“I asked a thief to steal me a peach;
He turned up his eyes;
I asked a lithe lady to lie her down
Holy and meek, she cries.
As soon as I went
An angel came;
He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame;
And without one word spoke
Had a peach from the tree;
And ’twixt earnest and joke
Enjoyed the lady.”[29]
A much better and more solid version of the same fancy than the one given in the “Selections” under the head of “Love’s Secret;” which is rather weakly and lax in manner. Our present poem has on the other hand an exquisite “lithe” grace of limb and suppleness of step, suiting deliciously with the “light high laugh” in its tone: while for sweet and rapid daring, for angelically puerile impudence as it were, it may be matched against any song of its fantastic sort.
Less complete in a small way, but worth taking some care of, is this carol of a fairy, emblem of a man’s light hard tyranny of will, calling upon the birds in the harness of Venus and the shafts in the hand of her son for help in setting up the kingdom of established and legal love: but caught himself in the very setting of his net.
THE MARRIAGE RING.
“‘Come hither, my sparrows,
My little arrows.
If a tear or a smile
Will a man beguile,
If an amorous delay
Clouds a sunshiny day,
If the step of a foot
Smites the heart to its root,
’Tis the marriage ring
Makes each fairy a king.’
So a fairy sang.
From the leaves I sprang;
He leaped from his spray
To flee away:
But in my hat caught,
He soon shall be taught,
Let him laugh, let him cry,
He’s my butterfly:
For I’ve pulled out the sting
Of the marriage ring.”
It is not so easy to turn wasps to butterflies in the world of average things; but, as far as verses go, there are few of more supple sweetness than some of these. They recall the light lapse of measure found in the beautiful older germs of nursery rhyme;[30] and the seeming retributive triumph of married lovers over unmarried, of wedlock over courtship, could not well be more gracefully translated than in the “Fairy’s” call to his winged and feathered “arrows”—the lover’s swift birds of prey, not without beak and claw. “If they do for a minute or so darken our days, dupe our fancies, prevail upon our nerves and blood, once well married we are kings of them at least.” Pull out that sting of jealous reflective egotism, and your tamed “fairy”—the love that is in a man once set right—has no point or poison left it, but only rapid grace of wing and natural charm of colour.
Throughout the “Ideas” one or two other favourite points of faith and feeling are incessantly thrown out in new fugitive forms; such as the last (rejected) stanza of “Cupid,” which, though the song may well dispense with it and even gain by such a loss in the qualities of shape or sound, must be saved if only as a specimen of the persistent way in which Blake assumed the Greek and Roman habits of mind or art to be typical of “war” and restraint; an iron frame of mind good to fight in and not good for love to grow under.
“’Twas the Greek love of war
That turned Love into a boy[31]
And woman into a statue of stone;
And away fled every joy.”
More frequent and more delightful is the recurrence of such loving views of love as that taken in the last lines of “William Bond;” a poem full of strange and soft hints, of mist that allures and music that lulls; typical in the main of the embodied struggle between selfish and sacrificial passion, between the immediate impulse that brings at least the direct profit of delight, and the law of religious or rational submission that reaps mere loss and late regret after a life of blind prudence and sorrowful forbearance—the “black cloud” of sickness, malady of spirit and body inflicted by the church-keeping “angels of Providence” who have driven away the loving train of spirits that live by innate impulse: not the bulk of Caliban but the soul of Angelo being the deadliest direct enemy of Ariel. “Providence” divine or human, prepense moral or spiritual “foresight,” was a thing in the excellence of which our prophet of divine instinct and inspired flesh could not consistently believe. His evangel could dispense with that, in favour of such faith in good things as came naturally to him.
“I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,
But oh, he lives in the moony light;
I thought to find Love in the heat of day,
But sweet Love is the comforter of night.
“Seek Love in the pity of others’ woe,
In the gentle relief of another’s care;
In the darkness of night and the winter’s snow,
In the naked and outcast, seek Love there.”