On which, a boy, he climbed the loftiest bough, Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now. He once was chief in all the rustic trade; His steady hand the straightest furrow made; Full many a prize he won, and still is proud To find the triumphs of his youth allowed; A transient pleasure sparkles in his eyes, 192 He hears and smiles, then thinks again and sighs: For now he journeys to his grave in pain; The rich disdain him; nay, the poor disdain: Alternate masters now their slave command, Urge the weak efforts of his feeble hand, And, when his age attempts its task in vain, With ruthless taunts, of lazy poor complain. Oft may you see him, when he tends the sheep, 200 His winter charge, beneath the hillock weep; Oft hear him murmur to the winds that blow O'er his white locks and bury them in snow, When, roused by rage and muttering in the morn, He mends the broken edge with icy thorn: 'Why do I live, when I desire to be 206 At once from life and life's long labor free? Like leaves in spring, the young are blown away, Without the sorrows of a slow decay; There it abides till younger buds come on The holy stranger to these dismal walls: And doth not he, the pious man, appear, He, passing rich, with forty pounds a year?' Ah! no; a shepherd of a different stock: And far unlike him, feeds this little flock: A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task As much as God or man can fairly ask; 307 The rest he gives to loves and labors light, To fields the morning, and to feasts the night; None better skilled the noisy pack to guide, To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide; 311 A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day, And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play: Then, while such honors bloom around his head, Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed, 315 To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal To combat fears that e'en the pious feel? WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) I walked the other evening to the end of the heath and touched the sky with my finger.' Was the man inspired or mad who made this statement in fierce literalness, when bored by some scientific cant about the vastness of space'? One's answer to this question will determine one's attitude toward Blake. The ordinary biographical summary hardly seems to apply to him; yet undeniably, like the hero in the old song, 'This man was born, lived, drank, and died.' He was born in London, he spent his life there, he did not drink much and frequently had none too much to eat and wear, and in London he died, leaving the delusive Goddess Nature to her laws, to get into freedom from all law of the numbers, into the mind, in which every one is king and priest in his own house.' Yet this man who denied the validity of positive science and repudiated the reality of physical nature was a twofold artist, draughtsman and poet. After the bare rudiments of an education, he began at ten the study of drawing and almost as early the writing of verses. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the well-known engraver, Basire. About the same time he wrote some of his published poems. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, and three years later brought out his first volume, Poetical Sketches, the only one of his publications which was printed in the ordinary manner. Songs of Innocence (1789), Songs of Experience (1794), and the series of enormous, crazed, difficult, or unintelligible Prophetic Books were all engraved upon plates and embellished with designs by himself. Other published designs and engravings of importance were those for Young's Night Thoughts (1797), Hayley's Life of Cowper (1803), Blair's The Grave (1808), the Book of Job (1825), and Dante (1824-27). None of his accomplishments, whether in literature or design, brought him any considerable return in money or immediate fame. He lived most of his life in almost squalid poverty which he did not seem to mind and, when he had means, bestowed them with unstinted charity and without concern for the future. His conduct was fairly within the law of conventional society and government; his doctrines were revolutionary and extreme even for the age of revolution in which he lived. With all their wildness they are sometimes startlingly modern, and it is not unlikely that the world is yet to ring with some of his ideas. As a workman in lines he was strangely original and powerful, and has been compared with the greatest artists of design that ever lived; though often crudely careless or perverse he could draw with propriety and beauty when he chose, and with tremendous energy and suggestiveness. It would be hard to conceive of finer illustrations than his 'Winter' and Evening' for Cowper's Task. His poetry speaks for itself. Like his design it is often absurdly crude and at other times his speech is something more than mortal. 'When the stars threw down their spears' We happen upon a line like this and we seem to have heard a voice of other worlds. |