Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/17

 upon the manuscript throughout the period of his sojourn at Felpham: but internal evidence, arising from the substance of the allegory, compels us to assign the greater part of it to the closing days of that episode. The earliest reference to the poem occurs in a letter to Thomas Butts, written at Felpham and dated 25th April 1803, where he gives a brief description of its nature. "None," he says, "can know the spiritual acts of my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost; the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of these persons excepted)…. I mention this to show you what I think the grand reason of my being brought down here." There can be very little doubt that it is Milton and not Jerusalem which is intended here: for, although the latter does indeed contain copious allusions to the events at Felpham, the pages of Milton are, as we have seen, almost exclusively concerned with these matters. It is true the length of the poem cannot be said to correspond in the least with the author's promise; and this discrepancy may not be explained upon the old supposition (derived from a misreading of the title page), that it was his original intention to publish twelve books in all, and that the two which were given to the world were only a fragment of an unfinished piece; for as a reviewer in The Academy of 9th March last has pointed out, the correct reading of the title is Milton, a Poem in 2 (not 12) Books: "the 2," he adds, "is in the middle of a round dark space, enclosed by wreaths of white cloud," while the 1, which some writers had hitherto imagined to precede it, is in reality only "a stroke among the enclosing lines of decoration." But it seems likely, at least, that the pressure of work which, together with the Scholfield affair, was the cause of the delay in the engraving, also prevented Blake from dealing immediately with the whole mass of visionary material, with which the three years at Felpham had furnished him, and working it up into the great epic of which his letter speaks, and that he therefore decided to modify his project and to print, for the moment, only the nucleus of strictly autobiographical incident.