Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/313

 allegory,' he says in his account of the 'Vision of the Last Judgment,' 'is a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision, or imagination, is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable, or allegory, is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of inspiration, who, in the aggregate, are called Jerusalem.'

The poems of the Pickering MS. have a certain unity of their own, a fact liable to be overlooked, when, as in several editions of the poet's works, they are scattered among pieces written at different times, and in a different manner. Among the 'deepest' of Blake's writings—if I may use the adjective in the sense in which English gypsies apply it to language, meaning thereby wholly or partly unintelligible to all save the highly initiate—they differ in their more fully developed mysticism from the earlier prophetic writings, and from those of later date in their avoidance of the mythological names which crowd the pages of Milton and Jerusalem. To the latter fact indeed part of their difficulty is due, for these names, consistently used by Blake in a definite sense, supply clues to the author's meaning which are absent in these poems.

This MS. may confidently be referred to Blake's Felpham period. 'Mary' was certainly written before August 16, 1803, when Blake in a letter to Mr. Butts introduces two of its lines in a slightly altered form, and in a different sense. The original drafts of two of the poems, 'The Golden Net ' and 'The Grey Monk,' which appear in a more perfected form in this MS., are found on two leaves of the latter part of the Rossetti MS., written probably in the same year. There are, moreover, in several of the poems phrases repeated in Milton and Jerusalem, both of which were engraved, in whole or part, in 1804. In identifying the style of 'The Mental Traveller' with that of Tiriel, which W. M. Rossetti and Swinburne concur in regarding as the first of the series of the Prophetic Books, W. B. Yeats (Notes, p. 349) would appear to date this poem at least as early as 1789. In so doing it will be seen that he differs from me, either in regarding the several poems in the Pickering MS. as having been written at widely different times, or by antedating the whole MS. by fourteen years.

Swinburne quotes with comment two stanzas of 'The Land of Dreams' (pp. 134, 135) and two lines of 'Mary' (p. 177), in the latter instance using Shepherd's text instead of Rossetti's. W. M. Rossetti prints the same pieces as his