Plate 20, “Night,” with its graceful lady tree growing up beside the verses, is a beautiful shadowy design on a background in which blue and green merge and deepen in a veil of evening mist and the poem is another of those minute pieces of perfection, which, like delicate sea-shells, were cast up out of the stormy ocean of Blake’s mind.
In their own way, and with due regard to their special range and quality, the “Songs of Innocence” are the most perfect things Blake ever did, for he attempted no effect in song or design that his art was not adequate to express, and his imagination lies over all like the haze of spring sunshine. At that time the lyric poet in Blake was dominant, compelling him to sing, while the mystic was hardly yet consciously awake in him.
But in the next book, “The Book of Thel,” the mystic has stirred and breathes through the poem. The story is veiled in a shining mystery, but is still quite intelligible and pellucid in style, till just at the end, when the sphinx riddle of this life, the paradox of the senses, the wonder and terror of death, close round the consciousness of Thel, and dark sayings are uttered darkly. Thel is the youngest of the daughters of the Seraphim, but is herself a mortal. All her joy in her own beauty and that of the natural world is destroyed by the thought that she must die, the flowers must fade, the cloud will melt away, everything must change and decay. The Lily of the Valley answers her gentle lamentation, telling her that in this very change, the feeding of the lives of others with our own life, lies the secret of an endless and blessed immortality. She herself will hereafter “flourish in eternal vales.” Thel assents to this—
Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb: he smells thy milky garments,
He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face,
Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.
That is all very well, she seems to say, you help to revive and nourish many creatures, but what do I do? I shall fade away like a little shining cloud. The lily then calls down a cloud, which appears in the bright likeness of a radiant youth in mid-air. The cloud tells her that when he passes away in an hour’s time, “It is to manifold life, to love, and peace and raptures holy.” He will wed the Dew, and linked together in a golden band they will “bear food to all our tender flowers.”
But Thel complains that she does nothing for any living thing,
Without a use this shining woman lived,
Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms.
Then the “cloud reclined upon his airy throne” tells her that even that would prove her of great use and blessing, for
Everything that lives
Lives not alone nor for itself,
and in token of the truth of what he says he calls the helpless worm, which appears to Thel as “an infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf.”