Life and Works of William Blake (MS fragment)

This is DGR's fair copy, made in 1880, of the poem he printed under the title “Love and Deceit” in the second volume of the revised 1880 edition of Alexander Gil christ's Life of William Blake (II. 128, “Ideas of Good and Evil”). The text in fact conflates verses from the drafts of two different poems Blake had scripted on page 107 of his notebook, the first eight lines being from the poem beginning “Love to faults in always blind”, the last four from the concluding quatrain of Blake's draft of “The Human Image”. The materials are taken from the manuscript notebook of Blake's that DGR had bought in 1847.

First printed in Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1880) II. 128.