— 39 —
"We two, she said, will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys".
(stanza 18.)
This same kind of enumeration we find in more than one case with Blake, the greatest resemblance to the foregoing is however shown in the Laughing Song, where the following stanza occurs:
"When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing
Ha, ha, he!"
With this last rather striking example of Blake's literary influence on Dante Gabriel Rossetti I will close the discussion of Blake's direct influence. I think I have fully shown the different items in which this influence existed, also how it made itself felt mostly in the first period of D. G. Rossetti's literary career, when the Praeraphaelitic love for naïve and natural expression could not but result in a great appreciation of Blake. Putting together for, the sake of clearness, the principal facts which formed the bias for these and the following investigations we find in chronological order:
a) 1847.Rossetti finds in the British Museum the Ms. Book of Blake, now known as "the Rossetti Ms."
b) 1856.Rossetti receives as a New - Year's gift Haley's[1] "Ballad of the Eagle" illustrated by Blake and writes
- ↑ William Haley (1745—1820) was "poet, country gentleman and patron of art and literature." He was a great friend of Blake and Cowper, whose biography he wrote. The poems he wrote are of no literary value; the full title of the above mentioned poem is: "Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals."
