“When thy little heart does wake,
Then the dreadful lightnings break
From thy cheek and from thine eye,
O’er the youthful harvests nigh;
Infant wiles and infant smiles
Heaven and earth of peace beguiles.”
The epithet “infant” has supplanted that of “female,” which was perhaps better: as to the grammatical licence, Blake followed in that the Elizabethan fashion which made the rule of sound predominate over all others. The song, if it loses simplicity, seems to gain significance by this expansion of the dim original idea; and beauty by expression of the peril latent in a life whose smiles as yet breed no strife between friends, kindle no fire among the unripe shocks of growing corn; but whose words shall hereafter be as very swords, and her eyes as lightning; teterrima belli causa.
[20] “His,” the good man’s: this lax piece of grammar (shifting from singular to plural and back again without much tangible provocation) is not infrequent with Blake, and would hardly be worth righting if that were feasible. A remarkable instance is but too patent in the final “chorus” of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Such rough licence is given or taken by old poets; and Blake’s English is always beautiful enough to be pardonable where it slips or halts: especially as its errors are always those of a rapid lyrical style, never of a tortuous or verbose ingenuity: it stammers and slips occasionally, but never goes into convulsions like that of some later versifiers.
[21] Such we must consider, for instance, the second Little Boy Lost, which looks at first more of a riddle and less worth solution than the haziest section of the prophetic books. A cancelled reading taken from the rough copy in the Ideas will at all events make one stanza more amenable to reason:
“I love myself; so does the bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.”
Blake was rather given to erase a comparatively reasonable reading and substitute something which cannot be confidently deciphered by the most daring self-reliance of audacious ingenuity, until the reader has found some means of pitching his fancy for a moment in the ordinary key of the prophet’s. This uncomfortable little poem is in effect merely an allegoric or fabulous appeal against the oppression of formulas (or family “textualism” of the blind and unctuous sort) which refuse to single and simple insight, to the outspoken innocence of a child’s laughing or confused analysis, a right to exist on any terms: just as the companion poem is an appeal, so vague as to fall decidedly flat, against the externals of moral fashion. Both, but especially the Girl, have some executive merit: not overmuch. To the surprising final query, “Are such things done on Albion’s shore?” one is provoked to respond, “On the whole, not, as far as we can see;” but the “Albion” of Blake’s verse is never this weaving and spinning country of our working days; it is rather some inscrutable remote land of Titanic visions, moated with silent white mist instead of solid and sonorous surf, and peopled with vague pre-Adamite giants symbolic of more than we can safely define or conceive. An inkling of the meaning may, if anything can, be extracted from some parts of the Jerusalem; but probably no one will try.
[22] With more time and room to work in, we might have noticed in these less dramatic and seemingly less original poems of the second series which take up from the opposite point of view matters already handled to such splendid effect in the Songs of Innocence, a depth and warmth of moral quality worth remark; infinite tenderness of heart and fiery pity for all that suffer wrong; something of Hugo’s or Shelley’s passionate compassion for those who lie open to “all the oppression that is done under the sun”; something of the anguish and labour, the fever-heat of sleepless mercy and love incurable which is common to those two great poets. The second Holy Thursday is doubtless far enough below the high level of the first; but the second Chimney-sweeper as certainly has a full share of this passionate grace of pain and pity. Blake’s love of children never wrung out into his work a more pungent pathos or keener taste of tears than in the last verse of this poem. It stood thus in the first draught:
“And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king,
Who wrap themselves up in our misery.”
The quiet tremulous anger of that, its childish sorrow and contempt, are no less true than subtle in effect. It recalls another floating fragment of verse on social wrongs which shall be rescued from the chaos of the Ideas:
“There souls of men are bought and sold,
And milk-fed infancy, for gold;
And youths to slaughter-houses led,
And maidens, for a bit of bread.”