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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 and the Jacobean singers, however, the Reformation had intervened, and she could not recapture the humanist delight in natural life, in the world that we know, in the simple pleasure of the healthy senses. The old order of belief had been invaded by doubts, by facts, by science. Energy had been replaced by enthusiasm, and few any longer accepted delight in visible beauty as sufficient to stifle the desires of the heart. Merry England had gone for ever, and men were finding a trouble in the soul, a trouble which bewitched the old refrains even when played by those who took most delight in them. The desire to escape was the motive of the coming poetry. Blake takes leave of the eighteenth century in the beautiful criticism contained in his own address “To the Muses”:
Whether in Heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air
Where the melodious winds have birth;
How have you left the ancient love
That bards alone enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few.
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