The Poets' Wives Read Free Page A

spare and read passages in the Bible he’d marked for me. It pleased him too when I’d read them aloud to him as he sat and rested after his toil. And best of all is when I read from the Song of Solomon, ‘Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits.’
    Those are the first and best days of love when everything is new and nothing runs empty or needs replenishing. I am his all and everything is rich in its bounty and my skin wears the inky marks of his fingers again and again, whether by firelight or in the early morning’s first rays. And sometimes I fear he will grow tired of me or leave nothing for his work but he also gives me words that are wondrous and full of Heaven’s light and he tells me it is a holiness, sanctified and blessed. Once I tease him by asking if he has any strength left to do his work and he laughs and tells me, ‘Enjoyment and not abstinence is the food of intellect.’
    ‘Then, Mr Blake, I understand why you possess such an incomparable cleverness,’ I say and it pleases him so much he laughs again and it is a sound that is sweeter to me than any other. And then he tells me about a vision that he has had and the great work of poetry that he must write which will confound his enemies and make him known and, although I don’t fully grasp all that he intends, his passion blazes like an angry fire until it frightens me a little and I still him into a different passion by kissing his lips and when he says my name in his need his breath rushes warm against my cheek.
    There is no shame in love – he makes me understand that – but there are drawings that never get shown and which in truth must be hidden from me. I find them by chance when looking for something else when he is out. And in these there are all manner of creatures engaged in everything that flesh can offer and things that I have never countenanced and in their monstrous strangeness they frighten me so that the hand which holds them trembles under the weight of their excess. Then I hear his footsteps on the stairs and I bundle them away but when he enters we both look as if we are surprised to see each other.
    ‘What’s wrong, Kate?’ he asks and I try to mask my confusion with a smile but he looks at me as if he knows what I have seen. ‘Are you well?’
    ‘I’m well enough, just resting my weary eyes.’
    He seems satisfied and takes off his coat to begin his labour and I sit and watch him. He has told me often that he writes when commanded by angels but I think of the drawings and wonder what angel told him to draw these things. And then, but not for the first time, it frightens me that I grasp so little of what exists in him even though I have striven to know him and understand the visions that bring his work into the world.
    ‘What are you thinking?’ I ask him almost before I know I’m going to.
    ‘Thinking?’ he repeats, ‘I suppose just what always plagues me from time to time, not knowing whether to curse or bless engraving because it takes so long and is so intractable, yet it’s capable of such beauty and perfection.’
    ‘And anything else?’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Yes, what else do you think in this very moment?’ I persist.
    ‘Will there be a sun in the sky tomorrow?’
    ‘Answer seriously, Will.’
    ‘Why do you ask this, Kate?’
    ‘Because I want to know such things as are in your head. To be fully your wife. As you start work on this new design tell me everything that you’re thinking.’
    ‘I can’t describe everything in words and if I could it would destroy the spirit of my invention and turn the imagination into nothing more than an empty husk. And sometimes I don’t know everything but have to wait for it to be spoken through me.’
    He stops working and takes my hand and tells me that I have been the truest wife from the day when we married and if he was to tell the world everything that was in his head they would say for sure that he was a madman.
    ‘Who thinks you