William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, and these four poems represent his richly symbolic style
A Divine Image
Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.
The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.
A Dream
Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
‘Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.’
Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, ‘What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
‘I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle’s hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home! ‘
But in the Wine-Presses the Human Grapes Sing Not Nor Dance
But in the Wine-presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:
They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,
In chains of iron and in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits and dens and shades of death, in shapes of torment and woe:
The plates and screws and racks and saws and cords and fires and cisterns
The cruel joys of Luvah’s Daughters, lacerating with knives
And whips their victims, and the deadly sport of Luvah’s Sons.
They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan,
They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them to one another:
These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play,
Tears of the grape, the death sweat of the cluster, the last sigh
Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.
Silent, Silent Night
Silent, silent night,
Quench the holy light
Of thy torches bright;
For possessed of Day
Thousand spirits stray
That sweet joys betray.
Why should joys be sweet
Used with deceit,
Nor with sorrows meet?
But an honest joy
Does itself destroy
For a harlot coy.
William Blake, famous as the precursor of the Romantic Age in English literature, was born to a modest family on November 28, 1757. A resident of London almost all his life, he was a poet, painter and printmaker. His major poetic works include Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Milton. He passed away on August 12, 1827.
William Blake’s poems are known for their complexity garbed in simplicity. Deeply mystical, Blake spoke about the essential human condition, doubt, fear and regrets that crowd the human mind, as well as spiritualism, during a time when the English society was on the brink of major socio-cultural upheaval. He is rightly said to be one of the precursors of the English Romanticism. He firmly believed that his poems should both instruct and entertain, especially in terms of rousing the national spirit of England and its citizens.
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