The "Poetical Sketches" are among the tenderest lyric notes uttered by Blake, and their bird-like spontaneity and lilt recall, says Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "the best period of English song-writing, whose rarest treasures lie scattered among the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists." These wild wood-notes gushing unselfconscious from a heart glad with youth and fair visions are in strange contrast to the artificial, trifling, and unsatisfying poetry of the age. Blake himself writes in the "Poem to the Muses":
How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoy'd in you! The languid strings do scarcely move, The sound is forced, the notes are few.
What can be said of that perfect lyric, written when Blake was but fourteen, "My silks and fine array," and that other which I shall surely be forgiven for quoting as it stands:
How sweet I roamed from field to field And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the Prince of Love beheld Who in the sunny beams did glide.
He show'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; He led me through his gardens fair Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet Maydews my wings are wet, And Phoebus fired my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
[Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF EXPERIENCE," 1794]
To a poetically sensitive mind, verses like these remain like a beautiful echo in the memory, having a musical charm apart from the sense of the words. Although in this little book it is my purpose to dwell mainly on Blake's manifestation of himself as a designer and painter, I cannot avoid lingering sometimes on his poetical expression. For the creative impulse that clothed its thought in a garment of words is the same as that which is embodied in plastic forms and symbolic colouring. Blake's invention had two outlets, but was itself one stream of energy only.
The lines to the Evening Star are incomparably sweet and haunting:
Thou fair-hair'd angel of the evening, Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light Thy brilliant torch of love; thy radiant crown Put on, and smile upon our evening bed! Smile on our loves, and whilst thou drawest round The curtains of the sky, scatter thy dew On every flower that closes its sweet eyes In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon, Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide, And then the lion glares through the dim forest, The fleeces of our flocks are covered with Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence.