Poetical Sketches
[8] For example, Benjamin Heath Malkin included 'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"' in A Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), Allan Cunningham published 'Gwin, King of Norway' and 'To the Muses' in Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), and Alexander Gilchrist included 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"' in his Life of William Blake (1863).
Many subsequent editors of Blake included extracts in their collections of his poetry, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, W. B. Yeats and E. J. Ellis, also introduced their own emendations.
[10] Although scholars are generally in agreement that Poetical Sketches is far from Blake's best work, it does occupy an important position in Blakean studies, coming as it does at the very outset of his career.
"[12] Damon also writes, "Historically, Blake belongs – or began – in the Revolutionary generation, when the closed heroic couplet was exhausted, and new subjects and new rhythms were being sought out.
The cadences of the Bible, the misunderstood Milton and the poetic Shakespeare with his fellow Elizabethans were Blake's staples from the first; to them we must add the wildness of Ossian, the music of Chatterton, the balladry of Percy's Reliques, and the Gothic fiction of Walpole.
"[13] Harold Bloom is also in agreement with this assessment, seeing the book as very much of its particular epoch; a period he dates from the death of Alexander Pope in 1744 to the first major poetry of William Wordsworth in 1789.
Bloom sees Sketches as "a workshop of Blake's developing imaginative ambitions as he both follows the poets of sensibility in their imitations of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and goes beyond them in venturing more strenuously on the Hebraic sublime [...] Perhaps the unique freshness of Poetical Sketches can be epitomised by noting Blake's first achievements in the greatest of his projects: to give definite form to the strong workings of imagination that produced the cloudy sublime images of the earlier poets of sensibility.
"[15] Susan J. Wolfson goes even further, seeing the volume as a statement of Blake's antipathy towards the conventions of the day and an expression of his own sense of artistic aloofness; "He serves up stanzas that cheerfully violate their paradigms, or refuse rhyme, or off-rhyme, or play with eye-rhymes; rhythms that disrupt metrical convention, and line-endings so unorthodox as to strain a practice of enjambment already controversial in eighteenth century poetics.
The nineteen lyric poems are grouped together under the title "Miscellaneous Poems": The work begins with an 'Advertisement' which explains that the contents were written by Blake in his youth and, therefore, any "irregularities and defects" should be forgiven: The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.
Henry Mathew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them; in which he not only acquiesced, but with his usual urbanity, wrote the following advertisement.
"[18] The following year, in 1784, Flaxman sounded a similar sentiment in a letter to William Hayley accompanying a copy of the book; "his education will plead sufficient excuse to your liberal mind for the defects of his work.
"[19] Spring seems to predict Tharmas, the peaceful embodiment of sensation, who comes to heal "our love-sick land that mourns" with "soft kisses on her bosom."
Summer is perhaps an early version of Orc, the spirit of Revolution, and is depicted as a strong youth with "ruddy limbs and flourishing hair", who brings out artists' passions and inspires them to create.
[20] Possibly inspired by Spenser's "Epithalamion" (c.1597), lines 285-295,[21] 'To the Evening Star' is described by S. Foster Damon as "pure Romanticism, way ahead of its time.
"[12] Harold Bloom identifies it as perhaps Blake's earliest Song of Innocence in its presentation of a pastoral vision of calm and harmony;[19] Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes In timely sleep.
[23] The opening lines, for example, are almost clichéd in their observance of Gothic conventions; The bell struck one, and shook the silent tower; The graves give up their dead: fair Elenor Walk'd by the castle gate, and looked in.
[26] Northrop Frye argues that the poem functions as a precursor to Blake's version of the Phaëton myth in 'Night the Second' of Vala, or The Four Zoas (1796), where the sun is seized by Luvah (representative of love and passion).
In order to have his world a consistently dark one, he is compelled to rush frantically around the spinning earth forever, keeping one jump ahead of the rising sun, unable even to sleep in his everlasting night.
The first reads So when she speaks, the voice of Heaven I hear So when we walk, nothing impure comes near; Each field seems Eden, and each calm retreat; Each village seems the haunt of holy feet.
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea Wand'ring in many a coral grove [...][38] In For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793), Blake would assign each element a visual representation.
[39] For Frye, "Gordred the giant leads a workers' revolution [...] the rebellion seems to be largely a middle class one in which the stronghold of political liberty is the independent yeoman.
"[40] David V. Erdman sees the poem as a direct antecedent of America and thus containing allusions to the American Revolution; England's actions prior to and during the war received widespread condemnation from the majority of the people, especially in London, where numerous protests were held against it.
[45] Predicting the close bond between form and content which would prove so important an aspect of his later Illuminated Books, in this simple story of a children's game, Blake uses the structure to carry his metaphorical intent; "Blake's tidy couplets report a game of all sound and no eye, where tyranny and wanton cruelty ensue, provoking a summary call for law and order and fair play […] Miming the forms of children's rhymes, he even implies the genesis of man's designs in childish games, whose local mischief, tricks and blood-letting confusions rehearse worldly power-plays.
Written in loose blank verse, the play is set the night before the Battle of Crécy, a significant turning point in the Hundred Years' War.
Instead, Erdman argues that "there are many indications of Blake's general prophetic intent in these scenes; yet if we forget to ask what historical climax they point toward, we may be quite puzzled that Blake's Edward and his brave and battle-ready warriors appear to be undertaking their invasion of the vineyards of France under favourable auspices, marching with jingoistic complacency towards a great slaughter of enemy troops and to be getting by what they represent to each other as glorious and fully justifiable murder.
'Edward the Fourth', which Frye calls "the first real statement of Blake's revolutionary politics," uses the refrain "Who can stand" to enquire into the possibility of nobility amidst war and destruction.
[53] It then imagines that even God wonders from where all the conflict has come, with Blake pointing his finger directly at those he holds responsible; O who hath caused this?
Erdman believes that the prose poem 'The Couch of Death' is a coda to Edward the Third, insofar as it depicts the victims of the plague and hardship brought about by the war.
On the blank leaves of a copy of Poetical Sketches inscribed "from Mrs Flaxman May 15, 1784", are three handwritten poems which, since John Sampson in 1905, have been attributed to Blake.
"then She bore pale desire" was first published in 1904, by William Michael Rossetti in the August edition of The Monthly Review, where it was rewritten into verse and appeared under the title The Passions (which is also the name used by Gilchrist).
