William Blake (1757-1827)

William Blake was born in London in 1757 into a lower-class family. At the age of ten he was
sent to a drawing school, where he first saw copies of works by Raphael, Michelangelo and
other Italian artists, and was then apprenticed to an engraver and spent most of his time
reading and drawing the statues in the old churches of London, particularly Westminster
Abbey, which inspired his love of the Gothic style. In 1778 he enrolled at the new Royal
Academy of Arts, and in 1782 set up a print-seller’s shop.

It was only in his late twenties that Blake took to writing poetry, but writing and the visual arts
were always closely associated for him. When he published his first collection of poetry, Songs
of Innocence , in 1789, the poems were engraved; he also illustrated each one with a picture
that was its visual counterpart – as for the famous The Lamb and The Tyger . In 1794 he
published his Songs of Innocence and of Experience , in a combined volume. They did not
bring him fame or financial success, but they are now considered the first outstanding result of
English Romantic poetry.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience were clearly intended by Blake to be read together,
since he published no separate editions of them in his lifetime. They were highly original in
their day and still retain much of their freshness. On a first level, they were songs intended for
children, but together they combined to show ‘the two contrary states of human soul’, as we
read in the subtitle, that is innocence and experience.

The world of innocence is apparently unthreatening and fearless, full of joy and happiness.
Externally it seems like a Garden of Eden, peopled by such figures as the lamb and the child –
both symbols of Christ. The lamb is shown as free and happy, in an unspoiled environment
where it receives and gives pleasure. The lamb’s innocence and the perfect harmony of its
existence make the poet ask, ‘who made thee?’ The answer comes in the second stanza of the
poem, where the traditional identification of the lamb with Christ is confirmed by the voice of
the child: ‘I a child and thou a lamb, / We are called by his name’. Both the child and the lamb
are united in God’s name, in a world made up of light, running waters, grass, and tender
voices.

The perfection of the world of innocence is, however, only apparent since it is a world where
morality has not yet been put to the test of experience. This happens in the Songs of
Experience , which often show similar subjects to those in the Songs of Innocence from a
different point of view. The world of experience is tainted by selfishness, cruelty and social
injustice, fiercely attacked by Blake. Its symbol is not the lamb but the tiger, a disquieting
creature whose origins are lost ‘in the forests of the night’. It is not a tiger realistically
described but rather the archetypal tiger, whose origins are buried in mystery and darkness.
The animal evoked is frightening yet fascinating, bursting with energy. The contrast here is
between the darkness of night and deep forests on the one hand, and flames and fire on the
other. Fire is the link between the tiger’s strength and the metaphor of the last part of the
song, where the tiger is seen as God’s creation, the product of a mighty hammer and anvil. As
often in Blake, the poem ends with a question which casts a doubt on the possibility of
understanding the universe through the senses and reason:

‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’

In all of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience , joy and pain, laughter and tears, go
together. In The Chimney Sweeper the contrast is presented visually in the alternation of
dazzling flashes of white (the young boy’s hair, the angel’s bright key, the sunshine) and the
darkness of soot and night. The fate of the poor chimney sweeper is told in the first quatrain of
this ballad: his mother died when he was very young, his father sold him when he was still a
child (either for greed or extreme poverty). In contrast with this ominous beginning, the core
of the song is taken up with the sweet dream of one of the little chimney sweepers, Tom
Dacre, in which they are freed from their sooty prisons and transformed into clean, white
children who play naked in the sun. This, however, in the last stanza is contrasted with the sad
reality of their going out together in the cold and dark morning:

‘And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags and our brushes to work.

Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom as happy and warm;

So if all do their duty they need not fear harm’.

Blake is the first to write the ‘poetry of the child’ which takes up so much Romantic poetry. He
not only describes children in his songs, he is also interested in their peculiar world, their
states of mind, representing them in a language that often reflects their simplicity and
imagination. Blake is also the first to denounce the exploitation of children by cruel and
oppressive families and society, and to express his moral indignation at this. In The Chimney
Sweeper the clear visionary quality of the poetry makes of the chimney sweeper’s story both a
radiant dream and a realistic picture. But there is no trace of sentimentalism or explicit social
criticism in it.

It would seem natural, and it would be partly correct, to identify the Songs of Innocence with
Eden and the Songs of Experience with a fallen world. But the relation between the two worlds,
or states of mind, is not simply one of regression or superiority. They co-exist in the same
person or situation, and Blake makes no attempt to reconcile their contradictions. Innocence
offers one point of view, experience another, and they can never be reconciled. For Blake this
tension or dialectical opposition is essential. He finds in man and the universe the presence of
good and evil, purity and corruption, innocence and experience in eternal balance and fruitful
contrast.

‘Contraries’, apparently opposed states of mind, were essential to Blake’s thought, because
the possibility of progress – of achieving knowledge of what we really are – is located in the
tension between contraries, not in their resolution by one gaining supremacy over another.
Instinct is necessary as reason, emotion as important as logic. This is symbolized in his
prophetic book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790): both are necessary and
complementary, neither can be denied.

Blake did not believe in man’s rationality. For him, the representatives of a rationalistic and
materialistic philosophy were great heretics, since they denied – so Blake thought – the value
of faith and intuition. Blake, on the contrary, believed in these as the only source of true
knowledge and denied the truth of sensorial experience. Like Wordsworth and Coleridge later,
he thought that imagination enabled man to see beyond physical reality. The internal mind
really builds the external world that man sees. The Tyger ends with a question which casts a
doubt on the possibility of understanding the universe through the senses and reason. The
same is true of the last line of The Chimney Sweeper , which is apparently simple but in fact
enigmatic, if not menacing in its implications: to a modern reader it sounds bitterly ironic.

Blake elaborated a complete view of the world in a complex mythology. This is fully expressed
in the many ‘prophetic’ books he published between 1790 and 1804, such as The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, The French Revolution , America: A Prophecy , Milton and Jerusalem . They
became increasingly formless and obscure with time, and much critical effort has been
dedicated to extricating alchemical, mystical, theosophical, Oriental, occult, neo-Platonic and
other elements from his writing, but such efforts have only been partially successful. His
complex symbolism and personal reworking of myth, the Bible and history are best
exemplified, in fact, in his paintings and engravings.

Blake’s poetry falls into two categories: the deceptively simple Songs of Innocence and of
Experience , and the much more complex ‘prophetic’ books. For Blake, the truth was difficult.
It was difficult to understand end even more difficult to express in ways that did not
compromise the original directness or sincerity of the artist’s vision. He refused to make
concessions to public taste: he said, ‘That which can be made explicit to the Idiot is not worth
my care’. Blake determined to accept poverty and obscurity rather than compromise his
artistic vision. An exhibition of his paintings was a total failure, and he lived in obscurity for the
rest of his life, supported by a small group of faithful friends. He died in 1827.

For the first time in Blake we find Romantic dualism: he rebelled, in his art and his life, against
an aristocratic and elitist concept of art, but at the same time his marked individualism, and
the refusal to rely on traditions, often make his poems difficult to read. His poetry is difficult
because of his use of a complex symbology. The use of symbols came naturally to Blake, who
believed that the physical world could be read as the book of God. To him, a lamb or a tiger, a
chimney sweeper or a London street were symbols of a supra-natural reality; they were never
to be taken at their face value. On the other hand, his language and syntax are fairly simple.
He often adopts an apparently naive style, using a plain, Anglo-Saxon (not Latinate)
vocabulary, as well as repetitions, refrains and regular stress patterns which are typical of
ballads, children’s songs and hymns.

Though in his day he was far less well-known than Wordsworth or Coleridge, Blake’s
personality and poetry mark the beginning of the Romantic Age. He reacted violently against
all traditional forms. Politically, he was in favour of both the French and American revolutions.
In London, he met left-wing political Radicals, such as William Godwin and Thomas Paine.
Many of Blake’s poems, like The Chimney Sweeper , are a criticism of the suffering of the poor
and the oppressed. He openly attacked such national institutions as the Church of England and
the monarchy. Blake saw the culture he lived in – its philosophy, its politics, its social
organisation, its art – as an instrument for the oppression of men who are born without power,
a kind of intellectual and social tyranny. He is now recognized as an archetypal revolutionary.

The Romantic Artist: Blake’s ‘Inner Eye’

William Blake ignored the accepted style of his time, still based on classical principles, and
followed his own highly personal inspiration. He refused to paint from life, working from his
imagination, or ‘inner eye’ – a typically Romantic trait. Like the medieval artist, he was more
concerned with the essential truth of his vision than with questions of realism.

The two colour prints below exemplify this point very vividly. They were both made in 1795
and were meant to be viewed together – being printed on facing pages.

1. The first picture represents Newton, not as a pale-faced scientist in late 17th -century garb
but as a muscular young athlete in the classical style, sitting naked on a rock at the bottom of
the Sea of Time and Space. He is staring at a geometrical figure, a triangle, inscribed between
a pair of compasses and his self-absorption and fixedness is for Blake extremely dangerous.
(Note the octopus behind his left foot, a symbol of the tentacular oppression of state religion
and politics.) Too much concentration on reason at the expense of intuition may lead to the
‘sleep of reason’, as the motto below the picture suggests. In fact, Newton is leaning so far
forward that if he fell asleep or lost his balance he would end on all fours like Nebuchadnezzar.

2. Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, is a degraded, hairy and long-nailed primitive version
of Newton. The parallel is suggested not only by the posture of the two bodies and their being
in an underwater (or underground, in the second picture) world, but also by the recurrence of
the triangle figure: here shown both in the arched entrance to Nebuchadnezzar’s cave and in
the angles formed by his limbs.

Blake’s Works

Poetical Sketches (1783), Blake’s first book of poems. It shows his dissatisfaction with
contemporary Augustan taste and his search for new poetical models (the Elizabethans,
Collins, Cowper, etc.).

Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). To the first
collection, which portrays the unfallen state of Man, and contains ‘happy songs / Every child
may joy to hear’, Blake added in 1794 a second group of poems which deal with the presence
of evil and injustice in the world, thus giving a more complete and complex picture of reality.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), The French Revolution (1791), America (1793), The
Four Zoas (1797), Milton (1804) and Jerusalem (1804), the ‘prophetic’ books in which Blake’s
mystical symbolism is the dominant tone.