[25] Another version of this line, with less of pungent and brilliant effect, has yet a touch of sound in it worth preserving: some may even prefer it in point of simple lyrical sweetness:
“She played and she melted in all her prime:
Ah! that sweet love should be thought a crime.”
[26] On closer inspection of Blake’s rapid autograph I suspect that in the second line those who please may read “the ruddy limbs and flowering hair,” or perhaps “flowery;” but the type of flame is more familiar to Blake. Compare further on “A Song of Liberty.”
[27] Other readings are “soothed” and “smiled”—readings adopted after the insertion of the preceding stanza. As the subject is a child not yet grown to standing and walking age, these readings are perhaps better, though less simple in sound, than the one I have retained.
[28] Here and throughout to the end, duly altering metre and grammar with a quite laudable care, Blake has substituted “my father” for the “priests;” not I think to the improvement of the poem, though probably with an eye to making the end cohere rather more closely with the beginning. This and the “Myrtle” are shoots of the same stock, and differ only in the second grafting. In the last-named poem the father’s office was originally thus;
“Oft my myrtle sighed in vain
To behold my heavy chain:
Oft my father saw us sigh,
And laughed at our simplicity.”
Here too Blake had at first written, “Oft the priest beheld us sigh;” he afterwards cancelled the whole passage, perhaps on first remarking the rather too grotesque confusion of a symbolic myrtle with a literal wife; and the last stanza in either form is identical. The simple subtle grace of both poems, and the singular care of revision bestowed on them, are equally worth notice.
[29] Those who insist on the tight lacing of grammatical stays upon the “painèd loveliness” of a muse’s over-pliant body may use if they please Blake’s own amended reading; in which otherwise the main salt of the poem is considerably diluted as by tepid water: the angel (one might say) has his sting blunted and the best quill of his pinion pulled out.
“And without one word said
Had a peach from the tree;
And still as a maid,” &c.
[30] We may find place here for another fairy song, quaint in shape and faint in colour, but with the signet of Blake upon it; copied from a loose scrap of paper on the back of which is a pencilled sketch of Hercules throttling the serpents, whose twisted limbs make a sort of spiral cradle around and above the child’s triumphant figure: an attendant, naked, falls back in terror with sharp recoil of drawn-up limbs; Alcmena and Amphitryon watch the struggle in silence, he grasping her hand.