This poem is from Blake's Songs of Experience (1794). Blake is often strange, but always direct; when he says he dreamt he was a young queen full of "witless woe" who couldn't be "beguiled" out of her constant tears... I believe him.

So what can it mean? The dream can be read two ways, depending on how you read "Then the morn blush'd rosy red."

1. The sun rose and he woke here, to find himself himself--male, older, impoverished--no longer a maiden, no sheltered queen, but a man callused by life. Not so ready to let an angel dry his tears.
2. Or perhaps he only woke in the dream--false waking isn't rare in experienced dreamworkers, and often happens in shamanic and lucid dreams. In this new level of his dream, he aged and changed sex again, his soul leaping from a young woman's form to an old man's; from impossible past to probable future. After all, Blake did not wake up an old man; he was in his thirties when he dreamt this. He'd never been either a maiden or a greybeard... awake!

Either way, the strangest thing is not Blake's cross-gender identification. In the informal polls I've done, many dreamers (at least those with good recall) dream they're the opposite sex at least occasionally; and shifts in sexual orientation are just as common. What strikes me is what Blake as a maiden queen does: cries all the time, gets stroked for it, "and hid from him my heart's delight." Am I perverse for suspecting she's hot for her own guardian angel, but can't yet admit her excitement at his touch? When he sees he's petting not consoling her, he pulls away, alarmed he's been lured close to... soul-incest? (Weird? No weirder than a lot of Blake.) And if this guardian angel is partly her sense of herself as pure, as a soul, then "so he took his wings and fled" makes sense. We stop seeing ourselves as souls, start feeling trapped in flesh. Grounded!

So I say (without proof) Angel's a gender-bent erotic dream about puberty and first love--but also a sharp spiritual parable, and this isn't later Blakean editorializing, but inherent in the dream. Blake's dreams aren't restricted to recalling his own puberty. Not every man could handle suddenly finding he's a female crybaby with a touchy-feelie male guardian angel who turns him/her on, but remember Blake was a visionary used to identifying with his soul not the body he so often left. By going through a girl's puberty as well, he gains emotional breadth; he sees outside the gender-blinders of his time and place, and instead looks at wider spiritual issues of puberty. Your urge to hide uneasy sexual feelings can build emotional armor, or teenage thorniness: "ten thousand spears" sounds about right! That armor, warns Blake, may block spiritual experience--blind you to angels.

Blake elsewhere argues repeatedly that sexual (and other) repressions are poisonous. Some shame may be inevitable as one moves from innocence to experience--of course you want privacy and time to come to terms with new feelings. But one of the foulest sins in Blake's view is to mock or harass others' sincere sexual desire. Can we (I think his dream is asking) avoid shaming or repressing ourselves? And if we do blush, hide, distort our feelings, can that callus of shamming stunt our soul-growth in areas outside sex?

Blake's dream-poem is short; he just poses a riddle. But he's asking deep questions--ones Freud, sure of his ideas on religion, sex and gender alike, could never even frame.

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