so impersonal that the lovers in this mystical song might equally well be love, poetry, music, beauty, man or woman. Love and harmony combine, Joys upon our branches sit, Thou the golden fruit dost bear, Thy sweet boughs perfume the air, There she sits and feeds her young, There his charming nest doth lay, And doth among our branches play. 1 Such is love, as represented in Blake's poetry: a vague feeling of reverence and adoration, mingled with intense desire. Its deceptions produce at one time the tender lamentations of a maiden, at another the wild howlings of a fiend. Its triumph is a hymn of joy, chanted in a garden of eternal youth. But it is not human love, as we know it, with its deep and at times heartrending music, its sudden ebullitions and overmastering storms. If, however, mysticism has the effect of destroying or attenuating this personal love and its selfish passions, it has the compensating result of increasing the sentiment of universal sympathy and the primitive feeling of fellowship with all created beings. Blake's work is full of this sympathy and this feeling. His love has as its object, not only man, but all creatures, animals, even all plants and stones, beneath each of which he perceived a soul resembling his own. None of his predecessors had ever enjoyed such intimate communion with the world of animals and of 1 Poetical Sketches: Song. inert nature. Others had regarded these as wonders of creation, as examples of God's goodness; had admired them for their beauty, caressed and praised them as faithful servants or lovable companions. But no one had ever loved them as equals, as a brother or a sister might be loved. We must go back to the old Indian philosophers, or to mediæval mystics like St. Francis of Assisi, to find this sentiment of brotherhood with animals, plants and inanimate things, this immense feeling of tenderness towards them, in which there is neither condescending pity nor any sense of man's superiority. To Blake, they were all spirits, like himself. He went farther even than most mystics to him, the stone, the cloud, the clod of clay, were not merely each the abode of a spirit, but the spirits themselves, thus made visible to our eyes. He, who could "see a world in a grain of sand," who found in the caterpillar on the leaf an image of the sorrows of motherhood, who heard the cherubim's song interrupted by the wounding of a lark, was able also to describe in touching words the emotions of the flower or the sparrow, the desire for love felt by the clod of clay, the sadness of the sick rose, or the infinite longings of the sunflower. To him, nothing is insignificant: all things are equal in the world of the eternal. What seems a trifle to others, fills him full of smiles or tears." He represents himself as a sower who would cast his seed on the sand rather than tear up "some stinking weed." 1 Of him, as of the Man of Sorrows, might it have been written that he would not break the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. Blake would never have declared that he loved the spider and the nettle because other men hated them. That would have been the love that springs from pity. He loved them because they were his equals. Sterne's hero refused to kill a fly, since the world was large enough for it and him. Blake thought the same. But he went further, and saw the fly as a man, and himself as a fly. He ended by identifying himself with it. For I dance And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing. If thought is life And strength and breath, Of thought is death; Then am I A happy fly If I live Or if I die. 1 His soul is one with the soul of all creatures: he feels with them and for them. His immense sympathy is like God's. And can he who smiles on all Hear the wren with sorrows small, And not sit beside the nest, Weeping tear on infant's tear? 2 He has brought his own feelings into harmony with those of all these dumb creatures. But, at least as far as we can understand them, they are very simple feelings, very usual and at the same time very indefinite. What kind of emotions can be shared by all animals? Only the desire for life and the joy of living, physical needs and their satisfaction, and, in certain cases, affection for offspring and other animals of their own species, or for man. If we take a plant or a mineral, it is only by an effort of the imagination that we can endow them with a personality—and then they will become men—or even grant them a single feeling: knowledge of, and pleasure in, their own existence. The psychology of such beings must be very simple, and Blake perceived this clearly. Perhaps because his own spirit was such a simple one, he never endowed them with the complex soul of a man. His incapacity for psychological analysis and minute observation here becomes a virtue. He has felt and expressed in a very remarkable Songs of Experience. The Fly. Songs of Innocence: On Another's Sorrow. 1 2 way the primitive desires, joys and sorrows of every sort of creature ; the feelings of which the actual essence of life is composed. He has entered into the enjoyments of the bird and the flower. Merry, Merry Sparrow ! Under leaves so green, A happy Blossom Sees you, swift as arrow, To the Lamb, he has spoken his own simple and tender language. Little Lamb who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed, Little Lamb who made thee? Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, He has heard the ant which has lost its way among the grass, weeping for its little ones left at home. "O, my children! do they cry? Pitying I drop'd a tear; But I saw a glow-worm near, 1 Songs of Innocence: The Blossom. 2 Songs of Innocence: The Lamb. "I am set to light the ground, He has wept over the robin, perched "in the foodless winter," << on leafless bush or frozen stone." 2 It is remarkable that the creatures he prefers are always the smallest and weakest. He seldom mentions those that might provoke any feeling of fear. The ox moaning in the slaughterhouse calls forth his compassion. The lion is only a symbol of mighty spirits with long golden hair. The tiger, in the poem which is perhaps the best known among all Blake's work, arouses admiration for his strength and his terrifying aspect. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In what distant deeps or skies And what shoulder, and what art, What dread hand? and what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain ? What the anvil? what dread grasp When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 3 1 Songs of Innocence: A Dream. 3 Songs of Experience: The Tyger. 2 Vala, Night I, 375. |