Poetry Thursday

The Fox, the Owl, the Beetle and the Bat,
By sweet reserve and modesty get fat.

William Blake

A fragment of a sonnet rather than an entire poem, but it has stuck in my head since I saw it in Blake's notebook at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, last January. There's something quite perfect in the rhythm, the images and the sounds. And like everything Blake wrote, engraved, drew and painted, mysterious and rich and evocative. You can see  the notebook here in the British Library's collection.

And this, equally mysterious, detail of his painting in Tate Britain The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth 1805.