to remind the world that the excesses of insight and private judgment are no less disastrous than the formalism against which he was protesting. He was perfectly equipped with talent and skill to write the Songs of Innocence. He was sufficiently equipped to divine the age of experience that lies immediately ahead. He was not equipped at all to create a new literary form for his profounder imaginings, and he remains a warning that genius which disdains the tools of tradition and all critical discipline risks being punished for its beauty. To endeavour, as Blake was to endeavour, to make the sublime the foundation instead of the crown of poetry is to sacrifice the means to the end, to rebuild the Tower of Babel, and to incur the penalty of confusion. In place of the epic temple that he promised, we have sublime ruins, only less artificial and picturesque than those visible constructions that beguiled the fancy of ambitious noblemen on the country estates of the time.
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 5, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 2, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
Even in the Poetical Sketches we observe the conflict between Blake’s wild imagination and his fragile technique. Before his technique was overwhelmed by an urgent inner message, Blake’s literary gifts were at their nearest, short-lived moment of equilibrium. Too specific in their content, they may be studied briefly for their form, and for ominous indications of his later manner. Every characteristic of Blake’s ultimate achievement in letters – his music, his magic, his flashes of imagination, his sudden insensitive lines – is somewhere or other to be discerned in them. In the earliest song to be approximately dated:
How sweet I roam’d from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
these last two lines are already a picture, a vision clear in outline which seems designed for such a draughtsman and engraver as the boy Blake was about to become. This pictorial quality is characteristic of all the Poetical Sketches. It is not merely that the metaphor becomes a symbol, but that the symbol is an image vivid enough to possess an independent life of its own. This song and its companions might almost belong to an Elizabethan songbook, were it not for a mysterious gleam that makes the poem more than a song and less than a hymn by some supernatural note of ecstasy. Already the Elizabethan directness, its natural innocence of eye, is shot with something from afar, an eerie hint of magic more subtle than the simpler wizardry of Spenser’s[5] time and without Donne’s[6] metaphysical grotesquerie. I find a suggestion of this transfiguration in the third stanza:
With sweet May dews my wings were wet
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
The aura of enchantment here hints at more than the white magic of childhood or Elizabethan fancy. It is a shadow in the sunlight of a mysterious presence from the void beyond his beams. The poet is already possessed and distraught by a demon.
These lines already carry the echoes of Fletcher[7] and Chatterton.[8] Let us examine part of another poem, the “Mad-Song” and its beautiful fellow:
Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes:
And while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 6, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 10, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
These lines suggest similar comparisons, with an intricacy that is usually the sign of a recovered, not simply original, form. There was a lot of impulse at this time in the English imagination, for, though Blake could hardly have known of him before 1777, we know that Chatterton also was possessed by it. His “Sing unto my Roundelay” might be its brother. Chatterton had died in 1770, and the first collection of the “Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley”[9] did not appear until Blake was twenty years old, by which time, according to the Advertisement to the Poetical Sketches printed in 1783, the contents of Blake’s earliest book had been already written.
The songs “Love and Harmony combine” and “I love the jocund dance” are full of a childlike simplicity, peculiar to Blake himself, an unspoilt modern child still living in Eden. In the songs written for the four seasons, we find his first experiments in unrhymed verse, perhaps attempted after reading Milton’s preface. The faint irregularity of these pieces, wavering from the normal measure, is captivating for its variation upon a never abandoned but continually modulated rhythmic strain. The opening line of the song, “O Winter, bar thine adamantine doors,” evokes another picture, scarcely needing Blake’s engraver to become an image visible to the eye. In the following stanza, again, the creature, “whose skin clings / To his strong bones [and] strides o’er the groaning rocks,” is the father of all Blake’s monsters, a monster invented by a creator already in love with the muscular anatomy of Michelangelo. These four songs pause at the end of each stanza. Each is a quatrain or sestet, and the effect of this pause is to make the absence of rhyme almost unfelt. “To the Evening Star” and “To Morning” are blank verse, with a magical lyric difference. The “lion’s glare” first appears in the former, and the coming of the tiger is foreshadowed in this song. Only “Fair Elenor” and “Gwin, King of Norway” suggest uninspired imitations. The admiration that Blake was later to confess for Ossian,[10] who was given to the world in 1760, and the probable effect of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) need no more than passing mention. Save in these two pieces and in the imperfect burlesque in the current fashion, called “Blind Man’s Buff,” Blake’s Poetical Sketches are beyond, rather than the product of, his age.
The Muse was growing weary of tripping to formal measures. She wanted to feel herself free from the apron-strings of the couplet, to play, to dance, to be enthusiastic once more. She envied the Elizabethans for their “barbarous” energy, for their adventurous spirit, for the easy grace of their songs, for their natural music, to which she turns as does the townsman when he leaves the dusty city for green hills. Between herself
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) was an English poet and Poet Laureate (officially appointed by the government). He is well known for his poem
John Donne (1572-March 31, 1631) was an English Jacobean poet and a figure among the metaphysical poets of his time. He is well known for his realistic, sensual and satirist poetry. He was later criticised for his use and abuse of the metaphor.
John Fletcher (1579–1625) was a Jacobean playwright. A close collaborator to Shakespeare, he was regarded as one of the most popular writers of his time and a key figure in the transition from the Elizabethan tradition to the Restoration.
Thomas Chatterton (November 20, 1752-August 24, 1770) was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. Committing suicide at seventeen to escape from starvation, he was considered an icon of unacknowledged genius by the Romantics.
Thomas Rowley was Chatterton’s pseudonym for poetry and history.
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems. In 1760, the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated his works from sources in Gaelic.
