Divine Images The Life and Work of William Blake
Metadata
- Author: Whittaker, Jason;
Highlights
Here the various elements of preparation are alluded to metaphorically: the viper folding around the cave is acid eating away the copper plate, while the wings of the eagle refer to the feather used to brush away bubbles in the acid that can cause irregularities. John Jones points out that relief etching ‘would appear crude compared to regularized typesetting and intaglio line engraving’, something that did not appeal to conventional publishers. For Blake, however, the handmade look of his prints could also appear much more artistic than the ‘perfection attained through mechanization’.19 — location: 554
Blake’s radicalism as a writer was often due not to his clear ability to perceive the injustices of experience, but rather his belief in the power and importance of innocence as a fundamental part of our humanity. — location: 763
‘Spring’ has tended to attract less attention than many of the other Songs, but its simple pleasures of rhythm and rhyme demonstrate Blake’s virtuosity: the truncated metrical foot of the first eight lines is an iambic dimeter, the first, unstressed syllable being omitted in each line to create a more vivid effect, balancing the final, explosive word, driving home the sheer joy of the season. After a century dominated by the regularity of the heroic couplet and iambic pentameter (or, if a poet was feeling particularly adventurous, tetrameter), these short, joyful lines were truly radical, capturing in their rhythm the song and dance of a rejuvenated natural world. — location: 786
The classical tradition of pastoral poetry had frequently been associated with sexual love, but the love of Songs of Innocence is the love between parent and child, or child and the natural world. — location: 817
Large love
This sustaining maternal love may become complicated in the later Songs of Experience, but throughout Songs of Innocence it is not viewed cynically or critically. The importance of innocence to Blake cannot be emphasized enough. While many of his fellow radicals succumbed to the despair of cynical experience after the collapse of their earlier hopes, Blake’s belief in the importance of innocence kept his radicalism alive. An example of how such belief in innocence endures – while at the same time being very much aware of the exploitative conditions of the society of his day – is to be found in one of the most famous of the poems from Songs of Innocence, ‘Holy Thursday’: — location: 834
but it is a mistake to assume any sarcasm on Blake’s part to the ‘wise guardians’ watching over the ‘flowers of London town’. That the final moral of the poem seems sentimental to modern readers draws attention more to our cynicism: Blake, seeing a multitude of children in the cathedral, was filled with awe at the sight, even as he recognized (and the version of ‘Holy Thursday’ in Songs of Experience makes this very clear) the terrible social conditions that made such poverty possible. — location: 859
In All Religions are One (1788), Blake had written that ‘The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy’ (e1). And this is where Blake’s poem reveals its radicalism. God is not something separate to man, but revealed entirely within and through man: it is the human face and human heart that demonstrates to us the reality of divinity. Rather than a metaphysical presence behind this world, we encounter God whenever we experience (or, indeed, demonstrate) the virtues of mercy, pity, peace and love. While these are familiar Christian virtues, their choice is significant: it would be very easy to conceive a God based on righteousness, or obedience, but these are far from Blake’s conception of the human form divine. — location: 887
Blake’s own use is loose, with lines typically between eleven and fourteen syllables in length, but his deployment of that metre allowed him to convey a slower, more weighty effect in his verse. — location: 929
Har and Heva appear again in The Song of Los and The Four Zoas, occupying only minor roles but clearly established as the parents of mankind who were restricted and diminished, as when Los and Enitharmon gave ‘Law and Religions to the sons of Har binding them more/ And more to Earth’ (The Song of Los, 4.4, e68). At the same time that he was composing what would become some of the most famous children’s poetry ever written in Songs of Innocence, Blake was also weaving the complex fabric of his personal mythology. — location: 946
Rather than simple, moral didacticism, The Gates of Paradise was meant to lead its readers to an understanding of the human condition, to understand the limits of mortality not as fatalism, but as the opportunity to transform the world by imagination.25 — location: 1015
exhibition of 1809 he cited the Swedish mystic favourably as inspiration for his painting The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell According to Robert Rix, the general appeal of Swedenborg — location: 1150
As such, the form and structure of The Marriage is designed to compel this perception of the infinite in everything, the ‘firm perswasion’ that it is imagination that shapes the world rather than vice versa. Blake’s point is polemical and contentious – deliberately so – but the important point here is that by refusing the conventions of an orderly narrative, the support of rational, organized, and also restricted thought, the book brings reason to the abyss of senses so that by falling into the precipice at the edge of rational thought it will be forced to take flight, for ‘No bird soars too high. if he soars with his own wings.’ (e36) — location: 1221
At this point, as indeed throughout much of the poem, Blake’s immediate concerns are for the poor and the dispossessed. Also, while his opinions of the Revolution would change as it entered its darker phase (though he, unlike Southey, Wordsworth or Coleridge, would never renounce his earlier support), Blake appears to have been generally consistent in terms of his pacifism. The lines above certainly refer to the crop failures that had affected France, but also to the consequences of war, announced by the ‘blasting of trumpets’. Perhaps only America offers a possible defence of revolutionary violence – and even that, as we shall see in the next chapter, was at best ambivalent; in all other circumstances, Blake’s art and poetry denounced war in all its forms. — location: 1368
The long line of The French Revolution, with its seven beats employing either anapaests or iambs, is a complement to the fourteener line that Blake was already experimenting with and which would become a familiar element of his later work. The poem also demonstrates how Blake’s use of Shakespearian form in Poetical Sketches was now developing into something more unique to him, combining Shakespeare’s elevated language with a highly metaphorical and symbolical style of writing that mythologized revolutionary figures just as he would later mythologize Orc, Urizen and Los. — location: 1376
The poem remains a dark one, dealing directly as it does with rape and slavery, yet in this speech she returns to the vision that opens the poem: innocence is not a one-off thing to be bought and sold with virginity and defined by penetration. Oothoon declares herself still a virgin, for when a flower is plucked ‘Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight/ Can never pass away’. — location: 1525
While the European woman has her eyes closed demurely and avoids the viewer’s gaze, the other two figures stare out boldly at the reader, challenging him to recognize the economic and immoral reality of slavery and colonialism in upholding European wealth. — location: 1552
the destruction of the Garden of Love is, rather, its own form of wilful ignorance and there is nothing but a sense of lament for what has been lost. — location: 1799
in coming over to the Devil’s party and seeking the overthrow of 1,800 years of false religion (the dream of Enitharmon in Europe a Prophecy) he had forgotten that such an overthrow had also been the ambition of Jesus in his opposition to the priestcraft of the Sadducees and Pharisees and the statecraft of imperial Rome. Paine, then, was half right: in the words of E. P. Thompson, Paine had understood the failings of the Moral Law, but had not yet discovered the Everlasting Gospel.4 — location: 1853
A and B contain them all, and even then in a different order, this variation being repeated in copies E and F. As Paul Mann observes, Urizen is ‘a book about books’, while Jason Snart follows W.J.T. Mitchell in observing that the ‘composite art’ on display in this book is there to destabilize the reader’s certainties and convictions – not least in deciding what the actual order of plates should be.6 If the Bible is the book that is meant to determine all meaning, according to conventional religion, and if Urizen constantly attempts to pin down that meaning in his books of brass, the better to establish the dictates of his law, then what better way to destroy that power than by writing a book that cannot be fixed and ordered: this is Blake’s Bible of Hell. — location: 1890
while Urizen seeks to assert control over the horrors he has called into existence, his fellow Eternals stand around in bemusement, wondering why he has set himself this despairing task when the universe already exists. Urizen’s answer is that he seeks ‘for a joy without pain,/ For a solid without fluctuation’ (4.10–11, e71) – for, ultimately, a world without death, not realizing that all things are intimately tied to their contraries. Urizen, sitting alone with his ‘Book/ Of eternal brass’, cannot endure change and so is reduced to a state of death-in-life, one dominated by ‘One command, one joy, one desire… One King, one God, one Law’ (4.38–40, e72). — location: 1914
Rather than the quietly heroic figure who guides Albion from death in Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, in The Book of Urizen Los is an agonized individual, full of terror and apparently resentful of his task to watch over Urizen who, it appears, has been created from him. — location: 1927
Having completed this terrible labour, Los unsurprisingly shrinks back, appalled by his handiwork just as Victor Frankenstein withdraws from his own creation. In this instance, however, Los also realizes that the act of giving form to Urizen has closed him into the fallen world, limited him to an existence of five senses cut off from the other Eternals. In anguish, his body begins to divide once more, another parody of the Book of Genesis: instead of God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, Enitharmon is formed — location: 1941
It is a revolutionary epic not merely in its subject matter – a rewrite of Genesis via Milton – but also its form: the reader is not given the single path of truth but instead must allow their senses to expand, to be infused with the creative impulse that will allow them to see the universe in an entirely new fashion. Blake’s boldness is not to show the cosmos anew, but to furnish the reader with the tools of creation (rather like Los’s hammer and forge) by means of which they can make that cosmos in their imagination. — location: 1977
Ahania tells the story of Fuzon, the son of Urizen introduced in the previous volume, who has taken on the role of Moses to lead the other children of Urizen to freedom. In Ahania he now assumes the characteristics of Orc, rebelling against his father and making explicit the relationship between Orc and Urizen that has been at least implicit since the very beginning: — location: 1989
When Fuzon thinks he has killed his father, his first response is: ‘I am God, said he, eldest of things!’ (3.38, e86). Revolution has become repression, and when Urizen rises from his living death to slay his son with a serpent before nailing him to a tree in a parody of the crucifixion, Fuzon has become an object of contempt. This is the point where Blake’s ambivalence towards Christianity is at its greatest: this may indeed be the case in the bitter representation of Christ, but it is just as likely that Blake’s bitterness remains, as it always was, towards those misrepresentations of the divine that manifested themselves as much in Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being as in conventional religion. — location: 1994
In The Book of Los, however, what we are presented with is not this family tragedy that had been introduced in Urizen but, rather, another recreation event, this time to fix Los himself into the world: — location: 2001
With The Book of Los and The Song of Los, Blake concluded two incredible mythological cycles, one which sought to offer a visionary history of the world, the other a retelling of the Bible and Milton as a fall into error. These Lambeth Prophecies as a whole represent one of the most startling sets of imaginative storytelling ever created: in the twenty-first century we are used to writers, artists and film-makers engaging in world making as a task that all artists do, but when Blake was creating his cosmos of Urizen and Orc, Los and Enitharmon, he had little in the way of guidance. In addition to the ambition of his myth-making, Blake was doing so via a medium that had not been used to present stories in this way since the medieval ages, creating illuminated books that challenged readers’ expectations via their form as well as their words. — location: 2009
Newton called this intelligent and powerful being ‘Lord God Pantokrator, or Universal Ruler’ and stated that, in contrast to the typical conceptions of a personal god, this perfect deity had complete power and complete knowledge but did not intervene in the affairs of his creation: rather, he had established those perfect rules by which the universe could function from ‘Eternity to Eternity’. This understanding of the divine, an impersonal, all-powerful deity who set in motion the wheels of the universe, would become increasingly identified with Blake as deism. — location: 2076
For Blake, they also defined the religious attitudes of the elite: God had set the universe in motion just so, and thus it was in accordance with his preordained laws of nature that the world operated according to its apparent injustices. — location: 2082
The imposition of a particular way of looking at the world – literally in the case of Newton’s Opticks, metaphorically in the Principia – is reflected in his view of divinity. — location: 2089
In a painting for Thomas Butts, executed around 1805, Blake depicts Satan in his Original Glory with the caption ‘Thou was Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee’. Newton too is perfect – too perfect: self-regarding, sure that he has discovered all the secrets of the universe, what we may see is the moment of his fall into an entirely self-regarding, Urizenic false creation, ignoring the natural beauties around him in preference for the closed-in void of his mathematics. — location: 2097
but it is perhaps more accurate to observe that the Revolution arose from a failure to marry reason and desire, heaven and hell. It was the repression of the people’s energy under Urizenic reason that resulted in an explosion of violence in the 1790s. — location: 2109
What is more, the intellectual complexity of this scene is utterly astonishing in that rather than being a mere pastiche of the creation depicted in Book vii of Milton’s epic, what Blake describes is a critique of Milton’s notions of creation: the deistic creator of the universe, the pantocrator envisaged by Newton, has created not Eden (Blake’s preferred name in his later poetry for the world of the Eternals) but a closed, fallen world that is more reminiscent of the accounts of the demiurge provided by Plato in the Timaeus. — location: 2405
This Christian revelation, rather than the violence of earthly revolution, would be Blake’s path through his final epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem. — location: 2476
David Perkins points out that there was an increasing body of literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries decrying abuses against animals, but that Blake’s poem is particularly impressive in the subtlety of its tone: it is the voice of innocence, but also ‘it is innocence at a moment of crisis, when it beholds the world of experience’.3 — location: 2656
establishing the reprobates – sinners – as the truly saved because they realize that they need God’s grace, while the Elect are actually followers of Satan, morally rigid and unable to understand the need for the forgiveness of sin. At the end of the Bard’s song, Satan creates hell by refusing to open himself up to his brothers, to admit his mistakes: — location: 2866
Conventional morality, the morality of the Elite, is to condemn others and, in the act of destroying them, ‘be a greater in [their] place’, what throughout the late illuminated books Blake refers to as the Covering Cherub or a Tabernacle. — location: 2914