Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/16

x endeavoured to explain the author's mode of composition by longer prefatory or appended notes, indicating the successive changes by which he arrived at his final version. Interesting examples of the pains taken by Blake in perfecting his verses will be found in the notes to 'The Tyger,' 'Fayette,' and 'The Everlasting Gospel.' These not only supply the student with data which, were the actual MS. before him, could only be ascertained after considerable study, but enable him to follow for himself the reasons that have led the editor to arrange lines or stanzas in the order in which they appear in the text.

5. Many poems would prove unintelligible were it not for the light thrown upon them by the Prophetic Books, where the key to obscure mystical allusions is generally to be found. Readers of Blake's simpler poetry only who, with Mr. W. M. Rossetti, turn from the visionary writings after a 'hasty and half-shuddering glance,' will be ignorant of the consistency with which his self-invented system of mythology is expounded, and the absolute uniformity with which definite symbolical figures are used to express definite conceptions. While Blake has been at little pains to supply the world with a chart of his mental voyagings, it is impossible to study the prophetical writings without becoming aware of the extreme precision of his mystical terminology. In the books of Euclid such terms as 'radius,' 'pentagon,' 'equal,' or 'parallel' are not more absolutely descriptive of certain mathematical figures or relations, than are such locutions as 'Jerusalem,' 'spectre,' 'emanation,' 'hermaphrodite,' or 'natural religion ' of symbolic meanings in the writings of Blake. I have therefore endeavoured to make the poet his own interpreter by appending to these poems elucidatory passages from the Prophetic Books, coupled occasionally with brief explanations of what I conceive to have been his meaning. The value of these references in the interpretation of difficult poems like 'My spectre around me' in the Rossetti MS. or 'The Mental Traveller' in the Pickering MS. will not