The book contains but five pages, of which the most beautiful is a design of a boy and girl with arms wound around each other, running over a hill-top, with a passionate sunset sky behind them. The “Book of Los,” which must not be confounded with the Song, appeared in the same year. The Print Room has no copy, so we must descend to the Library, which happily possesses one. It consists of four chapters on the old themes, written in a sort of metrical prose. The frontispiece, representing a woman in the characteristic attitude so often adopted by Blake—the figure being seated on the ground, with head supported on knees in a mysterious lone place among rocks—is an arresting and powerful design. The writing in this book is particularly fine and clear. It is the last of Blake’s “London Books of Prophecy.”

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THE ACCUSERS: OR, SATAN’S TRINITY

Colour-print from the Large Book of Designs in the Print Room

What shall I say of “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion”—this longest and perhaps most mystical of all Blake’s dithyrambic books?

It was written, as well as the “Milton,” during the Felpham period, though probably added to, and finally finished after his return to London.

Those who have heard the extraordinary tone-poem called “Also sprach Zarathustra,” by Richard Strauss, may not think it far-fetched to suggest a parallel between revolutionary, chaotic, yet somehow great music, such as it is, and the so-called poem of “Jerusalem.” To the authors of both, the classical, the established forms of expression belonging to their respective arts, seem outworn, inadequate, cramped. They feared to trust the new wine of their fermenting ideas to the old bottles of recognized form, and each has invented for himself a way of escape—somewhat dangerous, nay, almost suicidal—from the pressure of precedent, law, and order. Strange harmonies, horrid discords, sweetness as of honey, to be succeeded by a sharp acridity like that of unripe lemons, great marshalled orchestral forms, and wild abortive sounds, tormenting alike to ear and heart, are to be discerned in “Zarathustra,” not without irrational excitement, anger, dismay, and occasional delight on the part of the hearer. And in “Jerusalem” is it not much the same?

With an Olympian audacity Blake writes, “When this Verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare, and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator, such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for the inferior parts; all are necessary to each other; Poetry fettered, fetters the human race.”

Self-assertion such as this is the apology for arts like those of Strauss and Walt Whitman, and our very admiration for Blake’s youthful lyrical gift compels us to lament that his muse was brought at last, after those early days of soaring flight, to wading through such quagmires of so-called poetry as this and the ensuing book. Mysticism had engulfed the poet in its dim cloud, though poetic phrases and passages like crystal dew glitter amid the gloom.