Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes

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       FOUR A Boy’s Poems 1768-77 [ÆT. 11-20]

      The poetical essays of the years of youth and apprenticeship, are preserved in the thin octavo, Poetical Sketches by W. B., printed by help of friends in 1783, and now so rare, that after some years’ vain attempt, I am forced to abandon the idea of myself owning the book. I have had to use a copy borrowed from one of Blake’s surviving friends. In such hands alone, linger, I fancy, the dozen copies or so still extant. There is (of course) none where, at any rate, there should be one – in the British Museum.

      ‘Tis hard to believe these poems were written in the author’s teens, harder still to realize how some of them, in their unforced simplicity, their bold and careless freedom of sentiment and expression, came to be written at all in the third quarter of the eighteenth century: the age ‘of polished phraseology and subdued thought,’ – subdued with a vengeance. It was the generation of Shenstone, Langhorne, Mason, Whitehead, the Wartons; of obscurer Cunningham, Lloyd, Carter. Volumes of concentrated Beauties of English Poetry, volumes as fugitive often as those of original verse, are literary straws which indicate the set of the popular taste. If we glance into one of this date, – say into that compiled towards the close of the century, by one Mr Thomas Tompkins, and which purports to be a collection (expressly compiled ‘to enforce the practice of Virtue’) of ‘Such poems as have been universally esteemed the first ornaments of our language’, – who are the elect? We have in great force the names just enumerated, and among older poets then read and honoured, to the exclusion of Chaucer and the Elizabethans, so imposing a muster-roll as – Parnell, Mallett, Blacklock, Addison, Gay, and, ascending to the highest heaven of the century’s Walhalla, Goldsmith, Thomson, Gray, Pope; with a little of Milton and Shakspere thrown in as make-weight.

      Where, beyond the confines of his own most individual mind, did the hosier’s son find his model for that lovely web of rainbow fancy already quoted? I know of none in English literature. For the Song commencing

      ‘My silks and fine array,’

      with its shy evanescent tints and aroma as of pressed rose-leaves, parallels may be found among the lyrics of the Elizabethan age: an alien though it be in its own. The influence of contemporary models, unless it be sometimes Collins or Thompson, is nowhere in the volume discernible; but involuntary emulation of higher ones partially known to him: of the Reliques given to the world by Percy in 1760; of Shakspere, Spenser, and other Elizabethans. For the youth’s choice of masters was as unfashionable in Poetry as in Design. Among the few students or readers in that day of Shakspere’s Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Sonnets, of Ben Jonson’s Underwoods and Miscellanies, the boy Blake was, according to Malkin, an assiduous one. The form of such a poem as

      ‘Love and harmony combine,’

      is inartificial and negligent; but incloses the like intangible spirit of delicate fancy: a lovely blush of life as it were, suffusing the enigmatic form. Even schoolboy blunders against grammar, and schoolboy complexities of expression, fail to break the musical echo, or mar the naïve sweetness of the two concluding stanzas; which, in practised hands, might have been wrought into more artful melody, with little increase of real effect. Again, how many reams of scholastic Pastoral have missed the simple gaiety of one which does not affect to be a ‘pastoral’ at all:–

      ‘I love the jocund dance.’

      Of the remarkable Mad Song extracted by Southey in his Doctor, who probably valued the thin octavo, as became a great Collector, for its rarity and singularity, that poet has said nothing to show he recognized its dramatic power, the daring expression of things otherwise inarticulate, the unity of sentiment, the singular truth with which the key-note is struck and sustained, or the eloquent, broken music of its rhythm.

      The ‘marvellous Boy’ that ‘perished in his pride,’ (1770) while certain of these very poems were being written, amid all his luxuriant promise, and memorable displays of Talent, produced few so really original as some of them. There are not many more to be instanced of quite such rare quality. But all abound in lavish if sometimes unknit strength. Their faults are such alone as flow from youth, as are inevitable in one whose intellectual activity is not sufficiently logical to reduce his imaginings into sufficiently clear and definite shape. As examples of poetic power and freshness quickening the imperfect, immature form, take his verses To the Evening Star, in which the concluding lines subside into a reminiscence, but not a slavish one, of Puck’s Night Song in Midsummer Night’s Dream; or the lament To the Muses, – not inapposite surely, when it was written; or again, the full-coloured invocation To Summer.

      In a few of the poems, the influence of Blake’s contemporary, Chatterton, – of the Poems of Rowley, i.e., is visible. In the Prologue to King John, Couch of Death, Samson, &c., all written in measured prose, the influence is still more conspicuous of Macpherson’s Ossian, which had taken the world by storm in Blake’s boyhood, and in his manhood was a ruling power in the poetic world. In the ‘Prophetic’ and too often incoherent rhapsodies of later years this influence increases unhappily, leading the prophet to indulge in vague, impalpable personifications, as dim and monotonous as a moor in a mist. To the close of his life, Blake retained his allegiance to Ossian and Rowley. ‘I believe,’ writes he, in a MS. note (1826) on Wordsworth’s Supplementary Essay, ‘I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton: that what they say is ancient, is so.’ And again, when the Lake Poet speaks contemptuously of Macpherson, ‘I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other poet whatever, of Rowley and СКАЧАТЬ