3) WILLIAM BLAKE ( 1757-1827)

„the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being”

 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Proverbs of Hell

 Songs of Innocence and of Experience
 The Everlasting Gospel
 Jerusalem (Book I)
REQUEST
 The significance of strongly sensory images in Blake’s poems and their relation to the
question of revolution
 Blake’s symbolism in his poetry / paintings; address the question of the power of myth
 Blake and the cult of megaliths
 The vocabulary used by Blake in Songs of Innocence compared with that in Songs of
Experience

A little about Blakey (long version- Harold Bloom William Blake, Bloom’s major poets)
Poet, artist, and engraver William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757,
the second or third child born to James Blake, a hosiery merchant, and Catherine Hermitage.
Blake was raised in his parents’ home, above their business at Broad and Marshall Streets. It
was an area where many merchants and tradesmen did business. The faith of his parents is
uncertain; they were Christian—they were married in one Anglican church and baptized most
or all of their children in another—but they did not always quite follow the Anglican or the
Catholic Church.
Politically, Catherine and John Blake held radical views, and the influence of this early
radicalism would manifest itself throughout Blake’s work. Blake’s personal relationships with
his family are obscure. He seems to have felt great affection for his youngest brother, Robert,
and he referred to another brother, John, as “the evil one”; apparently, Blake believed his
parents favored John. Still, it seems his parents did encourage the young artist: His mother
hung Blake’s drawings and verses in her chambers, and his father bought engravings and
plaster casts for Blake to study. In any case, Blake would later discount his parents’influence
on his life or work. Blake learned the basics of reading and writing in school. When he was
ten, his parents sent him to study drawing with Henry Pars of the Strand—whose
establishment was one of London’s best art schools. In the next five years, he gained a
background in art history and many skills. On his own he was a great reader, reading
avidly the Bible, Greek classics, and the works of Milton and Shakespeare. He was
writing as early as 1767 or 1768, when he began what would become his Poetical Sketches.
Blake’s schooling in art finally became too costly for his parents to support, and in 1771 he
was apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whose assignments to
sketch Westminster Abbey may mark the first stirrings of Blake’s later Gothic tendencies.
When he finished his apprenticeship after years, he did not join the Stationers’Guild, which
was the usual path to professional engraving; instead, he applied to the Royal Academy of
Arts, into which he was accepted, in 1779, as an engraver. He studied and exhibited his
engravings and watercolors there for several somewhat spotty years, despite an intense dislike
of the Academy’s head; One year after starting his studies, he completed his first project as a
professional engraver and began to earn a living in the trade, working for Joseph Johnson, a
purveyor of subversive literature. In 1782, at the age of 25, he married Catherine Boucher,
the daughter of a vegetable farmer. Blake taught her to read and write, and she would later
assist him in his work; it is to her, too, that criticism owes the salvation of Blake’s original
manuscripts, for the poet felt that once his work had been published there was no need to keep
its raw materials. Their marriage would last some 45 years but produce no children. In this
period, Blake began to associate with a circle of London intellectuals that included Mary
Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, sculptor and draftsman John Flaxman, William Godwin,
Rev. Anthony S. and Harriet Mathew (through Flaxman), and painters Thomas
Stothard and Henri Fuseli. Mathew and his wife in particular became Blake’s artistic allies;
he was the center of attention at entertainments in their home, and it was Harriet Mathew and
Flaxman who funded the publication of 50 copies of Blake’s first book of poetry. Throughout
this period, he continued to create and to exhibit artwork on both religious and secular
themes; in 1784, he wrote An Island in the Moon, satirizing his progressive friends of the
Joseph Johnson circle. Also in 1784, with friend and fellow apprentice James Parker, Blake
opened his own print shop; this would eventually enable him to publish his own poetry. He
developed his technique of “illuminated printing”: he engraved words and artwork on copper
plates and, having made the ink himself, printed his work onto paper.
.Blake supported himself and his wife through engraving by his own process and through
providing engraved illustrations on commission; the latter projects resulted in connections
between Blake and many radical thinkers of the 18th century.
Beginning in 1789, Blake experienced a period of great literary activity, producing Songs
of Innocence (1789), The Book of Thel (1789), Tiriel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (early 1790s), and Songs of Experience (1794). It was in the same year, 1789, that the
French Revolution began; that uprising and the American Revolution of a decade before
influenced Blake’s work and thought extensively.
Throughout Blake’s work and literary life are allusions to spiritual concerns; indeed these,
combined with the sensibilities of a political radical, inform much of his work. “I write when
commanded by the spirits,” he once said to a friend, “and the moment I have written I see the
words fly about the room in all directions.” Visions had been part of Blake’s lonely childhood
as early as his fifth year. The Blake parents did not support the visions; Catherine Blake beat
young William once for describing what he saw, and on at least one other occasion his father
threatened the same. Still, Blake’s clairvoyance extended into his adulthood: he claimed to
have seen the spirit of his brother Robert, with whom he had always had a close relationship,
leap from Robert’s body at the moment of death. Indeed, it was Robert’s spirit, Blake said,
that had described to him the process of illuminated printing.
In any case, it was shortly after this experience that Blake discovered the writings of
Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem, preaching a gentle,
mystical interpretation of Christianity, had a major influence on Blake’s life and work, though
because Blake seems to have both exalted and satirized Swedenborg’s work the nature of this
influence is unclear. By even the late 1780s, Blake was producing work with religious
themes: “There Is No Natural Religion” (1788), for example, and “All Religions Are One”
(1788). By 1796, he had strayed far enough from orthodoxy to create the etching “Lucifer and
the Pope in Hell.”
By the end of the 18th century, Blake was producing works of Biblical theme, especially
images with overtones of mysticism and divine mystery, almost exclusively. Blake’s works of
lesser distinction of the mid- to late 1790s include some biographically noteworthy political
material suited to the internationally turbulent times: America: A Prophecy (1793) and
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The Song of Los (1795) and The Four Zoas (1795,
originally entitled Vala).
Between 1800 and 1803, Blake and Catherine lived in the seaside town of Felpham in
Sussex, southern England, under the patronage of William Hayley, for whom Blake would
work on a number of paintings and engravings; and it was then that Blake’s political views
had a direct effect on his freedom. While living there, he violently expelled an inebriated
soldier, one John Scofield or Scolfield, from his garden and spoke some ill-advised
words concerning the King and England’s state of military preparedness. He soon was
charged with sedition, and he was tried in 1803.
It was around the time of his acquittal in 1804 that he began one of his best-known and most
important works, the two-volume poem Milton, both inspired by and based largely on
Milton’s Paradise Lost; Milton was composed and etched through 1805 and the following
three years. In 1809, Blake held an exhibition of his paintings at a brother’s house, hoping the
event would publicize his work. It was not very well attended, and it may mark the beginning
of the end of his creative period. The years following the exhibition were marked by failed
enterprises and commercial errors and a few more works. His most significant literary
achievements of this period are The Everlasting Gospel (ca. 1818); Jerusalem (1820), his
longest “prophetic” book; and one of his best-known works of art, a 21-plate series
illustrating the Book of Job that had been commissioned in the early 1820s by artist and
patron John Linnell and was published in 1826. Blake also illustrated Dante’s Divine
Comedy in his later years; his last illustrated book, The Ghost of Abel, was written in 1821
The artistic wasteland that followed the disappointing exhibition of 1809–1810 was mitigated
to some extent by Blake’s development of a new following: a group of young artists,
including Samuel Palmer, who called themselves “The Ancients” and revered Blake and his
work. The support of this group encouraged Blake’s production of some imaginative work of
the variety that he had wanted to produce all his life. Still, Blake died in his usual poverty,
relatively unknown, on August 12, 1827, having continued his work in coloring and
engraving until the time of his death. He was 69 years old. It would be nearly forty years
before a biography would turn public attention back to Blake and a century before Blake
would be appreciated and admired as an artist and poet. Now, he is considered the first, and
among the greatest, of the English Romantics.

Summaries
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (for exam, the tyger and the lamb)
. Songs of Innocence, 1789, the Author & Printer W. Blake contains thirty-one plates.
Twenty-two copies of this separate issue are known. The complete work of fifty-four plates
was published in 1794 with the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two
Contrary States of the Human Soul. Twenty-eight copies are known, plus sixteen issued
posthumously. “Innocence” was the technical word for the state of the unfallen man;
“Experience” was used by Blake to indicate man’s state after the Fall. The idea of a single
work of two contrasting parts was doubtless suggested by Milton’s L’Allegro and Il
Penseroso, which together form a single cyclical work: where either ends, the other begins.
But where Milton contrasted gaiety and thoughtfulness, Blake contrasted ecstasy and despair;
and he anticipated not repetition but progress to a third state.
Blake’s obvious parallels are limited to comparatively few of the poems: the two “Chimney
Sweepers,” the two “Nurse’s Songs,” the two “Holy Thursdays”; there are also contrasting
titles: “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow,” “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image.” Some
parallel titles are not real contrasts, but different subjects: thus “The Little Girl Lost” deals
with the death of a child, while “A Little Girl Lost” describes her first love affair; and “The
Little Boy Lost” describes the child’s agony at being misled, while the second poem with a
similar title tells of his martyrdom for having his own ideas.
Other poems are contrasted only by subject. Thus “The Lamb” (God’s love) is to be paired
with “The Tyger” (God’s wrath); “The Blossom” with “The Sick Rose”; and probably “The
Ecchoing Green” with “The Garden of Love,” and “The Shepherd” with “London.” Beyond
this, the reader may make his own conjectures, because Blake was not mechanically
systematic.
The first poem in the book, the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence, indicates the two
Contrary States when the piper plays his tune twice: the first time, the child laughs, and the
second time, he weeps. But at the third performance (this time with words) the child weeps
with joy—the third stage where the contraries are synthesized. The last poem of the book, “To
Tirzah” (added about 1795), is a fitting conclusion, as it expresses the third stage—revolution.
The lad becomes himself by rejecting the maternal authority, using Jesus’ own words to
Mary: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John ii:4). But the sense conjectures, because
Blake was not mechanically systematic.
The first poem in the book, the “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence, indicates the two
Contrary States when the piper plays his tune twice: the first time, the child laughs, and the
second time, he weeps. But at the third performance (this time with words) the child weeps
with joy—the third stage where the contraries are synthesized. The last poem of the book, “To
Tirzah” (added about 1795), is a fitting conclusion, as it expresses the third stage—revolution.
The lad becomes himself by rejecting the maternal authority, using Jesus’ own words to
Mary: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John ii:4).

The Prophetic Books

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (for exam, his dialectic of contraries)

The MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL has nothing but the title on the title page—no
author, no place, no date. The place was Lambeth, whither Blake had moved in 1791. This
book is Blake’s Principia, in which he announced a new concept of the universe, thus quietly
equating himself with Ptolemy and Copernicus (cf. J 83:40). Mind, not matter, is the basic
substance. This universe is psychological; it is the universe in which we really live. It is
egocentric, and differs with each individual, yet is essentially the same. In analyzing this
universe of man’s mind, which contains heaven and hell and nature, Blake anticipated the
theories of Freud, for Blake’s “Energy” is the libido, the Id, and his “Reason” is the censor,
the Superego. As these contraries are essential to each other in the psychic structure, Blake
reduced “Good” and “Evil” to mere technical terms, denoting arbitrary and artificial qualities
devoid of any real moral significance. Heaven and its angels, the “Good,” are simply the
unthinking orthodox. But Hell and its devils, the “Evil,” required revaluation. The forces of
the Id are the fountain of life; its “devils” are the original thinkers, essentially revolutionists,
who are always disturbing to orthodoxy.

This universe is a unity. All those things long since separated by Reason—God and man, man
and nature, body and soul, good and evil, all religious differences—are accounted for and
reconciled. The contraries are essential to each other; they work together; and Blake’s
universe is therefore dynamic. The terminal “Song of Liberty” describes the ensuing
revolution, but without naming the characters involved. “The Eternal Female” (Enitharmon)
groans in childbirth. Her son is “the new born terror” (Orc), who stands before “the starry
king” (Urizen). Urizen hurls Orc into the western sea, then himself falls in ruins on Urthona’s
dens (the subconscious). Like the fallen Satan, Urizen rouses himself to reorganize his forces:
“leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands” (the
Decalogue). But Orc appears as the dawn in the east, and “stamps the stony law to dust,”
crying “Empire is no more! and now the Lion [protector of the flock] & Wolf [predator of the
flock] shall cease. . . . For every thing that lives is Holy.”

The Everlasting Gospel (a long poem)

Everlasting Gospel” signified to Blake the essential ethics of man, which always existed but
was first formulated by Jesus. Its basis is the Forgiveness of Sins; its opposite is the
conventional system of moral virtues, which are based on the Punishment of Sins.
The body of the poem is devoted to proving that Jesus was not “meek and mild” but rather a
heroic rebel against established religion. It is an extension of the theory found in the last
“Memorable Fancy” of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Jesus in one way or another
broke all of the Ten Commandments. “Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from
rules”; he did not honor his parents; he declared that humility, even to God, was wrong; and in
saving the adulterous woman from execution he exalted unchastity. (Damon Foster)
Jerusalem

- The Strong Man represents the human sublime [Urthona].

- The Beautiful Man represents the human pathetic [Luvah], which was in the wars of Eden
divided into male [Luvah] and female [Vala].
- The Ugly Man represents the human reason [Urizen].
- They were originally one man [Albion], who was fourfold; he was self-divided and his
real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son
of God [Los]. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The
Artist has written it under inspiration, and will, if God please, publish it; it is voluminous
and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of Adam”

The dream-plot of Jerusalem is so complex, so interrupted by laments, colloquies, repetitions,

and seemingly unrelated episodes, that the basic structure was not discovered until Dr. Karl
Kiralis analyzed it in a brilliant study:

The tale proceeds not by action but by the sequence of ideas. Chapter 1 describes the Fall of
Man into “the Sleep of Ulro”; the remaining three chapters describe his “passage through
Eternal Death! and . . . the awaking to Eternal Life” .These three are addressed respectively to
the Jews, the Deists, and the Christians; they analyze man’s progress through Experience until
he reaches the Truth. They correspond to Blake’s threefold division into “the Three
Regions immense of Childhood, Manhood, & Old Age [maturity]”.

- The Jewish religion is that of Moral Law and the Angry God; it pertains to the childhood
of the human race and of the individual as well.
- The Deist religion, that of young manhood, retains the Moral Law, but substitutes Nature
for God.
- The Christian religion, that of maturity, is particularly plagued by the errors of sex—the
false ideal of chastity, which produces the spiritual dominion of woman. Eventually all
these errors are worked out, and the final truth is obtained in the recovery to man of his
perfect balance of faculties and the fullness of power, and in his eternal union with God.

“Jerusalem” is both the first and the last word of the poem, indicating that Blake was
concerned, first and last, with Liberty. It is the ideal for the individual and also for society, for
on Liberty is based the Brotherhood of Man, without which Man cannot exist. It is “the
Divine Appearance”; it is the true religion without it, “Man Is Not”.

Chapter I opens as Albion rejects Jesus, in jealousy hiding Jerusalem, his Emanation, who
should be the Bride of the Lamb. Albion exteriorizes his affections, which manifest as his
Sons, raging against Jerusalem. Albion flees inward, where he encounters Jerusalem and Vala
(nature); once they were friends, but now they become opposed. In revulsion, Albion casts
Moral Law (Vala’s veil) into the Atlantic, “to catch the Souls of the Dead” but even at the
moment when he believes he is dying, and utters his last words, he beholds the Slain Lamb.

Meanwhile Los, ever the champion of Man, is affected. He divides into Spectre and
Emanation. He forces the threatening Spectre to help him in his work; his first creation is Erin
(the purity and holiness of the body); he also creates Golgonooza (the City of Art) and assigns
the British counties to the Sons of Israel. His separated Emanation in the meantime has
become a Globe of Blood (Pity, which divides the soul). At the end of the chapter, the
Daughters of Beulah, protesting against Vengeance (punishment of sin), beg the Lamb to
create States, and thus deliver Individuals evermore. These States are the path of Experience,
detailed in the following chapters.

Chapter II is the triumph of Moral Law. Albion, discovering himself in a world of sin,
proclaims himself “the punisher & judge”.The Spectre appears immediately, preaching
materialism, and Vala (nature) asserts her superiority. Los, who is now able to intervene,
deplores this creation of the Female Will, and in vain tries to force the unstable Reuben (the
ordinary man) to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, but Reuben cannot settle there.
When the falling Albion flees to the threshold of Eternal Death, Los expostulates with him,
and in despair calls upon the Cathedral Cities (religion) to save him, but they cannot do so
against his will. Meanwhile Los’s Spectre and Emanation report to the Saviour about the false
god risen from Albion’s wearied intellect.

Albion’s Sons issue from his bosom and bear him to a Druid temple. War breaks out Albion
then utters again his last words, “Hope is banish’d from me” but the Saviour reposes him on
the Rock of Ages where he builds for him a protecting tabernacle (the inspired books of the
Bible). After Erin laments over Man and his fallen universe, the Daughters of Beulah reply by
imploring the Lamb of God to take away “the remembrance of Sin,” which is the sense of
guilt.
Chapter III is the triumph of Reason, against a confused background of war. The Spectre
(reason) proclaims himself God; reacting against him the Eternals elect the seven Eyes of
God. The plowing of the Nations begins; when Albion himself falls into the furrow and is
plowed under, his Spectre then drives the plow. Los labors to create “a World of Generation
from the World of Death” Urizen directs the building which becomes his temple. Jerusalem
(liberty) is degraded and enslaved. Luvah (France) is conquered and crucified). The children
of Albion now rage at will. Gwendolen dances naked to the timbrel of war, leading her sisters
in inciting the warriors. The females unite into Vala, who proclaims her contempt for the
males, “Woman-born and Woman-nourish’d & Woman-educated & Woman-scorn’d”. She
becomes one with the plowing Spectre as the Hermaphrodite. The Sons rejoice about the
victim in Salisbury, where they build Stonehenge. The Daughters unite in Rahab and Tirzah;
the Sons become united as Hand. Finally Rahab and her cycle of Twenty-seven Heavens and
their Churches are revealed.

Chapter IV contains the triumph of the Female Will, the climaxing of all errors, the self-
sacrifice of Albion, and the final reunion of all things.

The great error of official Christianity was its exaltation of “chastity,” which gave dominance
to the Female. Consequently, this problem occupies much of this chapter in the tale of the
conspiracy of Gwendolen and Cambel to dominate the male. The Daughters of Albion
develop Gwendolen’s falsehood into the “allegory” of marriage, which spreads over Erin
(88:31); in marriage Reuben finally finds his abiding place.

Meanwhile Enitharmon, who had become a Globe of Blood much earlier, separates
completely from Los and develops a will of her own. They wander from Enion ;his love
becomes desire; Enitharmon repels him and proclaims, “This is Woman’s World” and the
Spectre, who has caused their “divisions & shrinkings,” declares that “The Man who respects
Woman shall be despised by Woman”.

1. The significance of strongly sensory images in Blake’s poems and their relation to
the question of revolution

A) Introduction
Blake has been called Britain’s greatest revolutionary artist. He is also
routinelydescribedasavisionaryormystic,amanmoreconcernedwithspiritual than political
matters. Many critics subscribe to the intermediate position that Blake’s early enthusiasm
for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative
power of the imagination. (The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, Edited by
Morris Eaves
A new generation of readers began to find him a poet for all mankind. They found
underneath his rather alarming manner there was a sane and keenly critical mind at work
on the most important problems of his age, and that there were in the main problems that
concern us today. They found a profound but in the end quite intelligible symbolism,
burning indignation and a complete imaginatice grasp of the world in which he lived
such as no poet of his time could approach.
 Blake regarded the rapid development of industrial capitalism in England. A machine does
not in itself grow more evil by growing more complex, but the producer can still own a
simple, uncostly machine. He cannot own a complex, expensive one. And Blake saw the
growth of capitalism turning the whole man into a divided man, a hand. This theme of the
division of man and his struggle to reintegrate himself, lies at the heart of all his
symbolism.
In the so called Prophetic Books, as we shall see, symbolism piled upon symbol, mythical
figures contend, unite and divide till the mind refuses to follow their mutation, but at their
wildest these Books keep a foot upon the earth whose realities Blake knew only too well.
The industrial revolution was one of these realities: a second was the French Revolution
( he was 30). The Revolution clearly enchained power in him, and under its influence
most of his greatest work was produced, not only the Songs of Experience. ( The marriage
of Heaven and Hell)
Under the stimulus of war, capitalism was developing at unprecedented pace. Opression
was changing its face and Blake was one of the first to recognise a new enemy. Behind the
familiar king and the priest he saw the newer power of money.
It is the sense of these new development which makes Blake’s later poetry unique. In one
sense the imagery grows mistier and more involved, in another it grows smokier and more
evil, reflecting the hideous growth of industrialism. (A.L.MORTON)

B) Example- The Tyger Songs of Experience

The strongly sensory images explained

 This is a creative work, centered on creation: the very origin of this fearsome jungle cat.
Blake captures the wildness of the beast—its burning eyes, its strength—with his words..
In the first stanza, we meet “The Tyger.” The luminous creature roams the forest at night.
The writer is struck by the beauty, strength, and balance of the beast and questions
what inspiration is behind its creation. Some scholars believe the tiger is Blake’s
version of the angel Lucifer. Like Lucifer, the tiger works alone and inspires thoughts of
death; it also is strong and beautiful, as the Bible portrays the fallen angel.
 The second stanza continues the powerful imagery, comparing the fire in the tiger’s eyes
and the fire used to create it, suggesting that the tiger is a reflection of the fires of Hell.
Also given is the image of wings: a reinforcement of the connection between the tiger and
angels—or possibly an image inspired by Greek mythology, particularly the myths of
Prometheus and of Icarus.
 Next, Blake poses more questions to the creator of the tiger, first pondering the two tiers
of strength needed to mastermind the mighty animal: The architect who created the animal
had to be physically strong to create its powerful heart and emotionally strong to stand up
to the cat’s intimidating form and nature.
 Then Blake mulls over the tiger’s first fearful footsteps. Images follow that remind the
reader of a blacksmith’s shop. The verse turns to talk of the hammer, chain, and anvil used
to forge the tiger and indicates the force needed to put the animal together. The raw power
 of the tiger appears to be too much for the heavens to take. Blake describes the denial of
dominance over the animal. The stars give up rather than fight for mastery of the tiger.
When the stars threw down their spears And water’d heaven with their tears.
 The writer then wonders if the Divine Being responsible for the tiger was pleased with the
creation. He asks outright if the same being produced “The Tyger and The Lamb.” This
sets in contrast the gentle lamb with the wild-eyed “Tyger.” To close out the poem, the
first stanza is repeated.
 Blake’s images, at first sensuous, are to continued inspection symbolic. Things which
burn, even tigers perhaps, are either purifying something or being purified. In the dark of
night, in a forest, a tiger’s eyes would seem to burn. The tiger’s striped body suggests this
same conflagration. In any case, Blake is trying to establish a kind of brilliance about his
image.
 Many of his writings reflect the major changes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
For example, the revolutions: Industrial, American, and French. These changes in the
economy, society, and politics changed the way people lived. Blake’s tiger is strong,
intimidating—a solitary, peripheral creature, independent of its shifting surroundings.

The relation to the question of revolution (Stewart Crehan on “the tyger” as a sign of
revolutionary times, harold bloom’s book)

 The Tyger is a response to the terrible, new-born beauty of violent revolution. The poet
now confronts his own antinomian energies as an external creation, whose ‘fearful
symmetry’ obeys no known laws, and yet has a manifest, organised (and ferocious)
presence. Whether as subjective potentiality or as political upheaval, the Tyger cannot be
ignored
 Blake conveys violent, revolutionary energy by his use of a resonating poetic symbol (the
wild beast in the forest) and the invention of a persona, whose thirteen unanswered
questions, bound by the six hammered stanzas, give the poem its peculiarly compressed
verbal power.
 In an important essay, Martin K. Nurmi argued that Blake’s The Tyger was a direct
response to events in France, and that the ‘cruel excesses’ of the August Rising and the
September Massacres of 1792 provoked an initially horrified reaction (hence the ‘horrid
ribs’ and ‘sanguine woe’ in the first draft), but that this was modified when the National
Convention was formed (21 September) and the French Republic was announced (22
September).
 It can be argued, in fact, that Blake was not only consciously transforming a traditional
symbolism, but that he was criticising, through the speaker of The Tyger, a prevailing
conservative ideology that viewed revolution merely as a horrifying, dehumanising
process.

OR (because we always need options)

London- The Songs of Experience
 It is impossible to study William Blake’s “London” without an understanding of the time
in which it was written; in Blake’s opinion, the Industrial Revolution had changed the city
for worse. The manufacturing work being done in factories created filth and pollution.
London was dirty. Thick, black smoke from factories left behind a nasty residue where it
landed. The river Thames was polluted with the byproducts of industry. The new type of
work changed the city socially, economically, and topographically. Although the new
industrial economy created many jobs, the wages of these jobs were low. Long hours of
hard labor did not guarantee a living wage. The poor worked themselves to death in
unsafe, unsanitary, and unhealthful conditions. The suffering in the streets of the city
affected Blake profoundly. While he could not change society, he could observe, and
express his opinion of the changes in his art.
 The speaker starts by searching the streets of London for inspiration, planning to describe
what he sees there. What he finds is troubling: “weakness” and “woe” in the face of every
person he meets. It’s a weary life for people in Blake’s London. In the second verse, we
find more despair; it becomes a common thread in the fabric of London life. Every man,
every woman, and every child can expect life and the law to produce the same misery.
The challenges of life in London weigh heavy on the minds of citizens. Blake believes
Londoners are shackled to an unpleasant life and that the worst of it is that the Londoners’
imprisonment is of their own conception. How can one break free when thought has
created the prison? Where can a Londoner find relief? Is there any peace for weary
workers or comfort for a wounded spirit? Not in these four verses. The third verse vividly
shows us what Blake means. It provides an extremely grim picture of life in London, a
worst-case scenario. Chimney sweeps faced some of the worst working conditions of the
day. They worked outdoors at great heights, affected by the elements, the ubiquitous smog
of London, and their own fear. The work was exhausting. They inhaled the layers of soot
and ash that they cleaned from the chimneys, and what they didn’t inhale ended up on
their clothing. Furthermore, the job was seasonal, and many were left to beg for a living
when their brooms were not busy. This was a sad image of a working life: when on the
job, he risked life and limb to provide for his family, and when not working he faced
desperation in the streets. The chimney sweep was forced to ask for charity. By Blake’s
standards, the job that cost so much personally offered little in the way of satisfaction.
 Family life in “London” is difficult, work is hard, the streets are dirty, and the air is filthy.
There is little comfort in religion or in patriarchy. For Blake’s speaker, the late 18th
century is a terrible time in which to be living in London.
David v. Erdman
 When we turn now to ‘London’, Blake’s ‘mightiest brief poem’,10 our minds ringing with
Blakean themes, we come upon infinite curses in a little room, a world at war in a grain of
London soot
 A number of cognate passages in which Blake mentions blood on palace walls indicate
that the blood is an apocalyptic omen of mutiny and civil war involving regicide. In The
French Revolution people and soldiers fraternize, and when their ‘murmur’ (sigh) reaches
the palace, blood runs down the ancient pillars.
 In ‘London’ Blake is talking about what he hears in the streets, about the moral stain of
the battlefield sigh of expiring soldiers.
2. Blake’s symbolism in his poetry / paintings; address the question of the power of
myth

A) Context
Blake was trying to do what every mystic tries to do. He was trying to rationalize the
Divine (To justify the ways of God to men) and do apotheosize the Human. He was trying
to lay bare the fundamental error which are the cause of misery. These errors he sought,
not in codes of ethic, nor in the construction of society, but in the human soul itself.
(Damon Foster- Blake’s Philosophy and his Symbols)
Thus Blake, secure behind his symbols in a time of severe thought-control, was free to
write whatever he chose. He could say what he thought of George III and all kings; he
could prove to his own satisfaction that the Decalogue was not written by the true God;
that the Christian cult of chastity had blighted our world for eighteen centuries; and that
the congregations of most churches were really worshipping the Devil. Furthermore, he
was inciting his readers to agree with him. (Damon Foster, A Blake dictionnary)
As a young man Blake had stood firmly with Paine and Priestley, with the Deists and
free-thinking radicals in defence of the French Revolution. He had many hard things to
say about them. Years later, Blake warmly declared that all he knew was in the Bible, but
then he understands by the Bible the spiritual sense. For as to the natural sense, that
Voltaire was commissioned bu God to expose.
He condemned Voltaire and Paine of attacking orthodox Christianity, as he condemned
Bacon, Newton and Locke, not so much because ther were rationalists as because they
were mechanical materialist. This mechanical materialism was the doctrine of capitalism
in its age of growth and was accepted almost universally by both progressived and
reactionaries.
B) Examples of using symbolism/the power of myth
The creator of Blake’s mythology, URIZEN, creates by division and measurement, and
is frequently identified with Newton and Locke, who share with him the symbolism of
wheels and the mathematically ordered stars. The starry wheels of Newton become the
mill wheels of Satan „ O Satan, my youngest born, art thou not prince of the starry hosts/
and of the wheels of heaven, to turn the mills day anf night?”
BLAKE did not condemn reason but the isolation and blind worship of reason. His
dialectic method is implict in all his work, but is most clearly stated in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell:
„ 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
religiou call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active
springing from Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.”
This dialectic gives a new social quality to his central myth of the fall from innocence
and the age-long struggle towards a new synthesis of innocence and experience.
 INNOCENCE is the term for the whole man in whom reason and imagination are
integrated, as well as for primitive classless society. This state he calls Beulah, a state
existing in time but before history, a state of social, sexual and intellectual simplicity in
which neither law nor morality had a place. BEULAH is, if you will, an idealisation of
the peasant past to which there is no return, though fallen and dividedman has always
been troubled in his vision by the daughter of Beluah. Blake understood that the way
forward is through experience.

 Man empraces knowldege, conflict, suffering and evil, and with them all he builds a new
state, JERUSALEM, in which innocence is included on a higher level.
Jerusalem is the entirely utopian symbol of all the later Prophetic Books. In them we
find the Giant Albion (England, Blakes three-fold vision) who has been betrayed by his
children who have rejected Jerusalem and chosen Babylon ( the rulers of England)
Albion and his children have the power to choose Jerusalem, but the gave preffered
Babylon, the wilderness of squalor and exploitation which Blake saw the rulers of
England creating around him.
The conflict within and around man is symbolised by the conflicts between Urizen
and Jehovah, the creator and oppressor, and a series of Promethean figures- Los, Orc
and Fuzon. These figure form a world which no one has yet fully comprehended, but still
more it arises because they are genuinely mythological character and not allegorical
dummies.
Blake sees the battle as fought simultaneously on a number of planes, as a conflict of
cosmic forces but no less as a conflic in society and in the mind of men. Nor is it a
mechanical clash of right and wrong. It is a dialectical interpenetration of opposites, a
conflict of iron ( Urizen represent the ”iron law of wages”, Malthus ” principle of
population” and fire. Orc is consumer as well as liberator, destroying both the good and
evil to create the better, while Los, who in the earlier Books is Time and Prophecy, comes
more and more to stand for metallurgy, the new creative technique of the age, in which
fire and iron are creatively brought togheter. Los is complex because he is a true
revolutionary symbol:
The blow of his Hammer is Justice, the swing of his Hammer Mercy,/ The of Los’s
Hammer is eterhnal Forgiveness.

3. The vocabulary used by Blake in Songs of Innocence compared with that in

Songs of Experience

Introduction
Each society fails to be that good which its men fought to fulfil. But it is also a generous
thought, seeing in men a will to good which they deny only because they have been
mutilated. The generosity shines in the symbol of the hypocrite, which moved Blake to
anger, and to hope, at one. For it is not enough that the will to good is innocent. Innocence
is helpless. Even the hypocrite is a more powerful witness to good, because his judgment
has grown in experience. The will to good must be driven by experience. The progressions
of societies are endless, and perhaps the hypocrite is the catalyst whose stifled discontent
sets off that ferment. But the contraries of innocence and experience close, in the
progression to an innocence wise and fruitful by experience. (Analogy> The child must
take, and must murder, experience, it must become father and hypocrite, and it will have
found itself if that iron cruelty has rewritten innocence.) The symbol is iron.
Blake had etched the last of the Songs of Innocence in 1789, in that happy child mood
which the French Revolution seemed to fulfil. There had been no contrary and no
progression in his mind then. Blake was etching the Songs of Experience which he
finished in 1794. The contrary was prompted by social bitterness. But it was the contrary
not to social but to spiritual innocence. To be just, it must remain a contrary within the
soul. Blake never retreated to the easy contrast of soul and body. Under the common
name, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, he wrote of their world precisely ”Shewing
the two contrary states of the human soul”. The happy world of the Songs of Innocence
had been a state of mind. The unhappy world of the Songs of Experience is the contrary
state of the mind, though that contrary has been thurst upon the mind. The state which the
Songs of Experience attack is the mind of the hypocrite. The symbol of innocence had
been the child. The symbol of experience, mazy and manifold as the hypocrite, and as
fascinating, is the father.
Example
The Lamb was within Songs of Innocence (1789), and the Tyger was within Songs of
Experience (1794). The two collections came together to be Songs of Innocence and of
Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. This should be viewed
as significant because the revised name itself shows the two poems contradictions. The
two poems display contrasting ideas behind god and his creations, symbolized by the
‘animals’, giving the reader a questionable doubt about god and creation. The Tyger and
the Lamb should be compared and contrasted side by side to exhibit the "two contrary
states of a human soul". In both poems William Blake is narrating, showing his
questioning of creation and God. He uses animals not only as a symbol themselves, but
brings out their characteristics to help bring across the message he’s setting forth.
Rhetorical questions are also asked to challenge the reader to think deeper. William Blake
is notorious for drawing upon John Milton ideas, especially his epic poem Paradise Lost.
Going so far to even write an epic poem about him called ‘Milton’. “It’s regarded
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's
existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall". Childhood is a state of protected
innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world. This world
sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through
"experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and
inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church,
State, and the ruling classes. (www.bartleby.com)
While attracted to Christianity, Blake did not subscribe to the tenets of one faith or
another for very long during his life. Certainly the images of the lion and the lamb are
rooted in the Bible. Perhaps Blake wishes to point out the Creator’s hand in each animal
and yet suggests the flames seen in the tiger’s eyes are a reflection of the fires of Hell.
Further still, the wings mentioned in the second verse can be compared to the wings of an
angel. Is Blake reminding readers that the Divine Being who created the meek and gentle
lamb, is the same who created the intimidating tiger? Or perhaps it is mankind who is
responsible for the beast, creating it out of mankind’s worst traits. If God created the tiger,
then is this creature supposed to be everything that the Lamb is not—a relationship meant
to symbolize the symbiosis between good and evil? If so, then does Blake mean evil to
appear stronger and more attractive than the mild goodness of the Lamb? It would be
simplistic to state that “The Lamb” is good and “The Tyger” is evil. And it is probably not
what Blake intended. “The Tyger” is experience. It is bright, energetic, and vital. It is
familiar with its domain and is assertive in its environment. While the Lamb merely
follows the flock, the tiger has learned from experience and is autonomous. No longer
following the crowd or a single shepherd, the tiger is a hunter directly in search of
satisfaction. Knowledge has given the animal its power: the intensity of it is seen in the
beast’s bright eyes. There is one major discrepancy. While Blake’s words describe power,
the artwork that accompanies the poem paints a very different picture of “The Tyger”—a
feline by no means ferocious. Some call the picture timid; was it Blake’s intention to
mitigate the effect of his textual work? While he describes a horrific animal, he paints a
picture of a tame one. Why describe vivid colors and burning eyes and then offer the
image of an animal clearly close to domestication? Further still, why pair imagery of a
hammer and an anvil with an illustration of docility? (Harold Bloom)
In "The Lamb" the poem is mainly very well structured and flows. In the first verse it has
the questions and in the second verse it has all the answers. If you were only to look at the
poem briefly you would believe it was a children's poem, a hopscotch poem or playground
chant, until you remember that Blake could not have known these as he did not attend
school. The reader would think this because of the simple vocabulary, and also if you
notice, the poem uses soft alliteration -- "little lamb" -- this gave a much softer feel to the
poem, obviously putting one in mind of children and their innocence.
Blake was a very holy and pious person. He often out biblical discourse into many of his
poems, as I have stated before. I found some plain biblical tones in "The Lamb" -- the next
quotation shows this point. "He is meek, and he is mild . . . became a little child".
This quotation is from the New Testament, where God was forgiving, whereas in the Old
Testament God was believed to punish people for their sins i.e. Noah and the Ark, in
which God drowns the entire human race apart from Noah and his family. The fact that
there is biblical content in "The Lamb" is inspiring and was maybe meant to give a sense
of hope. (www.bartleby.com)
‘The Tyger’ is the best known of Blake’s songs and the most frequently and elaborately
interpreted. The phrase ‘fearful symmetry’—whatever its possible symbolic suggestions—
is clearly the initial puzzle: the ‘symmetry’ implies an ordering hand or intelligence, the
‘fearful’ throws doubt on the benevolence of the Creator. The ‘forests of the night’are the
darkness out of which the tiger looms, brilliant in contrast; they, also embody the doubt or
confusion that surrounds the origins of the tiger. In the case of ‘The Lamb’, the Creator
‘calls himself a Lamb. / He is meek, & he is mild; / He became a little child’. In ‘The
Tyger’the Creator again is like what he creates, and the form that must be supplied him
now is the Promethean smith working violently at his forge. The last alteration we have of
 this much altered poem insists upon the likeness of Creator and created: ‘What dread hand
Form’d thy dread feet?’The tiger is an image of the Creator; its ‘deadly terrors’ must be
His. The most puzzling stanza of the poem is the next-to-last: When the stars threw down
their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he
who made the Lamb make-thee? The first two lines are the crux of the poem. (. . .) The
‘spiritual sword / That lays open the hidden heart’ is a counterpart of the tiger we see in
the Songs of Experience. The wrath serves the ultimate end of redemption and becomes
one with mercy. If the God of apparent wrath is also the God of forgiveness, the tiger’s
form is only superficially ‘fearful’. In the words of Pope: Nor God alone in the still calm
we find, He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind (Essay on Man, II, 109–10). ‘The
Tyger’ dramatizes the terrors of the shocked doubter, but it moves with assurance—in the
stanza I have quoted—to an assertion of faith (faith in the oneness of God, in the goodness
of wrath, in the holiness of prophetic rage). When the last stanza repeats the first, but for
the alteration of ‘could’ to ‘dare,’ the question has been answered. The inconceivable of
the first stanza has become the majestic certainty of the last: the daring of the Creator—
whether God or man—is the cleansing wrath of the tiger. (Martin Price of Yale
University),

4. Blake and the cult of megaliths (..............)

Megalith, huge, often undressed stone used in various types of Neolithic (New Stone Age)
and Early Bronze Age monuments. Many were built in England, the best-known sites being
Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire.
Stonehenge and other megaliths are featured in Milton, suggesting they may relate to the
oppressive power of priestcraft in general; as Peter Porter observed, many scholars argue that
the "[mills] are churches and not the factories of the Industrial Revolution everyone else takes
them for". (Peter Porter, The English Poets: from Chaucer to Edward Thomas, Secker and
Warburg, 1974, p.198., quoted in Shivashankar Mishra, The Rise of William Blake)

Blake saw Druidism in reconstructed stonehedge-druidism-agonism-the sacrifice of human, the serpent temple,

alchemical