‘Only the wings on his heels’: Blake and Dylan

Abstract

The inspiration to which Blake aspires in ‘An Imitation of Spenser’ is personified by the messenger of the gods: ‘O Mercury, assist my lab’ring sense, / That round the circle of the world would fly!’ (‘An Imitation of Spenser’ E421). The narrator of a ‘Song’ from the same precociously early selection, Poetical Sketches, proclaims, ‘My feet are wing’d, while o’er the dewy lawn, / I meet my maiden, risen like the morn’ (E416). A young Dylan Thomas confides to Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘I am in the path of Blake, but so far behind him that only the wings on his heels are in sight’ (43). On the album sleeve of Desire, Bob Dylan reflects, ‘Where do I begin … on the heels of Rimbaud moving like a dancing bullet thru the secret streets of Babylon.’ For Dylan Thomas, the personification of mercurial inspiration is Blake himself; whilst for Bob Dylan, it is Arthur Rimbaud, on shore leave from his ‘magic swirlin’ ship’, as well as ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’ (as Thomas describes himself in a letter to Vernon Watkins; 548). Influences can obviously be composite and far from mutually exclusive. Though the French poet is explicitly designated as precursor, the ‘dancing bullet’, an oxymoronic expression of exuberant creativity, has a thoroughly Blakean trajectory: ‘I see London, blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon’ (J 84:11–12, E243).¹