Features > The Poems of William Blake

An introduction by Tom Paulin

In the Four Zoas, which Yeats discovered in manuscript, this passage occurs:

For Los and Enitharmon walk'd forth on the dewy Earth
Contracting and expanding their all flexible senses
At will to murmur in the flowers small as the honey bee,
At will to stretch across the heavens & step from star to star...

It may be that these lines helped Yeats to shape

Nine bean-rows will I have there, and a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

It may also be that this line from Blake's 'The Smile' - 'For it sticks in the Heart's deep core' is behind 'I hear it in the deep heart's core'. We begin to see, then, that Blake is behind 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree,' and that that apparently Irish poem is entangled with radical English dissent.

In his 1893 selection of Blake's verse and prose, Yeats concludes by saying
He knew, despite the neglect and scorn of his time, that fame even upon the
Earth would be granted him, and that his work was done, for the Eternal Powers do not labour in vain.

'Re-engraved time after time,
Ever in their youthful prime;
My designs unchanged remain,
Time may rage but rage in vain.
For above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic mountains,
In my golden house on high,
There they shine eternally.'

The Blake fragment from which Yeats is quoting begins 'The caverns of the grave I've seen,/And these I shewed to England's Queen..' As a nationalist and republican, Yeats would have puzzled his readers had he included the lines - by dropping them he places the res tof the fragment in an Irish context. No one reading these lines of Blake can fail to place them in Sligo - for Irish readers the 'great Atlantic mountain' has to be Ben Bulben, and so we are reading the lines through late Yeats. Here he is at the age of 28 planning his epitaph - 'Under bare Ben Bulben's head', a line written nearly forty-five years later is already somewhere being sketched out deep in the young poet's imaginative subconscious. And if we look at 'Under Ben Bulben' we find:

Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God.

Blake is much in Yeats's mind at the end -

that William Blake
who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call
as he says in 'An Acre of Grass'.

Blake is eternally present for Yeats partly because the great Atlantic mountains are, as he and/or Edwin Ellis say in their great three-volume edition of Blake, 'a symbolic place where imaginative creatures elude the washing of the sea of time and space, and the flood of the five senses.' This must be part of the meaning which that great Atlantic mountain, Ben Bulben has for Yeats.

One day, perhaps, a scholar will comb the three-volume edition of Yeats to sift out his contributions from Ellis's. This sentence on Blake's early verse seems to me to be pure Yeats: 'the movement of his [Blake's] early verse are like the gambollings of some very powerful animal, still in its fluffy-footed and tottering babyhood.'Tthe last two concatenated adjectives and the two '00' sounds have a distinctively Yeatsian cadence.

The theme of time in Yeats - time and form - owes much to his reading of Blake. He quotes earlier in his 1893 introduction to Blake these lines from The Book of Urizen which describe the making of Enitharmon:

Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment,
Petrify the eternal myriads
At the first female form, now separate:
They called her Pity, and fled.

'Pity' - Yeats defines as 'the vegetable mortal wife of Los', while Los 'though he is time', Yeats says, 'and more than one other great abstract thing is also Blake himself'. Blake's lines and Yeats's comments may be somewhere adjacent to Yeats's 'Peace':

Ah, that Time could touch a form
That could show what Homer's age
Bred to be a hero's wage.
'Were not all her life but storm,
Would not painters paint a form
Of such noble lines,' I said,
'Such a delicate high head,
All that sweetness amid charm,
All that sweetness amid strength?'
Ah, but Peace that comes at length,
Came when Time had touched her form.

Blake's insistence on form - on 'the more distinct, sharp, and wirey founding line, the more perfect the work of art' - that insistence reverberates in Yeats's use of the words 'form', 'line' and 'discipline'. When he says 'In Memory of Robert Gregory' 'that stern colour and that delicate that are our secret discipline line', he is drawing on Blake. He is also drawing on Blake's insistence on the importance of 'minute particulars' when he insists on the value of 'small things' in his poems - from the brown mice bobbing round and round the oatmeal chest in 'The Stolen Child' to the moorhens later on, he is minutely particularizing details in order to locate vision.

Blake's word 'lineaments' is taken up by Yeats: 'ancient lineaments are blotted out' ('The Gyres'), 'Ireland's history in their lineaments trace ('The Municipal Gallery Revisited'), and both poets use the words 'thing' and 'think' many, many times. Yeats so admired Blake that he discovered an Irish ancestry for the poet, arguing it in some detail right at the beginning of his 1893 introduction. He would have noted that Ireland and Sligo figure in Blake's visionary topography in The Four Zons, and he argues in his introduction that Blake was descended from the O'Neill family via a shebeen in Rathmines run by a woman called Ellen Blake. In other words, Blake was a Gaelic aristocrat brought low. Yeats states:

The very manner of Blake's writing has an Irish flavour, a lofty extravagance of invention and epithet, recalling the Tain Bo Cuilane and other old Irish epics and his mythology often brings to mind the tumultuous vastness of the ancient tales of god and demon that have come to us from the dawn of mystic tradition in what may fairly be called his fatherland.

The word 'lofty' which Yeats will later apply to John O'Leary, Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne, here webs Blake into what Yeats in the introduction calls 'ancestral turbulence' - an aesthetic energy he says showed again in Blake's brother, John, whom he compares to Shaun O'Neill - he means Shane O'Neill, the Gaelic aristocrat and rebel leader.

When Yeats remarks that Blake 'is one of the great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan', he is beginning the quest for the 'artifice of eternity' in 'Sailing to Byzantium' - a quest he is also preparing for when he remarks in the same introduction that Blake said 'Israel delivered from Egypt is art delivered from nature and imitation.' The Yeats who is later to write 'deliver me / Into the artifice of eternity' is beginning his journey toward that supreme poem.

The Egyptian theme in Irish and English writing is almost always a republican trope, and Yeats describes Blake's work as 'republican art' - every one of the parts has, he says, a 'separate individuality and separate rights as in a republic.'

James Joyce also portrays Blake as a republican artist, stating that even among the members of the circle that included Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine 'Blake was the only one with the courage to wear in the street the red cap, emblem of liberty.' He took it off, Joyce says, after the September Massacres. Joyce points out that Blake 'always insists on the importance of the pure, clean line that evokes and creates the figure on the background of the uncreated void.' And Joyce, like Yeats, is pointing to lineation in Blake as an essentially republican aesthetic. Joyce's many allusions to Blake, his profound admiration for the poet, still await a definitive study - the nets of nationality, language, religion, come from The Book of Urizen, the 'smithy of my soul' derives from The Book of Los and Milton. Stephen's 'Am I walking into Eternity along Sandymount Srtand' derives from The Book of Los.

Perhaps most wonderfully and tenderly, this passage from Joyce's Trieste lecture on Blake lets us see Bloom beginning to form deep in Joyce's imaginative subconscious.

We are amazed that the symbolic beings Los and Urizen and Vala and Tiriel and Enitharmon and the shades of Milton and Homer came from their ideal world to a poor London room, and no other incense greeted their coming than the smell of East Indian tea and eggs fried in lard. Isn't this perhaps the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal spoke through the mouth of the humble?

It is difficult to read this deeply democratic sentence and not see Bloom making breakfast, indeed the whole structure and conception of Joyce's masterpiece beginning to unfold.

Blake is a great liberating imaginative force for Irish artists, as we can see in the references to his work that Van Morrison makes - this is 60s Belfast where Blake, Rimbaud, Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas De Quincey were eagerly read and discussed by the young.

In Milton, Blake says 'a moment equals a pulsation of the artery' and then says

Every time less than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period of value to six thousand years.

A few lines later he says 'Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery'. The noun 'pulsation' does not lend itself to poetry, but Yeats was taken by the repeated phrase 'pulsation of the artery,' and adapted it in 'A Meditation In Time of War'

For one throb of the artery
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate fantasy.

I can't find that my heart returns an echo to this sentiment, but the link to Blake - even to Wordsworth in the cadence of 'that old grey stone' - suggests that Yeats is placing himself as the latest Romantic poet to confront war in a single pulse of subjectivity.

I mentioned Belfast in the 60s - here we come to locating what drew Yeats and Van Morrison to Blake - that strain of visionary protestant radicalism - at times headbanging, obsessive, obscure and relentless in its search for secret codes and meanings, at others capable of a natural simplicity and boundless wonder above and beyond institutional ways of thinking. It was this quality or energy that spoke to the eternally anti-institutional Joyce. One day perhaps a study of this imagination will be written - for the moment we need to read Blake through Yeats, and Yeats through Blake.