The hours drew away the robe of night,
Her subtle tapestry was rent in twain.
But the evocation of the seasons themselves, as in “Ælla” (32),
When Autumn sere and sunburnt doth appear
With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf
Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year
Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf,
conveys a fresh and distinct picture that belongs to the new poetry, and has in it a faint forecast of Keats.
It remains to look at the work of the later eighteenth century poets, who announce that if the Romantic outburst is not yet, it is close at hand. The first and greatest of these is William Blake. His use of personification in the narrower sense which is our topic, is, of course, formally connected with the large and vital question of his symbolism, to treat of which here in any detail is not part of our scheme.
In its widest sense, however, Blake’s mysticism may be connected with the great mediaeval world of allegory: it is “an eddy of that flood-tide of symbolism which attained its tide-mark in the magic of the Middle Ages.”[231] But the poet himself unconsciously indicates the vital distinction between the new symbolism, which he inaugurates, and the old, of which the personified abstractions of his eighteenth century predecessors may be regarded as faint and faded relics. “Allegory addressed to the intellectual powers,” he wrote to Thomas Butts,[232] “while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most surprising poetry.”