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yellowish resin luster of those eyes. Reports of my son's unmanageable behavior while I was away and his response to the harmonica I had brought him, not to mention my own travel fatigue, had frayed my nerves and deprived me of the emotional leeway I needed to read and register his grief.
    Writing this now it is hard to imagine how as a father I could have failed to see that massive grief in the desolation of my son's eyes. And I can't help feeling that, healing the rift with my son, I became aware of his grief through the agency of a Blake poem, “On Another's Sorrow,” which includes this stanza:
    Can I see a falling tear,
    And not feel my sorrows share,
    Can a father see his child,
    Weep, nor be with sorrow fill'd.
    One of the “Songs of Innocence,” the poem concludes with the following verse:
    O! he gives to us his joy,
    That our grief he may destroy
    Till our grief is fled & gone
    He doth sit by us and moan.
    I was able to read the grief in my son's eyes even more directly, as though it were in my own experience, because I was equipped with a definition of grief that had appeared for just an instant in Mr. H's eyes that day at the bar in the New Delhi airport.

2 : A Cold Babe Stands in the Furious Air
    “I nnocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance,” Blake wrote. This aphoristic note is appended to one of his epic poems, together with the following, to me not entirely clear but nonetheless appealing, phrase: “Unorganized Innocence, an Impossibility.” I have returned to the poem in question repeatedly at various times but have always skimmed my way through it. Given the nature of Blake's epic poetry, it might be said that anything less attentive than poring over the details is not reading it at all; nevertheless, in my own way I have discovered verses that have inscribed themselves on me. Consider, for example, in the heroic poem usually called The Four Zoas, properly speaking, with “Zoa” signifying “living thing” as in the Greek version of Revelations, “The Four Zoas, or, The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man,” the unforgettable prospect of the dead, at the time of the final judgment, revealing themselves as they were in life, wounds and all, as they stand to accuse:
    They shew their wounds they accuse they seize the oppressor howlings began
    On the golden palace Songs & joy on the desart the Cold babe
    Stands in the furious air he cries the children of six thousand years
    Who died in infancy rage furious a mighty multitude rage furious
    Naked & pale standing on the expecting air to be delivered.
    When I wrote just now that I “skimmed” these lines, I didn't mean to imply that I could read Blake fluently. On the contrary, it remains difficult for me no matter how often I read and reread the original year after year. In particular, the voluminous poems known as the “Prophecies,” from Blake's middle period, are knotty with passages that impede the foreigner's understanding. Even so, I always imagined that even I could have made my way close to the full meaning of a poem had I taken the time to move carefully through it with the help of a commentary. And I did make it a point to acquire whatever Blake studies and commentaries I found in Western bookstores. I still do. At the same time, since my student days I have had a kind of fear that once I began reading Blake line by line I would come to feel that no amount of time was adequate, no matter how much time I spent. Besides, I wanted to taste whatever I felt moved to read, for example the entire Four Zoas, which is 855 lines long, and so, with a sense of urgency as my guide, I have made a practice of finding my way along the stepping stones of what I am able to understand unaided.
    If I were to quote another passage from The Four Zoas that has stayed with me vividly, without reference to the complex narrative of the work or, for that matter, to the premise of God or the godlike person