view of the territory. I mean the once-famous but now somewhat neglected outcropping called
Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect
(Kilmarnock, 1786). From the latter the way leads directly on to both Blake's
Songs
and Wordsworth and Coleridge's
Lyrical Ballads
. The route from Burns's 1786
Poems
to
Lyrical Ballads
is well known if no longer so well frequented. But the rigs o' Burns run into the range of Blake. We trace this route very clearly by following certain of their shared territorial features: their critiques of moralized religion, their sympathy with the ideals of the French Revolution, and their commitment to what Blake called "exuberance" and "energy" (and Wordsworth, later, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings").
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Blake found his way by various paths, it is true, but one of them followed the trail of Burns. Indeed, Blake marked the route he took in one of his greatest early works, "The Tyger," although later travellers have failed to note the signs he left:
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 | | When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
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Blake's starry spears of 1794 broke across the earlier sky of 1786 in another satanic text, Burns's great "Address to the Deil." The second line of Blake's verse is an English translation of Burns's Scots:
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| | Ae dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi sklentan light,
Wi' you,
mysel
, I gat a fright. . . .
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Blake's "smile"like the high-spirited comedy of that associated text
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(1 793)is a memorial tribute to Burns, who also liked to treat his gods and demons with familiarity. Like Blake, he knew that all deities reside in the human breast, as the very next lines of his address to the "deil" show:
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| | Ayont the lough;
Ye, like a
rash-buss
, stood in sight,
Wi' waving sugh.
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| | The cudgel in my neive did shake,
Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake,
When wi' an eldritch, stoor
quaick, quaick
,
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