

In 1803, after three increasingly unhappy years in Felpham, Sussex, as artist-in-residence for William Hayley, Blake wrote in a letter to his friend and patron Thomas Butts, “O why was I born with a different face / Why was I not born like the rest of my race” (Erdman pages 733-34). He varied that couplet only slightly in the separate poem “Mary,” which at some point he copied neatly into a 22-page manuscript with nine other poems—seven known from no other source—on paper that he reutilized from Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads, 1802 (to which Blake had contributed engraved illustrations). On the spacious inside margins he wrote out the ten poems that constitute what is conventionally known as The Pickering Manuscript—after one of its several nineteenth century owners.



But he must have sensed that he had produced ten particularly masterful poems underwritten by an increasingly codified mythology. The elegant, memorable, dark “Mental Traveller” comes across as a module that Blake could easily have slipped into his more extended mythopoeic ventures—extraordinarily concise but enigmatic, as if it can simultaneously know precisely what it is about but remain baffling to readers who want to crack its code. But other poems beckon to readers (and poets, artists, and musicians, because these are among Blake’s most influential lines) who prefer unsparing social insights balanced against hope and healing. This attractive, popular Blake is best represented in the long aphoristic sequence “Auguries of Innocence,” where it is possible “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (object 16). Miraculous acts of imagination can be achieved even in a world where “The Harlots cry from Street to Street / Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet” (object 18).



Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive