continued...
Beyond Blake's lyrical poetry we find some of his greatest, yet most misunderstood and underrated work. His prose piece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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...may just be Blake's masterpiece. This brief book is composed of a series of meditations or "fancies" as Blake titles them, in which he puts forth many of his ideas about good and evil, free will, creation and even of literature:
Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
Perhaps the most known passages of this work come from the series of aphorisms entitled, Proverbs of Hell:
A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.
A dead body revenges not injuries.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
Expect poison from standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!
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Job, his Wife and his Accusers
Perhaps the most unique... and challenging work by Blake is his Job. This work is built of a title page and 21 engraved illustrations. At first glimpse one might assume that Blake has merely illustrated the Biblical text of Job... but as is usual with Blake, nothing is as simple as it first appears. The usual orthodox interpretation of Job is that he represents an admirable figure of faith and patience... a good man who is tested by God by having all of his worldly belongings stripped from him, his family killed, and his own body stricken with painful disease... and yet he does not lose his faith in God. Blake's Job is something of a critique of this interpretation. Utilizing images as well as inscribed quotes from the Book of Job and other Biblical texts, Blake presents the idea that Job does not begin as a man deeply faithful to God... but rather as a figure who is faithful only in appearance. He may do the right things... but for the wrong reasons. 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:
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Blake presents a Job condemned to the fires of Hell. Devils reach out from the hell fires below in an attempt to drag him down. 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.
Blake's epic poems, especially Milton and Jerusalem are undoubtedly his most challenging works. The staggering achievement of these works is that Blake has essentially created his own cosmology and mythology... an achievement not unlike that of Muhammad, Dante, or Homer. He essentially attempts to live up to his own declaration:
"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's
I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create!
In Milton, Blake presents a fantastic narrative in which Milton is driven out of Heaven for his false representation of God as an external authoritarian being. To Blake there was no God outside of the God that resides within the human breast. Milton enters into Blake himself and begins a spiritual journey of remaking himself. Milton contains some of Blake's most fabulous and memorable poetry:
And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.
(The oft-quoted phrase from this introduction to Milton, "dark and Satanic Mills" is among the first criticisms directed at the dehumanizing and polluting elements of industrialization and clearly made Blake a hero with the socially like-minded Pre-Raphaelites.)
If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be silent, and
Not to shew it: I do not account that Wisdom but Folly.
Every Mans Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality
O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day & night?...
And this is the manner of the Daughters of Albion in their beauty
Every one is threefold in Head & Heart & Reins, & every one
Has three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine
Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins
Surrounded with fires unapproachable: but whom they please
They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight...
Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shut in narrow doleful form
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground
The Eye of Man a little narrow orb closed up & dark
Scarcely beholding the great light conversing with the Void
The Ear, a little shell in small volutions shutting out
All melodies & comprehending only Discord and Harmony
The Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys
A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard
Then brings forth Moral Virtue the cruel Virgin Babylon
Can such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro' its tubes
Measure the sunny rays that point their spears on Udanadan
Can such an Ear fill'd with the vapours of the yawning pit.
Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a hand divine?
Can such closed Nostrils feel a joy? or tell of autumn fruits
When grapes & figs burst their covering to the joyful air
Can such a Tongue boast of the living waters? or take in
Ought but the Vegetable Ratio & loathe the faint delight
Can such gross Lips perceive? alas! folded within themselves
They touch not ought but pallid turn & tremble at every wind...
But in the wine presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:
They howl & writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,
In chains of iron & in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits & dens & shades of death, in shapes of torment & woe –
The plates & screws & racks & saws & cords & fires & cisterns,
The cruel joys of Luvah's daughters, lacerating with knives
And whips their victims, & the deadly sport of Luvah's sons...
The epic poem, Jerusalem is Blake's longest and most ambitious work. The narrative, which is confusing and does not seem to follow a linear manner, centers upon the fall of Albion, a personification of Man... Britain... or Western Culture. The work is cloaked in a dense symbolism where characters are all inventions of Blake's own personal mythology and where any single character can represent multiple persons, concepts, or even cities. In spite of this hermetic aspect the poem, like Milton, contains many brilliant passages:
Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro' Albion's pleasant land.
In all the dark Atlantic vale down from the hills of Surrey
A black water accumulates, return Albion! return!
Thy brethren call thee, and thy fathers, and thy sons,
Thy nurses and thy mothers, thy sisters and thy daughters
Weep at thy souls disease, and the Divine Vision is darken'd:
Thy Emanation that was wont to play before thy face,
Beaming forth with her daughters into the Divine bosom
Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem
From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!
Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!...
Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages...
Los answer'd: Altho' I know not this, I know far worse than this:
I know that Albion hath divided me, and that thou, O my Spectre,
Hast just cause to be irritated; but look steadfastly upon me;
Comfort thyself in my strength; the time will arrive
When all Albion's injuries shall cease, and when we shall
Embrace him, tenfold bright, rising from his tomb in immortality.
They have divided themselves by Wrath, they must be united by
Pity; let us therefore take example & warning, O my Spectre.
O that I could abstain from wrath! O that the Lamb
Of God would look upon me and pity me in my fury!
In anguish of regeneration, in terrors of self annihilation,
Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn asunder...
Inspiration deny'd; Genius forbidden by laws of punishment:
I saw terrified; I took the sighs & tears, & bitter groans:
I lifted them into my Furnaces; to form the spiritual sword.
That lays open the hidden heart: I drew forth the pang
Of sorrow red hot: I work'd it on my resolute anvil:
I heated it in the flames of Hand, & Hyle, & Coban
Nine times; Gwendolen & Cambel & Gwineverra
Are melted into the gold, the silver, the liquid ruby,
The crysolite, the topaz, the jacinth, & every precious stone.
Loud roar my Furnaces and loud my hammer is heard:
I labour day and night, I behold the soft affections
Condense beneath my hammer into forms of cruelty
But still I labour in hope, tho' still my tears flow down.
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compell'd to defend
A Lie:...
We are told to abstain from fleshly desires that we may lose no
time from the Work of the Lord. Every moment lost, is a moment
that cannot be redeemed every pleasure that intermingles with the
duty of our station is a folly unredeemable & is planted like the
seed of a wild flower among our wheat. All the tortures of
repentance. are tortures of self-reproach on account of our
leaving the Divine Harvest to the Enemy, the struggles of
intanglement with incoherent roots. I know of no other
Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body
& mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.
Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable
Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our
Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies
are no more...
England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy Sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?
And close her from thy ancient walls.
Thy hills & valleys felt her feet,
Gently upon their bosoms move:
Thy gates beheld sweet Zions ways;
Then was a time of joy and love.
And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult & London's towers,
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England's green & pleasant bowers.
Blake never attained the recognition he deserved during his lifetime and he forever lived in near poverty. A prophet by calling and an engraver by trade he struggled to eek out a living in a highly competitive field working in what appeared to many to be a hopelessly outmoded manner... yet in many ways Blake was as innovative as a visual artist as he was as a poet. At a time when oil painting dominated the visual arts (and had dominated for centuries) Blake had the audacity to reject such in favor of print, watercolor and his ideal of the "illuminated books". While Western art reveled in the abilities of the artist to mimic the appearance of physical reality, Blake rejected such a goal as worthy of the artist, declaring "One power alone makes a poet, Imagination. The Divine Vision." As such it should come as little surprise that few took Blake's art seriously until the advent of Modernism when invention and imagination would triumph over the imitation of nature.
Beyond the books that Blake completed in an engraved manner he also produced numerous watercolor "illustrations" for other texts: the Bible:
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The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
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The Last Judgment
Milton's Paradise Lost:
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The Temptation and Fall
Dante's Divine Comedy:
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The Blasphemer
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Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil
...chief among them. These may have been intended as studies for color engraved versions of these books. One might even suggest that Blake may have intended something along the line of what he had achieved with his Job: a merger of text and image that is a completely new invention. Blake's art would have a direct influence upon the work of a group of followers known as "the ancients" that included Samuel Palmer...
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Samuel Palmer-Early Morning-engraving
and Edward Calvert...
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Edward Calvert-The Bride-engraving
His work would be a model for the design of children's books by the end of the 19th century as well as a major source of inspiration for the development of the so-called "book arts" as found in the works of Eric Gill...
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Eric Gill-The Bible
and most importantly William Morris:
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William Morris/Edward Burns Jones-"Kelmscott Chaucer"
In spite of this, Blake's art did not attain a level of recognition equal to that afforded to his poetry until after mid-century with the increased access to color reproduction allowing for his work to be experienced as close as possible to the manner in which he had intended. Since that time Blake's work has grown greatly in popularity with artists and art lovers (as with lovers of literature)... and especially with those who follow the "book arts". A recent collection of 19 watercolors were broken up by the owners and 12 sold for more than $7 million US. In spite of the incredibly high price for works on paper, the sale was actually far below what was expected. (A good many buyers opted out of the auction due to anger over the fact that the collection had been quickly broken up by speculators out to make a quick dollar rather than allowing the Tate or another museum time to raise the funds needed to purchase the work as a whole) The recent exhibition of Blake's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew crowds in numbers usually reserved for the finest painters in oils... not for an artist working in print and watercolor and often regulated to the category of "outsider artist". It is clear that Blake's achievements as a visual artist have attained a status that equals his achievements as a poet.
