Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/166

 142 fragment of translation from Klopstock, done at Felpham under the immediate dictation of Hayley. 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake' we have seen Hayley noting down. But I can find no original for it in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his own head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an experiment in that 'monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming,' which he tells us in the preface to Jerusalem he considered 'to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse,' at the time 'when this verse was first dictated to me.' The only resemblance which we find to it in Blake's published work is in an occasional early fragment like that known as 'The Passions,' and where it is so different from this or any of the early attempts at blank verse is in the absolute regularity of the metre. All I can suggest is that Blake may have written it at a very early age, and preserved a rough draft, which Hayley may have induced him to make a clean copy of, and that in the process of copying he may have touched up the metre