Apart from this special aspect of the Romantic revival marked by a tendency to look back lovingly to the earlier English poetry, there are few traces of the use of archaic and obsolete words, at least of such words used consciously, in eighteenth century poetry. The great poets of the century make little or no use of them. Collins has no examples, but Gray, who began by advocating the poet’s right to use obsolete words, and later seemed to recant, now and then uses an old term, as when in his translation from Dante he writes:
The anguish that unuttered nathless wrings
My inmost heart.
Blake, however, it is interesting to note, often used archaic forms, or at least archaic spellings,[157] as Tyger, antient (“To the Muses”), “the desart wild” (“The Little Girl Lost”), as well as such lines as
In lucent words my darkling verses dight
(“Imitation of Spenser”)
or
So I piped with merry chear.
(Introduction to “Songs of Innocence”)
Perhaps by these means the poet wished to give a quaint or old-fashioned look to his verses, though it is to be remembered that most of them occur in the “Poetical Sketches,” which are avowedly Elizabethan.