# The Poems of William Blake (Shepherd, 1887)

Table of contents: page xvii
THE POEMS
OF
WILLIAM BLAKE
COMPRISING
SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE TOGETHER WITH POETICAL SKETCHES AND SOME COPYRIGHT POEMS NOT IN ANY OTHER COLLECTION
A NEW EDITION
LONDON PICKERING AND CHATTO 66 HAYMARKET 1887
INTRODUCTION
BY THE EDITOR.
A very few words of introduction will suffice to explain the character and purpose of this new edition of William Blake's Poetical Works. Five-and-thirty years ago, and some twelve years after the death of Blake, an edition of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (the first, in fact, printed in the ordinary way) was issued by the father of the present Publisher. It was edited by Dr. Garth Wilkinson, who prefixed a graceful preface, which presented for the first time anything like an adequate appreciation of the high and subtle qualities of the artist-poet's verse.
Some eleven years ago the publication of Gilchrist's "Life of Blake" created, or re-awakened at least, an extraordinary interest in the poet-painter's singular genius. This memoir, which its ​accomplished author did not live fully to complete, was accompanied by a collection of Blake's lyrical poems. This collection, it soon appeared, was very imperfect as regards completeness and very unreliable as regards accuracy of text. Apart from these serious disadvantages, the mass of extraneous matter with which it was weighted placed it beyond the reach of many readers who might desire to possess the Poems in a separate form. These considerations, his father's former connexion with the Songs of Innocence, and the purchase eventually of a number of inedited autograph Poems of Blake, led the Publisher to re-issue his father's volume, together with the newly-acquired pieces, in 1866. The ground was carefully re-traversed, and several errors into which Dr. Wilkinson had fallen were removed by a careful collation with the rare original edition issued by Blake himself. The little volume was welcomed as satisfying a public want, and it passed into a second edition (now also exhausted) two years later (1868). About the same time the loan, opportunely obtained, of a still rarer book, the juvenile Poetical Sketches, privately printed in 1783, with a few other short pieces written in the fly-leaves, enabled the Publisher to add a twin volume to the former one. These are now united, ​together with a few similar pieces, not included before, scattered through the Prophetical Books. It will suffice to add that not a few of these pieces do not appear in Gilchrist's "Life of Blake," and being the present Publisher's copyright, cannot appear in Messrs. Bell's forthcoming edition.
Although the poetry of Blake was comparatively neglected until a quite recent period, it did not remain entirely unnoticed even during his lifetime. Flaxman, through whose kindly aid his early verses are preserved to us, considered Blake's poems as fine as his pictures. Wordsworth spoke of them with a generous admiration, which he did not often accord to the writings of his contemporaries. Charles Lamb also loved them as so subtle a critic and so kind and simple-hearted a man could not fail to do.
"A Father's Memoirs of his Child," by Benjamin Heath Malkin, (London, 1806}, contains a portrait frontispiece designed by Blake, in introducing which the author devotes twenty pages to a disquisition on Blake's genius, and quotes the following poems: "Laughing Song," "Holy Thursday," "The Divine Image," "How sweet I roam'd," "I love the jocund dance," "The Tiger."
​On this memoir the late Mr. Henry Crabb Robinson founded a notice of Blake as an artist and poet, which was translated into German by a certain Dr. Julius, and appeared in the first (and only) number of the second volume of the Vaterländisches Museum (Hamburg) in 1811. The extracts were given in both languages, and included: "To the Muses," "The Piper," "Holy Thursday," "The Tiger," "The Garden of Love," and a few passages from the Prophetical Books.
The next notice of Blake's poetry was by Allan Cunningham in his "Lives of the Painters," in 1830. His praise, however, is rather half-hearted and lukewarm, and the dozen pieces he printed as specimens, he could not refrain from touching up here and there to suit his fancy.
In a recent volume the author of "Modern Painters" thus speaks of Blake's poetry:—
"The impression that his drawings once made is fast, and justly, fading away, though they are not without noble merit. But his poems have much more than merit; they are written with absolute sincerity, with infinite tenderness, and though in the manner of them diseased and wild, are in verity the words of a great and wise mind, disturbed but not deceived, by its sickness; nay, ​partly exalted by it, and sometimes giving forth in fiery aphorism some of the most precious words of existing literature."
That the poems of William Blake should have been long neglected was but the natural consequence both of the vitiated taste of his contemporaries and of the unusual manner of their publication—if publication it can, indeed, be called.
"It consisted," says Mr. Gilchrist, "in a species of engraving in relief both words and designs. The verse was written, and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing, or ground colour in his facsimiles; red he used for the letterpress. The page was then coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues."
It is not extraordinary that a book appearing in ​this way should have failed to attract the attention of an age which chose Whitehead for its Poet Laureate, which applauded the mediocrities of Darwin and Hayley, and which refused to read or to buy the Lyrical Ballads in ordinary "hot-pressed twelves."
To William Blake must, however, be accorded the merit of having been the first to lead back English poetry to that simplicity and nature from which the school of Pope and his feeble imitators had so widely departed. Already in 1783, he had printed for circulation among his friends a tiny volume of verses written in very early youth, and containing, among other things, six songs characterized by a power of lyrical feeling and expression of which no poet had given evidence for more than a century. As these poems were all written by Blake before he had attained his one-and-twentieth year in 1777, we may fairly call him the precursor not only of Wordsworth, whom he preceded by fully fifteen years, but also of Cowper and of Burns, With respect to the first of these the fact is all the more remarkable on account of the general resemblance in tone and style, the similarities of subject and metre between the Songs of Innocence and of Experience published in 1789-1794 and the earlier poems of Wordsworth, ​published in 1798, 1800, and 1807, such pieces as Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Poor Susan, The Two Thieves, Rural Architecture, Alice Fell, and all that class of poems which drew down on Wordsworth the ridicule of Jeffrey and other self-constituted critics of the period. There is precisely the same exquisite tenderness and noble simplicity in Blake. Some dozen of his Songs of Innocence might assuredly have been printed in the Lyrical Ballads and have passed for Wordsworth's, and on the whole the attentive student who follows out this hint, with the two books before him, will discover coincidences of thought and expression which are very remarkable.
Nevertheless, the fame of Blake as a poet has not kept pace with his fame as an artist. His original volumes, it is true, are sold for fabulous prices; but probably more on account of the embellishments than the poetry. Certain it is that no poet can expect to survive who depends on illustrated or illuminated editions for his celebrity. We think, however, that the poems of William Blake are destined at length to meet with a full though tardy recognition, and that they will therefore be welcome without such adventitious aid; that they will be cherished by children for their ​purity and simplicity, and by grown-up men and women for the deeper meanings which always underlie the most simple of them:—
"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
There is something sublime in the spirit of childlike innocence and Christian rebuke of worldliness and hardheartedness that pervades these productions. He sums up all the commandments under the precept, "Little children, love one another. For love is the fulfilling of the law. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love."
Some of his poems would doubtless have been improved by additional polish; there are many harsh and rugged lines, many with an imperfect number of feet. His ear seems to have been uncertain; and sometimes, as in "The Little Vagabond," he forgets to rhyme, or makes the same word do duty in lieu of a rhyme. He also now and then uses a singular verb for a plural, and vice versâ. But a reader who should be greatly offended by these occasional inaccuracies would be quite incapable of appreciating his higher beauties: the matter makes us forget the manner.
Despite what has been said above, he sometimes attains a perfection of lyrical expression in ​his shorter pieces unequalled except in Shakespeare and Tennyson, and evidently due to a reverential study of the earlier models. Our two greatest Poets have never written songs of more surpassing melody or richer music than the Blossom and the Sunflower.
Those other wonderful productions of Blake's mystical and visionary genius—the Books of Prophecy—of which the key-note is struck in the two opening pieces of the Songs of Experience, have yet to find acceptance with the public. Despite their strangeness of metre, however, and a certain forbidding aspect, at first sight, of wildness and incoherence, they will well repay study, and will be found to contain here and there lines of as great beauty as anything in his lyrical poems. Before closing our remarks, we must say a final word respecting the principle adopted by Mr. Rossetti in his reprint of some of these poems in the second volume of Gilchrist's "Life of Blake." Once for all, while rendering due homage to his genius and rare critical perception, as well as to the great services he has rendered to the fame of Blake, we must firmly protest against the dangerous precedent he has established of tampering with his author's text. Much ruggedness of metre and crudeness of expression he has doubtless removed ​or toned down by this process; but, however delicately and tastefully done, we contend that the doing of it was unwarrantable—nay, that it destroys to a certain extent the historical value of the poems. It was the growth of this mischievous system which prevented the readers of the eighteenth century from enjoying a pure text of Shakespeare; which to this day, in nine editions out of ten, gives us a corrupt and mutilated text of such writers as Bunyan, Walton, and De Foe, and which has spoilt some of the finest hymns in our language. For where is the process, once admitted as legitimate, to stop? It is not every emendator who possesses the taste and judgment of Mr. Rossetti, and, in a case like the present one, where the original edition is almost inaccessible as a check, what protection has the reader against the caprice or vanity of an editor who does not adhere religiously to his author's text? Mr. Rossetti (though sanctioned by Mr. Swinburne) has no more right to alter William Blake's poems than Mr. Millais would have to paint out some obnoxious detail of mediævalism in a work of Giotto or Cimabue; or Mr. Leighton to improve some flaw in the flesh-colour of Correggio.
R. H. Shepherd.
Brompton, July, 1874.
* ↑ Song of Innocence and of Experience, shewing the two states of the human Soul. By William Blake. London: W. Pickering, Chancery Lane, 1839; pp. xxi. 76.
* ↑ Pp. 107-131.
* ↑ Vol. II., pp. 142-179.
* ↑ John Ruskin, "The Eagle's Nest" (1872), p. 23.
* ↑ Gilchrist's Life of Blake (Lond. 1863), i 69.
* ↑ As the fast-waning fame of Rogers may show.
WITH BLAKE'S "SONGS OF INNOCENCE."
Accept, dear child, these songs of one whose Muse For happy children piped her sweetest lays, Nor deem'd their suffrages her lightest praise Who hold Heaven's kingdom as their proper dues. And wilt thou with the lyric gift refuse His thanks, whose drooping spirits thou couldst raise By airy gestures, graceful as a fay's Dancing at eve in shady avenues?
With rapt delight I see you ponder long The gentle words of one so pure of blame, Who loved the right, who scorn'd and loathed the wrong: O future heiress of his double fame, Whose smile, whose look, nay, even whose very name Recalls the sunny land of art and song.
R. H. S.
CONTENTS.