WILLIAM BLAKE
and again these senseless scraps of rhyme, as if they were spells to keep off the devil.
In four of five different poems, without any apparent connection with those poems, occur these two extraordinary lines—
"The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief."
In the abstract this might perhaps mean something, though it would, I think, take most people some time to see what it could mean. In the abstract it may perhaps involve some allusion to a universal law of sacrifice in nature. In the concrete—that is, in the context—it involves no allusion to anything in heaven or earth. Here is another couplet that constantly recurs—
"The red blood ran from the grey monk's side,
His hands and his feet were wounded wide."
This is worse still; for this cannot be merely abstract. The ordinary rational reader will naturally exclaim at last, with a not unnatural explosion, "Who the devil is the grey monk? and why should he be always bleeding in places where he has no business?" Now to say that this sort of thing is not insanity of some kind
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