Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/154

112 notice when engraving the poem for the Songs of Experience, and by a change of punctuation he converted the unfinished passage into its present shape—

a line exactly parallel in form to—

of the following stanza. The terrible, compressed force of these two short sentences, which burst forth with a momentary pause between them like shells from a mortar, is altogether lost in the languid punctuation of the Aldine edition—

and it is only the failure of critics to observe the significance of the revised pointing of the engraved version which caused Swinburne to speak of this passage as a 'rock of offence,' or Mr. Yeats to remark that when engraving the poem Blake 'forgot to alter the last line of the third stanza.' At a later date, in the version which there is no reason to doubt was supplied by the author to Dr. Malkin, Blake again remodelled this line into the slow and solemn form —

a variant for which there is no printed or manuscript authority. The word 'frame' moreover had already been used in the first stanza.

'I think that [BIake] wrote first "What the shoulder? What the knee?" and then, seeing that he had used the word "shoulder" before, he struck it out and inserted the word over it, which seems to be "ankle," but is not very clearly written. 'Then I think the glorious line occurred to him, "Did He who made the lamb make thee?" Probably after that he erased the line above, and wrote above it '"And did He laugh His work to see?" and then added the two lines about the stars. Then Blake re-arranged the order of the lines in the stanza, and numbered them in order to make this order clear; and also at the same time numbered the stanzas, making this the fifth. I think that he struck out the number "3" in front of the first line of this stanza by accident, meaning to erase the first word "And."' Above the fifth stanza, though probably written after it, is a revised version of stanza 2, which differs from that finally adopted. The difficult line—}}