Poetry is the rejuvenation and renewal of words and setting them free. That is what a great poet does while loosening the cluster of words and letting them afloat in the sea of time. Rabindranath Tagore (1861 � 1941) compared the poet with an archer wielding a bow and his poems (words) as arrows:
The bow whispers to the arrow
Before it speeds forth,
'Your freedom is mine!'
A poet I love most is William Blake (1757- 1827). Apart from being a mystical poet, he was also a painter, engraver and illustrator who illustrated his own books of poems. An artist whose designs and drawings are breathtaking in their magnificent conception,; a poet whose lyrical sweetness and purity is unsurpassed in the English language�that is how I view William Blake.
He was born in London in 1757 and there 70 years later he died in 1827. When he was 24 he married the illiterate Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market gardener. He taught her to read and she became his assistant in etching and binding. William Blake's first book was Poetical Studies in 1878. He etched, water-coloured and bound most of his illustrated books: Songs of Innocence and The Book of The (1789),The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Gates of Paradise and Visions of the Daughters of Albion(1793), etc.
As a visionary poet of embodiment he strives to bring abstractions before our eyes as manifest, just as he allows us to catch the glimpses, though all too fleetingly, of the streets and green places of London undergoing a dramatic change under the tremendous blast of the Industrial Revolution in England in the last quarter of the 18th century. This will be clear from the following luminous lines of soulful wisdom marked by electrifying clarity:
For mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress
In 1798 he published his Songs of Innocence. This work is remarkable for the beauty and purity of its lyrics. I am presenting below William Blake's Poem 'Introduction to Songs of Innocence'. In this poem the words are as pleasing to the ear as the meaning to the mind and heart.
Songs of Innocence
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing, said to me:
Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer,
'Piper pipe that song again';
So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer':
So I sang the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper sit thee down, and write
In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed
And I made a rural pen
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
William Blake wrote 'Exuberance is Beauty'.Passion and Expression is Beauty itself'Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is Not to be Acquired, it is born with us�. Beauty for William Blake was not an end itself, nor was it a mere byproduct. It was a means of communication. He viewed beauty as the spark at contact, marking the mystical union of poet and reader. All art exists at that point of contact and nowhere else.
The real thrill that I get from William Blake's poems is the preliminary perception of TRUTH and Blake's prophecy of its revelation. I have never seen any other poet who wrote passages which give us that kind of exciting thrill while that actual meaning is still quite hidden from our corporeal understanding. His famous poem called 'TYGER' fascinates us, long before we connect it with Wrath in heaven and Revolution on earth. Here is this great poem:
TYGER
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Poems of William Blake begin in delight and end in wisdom. They create more than one thousand beautiful celestial images in a flash at the same time on our mind's screen, transforming, transposing and transmuting our understanding and perception of terrestrial reality and the cosmos. Perhaps the great American poet Robert Frost (1874 -1963) had poets like William Blake in mind when he wrote: �Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting�. Let us now turn to William Blake's poem 'Ah! Sunflower!'. This poem holds us all by its mere melody
Ah! Sunflower!
Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!
Yet another favorite poem which has got lodged forever in my heart is William Blake's 'The Lamb'
The Lamb
Little Lamb, who made thee
Does thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing woolly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice.
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Does thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by His name,
Little Lamb God bless thee,
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Lamb
The basic purpose of William Blake was the discovery and recording of new truths about the human soul. For him the most exhilarating thing possible was the discovery of these truths. He was convinced that the births of intellect come to us direct from the Divine humanity and the treasures of Heaven are realities of Intellect, from which all the passions emanate unfettered and uncurbed in their eternal glory. To quote the words of William Blake himself in this context : 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom... Without contraries there is no progression.I must invent my own system, or be enslaved by another man's.I will not reason & compare: my business is to create'.
Thus Blake attempted to open the immortal EYES of man in words, to the WORLDS OF THOUGHT. As a poet and as a mystic, he often used objects solely for their poetic values. Here are his sublime words:
To see the world in a grain of sand
Heaven in a wild flower
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
Blake's researches into the terra incognita were so profound that he has been hailed as the Columbus of the psyche in whose footsteps Sigmund Freud (1856 � 1939) and Carl Jung (1875 � 1961), among others, were to follow in the next century. He created new world in which everything was so novel for which the then existing vocabulary was totally inadequate. The psychic forces seen and released by him were so real that he had to name them. Foster Damon rightly concludes �Thence arose Blake's special mythology, for these forces were living creatures�. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making us, now and then, involuntarily exclaim: �What made him think of that?�. With Blake, we are asking this question all the time.
Blake remains the challenge to every thinking person. He was far ahead of his times that we are just catching up to him. Many of his strange theories are now common places to the psychologist. His visionary, clairvoyant and sublime poems proclaim the Holiness of all life, the Brotherhood of Man, the Forgiveness of Sins, and above all the God above us, beneath us, before us, behind us and around us.
Olive Dargan (1869 - 1968), the American lyric poetess, paid this tribute to William Blake:
Be a God, your spirit cried;
Tread with feet that burn the dew;
Dress with clouds your locks of pride;
Be a child, God said to You.
(To be contd...)
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