Poem of the month - January 2008

Blake’s Wife My love walked in a wild domain I followed him as best I could beyond the boundaries of the brain half credible, half understood. He hardly slept, strange music played he wrote, dreamed, painted. In love I pitied, helped him work on copper plates, the ink and fire. We cooled it down in printed books of prophecy or soul’s desire. “The lark an angel on the wing” purest line engraving. His spectre visited for days and silent brooded on the house. I waited, made his soup, his clothes until  he found a form in chaos. I gathered fragments he had scattered: Job, Dante, Milton uttered. I rocked no babies at the breast: this child I had was child enough, Like Mary I was chosen, blessed to bear this spirit through his life. “Jerusalem in every man” this grain of sand in Albion. My love walked in a wild domain I followed him as best I could beyond the boundaries of the brain half credible, half understood. We turned our trials into art hammered the work upon the heart. Tessa Ransford Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

The inspiration for the poem Tessa says:  'I have been blessed by the life-energy in the works of Blake for as long as I can remember. I read Bronowski's William Blake in the Pelican version in the 1970s and, in the months before writing the poem in 1998, I had read Peter Ackroyd's Blake. I used a poem and drawing of Blake as the basis for one of my publishing exercises on the course at Napier College in 1972 and quoted "Innocence dwells with wisdom and never with ignorance" on the title page of my book A Dancing Innocence, published in 1988. "Without contraries is no progression" is also quoted in the introduction to my poem sequence 'Medusa Dozen' of that year. My copy of Blake's poems in Oxford's World Classics has been with me since I worked there in 1958. I have written other poems inspired by Blake: 'A Tear is an Intellectual thing' , 'Blake's secrets at Pollock house' and also 'Orpheus at Callanish'. When, in 1997-8, it came to thinking about  the final issue of Lines Review magazine, which I edited for ten of its forty-five years, we decided on the theme of Orpheus, the archetypal poet. Callum Macdonald, my husband, was walking with me beside the river Tweed in Innerleithen, as I was thinking about the Orpheus theme and asking myself who was the most Orphic poet I could think of. The answer was Blake and, as we walked along, the first verse came into my head, complete in its first four lines.  I don't remember what happened after that, but I must have reached Callum's house by the river Leithen, gone in and finished the poem. I know that I wrote it without revision in one sitting; a very unusual happening. The line 'the lark an angel on the wing' is inspired by the description of Blake's drawing and commentary in Ackroyd's biography. The last two lines are probably spoken by me through Blake's wife, thinking about myself and Callum as we worked constantly for Lines Review and for poetry in Scotland.  Blake's wife, who held his life together, affirms the need for us to support each other in the sacrifices required from us by art in its life-giving, visionary intensity. The poem was included in Lines Review 144, the final issue, published in March 1998, an issue full of exceptional poems, reviews and articles including Mario Relich on 'The making of Iain Crichton Smith's Orpheus and Euridice.' This was a long masterpiece of a poem of Iain's. Later that year a book of my poems was published by the Ramsay Head Press, entitled 'When it works it feels like play'. The poem 'Blake's Wife' is included in that collection. It  serves as an example of 'when it works', but the work becoming play spills over from a lifetime of what Blake himself called 'following the golden thread of poetry'.

About the Poet   Tessa Ransford is secretary to the Scottish PEN committee and immediate past president. She is poet , translator, editor and cultural activist, campaigning on many fronts in Scotland over the last forty years. The poetry pamphlet campaign is an ongoing success-story. Her latest publication is Sonnet Selection and eight Rilke lyrics translated, published by Akros Publications (2007). She works at present for the Royal Literary Fund at Queen Margaret University as she did previously at the Centre for Human Ecology. For further information, please visit Tessa's website.