William Blake

(1757-1827): Life and Times

William Blake was born in 1757, the third son of a London hosier. Apart from a brief idyllic sojourn to Felpham, West Sussex, Blake lived in or near to London, a city which dominates much of his work, whether as the nightmare 'London' of the Songs of Experience, or the London which Blake saw as the 'New Jerusalem', the kingdom of God on earth. As the son of a hosier, a generally lower middle class occupation in late eighteenth century London, he was brought up in a poor household, a preparation for the relative poverty in which he would live for most of his life. He also received little formal schooling, which is all the more remarkable given both the depth and range of his reading of the Bible, of Milton and Greek and Latin classic literature, evident throughout his work. His intellectual and psychological growth, however, was dominated by the influence of his brother, Robert, who died of consumption at the age of 20. Blake, witnessing his brother's death, remarked that he saw his brother's soul "ascend heavenward clapping its hands for joy", and continued, from that point on, to feel Robert's inspirational influence over his work. Blake, who had already testified to seeing visions - (at the age of ten he tried to convince his father that he had seen hosts of angels in a tree in Peckham Rye) - retained this strong faith in the spirit world throughout his life, affirming that he often spoke with the apparitions, angels, devils and spirits which populate his work. It was this psychical interest which also brought him into contact with that strange world of late eighteenth century London psychics, visionaries, and various other Christian and progressive free-thinking writers and intellectuals such as Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake's subsequent career as an artist was inaugurated by his apprenticeship, in 1771, to James Basire, a noted Engraver, after which he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy (1797), an Academy then dominated by the influence of its Principal, Sir Joshua Reynolds. From 1779 he was employed as an engraver for a local Bookseller, and Blake continued to earn an often precarious living from contracted engraving until, with the help of his friend John Flaxman (1755-1826), he was able to set up his own engraving business at 27 Broad Street, which proved not to be a successful enterprise.
It is from this point, 1784, that Blake's career as an engraver-poet-prophet began in earnest. Working with the help of his dedicated wife Catherine Boucher (the daughter of a market gardener, whom he married in 1782), Blake divided his time between composing and engraving illustrated poetry, and eking out a precarious living as a contract engraver. His first works in illustrated painting - All Religions Are One and There is No Natural Religion (1788) - followed on from the satirical verse of An Island in the Moon (1784-5), but it was in 1789, the year of the French Revolution and the Storming of the Bastille, that saw Blake's early masterpieces, The Book of Thel and Songs of Innocence. Between 1789 and 1800, when the Blake’s moved to Felpham, Blake was ferociously active, composing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), The French Revolution (1791), America: A Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), the Songs of Experience (1793-4), Europe: A Prophecy (1794) The Book of Los (1795) and The Four Zoas (1795-1804). Uniting all of these was an extraordinary mixture of apocalyptic vision, political fervour, revisions of Christian theology and psychological exploration. Part of the reason for this extraordinary creative energy was that Blake felt compelled to work through his responses to the political upheavals of in Europe and America in this period. The American Revolution of 1775, and the Declaration of Independence in 1783 was, for Blake, just one example of youthful energetic rebellion against the forces of Autocratic Authority. Blake, who met Tom Paine in the early 1790s, sided with the American forces, mythologising them in his writings into the epic cosmic struggle between the forces of the Authoritarian Jehovah (the figure of "Urizen") and the forces of youthful rebellion (symbolised by the mythological figure of Orc). The French Revolution of 1789 represented, for Blake, a similar irruption of necessary rebellion against the corruption of the 'Ancien Regime' and, once again, his sympathies were with the revolutionaries and supporters such as Paine (whom he helped save, in 1793, when Paine was in danger of being arrested, allowing him to escape to France). The British war with France, 1793, and the introduction of rigorous laws of civil obedience were, for Blake, yet further instances of the hold which the forces of Authority (Church and State) held over the common people: like Wordsworth, and Shelley and Byron a generation later, Blake was politically both a Radical and a libertarian. Yet, as Blake himself realized, the forces of youthful rebellion which had promised to usher in a new dawn in human consciousness swiftly gave way to the bloodshed and anarchy of the Reign of Terror and the imposition of new stricter forms of social control in both France and Britain. His works, from 1794 onwards, reflect a sense of the paradoxes and complexities of rebellion although, as his work also testifies, Blake remained unswervingly committed to the principles of equality in all forms (social, political and sexual), to liberty and to justice.
In 1800 Blake moved to West Sussex and spent nearly three idyllic years there, until the dramatic events which led to him being charged with sedition: in 1803 he was charged, at Chichester, with high treason (for being too vocal in his responses to a soldier he found urinating in his garden). That year Blake returned to London, where he lived until his death in 1827. Yet the final 24 years of his life saw Blake producing voluminous amounts of illustrated work and engraving, including the monumental work Milton (begun in Felpham but finished only in 1808) and Jerusalem, 1804-20), and illustrated versions of Dante and The Book of Job. These later years were, however, disappointing for Blake: he had not found the fame and recognition he longer for and, as for most of his life, he was never far from penury. What did not change also was Blake's passionate commitment to a vision of Christianity revisioned, and to a Spiritual, Psychological, Political and Sexual Renaissance, brought about by discarding the narrow moralising and conventionality of orthodox Christianity, and his vision of Albion reborn, in Everyman and in England. Blake died in 1827, and was buried in a common grave.

The Songs of Experience

The Tiger

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake's most famous poem raises profound questions, but does not finally answer them. How could the creator make something as terrifying and awesome as the Tiger? Could the same creator also be responsible for making the Lamb (both Christ, and the creator whose meek and mild spirit dominates the Songs of Innocence)? Is the Tiger not created in God's own image? Is the Tiger a symbol of Evil, for elsewhere (as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) Blake praises energy as a form of good and delight. These speculations lead to wider questions, about the wisdom of a God who can create such terrifyingly destructive creations, and questions of God's creation of Good and Evil, or Good-and-Evil. Comparison with The Lamb in the Songs of Innocence is extremely illuminating here. The Tiger is personified as having been born from fire (stolen from the Gods by Prometheus?), forged rather than created, and characterised also in terms of its (metallic) coldness: note the effectiveness of the poem's imagery in creating associations of fire, coldness and darkness. Interpretation of the poem is complicated by the fact that we cannot assume the speaker of the poem to be Blake himself, but perhaps any poet, who has created this Tiger out of his own imagination ("forests of the night").

The Sick Rose

Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Many have seen this poem as directly sexual, in its references to venereal disease and to the corruption of the innocent Rose by the masculine "invisible worm" of sexual experience. Certainly the poem draws on these, but it should also be read less literally, relying on the traditional associations of the Rose (Love, the young girl) in its depiction of an altered state of psychological (and spiritual) awareness. The sickness, however, may well be an internal psychological sickness that comes from unacted desires within the Rose ("Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires", from the 'Proverbs of Hell' in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) rather than corruption forced from outside. This is a recurrent theme in the Songs of Experience

The Chimney Sweeper (Experience)

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying 'weep! 'weep! in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother, say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

A very much darker and more savage vision here than in the counterpart poem in the Songs of Innocence. The references to a church which is complicit in the repression of the child, together with the treatment of the negligent parents, make this one of the most bitter poems in the sequence, with its emphasis on a whole system (God, Priest and King) which represses the child, even forcing him to conceal his unhappiness (a reference to being "clothed"), psychologically as well as physically).

The Fly

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.

The speaker, in this poem, speculates on whether he is or is not like the Fly, carelessly swept away by the speaker's hand. The Fly may have little, if any, conscious awareness of himself and his mortality and, if the speaker shares that freedom from awareness, then life or death is of little consequence. If, on the other hand, the fly does have human awareness then it is a different story.