"The Voyage" by Charles Baudelaire

National Gallery

Charles Baudelaire died #OnThisDay in 1867. He appears in Edouard Manet's 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens', Manet's first major work depicting modern city life. The painting hangs in Room 41:http://bit.ly/1X0af6s

Charles Pierre Baudelaire died in Paris, France on this day in 1867 (aged 46). He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

"The Voyage" by Charles Baudelaire

(To Maxime du Camp)

To a child who is fond of maps and engravings
The universe is the size of his immense hunger.
Ah! how vast is the world in the light of a lamp!
In memory's eyes how small the world is!
One morning we set out, our brains aflame,
Our hearts full of resentment and bitter desires,
And we go, following the rhythm of the wave,
Lulling our infinite on the finite of the seas:
Some, joyful at fleeing a wretched fatherland;
Others, the horror of their birthplace; a few,
Astrologers drowned in the eyes of some woman,
Some tyrannic Circe with dangerous perfumes.
Not to be changed into beasts, they get drunk
With space, with light, and with fiery skies;
The ice that bites them, the suns that bronze them,
Slowly efface the bruise of the kisses.
But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!"
Those whose desires have the form of the clouds,
And who, as a raw recruit dreams of the cannon,
Dream of vast voluptuousness, changing and strange,
Whose name the human mind has never known!

II
Horror! We imitate the top and bowling ball,
Their bounding and their waltz; even in our slumber
Curiosity torments us, rolls us about,
Like a cruel Angel who lashes suns.
Singular destiny where the goal moves about,
And being nowhere can be anywhere!
Toward which Man, whose hope never grows weary,
Is ever running like a madman to find rest!
Our soul's a three-master seeking Icaria;
A voice resounds upon the bridge: "Keep a sharp eye!"
From aloft a voice, ardent and wild, cries:
"Love... glory... happiness!" �Damnation! It's a shoal!
Every small island sighted by the man on watch
Is the Eldorado promised by Destiny;
Imagination preparing for her orgy
Finds but a reef in the light of the dawn.
O the poor lover of imaginary lands!
Must he be put in irons, thrown into the sea,
That drunken tar, inventor of Americas,
Whose mirage makes the abyss more bitter?
Thus the old vagabond tramping through the mire
Dreams with his nose in the air of brilliant Edens;
His enchanted eye discovers a Capua
Wherever a candle lights up a hut.

III
Astonishing voyagers! What splendid stories
We read in your eyes as deep as the seas!
Show us the chest of your rich memories,
Those marvelous jewels, made of ether and stars.
We wish to voyage without steam and without sails!
To brighten the ennui of our prisons,
Make your memories, framed in their horizons,
Pass across our minds stretched like canvasses.
Tell us what you have seen.

IV
"We have seen stars
And waves; we have also seen sandy wastes;
And in spite of many a shock and unforeseen
Disaster, we were often bored, as we are here.
The glory of sunlight upon the purple sea,
The glory of cities against the setting sun,
Kindled in our hearts a troubling desire
To plunge into a sky of alluring colors.
The richest cities, the finest landscapes,
Never contained the mysterious attraction
Of the ones that chance fashions from the clouds
And desire was always making us more avid!
— Enjoyment fortifies desire.
Desire, old tree fertilized by pleasure,
While your bark grows thick and hardens,
Your branches strive to get closer to the sun!
Will you always grow, tall tree more hardy
Than the cypress? — However, we have carefully
Gathered a few sketches for your greedy album,
Brothers who think lovely all that comes from afar!
We have bowed to idols with elephantine trunks;
Thrones studded with luminous jewels;
Palaces so wrought that their fairly-like splendor
Would make your bankers have dreams of ruination;
And costumes that intoxicate the eyes;
Women whose teeth and fingernails are dyed
And clever mountebanks whom the snake caresses."

V
And then, and then what else?

VI
"O childish minds!
Not to forget the most important thing,
We saw everywhere, without seeking it,
From the foot to the top of the fatal ladder,
The wearisome spectacle of immortal sin:
Woman, a base slave, haughty and stupid,
Adoring herself without laughter or disgust;
Man, a greedy tyrant, ribald, hard and grasping,
A slave of the slave, a gutter in the sewer;
The hangman who feels joy and the martyr who sobs,
The festival that blood flavors and perfumes;
The poison of power making the despot weak,
And the people loving the brutalizing whip;
Several religions similar to our own,
All climbing up to heaven; Saintliness
Like a dilettante who sprawls in a feather bed,
Seeking voluptuousness on horsehair and nails;
Prating humanity, drunken with its genius,
And mad now as it was in former times,
Crying to God in its furious death-struggle:
'O my fellow, O my master, may you be damned!'
The less foolish, bold lovers of Madness,
Fleeing the great flock that Destiny has folded,
Taking refuge in opium's immensity!
— That's the unchanging report of the entire globe."

VII
Bitter is the knowledge one gains from voyaging!
The world, monotonous and small, today,
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our image:
An oasis of horror in a desert of ennui!
Must one depart? Remain? If you can stay, remain;
Leave, if you must. One runs, another hides
To elude the vigilant, fatal enemy,
Time! There are, alas! those who rove without respite,
Like the Wandering Jew and like the Apostles,
Whom nothing suffices, neither coach nor vessel,
To flee this infamous retiary; and others
Who know how to kill him without leaving their cribs.
And when at last he sets his foot upon our spine,
We can hope and cry out: Forward!
Just as in other times we set out for China,
Our eyes fixed on the open sea, hair in the wind,
We shall embark on the sea of Darkness
With the glad heart of a young traveler.
Do you hear those charming, melancholy voices
Singing: "Come this way! You who wish to eat
The perfumed Lotus! It's here you gather
The miraculous fruits for which your heart hungers;
Come and get drunken with the strange sweetness
Of this eternal afternoon?"
By the familiar accent we know the specter;
Our Pylades yonder stretch out their arms towards us.
"To refresh your heart swim to your Electra!"
Cries she whose knees we kissed in other days.

VIll
O Death, old captain, it is time! let's weigh anchor!
This country wearies us, O Death! Let us set sail!
Though the sea and the sky are black as ink,
Our hearts which you know well are filled with rays of light
Pour out your poison that it may refresh us!
This fire burns our brains so fiercely, we wish to plunge
To the abyss' depths, Heaven or Hell, does it matter?
To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!"

*

Modern poetry begins with Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), who employed his unequalled technical mastery to create the shadowy, desperately dramatic urban landscape -- populated by the addicted and the damned -- which so compellingly mirrors our modern condition. Deeply though darkly spiritual, titanic in the changes he wrought, Baudelaire looms over all the work, great and small, created in his wake. READ more here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/9617/baudelaire-poems/

D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate”

Fruit Poem: Pomegranate By D. H. Lawrence

September 28th, 2010 | by Editor 

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek
    women.
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in
    flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes.
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm, your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
    shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

From “Birds, Beasts, And Flowers: Poems By D. H. Lawrence.”

THE POEM STUCK IN MY HEAD

D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate”

July 11, 2012 | by Eli Mandel

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Sometimes in life you get yelled at. No matter your moral fiber, it can’t be avoided all the time. It happens in Marine Corps boot camp; it happens in rush-hour subway cars; it happens if your mother catches you reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover at an impressionable young age. But one place you don’t expect to get harangued, one place where the lid’s supposed to stay on the pot, is poetry.

So cracking open D. H. Lawrence’s seemingly innocuous Birds, Beasts, Flowers is a bit of a shock. Lawrence is, of course, better known for his novels and short stories; verse can unleash in him an irritating Whitmanesque mania, an exhibitionist verbal autoeroticism. But that’s not the case here. You flip past the title page and the index to the first poem, “Pomegranate,” and before your eyes can adjust to the typeface, you’re in trouble. Big trouble:

You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

No matter how many times I read these lines I’m stunned by their gutsiness, ferocity, and sheer verbal voltage. I recoil; I want to say, I didn’t say anything to you, D. H.! All I did was look at the damn book! Poets tend to beseech or cajole, seduce or flat-out ignore their readers; they don’t usually pick fights with them. Lawrence has got a lot of nerve.

But all’s fair in love and war, and “Pomegranate,” at its core, is a poem about love. As Lawrence beats you into submission, it becomes clear that it’s over a lot more than a piece of fruit. Indeed, you’re getting it about the entire history of love in the West—and your own complicity in that sad story.

If the authors of Genesis envisioned any one particular fruit dangling from that infamous tree in Eden, scholars argue it was likely the pomegranate. In the Greco-Roman tradition, those same ruby seeds cursed Persephone to an eternal half-life, consigned her to winter after winter with her abductor-husband, Hades, among the pomegranate groves of the dead. From Jerusalem to Athens to Rome, this is the fruit you get when love spoils into lust, when desire goes to seed.  This is not a fruit you want to crack open.

Lawrence knows this mythology. His poem is, in fact, a highly compressed commentary on it. He take a tour of three cities—Syracuse, Venice, San Gervasio—and three of their pomegranate orchards. As Lawrence moves among these places, these pomegranates, he moves, too, among the fragments of lost—or soon to be lost—love. (As for his puzzling reference to the “viciousness of Greek women,” maybe he had a bad experience.) The fruits’ imperious grandeur—“barbed, barbed with crowns”—allures and inflames his memory, stoking his violent outcry until it bursts its confines. Literally. One of the wonders of this poem is that it is itself a pomegranate. Its prickly, defensive opening lines call to mind a barbed crown. That crown gives way to a tough rind and bitter pulp, the poem’s central section, with its various fruits and grievances. These, in turn, at long last yield seeds. By his fifth stanza Lawrence is railing about a “fissure,” and pretty soon “the end cracks open with the beginning,” and the poem reveals a prize too ravishing, too delicious, to be anything but the pomegranate’s bejeweled contents:

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

Lawrence does not deny the pomegranate its history of love and death, but neither does he view that history as problematic. Far from it: he rails against you, the reader, for your temerity and your squeamishness in matters of love. He “prefers his heart to be broken” and—millennia of human unease with the erotic be damned—he want you to as well. In eighth grade, I discovered my school library’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (true to Justice Potter Stewart’s dictum, I knew pornography when I saw it). Over a series of lunch periods, I read the faded paperback while crouched under a table, thus evading castigation and/or gentle joshing from the librarian or, horror of horrors, Mom. But not until the endgame of adolescence—which, for me, was about six months ago—did I chance upon “Pomegranate.” (No clandestine operations this time.) Sure,Lady Chatterleywins in the titillation department, but I find these twenty-nine lines of verse far more shocking. Certainly they’re seared into my memory in a way that their seedy uncle of a novel isn’t. Partly that’s because I’m not thirteen anymore; partly that’s because this is what great poems do.

Eli Mandel lives in New York.

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Anne's Favorite Poems (Persuasion (1995) ):'Lord Byron and Jane Austen

Persuasion (1995)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbmNfvr12I

約52:40

When Captain Benwick asks Anne "do you prefer Marmion or The Lady of the Lake?" she replies by quoting a line from The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott (Canto iii. Stanza 16):

"Like the dew on the mountain,

Like the foam on the river,

Like the bubble on the fountain,

Thou art gone, and forever!"

Old-Fashioned Charm: Anne's Favorite Poems

http://old-fashionedcharm.blogspot.tw/2011/08/annes-favorite-poems.html
~~~~~~

Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her. Lord Byron's "dark
blue seas" could not fail of being brought forward by their present
view, and she gladly gave him all her attention as long as attention
was possible. It was soon drawn, perforce another way.

Lord Byron's "dark blue seas"

From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem in four cantos, 1812-1818, that overnight made Lord Byron the most lionized literary figure in England and Europe. 

Bliss Carman, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Poetry. Volume V. Nature.  1904.

VII. The Sea

The Sea

Lord Byron (1788–1824)

From “Childe Harold,” Canto IV.   THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,   There is a rapture on the lonely shore,   There is society where none intrudes   By the deep sea, and music in its roar:   I love not man the less, but nature more,         5   From these our interviews, in which I steal   From all I may be, or have been before,   To mingle with the universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.     Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,—roll!         10   Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;   Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control   Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain   The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain   A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,         15   When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,   He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.     His steps are not upon thy paths,—thy fields   Are not a spoil for him,—thou dost arise         20   And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields   For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,   Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,   And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray   And howling, to his gods, where haply lies         25   His petty hope in some near port or bay, And dashest him again to earth:—there let him lay.     The armaments which thunderstrike the walls   Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake   And monarchs tremble in their capitals,         30   The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make   Their clay creator the vain title take   Of lord of thee and arbiter of war,—   These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,   They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar         35 Alike the Armada’s pride or spoils of Trafalgar.     Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;   Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?   Thy waters wasted them while they were free,   And many a tyrant since; their shores obey         40   The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay   Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou;   Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play,   Time writes no wrinkles on thine azure brow; Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.         45     Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form   Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,   Calm or convulsed,—in breeze, or gale, or storm,   Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime   Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime,         50   The image of Eternity,—the throne   Of the Invisible! even from out thy slime   The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.     And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy         55   Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be   Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy   I wantoned with thy breakers,—they to me   Were a delight; and if the freshening sea   Made them a terror, ’t was a pleasing fear;         60   For I was as it were a child of thee,   And trusted to thy billows far and near, And laid my hand upon thy mane,—as I do here.

The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Byron

https://books.google.com.tw/books?isbn=0230245412

M. Garrett - 2010 - ‎Literary Criticism

But what we have, brief though it is, is Byron's most accomplished piece of prose ... In Chapter 12 there is a reference to 'Lord Byron's “dark blue seas”' (the 'dark ..

Eve on Her Deathbed by Linda Pastan

The Paris Review

Eve on Her Deathbed
by Linda Pastan

In the end we are no more than our own stories:
mine a few brief passages in the Book, 
no further trace of plot or dialogue.
But I once had a lover no one noticed
as he slipped through the pages, through
the lists of those begotten and begetting…

“Eve on Her Deathbed,” a poem by Linda Pastan

Published in The Paris Review no. 192 (Spring 2010)

THEPARISREVIEW.ORG

IKEJA, Friday, Four O'clock ( October '66 ) by Wole Soyinka

Hanching Chung

2013年8月18日 20:50 · 

摘索因卡詩一段寄 大埔事件"拆政府" 2013年8月18臺北凱道:

非豐祭而是人慾橫流之恆嘔
損益計算時但留殘渣棄佳釀
No feast but the eternal retch of human surfeit
No drinking but dregs at reckoning of loss and profit
---IKEJA, Friday, Four O'clock ( October '66) Idanre & other poems (1967,p.49) by Wole Soyinka,

Ted Hughes

Edward James Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England on this day in 1930.

"Wodwo" by Ted Hughes

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edge
I enter water. Who am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I've no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it's no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that's touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there's all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here's the water
again very queer but I'll go on looking

*

Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman brings to life a colorful menagerie of fantastical creatures from across the ages. Humans have always defined themselves by imagining the inhuman; the gloriously gruesome monsters that enliven our literary legacy haunt us by reflecting our own darkest possibilities. The poems gathered here range in focus from extreme examples of human monstrousness—murderers, cannibals, despotic Byzantine empresses—to the creatures of myth and nightmare: dragons, sea serpents, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, witches, and all sorts of winged, fanged, and fire-breathing grotesques. The ghastly parade includes Beowulf’s Grendel, Homer’s Circe, William Morris’s Fafnir, Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, Robert Lowell’s man-eating mermaid, Oriana Ivy’s Baba Yaga, Thom Gunn’s take on Jeffrey Dahmer, and Shakespeare’s hybrid creature Caliban, of whom Prospero famously concedes, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Monster Verse is both a delightful carnival of literary horror and an entertainingly provocative investigation of what it means to be human. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/233726/monster-verse/

"The prophetic books of William Blake (1757–1827) : Milton"

British Museum








William Blake (1757–1827), ‘Albion Rose’. Colour printed etching with hand-drawn additions in ink and watercolour, 1794–1796.

  The generations of men run on in the tide of time
     But leave their destind lineaments permanent for ever & ever.

學士論文

William Blake's Milton: Meaning And Madness - The ...
www.pathguy.com/blake/blakemil.txt



The generations of men run on in the tide of time But leave their destind lineaments permanent for ever & ever. So spoke Los as we went along to his supreme ...

-----

Milton: A Poem in Two Books - Wikipedia, the free ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton:_A_Poem_in_Two_Books

Milton is an epic poem by William Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who returns from Heaven and unites with Blake ...

Full text of "The prophetic books of William Blake : Milton"

www.archive.org/stream/.../propheticbooksof00blak_djvu.txt

Full text of "The prophetic books of William Blake : Milton". W. BLAKE'S MILTON TED I3Y A. G.B.RUSSELL and E.R.D. MACLAGAN J MILTON UNIFORM WirH ...

portrait of William Blake. Etching, 1808. William Blake Poems; Songs of Innocence and of Experience

British Museum

Luigi Schiavonetti (1765–1810), Frontispiece to Blair's ‘The Grave’: half-length portrait of 

William Blake. Etching, 1808.

The British Library

‘Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’

For ‪#‎InternationalTigerDay‬, sketches of a tiger from the pages of William Blake’s notebook. http://bit.ly/29vIZqm

Everyman's Library

"A Divine Image" by William Blake

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,
The human heart its hungry gorge.

*

This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other. The tigers that crouched in Blake's baleful spiritual forests, the roses and sunflowers whose mystical properties he rendered with such accurate music, the angels with whom he wrestled and who delivered prophetic books to him late at night, were literally more real to him than the London, where, in the period of the French Revolution, he lived out his life of poverty and indignant isolation. One of England's great lyric poets; one of Europe's great visionaries. Introduction by Kathleen Raine

2011.11.4

2010年的一則筆記

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

"《純真與經驗之歌》 ( Songs of Innocence and Experience ) 是浪漫時期英國詩人威廉 ‧ 布雷克 (William Blake, 1757-1827) 於 1794 年集結成冊的詩選。早在 1789 年《純真之歌》( Songs of Innocence )便率先出版問世，直到 1793 年布雷克陸續完成《經驗之歌》( Songs of Experiece ) 後，才於隔年正式將兩部分的詩合而為一，並加上副標題「揭露人類靈魂的兩個對立面」("showing the two contrary states of the human soul")。"

由於William Blake窮 結集之前， 有誰要買零的 ，都可印賣。

市面上有幾種漢文選譯

BBC Radio 4

"O Rose thou art sick."

William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

BBC.IN

2012

Life of William Blake

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus"
cover for the 1880 edition
Author(s)	Alexander Gilchrist
Cover artist	Frederic Shields
Country	England
Language	English
Subject(s)	William Blake
Genre(s)	biography
Publication date	1863; 1880

The Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” With selections from his poems and other writings is a two volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863. The first volume is a biography and the second a compilation of Blake's poetry, prose, artwork and illustrated manuscript.

The book was largely written by Alexander Gilchrist, who had spent many years compiling the material and interviewing Blake's surviving friends. However, Gilchrist had left it incomplete at his sudden death from scarlet fever in 1861. The work was published two years later, having been completed by his widow Anne Gilchrist with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti.

The book became the first standard text on the Blake, a foundation of the extensive scholarship on his life and work.

The original 1863 edition was subtitled 'Pictor Ignotus', Latin for "unknown artist", a common phrase used for unattributed artworks. Here it refers to Blake's obscurity at the time. The phrase was taken from the recently published poem of that title by Robert Browning, part of which was used as an epigraph.^[1] A second edition was published in 1880, this included additional material and revisions to the earlier transcripts of Blake's work and Gilchrist's bibliographical details. Both are referred as Gilchrist's Blake or Life.

Several of Blake's short poems, such as 'The Tyger', were typeset during his lifetime and had become widely known since the author's death in 1827, having been reproduced in commonplace books by William Wordsworth and others; however, the larger corpus of his work remained in relative obscurity.

The second volume, edited and annotated by D. G. Rossetti, included most of Blake's songs, verse and other poetry, his prose, and letters. These were often the first publication in typeset. The editors sometimes adapted the works during transcription, printing 'Tyger' as 'Tiger' for the well known example, and largely excluded discussion and republication of the 'Prophetic Books'. The transcriptions included the Poetical Sketches(selections), the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the Book of Thel, and unpublished poetry from manuscript as "Ideas of Good and Evil". Prose works include the rare "Descriptive Catalogue", Blake's description of the paintings exhibited at his solo exhibition in 1809. It includes his analysis of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and an account of his panoramic depiction of the pilgrims leaving London.

The work reproduced many of Blake's illustrations from public and private collections, interspersed throughout the biography and series of plates from his illuminated books. Many of these were engraved by William James Linton. Other designs, commentary and the second edition's cover were provided by Frederic Shields.

Anne Gilchrist appended a memoir of her husband, Alexander, to the second volume.

A review by James Smetham of the first edition was included in the second as an "Essay on Blake". The biography of the second edition was expanded with Blake's letters, obtained in an 1878 sale at Sothebys.

[edit]Notes

1. ^ "The sanctuary's gloom at least shall ward
   Vain tongues from where my pictures stand apart."
   "Pictor Ignotus," by Robert Browning. cited in Volume 1, 1863

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• Scholarly Commentary Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ Rossetti archive. Collections
• Online transcript of the 1863 (first) edition of Gilchrist's Life of Blake

"A Cradle Song" by William Blake

Sweet dreams form a shade,
O'er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams

Sweet sleep with soft down.
Weave thy brows an infant crown.
Sweet sleep Angel mild,
Hover o'er my happy child.

Sweet smiles in the night,
Hover over my delight.
Sweet smiles Mothers smiles,
All the livelong night beguiles.

Sweet moans, dovelike sighs,
Chase not slumber from thy eyes,
Sweet moans, sweeter smiles,
All the dovelike moans beguiles.

Sleep sleep happy child,
All creation slept and smil'd.
Sleep sleep, happy sleep.
While o'er thee thy mother weep

Sweet babe in thy face,
Holy image I can trace.
Sweet babe once like thee.
Thy maker lay and wept for me

Wept for me for thee for all,
When he was an infant small.
Thou his image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee,

Smiles on thee on me on all,
Who became an infant small,
Infant smiles are His own smiles,
Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.

---2015
Today is the 258th anniversary of the birth of William Blake. He was born in London, England on this day in 1757.

"A Dream" by William Blake

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home! '

*

Since its first publication in 1965, this edition has been widely hailed as the best available text of Blake's poetry and prose. Now revised, if includes up-to-date work on variants, chronology of poems and critical commentary by Harold Bloom.

詩與預言集

Everyman's Library

William Blake was born in Soho, London, England on this day in 1757.

"A Cradle Song" by William Blake

Sweet dreams form a shade,
O'er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams

Sweet sleep with soft down.
Weave thy brows an infant crown.
Sweet sleep Angel mild,
Hover o'er my happy child.

Sweet smiles in the night,
Hover over my delight.
Sweet smiles Mothers smiles,
All the livelong night beguiles.

Sweet moans, dovelike sighs,
Chase not slumber from thy eyes,
Sweet moans, sweeter smiles,
All the dovelike moans beguiles.

Sleep sleep happy child,
All creation slept and smil'd.
Sleep sleep, happy sleep.
While o'er thee thy mother weep

Sweet babe in thy face,
Holy image I can trace.
Sweet babe once like thee.
Thy maker lay and wept for me

Wept for me for thee for all,
When he was an infant small.
Thou his image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee,

Smiles on thee on me on all,
Who became an infant small,
Infant smiles are His own smiles,
Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.

*

This is a selection of the poet's work, including all the great lyrics and the more important prophetic books. In her introduction the poet and critic expounds Blake's esoteric theory and shows how it helped to create a poetry which is unlike any other. The tigers that crouched in Blake's baleful spiritual forests, the roses and sunflowers whose mystical properties he rendered with such accurate music, the angels with whom he wrestled and who delivered prophetic books to him late at night, were literally more real to him than the London, where, in the period of the French Revolution, he lived out his life of poverty and indignant isolation. One of England's great lyric poets; one of Europe's great visionaries.

*****
2014

William Blake, England's finest visionary, was born today in 1757. The great poet was a passionate dissident & a political artist deeply at odds with his country whose ideas were formed by the turbulent history of the time.

The Poet of Albion ： http://bbc.in/1vtc2m0

The Poet of Albion - BBC Radio 4 Extra

Jenny Uglow investigates the life of the radical London artist and poet William Blake.

BBC.IN