Poems
They danced over the pillow white,
And the angels of Providence left the bed.
“I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,
But O, he lives in the moony light!
I thought to find Love in the heat of day,
But sweet Love is the comforter of night.
“Seek Love in the pity of others’ woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care,
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
With the naked and outcast,—seek Love there.”
Los
VERSES FROM A LETTER TO MR. BUTTS, 1802
With happiness stretched across the hills
In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils,
With a blue sky spread over with wings,
And a mild sun that mounts and sings;
With trees and fields full of fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves,
Remembering the verses that Hayley sung
When my heart knocked against the root of my tongue,
With angels planted in hawthorn bowers,
And God himself in the passing Hours;
With silver angels across my way,
And golden demons that none can stay;
With my father hovering upon the wind,
And my brother Robert just behind,
And my brother John, the evil one,
In a black cloud making his moan;
(Though dead, they appear upon my path,
Notwithstanding my terrible wrath;
They beg, they entreat, they drop their tears,
Filled full of hopes, filled full of fears;)
With a thousand angels upon the wind,
Pouring disconsolate from behind
To drive them off,—and before my way
A frowning Thistle implores my stay.
What to others a trifle appears,
Fills me full of smiles or tears;
For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, ’tis an old man grey;
With my outward, a thistle across my way.
“If thou goest back,” the Thistle said,
“Thou art to endless woe betrayed;
For here does Theotormon lour,
And here is Enitharmon’s bower,
And Los the terrible thus hath sworn,
Because thou backward dost return,
Poverty, envy, old age, and fear,
Shall bring thy wife upon a bier;
And Butts shall give what Fuseli gave,
A dark black rock and a gloomy cave.”
I struck the thistle with my foot,
And broke him up from his delving root.
“Must the duties of life each other cross?
Must every joy be dung and dross?
Must my dear Butts feel cold neglect
Because I give Hayley his due respect?
Must Flaxman look upon me as wild,
And all my friends be with doubts beguiled?
Must my wife live in my sister’s bane,
Or my sister survive on my Love’s pain?
The curses of Los, the terrible shade,
And his dismal terrors, make me afraid.”
So I spoke, and struck in my wrath
The old man weltering upon my path.
Then Los appeared in all his power:
In the sun he appeared, descending before
My face in fierce flames; in my double sight,
’Twas outward a sun,—inward, Los in his might.
“My hands are laboured day and night,
And ease comes never in my sight.
My wife has no indulgence given,
Except what comes to her from heaven.
We eat little, we drink less;
This earth breeds not our happiness.
Another sun feeds our life’s streams;
We are not warmed with thy beams.
Thou measurest not the time to me,
Nor yet the space that I do see:
My mind is not with thy light arrayed;
Thy terrors shall not make me afraid.”
When I had my defiance given,
The sun stood trembling in heaven;
The moon, that glowed remote below,
Became leprous and white as snow;
And every soul of man on the earth
Felt affliction and sorrow and sickness and dearth.
Los flamed in my path, and the sun was hot
With the bows of my mind and the arrows of thought:
My bowstring fierce with ardour breathes,
My arrows glow in their golden sheaves.
My brother and father march before;
The heavens drop with human gore.
Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me.
’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night,
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton’s sleep!
Dedication of the Designs to Blair’s “Grave”
TO QUEEN CHARLOTTE
The door of Death is made of gold,
That mortal eyes cannot behold:
But, when the mortal eyes are closed,
And cold and pale the limbs reposed,
The soul awakes, and, wondering, sees
In her mild hand the golden keys.
The grave is heaven’s golden gate,
And rich and poor around it wait:
O Shepherdess of England’s fold,
Behold this gate of pearl and gold!
To dedicate to England’s Queen
The visions that my soul has seen,
And by her kind permission bring
What I have borne on solemn wing
From the vast regions of the grave;
Before her throne my wings I wave,
Bowing before my sovereign’s feet.
The Grave produced these blossoms sweet,
In mild repose from earthly strife;
The blossoms of eternal life.
For a Picture of the Last
Judgment
DEDICATION
The caverns of the Grave I’ve seen,
And these I showed to England’s Queen,
But now the caves of Hell I view,—
Whom shall I dare to show them to?
What mighty soul in beauty’s form
Shall dauntless view the infernal storm?
Egremont’s Countess can control
The flames of hell that round me roll.
If she refuse, I still go on,
Till the heavens and earth are gone;
Still admired by noble minds,
Followed by Envy on the winds.
Re-engraved time after time,
Ever in their youthful prime,
My designs unchanged remain;
Time may rage, but rage in vain;
For above Time’s troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic mountains,
In my golden house on high,
There they hide eternally.
Scoffers
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain;
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem,
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
The atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
Fragments and Epigrams
The Sword sang on the barren heath,
The Sickle in the fruitful field:
The Sword he sang a song of death,
But could not make the Sickle yield.
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
These are not done by jostling in the street.
The errors of a wise man make your rule,
Rather than the perfections of a fool.
Some people admire the work of a fool,
For it’s sure to keep your judgment cool:
It does not reproach you with want of wit;
It is not like a lawyer serving a writ.
He’s a blockhead who wants a proof of what he can’t perceive,
And he’s a fool who tries to make such a blockhead believe.
The Angel that presided at my birth
Said: “Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go, live without the help of any thing on earth.”
At a friend’s errors anger show,
Mirth at the errors of a foe.
Anger and wrath my bosom rends:
I thought them the errors of friends.
But all my limbs with warmth glow,
I find them the errors of the foe.
Section V
EXTRACTS FROM THE PROPHETICAL BOOKS
From “Jerusalem”
TO THE JEWS
The fields from Islington to Marylebone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold;
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.
Her little ones ran on the fields,
The Lamb of God among them seen;
And fair Jerusalem, His Bride,
Among the little meadows green.
Pancras and Kentish Town repose
Among her golden pillars high,
Among her golden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
The Jews’-Harp House and the Green Man,
The ponds where boys to bathe delight,
The fields of cows by Welling’s Farm,
Shine in Jerusalem’s pleasant sight.
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side,
And every English child is seen,
Children of Jesus and His Bride.
Forgiving trespasses and sins,
Lest Babylon, with cruel Og,
With moral and self-righteous law,
Should crucify in Satan’s synagogue.
What are those golden builders doing
Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington—
Standing above that mighty ruin
Where Satan the first victory won?
Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree?
And the Druid’s golden knife
Rioted in human gore,
In offerings of human life?
They groaned aloud on London Stone,
They groaned aloud on Tyburn’s brook;
Albion gave his deadly groan,
And all the Atlantic mountains shook.
Albion’s spectre from his loins
Tore forth in all the pomp of war,
Satan his name: in flames of fire,
He stretched his Druid pillars far.
Jerusalem fell from Lambeth’s vale
Down through Poplar and Old Bow.
Through Malden, and across the sea,
In war and howling, death and woe.
The Rhine was red with human blood,
The Danube rolled a purple tide;
On the Euphrates Satan stood,
And over Asia stretched his pride.
He withered up sweet Zion’s hill
From every nation of the earth;
He withered up Jerusalem’s gates,
And in a dark land gave her birth.
He withered up the human form
By laws of sacrifice for sin,
Till it became a mortal worm,
But O, translucent all within!
The Divine Vision still was seen,