William Blake. Osbert Burdett

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      “The Lamb,” the “Laughing Song,” the almost monosyllabic lines to Spring, which seem as if they issued from a cradle, the lovely “Nurse’s Song,” in which the nurse becomes the eldest of her charges for a moment, and the voice of play seems naturally to sing, are absolutely childlike. There are others, however, in which the poet allows a glimpse of his hand to appear, as in “The Divine Image” and the haunting stanzas of “Night,” which Swinburne declared to be of the “loftiest loveliness.” There are poems which tell stories and poems which speak of religion, making simple lessons to explain a child’s feelings about sorrow and pain. So finely are these verses adjusted to their end that we hardly know whether the mother or her infant is reflecting. Indeed the second childhood of humanity is the blessing of those who have children of their own and are deeply connected to them.

      Perhaps only a poet such as Blake, who had read no fine literature except through childlike eyes, could have written such things. There is in them an innocence of heart that is not to be found in Shakespeare. A few have the quality of children’s hymns, in which God appears as a loving Father, and mercy, pity, peace, and love, the virtues of childhood at its rare best, become the lineaments of His “divine image.” The occasional moral, as at the end of The Chimney Sweeper, is transformed by the poetry into an exquisite platitude of the world, as it can be represented to children in the school-room. This completes the nursery atmosphere. Note, too, that the shepherd, the sheep, the cradle, and the rest are nursery symbols, thus enabling Blake to pass from the lamb to “Him who bore its name” without any change of tone. The emotions aroused by this poetry are instinctive and almost as characteristic of animals as of men. Indeed, it celebrates the life, motions, and feelings of all young things, with the apparent artlessness of a lamb’s bleat or the cry of a bird, or a baby’s shout of astonishment or pleasure. By returning to these elements, poetry seems to return to its own infancy, and the language is almost as free from meaning, apart from emotion, as a child’s prattle.

      Both meaning and observation, even of social life, appear in Songs of Experience, the companion volume of 1794. These darker songs, along with the group often called Ideas of Good and Evil, or the Rossetti MS., are a convenient bridge between the simple lyric poetry with which Blake began and the complex prophecies that were to follow. The scene tends to shift from the nursery to the school-room, from the green to the church, from the open country to the city. We pass from feeling to observation, and the poems that touch on love reveal its pitfalls. Jealousy and prohibitions, whether personal or ecclesiastical, are illustrated in their lines. Mr. Ellis has reconstructed a situation that would explain the references to those who are curious of Blake’s erotic life. The famous “Tiger” is of course here, and with Mr. Sampson’s aid we can trace every variant in its gradual composition. The number of revisions reminds us of the care that Blake would spend upon his form, and which he claimed to have spent later on his prophecies, where the ending of his lines can, in fact, be shown to depend upon the decoration surrounding them. In his own work, poetry was to yield to decoration, and there can be no doubt that design was the principal preoccupation of his mind. The first ecstasy of conscious life is complicated with a growing knowledge of good and evil, and the music of the verse will bear the burden of this trouble without caring to assign a cause. Such lines as: “Ah, sun-flower! weary of time, / Who countest the steps of the sun” are the music of heaviness of heart, as the lines to the infant had been the music of gladness. When he observes his fellow-men fallen into the bonds of cold reason and dull experience, he wonders “How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” And he finds the explanation not in their circumstances but in themselves: “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”

      William Blake, Illustration from The First Book of Urizen, plate 6, 1794.

      Colour relief etching, with added hand colouring, 14.8 × 10.4 cm.

      The British Museum, London.

      All forms of external control were to Blake the enemy of imagination, and he was right in so far as the dictates of wisdom have little use until justified by personal experience. All the rest is morality, which, so long as it remains repressive СКАЧАТЬ