"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 Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 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. But this is almost the only case in which Blake strikes this strong and energetic note in singing of the animal world. Everywhere else he depicts it as being mild like the world of childhood, with its simple joys and quickly passing sorrows. And this simplicity of feeling explains, to a great extent, why Blake was, at one period, the poet par excellence of childhood. If there is indeed, in human life, a time when our joys and desires are the same as those of universal nature, and probably also the same as those of Blake's supernatural world, that time is the time of childhood. Then the soul, fresh from the bright abode in which it has slept through all ages, is still in the ecstasy of its former bliss: it has not yet felt the chains of the material world, which will soon press so heavily upon it. Then, too, it still enjoys the innocence of nature and of the angelic world, the innocence of a creature knowing neither doubt nor evil, whose joy is pure, with no thought of the future, and whose dreams are full of light, with no underlying shadow. This was man's state in Eden: it is the Golden Age restored to us. No one has ever been so well able as Blake to bring his soul into harmony with the soul of childhood. He became as a child. Like a child he uttered almost inarticulate cries of joy. He spoke the infantile language, from that of the new-born baby to that of the little chimneysweep describing the bright dream which has consoled him. His Songs of Innocence-real poetic jewels, every one of which deserves quotation—are just such as every child delights to listen to. In them we find the closest intermingling of the child's life with that of the animals, those eternal children, filled and not yet troubled by the same desires and the same joys. Later, when these childish feelings have come into contact with life, their note grows sadder. Experience comes, and shows desires checked by moral and physical laws, jealous and egotistical love accompanying sincere, unselfish love, light struggling against darkness. Joy turns to sorrow. But-and here we see once more the influence of mysticism-it is sorrow mingled with resignation. The soul does not argue or rebel. It has kept the pure faith of childhood, while gaining the man's experience. For does not the mystic know that it is the same hand which makes the lamb and the tiger? Does he not await the deliverance that will quickly come, and the opening of the golden gates? Does he not realise that sorrow is itself an illusion, which will soon vanish for ever? His, therefore, will be a tempered grief deep but calm, as in face of the inevitable. Blake felt this; and it is this he has tried to express in the Songs of Experience, a collection of poems which is also rich in beauties. Here we find portrayed, for instance, the sorrows of the rose and of the sunflower. O Rose, thou art sick! Has found out thy bed And his dark secret love Here, the rose shows its thorns; the Garden of Love is filled with graves. Here, the Spirit of the Earth groans under the restrictions imposed upon love: youth and maiden stray from their parents, and return only to fill them with sorrow. Here, Christianity loses its true self, and becomes a religion of oppression: the little vagabond turns from the cold church to the well-warmed ale-house: the Divine Image takes on a cruel human form: deceitful smiles make their appearance even in the dreams of a child. Little wonder that the new-born babe, in its father's arms, struggles against its swaddling bands, and sulks upon the breast of its weeping mother. Little wonder that the book ends with a curse upon the mother of this body of death and of evil, and with a cry of triumph over the deliverance from it which Christ has brought. 2 Here the feelings of the mystic have already begun to be different from ours. Looking far back into the past, we can recall a little of what we experienced in childhood: we can perhaps dream over again some few of those long-lost joys when we see the light that shines in the eyes of our own children. But their simplicity of spirit is far, indeed, from us, and far also from us the attenuated sorrow of the Songs of Experience. Later on, we shall find Blake becoming still more alien to us, by reason of his peculiar sentiments. All that is purely human tends more and more to disappear from his work. In the Prophetic Books, his emotions are mingled with those of spirits from above: the feelings he experiences end by fading away into vacancy. Man's soul can only attach itself to what it can perceive and grasp. Little by little, Blake 1 Songs of Experience: The Sick Rose. 2 A more detailed study of the Songs of Experience, with numerous extracts, will be found in Chapter XIX. passes from his love for a young girl, from his delight in the pleasures of childhood and his grief at its sorrows, to sympathy for a bodiless spirit symbolising an idea, like Thel or Oothoon, or even for a misty abstract conception, as in The Mental Traveller. In the end, all that he seems to feel is love alone, without any definite object, viewed as the simple growth of a desire. This love, which cannot be bound To any tree that grows on ground. 1 is, as a consequence, incapable of any earthly satisfaction. It demands the infinite, the Eternal, for its fruition. The mystic's ecstasy, the Divine Vision, can alone content it. There only is to be found that Eternal Brotherhood of Eden which is "the divine body of the Saviour... the Human imagination." " Blake has himself supplied the word: the Imagination. And, indeed, his love is no longer a thing of the heart, but has its source in the imagination, through which alone we can, like the mystics, detach ourselves from this passing world. Without it, we cannot rise to the heights that they reached. We see and wonder; but we shall never attain. Mysticism, which in the beginning gave its peculiar charm to Blake's poetical expression of his emotions, ended by killing in them all that could find an echo in our own hearts. It destroyed, in fact, one of the chief elements in lyrical poetry, the personal and human note, which is almost entirely absent throughout the greater part of the Prophetic Books, leaving them to depend altogether for their interest upon the extraordinary splendour of the poet's imagination. 1 Rossetti MS No 13. In a Mirtle Shade. Last Judgment. A XVII: THE IMAGINATION N analogous influence of mysticism, a kind of evolution of the superhuman out of the human, can be clearly seen in Blake's chief poetic faculty-his imagination. This evolution is the more important because he regarded imagination as the principal, if not the only source of poetry. We have already seen how his imagination took possession of his abstract ideas, transforming them into allegories and setting them forth in symbolic language; how all his feelings, his affections, his sympathy for all created beings, needed imagination to give them vital force. It is at the root of all his poetry and of all his doctrine: to it his writings as well as his worlds owe their existence. It is his directing power, the embodiment, for him, of all poetic inspiration: he assimilates it with all the other faculties, and makes it control them. Nay more, it is the one link between man and the world of the Eternal : it is, to use his own expression," the divine body of the Saviour." At all events, it is the soul of his poetry and of his art. Imagination is, for him, the direct vision of the visible world, and also of the world of the unseen. It is a faculty quite different not only from the imagination of ordinary men but from that of most poets. With very rare exceptions, all that imagination can do is to create a mental picture of actual objects which, for the time being, are not before us, or to form some fanciful combination of elements belonging to the world of reality. But it very seldom annihilates this world. When we are looking at any particular scene or object, its sole effect is to make us see certain portions of it in a stronger light, and cast others into the background, to strengthen and vivify the image presented by our eye, and, as Shelley so forcibly puts it," to create that which we see.' ." But underneath, there always remains some foundation of reality perceptible by the senses. Even the most imaginative among the poets never lose sight of this reality, and all that many of them can do is to evoke it by their words when it is absent. For Blake, the material image does not exist, except as a glass through which we must look to see the truth. Those who look no further are blind, and possess only the power of "single vision," |