BIOGRAPHY 2

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Illustrations to Blair's The Grave

Object 19

From Chapter 1 of Larry's book Ram Horn'd With Gold.   

For the next five years Blake spent his days in this and other religious monuments communing with the images of legend and history. His imagination was nurtured and strengthened by the spiritual treasures of his country. One day he saw Jesus walking with the Twelve--and painted them. On another occasion he was present, the sole artist as it happened, when the embalmed body of a King Edward of the 15th Century was exhumed for inspection by the Antiquary Society.

       Some of Blake's formative experiences he shared with his contemporaries but not with us. For example 18th Century measures against crime were rather repressive by modern standards; petty crimes such as picking pockets were punished by hanging. A few blocks from Blake's home was Tyburn, the public gallows. In all likelihood on at least one occasion the impressionable lad witnessed a ten year old child being hung for his crimes. Tyburn became one of the mature poet's continually recurring symbols; he often equated it with Calvary, and he conceived of Satan as Accuser and Avenger.

       When Blake was nineteen, the American colonies declared their independence. His feelings, like those of many other Londoners, resembled the feelings of American liberals 190 years later about another war. At 23 he was swept along with a crowd that stormed Newgate Prison and set the prisoners free, eleven years before Bastille Day. Many in London devoutly hoped that the American revolution might spread to England. Blake saw this in his mind's eye because thirteen years later in his poem, America, he imaginatively described it.

       Blake's religious world was dominated by the State Church. Bishops were civil servants, appointed by the Crown; the religious establishment existed to all intents and purposes as part of the oppressive bureaucracy. This yoke had been thrown off briefly in the Puritan Revolution of the 17th Century, but the Restoration once again fastened it upon the people. Many of the established religious leaders of the age were corrupt and venal. Blake knew this from childhood and set his pen and artist's vision against religious hypocrisy.

       In Blake's day a strong sense of religious expectancy filled the air, especially within the dissenting community to which he belonged. He and many of his contemporaries hoped that an oppressive tyranny would shortly be replaced by the New Age of freedom and creativity. Today that hope has dimmed, but perhaps even in this dark age a few might get from Blake's poetry a glimpse of radiant possibilities.

       In 1782 the twenty-five year old poet married Catherine Boucher, the illiterate but beautiful daughter of a gardener. Blake taught her to read, draw, and assist him in many of his artistic endeavours, and she provided a full measure of faithful emotional support to him over a long and often trying creative career.

      In his younger days Blake often voiced the prevailing counter culture opinions about what was called free love. However all the evidence suggests that he was a devoted and faithful husband throughout the forty five years of their life together. Her only complaint was that he spent so much time in heaven. She made every effort to accompany him on those journeys. She frequently sat patiently with him through the long hours of the night while he pursued his rapturous visions. In a notebook poem, which he wrote after twenty five years of marriage he said, "I've a Wife I love and that loves me;/I've all but Riches Bodily." (Erdman, 481)

       Fortunate in parents, employer and wife Blake embarked in his twenties upon perilous paths and times. He suffered a fate common to many artists: economic necessities loomed as a dark shadow over the creative impulse. Like most young idealists he still had hopes of making his way in the world, and he began to confront the painful tension between creative work as an artist and a comfortable income.

       Some of Blake's students believe that a grim, traumatic event of some sort led to his disillusionment. If there was any one thing, we have lost sight of it. We do know that by 1784 his mind and thought had broadened beyond the pellucid innocence of his Poetical Sketches  to include the satirical stories of 'An Island in the Moon'. In these he lampooned the polite society in which he moved. The work probably served a healthy outlet for the frustration of conventional conformities.

       Interpreters most often use the 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience' to demonstrate the contrast between Blake's poetry before and after disillusionment. But the poem called 'Thel', written in 1789, illustrates that contrast in itself with startling abruptness. The first five plates of 'Thel' express the transparent radiance of child like faith as vividly as has been done in English. In 'Thel' the Lilly, the Cloud and finally the Clod of Clay all witness with ethereal beauty and clarity the reality of a warm and loving universe and their transparent destiny to move into yet greater glory. Hear the Clod of Clay as she speaks to the maiden, Thel:

'O beauty of the vales of Har, we live not for ourselves.
Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed:
My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,
But he that loves the lowly pours his oil upon my head,
And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,
And says: "Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee,
And I have given thee a crown that none can take away."
But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;
I ponder, and I cannot ponder, yet I live and love.'

       But Plate Six is a shrieking, although its symbolism is too complex to deal with here. It does appear that Blake wants us in 'Thel' to experience the full shock of the contrast between the Garden and the Fall. And we must conclude that he himself experienced it in personal trauma, although we can't pinpoint it. Henceforth for the next twenty years fallenness was to be his major theme.       

A good case can be made for the idea that Blake's personal fall came after a conscious decision for the world; it led to two decades of trouble-economic and spiritual. Luckily for us it was the one decision he couldn't make stick. With his very best efforts he could never quite become a worldling; there were too many angels knocking on his door. But for twenty years he proceeded to "kick against the pricks" (Acts 9.5).

       As a responsible husband Blake made a valiant effort to conform to the social exigencies and to make his way in the world. He won some success as an artist and was even ashamed of his versifying because he knew that it was against what he called the "main chance" . He tried to be worldly and sophisticated, but he was always coming up against compromises which he simply couldn't make.

       For a while he and Catherine frequented the salon of a Rev. Mathews, an intellectual and artistic dilettante. This good man even brought out Blake's 'Poetical Sketches' in a small private printing. But Blake's ideas about organized religion were much too inflammatory to afford him the freedom of any parsonage for long. Soon he and Catherine drifted away.

       Blake found a more congenial group gathering for weekly dinners with the publisher, Joseph Johnson, his employer. Here Blake met some of the most prominent radicals of the day, among them Tom Paine. Blake deeply admired the republican activism of Paine, and he liked Paine's general iconoclasm, although he and Paine disagreed about spirit and matter. In this piquant relationship Blake might have learned how to open infinity to the deist mind. Unfortunately before it could develop, Paine was hounded out of the country.

       Blake enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art during the hegemony of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He even had several exhibits there, but he couldn't quite conform his aesthetic values to the prevailing taste as represented by Sir Joshua. As a consequence he found himself shut out of the lucrative popular market. In simplest terms the popular market was fallen, then as now; Blake refused to stoop to it, and he paid the price of poverty.

       Blake's gifts were well recognized, and he developed quite a reputation as a teacher of drawing. One day an invitation came to teach the children of the royal family. That assignment would have established him in the world of fashion. But at that awesome crossroad he chose the lower path; he declined. He knew too well how he felt about royalty, and he also knew that he could never enjoy the royal bounty. At that critical point he was true to himself, and he definitively unmade the decision which had begun his troubles; he chose spiritual values and rejected the world. Afterward things got better spiritually, although for the moment they worsened financially.