1Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
5Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
9For I dance,
And drink, & sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
Engraved on a single plate, in double columns, from what is evidently the first draft, without title, on p. 101 of the MS. Book. An uncompleted and deleted stanza shows that before hitting upon this felicitous tiny metre Blake began to write the song in a less sprightly strain —
'Woe! alas! my guilty hand
Brush'd across thy summer joy;
All thy gilded painted pride
Shatter'd, fled ... '
He then turned to the shorter metre, preserving the ' guilty hand ' in the first draft of stanza 1. Then follows a deleted stanza, omitted by him in the engraved version, probably because, since writing the poem, he had used its first two lines as one of his * Proverbs of Hell ' {Marriage of Heaven and Hell):
'The cut worm
Forgives the plow,
And dies in peace,
And so do thou.'
Then come the second, third, and fifth stanzas in their present form, followed by two versions of stanza four, which is an afterthought. Blake then prefixed numbers to the stanzas indicating their present order. A few trifling deviations from the engraved text are given in the footnotes.
2 summer's] summer MS. Book. 3 thoughtless] guilty MS. Book 1st rdg. del. 8 A pictorial representation of the same idea occurs in The Gates of Paradise (engraved 1793, from the original pencil sketches in the MS. Book), in which a youth, hat in hand, chases a butterfly of human shape, labile another, which he has just struck down, lies crushed at his feet. Below is the inscription 'Alas!' Cp. also Milton, f. 18, ll. 27-30.
