Spring, sound the flute

Spring is one of the shortest poems in Songs of Innocence, from 1789. The lines are often two or three words long, and the plate shows a child with a lamb. This text follows the copy of 1826. It was one of the last copies Blake printed and colored himself. Wikisource carries that copy page by page.

Where this text comes fromBlake did not have his poems typeset. He etched text and picture together onto one copper plate and printed the page as a single image, then colored it by hand, which is why the capital letters and the punctuation follow no printer’s rule at all. The copy linked below is from 1826, near the end of his life, and Wikisource is explicit that what you read there is a transcription provided by a contributor rather than machine-read type. You are copying the first two of three verses, the ones that are almost entirely birds.

What you might not noticeThe refrain is not identical each time. Two verses end with Merrily Merrily to welcome in the Year and the last one changes it to we welcome in the Year, a difference the transcription reproduces faithfully. Source

What it trainsTwenty-seven capital letters inside 288 characters is the densest Shift work anywhere in this corpus, and only five of them stand where a sentence begins. The rest fall on ordinary nouns inside the line: Flute, Night, Sky, Year, Boy, Girl, Cock, Merry. Five sentences average barely ten words, so a full stop arrives about every second line and you never build momentum. The passage also has it’s standing for it is rather than for a possessive, which is the opposite of the trap in the Wordsworth sonnet on this shelf. Merrily appears five times across eighteen lines, three of them in a single two-line run, and typing one word over and over is where fingers start anticipating and slip.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource