WILLIAM BLAKE by JOHN ORLEY ALLEN TATE

Now William pulled the lever down,
And click-clack went the printing-press.
William was the only printer in town
Who had peeped while the angels undress.

'Damn this unmystical sweat,' quoth he,
(He was longing for the New Jerusalem);
'Now in sketching an evil spirit -- let's see,
Should the skirt of Lot's wife have a wide hem?

And William had dudgeon for the sightless beadle
Who worshipped a God like a grandmother on ice-skates,
For William saw two angels on the point of a needle
As nobody since except W. B. Yeats.

He browsed in bathetic books -- John Boehme
And Paracelsus -- which never mattered;
But he mentions the Ohio River in a poem,
So Americans ought to feel flattered.

William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod,
Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell:
'The nakedness of woman is the work of God',
Or that title -- @3The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.@1

Now I don't believe William ever saw that ghost,
Or even the universe in a fleck of dust;
But maybe I'm blind, like a soul lost,
With a lot of psychoanalytic lust.

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