By John Beer (auth.)
This quantity on Blake follows the writer's existence and combines biography and significant research. overlaying Blake's early occupation, his significant works and his paintings as a visible artist, this new examine can be a needs to for all Blake students and lovers. contemporary discoveries relating Blake's forebears and their faith make this new research also timely.
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Extra resources for William Blake: A Literary Life
Sample text
In exploring the new world that opened for him after the death of his brother, Blake seems to have subdued the more satirical and sardonic side of his personality to an art that was the medium of direct, lightfilled vision. In particular, he drew on a belief that the time when the imaginative powers are at their most intense is in childhood. Swedenborgian provenance has also been claimed, however, for certain other poems in the Songs of Innocence: To Mercy Pity Peace and Love, All pray in their distress: And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness.
Even in these early lyrics Blake could proceed by evoking contrary states of mind: two consecutive poems, for example, each entitled ‘Song’, give opposing versions of a village love. ey’d maid Closes her eyes in sleep beneath night’s shade: Whene’er I enter, more than mortal fire Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire. The second song, by contrast, describes the torments of jealousy. 8 Blake’s ability to see the same situation from varying points of view, recognizing that in different moods all the lights of a scene could change, would come into its own in his later writing, notably in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
One such, which claimed Blake’s primary attention in these years, came as a concomitant to the death of his brother Robert in 1787, when he claimed to have seen the released spirit ascending through the ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy’. 22 It is not uncommon for an experience of this kind to leave a momentous impression on the person involved – even to change his or her entire view of the world. In Blake’s case the event was to be reflected in one or two designs, such as the vignette in ‘The Gates of Paradise’ showing an elderly man rising from his deathbed (Figure 2).
