At Hercules Buildings Blake did a large number of paintings and engravings, including the 537 coloured drawings for Young’s Night Thoughts, and some of the greatest of his designs, such as the “Job” and “Ezekiel” prints; and here, too, he completed certain of his Prophetic Books, with their incomprehensible imagery and allegory, and what Swinburne has called their “sunless and sonorous gulfs.” From Hercules Buildings also came “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night,” and the rest of the Songs of Experience. Then, in 1800, Hayley, the poet of the dull and unreadable Triumphs of Temper, persuaded him to move into the country and settle down in a cottage at Felpham; from which, because he said “the visions were angry with me at Felpham,” he returned to London early in 1804, and took lodgings on the first floor of 17 South Moulton Street, Oxford Street.
BLAKE’S HOUSE. SOUTH MOULTON ST.
Nevertheless, at Felpham he must have been working on his Jerusalem, and on Milton, A Poem in Two Books, for these were issued shortly after his arrival in South Moulton Street. He writes of Jerusalem in one of his letters: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve, or sometimes twenty or thirty, lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will”; and in a later letter, speaking of it as “the grandest poem that this world contains,” he excuses himself by remarking, “I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary—the authors are in eternity.” Much of Jerusalem is turgid, obscure, chaotic, and so impossible to understand that Mr. Chesterton declares that when Blake said “that its authors were in eternity, one can only say that nobody is likely to go there to get any more of their work.” But it is in this poem that Blake introduces those verses “To the Jews,” setting forth that Jerusalem once stood in—
“The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,”
and that then—
“The Divine Vision still was seen,
Still was the human form divine;
Weeping in weak and mortal clay,
O Jesus! still the form was Thine.
And Thine the human face; and Thine
The human hands, and feet, and breath,
Entering through the gates of birth,
And passing through the gates of death”;
and in Jerusalem you have his lines “To the Deists,” the first version of his ballad of the Grey Monk, with its great ending:—
“For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of a martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.”
For my part, I wish it were possible for some of our living poets to go again to those authors in eternity and get some more of such stuff as this, even if we had to have it embedded in drearier lumps of nonsense than you find in Jerusalem.