Full thirty years his task has been Day after day more weary; 75 For Heav'n design'd his guilty mind Should dwell on prospects dreary. Bound by a strong and mystic chain, He has not pow'r to stray; But destin'd mis'ry to sustain, so He wastes, in Solitude and Pain, A loathsome life away.
1800
To the Poet Coleridge1
Rapt in the visionary theme! Spirit divine! with thee I'll wander, Where the blue, wavy, lucid stream, 'Mid forest glooms, shall slow meander! 5 With thee I'll trace the circling bounds Of thy new Paradise extended; And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended.
Now by the source which lab'ring heaves 10 The mystic fountain, bubbling, panting, While gossamer' its net-work weaves, filmy cobweb
Adown the blue lawn slanting! I'll mark thy sunny dome, and view Thy caves of ice, thy fields of dew!
15 Thy ever-blooming mead, whose flow'r Waves to the cold breath of the moonlight hour! Or when the day- star, peering bright On the grey wing of parting night; While more than vegetating pow'r
20 Throbs grateful to the burning hour,
1. This poem is a tribute to, and running commentary on, Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan,' which Robinson read in manuscript (Coleridge had drafted it in 1797 but did not publish it until 1816).
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T o THE P OET C OLERIDGE / 7 5 As summer's whisper'd sighs unfold Her million, million buds of gold; Then will I climb the breezy bounds, Of thy new Paradise extended, 25 And listen to the distant sounds Of winds, and foamy torrents blended! Spirit divine! with thee I'll trace Imagination's boundless space! With thee, beneath thy sunny dome, 30 I'll listen to the minstrel's lay, Hymning the gradual close of day; In caves of ice enchanted roam, Where on the glitt'ring entrance plays The moon's-beam with its silv'ry rays; 35 Or, when the glassy stream, That through the deep dell flows, Flashes the noon's hot beam; The noon's hot beam, that midway shows Thy flaming temple, studded o'er 40 With all Peruvia's0 lustrous store! Peru's There will I trace the circling bounds Of thy new Paradise extended! And listen to the awful sounds, Of winds, and foamy torrents blended! 45 And now I'll pause to catch the moan Of distant breezes, cavern-pent; Now, ere the twilight tints are flown, Purpling the landscape, far and wide, On the dark promontory's side 50 I'll gather wild flow'rs, dew besprent,0 sprinkled And weave a crown for thee, Genius of Heav'n-taught poesy! While, op'ning to my wond'ring eyes, Thou bidst a new creation rise, 55 I'll raptur'd trace the circling bounds Of thy rich Paradise extended, And listen to the varying sounds Of winds, and foaming torrents blended. And now, with lofty tones inviting, 60 Thy nymph, her dulcimer swift smiting, Shall wake me in ecstatic measures! Far, far remov'd from mortal pleasures! In cadence rich, in cadence strong, Proving the wondrous witcheries of song! 65 I hear her voice! thy sunny dome, Thy caves of ice, aloud repeat, Vibrations, madd'ning sweet, Calling the visionary wand'rer home. She sings of thee, O favor'd child 70 Of minstrelsy, sublimely wild!
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76 / WILLIAM BLAKE
Of thee, whose soul can feel the tone Which gives to airy dreams a magic all thy own!
Oct. 1800 1801
WILLIAM BLAKE
1757-1827
What William Blake called his 'Spiritual Life' was as varied, free, and dramatic as his 'Corporeal Life' was simple, limited, and unadventurous. His father was a London tradesman. His only formal education was in art: at the age of ten he entered a drawing school, and later he studied for a time at the school of the Royal Academy of Arts. At fourteen he entered an apprenticeship for seven years to a well-known engraver, James Basire, and began reading widely in his free time and trying his hand at poetry. At twenty-four he married Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market gardener. She was then illiterate, but Blake taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. In the early and somewhat sentimentalized biographies, Catherine is represented as an ideal wife for an unorthodox and impecunious genius. Blake, however, must have been a trying domestic partner, and his vehement attacks on the torment caused by a possessive, jealous female will, which reached their height in 1793 and remained prominent in his writings for another decade, probably reflect a troubled period at home. The couple was childless.
The Blakes for a time enjoyed a moderate prosperity while Blake gave drawing lessons, illustrated books, and engraved designs made by other artists. When the demand for his work slackened, Blake in 1800 moved to a cottage at Felpham, on the Sussex seacoast, to take advantage of the patronage of the wealthy amateur of the arts and biographer William Hayley (also a supporter of Charlotte Smith), who with the best of narrow intentions tried to transform Blake into a conventional artist and breadwinner. But the caged eagle soon rebelled. Hayley, Blake wrote, 'is the Enemy of my Spiritual Life while he pretends to be the Friend of my Corporeal.'
At Felpham in 1803 occurred an event that left a permanent mark on Blake's mind and art?an altercation with one John Schofield, a private in the Royal Dragoons. Blake ordered the soldier out of his garden and, when Schofield replied with threats and curses against Blake and his wife, pushed him the fifty yards to the inn where he was quartered. Schofield brought charges that Blake had uttered seditious statements about king and country. Since England was at war with France, sedition was a hanging offense. Blake was acquitted?an event, according to a newspaper account, 'which so gratified the auditory that the court was . . . thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.' Nevertheless Schofield, his fellow soldier Cock, and other participants in the trial haunted Blake's imagination and were enlarged to demonic characters who play a sinister role in Jerusalem. The event exacerbated Blake's sense that ominous forces were at work in the contemporary world and led him to complicate the symbolic and allusive style by which he veiled the radical religious, moral, and political opinions that he expressed in his poems.
The dominant literary and artistic fashion of Blake's youth involved the notion that the future of British culture would involve the recovery, through archaeology as well as literary history, of an all but lost past. As an apprentice engraver who learned to draw by sketching the medieval monuments of London churches, Blake began his artistic career in the thick of that antiquarianism. It also informs his early lyric poetry. Poetical Sketches, published when he was twenty-six, suggests Blake's affinities with a group of later-eighteenth-century writers that includes Thomas Warton, poet and student of Middle English romance and Elizabethan verse; Thomas Gray, translator
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WILLIAM BLAKE / 77
