BLAKE'S SYMBOLISM

British Museum

Illustrations to Night Thoughts by Edward Young

Pierre Berger wrote William Blake: Poet and Mystic while Professor of English Language and Literature in the Lycée and Lecturer in the University of Bordeaux. The book was published in 1915 in French. The English translation is by Daniel H Conner.   

Pierre Berger demonstrated that Blake pushed the use of symbols to the extreme. Because Blake identified so strongly with the spiritual world and with his identity as a spiritual being, all experience became for him symbolic of the unseen. 

William Blake: Poet and Mystic
Pierre Berger

Page 90-93

"I do not behold the outward creation: to me it is hindrance and not action.
It is as the dirt upon my feet - no part of me."

 

And we know that for him things which had no part in his spirit simply did not exist.

...

All animals and all plants are spirits similar to human spirits or actual men

"Each grain of Sand
Every Stone on the Land
Each rock and each hill
Each fountain and rill
Each herb and each tree
Mountain hill earth and sea
Cloud Meteor and Star
Are Men Seen Afar"

Such an interpretation is only natural to a man for whom nothing existed except the human spirit. Every other object that he saw also be a spirit like himself. Consequently all things are human. The visible world is but the outward sign of bodies hiding a soul. And even this last assertion could not satisfy Blake since to him body and soul were not distinct things. The body is a part of the soul made visible, the expression of the soul to our senses. There is no separation of one from the other. The parting of soul and body is not the putting off of an old garment which can be utterly destroyed, it is the soul's release from its visible part, or better still its ceasing to be visible. The body was not only a prison in which the soul was enclosed and from which it now escapes, it was rather a product of the soul as the cocoon is a product of the silkworm, an emanation from the soul created by and attached to the soul like a kind of vegetable growth in order to give it a material visibility, and also for other and profounder reasons which will explained later.

Thus all material objects are bodies created by the souls which they at once display and hide and in which they seem to be enclosed. This theory while resembling the metempsychosis of the ancients differs in some respects from it. For them body and soul had an independent existence, the soul passing into the bodies of plants and animals according to its tendencies in this life. But neither the animal nor the plant was an integral part of it. Blake like the ancient Indians held that the soul not merely decides what body it shall enter but actually creates a body for itself and perhaps passes in this way through a series of existences. He does not clearly say how this creation is worked, sometimes indeed he even adopts the common expression and speaks of a soul imprisoned in its body of clay and actually represents in pictures the separation and reunion of the soul and the body. But he never loses sight of his essential idea of the body as a part of the spirit made visible.

Consequently we are everywhere surrounded by spirits. We see only the visible part of them and are satisfied with that because we are men of simple vision living in the world of matter which is illusion. The great poets alone can see the invisible. And for this reason they have recourse to metaphors, giving a soul to material things and making them think and feel like men. An effect of their imagination! we say. Blake would reply: No but the expression and actual perception of reality. The poets themselves however do not deny the independent existence of material things. Blake does deny it. To him a metaphor is no mere poetic fiction, it is the truth. If he had lived in ancient times he would have believed literally in the horses of Phoebus and the rosy fingers of Aurora. He would have formed his creed out of all the allegories of the poets. It is true that he attempts to distinguish between allegory and his own visions. Fable or allegory he says is a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration. The Greeks represent Chronos or Time as a very aged man. This is fable but the real vision of Time is an Eternal youth. He does however allow some power of vision to the poets who preceded him. Fable or allegory is seldom without some vision. Pilgrim's Progress is full of it. The Greek poets the same. But allegory and vision ought to be known as two things and so called.

Freed from unessential details the distinction does not seem a really important one. It depends upon the degree of its creator's genius and above all on his originality. If the metaphor is evolved slowly and as the result of thought, labour, and comparison then it is Allegory. When it presents itself to the mind in a flash then it is Vision and partakes itself of the nature of revelation. And all great poets have believed in revelation. The ancients did not mean to impose when they affirmed their belief in Vision and Revelation. Plato was in earnest, Milton was in earnest. They believed that God did visit man really and truly. Blake's visions or revelations seem then to be only a sort of generalization and concretion of symbols. He turns every visible thing into a metaphor using the tiger's eyes for anger, a pebble for hardheartedness, the myrtle for conjugal love, the sunflower for desire of the infinite, and so making each of these objects a symbol of something invisible. Most makers of symbols stop at this point to avoid becoming absurd. But Blake fearlessly goes on to deny the existence of the symbol and affirms instead that of the abstract thing symbolized. For him the sunflower, the myrtle, the pebble, the tiger's eyes have all vanished leaving only angry or selfish men bound by marriage vows, or burning with never satisfied desires. His authority for such assertions is simply his own vision In the same way the priest in the mass of Bolsenna saw the blood of Christ on the consecrated elements, in the same way many saints have beheld Christ himself upon the altar. Blake's assertions are as daring as the doctrine of transubstantiation itself.  

...

These familiar symbols will help us to understand Blake's conception of the visible world. We have only to apply the same procedure to every other case. The world of matter has no existence of its own it is only a symbol of the invisible universe, something shown to us in order that through it we may gain knowledge of what we cannot see. The earth, the sky, the sun are all symbols each at once a portion and a visible representation as delusive as a mirage of some eternal spirit. Trees animals, nay more even men are only symbols. History is a symbol, revolutions are symbols of some great change actually taking place in the invisible world. The American Revolution for instance merely symbolized the revolt of the angels of liberty against the powers of tyranny in the eternal universe.

America itself is only a symbol standing for that part of the spirit not yet subjugated and bound down by tyrannical laws. Blake is a symbol a mere transitory form of the prophetic spirit, his wife is a symbol of the internal joy felt by that spirit and of its softer emotions. And so we pass through this little life of ours unknowing unsuspecting that we are but reflections, metaphors in action, symbols and representations of eternal beings who dwell outside of time and space and whose life is the only real existence."