Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Eternity’s Sunrise

  William Blake’s London

  ETERNITY’S SUNRISE

  The Imaginative World of William Blake

  Leo Damrosch

  Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. The acquisition of images was supported in part by a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

  Copyright © 2015 by Leo Damrosch.

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  “The Poems of Our Climate” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Designed by James J. Johnson.

  Set in Dante type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942776

  ISBN 978-0-300-20067-6

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To

  Harold Bloom and E. D. Hirsch

  and in memory of

  Charles Ryskamp

  three great teachers who first inspired my love of Blake

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. The Working Artist

  2. How Should We Understand Blake’s Symbols?

  3. Innocence

  4. Experience

  5. Revolution

  6. Atoms and Visionary Insight

  7. “The Gate Is Open”

  8. Understanding Blake’s Myth

  9. The Zoas and Ourselves

  10. The Prophetic Call

  11. Breakthrough to Apocalypse

  12. “The Torments of Love and Jealousy”

  13. The Female Will

  14. Wrestling with God

  15. The Traveler in the Evening

  Color Plates

  Chronology

  List of Short Titles

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to express my gratitude to my agent, Tina Bennett, for her unfailing loyalty over many years; to Jennifer Banks, my marvelously encouraging and intuitive editor; to Laura Jones Dooley, who ably guided the manuscript through all the stages of production; and above all to my wife, Joyce Van Dyke, whose imaginative yet rigorous critique of successive drafts improved this book immeasurably.

  Eternity’s Sunrise

  INTRODUCTION

  WILLIAM BLAKE was a creative genius, one of the most original artists and poets who ever lived. Some of his works are widely known: the image of a majestic creator tracing the orb of the sun with a pair of compasses; the hypnotically powerful lyric “Tyger tyger burning bright”; the poem known as Jerusalem that was later set to music and became a popular hymn. But many years had to pass after Blake’s death before he had any reputation at all. His poems were virtually unknown in his lifetime, and even as a visual artist he was considered a minor figure, known mainly for engraving designs—usually by other artists—to illustrate books. These jobs dwindled as the years went by, and his contemporaries would have been incredulous if they could have known that one day he would be recognized as a major figure in not just one art but two, and that the greatest museums and libraries would treasure works that he sold for absurdly low prices when he could sell them at all. The disappointments of Blake’s worldly career illustrate Schopenhauer’s saying that talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see.1

  Blake was not only a superb painter and poet, one of the very few equally distinguished in both arts, but a profound thinker as well. Trenchantly critical of received values, he was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. As he developed his ideas, he evolved a complex personal mythology that incorporated elements of Christian belief and drew upon many other strands of symbolism as well. The resulting myth can seem daunting in its complexity, and Blake specialists, focusing on its more esoteric aspects, have naturally tended to talk mainly to one another. This book draws constantly on their insights but is intended for everyone who is attracted to Blake and would like to know more about his art and ideas. It is not just a book about Blake but a book with Blake, who urges us again and again to open our imaginations to “thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire.”2

  It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes overwhelming. During his life he was often accused of madness, but the artist Samuel Palmer, who knew him well, remembered him as “one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.” And a Baptist minister replied, when asked if he thought Blake was cracked, “Yes, but his is a crack that lets in the light.”3

  Throughout his life Blake was bitterly aware that he was an outsider, not just with respect to society as a whole, but even in his chosen profession of graphic art. It was from a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness that his great myth emerged, in response to what Algernon Charles Swinburne called “the incredible fever of spirit, under the sting and stress of which he thought and labored all his life through.”4 In some sense we are all outsiders, and his imaginative words and pictures speak to us with undiminished power.

  Although Blake is never pious or doctrinal, his thinking is religious in the sense that it addresses the fundamental dilemmas of human existence—our place in the universe, our dread of mortality, our yearning for some ultimate source of meaning. His goal, he said, was to “rouse the faculties to act,” and he hoped that we would use his images and symbols to provoke a spiritual breakthrough. “If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought; if he could enter into Noah’s rainbow or into his bosom, or could make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder which always entreats him to leave mortal things, as he must know; then would he arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy.”5 The aspiration is both ambitious and touching: to change our lives and to make us happy. But it is a poignant fact that Blake’s most powerful writing, as the years went by, was haunted by intractable barriers to happiness.

  A little poem that Blake never published, entitled Eternity, condenses an important part of his message into four eloquent lines:

  He who binds to himself a joy

  Does the wingèd life destroy,

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.6

  Blake believed that we live in the midst of Eternity right here and now and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it
would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. That would not be a mystical escape from reality—he was never a mystic in that sense—but a fuller and deeper engagement with reality. Yet he also knew how hard it is to relinquish the self-centered possessiveness that kills joy instead of kissing it, and much of his work focuses on that struggle.

  This book has a strongly biographical focus, but it is not a systematic biography. Two excellent ones already exist, by Peter Ackroyd and G. E. Bentley, each with its own strengths, and in any case Blake’s life was relatively uneventful.7 Nor is it a comprehensive guide to Blake’s work. Rather, it is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment. Its goal is to help nonspecialists appreciate Blake’s profoundly original vision and to open “the doors of perception” to the symbols in which he conveyed it. In the words of Plotinus, one of his favorite philosophers, “There are parts of what it most concerns you to know which I cannot describe to you; you must come with me and see for yourselves. The vision is for him who will see it.”8

  A Note on Images

  Throughout his life Blake made pictures and paintings that stand alone, with no text at all. Sometimes these illustrated other people’s work, though he tended to insinuate implications of his own, and sometimes they were original works that he hoped to sell. One commentator rightly says that all of his pictures are “riddled with ideas” and need to be “read” just as much as his texts do.9

  In addition to these stand-alone pictures, Blake created an extraordinary series of books in which images and texts are embedded in each other, etched on copper plates and hand-colored after printing. Following a hint of his own, these are known as the illuminated books, on the analogy of medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is certainly not wrong to read poems like The Tyger in conventionally printed form, but they will always be richer and more thought-provoking in the format Blake intended.

  The publisher of this book has permitted a generous representation of Blake’s visual art, but if it were not prohibitively expensive, every plate of his illuminated books would deserve to be seen as he intended, in graphic format and in color. Fortunately, admirable facsimiles are readily available. The William Blake Trust, in collaboration with Princeton University Press, has issued six splendid volumes that reproduce copies of all of the illuminated books, together with excellent commentaries. And multiple copies of most of the books may be seen online at the superb Blake Archive website, blakearchive.org. This resource is maintained to the highest scholarly standard and at the same time is accessible and welcoming to everyone who loves Blake.

  Thanks to this archive, we are able to do something that Blake himself never could. Unless he borrowed back copies of his works from friends and patrons with whom he remained in touch, there was no way he could ponder choices he had made long before: for example, looking at a 1789 printing of Songs of Innocence before coloring a new version in 1818. But with the archive, it is a simple matter to use a “compare” feature to see multiple versions of a given plate. As for the dates of the various copies, those have been convincingly established by one of the archive editors, Joseph Viscomi, in his indispensable Blake and the Idea of the Book.10

  No matter how scrupulously prepared, even the best reproductions cannot capture the full effect of the originals, with their nuances of coloring, thickness and texture of paper, and width of margins. In early copies of the illuminated books, Blake (sometimes assisted by his wife, Catherine) used pale watercolor washes. These have a delicate glow, and as the printmaker and scholar Michael Phillips observes, “A transparent pigment on white paper will assume its hue more from the color of the light transmitted through it, reflecting off the white paper and back to the eye, than from the light reflected off of it.”11

  Conversely, Blake’s later works were richly colored with dense, opaque paint, with a view to selling them as expensive art objects. These can sometimes appear garish in reproduction, while certain effects, such as the use of gold leaf highlights, don’t come through at all. The Blake Archive editors have given scrupulous attention to color correction, but in website reproduction there is another problem: backlit images on a computer monitor glow like stained glass windows. For all we know Blake might have loved that effect, but it is very different from the original. Tristanne Connolly compares looking at a reproduction to reading a translation—“like kissing through a handkerchief.”12

  A Note on Texts

  Blake’s spelling and punctuation were eccentric. For the purposes of this book, nothing is gained by preserving “recieve” and “opressors” and “rabbet” (for “rabbit”), though some spellings, such as “tyger,” have become too familiar to alter. Likewise, Blake’s extensive use of capital letters is generally not followed here, except in instances like “Man” and “Eternity” where the context seems to call for capitalization.

  Punctuation is also a problem. David Erdman, whose edition has been standard for many years and includes valuable commentary by Harold Bloom, sought to reproduce every idiosyncratic mark in the originals, although the result often gets in the way of understanding the meaning. Commentators used to make much of the supposed significance of periods where commas might be expected, but careful study of multiple copies shows that often the difference was nothing more than an accidental result of the printing process, in which a comma could easily lose its tail. Surely the editor is right who concludes that Blake “was relatively indifferent about punctuation.”13

  So I have not hesitated to alter punctuation in places where it clearly confuses the sense, often adding it in Blake’s headlong prose, and I have also eliminated his customary ampersands in place of “and.” It is possible that he preferred them simply to save space in a congested line, and they do create unnecessary oddity in such expressions as “every pot & vessel & garment & utensil.” Occasionally, in fact, he did write out “and.” Also, he seldom used quotation marks, and arguably he sometimes wanted different voices to merge into each other, but I have added them when it seems clear who is speaking. In this I generally follow G. E. Bentley’s choices in his edition of William Blake’s Writings.14

  References to the illuminated books are by plate and line number, followed by page numbers in the Erdman edition, identified by the letter “E.”15 Since Blake often reshuffled the sequence of plates from one copy of a work to the next, plate numbers will sometimes be different in an edition based on a different copy. And because the Erdman edition is uncompromisingly faithful to the original format, readers who want a more user-friendly text may prefer those of Alicia Ostriker and W. H. Stevenson, both of which have very helpful annotation.16 They do not, however, include Blake’s letters and other prose.

  1. THE WORKING ARTIST

  Youth

  WILLIAM BLAKE was born in London on November 28, 1757. His father, James, was a hosier or haberdasher, selling gloves and stockings, and the family lived above the shop at 28 Broad Street, just south of Oxford Street. Catherine, his mother, had previously been married to a haberdasher named Thomas Armitage, who died in 1751, leaving her a young widow of twenty-eight. The following year she married James Blake, a year younger than herself. As a haberdasher, he was well suited to merging his business with hers, and may indeed have been a friend of her late husband.

  The house, at the corner of Broad and Marshall Streets, was joined to its neighbors on the other two sides. Each of the four floors had three large windows (one window in each row on the Marshall Street side was bricked up to avoid an onerous window tax), and the shop occupied the ground floor. That building no longer exists, nor do most of William’s other residences over the years.1

  The Blakes’ first child was named James after his father, and in due course he would take over the shop. William was born four years later, and John two years after that. William could never stand John, whom he once referred to as “the evil one” and who seems to have died as a soldier abroad. The youngest brother was Robert, four and a half years younger than William, who became his closest friend but died of tuberc
ulosis at the age of nineteen. Last of all came Catherine, named for their mother. Little is known of William’s siblings, but apart from John he seems to have been on good terms with them throughout his life.2

  Alexander Gilchrist, who wrote an excellent biography thirty-six years after Blake’s death, heard from surviving friends that he hardly ever talked about his parents. In his poems, with the exception of Songs of Innocence, parents tend to be possessive or even harsh. Nevertheless, one friend recalled that he described his father as “lenient and affectionate, always more ready to encourage than to chide.” He also said that because he “despised restraints and rules,” his parents thought it best not to send him to school, where beatings were a regular practice. It is quite possible, though, that his siblings didn’t go to school either, since the children of tradesmen were often taught to read and write at home.3

  Blake never regretted his lack of formal education:

  Thank God I never was sent to school

  To be flogged into following the style of a fool.

  But he was always a voracious reader. A dozen or so of his books have survived, and their margins are crammed with annotations that show him pondering deeply and often arguing back. As has been well said, he was unschooled but not unlearned.4

  Some lines of verse in a letter written when Blake was forty-three suggest the wide range of his interests:

  Now my lot in the heavens is this: Milton loved me in childhood and showed me his face,

  Ezra came with Isaiah the Prophet, but Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand;

  Paracelsus and Behmen appeared to me . . . .5

  Blake may be speaking metaphorically when he says that these inspiring figures showed their faces and appeared to him, or he may be recalling actual visions of a kind to be described shortly. “Ezra” is the prophet Esdras, in the Apocrypha. Paracelsus was a Swiss alchemist and occultist, and Jacob Boehme a German mystic; their ideas interested Blake greatly. Self-taught and fiercely independent, he saw the culture of his day from an outsider’s perspective, far more so than the other poets we remember as Romantics, who were educated more conventionally. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron all went to Cambridge; Shelley was at Oxford until expelled for political radicalism; and Keats, though never at a university, went to an excellent school and then studied medicine.