Poetical Sketches
Encyclopedia
Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry
and prose
by William Blake
, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman
and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew
. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes
' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957.
by John Flaxman's aunt, who owned a small print shop in the Strand
, and paid for by Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, dilettantes to whom Blake had been introduced by Flaxman in early 1783. Each individual copy was hand-stitched, with a grey back and a blue cover, reading "POETICAL SKETCHES by W.B." It was printed without a table of contents and many pages were without half title
s. Of the twenty-two extant copies, eleven contain corrections in Blake's handwriting. Poetical Sketches is one of only two works by Blake to be printed conventionally with typesetting
; the only other extant work is The French Revolution
in 1791, which was to be published by Joseph Johnson
. However, it never got beyond the proof copy
, and was thus not actually published.
Even given the modest standards by which the book was published, it was something of a failure. Alexander Gilchrist
noted that the publication contained several obvious misreadings and numerous errors in punctuation, suggesting that it was printed with little care and was not proofread
by Blake (thus the numerous handwritten corrections in printed copies). Gilchrist also notes that it was never mentioned in the Monthly Review
, even in the magazine's index of "Books noticed", which listed every book published in London each month, signifying that the publication of the book had gone virtually unnoticed. Nevertheless, Blake himself was proud enough of the volume that he was still giving copies to friends as late as 1808, and when he died, several unstitched copies were found amongst his belongings.
After the initial 1783 publication, Poetical Sketches as a volume remained unpublished until R.H. Shepherd
's edition in 1868. However, prior to that, several of the individual poems had been published in journals and anthologised by Blake's early biographers and editors. For example, Benjamin Heath Malkin
included 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"' in A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), Allan Cunningham published 'Gwin, King of Norway' and 'To the Muses' in Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), and Alexander Gilchrist
included 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"' in his Life of William Blake
(1863). Gilchrist, however, did not reproduce Blake's text verbatim, instead incorporating several of his own emendations. Many subsequent editors of Blake who included extracts in their collections of his poetry, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, A.C. Swinburne
, W.B. Yeats and E.J. Ellis
, also introduced their own emendations. Due to the extreme rarity of the original publication, these emendations often went unnoticed, thus giving rise to a succession of variant readings on the original content. Subsequent versions repeated or added to these changes, despite what later commentators described as obvious misreadings. However, in 1905, John Sampson
produced the first scholarly edition of Blake's work, in which he returned to the original texts, also taking into account Blake's own handwritten corrections. As such, most modern editors tend to follow Sampson's example, and use the original 1783 publication as their control text.
, Shakespearean drama
, John Milton
, Ben Jonson
, Thomas Fletcher, Thomas Gray
, William Collins
, Thomas Chatterton
, Edmund Spenser
, James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–1730), Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
(1764), James Macpherson
's Ossian
(1761–1765) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765). Blake shows especial antipathy towards the closed couplet
of Augustan poetry
.
Although scholars are generally in agreement that Poetical Sketches is far from Blake's best work, it does occupy an important position in Blakean studies, coming as it does as the very outset of his career. In 1947, for example, Northrop Frye
declared in Fearful Symmetry
that although Poetical Sketches is not regarded as a great piece of work, "it is of the highest importance to us, partly because it show Blake's symbolic language in an emergent and transitional form, and partly because it confirms that Blake is organically part of his literary age."
Writing in 1965, S. Foster Damon
concurs with Frye's opinion. In the entry for Poetical Sketches in Damon's Blake Dictionary, he refers to Sketches as "a book of the revolutionary period, a time of seeking for non-neoclassical
inspiration, a preparation for the Romantic period
[...] For all the derivative material, the book is a work of genius in its daring figures, its metrical experiments, its musical tone." Damon also writes, "Historically, Blake belongs – or began – in the Revolutionary generation, when the closed heroic couplet was exhausted, and new subjects and new rhythm
s were being sought out. The cadences of the Bible
, the misunderstood Milton and the poetic Shakespeare
with his fellow Elizabethans were Blake's staples from the first; to them we must add the wildness of Ossian, the music of Chatterton, the balladry of Percy's Reliques, and the Gothic fiction
of Walpole. All the principles of Romanticism
are to be found in Blake's first book."
Harold Bloom
is also in agreement with this assessment, seeing the book as very much of its particular epoch; a period he dates from the death of Alexander Pope
in 1744 to the first major poetry of William Wordsworth
in 1789. Bloom sees Sketches as "a workshop of Blake's developing imaginative ambitions as he both follows the poets of sensibility in their imitations of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and goes beyond them in venturing more strenuously on the Hebraic
sublime
[...] Perhaps the unique freshness of Poetical Sketches can be epitomised by noting Blake's first achievements in the greatest of his projects: to give definite form to the strong workings of imagination that produced the cloudy sublime images of the earlier poets of sensibility. In the best poems of Blake's youth, the sublime feelings of poets like Gray and Collins find a radiant adequacy of visionary outline."
Frye, Damon and Bloom are all in agreement that Blake was, at least originally, very much of his age, but this is by no means a universally accepted opinion. Peter Ackroyd
, for example, sees the poems as fundamentally divorced from the dominant poetic formulas of the day. Speaking of 'To the Evening Star
' in specific and Poetical Sketches in general, Ackroyd argues that "it would be quite wrong to approach Blake's poetry with a Romantic belief that he is engaged in an act of confessional lyricism or brooding introversion [...] This is not the poetry of a melancholy or self-absorbed youth."
Susan J. Wolfson goes even further, seeing the volume as a statement of Blake's antipathy towards the conventions of the day and an expression of his own sense of artistic aloofness; "He serves up stanzas that cheerfully violate their paradigms, or refuse rhyme
, or off-rhyme, or play with eye-rhymes
; rhythms that disrupt metrical convention
, and line-endings so unorthodox as to strain a practice of enjambment
already controversial in eighteenth century poetics."
Similarly, W.H. Stevenson argues that "there is little direct borrowing, and it would be truer to say that, even at this early stage, he is experimenting with verse forms and has formed for himself a style as individual as Collin's and Akenside's
."
, a dramatic fragment (King Edward the Third), a prologue to another play in blank verse
('Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth'), a prose poem
prologue ('Prologue to King John'), a ballad
('A War Song to Englishmen') and three prose poems ('The Couch of Death', 'Contemplation', and 'Samson').
The nineteen lyric poems are grouped together under the title "Miscellaneous Poems":
The work begins with an 'Advertisement' which explains that the contents were written by Blake in his youth and, therefore, any "irregularities and defects" should be forgiven:
According to J.T. Smith, the advertisement was written by "Henry Mathew", which most critics take to mean Anthony Stephen Mathew; "Mrs Mathew was so extremely zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that upon hearing him read some of his earlier efforts in poetry, she thought so well of them as to request the Rev. Henry Mathew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them; in which he not only acquiesced, but with his usual urbanity, wrote the following advertisement."
The following year, in 1784, Flaxman sounded a similar sentiment in a letter to William Hayley
accompanying a copy of the book; "his education will plead sufficient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of his work."
, each one represented by the respective season, where "abstract personifications merge into the figures of a new myth." Spring seems to predict Tharmas
, the peaceful embodiment of sensation, who comes to heal "our love-sick land that mourns" with "soft kisses on her bosom." Summer is perhaps an early version of Orc
, spirit of Revolution
, and is depicted as a strong youth with "ruddy limbs and flourishing hair", who brings out artists' passions and inspires them to create. In later poems, Orc's fiery red hair is often mentioned as one of his most distinguishing characteristics; "The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, 25:13). Autumn seems to predict Los
, the prophetic genius and embodiment of imagination
, as it is the only one of the four seasons Blake allows to speak directly, which it does in a "jolly voice." Finally, Winter serves as an antecedent for Urizen
, limiter of men's desires and embodiment of tradition
and conventionality
, insofar as winter is depicted as a giant who "strides o'er the groaning rocks;/He writhers all in silence, and his hand/Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life." In The Book of Urizen
(1795), Urizen is depicted as a giant striding over the land spreading winter throughout the cities of men (Chap. VIII: Verse 6).
in its presentation of a pastoral
vision of calm and harmony;
, Cupid
and Psyche
. Bloom sees it as Blake's first Song of Experience in its depiction of a hapless wanderer duped into sacrificing his own freedom for the malicious pleasure of another.
Northrop Frye argues that the poem functions as a precursor to Blake's version of the Phaëton
myth in 'Night the Second' of Vala, or The Four Zoas
(1796), where the sun is seized by Luvah
(representative of love and passion). Damon reads it as "a protest against marriage," and notes that the imagery in the poem, particularly the phrases "silken net" and "golden cage" predict Blake's later metaphorical uses of nets and enclosures. For example, in The Book of Urizen, after the Fall of Los and Urizen, and the birth of Enitharmon
and Orc, the Eternals cover mortal earth with a roof "called Science" (Chap: V: Verse 12). Subsequently, after exploring the earth, Urizen spreads out "the net of Religion" (Chap VIII: Verse 9).
W.H. Stevenson speculates that Kitty could in fact be Blake's future wife, Catherine Blake
.
. Harold Bloom, who feels it is the most "Blakean" poem in Poetical Sketches refers to it as an "intellectual satire" on both the concept of mad songs (six of which appeared in Percy's Antiques, which describes madness as being a peculiarly English theme) and the world which the singer seeks to leave. Frye is also an admirer of the poem and argues that "a maddened world of storm and tempest is the objective counterpart of madness in the human mind; and the madman is mad because he is locked up in his own Selfhood or inside, and cannot bear to see anything. In order to have his world a consistently dark one, he is compelled to rush frantically around the spinning earth forever, keeping one jump ahead of the rising sun, unable even to sleep in his everlasting night." Alexander Lincoln likens the poem to 'Song: "How Sweet I roam'd from field to field"' insofar as both deal with "states of mental captivity described from within."
This is strongly contrasted with
Northrop Frye calls the contrasts between these various poems an "attempt to work out an antithesis of innocence and experience," and as such, they serve as a thematic antecedent of Blake's later work.
, once so active amongst the poets of old, now seem to have left the earth;
The poem also contains Blake's first reference to a topic with which he would deal several times in his subsequent work; the four elements, water
, air, fire
and earth
(although he replaces fire with Heaven);
In For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), Blake would assign each element a visual representation. In The Book of Urizen, the four elements are personified as the sons of Urizen (Utha
is water, Thiriel
is air, Fuzon
is fire and Grodna
is earth). In Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1820), Blake describes the original formation of the elements (30:27-40).
(1793), Europe a Prophecy
(1794), The Song of Los
(1795) and The Book of Ahania
(1795). In 'Gwin', Blake points out how the ordinary man must become a revolutionary to suppress political tyranny;
For Frye, "Gordred the giant leads a workers' revolution
[...] the rebellion seems to be largely a middle class
one in which the stronghold of political liberty is the independent yeoman
." David V. Erdman
sees the poem as a direct antecedent of America and thus containing allusions to the American Revolution
; England's actions prior to and during the war received wide spread condemnation from the majority of the people, especially in London, where numerous protests were held against it. Blake was very much of the popular opinion that England was the oppressor and that the American people were fighting a righteous battle for their freedom. Erdman argues that in 'Gwin', "the geography is sufficiently obscure so that "the nations of the North" oppressed by King Gwin may easily be compared to the nations of North America
oppressed by King George
[...] In 'Gwin', the rising up of the oppressed behind the "troubl'd banners" of their deliverer "Gordred the giant" parallels the hope that some American champion would prove the Samson
of the New World
." Erdman thus compares Gordred with George Washington
and Thomas Paine
. Susan J. Wolfson also sees the poem as primarily metaphorical; "the revenge-tale enacted by two symbolic figures is less the ballad's point than the universal carnage that displaces all hope of political reform […] this bloodbath may not so much pale politics into visionary history as evoke an appalling visionary politics, a transhistorical anxiety about the human cost of historical conflict."
The name Gordred was probably taken from Chatterton's 'Godred Crovan' (1768). Margaret Ruth Lowery suggests that Blake took more from Chatterton than simply the name of Gordred, arguing that there are many parallels in theme and imagery between Chatterton's story of a Norse
tyrant invading the Isle of Man
, and Blake's of a revolution against a Norse tyrant.
sees 'An Imitation of Spencer' as "an early attempt on Blake's part to define his poetic vocation." The poem follows 'To the Muses' in its mockery of Augustan poetry, accusing such poetry of consisting of "tinkling rhimes and elegances terse." This is contrasted with the power of more accomplished poetry;
inspired ironic
depiction of Edward III's
invasion of France in 1346. Written in loose blank verse, the play is set the night before the Battle of Crécy
, a significant turning point in the Hundred Years' War
. Blake ironically presents the invasion as a noble crusade for Liberty
, which is spoken of as a commercial value by the English lords. For example, several times they boast that England is the home of Liberty and is protected by Liberty, yet they also proudly claim that "England is the land favour'd by Commerce" (Sc.2 l.30). This treatment of Liberty has been identified as mockery of a similar, but non-ironic, treatment in James Thomson's Liberty (1735), e.g. "Cressy, Poitiers
, Agincourt
proclaim/What Kings supported by almighty love/And people fired with liberty can do" (iv:865-867).
The character of William his Man may be a representative of Blake himself, as he is the only character in the play who questions the morality of the invasion beyond the ostensible explanation of Liberty; "I should be glad to know if it was not ambition that brought over our King to France to fight for his right" (Sc.4: ll.20-21).
Beyond the investigation into notions of Liberty and the reasons for the invasion, David V. Erdman argues that the theme of the play is the bloodshed and hardship for the common people which will result, despite Edward's belief that the war provides ordinary men with a chance to be heroes; "the key to the [play] is the great Death which lies in wait for the warriors of Edward's ill-starred invasion of France." Erdman believes the play is wholly ironic, and challenges critics who have read it literally and accused it of jingoism
. Margaret Ruth Lowery, for example, believes that it expresses "a "boylike" delight in the picturesqueness of war." S. Foster Damon calls it "uncritically patriotic." Mark Schorer
interprets it as an "extended defence of war and national interests." Northrop Frye sees it as "Rule, Britannia!
in blank verse." He further states, "the most puzzling feature of King Edward the Third is the frankness with which Blake admits that economic conditions are the cause of the war. Industry, commerce, agriculture, manufacture and trade are the gods directing the conflict, but the conflict is glorious and the gods worthy of worship. There seems to be no use looking for irony here."
Erdman, however, sees it as impossible that the author of such bitter and anti-imperialist tracts as 'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth', 'Prologue to King John' and 'Couch of Death', could possibly be expressing genuine sentiments in this apparent celebration of jingoism. Instead, Erdman argues that "there are many indications of Blake's general prophetic intent in these scenes; yet if we forget to ask what historical climax they point toward, we may be quite puzzled that Blake's Edward and his brave and battle-ready warriors appear to be undertaking their invasion of the vineyards of France under favourable auspices, marching with jingoistic complacency towards a great slaughter of enemy troops and to be getting by what they represent to each other as glorious and fully justifiable murder." Similarly, Alicia Ostriker refers to the piece as "an ironic treatment of military values urged in the name of high ideals."
Regarding the fact that Blake never completed the play, and hence did not depict the English victory, Susan J. Wolfson argues that "Blake's refusal to report these outcomes functions systematically as a refusal of triumphalism, the mode of nationalistic self-satisfaction. His sketch draws us in, instead, to the various critical perspectives on the interests that impel England's history of military adventurism." She goes on to point out that "Blake's perspective is not the conservative lens of eighteenth-century formalism
that would expose liberty as lawlessness, but a modern lens of suspicion about the motivated rhetoric
, craft and intentional designs in the cant of Liberty."
Blake was evidently quite proud of this piece as c.1796, he inscribed a colour etching with "When the senses are shaken/And the Soul is driven to madness. Page 56". This is a reference to the original publication of Poetical Sketches and refers to lines 2-3 of 'Edward the Fourth'.
In 'King John', which Erdman reads as a document of English protest against the American War, Blake becomes even more explicit regarding his detestation of war. Depicting an almost apocalyptical wilderness, Blake laments how "brother in brother's blood must bathe." England has become a place where "the sucking infant lives to die in battle; the weeping mother feeds him for the slaughter" and "the trembling sinews of old age must work the work of death against their progeny." However, the poem concludes on an optimistic note; "O yet may Albion smile again, and stretch her peaceful arms and raise her golden head, exultingly." The source for this possibility of renewal however is never revealed.
The ballad 'A War Song to Englishmen' is usually interpreted as forming a part of Edward the Third, perhaps written by Blake to be inserted later. Specifically, the poem is seen as the second song of the minstrel, whose first song closes the fragment with a passionate evocation of Brutus of Troy
, supposed founder of Britain. "War Song" continues to urge troops to battle and, like the minstrel's first song, is usually interpreted as parody and an ironic celebration of patriotic
bloodlust. Erdman interprets it as "a parody of the battle songs of modern Britain."
as "the strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches" (22:50).
In his 1965 edition of the Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, David Erdman assigns two additional incomplete prose poems to Poetical Sketches, under the section title 'Further Sketches'; "then She bore Pale desire…" and "Woe cried the muse…". These two poems are extant on seven MS pages in Blake's handwriting, and dateable to the early 1780s, but nothing else is known about them.
Erdman includes the two pieces in Poetical Sketches simply because there is no other collection with which to associate them. His decision, however, is by no means the norm amongst Blake's editors. For example, R.H. Shepherd did not include them in his publication of Poetical Sketches in 1868. In his 1905 edition of the collected works, Sampson mentioned them in his Introduction to Poetical Sketches but did not include them in the collection itself. In The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957 and 1966) Geoffrey Keynes included them but divided them from Poetical Sketches, indexed them separately and dated them both 1777. Alicia Ostriker, in her William Blake: The Complete Poems (1977), makes no reference at all to either piece throughout the volume. W.H. Stevenson in Blake: The Complete Poems (1971, 1989 and 2007), mentions them in a footnote, but does not reproduce them.
"then She bore pale desire" was first published in 1904, by William Michael Rossetti
in the August edition of The Monthly Review, where it was rewritten into verse and appeared under the title The Passions (which is also the name used by Gilchrist). "Woe cried the muse" was first published in 1925 in Geoffrey Keynes' The Writings of William Blake.
"then She bore Pale desire…" begins with a small letter and the first line is not indented, so it is clear that at least one page is missing. Harold Bloom believes it to be an experiment in stream of consciousness writing. According to Erdman, it is "an allegorical genealogy of Pride and Shame and Policy and "the Kingdoms of the World & all their Glory," it shows Blake revolving the problem of man's fate in terms that link imperial pride and individual frustration." For Damon, it is an attempt "to outline the spiritual decay of mankind in the course of history."
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
and prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
by William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman
John Flaxman
John Flaxman was an English sculptor and draughtsman.-Early life:He was born in York. His father was also named John, after an ancestor who, according to family tradition, had fought for Parliament at the Battle of Naseby, and afterwards settled as a carrier or farmer in Buckinghamshire...
and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew
Harriet Mathew
Harriet Mathew , wife of the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew , was an 18th century London socialite and patron of the arts, who is considered an important early patron of John Flaxman and William Blake....
. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes
Geoffrey Keynes
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was an English biographer, surgeon, physician, scholar and bibliophile...
' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957.
Publication
The original 1783 copies were seventy-two pages in length, printed in octavoOctavo
Octavo to is a technical term describing the format of a book.Octavo may also refer to:* Octavo is a grimoire in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett...
by John Flaxman's aunt, who owned a small print shop in the Strand
Strand, London
Strand is a street in the City of Westminster, London, England. The street is just over three-quarters of a mile long. It currently starts at Trafalgar Square and runs east to join Fleet Street at Temple Bar, which marks the boundary of the City of London at this point, though its historical length...
, and paid for by Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, dilettantes to whom Blake had been introduced by Flaxman in early 1783. Each individual copy was hand-stitched, with a grey back and a blue cover, reading "POETICAL SKETCHES by W.B." It was printed without a table of contents and many pages were without half title
Half title
The half title, or bastard title, is a page carrying nothing but the title of a book, as opposed to the title page, which also lists subtitle, author, publisher and similar data....
s. Of the twenty-two extant copies, eleven contain corrections in Blake's handwriting. Poetical Sketches is one of only two works by Blake to be printed conventionally with typesetting
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
; the only other extant work is The French Revolution
The French Revolution (poem)
The French Revolution is a poem written by William Blake in 1791. It was intended to be seven books in length, but only one book survives. In that book, Blake describes the problems of the French monarchy and seeks the destruction of the Bastille in the name of Freedom.-Background:Blake felt that...
in 1791, which was to be published by Joseph Johnson
Joseph Johnson (publisher)
Joseph Johnson was an influential 18th-century London bookseller and publisher. His publications covered a wide variety of genres and a broad spectrum of opinions on important issues...
. However, it never got beyond the proof copy
Galley proof
In printing and publishing, proofs are the preliminary versions of publications meant for review by authors, editors, and proofreaders, often with extra wide margins. Galley proofs may be uncut and unbound, or in some cases electronic...
, and was thus not actually published.
Even given the modest standards by which the book was published, it was something of a failure. Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist was the biographer of William Blake. Gilchrist's biography is still a standard reference work on the poet....
noted that the publication contained several obvious misreadings and numerous errors in punctuation, suggesting that it was printed with little care and was not proofread
Proofreading
Proofreading is the reading of a galley proof or computer monitor to detect and correct production-errors of text or art. Proofreaders are expected to be consistently accurate by default because they occupy the last stage of typographic production before publication.-Traditional method:A proof is...
by Blake (thus the numerous handwritten corrections in printed copies). Gilchrist also notes that it was never mentioned in the Monthly Review
Monthly Review (London)
The Monthly Review was an English periodical founded by Ralph Griffiths, a Nonconformist bookseller. The first periodical in England to offer reviews, it featured the novelist and poet Oliver Goldsmith as an early contributor. William Kenrick, the "superlative scoundrel", was editor from 1759 to...
, even in the magazine's index of "Books noticed", which listed every book published in London each month, signifying that the publication of the book had gone virtually unnoticed. Nevertheless, Blake himself was proud enough of the volume that he was still giving copies to friends as late as 1808, and when he died, several unstitched copies were found amongst his belongings.
After the initial 1783 publication, Poetical Sketches as a volume remained unpublished until R.H. Shepherd
Richard Herne Shepherd
-Life:Richard, born at Chelsea early in 1842, was a younger son of Samuel Shepherd, F.S.A. His grandfather, Richard Herne Shepherd , was from 1818 to 1848 a well-known revivalist preacher at the Ranelagh Chapel, Chelsea, and published, besides sermons and devotional works, a volume of meditative...
's edition in 1868. However, prior to that, several of the individual poems had been published in journals and anthologised by Blake's early biographers and editors. For example, Benjamin Heath Malkin
Benjamin Heath Malkin
Benjamin Heath Malkin was a British scholar and writer notable for his connection to the artist and poet William Blake.Malkin was educated at Harrow School and Cambridge University, receiving his MA in 1802 and his doctorate in 1810. In 1795 he published Essays on Subjects connected with...
included 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"' in A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), Allan Cunningham published 'Gwin, King of Norway' and 'To the Muses' in Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), and Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist
Alexander Gilchrist was the biographer of William Blake. Gilchrist's biography is still a standard reference work on the poet....
included 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"' in his Life of William Blake
Life of William Blake
The Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” With selections from his poems and other writings is a two volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863...
(1863). Gilchrist, however, did not reproduce Blake's text verbatim, instead incorporating several of his own emendations. Many subsequent editors of Blake who included extracts in their collections of his poetry, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
, A.C. Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
, W.B. Yeats and E.J. Ellis
Edwin Ellis
Edwin John Ellis was a British poet and illustrator, now remembered mostly for the three-volume collection of the works of William Blake he edited with W. B. Yeats....
, also introduced their own emendations. Due to the extreme rarity of the original publication, these emendations often went unnoticed, thus giving rise to a succession of variant readings on the original content. Subsequent versions repeated or added to these changes, despite what later commentators described as obvious misreadings. However, in 1905, John Sampson
John Sampson (linguist)
John Sampson was an Irish linguist. As a scholar he is best known for The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales , an authoritative grammar of the Welsh-Romany language. It was written with the collaboration of Edward Wood, who died in 1902...
produced the first scholarly edition of Blake's work, in which he returned to the original texts, also taking into account Blake's own handwritten corrections. As such, most modern editors tend to follow Sampson's example, and use the original 1783 publication as their control text.
Influences and importance
Blake's literary influences in Poetical Sketches include, amongst others, Elizabethan poetryElizabethan literature
The term Elizabethan literature refers to the English literature produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I .The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama...
, Shakespearean drama
Shakespeare's plays
William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy; they have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being...
, John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
, Thomas Fletcher, Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University.-Early life and education:...
, William Collins
William Collins (poet)
William Collins was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century...
, Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton was an English poet and forger of pseudo-medieval poetry. He died of arsenic poisoning, either from a suicide attempt or self-medication for a venereal disease.-Childhood:...
, Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
, James Thomson's The Seasons (1726–1730), Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole. It is generally regarded as the first gothic novel, initiating a literary genre which would become extremely popular in the later 18th century and early 19th century...
(1764), James Macpherson
James Macpherson
James Macpherson was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems.-Early life:...
's Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...
(1761–1765) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry is a collection of ballads and popular songs collected by Thomas Percy and published in 1765.-Sources:...
(1765). Blake shows especial antipathy towards the closed couplet
Closed couplet
In poetics, closed couplets are two line units of verse that do not extend their sense beyond the line's end. Furthermore, the lines are usually rhymed. When the lines are in iambic pentameter, they are referred to as heroic verse. However, Samuel Butler also used closed couplets in his iambic...
of Augustan poetry
Augustan poetry
In Latin literature, Augustan poetry is the poetry that flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus as Emperor of Rome, most notably including the works of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. In English literature, Augustan poetry is a branch of Augustan literature, and refers to the poetry of the...
.
Although scholars are generally in agreement that Poetical Sketches is far from Blake's best work, it does occupy an important position in Blakean studies, coming as it does as the very outset of his career. In 1947, for example, Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye, was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century....
declared in Fearful Symmetry
Fearful Symmetry (Frye)
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake is a 1947 book by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye whose subject is the work of English poet and visual artist William Blake. The book has been hailed as one of the most important contributions to the study of William Blake and one of the very first...
that although Poetical Sketches is not regarded as a great piece of work, "it is of the highest importance to us, partly because it show Blake's symbolic language in an emergent and transitional form, and partly because it confirms that Blake is organically part of his literary age."
Writing in 1965, S. Foster Damon
S. Foster Damon
S Foster Damon was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. He was born in Newton, Massachusetts. He was one of the Harvard Aesthetes, and married Louise Wheelwright, sister of John Wheelwright who was another poet identified with that grouping...
concurs with Frye's opinion. In the entry for Poetical Sketches in Damon's Blake Dictionary, he refers to Sketches as "a book of the revolutionary period, a time of seeking for non-neoclassical
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
inspiration, a preparation for the Romantic period
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
[...] For all the derivative material, the book is a work of genius in its daring figures, its metrical experiments, its musical tone." Damon also writes, "Historically, Blake belongs – or began – in the Revolutionary generation, when the closed heroic couplet was exhausted, and new subjects and new rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
s were being sought out. The cadences of the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, the misunderstood Milton and the poetic Shakespeare
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144...
with his fellow Elizabethans were Blake's staples from the first; to them we must add the wildness of Ossian, the music of Chatterton, the balladry of Percy's Reliques, and the Gothic fiction
Gothicismus
Gothicismus, Gothism, or Gothicism is the name given to what is considered to have been a cultural movement in Sweden, centered around the belief in the glory of the Swedish ancestors, originally considered to be the Geats, which were identified with the Goths. The founders of the movement were...
of Walpole. All the principles of Romanticism
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era which began in the mid/late-1700s as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day , also influenced poetry...
are to be found in Blake's first book."
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
is also in agreement with this assessment, seeing the book as very much of its particular epoch; a period he dates from the death of Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
in 1744 to the first major poetry of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
in 1789. Bloom sees Sketches as "a workshop of Blake's developing imaginative ambitions as he both follows the poets of sensibility in their imitations of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and goes beyond them in venturing more strenuously on the Hebraic
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
sublime
Sublime (literary)
The sublime is a form of expression in literature in which the author refers to things in nature or art that affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power. It is calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur...
[...] Perhaps the unique freshness of Poetical Sketches can be epitomised by noting Blake's first achievements in the greatest of his projects: to give definite form to the strong workings of imagination that produced the cloudy sublime images of the earlier poets of sensibility. In the best poems of Blake's youth, the sublime feelings of poets like Gray and Collins find a radiant adequacy of visionary outline."
Frye, Damon and Bloom are all in agreement that Blake was, at least originally, very much of his age, but this is by no means a universally accepted opinion. Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd CBE is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award...
, for example, sees the poems as fundamentally divorced from the dominant poetic formulas of the day. Speaking of 'To the Evening Star
Hesperus
In Greek mythology, Hesperus is the Evening Star, the planet Venus in the evening. He is the son of the dawn goddess Eos and is the brother of Eosphorus , the Morning Star. Hesperus' Roman equivalent is Vesper...
' in specific and Poetical Sketches in general, Ackroyd argues that "it would be quite wrong to approach Blake's poetry with a Romantic belief that he is engaged in an act of confessional lyricism or brooding introversion [...] This is not the poetry of a melancholy or self-absorbed youth."
Susan J. Wolfson goes even further, seeing the volume as a statement of Blake's antipathy towards the conventions of the day and an expression of his own sense of artistic aloofness; "He serves up stanzas that cheerfully violate their paradigms, or refuse rhyme
Rhyme
A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...
, or off-rhyme, or play with eye-rhymes
Eye rhyme
Eye rhyme, also called visual rhyme and sight rhyme, is a similarity in spelling between words that are pronounced differently and hence, not an auditory rhyme...
; rhythms that disrupt metrical convention
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
, and line-endings so unorthodox as to strain a practice of enjambment
Enjambment
Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...
already controversial in eighteenth century poetics."
Similarly, W.H. Stevenson argues that "there is little direct borrowing, and it would be truer to say that, even at this early stage, he is experimenting with verse forms and has formed for himself a style as individual as Collin's and Akenside's
Mark Akenside
Mark Akenside was an English poet and physician.Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, England, the son of a butcher. He was slightly lame all his life from a wound he received as a child from his father's cleaver...
."
Contents
Poetical Sketches consists of nineteen lyric poemsLyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
, a dramatic fragment (King Edward the Third), a prologue to another play in blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...
('Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth'), a prose poem
Prose poetry
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose instead of using verse but preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery and emotional effects.-Characteristics:Prose poetry can be considered either primarily poetry or prose, or a separate genre altogether...
prologue ('Prologue to King John'), a ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
('A War Song to Englishmen') and three prose poems ('The Couch of Death', 'Contemplation', and 'Samson').
The nineteen lyric poems are grouped together under the title "Miscellaneous Poems":
- 'To Spring'
- 'To Summer'
- 'To Autumn'
- 'To Winter'
- 'To the Evening Star'
- 'To Morning'
- 'Fair Elenor'
- 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field'"
- 'Song: "My silks and fine array'"
- 'Song: "Love and harmony combine'"
- 'Song: "I love the jocund dance'"
- 'Song: "Memory, hither come'"
- 'Mad Song'
- 'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year'"
- 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in the sober grey'"
- 'To the Muses'
- 'Gwin, King of Norway'
- 'An Imitation of Spencer'
- 'Blind-man's Buff'
The work begins with an 'Advertisement' which explains that the contents were written by Blake in his youth and, therefore, any "irregularities and defects" should be forgiven:
The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.
According to J.T. Smith, the advertisement was written by "Henry Mathew", which most critics take to mean Anthony Stephen Mathew; "Mrs Mathew was so extremely zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that upon hearing him read some of his earlier efforts in poetry, she thought so well of them as to request the Rev. Henry Mathew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them; in which he not only acquiesced, but with his usual urbanity, wrote the following advertisement."
The following year, in 1784, Flaxman sounded a similar sentiment in a letter to William Hayley
William Hayley
William Hayley was an English writer, best known as the friend and biographer of William Cowper.-Biography:...
accompanying a copy of the book; "his education will plead sufficient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of his work."
'To Spring', 'To Summer', 'To Autumn', 'To Winter'
The opening four poems, invocations to the four seasons, are often seen as offering early versions of four of the figures of Blake's later mythologyWilliam Blake's mythology
The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology , in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology...
, each one represented by the respective season, where "abstract personifications merge into the figures of a new myth." Spring seems to predict Tharmas
Tharmas
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Tharmas is one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial man, was divided fourfold. He represents sensation, and his female counterpart is Enion, who represents sexual urges. He is connected to the God the Father aspect of the...
, the peaceful embodiment of sensation, who comes to heal "our love-sick land that mourns" with "soft kisses on her bosom." Summer is perhaps an early version of Orc
Orc (Blake)
Orc is a proper name for one of the characters in the complex mythology of William Blake. Unlike the medieval sea beast, or Tolkien's humanoid monster, his Orc is a positive figure, the embodiment of creative passion and energy, and stands opposed to Urizen, the embodiment of tradition.In Blake's...
, spirit of Revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
, and is depicted as a strong youth with "ruddy limbs and flourishing hair", who brings out artists' passions and inspires them to create. In later poems, Orc's fiery red hair is often mentioned as one of his most distinguishing characteristics; "The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea" (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake. It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets...
, 25:13). Autumn seems to predict Los
Los (Blake)
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Los is the fallen form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas. He is referred to as the "eternal prophet" and creates the visionary city of Golgonooza. Los is regularly described as a smith, beating with his hammer on a forge, which is metaphorically...
, the prophetic genius and embodiment of imagination
Imagination
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
, as it is the only one of the four seasons Blake allows to speak directly, which it does in a "jolly voice." Finally, Winter serves as an antecedent for Urizen
Urizen
In the complex mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional culture...
, limiter of men's desires and embodiment of tradition
Tradition
A tradition is a ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past. Common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes , but the idea has also been applied to social norms such as greetings...
and conventionality
Conventionalism
Conventionalism is the philosophical attitude that fundamental principles of a certain kind are grounded on agreements in society, rather than on external reality...
, insofar as winter is depicted as a giant who "strides o'er the groaning rocks;/He writhers all in silence, and his hand/Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life." In The Book of Urizen
The Book of Urizen
The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English writer William Blake, illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the "First". The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake's mythology,...
(1795), Urizen is depicted as a giant striding over the land spreading winter throughout the cities of men (Chap. VIII: Verse 6).
'To the Evening Star'
Possibly inspired by Spenser's "Epithalamion" (c.1597), lines 285-295, 'To the Evening Star' is described by S. Foster Damon as "pure Romanticism, way ahead of its time." Harold Bloom identifies it as perhaps Blake's earliest Song of InnocenceSongs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of...
in its presentation of a pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
vision of calm and harmony;
Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the
Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep.
'Fair Elenor'
'Fair Elenor' has attracted critical attention insofar as it is one of the very few poems in Blake's oeuvre written in a specific genre; in this case the genre is Gothic, and the poem adheres to its conventions so rigidly, it may in fact be a parody. The opening lines, for example, are almost clichéd in their observance of Gothic conventions;
The bell struck one, and shook the silent tower;
The graves give up their dead: fair Elenor
Walk'd by the castle gate, and looked in.
A hollow groan ran thro' the dreary vaults.
'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"'
According to Benjamin Heath Malkin, this poem was written prior to Blake's fourteenth birthday, and as such, "How sweet" may be his oldest extant poem. Despite his young age, the poem includes allusions to mythological figures such as ErosEros
Eros , in Greek mythology, was the Greek god of love. His Roman counterpart was Cupid . Some myths make him a primordial god, while in other myths, he is the son of Aphrodite....
, Cupid
Cupid
In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love. He is the son of the goddess Venus and the god Mars. His Greek counterpart is Eros...
and Psyche
Cupid and Psyche
Cupid and Psyche , is a legend that first appeared as a digressionary story told by an old woman in Lucius Apuleius' novel, The Golden Ass, written in the 2nd century CE. Apuleius likely used an earlier tale as the basis for his story, modifying it to suit the thematic needs of his novel.It has...
. Bloom sees it as Blake's first Song of Experience in its depiction of a hapless wanderer duped into sacrificing his own freedom for the malicious pleasure of another.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
Northrop Frye argues that the poem functions as a precursor to Blake's version of the Phaëton
Phaëton
In Greek mythology, Phaëton or Phaethon was the son of Helios and the Oceanid Clymene. Alternate, less common genealogies make him a son of Clymenus by Merope, of Helios and Rhode or of Helios and Prote....
myth in 'Night the Second' of Vala, or The Four Zoas
Vala, or The Four Zoas
Vala, or The Four Zoas refers to one of the incompleted prophetic books by English poet William Blake, begun in 1797. The titular main characters of the book are The Four Zoas: , who were created by the fall of Albion in Blake's mythology. It consists of nine books, referred to as "nights"...
(1796), where the sun is seized by Luvah
Luvah
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Luvah is one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial man, was divided fourfold. He represents love, passion, and rebellious energy. His Emanation is Vala; his fallen form is Orc. Throughout Blake's mythological system, he is...
(representative of love and passion). Damon reads it as "a protest against marriage," and notes that the imagery in the poem, particularly the phrases "silken net" and "golden cage" predict Blake's later metaphorical uses of nets and enclosures. For example, in The Book of Urizen, after the Fall of Los and Urizen, and the birth of Enitharmon
Enitharmon
Enitharmon is a major female character in William Blake's mythology, playing a main part in some of his prophetic books. She is, but not directly, an aspect of the male Urthona, one of the Four Zoas. She is in fact the Emanation of Los, also male. There is a complex verbal nexus attached. The Zoa...
and Orc, the Eternals cover mortal earth with a roof "called Science" (Chap: V: Verse 12). Subsequently, after exploring the earth, Urizen spreads out "the net of Religion" (Chap VIII: Verse 9).
'Song: "My silks and fine array"'
"A pastiche of Elizabethan imagery", possibly to the point of parody, "My silks" deals with the popular Elizabethan topic of the transience of love;
When I my grave have made,
Let winds and tempests beat:
Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay.
True love doth pass away.
'Song: "Love and harmony combine"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"'
"My silks and fine array" contrasts sharply with the next two poems; "Song: 'Love and harmony combine'", which celebrates a natural love in which the lovers are depicted as trees with intertwining branches and roots ("Love and harmony combine,/And around our souls intwine,/While together thy branches mix with mine,/And our roots together join") and the similarly themed "Song: 'I love the jocund dance'" ("I love our neighbours all,/But, Kitty, I better love thee;/And love them I ever shall;/But thou art all to me").W.H. Stevenson speculates that Kitty could in fact be Blake's future wife, Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake was the wife of the poet, painter and engraver William Blake , and a vital presence and assistant throughout his life as an artist.-Life:...
.
'Mad Song'
'Mad Song' is often regarded as Blake's first satireSatire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. Harold Bloom, who feels it is the most "Blakean" poem in Poetical Sketches refers to it as an "intellectual satire" on both the concept of mad songs (six of which appeared in Percy's Antiques, which describes madness as being a peculiarly English theme) and the world which the singer seeks to leave. Frye is also an admirer of the poem and argues that "a maddened world of storm and tempest is the objective counterpart of madness in the human mind; and the madman is mad because he is locked up in his own Selfhood or inside, and cannot bear to see anything. In order to have his world a consistently dark one, he is compelled to rush frantically around the spinning earth forever, keeping one jump ahead of the rising sun, unable even to sleep in his everlasting night." Alexander Lincoln likens the poem to 'Song: "How Sweet I roam'd from field to field"' insofar as both deal with "states of mental captivity described from within."
'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year"' and 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"'
As with the contrast between "My silks and fine array" on one hand and "Love and harmony combine" and "I love the jocund dance" on the other, Blake again opposes the pleasure of love with its opposite in 'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year'" and 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"'. In particular, the third stanza of each poem stands in diametric opposition to one another. The first reads
So when she speaks, the voice of Heaven I hear
So when we walk, nothing impure comes near;
Each field seems EdenGarden of EdenThe Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...
, and each calm retreat;
Each village seems the haunt of holy feet.
This is strongly contrasted with
Oft when the summer sleeps among the trees,
Whisp'ring faint murmurs to the scanty breeze,
I walk the village round; if at her side
A youth doth walk in stolen joy and pride,
I curse my stars in bitter grief and woe,
That made my love so high, and me so low.
Northrop Frye calls the contrasts between these various poems an "attempt to work out an antithesis of innocence and experience," and as such, they serve as a thematic antecedent of Blake's later work.
'To the Muses'
'To The Muses' represents an attack on contemporary poetry, using the language and cadence of Augustan verse to mock that very style of writing. Blake describes how the nine musesMuse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
, once so active amongst the poets of old, now seem to have left the earth;
How have you the antient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few.
The poem also contains Blake's first reference to a topic with which he would deal several times in his subsequent work; the four elements, water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
, air, fire
Fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products. Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition....
and earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
(although he replaces fire with Heaven);
Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Of the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth.
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wandering in many a choral grove.
In For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), Blake would assign each element a visual representation. In The Book of Urizen, the four elements are personified as the sons of Urizen (Utha
Utha
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Utha is the second son of Urizen.In Chapter VIII of The Book of Urizen his birth is briefly described:...
is water, Thiriel
Thiriel
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Thiriel is the first son of Urizen. There is a possible confusion with Tiriel, the protagonist of the first prophetic book, of that name....
is air, Fuzon
Fuzon (Blake)
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Fuzon is the fourth and final son of Urizen, associated with the classical element of fire. In The Book of Ahania he fights Urizen for control of the world....
is fire and Grodna
Grodna (Blake)
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Grodna is the third son of Urizen.In Chapter VIII of The Book of Urizen his birth is described:...
is earth). In Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1820), Blake describes the original formation of the elements (30:27-40).
'Gwin, King of Norway'
Presented as a warning for tyrannical kings, the longer lyric poem, 'Gwin, King of Norway' represents Blake's first engagement with revolution, a theme which would become increasingly important in his later verse, such as America a ProphecyAmerica a Prophecy
America a Prophecy is a 1793 prophetic book by English poet and illustrator William Blake. It is engraved on eighteen plates, and survives in fourteen known copies. It is the first of Blake's Continental prophecies.-Background:...
(1793), Europe a Prophecy
Europe a Prophecy
Europe a Prophecy is a 1794 prophetic book by English poet and illustrator William Blake. It is engraved on 18 plates, and survives in just nine known copies. It followed America a Prophecy of 1793.-Background:...
(1794), The Song of Los
The Song of Los
The Song of Los is one of William Blake's epic poems, known as prophetic books. The poem consists of two sections, "Africa" and "Asia". In the first section Blake catalogues the decline of morality in Europe, which he blames on both the African slave trade and enlightenment philosophers...
(1795) and The Book of Ahania
The Book of Ahania
The Book of Ahania is one of the English poet William Blake's prophetic books. It was published in 1795, illustrated by Blake's own plates....
(1795). In 'Gwin', Blake points out how the ordinary man must become a revolutionary to suppress political tyranny;
The husbandmanHusbandmanA Husbandman in England in the medieval and early modern period was a free tenant farmer. The social status of a husbandman was below that of a yeoman....
does leave his plow,
To wade thro' fields of gore;
The merchant binds his brows in steel,
And leaves the trading shore:
The shepherd leaves his mellow pipe,
And sounds the trumpet shrill;
The worksman throws his hammer down
To heave the bloody bill.
For Frye, "Gordred the giant leads a workers' revolution
Proletarian revolution
A proletarian revolution is a social and/or political revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists, communists, and most anarchists....
[...] the rebellion seems to be largely a middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
one in which the stronghold of political liberty is the independent yeoman
Yeoman
Yeoman refers chiefly to a free man owning his own farm, especially from the Elizabethan era to the 17th century. Work requiring a great deal of effort or labor, such as would be done by a yeoman farmer, came to be described as "yeoman's work"...
." David V. Erdman
David V. Erdman
David V. Erdman was an American literary critic, editor, and Professor Emeritus of English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Professor Erdman established his reputation as a William Blake scholar when his Blake: Prophet Against Empire was published in 1954...
sees the poem as a direct antecedent of America and thus containing allusions to the American Revolution
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
; England's actions prior to and during the war received wide spread condemnation from the majority of the people, especially in London, where numerous protests were held against it. Blake was very much of the popular opinion that England was the oppressor and that the American people were fighting a righteous battle for their freedom. Erdman argues that in 'Gwin', "the geography is sufficiently obscure so that "the nations of the North" oppressed by King Gwin may easily be compared to the nations of North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
oppressed by King George
George III of the United Kingdom
George III was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of these two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death...
[...] In 'Gwin', the rising up of the oppressed behind the "troubl'd banners" of their deliverer "Gordred the giant" parallels the hope that some American champion would prove the Samson
Samson
Samson, Shimshon ; Shamshoun or Sampson is the third to last of the Judges of the ancient Israelites mentioned in the Tanakh ....
of the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
." Erdman thus compares Gordred with George Washington
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...
and Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...
. Susan J. Wolfson also sees the poem as primarily metaphorical; "the revenge-tale enacted by two symbolic figures is less the ballad's point than the universal carnage that displaces all hope of political reform […] this bloodbath may not so much pale politics into visionary history as evoke an appalling visionary politics, a transhistorical anxiety about the human cost of historical conflict."
The name Gordred was probably taken from Chatterton's 'Godred Crovan' (1768). Margaret Ruth Lowery suggests that Blake took more from Chatterton than simply the name of Gordred, arguing that there are many parallels in theme and imagery between Chatterton's story of a Norse
Norsemen
Norsemen is used to refer to the group of people as a whole who spoke what is now called the Old Norse language belonging to the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, especially Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish and Danish in their earlier forms.The meaning of Norseman was "people...
tyrant invading the Isle of Man
Isle of Man
The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...
, and Blake's of a revolution against a Norse tyrant.
'An Imitation of Spencer'
Alicia OstrikerAlicia Ostriker
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...
sees 'An Imitation of Spencer' as "an early attempt on Blake's part to define his poetic vocation." The poem follows 'To the Muses' in its mockery of Augustan poetry, accusing such poetry of consisting of "tinkling rhimes and elegances terse." This is contrasted with the power of more accomplished poetry;
Such is sweet Eloquence, that does dispel
Envy and Hate, that thirst for human gore:
And cause in sweet society to dwell
Vile savage minds that lurk in lonely cell.
Blind-Man's Bluff
Predicting the close bond between form and content which would prove so important an aspect of his later Illuminated Books, in this simple story of a children's game, Blake uses the structure to carry his metaphorical intent; "Blake's tidy couplets report a game of all sound and no eye, where tyranny and wanton cruelty ensue, provoking a summary call for law and order and fair play […] Miming the forms of children's rhymes, he even implies the genesis of man's designs in childish games, whose local mischief, tricks and blood-letting confusions rehearse worldly power-plays." This is most evident in the poem's concluding lines:
Such are the fortunes of the game,
And those who play should stop the same
By wholesome laws; such as all those
Who on the blinded man impose,
Stand in his stead; as long a-gone
When men were first a nation grown;
Lawless they liv'd – till wantonness
And liberty began t'increase;
And one man lay in another's way,
Then laws were made to keep fair play.
King Edward the Third
The unfinished dramatic fragment King Edward the Third is a ShakespeareanShakespearean history
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. This categorisation has become established, although some critics have argued for other categories such as romances and problem plays. The histories were those plays based on...
inspired ironic
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
depiction of Edward III's
Edward III of England
Edward III was King of England from 1327 until his death and is noted for his military success. Restoring royal authority after the disastrous reign of his father, Edward II, Edward III went on to transform the Kingdom of England into one of the most formidable military powers in Europe...
invasion of France in 1346. Written in loose blank verse, the play is set the night before the Battle of Crécy
Battle of Crécy
The Battle of Crécy took place on 26 August 1346 near Crécy in northern France, and was one of the most important battles of the Hundred Years' War...
, a significant turning point in the Hundred Years' War
Hundred Years' War
The Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
. Blake ironically presents the invasion as a noble crusade for Liberty
Liberty
Liberty is a moral and political principle, or Right, that identifies the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves, to behave according to their own free will, and take responsibility for their actions...
, which is spoken of as a commercial value by the English lords. For example, several times they boast that England is the home of Liberty and is protected by Liberty, yet they also proudly claim that "England is the land favour'd by Commerce" (Sc.2 l.30). This treatment of Liberty has been identified as mockery of a similar, but non-ironic, treatment in James Thomson's Liberty (1735), e.g. "Cressy, Poitiers
Battle of Poitiers (1356)
The Battle of Poitiers was fought between the Kingdoms of England and France on 19 September 1356 near Poitiers, resulting in the second of the three great English victories of the Hundred Years' War: Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt....
, Agincourt
Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory against a numerically superior French army in the Hundred Years' War. The battle occurred on Friday, 25 October 1415 , near modern-day Azincourt, in northern France...
proclaim/What Kings supported by almighty love/And people fired with liberty can do" (iv:865-867).
The character of William his Man may be a representative of Blake himself, as he is the only character in the play who questions the morality of the invasion beyond the ostensible explanation of Liberty; "I should be glad to know if it was not ambition that brought over our King to France to fight for his right" (Sc.4: ll.20-21).
Beyond the investigation into notions of Liberty and the reasons for the invasion, David V. Erdman argues that the theme of the play is the bloodshed and hardship for the common people which will result, despite Edward's belief that the war provides ordinary men with a chance to be heroes; "the key to the [play] is the great Death which lies in wait for the warriors of Edward's ill-starred invasion of France." Erdman believes the play is wholly ironic, and challenges critics who have read it literally and accused it of jingoism
Jingoism
Jingoism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as extreme patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy. In practice, it is a country's advocation of the use of threats or actual force against other countries in order to safeguard what it perceives as its national interests...
. Margaret Ruth Lowery, for example, believes that it expresses "a "boylike" delight in the picturesqueness of war." S. Foster Damon calls it "uncritically patriotic." Mark Schorer
Mark Schorer
Mark Schorer was an American writer, critic, and scholar born in Sauk City, Wisconsin.-Biography:Schorer earned an MA at Harvard and his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1936...
interprets it as an "extended defence of war and national interests." Northrop Frye sees it as "Rule, Britannia!
Rule, Britannia!
"Rule, Britannia!" is a British patriotic song, originating from the poem "Rule, Britannia" by James Thomson and set to music by Thomas Arne in 1740...
in blank verse." He further states, "the most puzzling feature of King Edward the Third is the frankness with which Blake admits that economic conditions are the cause of the war. Industry, commerce, agriculture, manufacture and trade are the gods directing the conflict, but the conflict is glorious and the gods worthy of worship. There seems to be no use looking for irony here."
Erdman, however, sees it as impossible that the author of such bitter and anti-imperialist tracts as 'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth', 'Prologue to King John' and 'Couch of Death', could possibly be expressing genuine sentiments in this apparent celebration of jingoism. Instead, Erdman argues that "there are many indications of Blake's general prophetic intent in these scenes; yet if we forget to ask what historical climax they point toward, we may be quite puzzled that Blake's Edward and his brave and battle-ready warriors appear to be undertaking their invasion of the vineyards of France under favourable auspices, marching with jingoistic complacency towards a great slaughter of enemy troops and to be getting by what they represent to each other as glorious and fully justifiable murder." Similarly, Alicia Ostriker refers to the piece as "an ironic treatment of military values urged in the name of high ideals."
Regarding the fact that Blake never completed the play, and hence did not depict the English victory, Susan J. Wolfson argues that "Blake's refusal to report these outcomes functions systematically as a refusal of triumphalism, the mode of nationalistic self-satisfaction. His sketch draws us in, instead, to the various critical perspectives on the interests that impel England's history of military adventurism." She goes on to point out that "Blake's perspective is not the conservative lens of eighteenth-century formalism
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
that would expose liberty as lawlessness, but a modern lens of suspicion about the motivated rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
, craft and intentional designs in the cant of Liberty."
'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth' and 'Prologue to King John'
The moral judgements which are kept implicit in King Edward the Third are made very much explicit in 'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth' and 'Prologue to King John'. 'Edward the Fourth', which Frye calls "the first real statement of Blake's revolutionary politics," uses the refrain "Who can stand" to enquire into the possibility of nobility amidst war and destruction. It then imagines that even God wonders from where all the conflict has come, with Blake pointing his finger directly at those he holds responsible;
O who hath caused this? O who can answer at the throne of God?,
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!,
Hear it not, thy Ministers have done it!,
Blake was evidently quite proud of this piece as c.1796, he inscribed a colour etching with "When the senses are shaken/And the Soul is driven to madness. Page 56". This is a reference to the original publication of Poetical Sketches and refers to lines 2-3 of 'Edward the Fourth'.
In 'King John', which Erdman reads as a document of English protest against the American War, Blake becomes even more explicit regarding his detestation of war. Depicting an almost apocalyptical wilderness, Blake laments how "brother in brother's blood must bathe." England has become a place where "the sucking infant lives to die in battle; the weeping mother feeds him for the slaughter" and "the trembling sinews of old age must work the work of death against their progeny." However, the poem concludes on an optimistic note; "O yet may Albion smile again, and stretch her peaceful arms and raise her golden head, exultingly." The source for this possibility of renewal however is never revealed.
'The Couch of Death' and 'A War Song to Englishmen'
Erdman believes that the prose poem, 'The Couch of Death' is a coda to Edward the Third, insofar as it depicts the victims of the plague and hardship brought about by the war.The ballad 'A War Song to Englishmen' is usually interpreted as forming a part of Edward the Third, perhaps written by Blake to be inserted later. Specifically, the poem is seen as the second song of the minstrel, whose first song closes the fragment with a passionate evocation of Brutus of Troy
Brutus of Troy
Brutus or Brute of Troy is a legendary descendant of the Trojan hero Æneas, known in mediæval British legend as the eponymous founder and first king of Britain...
, supposed founder of Britain. "War Song" continues to urge troops to battle and, like the minstrel's first song, is usually interpreted as parody and an ironic celebration of patriotic
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
bloodlust. Erdman interprets it as "a parody of the battle songs of modern Britain."
'Samson'
The final piece in the volume, 'Samson' has received little critical attention over the years. Andrew Lincoln, however, has identified it as perhaps introducing a pseudo-biographical element into Blake's work, and argues that it "is an early experiment in prophetic narrative. Blake's Samson can be seen as a type of the artist who struggles against the materialism of his own age - and is doomed to be seduced by it before finally achieving his mission. The vulnerability of the would-be deliverer suggests that spiritual captivity is a state through which the strongest of mortals must pass." In Milton a Poem (1810), Blake would again allude to the Samson legend, referring to Emanuel SwedenborgEmanuel Swedenborg
was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian. He has been termed a Christian mystic by some sources, including the Encyclopædia Britannica online version, and the Encyclopedia of Religion , which starts its article with the description that he was a "Swedish scientist and mystic." Others...
as "the strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches" (22:50).
Additional Content
On the blank leaves of a copy of Poetical Sketches inscribed "from Mrs Flaxman May 15, 1784", are three handwritten poems which, since John Sampson in 1905, have been attributed to Blake. The three poems, "Song 1st by a shepherd", "Song 2nd by a Yound Shepherd" and "Song 3d by an old shepherd" are not in Blake's handwriting, but are thought to be of his composition insofar as "Song 2nd" is an early draft of "Laughing Song" from Songs of Innocence (1789).In his 1965 edition of the Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, David Erdman assigns two additional incomplete prose poems to Poetical Sketches, under the section title 'Further Sketches'; "then She bore Pale desire…" and "Woe cried the muse…". These two poems are extant on seven MS pages in Blake's handwriting, and dateable to the early 1780s, but nothing else is known about them.
Erdman includes the two pieces in Poetical Sketches simply because there is no other collection with which to associate them. His decision, however, is by no means the norm amongst Blake's editors. For example, R.H. Shepherd did not include them in his publication of Poetical Sketches in 1868. In his 1905 edition of the collected works, Sampson mentioned them in his Introduction to Poetical Sketches but did not include them in the collection itself. In The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957 and 1966) Geoffrey Keynes included them but divided them from Poetical Sketches, indexed them separately and dated them both 1777. Alicia Ostriker, in her William Blake: The Complete Poems (1977), makes no reference at all to either piece throughout the volume. W.H. Stevenson in Blake: The Complete Poems (1971, 1989 and 2007), mentions them in a footnote, but does not reproduce them.
"then She bore pale desire" was first published in 1904, by William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti
William Michael Rossetti was an English writer and critic.-Biography:Born in London, he was a son of immigrant Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and the brother of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Georgina Rossetti.He was one of the seven founder members of the...
in the August edition of The Monthly Review, where it was rewritten into verse and appeared under the title The Passions (which is also the name used by Gilchrist). "Woe cried the muse" was first published in 1925 in Geoffrey Keynes' The Writings of William Blake.
"then She bore Pale desire…" begins with a small letter and the first line is not indented, so it is clear that at least one page is missing. Harold Bloom believes it to be an experiment in stream of consciousness writing. According to Erdman, it is "an allegorical genealogy of Pride and Shame and Policy and "the Kingdoms of the World & all their Glory," it shows Blake revolving the problem of man's fate in terms that link imperial pride and individual frustration." For Damon, it is an attempt "to outline the spiritual decay of mankind in the course of history."
External links
- William Blake: Dreamer of Dreams article
- 'A Census of Copies of William Blake's Poetical Sketches, 1783', Margaret Ruth Lowery, The Library, Fourth Series, 17:3 (Autumn, 1936), 354-360 (subscription needed)
- 'The Reputation of Blake's Poetical Sketches, 1783-1863', Michael Phillips, Review of English Studies, 26 (1975), 19-33 (subscription needed)
- 'Blake's Poetical Sketches Finally Arrive in America', Raymond H. Deck, Review of English Studies, 31 (1980), 183-192 (subscription needed)