Some poems from the Pickering Manuscript, William Blake

The Smile

There is a smile of love,

And there is a smile of deceit,

And there is a smile of smiles

In which these two smiles meet.

And there is a frown of hate,

And there is a frown of disdain,

And there is a frown of frowns

Which you strive to forget in vain,

For it sticks in the heart's deep core

And it sticks in the deep backbone-

And no smile that ever was smiled,

But only one smile alone,

That betwixt the cradle and grave

It only once smiled can be;

And, when it once is smiled,

There is an end to all misery.

The Grey Monk

'I die, I die!' the Mother said,

'My children die for lack of bread.

What more the merciless tyrant said?'

The Monk sat down on the stony bed.

The blood red ran from the Grey Monk's side,

His hands and feet were wounded wide,

His body bent, his arms and knees

Like to the roots of ancient trees.

His eye was dry; no tear could flow:

A hollow groan first spoke his woe.

He trembled and shuddered upon the bed;

At length with a feeble cry he said:

'When God commanded this hand to write

In the studious hours of deep midnight,

He told me the writing I wrote should prove

The bane of all that on Earth I love.

'My brother starved between two walls,

His children's cry my soul appalls;

I mocked at the wrack and griding chain,

My bent body mocks their torturing pain.

'Thy father drew his sword in the North,

With his thousands strong he marched forth;

Thy brother has armed himself in steel,

To avenge the wrongs thy children feel.

'But vain the sword and vain the bow,

They never can work War's overthrow.

The hermit's prayer and the widow's tear

Alone can free the world from fear.

'For a tear is an intellectual thing,

And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,

And the bitter groan of the martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

'The hand of Vengeance found the bed

To which the purple tyrant fled;

The iron hand crushed the tyrant's head,

And became a tyrant in his stead.'

Auguries of Innocence

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.

...

He who doubts for what he sees

Will never believe, do what you please.

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,

They'd immediately go out.

To be in a passion you good may do,

But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and the gambler, by the state

Licensed, build that nation's fate.

The harlot's cry from street to street 

Shall weave Old England's winding-sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,

Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not through the eye,

Which was born in a night, to perish in a night,

When the Soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is Light,

To those poor souls who dwell in Night;

But does a Human Form display

To those who dwell in realms of Day.

I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine,

But, O, he lives in the moony light!

I thought to find Love in the heat of day,

But sweet Love is the comforter of night.

Seek Love in the pity of others' woe,

In the gentle relief of another's care,

In the darkness of night and the winter's snow,

In the naked and outcast, seek Love there!

Extract

from "William Bond"

The photographs are from the village of Boscastle, North Cornwall, UK