ABSTRACT
This chapter wishes to establish some more specific links between Joanna Baillie's 'keenest observation' and William Blake, before examining in more detail how such an 'inquiry' attempts to 'mix itself by stealth' with the forces of aversion and desire struggling within the 'afflicted soul'. The psychology of Blake's lyric is at least strongly analogous to and arguably directly reworks Baillie's scene in its dramatization of conflict between, and ultimate convergence of antithetical principles. Aileen Forbes argues that 'Baillie in the eighteenth century constructs the human passions as the "secret" of humanity'. Forbes goes on to argue: By relegating the passions into a man's 'closet', Baillie fashions the passions as a secret, and, consequently, as a curiosity. The 'closet' conceals, privatizes, and protects its contents. In its function of concealment, the closet aligns its contents with shame and guilt, with that which has been excluded from cultural circulation, with the illicit.
