To my dear Friend, Mrs. Anna Flaxman. Poems from Letters. William Blake. 1908. The Poetical Works

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William Blake (1757–1827). The Poetical Works. 1908.

Poems from Letters

To my dear Friend, Mrs. Anna Flaxman


THIS 1 song to the flower of Flaxman’s joy,
To the blossom of hope for a sweet decoy;
Do all that you can, or all that you may,
To entice him to Felpham and far away.

Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there;	5
The Ladder of Angels descends thro’ the air;
On the turret its spiral does softly descend,
Thro’ the village then winds, at my cot it does end.

You stand in the village and look up to Heaven;
The precious stones glitter on flights seventy-seven;	10
And my brother is there, and my friend and thine
Descend and ascend with the bread and the wine.

The bread of sweet thought and the wine of delight
Feed the village of Felpham by day and by night,
And at his own door the bless’d Hermit does stand,	15
Dispensing unceasing to all the wide land.

Note 1. To Anna Flaxman] In a letter dated ‘H[ercules] B[uildings], Lambeth, 14 Sept., 1800,’ the ‘Hermit’ being William Hayley, Blake’s patron, who in letters to his friends loved to refer to himself as the ‘Hermit of Eartham’ or the ‘Hermit of the Turret’. See also Blake’s Letters, ed. Russell, passim. [back]

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