Yet the laughter was as fitful as it was fierce; and it can suddenly fail. Blake’s sense of humour can sometimes completely desert him. He writes a string of verses against cruelty to the smallest creature as a sort of mystical insult to the universe. It contains such really fine couplets as these—
“Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain can tear.”
“A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.”
Or again, in a more fanciful but genuinely weird way—
“He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.”
And then, after all this excellent and quite serious poetry, Blake can calmly write down the following two lines—
“He who the ox to wrath has moved