WILLIAM BLAKE
energy. Nevertheless I should not say for a moment that this startling fiction proved Blake to be mad. It proved him to be violent and recklessly suspicious; but there was never the least doubt that he was that. But now turn to another poem of Blake's, a merely romantic and narrative poem called "Fair Eleanor," which is all about somebody acting on somebody else's wife. Here we find the same line repeated word for word in quite another connection—
"Hired a villain to bereave my life."
It is not a musical line; it does not resemble English grammar to any great extent. Yet Blake is somehow forced to put it into a poem about a real person exactly as he had put it into an utterly different poem about a fictitious person. There seems no particular reason for writing it even once; but he has to write it again and again. This is what I do call a mad spot on the mind. I should not call Blake mad for hating Hayley or for boiling Hayley (though he had done him nothing but kindness), or for making up any statements however monstrous or mystical about Hayley. I should not in the least degree think that Blake was
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