The Many Meanings of William Blake

“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction…”

“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle/ Than nurse unacted desires…”

What are we to make of the visionary artist William Blake (1757-1827)? How we loved him in the 1960s and 70s, when he seemed to validate the revolt against traditional authority – and gave us permission to ignore moral codes and pursue our personal desires.

But we were puzzled by his art and his obscure prophetic books. Why was Newton portrayed as a super-fit, naked young man with a giant compass? Who were all these old men with flowing white beards? Did the later prophetic poems even make sense?

This impressive study by Mark Vernon addresses the many paradoxes of the artist – and enables the reader to find the thread of coherence in his thought – and method in his apparent madness!

The first puzzle is that the author of some of the best poems in the English language – The Tiger, Jerusalem, The Sick Rose, London, The Clod and the Pebble, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – was a visionary. He claimed to see angels and sometimes demons. So were these real – or a delusion?

Mark Vernon who has degrees in both Theology and Physics and currently works as a psychotherapist explains it like this: William Blake had visions but he didn’t pretend that they existed for everyone else in the external, objective world.

Blake had little regular education – he was allowed by his parents to roam free in the countryside and school himself, until they apprenticed him to an engraver and print maker. In this teenage phase, he developed a passion for medieval art, with its sense of a world of miracles inhabited by spirits. And a little later, from books and prints, he fell in love with the statuesque visual language of Michaelangelo, where heroic physical bodies such as Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are emblems of psychic transformation.

    “Little Lamb who made thee?

     Dost thou know who made thee?

     Gave thee life and bid thee feed

     By the stream and o’er the mead…?”

These lines from The Songs of Innocence point to the fact that we humans, like the lamb, cannot exactly explain what we are doing here, now, on this particular planet – and whether we have a purpose. As children we take this on trust.

When Blake moves on to the Songs of Experience and the darker scenes of the little chimney sweep, the black boy, the Poison Tree and the youthful harlot in a city slum, he makes a conscious choice to retain his radical innocence of vision. In the same way that a young child given the freedom to roam in nature will create a magical world of stories and adventures and discoveries, Blake made a conscious decision to retain the innocent sense of wonder into adulthood – and to continue to

“See the world in a grain of sand/ And heaven in a wild flower.”

He was always trying to make perception an act of the imagination, to create a vision.

At the end of The Garden of Love, Blake wrote

“I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

He regarded human desires as something holy, the source of energy in life. But he also bore witness to the cruelty and violence in the world, the Tiger as well as the Lamb. So he developed a theory of contraries, opposites which co-exist.  He had a personal belief in Jesus, as a source of a loving relationship which he found within himself.  But he rejected conventional religion in favour of something more intricate and maybe truer to life.

He was born in the eighteenth century, at the height of the Enlightenment, dominated by the achievements of science and empirical philosophy, personified in Newton and Locke. Blake didn’t deny science – but he refused to believe that man alone was conscious and important – isolated in a grey, material world that existed solely for our use.

Instead he chose to see the natural world as a shining, speaking thing in dialogue with humans. And he focused on the particular details of nature, as the gateway to revelation, rather than the generalised theories of science. He believed that the strong desires and passions of human beings give us a lust for the infinite, to embrace everything, if we can only keep the innocent eyes of a child. And concentrate on the eternal, present moment:

“He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”

Now something even weirder. In a society where people were used to distinguishing the Mind or Soul from the Body (the sinful flesh for Puritans), Blake insisted there was no separation.  He wrote “Man has no Body Distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses…

“Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.”

In other words, he is recreating the world of the first human animists. And he is living in this habitat of feelings and spirits!

On to the challenge of the prophetic books: Blake lived in tumultuous times, through the defeats of the American War of Independence and then the French Revolution, leading on to the Reign of Terror and fifteen years of the most bloody fighting across Europe. Although initially a social reformer, Blake came to reject the simple ideologies of revolutionary progress.

In the prophetic books, it’s as if he is describing contemporary history in a code, and pushing for progress to be measured by human, not just material values. Vernon helps with the explanation that Blake invented characters called Eternals or Zoas (from the Greek word for life) who personified universal forces, such as Los (Sol, the sun backwards) and Enitharmon (guardians of space and time).

Vernon compares them to Marvel Superheroes. So Blake creates Orc, an emblem of revolutionary violence, to represent one of the spirits of the age. Urizen may stand for the old authority of the king – who has fallen under the spell of a lifeless rationalism, the realm of Ulro. Beulah is a hopeful state of mind, of having suffered greatly but being determined to progress to a promised fulfilment. And there are several more spirit-beings such as Luvah, Rintrah, Palambron, Tirzah and others.

You could say Blake is creating his own world of archetypes, with many echoes of the Bible and Milton. It is no easy task to disentangle this new and in many ways post-Christian mythology.

Vernon pilots us through these later books, showing that there is a logical, ethical viewpoint running through the grand biblical story-telling – as well as the impression of a moral world turned upside down. Maybe the obscurity of these works also helped to keep Blake safe from censorship and prosecution?

I only have one serious niggle with this book: all the references to quotations from Blake’s poetry are given as K numbers. That refers to a complete version of Blake’s writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes, so without that volume, you are in the dark.

Just occasionally I wonder whether Mark Vernon might be using Blake to expound his own subtle form of mystical Christianity, but he is a convincing and entertaining guide. It’s an absorbing piece of spiritual detective work! He says Blake didn’t believe in an external God but only the divine connection he found inside himself with Jesus, the God in human form. He manages to demonstrate that there IS coherence in the prophetic books – even though many of Blake’s contemporaries came to regard him as mad – and stopped buying his work.

He reminds us of the beauty and power of the later illustrations for The Book of Job, Virgil’s Eclogues and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Blake’s art creates its meaning through a combination of relief etching, colouring and poetry. Towards the end, he depicted the champions of science and the arts walking hand in hand:

“And Bacon and Newton and Locke, and Milton and Shakespeare and Chaucer.” He also pictured a world seen from the perspective of eternity, as in Dante’s Paradiso, where the nature of the sexes would change. He portrayed the fullest development of our individuality as androgynous, a combination of our male and female sides.

He offered this vision of a heartless, mechanical universe restored to life, based on human and sacred values:

“And Los beheld his Sons, and he beheld his Daughters:

Every one a translucent Wonder, a Universe within,

Increasing inwards, into length and breadth, and heighth,

Starry and glorious…”

Although living in poverty and illness, Blake somehow held on to his sense of wonder and optimism. He survives as a major influence on our thought and culture today.