The Soldier in the Garden

A Poetry Tale about William Blake, told by Hello Doggo.

Most of us have had a bad neighbour. William Blake had a soldier in his garden. And it very nearly finished him.

Felpham, on the Sussex coast. The twelfth of August, eighteen-oh-three. Blake finds a private, John Scolfield, among his plants. By Blake’s own account, he asks him to leave. Scolfield refuses, with threats. So the poet of Songs of Innocence takes him by the elbows and propels him down the road.

Three days later, Scolfield swore a statement. Blake, he claimed, had damned the King — and said the soldiers were all slaves.

Britain was at war with Napoleon, and invasion fears were everywhere. Words like that weren’t rudeness. They were sedition.

In January eighteen-oh-four, Blake stood trial at Chichester. His patron, William Hayley, found him a barrister. The jury acquitted him.

So did Blake actually say it? Here’s the delicious part: nobody knows. The indictment still survives in the West Sussex archives, but an accusation isn’t proof. And years later his friend John Linnell is reported to have thought it rather likely that Blake had indeed damned the King. It does sound like him.

Now, A Poison Tree came out nine years before any of this. It’s about a man who nurses his anger until it bears fruit, and ends with “my foe outstretched beneath the tree”.

Blake didn’t kill Scolfield.

He did something far more Blakean. He wrote him into his epic poem Jerusalem, as Skofeld, one of its villains. For ever.