(William) Blake's Seven

William Blake’s poem ‘Never Seek to Tell Thy Love’ speaks of the melancholy experience of one man’s love for a woman who slips from his grasp. It speaks of a traveller taking her ‘with a sigh’. The key issue seems to be a necessary reluctance to ‘tell’ of one’s love, for fear of notifying the lover, or explaining this love and the effects and ramifications of so doing, based on the narrator’s experience of love lost. I interpreted the poem as a warning of sorts, a cautionary tale of love and loss, with sinister, potentially supernatural undertones. When he tells his lover of his feelings, she is fearful and he loses her. Love is like the wind, silent, invisible, a natural feeling that need not, nay, should not be explained. It is perhaps an unrequited love he is professing, or she may be simply a typical woman, making a big deal of the fact he said the l-o-v-e word, and running away because she’s relationship-phobic or whatnot. In the case of the latter, what then became of the pair? She has left, following his admission of love. Does he pursue her? Does she return of her own accord? Does she stay gone, and he become an emotional wreck drinking himself to an early grave? Or perhaps she realises she loves him but has by now fallen-foul of a ghost-like ‘traveller’ from whom she needs rescue? Only time, and a three-part sci-fi adaptation by a second-year TV student, will tell…