Thou hearest the nightingale begin the Song of Spring:
The lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn
Appears; listens silent: then springing from the waving cornfield, loud
He leads the choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse:
Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining shell.
His little throat labours with inspiration, every feather,
On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence divine,
All Nature listens silent to him, and the awful sun
Stands still upon the mountains looking on this little bird,
With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love and awe.
Then loud from their green covert all the birds begin their song.
The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren,
Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains.
The nightingale again assays his song and through the day
And through the night warbles luxuriant: every bird of song
Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love.
To this passage succeeds another of like beauty, a Flora’s Feast of colour and scent.
Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours:
And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet,
Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands
Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anak fiercely guard.
First ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the wild thyme
And meadowsweet downy and soft, waving among the reeds,
Light springing in the air, lead the sweet dance: they wake
The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak: the flaunting beauty
Revels along the wind: the white-thorn, lovely may
Opens her many lovely eyes: listening, the rose still sleeps,
None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed
And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower,
The pink, the jessamine, the wall-flower, the carnation,
The jonquil, the mild lily opes her heavens: every tree
And herb and flower soon fill the ear with an innumerable dance,
Yet all in order sweet and lovely. Men are sick with love.
Oh! how gladly the ear and heart rest on passages such as these, after toiling through the arid wilds of non-poetical occultism!
As usual the illustrations are turned to with keen delight. The iridescent pages recall the charms of the “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” Take it all in all the colour in this last prophetic book combines a clarity and brilliance of tone inferior to no other of Blake’s. All is careful, clear and precise, and there are no passages of heavy colouring or impasto work.
Forms, elemental, electric, indicative of unknown forces and conditions of consciousness start from the pages. As in “Jerusalem,” every page of writing is adorned, but the colour adds the necessary charm to the forceful designs. Plate 15 represents a muscular male—Michael Angelesque in its modelling—leaping upon a rock and seizing by the shoulders a languid old man. The young man is Milton, starting on his journey “to annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness.” The old man is Albion seated on the Rock of Ages, his legs immersed in the sea of Time and Space, his nerveless arms supported on the tables of the Law. Above them both, on a semi-circular plane of light, the Eternals are seen, passing in procession in a kind of ecstatic choric dance. Three play on instruments of music, while two others toss balls of light in joyous abandon. The rhythmic character of these dancers, their robes fetched out like clouds upon the wind, and the colour translucent and vivid as that of a border of April flowers, makes one think of the fair works with which Luca della Robbia has set the dark old streets of Florence, of which, as some one has poetically said, they would seem to be the “wall-flowers.”
The two other specially noteworthy plates are full-page designs, entitled respectively William and Robert. It is evident that they are the spiritual likenesses of Blake and that younger brother with whom he always maintained such close communion. A burning star emitting fountains of light falls beside each brother, while their bodies thrown backwards, and their faces skywards, seem to indicate the abandon of themselves to spiritual influences. The senses are not the limits put upon their perceptions. The Infinite spirit, the “Poetic Genius,” thrills through their entire beings as the sunshine through a dewdrop.
Let not the profane smile when they learn that the star is in reality Milton! For it is written, “so Milton’s shadow fell Precipitant loud thundering into the sea of Time and Space.”
Then first I saw him in the zenith as a falling star,
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift,
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter’d there.
So there can be no doubt as to what the star symbolizes in the design. The articulation, the tense nervous drawing of these two figures is remarkable, even for Blake, and the light throbbing with rainbow hues, and the intense darkness, against which it is contrasted, are boldly handled, while the weird colouring of the dead Robert, whose skin has the tone and lustre of gun metal, conduce to make these two designs of great imaginative appeal. Space has only allowed me to call attention to the most remarkable of the plates in this and the other “Prophetic Books,” but enough has been said to indicate the extraordinary range of their expression.