelsome man. A saint (and Blake’s
experiences of ecstasy and contest resemble those of innumerable saints)
would suspect all Blake’s spiritual history to be evil, delusive, and
infernal because of the unchastened violence of his passion of anger.
For the saint does not enter upon the mystical life except by the hard
and humble way of long and unrelaxing self-conquest._
_Of his wonderful pictorial works we need not here make a list, nor do
his immoderate revilings of the painters whose works or persons
displeased him concern the present purpose._
_Blake died at the age of seventy. “On the day of his death”, writes one
who reported Catherine Blake’s narrative, “he composed songs to his
Maker, so sweetly to the ear of Catherine that, when she stood to hear
him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, ‘My beloved, they