y brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

Just because his materials are so simple and so few--and this applies
to his plastic art as well as to his poetry--we are brought to pause
more sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other,
before the primordial mystery of human expression and its
malleableness under the impact of personality. Probably no poet
ever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limited
number of words, or of words so simple and childish. It is as though
William Blake had actually transformed himself into some living
incarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammering
his oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips.

What matter? It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis,
Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllables
announce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chanted
by the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted
"over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman.

It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race.

"I will not cease from mental strife
Nor shall my sword sink from my hand
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land!"

One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is the
value he places upon tears. All his noble mythological figures,
gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality
and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little
ones. Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies
and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of
stupidity and tyranny.

He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is to
have dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale. "A tear
is an intellectual thing," and those who still have the power of
"weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternal
gods. It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity of
rhyme that leads him to associate in poem after poem--until for the
vulgar mind, the repetition becomes almost ludicrous--this symbolic
"weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings.

The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally a
poet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep. And William
Blake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality.
That is