Rossetti MS, 1 8s the reasoning power in man, and the latter his imagination and emotion, supplies the clue to the meaning of this beautiful but obscure poem. The theme is identical with that of the later Prophetic Books, i.e. the separation of reason and emotion into two contrary and conflicting selves, and their reunion in a state of regained humanity and moral liberty, through self- annihilation achieved by the infinite tolerance and forgiveness of sin. Cp. the author's invocation to the Muses — in Blake's mythology the Daughters, not of Memory, but of Imagination — in the opening lines of The Four Zoas : — ' Daughters of Beulah, sing
- His fall into Division and his resurrection into Unity,
- His fall into the generation of decay and death, and his
- Regeneration by resurrection from the dead.'
Of this poem, with the title 'Broken Love,' descriptive of the meaning which he reads into it, Mr. D. G. Rossetti gives a very corrupt text, printing stanzas i, a, 3, a fourth and fifth stanza, formed by amalgamating couplets taken from the unplaced or rejected stanzas :—
- ' Poor pale pitiable form
- That I follow in a storm,
- From sin I never shall be free
- Till thou forgive and come to me.
- ' A deep winter dark and cold
- Within my heart thou dost unfold ;
- Iron tears and groans of lead
- Thou bind'st around my aching head.'
then stanza 4, the unplaced stanza *i, the rejected stanza 'Thy weeping thou shall ne'er give o'er,' the unplaced stanza *2, and stanzas 5, 6, 7, 8, 14. The same version is adopted by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, and has been accepted without question by the majority of editors who follow the text of the Aldine edition. Mr. Swinburne (pp. 278, 279) prints with commentary the two rejected stanzas 'Thou hast parted from my side,' and 'When my love did first begin,' and stanzas 8-14, transposing the position of 11 and 12, which he thinks Blake must have so numbered 'by some evident slip of mind or pen.' In vol. ii, pp. 37-41, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats print fourteen stanzas with S3'mbolic 'interpretation.' They conclude with the note: 'The text of the poem here is reprinted from the Aldine edition, the present editors not having seen the MS.' ; which must mystify readers who find, three pages before, ' the above is the true text of this poem with the numberings of the verses as finally arranged after three re-considerations by Blake. Not a word is altered from the original. The poem as printed in the Aldine Edition and elsewhere is erroneously arranged, partly from numberings of verses put experimentally and then erased by Blake.' The latter of these two contradictory statements, it may be explained, is the nearer to the truth ; though the editors have rendered their third stanza meaningless by printing the second in its earlier and cancelled, instead of in its revised form; and their text contains one or two of their customary deviations from verbal accuracy. Under the title ' Spectre and Emanation,' the poem is rather more correctly given by Mr. W. B. Yeats, who prints the fourteen approved and numbered stanzas in the text, and the three unplaced stanzas (' appa- rently rejected ') in the notes (p. 249).
