Poetical Sketches


Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957. In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000.

Publication

The original 1783 copies were seventy-two pages in length, printed in octavo by John Flaxman's aunt, who owned a small print shop in the Strand, and paid for by Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, dilettantes to whom Blake had been introduced by Flaxman in early 1783. Each individual copy was hand-stitched, with a grey back and a blue cover, reading "POETICAL SKETCHES by W.B." It was printed without a table of contents and many pages were without half titles. Of the twenty-two extant copies, eleven contain corrections in Blake's handwriting. Poetical Sketches is one of only two works by Blake to be printed conventionally with typesetting; the only other extant work is The French Revolution in 1791, which was to be published by Joseph Johnson. However, it never got beyond the proof copy, and was thus not actually published.
Even given the modest standards by which the book was published, it was something of a failure. Alexander Gilchrist noted that the publication contained several obvious misreadings and numerous errors in punctuation, suggesting that it was printed with little care and was not proofread by Blake. Gilchrist also notes that it was never mentioned in the Monthly Review, even in the magazine's index of "Books noticed", which listed every book published in London each month, signifying that the publication of the book had gone virtually unnoticed. Nevertheless, Blake himself was proud enough of the volume that he was still giving copies to friends as late as 1808, and when he died, several unstitched copies were found amongst his belongings.
After the initial 1783 publication, Poetical Sketches as a volume remained unpublished until R. H. Shepherd's edition in 1868. However, prior to that, several of the individual poems had been published in journals and anthologised by Blake's early biographers and editors. 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, Allan Cunningham published 'Gwin, King of Norway' and 'To the Muses' in Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, and Alexander Gilchrist included 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"' in his Life of William Blake. Gilchrist, however, did not reproduce Blake's text verbatim, instead incorporating several of his own emendations. Many subsequent editors of Blake who 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. Due to the extreme rarity of the original publication, these emendations often went unnoticed, thus giving rise to a succession of variant readings on the original content. Subsequent versions repeated or added to these changes, despite what later commentators described as obvious misreadings. However, in 1905, John Sampson produced the first scholarly edition of Blake's work, in which he returned to the original texts, also taking into account Blake's own handwritten corrections. As such, most modern editors tend to follow Sampson's example, and use the original 1783 publication as their control text.

Influences and importance

Blake's literary influences in Poetical Sketches include, amongst others, Elizabethan poetry, Shakespearean drama, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Fletcher, Thomas Gray, William Collins, Thomas Chatterton, Edmund Spenser, James Thomson's The Seasons, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, James Macpherson's Ossian and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Blake shows especial antipathy towards the closed couplet of Augustan poetry.
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 as the very outset of his career. In 1947, for example, Northrop Frye declared in Fearful Symmetry that although Poetical Sketches is not regarded as a great piece of work, "it is of the highest importance to us, partly because it show Blake's symbolic language in an emergent and transitional form, and partly because it confirms that Blake is organically part of his literary age."
Writing in 1965, S. Foster Damon concurs with Frye's opinion. In the entry for Poetical Sketches in Damon's , he refers to Sketches as "a book of the revolutionary period, a time of seeking for non-neoclassical inspiration, a preparation for the Romantic period For all the derivative material, the book is a work of genius in its daring figures, its metrical experiments, its musical tone." 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. All the principles of Romanticism are to be found in Blake's first book."
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. In the best poems of Blake's youth, the sublime feelings of poets like Gray and Collins find a radiant adequacy of visionary outline."
Frye, Damon and Bloom are all in agreement that Blake was, at least originally, very much of his age, but this is by no means a universally accepted opinion. Peter Ackroyd, for example, sees the poems as fundamentally divorced from the dominant poetic formulas of the day. Speaking of 'To the Evening Star' in specific and Poetical Sketches in general, Ackroyd argues that "it would be quite wrong to approach Blake's poetry with a Romantic belief that he is engaged in an act of confessional lyricism or brooding introversion This is not the poetry of a melancholy or self-absorbed youth."
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."
Similarly, W. H. Stevenson argues that "there is little direct borrowing, and it would be truer to say that, even at this early stage, he is experimenting with verse forms and has formed for himself a style as individual as Collin's and Akenside's".

Contents

Poetical Sketches consists of nineteen lyric poems, a dramatic fragment, a prologue to another play in blank verse, a prose poem prologue, a ballad and three prose poems.
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:
According to J.T. Smith, the advertisement was written by "Henry Mathew", which most critics take to mean Anthony Stephen Mathew; "Mrs Mathew was so extremely zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that upon hearing him read some of his earlier efforts in poetry, she thought so well of them as to request the Rev. 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."
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."

'To Spring', 'To Summer', 'To Autumn', 'To Winter'

The opening four poems, invocations to the four seasons, are often seen as offering early versions of four of the figures of Blake's later mythology, each one represented by the respective season, where "abstract personifications merge into the figures of a new myth." 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, 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. In later poems, Orc's fiery red hair is often mentioned as one of his most distinguishing characteristics; "The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea". Autumn seems to predict Los, the prophetic genius and embodiment of imagination, as it is the only one of the four seasons Blake allows to speak directly, which it does in a "jolly voice." Finally, Winter serves as an antecedent for Urizen, limiter of men's desires and embodiment of tradition and conventionality, insofar as winter is depicted as a giant who "strides o'er the groaning rocks;/He writhers all in silence, and his hand/Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life." In The Book of Urizen, Urizen is depicted as a giant striding over the land spreading winter throughout the cities of men.

'To the Evening Star'

Possibly inspired by Spenser's "Epithalamion", lines 285-295, 'To the Evening Star' is described by S. Foster Damon as "pure Romanticism, way ahead of its time." Harold Bloom identifies it as perhaps Blake's earliest Song of Innocence in its presentation of a pastoral vision of calm and harmony;

'Fair Elenor'

'Fair Elenor' has attracted critical attention insofar as it is one of the very few poems in Blake's œuvre written in a specific genre; in this case the genre is Gothic, and the poem adheres to its conventions so rigidly, it may in fact be a parody. The opening lines, for example, are almost clichéd in their observance of Gothic conventions;

'Song: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field"'

According to Benjamin Heath Malkin, this poem was written prior to Blake's fourteenth birthday, and as such, "How sweet" may be his oldest extant poem. Despite his young age, the poem includes allusions to mythological figures such as Eros, Cupid and Psyche. Bloom sees it as Blake's first Song of Experience.
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, where the sun is seized by Luvah. Damon reads it as "a protest against marriage," and notes that the imagery in the poem, particularly the phrases "silken net" and "golden cage" predict Blake's later metaphorical uses of nets and enclosures. For example, in The Book of Urizen, after the Fall of Los and Urizen, and the birth of Enitharmon and Orc, the Eternals cover mortal earth with a roof "called Science". Subsequently, after exploring the earth, Urizen spreads out "the net of Religion".

'Song: "My silks and fine array"'

"A pastiche of Elizabethan imagery", possibly to the point of parody, "My silks" deals with the popular Elizabethan topic of the transience of love;

'Song: "Love and harmony combine"' and 'Song: "I love the jocund dance"'

"My silks and fine array" contrasts sharply with the next two poems; "Song: 'Love and harmony combine'", which celebrates a natural love in which the lovers are depicted as trees with intertwining branches and roots and the similarly themed "Song: 'I love the jocund dance'".
W. H. Stevenson speculates that Kitty could in fact be Blake's future wife, Catherine Blake.

'Mad Song'

'Mad Song' is often regarded as Blake's first satire. Harold Bloom, who feels it is the most "Blakean" poem in Poetical Sketches refers to it as an "intellectual satire" on both the concept of mad songs and the world which the singer seeks to leave. Frye is also an admirer of the poem and argues that "a maddened world of storm and tempest is the objective counterpart of madness in the human mind; and the madman is mad because he is locked up in his own Selfhood or inside, and cannot bear to see anything. 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." Alexander Lincoln likens the poem to 'Song: "How Sweet I roam'd from field to field"' insofar as both deal with "states of mental captivity described from within."

'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year"' and 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"'

As with the contrast between "My silks and fine array" on one hand and "Love and harmony combine" and "I love the jocund dance" on the other, Blake again opposes the pleasure of love with its opposite in 'Song: "Fresh from the dewy hill, the merry year'" and 'Song: "When early morn walks forth in sober grey"'. In particular, the third stanza of each poem stands in diametric opposition to one another. The first reads
This is strongly contrasted with the following song:
Northrop Frye calls the contrasts between these various poems an "attempt to work out an antithesis of innocence and experience," and as such, they serve as a thematic antecedent of Blake's later work.

'To the Muses'

'To The Muses' represents an attack on contemporary poetry, using the language and cadence of Augustan verse to mock that very style of writing. Blake describes how the nine muses, once so active amongst the poets of old, now seem to have left the earth;
The poem also contains Blake's first reference to a topic with which he would deal several times in his subsequent work; the four elements, water, air, fire and earth ;
In , Blake would assign each element a visual representation. In The Book of Urizen, the four elements are personified as the sons of Urizen. In Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Blake describes the original formation of the elements.

'Gwin, King of Norway'

Presented as a warning for tyrannical kings, the longer lyric poem 'Gwin, King of Norway' represents Blake's first engagement with revolution, a theme which would become increasingly important in his later verse, such as America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, The Song of Los and The Book of Ahania. In 'Gwin', Blake points out how the ordinary man must become a revolutionary to suppress political tyranny;
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." 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. Blake was very much of the popular opinion that England was the oppressor and that the American people were fighting a righteous battle for their freedom. Erdman argues that in 'Gwin', "the geography is sufficiently obscure so that "the nations of the North" oppressed by King Gwin may easily be compared to the nations of North America oppressed by King George In 'Gwin', the rising up of the oppressed behind the "troubl'd banners" of their deliverer "Gordred the giant" parallels the hope that some American champion would prove the Samson of the New World." Erdman thus compares Gordred with George Washington and Thomas Paine. Susan J. Wolfson also sees the poem as primarily metaphorical; "the revenge-tale enacted by two symbolic figures is less the ballad's point than the universal carnage that displaces all hope of political reform this bloodbath may not so much pale politics into visionary history as evoke an appalling visionary politics, a transhistorical anxiety about the human cost of historical conflict."
The name Gordred was probably taken from Chatterton's 'Godred Crovan'. Margaret Ruth Lowery suggests that Blake took more from Chatterton than simply the name of Gordred, arguing that there are many parallels in theme and imagery between Chatterton's story of a Norse tyrant invading the Isle of Man, and Blake's of a revolution against a Norse tyrant.

'An Imitation of Spencer'

sees 'An Imitation of Spencer' as "an early attempt on Blake's part to define his poetic vocation." The poem follows 'To the Muses' in its mockery of Augustan poetry, accusing such poetry of consisting of "tinkling rhimes and elegances terse." This is contrasted with the power of more accomplished poetry;

'Blind-Man's Bluff'

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." This is most evident in the poem's concluding lines:

''King Edward the Third''

The unfinished dramatic fragment King Edward the Third is a Shakespearean-inspired ironic depiction of Edward III's war with France which began in 1337. 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. Blake ironically presents the invasion as a noble crusade for Liberty, which is spoken of as a commercial value by the English lords. For example, several times they boast that England is the home of Liberty and is protected by Liberty, yet they also proudly claim that "England is the land favour'd by Commerce". This treatment of Liberty has been identified as mockery of a similar, but non-ironic, treatment in James Thomson's Liberty, e.g. "Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt proclaim/What Kings supported by almighty love/And people fired with liberty can do".
The character of William his Man may be a representative of Blake himself, as he is the only character in the play who questions the morality of the invasion beyond the ostensible explanation of Liberty; "I should be glad to know if it was not ambition that brought over our King to France to fight for his right".
Beyond the investigation into notions of Liberty and the reasons for the invasion, David V. Erdman argues that the theme of the play is the bloodshed and hardship for the common people which will result, despite Edward's belief that the war provides ordinary men with a chance to be heroes; "the key to the is the great Death which lies in wait for the warriors of Edward's ill-starred invasion of France." Erdman believes the play is wholly ironic, and challenges critics who have read it literally and accused it of jingoism. Margaret Ruth Lowery, for example, believes that it expresses "a 'boylike' delight in the picturesqueness of war." S. Foster Damon calls it "uncritically patriotic." Mark Schorer interprets it as an "extended defence of war and national interests." Northrop Frye sees it as "Rule, Britannia! in blank verse." He further states, "the most puzzling feature of King Edward the Third is the frankness with which Blake admits that economic conditions are the cause of the war. Industry, commerce, agriculture, manufacture and trade are the gods directing the conflict, but the conflict is glorious and the gods worthy of worship. There seems to be no use looking for irony here."
Erdman, however, sees it as impossible that the author of such bitter and anti-imperialist tracts as 'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth', 'Prologue to King John' and 'Couch of Death', could possibly be expressing genuine sentiments in this apparent celebration of jingoism. 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." Similarly, Alicia Ostriker refers to the piece as "an ironic treatment of military values urged in the name of high ideals."
Regarding the fact that Blake never completed the play, and hence did not depict the English victory, Susan J. Wolfson argues that "Blake's refusal to report these outcomes functions systematically as a refusal of triumphalism, the mode of nationalistic self-satisfaction. His sketch draws us in, instead, to the various critical perspectives on the interests that impel England's history of military adventurism." She goes on to point out that "Blake's perspective is not the conservative lens of eighteenth-century formalism that would expose liberty as lawlessness, but a modern lens of suspicion about the motivated rhetoric, craft and intentional designs in the cant of Liberty."

'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth' and 'Prologue to King John'

The moral judgements which are kept implicit in King Edward the Third are made very much explicit in 'Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth' and 'Prologue to King John'. '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. 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;
; 2nd state of a piece also known as Our End is come and The Accusers of Theft Adultery Murder: A Scene in the Last Judgement
Blake was evidently quite proud of this piece as c.1796, he inscribed a colour etching with "When the senses are shaken/And the Soul is driven to madness. Page 56". This is a reference to the original publication of Poetical Sketches'' and refers to lines 2-3 of 'Edward the Fourth'.
In 'King John', which Erdman reads as a document of English protest against the American War, Blake becomes even more explicit regarding his detestation of war. Depicting an almost apocalyptical wilderness, Blake laments how "brother in brother's blood must bathe." England has become a place where "the sucking infant lives to die in battle; the weeping mother feeds him for the slaughter" and "the trembling sinews of old age must work the work of death against their progeny." However, the poem concludes on an optimistic note; "O yet may Albion smile again, and stretch her peaceful arms and raise her golden head, exultingly." The source for this possibility of renewal however is never revealed.

'The Couch of Death' and 'A War Song to Englishmen'

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.
The ballad 'A War Song to Englishmen' is usually interpreted as forming a part of Edward the Third, perhaps written by Blake to be inserted later. Specifically, the poem is seen as the second song of the minstrel, whose first song closes the fragment with a passionate evocation of Brutus of Troy, supposed founder of Britain. "War Song" continues to urge troops to battle and, like the minstrel's first song, is usually interpreted as parody and an ironic celebration of patriotic bloodlust. Erdman interprets it as "a parody of the battle songs of modern Britain."

'Samson'

The final piece in the volume, 'Samson', has received little critical attention over the years. Andrew Lincoln, however, has identified it as perhaps introducing a pseudo-biographical element into Blake's work, and argues that it "is an early experiment in prophetic narrative. Blake's Samson can be seen as a type of the artist who struggles against the materialism of his own age – and is doomed to be seduced by it before finally achieving his mission. The vulnerability of the would-be deliverer suggests that spiritual captivity is a state through which the strongest of mortals must pass." In , Blake would again allude to the Samson legend, referring to Emanuel Swedenborg as "the strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches".

Additional Content

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. The three poems, "Song 1st by a shepherd", "Song 2nd by a Yound Shepherd" and "Song 3d by an old shepherd" are not in Blake's handwriting, but are thought to be of his composition insofar as "Song 2nd" is an early draft of "Laughing Song" from Songs of Innocence.
In his 1965 edition of the Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, David Erdman assigns two additional incomplete prose poems to Poetical Sketches, under the section title 'Further Sketches'; "then She bore Pale desire…" and "Woe cried the muse…". These two poems are extant on seven MS pages in Blake's handwriting, and dateable to the early 1780s, but nothing else is known about them.
Erdman includes the two pieces in Poetical Sketches simply because there is no other collection with which to associate them. His decision, however, is by no means the norm amongst Blake's editors. For example, R.H. Shepherd did not include them in his publication of Poetical Sketches in 1868. In his 1905 edition of the collected works, Sampson mentioned them in his Introduction to Poetical Sketches but did not include them in the collection itself. In The Complete Writings of William Blake Geoffrey Keynes included them but divided them from Poetical Sketches, indexed them separately and dated them both 1777. Alicia Ostriker, in her William Blake: The Complete Poems, makes no reference at all to either piece throughout the volume. W.H. Stevenson in Blake: The Complete Poems, mentions them in a footnote, but does not reproduce them.
"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. "Woe cried the muse" was first published in 1925 in Geoffrey Keynes' The Writings of William Blake.
"then She bore Pale desire…" begins with a small letter and the first line is not indented, so it is clear that at least one page is missing. Harold Bloom believes it to be an experiment in stream of consciousness writing. According to Erdman, it is "an allegorical genealogy of Pride and Shame and Policy and "the Kingdoms of the World & all their Glory," it shows Blake revolving the problem of man's fate in terms that link imperial pride and individual frustration." For Damon, it is an attempt "to outline the spiritual decay of mankind in the course of history."

Citations