VII.
I beheld the priests by night;
They embraced the blossoms bright;
I beheld the priests by day;
Underneath the vines they lay.
VIII.
Like to serpents in the night,
They embraced my blossoms bright;
Like to holy men by day,
Underneath my vines they lay.
IX.
So I smote them, and their gore
Stained the roots my myrtle bore;
But the time of youth is fled,
And grey hairs are on my head."
Now not even the spilt blood of those who forbid and betray shall quicken the dried root or flush the faded leaf of love; the myrtle being past all comfort of soft rain or helpful sun. So in the Rose-Tree (vol. ii. p. 60), when for the sake of a barren material fidelity to his "rose" of marriage, he has passed over the offered flower "such as May never bore," the rose herself "turns away with jealousy," and gives him thorns for thanks: nothing left of it for hand or lip but collapsed blossom and implacable edges of brier. Blake might have kept in mind the end of his actual wild vine (vol. i. p. 100 of the Life), which ran all to leaf and never brought a grape worth eating, for fault of priming-hooks and vine-dressers.
In all this there is a certain unmistakeable innocence which accounts for the practical modesty and peaceable
Here too Blake had at first written, "Oft the priest beheld us sigh;" he afterwards cancelled the whole passage, perhaps on first remarking the rather too grotesque confusion of a symbolic myrtle with a literal wife; and the last stanza in either form is identical. The simple subtle grace of both poems, and the singular care of revision bestowed on them, are equally worth notice.
