WILLIAM BLAKE

(1757-1827) 70
*dismissed as a MADMAN during & shortly after his lifetime
*buried in unmarked grave
*poet, painter, engraver, spiritual visionary/mystic
*anti-Neoclassicism: broke away from the formalism of his century (NEOCLASSICISM)
* Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Old Testament poetry
* sonnets without rhyme
* bold, deep metaphors
* Nature metaphors
* deep symbolism
* man & nature = connected (linked)
* Fallen Man = selfish

born, raised, lived in working-class section of London

avid reader: Bible, philosophy, poetry
1767: WB = 10, expressed interest in painting father enrolled him in a drawing school
later apprenticed to an engraver
1779: WB = 22, began to accept commissions to illustrate & engrave the works of others
artists
1782: WB = 24, married Catherine Boucher, whom he taught to read, write, engrave & who
assisted him in his engraving business & soothed him during his fits
o possessive, jealous, childless
o see his poetry
1784: Poetical Sketches
o 1st book
o dissatisfaction with the current poetic tradition (Neoclassicism)
o called for new forms & techniques
o models should be: Elizabethan, early 17thC, no Alexander Pope
1788: illuminated printing = relief, etchings occupying works

* MYSTIC: states of visionary rapture, revelations

he reported a vision as early as 4 years old
had seen prophet Ezekiel in a tree
had seen a tree filled with angels
very religious as a child, mystical beliefs as an adult
Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise.
* 1789: Songs of Innocence

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* 1794: Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human
Soul
o STYLE:
compressed metaphor & symbol
that explodes into multiplicity of references
1) Experience never published separately,
2) subtitle,
3) many songs paired
Innocence & Experience were meant as companion pieces, meant to be counterparts
from 1783-93
wrote, illustrated, printed them himself
prepared the engraving himself
created/invented a process for such preparation (illuminated printing)
tinted each illustration himself, with his wife
(see illuminated medieval manuscripts)
* 1800:
cottage in Felphan, Sussex
money from engraving, drawing lessons, illustrating books
* 1803:
falsely accused of sedition by John Schofield, private in Royal Dragons, after an altercation:
Blake ordered him out of his Felphan garden, JS replied with threats & curses against WB
and his wife, so WB pushed him the 50 yards back into the inn in which JS was quartered.
WB = eventually acquitted.
Effects =
o WB moved back to London,
o exacerbated his sense that ominous forces were at work in the world,
o complicated symbolic obliquities (obscurities) & unorthodox religion and morality,
o increased number of contemporary affairs/references in his works
* PROPHET-POET:
all life: had mystical visions
1795: minor prophecies
1820: major prophet book: The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem
BIBLE:
o he called the Bible the Great Code of Art
o Overall Biblical plot: Creation, Fall, history of man in fallen world, redemption,
promise of recovering Eden & New Jerusalem
FRENCH REVOLUTION:
o WB, WW, STC, Southey:
FR = the purifying violence that, according to Biblical prophecy, was the
portent of the imminent redemption of man & world (before the
Millennium)

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o later recants
o from apocalypse by revolution to apocalypse by imagination
IMAGINATIVE APOCALYPSE:
a restoration, re-unification
do not have to destroy earth
but restore Imaginative vision: see through the veil, break on
through to the other side
Man & World share 1 life, Universal Brotherhood
the act of seeing this connection creates unification of the Universal
Man and New Jerusalem
enhance the senses: see through the Fallen World (RECOGNITION)
o see PBS the veil
(LINK: Man & World are interconnected)

William Blake mythology: (Norton)

o Universal Man
original state of a unified, undivided condition
the Human Form divine
Albion Adam
incorporated cosmos
o the FALL of mankind:
not a fall away from God
but a fall into division (PSC)
selfhood, self-sufficiency selfish
fall of Man & Nature (BC)
o WB and German Philosophers:
our fall (or the malaise of modern culture) is essentially a mode of psychic
disintegration and of resultant alienation from oneself, ones world, and ones
fellow beings (WB)
Fall of Man = a disintegration (of Universal Man)
isolation from self, Nature, society
o 3 states of being in the FALLEN WORLD:
Beulah: pastoral condition of easy & relaxed INNOCENCE, without clash of
contraries
Generation: realm of common human experience, suffering, conflicting
contraries
Ulro: hell, lowest state, bleak rationality, tyranny, static negation, isolated
selfhood
o SC:
The fallen world moves through the cycles of its history, successively
approaching and falling away from redemption, until, by the agency of
the Redeemer, it will culminate in an apocalypse. (WB)
Apocalypse = unifying man, back to Universal Man; a return to the original,

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undivided condition, his Resurrection to Unity
Redeemer = human imagination, most potently operative in the prophetic poet
o WB = against:
18thC poets:
Pope, Gothic terrors, sentimental melodramas
(see WWs Preface to Lyrical Ballads)
Christian Orthodoxy:
Creed = based on a particular Scripture
Deism:
natural religion
not based on Scripture, but based on evidences of God in nature
all religions = variants of 1 true religion
sense experience
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------STYLE:
mastery of the lyric form
religious, Biblical
mystical
Romantic: childhood, innocence
un-Neoclassical: absent of Classical allusions, no formal language
instead: childlike simplicity, lyricism, visual immediacy
o (see Robert Burns)
however: childlike simplicity = deceptive b/c beneath the simple appearance, tone = deep
theological, philosophical thoughts & concepts
*artist creed/theme: ...the real man, the imagination, which liveth forever (WB) though he
was old & feeble, his spirit & mind were still sharp
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------common Blake THEMES
central theme = Without Contraries is no progression.(in Marriage of Heaven & Hell)
common theme (seen in New Jerusalem)
o ** WB's confidence
in the goodness of God (religious)
in the redeemable nature of humanity (optimistic)
o we can change things, build a New Jerusalem in Englands green and pleasant land.
o Prophet-Poet's task = to fight for the rights of every one, to bring about a New
Jerusalem, to point out society's ills, to be the voice of the people, to change hearts
and minds, to help redeem humanity
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
WB = PRECURSOR:

pre-Raphaelites
Romantics
Post-Modern drama:
o irony
o defiant pleasure in shocking the angels of his day by being deliberately outrageous
in works and opinion.
o shock audience out of their dullness, complacency
o challenge, scorn, send up conventionality (conventional wisdom, thinking, theology)

SONGS of INNOCENCE and EXPERIENCE

SONGS of INNOCENCE:
happy songs for children
FALLEN WORLD:
o injustice, evil, suffering
o as it appears to a state of the human soul WB calls innocence
SONGS of EXPERIENCE:
contrary state of soul = experience
o ugly, terrifying
o with poverty, disease, prostitution, war,
o with repression (social, sexual, theological, institutional)
fallen world of experience = epitomized by modern LONDON
Introduction to Innocence (1789)
speaker = piper, asked by a boy to Pipe a song about a Lamb!, again, then to sing his
songs of happy cheer, and then to write a book that all may read
boy then quickly disappeared, as an angel sent to Gospel writer
speaker then moves from piper, to singer, to poet
setting = rural ("down the valleys wild"), daytime
Introduction to Experience (1794)
speaker = bar/prophet, "Who Present, Past, and Future sees"
who had heard Christ in person
who (either the bard or Christ) calls souls (the lapsed Soul) fallen from grace after Adam & Eve's
fall
setting = from night to dawn
Lamb & Tyger
good & evil, peace & war, meekness & ferocity
perhaps not opposites, but merely different creatures in an infinitely varied universe
Lamb
catechism
question-and-answer
lamb = animal, child, Christ, speaker
child = youth, child of God
LINK: God-lamb (animal)-man
(humanity)

Tyger
Why is the devil like he is?
Who made the devil?
Did the same person who made the
devil/tiger make the lamb?
If so, can he/she/it be good?
NO answers, all questions

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Holy Thursday
Holy Thursday
39 days after Easter
material prosperity
Christs Ascension to heaven
vs.
march kids from charity schools to St.
spiritual poverty
Peters
kids = clean: the flowers of London
could be, if changed: Charity,
o (natural metaphor)
Brotherhood
In a land with so much money, how can
the Rapture
there be poor children??
charity: lest you drive an angel from

FALLEN MAN = selfish, miser

your door (Heb. 13.2)
(usury), no charity
charity = BROTHERHOOD
Nature symbolism
o help each other, especially
children
o see The Open Boat

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Chimney Sweeper
Chimney Sweeper
child labor
child labor BLAME: parents, Church,
society, Industrial Revolution
father sold me
o all of us (society) = to blame
FALLEN WORLD: mother died when
o (not just guns, violence, apathy)
young
Contrast: black & white
Innocence: see good in bad, Tom
Because I was happy: feels punished
Dacres hair, dream
for being a kid, innocent, happy
Toms vision:
clothes of death
o thousands of dead sweepers in
caskets,
am happy: happy in the face of misery
o angel opens them, frees sweeps,
(innocence?)
o they play in green fields, wash in
Let kids be kids
river, shine in the sun
Institutionalized Religion: should be
o Promise; if good, God = his
looking out for kids/lambs
father, never lack =joy
adults/parents = disconnected from
happy in the face of abuse
children

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Divine Image
virtues = God, in man
aspects of humanity:
LINK: God in all, loves, made all
mercy = human heart
o heathen, Turk, Jew (SHK)
pity = human face
Divine Image
cruelty = human heart (stomach, gorge)
peace = human form divine
jealousy = human face (furnace)
love = human dress

terror = human form divine (forge)

secrecy = human dress (forged iron)

FALLEN MAN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Nurses Song
Nurses Song
kids being kids
childhood memory (LINK)
unbridled, unrestricted
BUT disconnected
innocence, bliss, joy
o jealous, spiteful
playing in a field
o Fallen Man
Nurse lets them play
LINK: birds, sheep, green, kids
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Infant Joy
Infant Sorrow
2 days old
born into the FALLEN WORLD
o dangerous world
Joy =
o helpless, naked
o name,
o bound, restrictions
o innocence,
see Garden of Love,
o share in her innocence
London
o war, poverty, death, cruelty, child
labor
starting off with the cards stacked
against you
pain of childbirth:
o physical
o metaphysical:
another mouth to feed
human existence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------from Songs of Innocence
Ecchoing Green
kids being kids, playing in a field
LINK: old & young = linked by adults memories of childhood
Little Black Boy
black skin, white soul
o (OTHELLO)
o Rappaccinis Daughter
LINK: nature = animals = man
o created by God
o black & white people (children of God = no race)

bodies = clouds (nature metaphor)

End of Innocence
weary
sun goes down
darkening green

death, winter
adulthood
world: worries, cares; responsibilities; school, knowledge (knowledge of Good and Evil)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------from Songs of Experience
Clod and Pebble
2 sides of love:
o selfless
o selfish
#1: seeks to please the other, not self; builds Heaven in Hells despair
clay clod = Order, trodden with cattles feet
pebble in brook = Chaos
#2: please self, bind other; joys in others loss; builds Hell in Heavens despite
FALLEN MAN: selfish, self-serving, self-sufficient
William Blake The Clod & the Pebble
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite."
< http://www.eliteskills.com/c/5079 >

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Sick Rose
invisible worm =
o death, adulthood, EXPERIENCE
o poverty, Industrial Revolution, Institutional Religion
o incest, divorce
o defloration, sex
o whatever force that robs innocent of its joy, innocence, or restricts freedom, natural
inclinations to joy, liberty, love,
cold reason, rationality (stars)
My Pretty Rose Tree
offered True Love (Juliet)
own rose tree spurns him (Rosaline)
unrequited love
FALLEN MAN = self-sufficiency
Sun Flower
sun = God, heaven
flower = grows to the sun
virgin, youth, traveler aspire to get to heaven
we should be like sunflower and follow the sun
Garden of Love
innocence of love (love = a natural emotion) restricted by laws, Institutionalized Religion
Institutionalized Religion:
o chapel in the middle of the field he played in;
o gates are shut;
o Thou shalt not
graves & tombstones replace flowers
priests in black bind (natural) joys & desires
Garden of Eden: ugly side of love:
o lusts, desires, death
FALLEN MAN-WORLD:
o selfishness
o rather than the presence of God

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o now = laws, Church, priests, restrictions
London
excessive regulation, restriction of society
o see Garden of Love
o chartered = verb
control of nature: land, streets, River Thames
FALLEN MAN:
o man-made restrictions
by Reason (mind-forgd manacles)
o Civil Law vs. Divine Law
o Institutionalized Religion
blames the Church & State for wars, chimney sweeps
young Prostitute with baby:
o baby suffers (the real victim here)
o exposes hypocrisy of marriage
o no charity (selfishness)
o sex (lust)
o VD ruins marriage, spreads disease
immorality, hypocrisy = disease that spreads, infecting the entire society
The Human Abstract
mercy = exploitation
pity = cruelty
peace = conflict
love = hypocritical humility
FALLEN WORLD
We:
o society
o share responsibility for poverty, cruelty
o see Chimney Sweeper #2
o we = Cause & Solution
man-made laws, restrictions, Institutionalized Religion
Reason (in the brain, not heart)
see London
keeps us from our natural inclinations: wed do whats right, that which is in
us to do, man = inherently good
we would have no use for virtues, pity, mercy IF we did what we should
fear selfishness cruelty
Inquisition false humility (tree) Mystery Deceit
nature symbolism
To Tirzah

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capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel

opposite = Jerusalem, the capital of Southern Judah
o free
represents: natural mother of mortal body with its restricted senses & enslaved desires
Fall Shame & Pride Sexes (differences, not unified) FALLEN MAN
senses = deceiving
Jesus = Mercy, sets us free

Poison Tree
natural symbolism
harbor grudges
should talk it out
glad his enemy is dead
o bad love of Clod and Pebble
FALLEN MAN: deceit, hatred, cruelty
both = guilty
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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

written 1783-93, same time he was writing Songs

prose, not poetry
milieu:
o revolutionary spirit of FRENCH REVOLUTION
o revolutionary prophecy
against:
o the timidly conventional & self-righteous
o stock opinions of Orthodox Christian piety & morality
see Good Country People (clichs)
o against people like Emanuel Swedenborg
o against conventional ideas of Good and Evil

Emanuel Swedenborg:
o Swedish scientist, religious philosopher
o WB repudiates/negates him
o WBs resurrection into Prophet-Poet
o ES writings = folded clothes in the tomb
o WB parodies ES in A Memorable Fancy

Conventional EVIL:
o devils, Hell, body & desires
o energy, abundance, act, freedom
o (children, in Songs of Innocence
and Experience)

Voice of the Devil

o = WB
o devils advocate
o turns these conventional values around
SATIRE:
o 18thC sustained ironic reversal
o transvaluation of standard criteria
o shock reader into realizing the inadequacy of conventional moral categories and stock
responses
(Post-Modern Drama)
Real GOOD:
o marriage of Good & Evil
o marriage of Reason & Energy
o *union of contraries
GOOD LIFE:
o sustained tension, without resolution, or suppression, of co-present oppositions

Conventional GOOD:
o angels, Heaven, soul, reason,
restraint, passivity, prohibition,
o (all thats bad in Songs of
Innocence and Experience)

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* no restrictions, no separation *

INSTITUTIONALIZED RELIGION:
o Bibles, Church = the Cause
no Body without Soul
o they are connected, linked, married
o BUT Religion & Reason = 2 separate
ISAIAH 34, 35, 63:
o Edom = where man is red with blood of Purifying Violence
1790s France (French Revolution)
o Man = Adam regaining Paradise
(Spirit of Revolution)
portent of apocalyptic redemption & recovery of Paradise
o Mind = more than the sum of sensory experiences
changes with new data

** CENTRAL THEME of his ENTIRE WORK:

From The Argument:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and
Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the
passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
o the interplay between opposites = a necessary condition of learning
o each needs its opposite in order to be understood fully
o ex: joy needs sorrow, we need to experience both, the one in order to understand the
other
o the Innocence of childhood = BALANCED with the experience of adulthood, with
the Wisdom gained through experience, the consequent pain & suffering &
disenchantment (along the way) notwithstanding
o yin & yang
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- contains Proverbs of Hell:
o list of aphorisms
o simple images
o simple thoughts, themes
o a diabolic Book of Proverbs in the Bible
o * themes:
no time for the dead
no time for sorrow
excess leads to wisdom push the envelope
take action, get moving
against restrictions, rules, regulations, laws, Institutionalized Religion
* Proverbs: (samples)

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o You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
(EXCESS, push the envelope)
o Where man is not nature is barren. (LINK: man & nature = interconnected)
o The cut worm forgives the plow.
o A dead body revenges not injuries.
o The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
o He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
o The most sublime act is to set another before you.
o If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
o Folly is the cloke of knavery.
o Shame is Prides cloke.
o Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
o The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
o Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
o Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
o Expect poison from the standing water.
o He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
o Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
o The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
o What is now proved was once only imagined.
o Think in the morning. Act in the noon, Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
o The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
o The crow wish'd every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.
o The soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- contains A Memorable Fancy #3 = PARABLE of the CAVE:
o with an angel (discourse with an angel)
o mill = prophecy
o cave = rational theology
o Black Sun
o angel shows him his lot, he shows angel its lot
o The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water and breeds reptiles
of the mind.
o ironic reversal: converts the angel to the devils side!
o Jesus broke the 10 Commandments
o Religions = based on stories (the Imagination)
o Religions = cause of hatred, wars, separation
o see: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man
as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow
chinks of his cavern.
RECOGNITION
The Doors (Break on through to the other side)
o Body & Soul = 1

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o 2 portions of being / human creative energies:
(1) the Prolific &
(2) the Devouring
Christ came to separate them: sheep, goats
Religion tries to unite them
marriage = end of world as we know it
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

contains A SONG of LIBERTY:

o 1792
o Spirit of Revolution shatters 10 Commandments or anything else that prohibits
political, religious, moral liberty

______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
And Did Those Feet or A New Jerusalem (1800-09?)
Did Christ walk in England?
when Jesus was a boy, he came to England, to Joseph of Arimatheas mines
Industrial Revolution:
o these dark Satanic Mills =
factories of England's Industrial Revolution
or figurative mills of the mind
b/c of Satanic Mills as industrial mills, & last stanza:
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.
o poem = hymn of England's Labour Party,
fighting for the rights of the working class
nationalistic, optimistic
o hope for a change
o belief in the redemption of humanity
prophet-poet:
o never stop Mental War until he builds a New Jerusalem in England
What was & What Should be:
o Past = pastoral, pure society
o Present = Industrial Revolution
o Future = Apocalypse, end of the world
o Future = New Jerusalem, hope
common Blake THEMES
seen in New Jerusalem

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** WB's confidence
o in the goodness of God (religious)
o in the redeemable nature of humanity (optimistic)
we can change things, build a New Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.
poet's task = to fight for the rights of every one, to bring about a New Jerusalem, to point out
society's ills, to be the voice of the people, to change hearts and minds, to help redeem
humanity
______________________________________________________________________________
Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau (?)
Voltaire, Rousseau = rationalism, Deism
WB = against V&R, rationalism, Deism
God vs. Science:
o Israel shines brighter than Science
______________________________________________________________________________
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THE LAMB

song
childlike purity, pastoral bliss
beneficent lamb = nourishing, comforting,
joyful
lamb = Christ
structure: 1st stanza = question; 2nd = reply
(w/naive enthusiasm & assurance)
unified: speaker, lamb, baby Jesus (in a
pastoral portrait of innocence & bliss)
Romantic vision of a benevolent world
envisioned by an uncorrupted, natural child
world view = too good to be true (highly
idealized)
BUT: hint of danger, of sacrifice: by
identifying the child, lamb, Christ

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______________________________________________________________________________
THE TYGER
How can we explain evil in a world that was created
by an all-knowing, beneficent God?
fearful, ominous tiger = in primeval creation
contrast btw lamb & tiger (stanza 5)...
expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven
angels weep: 1) for the rebellion & fall of Lucifer
(brightest) and 2) introduction of evil into the world

lines 7 & 8: mythical allusions

unanswered question
from Experience : contrast in tone, answer

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THE SICK ROSE
rose =
worm =
sickness =
rose = archetype of love
worm = hidden (at night), on storm
(foreboding catastrophe)
perhaps: syphilis (literally, then), adultery
(figuratively kills love), AIDS (today)
worm = (sketched by Blake): eating one
leaf of a drooping rose, a spirit expelled
from the flower's closed center
o Erotic Love theme: merely
sensuous worm enters the rose
& drives out the spirit of joy &
authentic love
worm = Church, with its sick
preoccupation with sex as sin eating away
at a life-giving leaf

personification (expands levels of

meaning)
description (of worm)

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A POISON TREE
unresolved, cultivated hatred
effect of carrying this for long time (tree)
changes the speaker: bitter, murderous, no
feelings
*Poe's CASK of AMONTILLADO

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