'The modest rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.'
Mr. Sampson tells us in his notes: Beginning by writing:
"The rose puts envious ..."
He felt that "envious," did not express his full meaning, and deleted the last three words, writing above them "lustful rose," and finishing the line with the words "puts forth a thorn." He then went on:
"The coward sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
And the lion increase freedom and peace;"
At which point he drew a line under the poem to show that it was finished. On a subsequent reading he deleted the last line, substituting for it:
'"The priest loves war, and the soldier peace;"
But here, perceiving that his rhyme had disappeared, he cancelled this line also, and gave the poem an entirely different turn by changing the word "lustful" to "modest," and "coward" to "humble," and completing the quatrain (as in the engraved version) by a fourth line simply explanatory of the first three.' This is not merely obeying the idle impulse of a rhyme, but rather a bringing of the mind's impulses into that land where 'contraries mutually exist.'
And when I say that he reads lessons, let it not be supposed that Blake was ever consciously didactic. Conduct does not concern him; not doing, but being. He held that education was the setting of a veil between light and the soul. 'There is no good in education,' he said. 'I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato. He knew nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And, as he says with his excellent courage: 'When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do'; and, again, with still more excellent and harder courage: 'When I am endeavoring to think rightly, I must not regard my own any more than other people's weaknesses'; so, in his poetry, there is no moral tendency, nothing that might not be poison as well as antidote; nothing indeed but the absolute affirmation of that energy which is eternal delight. He worshipped energy as the wellhead or parent fire of life; and to him there was no evil, only a weakness, a negation of energy, the ignominy of wings that droop and are contented in the dust.
And so, like Nietzsche, but with a deeper innocence, he finds himself 'beyond good and evil,' in a region where the soul is naked and its own master. Most of his art is the unclothing of the soul, and when at last it is naked and alone, in that 'thrilling' region where the souls of other men have at times penetrated, only to shudder back with terror from the brink of eternal loneliness, then only is this soul exultant with the supreme happiness.