The Nature of Blake's Alterations
We know from Blake's Notebook and other manuscripts that he was
an extensive reviser and rearranger of his verses before he considered them
ready for publication. But once he had made a fair copy in acid-resistant
varnish or ground, to be applied in reverse to the copper plate, he was able
to make only minor changes.[7] Some
examples of mending in the varnish are the redrawings of lower-case letters
as capitals on Plates 10, 21, 24, 61, 83, and 85. The correction of
"furnaes" to "furnaces" and of "garents" to "garments" on Plates 53 and 61
must have been made after transfer to copper and also after some etching
had been done: the inserted letters and carets are very faint when Blake
forgets to retouch them after printing; if they had been added at once, they
should have been as dark as the original lettering.
Before etching, or after only shallow etching, Blake could easily
remove whole lines and replace them with birds or flames or tendrils drawn
in varnish directly on the copper. We can hardly recover such deletions, but
we can suspect their having existed, because Blake's normal paragraph
spacing does not leave the exact height of a line as do some of the
bird-filled hiatuses, and because there is usually some slight indention of the
first line of a genuine paragraph. By the same token, we are able to detect,
from signs of crowding, the late insertion
of a line within a stanza break (see Plates 39 and 53). But such insertions
could only be made before the acid had been applied for any length of
time.
When Blake called his etched or etched and engraved plates "types"
or "stereotypes" he was expressing the fact that once finished his copper
plates were monolithic. The illustrations could be modified by further
etching (see Plate 95) or engraving, but the text was almost unalterable.
Once in a while, when there was room, he could add a line above or below
the block of text, by engraving. And we have seen that he could scratch out
words or lines whenever he felt the need to. But it was almost impossible
for him to put new words in the place of old. The complicated mending
process involved in transforming one fourletter adjective into another on
Plate 37 is a formidable illustration of the limits imposed on the
blacksmith-poet by the nature of his medium.
