212 Ideals in the Modern World
Then shall we return & see
The worlds of happy Eternity& Throughout all Eternity
I forgive you you forgive me.
(477)By “love” Blake here means jealous love, possessive love; he aspires
to forswear the love that exists as an alluring counterfeit to the true
love that brings freedom— and is an inducement to more arduous
and valuable creative labors.
Love is not the only resource the Romantic imagination draws
upon to attain full strength. The Romantics, as everyone knows, are
also infatuated with childhood. Following Rousseau, they are in-
clined to see children— and especially their childhood selves—as
sources of authenticity. And of course, almost all Romantic poets
are inspired by Nature. They take themselves to live in times when
culture has become far too pervasive and accordingly oppressive—
they seek the purity and vigor they can fi nd in the natu ral world.
Romantics are dreamers, too, or at least they look to dreams as likely
sources of inspiration. Dreams weave through the Prelude; dreams
frame Keats’s Hyperion poems; perhaps the best known and most
marvelous of the Romantic poems, Kubla Khan, comes out of a
dream. An opium dream! Romantics often stimulate the dreaming
mind with this or that sacramental substance— for the gates of par-
adise do not always swing of their own accord.
Dreams, childhood, and Nature: three sources of Romantic in-
spiration, all of which Freud seeks to discredit. Dreams, the great
analyst says, give us nothing that is new. They are regressive and
not inventive; no one ever had a genuine mental breakthrough in a
dream. For a dream is, after all, merely a “disguised fulfi llment of a
repressed wish.” Childhood? Children are unhappy creatures,