The Poet 191
Blake may be thinking of the redcoats sent across the world to Ame-
rica to try to put down the revolution, which Blake saw as a gen-
uine movement for human liberation. (He writes a brief celebratory
epic about the rebellion of 1776, Ame rica, a Prophecy.) Blake doesn’t
blame the soldier— he’s “hapless.” His cry of distress runs in blood
down the palace walls and no one inside hears it or sees it. The sol-
dier is shedding blood— his blood— for people who care nothing
about him.
Blake has an instinct for the signifi cant spot— the place where he
can see into the condition of the nation’s spirit. In the ancient world,
courage is of course the preeminent virtue: it is the virtue of Rome
and Athens. Just so, compassion is the virtue of Jerusalem and of
the dusty Indian roads the Buddha walked and the out- of- the- way
villages in China where Confucius laughed and drank a bit of
wine and taught his disciples. To truly exercise courage, a soldier
has to believe he’s fi ghting in a just war—as Blake thought the
American revolutionaries were. The soldier must also sense the
support of the nation. The soldiers who went to fi ght for Britain
in Ame rica didn’t feel unity back home; the formidable Edmund
Burke sympathized with the American cause, and many others
concurred.
Where is renovation to come from? Blake, the High Romantic,
believes in the power of imagination, and he believes in the re-
demptive force of a certain kind of erotic love. Blake’s sense of the
possibilities of erotic love is not unlike Aristophanes’ in Plato’s
Symposium. Aristophanes’ myth is both grotesque and lovely. Once
upon a time, he tells us, there were creatures with two heads, four
arms, and four legs; at times they traveled by cartwheeling from
place to place. But one day the gods, in a fi t of anger, split these
creatures down the middle. Sorrow and woe! From then on the
poor beings, cut in the middle, roamed the earth in quest for their
lost part, their other half. The fable ends by affi rming that all who