DREAM WEAVER

A poet and painter. William Blake. After an attempt to live in the country at Sussex, at the urging of the well intentioned, but mediocre poet, William Hayley; Blake feeling himself patronized and intruded upon, returned to London. On returning to London, he decided, he would be able to carry on his visionary studies unannoyed and ”converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophesy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals”.

A Human soul ecstatically reunites itself with God in Blake's illustration for his epic poem Jerusalem

In London, Blake did, in fact, produce a series of increasingly visionary, and to other eyes, decreasingly comprehensive works. The autobiographical ”Milton” was written and etched between 1804 and 1808, ”To Justify the Ways of God to Men” in forty- three plates. It calls on the young men of the new age to set their foreheads against the ”ignorant Hirelings” of camp, court, and university. ”Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion” , completed in 1820 , is a still more stupendous vision, set forth on ninety-nine tightly worded plates.

In the earlier ”Songs of Innocence and of Experience”  he had been the most exquisite of lyric poets, but now he deserted conventional lyric forms  to become what he called an ”orator” and prophet. Written in a kind of biblical free verse, his prophecies constantly shift their cadence and meter in accordance with the method he describes in the preface to Jerusalem:

''Blake wrote, illustrated, and printed “Jerusalem” (1804-1820) as a counter-culture response to industrialization’s mechanistic approaches and effects on modern life. His handmade books of illuminated poetry gave voice to his romanticism ideals where ideas of inspiration, subjectivity, and concerns of the individual were of importance 1(pg. 135). Blake created a revolutionary design of the graphic work where text and pictorial forms became integrated.''

”Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for the inferior parts; all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race. Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy’d or Flourish!”

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, most of these later poems were considered wanting in the quality of sanity and being devoid of logical coherence. However, thanks to James Joyce, Ezra Pound and others, different standards of coherence arose, but most of Blake’s contemporaries were understandably puzzled by these spellbinding incantations and great hectoring screeds, peopled with a cast of strange characters who represent psychic states in Blake’s self made mythology; Urize, Orc,Luvah, Urthona,Enitharmon, Oothoon, Rintrah and scores of others, whom now, at least, one can find duly catalogues and explained in S. Foster Damon’s ”Blake Dictionary”.

Blake, Albion's Rock

”But Blake cannot be contained in any dictonary. Even his simplest and clearest statements have vast implications behind them. I have merely untied some knots and shaken out some tangles in the Golden String… The important thing to remember is that he was always writing about the human soul. Blake is a challenge to every thinking person. He was so far ahead of his time that we are just catching up to him. Many of his once strange theories are now commonplaces to the psychologist” ( Damon )

Without the benefits of hindsight and Damon, it was no wonder that the London literati thought Blake a lunatic. It was common according to Crabb Robinson, that others would admire Blake’s designs and poetic talents while at the same time holding him for a decided madman.

l wp-image-11060" title="blake15" src="/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/blake15.jpg" alt="''William Blake The Vision of the Last Judgement Pen and watercolour, 510 x 395 mm 1808 Petworth House, Sussex, National Trust ''" width="472" height="602" />

''William Blake The Vision of the Last Judgement Pen and watercolour, 510 x 395 mm 1808 Petworth House, Sussex, National Trust ''

An Anglican divine, the Reverend Thomas Dibdin, arrived at a similar conclusion after a visit from Blake, who wanted to talk to him about literary subjects. ”Never were such dreamings’ poured forth as were poured forth by my original visitor:- his stature mean, his head big and round, his forehead broad and high, his eyes blue, large and lambent…This extraordinary man sometimes- but in good sooth very rarely-reached the sublime; but the sublime and the grotesque seemed, somehow or other, to be for ever amalgamated in his imagination.”

Only rarely did anyone try to understand the nature of Blake’s visions, which he managed without the benefit of drugs. As he repeatedly explained, they were intellectual visions, the products of a well developed imagination. He never recognized an objective visual reality; after all, no two people see alike. And he writes in his ”Vision of the Last Judgement”:

Blake. The Wise and Foolish Virgins

“What,” it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight: I look thro it & not with it.”

He told the painter George Richmond that his visionary gift was so strongly developed that he could look at a knot in a piece of wood until he was frightened by it. And in the descriptive catalogue of his historic one man show of 1809 he challenged his critics to a kind of trial by vision:

''Blake suggests that the various trials that Job undergoes amount to a spiritual journey… from a false believer to a truly spiritual man. In what in perhaps the most powerful image, Illustration XI:''

”A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments , and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.”

That was the state of the controversy as Blake left it, to be decided by future generations on the merits of his art. Yet in the last years before his death the light of comprehension began going on here and there. A group of young romantic artists, including the gifted painter Samuel Palmer, were more than willing to see things his way. ”I remember Blake , in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known”, wrote Palmer later.

It was gall bladder trouble that finally ended Blake’s exertions in the hither world. He died on August 12, 1827, three months before his seventieth birthday. But he died just as he had lived. According to George Richmond, ”Just before he died His countenance became fair- His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.” If this was madness, what a price we pay for trying to be sane.

Blake. Whirlwind of the Lustful

”Blake presents a Job condemned to the fires of Hell. Devils reach out from the flames below in an attempt to drag him down. Serpents entwine him. Still his hands are clutched in prayer as he looks up to the Hebrew God, Jehovah, hovering over him. Jehovah points to the tablets of the law which condemn Job while the lightning bolt of damnation leap around him. And yet… as Job glances down at Jehovah’s cloven foot and at the serpent of materialism with which he is intertwined… he realizes that this immovable God of the law is one and the same with Satan. The inscription “I know that my redeemer liveth” suggests that Job has begun to imagine that there is a better God: Jesus.

In the final image of Job, the narrative has come full circle…” ( Stlukesguild’s Ramblings )

Blake