The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic and critical/2/Minor Poems

by Edwin Ellis and William Butler Yeats

MINOR POEMS.

William Bond.	Daybreak.
Mary.	Thames and Ohio.
The Crystal Cabinet.	Young Love.
The Chapel of Gold.	Seed-sowing.
Love's Secret.	Night and Day.
The Golden Net.	In a Myrtle Shade.
The Wild Flower's Song.	Idolatry.
Scoffers.

It has been suggested that in order to understand the poem "William Bond," we must read the title "William Blake." Then we are to remember that Blake is supposed to have at one time intended to add a concubine to his establishment in imitation of the characters in the Old Testament, but Mrs. Blake cried, and he gave up the plan. There is at least as much to be said against this interpretation as in favour of it.

The fairies and angels are of sufficient importance in the poem to be considered first. In "Jerusalem," p. 13, l. 29, sixty-four thousand fairies guard the southern gate. In p. 36, ll. 34, 37, fairies are named first of the quaternary, and are ravening death-like forms of the elements, and as states permanently fixed by the Divine Power. On p. 63, l. 14, when the giants and witches and ghosts of Albion dance with Thor and Friga, fairies lead the moon along the valley of Cherubim, bleeding in torrents from mountain to mountain, a lonely victim. The fairy that dictates "Europe" is a mocking and cruel little sprite, who demands to be fed of thoughts of love and sparkling poetic fancies.

Fairies need no more explanation. They are small copies of Fuzon. They belong to the South—eyes, marriage. They receive orders from male desire and give it to that of the female. They are true portions of spiritual experience, and have a right to be visible, even when they are "put off" as all states may be, or die and are buried.

Angels of Providence are not necessarily pure, holy, attractive, superior beings. In " Jerusalem," p. 50, ll. 4, 5, there is a Providence mentioned, who is, like the slaughtering commander of the sack of cities and the massacre of innocents in the Old Testament, a "murderous Providence, opposed to the Divine Lord Jesus." But the murdering done is not merely that of the outer spheres of creation where life lives on death, but enters within and destroys the soul with self-righteousness. This " Providence " (for which, perhaps, a more unsuitable name could not be found) is he whom we are told in the New Testament to fear, because after he has destroyed the body he is able to destroy the soul also.

Some attempt may be made now to understand the poem, but it is undoubtedly among the most difficult in the whole of Blake's collected works. William Bond, whom perhaps the girls mean to kill (it is not said how, but may be understood best in a spiritual sense), goes to church and submits his mind to literal dogma, attended by lower spiritual powers of love and vision. But the spiritual strength of the influences of obedience appear in the form of angels, and drive the pretty impulses away. (Urizen's bands of angels and warriors are also bands of influences that can divide and act in groups. " Vala," Night II. l. 21.)

William Bond entered into the darkest of Urizen's clouds, when he is the Primal Priest in the North, and taking to his bed prepared to die — as Urizen himself did more than once. The depressing influences of the obedient spirits stand at his head and feet, and watch his death. He is now in danger of being good for morality's sake, and not for love's sake — and this is death.

On his right hand was Mary Green. But why she is to be identified with Blake's wife if William Bond was Blake it is hard to see. She might at least have been called Mary Bond— if not Kate at once, if such were the intention. The introduction of the "sister Jane" is also obscure. Blake's sister formed part of his household at Felpham, but there is no record of the concubine incident as having to do with his life there.

Mary, having heard that William loves another, proposes to be her servant, while this other is to be the wife of William. It is never supposed that Mrs. Blake made any such impossible proposition. William accepts this from Mary Green who is not Mrs. Bond, and explains that the reason is that she is melancholy and pale. This equally puts Mrs. Blake out of the caste, for she was a bright brunette, and never was known to be melancholy during Blake's life.

Finding her sacrifice accepted, Mary faints away and nearly dies. She is laid by William. The fairies go to her. The angels leave him. William and Mary then love each other and are happy. William, in the moral of the poem, incidentally hints that Mary was "naked and outcast." Once more, not Mrs. Blake.

The poem of "William Bond" should be read with the poem called "Mary." Here is the "Mary Green," though her surname is not given. Here are lines about Mary —

"Oh, why was I born with a different face;

Why was I not born like this envious race?"

which occur also in one of Blake's letters from Felpham, August lGth, 1803, where they are added to and used by Blake as referring to himself. In the letter the lines run thus : —

"Oh, why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

When I look, each one starts, when I speak, I offend;

Then I'm silent and passive and lose every friend.

Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise,

My person degrade and my temper chastise;

And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame;

All my talents I bury, and dead is my fame.

I am either too low or too highly priz'd;

When elate I'm envied ; when meek I'm despised. "This," he adds, "is but too true a picture of my present state. I pray God to keep you from it and to deliver me in his own good time."

Mary, after uttering the lament of the first two lines, says that to be weak and smooth and not raise envy is "called Christian love." But that if you raise envy and plant spite in the tame and weak, "your merit" is to blame. She goes on : —

"I will humble my beauty, I will not dress fine,

I will keep from the ball and my eyes shall not shine.

If any girl's lover forsake her for me,

I'll refuse him my hand and from envy be free."

Then Mary went out, "plain and neat" in her dress, and people said she had gone mad. She returned at evening bespattered with mire. She sat trembling on her bed, forgetting night and morning, absorbed with the memory of scornful faces. Her own face is a face of sweet, despairing love, mild sorrow and care, wild terror and fear. In this life it shall know no quiet.

This is the "naked and outcast Mary Green," and not Mrs. Blake, but a phase of Blake's own personality that he chastised and cast out in order not to raise envy. He learns from it that not merely art and fame are worthy of love. Then he enlarges the lesson, and loves the spiritually naked and outcast. Here comes the biographical element, for Mrs. Blake's artistic helplessness might perhaps have been among the rejected "states and spaces "who merited love in their humbleness. But "Mary Green" is more than a personage disguised. She is a mood expressed, a State and, as such, of much more universal interest and artistic importance than an individual. "States are combinations of Individuals."

Less quaint than either of these poems is that called the "Crystal Cabinet," with regard to whose meaning the reader of to-day has once again a standard but erroneous interpretation to clear away from the entrance before he can enter in. The "maiden" in the "Crystal Cabinet" has not, it is true, been supposed to be this terrible but nameless female who has haunted tradition as Blake's bad angel made flesh. If Blake had only begun "William Bond" more conventionally with tho word "maids" where he has written "girls," even that poem might have eluded the biographer. The "Crystal Cabinet" has been the occasion of a yet more unfortunate suggestion. A foot-note in the Aldine edition explains it as giving "under a very ideal form the phenomena of gestation and birth." This is Interpretation at its wit's end, and is likely to produce more anger than laughter in any real reader of Blake. It is adopted with amazing gravity in the last edition of Gilchrist. Mr. Rossetti enforces his idea by citing the verses from Felphain that tell of Blake's visionary faculty, as

"Three-fold in soft Beulah's night;"

and the passage in the "Descriptive Catalogue," telling how the "Three Men" in his " Ancient Britons," namely, the Strong, the Beautiful, and the Ugly, "were originally one man, who was fourfold ; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation."

These passages, it is evident, do not support the " gestation" theory of the "Crystal Cabinet" at all. Some lines in "Jerusalem," p. 70, l. 18, &c, would have been of more use, especially as they belong to a date near that when the "Crystal Cabinet" may be presumed to have been written. But in spite of the obvious appropriateness none of the early editors, who had done everything with Blake except (as charity must needs suppose) read him, have thought it useful to refer us to the passage.

The whole of p. 70 is appropriate. It begins with the form of mighty Hand, sitting on Albion's cliffs, threatening Albion. He has three heads that contradict one another, and it is his opinion that ideas are nothing, but that all wisdom consists in the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Bacon, Newton, and Locke are the presiding spirits of his three heads. Below these : —

"Imputing Siu and Righteousness to Individuals, Rahab

Sat deep within him hid, his Feminine Power unrevealed,

Brooding abstract philosophy to destroy Imagination the Divine —

Humanity : a Three-fold Wonder ; feminine, most beautiful ; Three-fold

Each within the other. On her white marble and even neck, her heart

In-orbed and bonified with locks of shadowing modesty, shining

Beams mild, all love and all perfection, that when the lips

Receive a kiss from gods or men, a threefold kiss returns

From the pressed loveliness ; so her whole immortal form threefold,

Threefold embrace returns, consuming lives of gods and men

In fires of beauty, melting them as gold and silver in the furnace.

Her brain enlabyrinths the whole heaven of her bosom and loins,

To put in act what her heart wills. Oh, who can withstand her power ?

Her name is Vala in Eternity. In time her name is Rahab."

She is, in fact, the mass of meanings (most of which are brought together for reference in the chapter on the Symbol of the Worm), that terrible being to whom Job said, "Thou art my mother.'"

In "Lafayette" the King of France and the Queen are not without points of affinity with the satanic aspects of Luvah and Yala — in which they are doiug the work of Urizen-in- North and Rahab. Their positions are not sufficiently developed in these few verses to make it possible to give them their exact place in the great myth, but that they are modern names applied, on a hint given by passing events, to the great groups of the States is evident. They both belong to the destructive. They contain the first elements of the ideas afterwards developed in the part of the "Song of Los" called Asia, where

"The Kings of Asia stood

And cried in bitterness of soul,

Shall not the King call for famine from the heath

And the priest for pestilence from the fen

To restrain, to dismay, to thin

The inhabitants of mountain and plain

In the day of full feeding prosperity

And the night of delicious songs ?

* * * *

To restrain the child from the womb.

* * * *

That the pride of the heart may fail,

That the lust of the eyes may be quenched,

That the delicate ear in its infancy

May be dulled, and the nostrils closed up." Here the "priest" ploys the part given to the queen in the poem. The "pestilence" is that same disease of the soul, namely doubt of imagination and belief in nature, equally brought about by fleshly indulgence and fleshly restraint. The "famine" that the kings call for is a famine of spiritual food because they believe that the sword is- the supporter of states. Blake held that art supported states because it could be, and should be, used for spiritual advancement on which alone brotherhood could be based. The sword shrunk up the senses of mau, and by limiting each individual limited the state.

By looking at all " false starts and variations," which the editor of the Aldine edition says have ' ' complicated " the poem in the MS., we can find in it something more than an "extremely curious" indication of Blake's "conceptions of contemporary history and politics."

Of all history and politics he had only one conception, — that they were visions drawn out in " strong delusive light of time and space," but would yield symbolic significance if looked at through the altering eye that perceives them as though they were of the South and not of the North among mental Regions.

La Fayette is the type of those who are deceived by the tears of Urizen, and who give themselves as agents to tyranny instead of to sympathy, for the tears of Urizen are nets that bind man to his image. The smiles of Rahab have the same effect. Both "restrain " the true man from development into love and life.

The poem began thus —

"Let the Brothels of Paris be opened

With many an alluring dance,

To awake the Pestilence through the city; "

Said the beautiful Queen of France.

(Pestilence was afterwards altered to physicians.)

"The King awoke on his couch of gold

As soon as he heard these tidings told,

'Arise and come, both fife and drum,

And the famine shall eat both crust and crumb.'

Then old Nobodaddy aloft

(erased) . . . . and coughed,

And said, I love hanging and drawing and quartering

Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."

The broken line may still be read as containing an indiscreet word or two unfit for poetry as for publication, and the printer may well respect Blake's erasure. Old Nobodaddy has had the pen drawn through him also, but he is here restored because he explains the idea of the King of France by the fact that one name was substituted for the other when the poem was sketched, both having the same meaning, that of the God of Battles and of executions whose attributes of the sword and the gallows were enough to identify him with Satan in Blake's theology. He is "Urizen drawn down into generation by Orc and the shadowy female" in the extra page of "Milton" written many years later.

The poem, as it first formed itself in the author's mind, went on thus — with old Nobodaddy's speech :

" Damn praying and singing

Unless they will bring in

The blood of ten thousand by fighting or surgery,"

and this was hastily crossed out and the verse recommenced.

Or surgery, added to the physicians, shows that Blake is not yet far removed from the ideas belonging to the period of the Island in the Moon. His classification of the professions came later. ("Milton," p. 24, 1. 60.)

The poem continues:

" The Queen of France just touched this globe

And the Pestilence darted from her robe,

But the bloodthirsty people across the water

Will not submit to gibbet and halter."

The last two lines crossed out, and the following substituted :

" But our good Queen quite grows to the ground,

There is just such a tree in Java found."

The last line crossed out, and the following substituted :

" And a great many suckers grow all around." This seems to have been too "curious" as a "view of contemporary history and politics/' and though not erased by Blake, has not been published. We see in it a conception of the vegetative world as that into which Ololon could enter in female form, later, but not in a male form without becoming (as Urizen did, under the similar Tree of Mystery) an enemy of the Human (or imaginative) race. (" Milton," p. 36, 1. 14.) La Fayette is at last introduced —

"Fayette beside King Lewis stood,

He saw him sign his hand,

And soon he saw the famine rage

About the fruitful land.

Fayette liked the Queen to smile

And wink her lovely eye, —

And soon he saw the pestilence

From street to street to fly.

Fayette beheld the King and Queen

In tears of iron bound,

But mute Fayette wept tear for tear

And guarded them around.

Fayette, Fayette, thou 'rt bought and sold,

For I will see thy tears

Of pity are exchanged for those

Of selfish slavish fears."

The poem was to end here, but it had not hit the subject in the centre. Blake worried himself to obtain a better rendering for the last verse that should show that he was aiming at something else than rhymed history. He crossed out the last four lines and began —

"Fayette beside King Lewis stood,

His captains false around.

Thou 'rt bought and sold . . . ."

But this brought the lines into too telescopic a compression, and was given up. This was tried —

"Who will exchange his own fireside

For the steps of another's door ?

Who will exchange his wheaten loaf

For the links of a dungeon floor?" This was re-written with stone for steps, and it went on —

"Who will exchange his own heart's blood

For the drops of a harlot's eye ? "

But this was pei'haps too historic and not sufficiently joined by symbolic terms to widen meaning. It was crossed out. So were the following :

"Will the mother exchange her new-born babe

For the dog at the wintry door ?

Yet thou dost exchange thy pitying tears

For the links of a dungeon floor.

Fayette, Fayette, thou 'rt bought and sold,

And sold is thy happy morrow.

Thou gavest the tears of pity away

In exchange for the tears of sorrow."

His dungeon was the net of Urizen, for the next lines are —

"Fayette beheld the King and Queen

In tears of iron bound,

But mute Fayette wept tear for tear

And guarded them around."

The final intention, to judge by the Nos. 1 and 2 written against these two stanzas, seems to have been that they should be the whole poem, and all the rest should be thrown away as not pointed enough. Unfortunately, the word " tears " was exchanged for " curses," in a doubtful moment, and the symbolic value spoiled.

These verses were written after the "Songs of Innocence," and probably before those of "Experience"; certainly before the "Everlasting Gospel," as their position in the MS. Book shows. The " Songs of Experience" were engraved in 1794, and probably written for the most part in 1793. Lafayette was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress of Olmutz, in Moravia, in 1792. Blake may have written after this incident to give expression to the idea that his real imprisonment dated from his sympathy with the "tears of iron" in which the King was bound. These were "chains of the mind," for " a tear is an intellectual thing." The expression, "dog at the wintry door," became a permanent symbol for the needs of the flesh. The new-born child was always the spirit of prophecy. The words " bought and sold" enable us to connect these verses with "Vala," Night I., 1. 462— written about 1797.

"Every tenth man is bought and sold and in dim night my word shall be their law."'

The tears that are chains are necessarily selfish, even where made by delusion from pity. The release is self-annihilation, as taught in " Milton," p. 39, 1. 40, contrary of the satanic teaching.

The "Gates of Paradise/' soon after the "Lafayette," are of incalculable value as interpreting the Prophetic books. Their "keys" will open the meaning of all the myth, though they will not, of course, explain its story.

The " Songs of Experience " would come in here chronologically, but as they have been placed for convenience with the " Songs of Innocence," some of the shorter pieces may be referred to next that need but few words of comment. The "Chapel of Gold" is not readily placed in the symbolic system because of the swine at the end. From a merely literary point of view it is evidently another form of " William Bond," and of "Mary." The golden chapel is the hot sunshine, in which love was first sought. The pig-stye is the moony night. The pigs are the naked and outcast. The serpent's poison is calumny. Each part of this poem finds its counterpart in the others. It seems to have a second meaning, in an artistic sense. The chapel suggests art, or the Temple of Fame. The serpent must be naturalism, the pig-stye the place to which the visionary artist betakes himself, not because, like the Prodigal Son, he has spent his fortune, but because, having none to start with, he refuses to acquire any in what he thinks, artistically considered, to be bad company.

"Love's Secret" and the "Wild Flower's Song" are laments over the impossibility of perfect unreserve in this world if a quiet life is to be lived. They are counterparts to "Mary," and to the "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," where Oothoon is another name for Mary. The "Golden Net" is the story of "pity seeking dominion " in another form. lb belongs, as the "Crystal Cabinet," to the life of Vala who is here seen, not as one virgin three-fold, but as three. The region of the three, it will be noticed, are East, North, West. The Net was disguised in gold to make it seem to be of the South. The idea is, — catch the eye and the man is caught. "What we look on we become."

"Scoffers" belongs to the "Grain of Sand in Lambeth." It explains itself in connection with the symbols in "Jerusalem."

The points of the compass in "Day-break" suggest the journey of Los. He leaves the North, goes through the "terrible East," sees the wars of Urizen and Luvah, and foretells the regeneration of Urizen when he shall arise like the lion in the "Songs of Innocence," whose eyes flowed with golden tears. The Western Path is that towards Eden — outwards every way — in Imagination, and is not here the region of Tharmas, in an evil, dark, vegetative sense. The "Thames and Ohio" are to be read by their regions only, as East and West, in the sense of Void and Eden, or Urizen and the innocent Tharmas.

"Young Love" naturally precedes "William Bond" and might be put into his mouth at the beginning of his story. Passing by "Riches," only noting that world, devil and earthly kings are used as equivalents, and passing "Opportunity" as containing no symbolic enigma, and "Seed-sowing "with the reference to the sowing by Urizen in the ninth book of "Vala" — and passing "Barren Blossom," with the note that it mnst be read with "Milton," extra page 3, we come to "Night and Day," and find ourselves in the presence of the subject of William Bond turned the other way up. Here is no Mary Green, nor Oothoon. Her place is taken by Rahab, the "harlot coy." This is the truth whose contemplation led William Bond into the error of failing to perceive that when seen from another side the same problem would yield a different solution, until Mary's fainting fit at the bedside gave him light. "In a Myrtle shade" is not written merely, as has been supposed, against the chain of marriage and morality, but against that of the flesh itself. Love will not only refuse, when existing in a given lover, to be bound to a woman because this lover is personally united with her in legal marriage. Love refuses to be bound to that other vegetable, the lover's own body, and the mundane shell itself. Love has a right to the "land of dreams beyond the morning star."

"Idolatry" repeats the statement made elsewhere that the classics have the same origin as the Bible, but are perverted as well as stolen from the same sources of inspiration. The "Will and the Way" are the comic equivalent for the sad acknowledgment of the power of reserve in all the romantic poems, which have one single subject wherever found, that it is the nature of bodily tendencies to be frightened at mental enthusiasm, or, as stated in "Jerusalem," the daughters of Albion fly before the Spectre of Los, revealed as undisguised desire, while Los himself dare not approach them openly lest he be vegetated under their looms. ("Jerusalem," p. 17, l. 7.)

Broken Love, the Mental Traveller, and the Everlasting Gospel must be considered more in detail.

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