| William Blake (1757–1827). The Poetical Works. 1908. | | | | Selections from ‘Milton’ | | [The Song of the Shadowy Female] |
| | (Milton, f. 17*, II. 6–25.)
MY Garments shall be woven of sighs and heart-broken lamentations: | |
| The misery of unhappy Families shall be drawn out into its border, | |
| Wrought with the needle, with dire sufferings, poverty, pain, and woe, | |
| Along the rocky Island and thence throughout the whole Earth. | |
| There shall be the sick Father and his starving Family; there | 5 |
| The Prisoner in the stone Dungeon, and the Slave at the Mill. | |
| I will have writings written all over it in Human words, | |
| That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read | |
| And get by rote, as a hard task of a life of sixty years. | |
| I will have Kings inwoven upon it, and Counsellors and Mighty Men: | 10 |
| The Famine shall clasp it together with buckles and clasps, | |
| And the Pestilence shall be its fringe, and the War its girdle; | |
| To divide into Rahab and Tirzah, that Milton may come to our tents. | |
| For I will put on the Human Form, and take the Image of God, | |
| Even Pity and Humanity; but my clothing shall be Cruelty. | 15 |
| And I will put on Holiness as a breastplate and as a helmet, | |
| And all my ornaments shall be of the gold of broken hearts, | |
| And the precious stones of anxiety and care, and desperation and death, | |
| And repentance for sin, and sorrow, and punishment and fear; | |
| To defend me from thy terrors, O Orc! my only belovèd! | 20 | | | |
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