Jesus."[1] Nor are any of these poems finer in structure or nobler in metrical form.
This present edition of the Songs of Experience is richer by one of Blake's most admirable poems of childhood—a division of his work always of especial value for its fresh and sweet strength of feeling and of words. In this newly recovered Cradle Song are perhaps the two loveliest lines of his writing:
Sleep, sleep: in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep."[2]
Before parting from this chief lyrical work of the poet's, we may notice (rather for its convenience as an explanation than its merit as a piece of verse) this
- ↑ Compare again in the Vision of the Last Judgment (v. 2, p. 163), that definition of the "Divine body of the Saviour, the true Vine of Eternity," as "the Human Imagination, who appeared to me as coming to judgment among his saints, and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be established." The whole of that subtle and eloquent rhapsody is about the best commentary attainable on Blake's mystical writings and designs. It is impossible to overstate the debt of gratitude due from all students of Blake to the transcriber and editor of the Vision, whose indefatigable sense and patient taste have made it legible for all. To have extracted it piecemeal from the chaos of notes jotted down by Blake in the most inconceivable way, would have been a praiseworthy labour enough; but without addition or omission to have constructed these abortive fragments into a whole so available and so admirable, is a labour beyond praise.
- ↑ This exquisite verse did not fall into its place by chance; the poem has been more than once revised. Its opening stanza stood originally thus:—
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Thou wilt every secret keep;
Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Thou shalt taste the joys of night."Before recasting the whole, Blake altered the second line into—
"Canst thou any secret keep?"
The gist of the song is this; the speaker, watching a girl newly-born, compares her innocuous infancy with the power that through beauty will one day be hers, her blameless wiles and undeveloped desires with the strong and subtle qualities now dormant which the years will assuredly awaken within her; seeing as it were the whole woamn asleep in the child, he smells future fruit in the unblown bud. On retouching his work, Blake thus wound up the moral and tune of this song in a
