Alan,
I enjoy mimetic exercises myself, as practice and humor. But more serious attempts at mimicry carry with them the risk that they will be compared with the original, and, since few poets choose to imitate the mediocre, found wanting. So I have to confess that I didn't much like this; it reads as if my favorite Blake had been shaken up in a tumbler and poured out again.
From a stylistic perspective this has an overlay of romantic regularity that is very un-Blakean.
It's nice enough, but the spirit is gone, the genius lacking.
Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.
Josh
[This message has been edited by Josh Hill (edited 11-14-2000).]
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