IN a gripping event, journalist, poet and author Blake Morrison took the audience on a journey from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to the High Court and the Bulger case, which he covered.

Mr Morrison wrote a book about the trial, and it was intriguing to hear the poet of The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper say he would not consider write verse about the Bulger murder.

He told the Market Theatre audience how Bulger's young killers, children themselves, probably never expected to get away with the abduction and when they did, were at a loss to know what to do "with a crying child".

The school truants took the toddler not to their homes, or to a police station, which appears to have been one possibility, but to the railway lines "to avoid getting into trouble".

Mr Morrison said he could understand them to that point, but no further.

His favourite line from Blake, "There's a moment in each day/ That Satan cannot find..." seems almost perverse in its optimism.

But Mr Morrison was surely correct in saying that the image of Jamie Bulger being led away by older children could have been an illustration from the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

He believes that Blake's claimed visions were only in the imagination. Likewise, Bulger's young murderers were "testing reality".

Blake was the singer of excess, including sexual matters, but he himself is faithful to his wife and, despite being a prophet for the hippy generation, only enjoyed the odd beer.

Mr Morrison claimed that Blake was "talking about grown-ups" when he talked about excess, and that Bulger's killers were not acting out of any such philosophy. But he was clearly unsettled by the excellent question from a member of the audience.

But Blake, a kindly and spiritual soul, was often a man of contradictions.

Against the statement "Sooner murder an infant in the cradle/Than nurse unacted desires", we can only respond with "Arise and drink your bliss/For everything that lives is holy."

Gary Bills-Geddes