Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/27

— 27 — at St. Paul's. Also in the Nurse's Song, in which is told how a nurse at sunset calls the children home from their sports. Besides these we find the pure lyrical song represented in the "Laughing Song" with its happy ring of merry voices; in the "Spring", a very vocal poem despite the imperfect rhymes. Other poems express a child-like piety as "the Lamb" and "A Cradle Song". In all these songs we find a tender loveliness which hardly reappears in Blake's subsequent writings. The "Songs of Experience", written five years later, are deeper, already they show forth Blake's mystic ideas; but though the melody and simplicity of expression remain the same, they have lost in freshness and spontaneity. As an example I quote the first stanza of the beautiful "Cradle Song" with its soft melancholy:

Highly remarkable are the poems "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found". In these Blake illustrates in a beautiful allegory one of his favourite doctrines viz. the physical nature has a right to be indulged in. It is true, and this holds good for Blake's Songs of Experience in general, that we do not easily catch the meaning of these poems; but then the language is so musical, the rhymes are so natural and profuse, the bold images so highly imaginative, that we feel that here we read true poetry of the highest kind. Blake represents in these poems physical nature by the lost girl Lyca (from the Greek word for wolf) who errs through a dense forest: