Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Reconciliation with the Father

  From Songs of Experience onward, it is obvious that Blake had a problem with fathers, though it is never clear why. All the same, his symbolism would be crippled if it dismissed fatherhood altogether. Just as Urizen must be reintegrated with the other Zoas, so Jehovah must recover a positive role. “I see the face of my Heavenly Father,” Blake wrote to Butts near the end of the time at Felpham; “he lays his hand upon my head and gives a blessing to all my works.” In Jerusalem we hear of “the universal Father.”40

  The next to last plate of Jerusalem (color plate 40) is a scene of reconciliation, but strange and hard to interpret. A bearded old man, with rays of light springing from his head, leans forward to embrace an androgynous figure with long hair who may be Jerusalem or possibly humanity as a whole. The colors are so dark that an art historian complains, “The black-red Blakean oven is peculiarly grim and smothering.” Morton Paley, on the other hand, says that “the variation of darks in the flames creates a truly apocalyptic effect” and notes the striking use of blue sky as a halo.41

  Is the bearded figure a return, at last, of the Father? The younger figure seems to be falling gratefully into his arms, gazing up into his face. But why is the old man gazing off to the side? Is he looking at us? And why does he grasp the young figure’s buttocks? Commentators have understandably seen the embrace as sexual, but is it? One interpreter sees the younger figure as “a terror-stricken androgyne”; another sees no terror but rather “the rapturous moment just before erotic consummation; Jerusalem and Albion are rising within the earth in heavenly flames, and ‘the time of love’ with its orgasmic ‘holy raptures of adoration’ is spreading forgiveness and life within and throughout the earth.”42 As so often, it’s hard to know if intense sexual feelings are actually implied in the picture or are just imagined by Blake’s commentators.

  A different interpretation is suggested by Anthony Blunt, who notes the similarity of the embrace in this image to that of the Prodigal Son and his father in an engraving by Martin de Vos. We know that Blake found that parable especially moving. Samuel Palmer told Gilchrist, “I can yet recall it when, on one occasion, dwelling upon the exquisite beauty of the parable of the Prodigal, he began to repeat a part of it; but at the words, ‘When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him,’ could go no further. His voice faltered, and he was in tears.” Here is what Blake was unable to finish:

  But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.43

  15. THE TRAVELER IN THE EVENING

  Poverty Lane

  AFTER returning to London from Felpham in 1803, the Blakes rented a small apartment at 17 South Molton Street, within sight of Hyde Park and bounded by an aptly named Poverty Lane (figure 51). This is the only one of their London residences that still exists; a beauty salon now occupies its ground floor. A catalog of the Blakes’ other residences makes melancholy reading. Number 28 Broad Street, William’s birthplace, “no longer survives; the street has been renamed Broadwick Street, and on the site is now a block of high-rise apartments.” Number 28 Poland Street, where he briefly kept a print shop with James Parker, “was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century.” Number 31 Great Queen Street, where he served his seven-year apprenticeship with James Basire, “was unfortunately demolished in the late nineteenth century.” Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand “was demolished in Regency times,” and Fountain Court, the Blakes’ final residence, “no longer exists, but was just situated behind the Coal Hole Tavern on the Strand which still stands, albeit rebuilt.” We have already noted that 23 Hercules Road, in Lambeth, was torn down in 1918.1

  In early 1804 Blake had to return to Sussex for his sedition trial, at which he was acquitted. It was the last remarkable outward event in his life. By now he seems to have realized that his suspicion of William Hayley had been irrational, and he sent him warm thanks from London, telling him optimistically, “I have indeed fought through a Hell of terrors and horrors (which none could know but myself) in a divided existence. Now no longer divided nor at war with myself, I shall travel on in the strength of the Lord God, as poor Pilgrim says.” Three years later, however, a laconic notebook entry reads: “Tuesday Jan. 20, 1807 between two and seven in the evening—despair.”2

  51. 17 South Molton Street

  Commercial jobs dried up, and the only income came from a few generous patrons, particularly Thomas Butts, whom Blake had met in 1800 or thereabouts and who was one of the only people who understood his religious ideas. Though not wealthy, Butts had a comfortable income as a clerk in the War Office, and whenever Blake was out of cash he knew that he had a standing order from Butts for paintings on biblical and Miltonic subjects.

  As mentioned earlier, Blake’s one attempt at a public exhibition, held in his brother James’s haberdashery shop, was a complete failure, and elicited a contemptuous review from Robert Hunt in the widely read Examiner. In Jerusalem, Hunt makes an appearance under the name of Hand (the image of a pointing hand identified his contributions in the publication), along with Blake’s Felpham accuser, the drunken soldier Schofield:

  Go thou to Skofield: ask him if he is Bath or if he is Canterbury;

  Tell him to be no more dubious: demand explicit words.

  Tell him I will dash him into shivers, where and at what time

  I please; tell Hand and Skofield they are my ministers of evil

  To those I hate: for I can hate also as well as they!3

  Hunt and Schofield, of course, never had the slightest inkling of this threat.

  Given the absence of any audience for Milton and Jerusalem, it is impressive that Blake continued to work steadily on those exceptionally ambitious poems. Three copies of the fifty-plate Milton were printed in 1811, and one more in 1818; five copies of the massive Jerusalem, in a hundred plates, were printed in 1820 and 1821. Only one copy of Jerusalem was colored. During that late period Blake also made copies of some of his older illuminated books, brilliantly colored to appeal to collectors who had little or no interest in the texts.

  The increasing obscurity of Blake’s poems was due not only to the complexity of his thinking but also to the extreme isolation in which he worked. There is a poignant aptness in George Cumberland’s description of the now-lost Last Judgment painting: “We called upon Blake yesterday evening, found him and his wife drinking tea, dirtier than ever [that is, with paint and ink]; however he received us well and showed his large drawing in water colors of the Last Judgment. He has been labouring at it till it is nearly as black as your hat.”4

  Blake’s gloom at his lack of readers is strikingly evident in some strange gaps that invade the address “To the Public” with which Jerusalem begins (figure 52). At several points, words and phrases have been savagely gouged out of the metal plate, and after the words “the Author hopes” several whole lines have been entirely deleted. A little later we read:

  Therefore Reader what you do not approve, &

  me for this energetic exertion of my talent.

  Working from a proof sheet that has survived, Erdman has been able to restore the missing words: “Therefore Dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, and love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.” Not only did Blake remove the hopeful appeal to the reader, but he deliberately left these yawning gaps in the text, even though when he printed new copies from the plate he could easily have inked in new words. “Blake’s attack upon plate 3,” Morton Paley suggests, “was expressive of terrible rage. The gaps were like wounds that could never heal.”5 Perhaps it is up to each reader to fill in
the blanks. If we want to forgive and love Blake, that will be our choice; he’s not counting on it.

  In 1821 the Blakes moved for the last time, to a second-floor apartment in a dark, narrow lane known as Fountain Court, just off the busy Strand and close to the drawing school where William had gone to study when he was ten years old. The house was owned by Catherine’s brother-in-law. Despite lack of money, this final period was happy on the whole. The nearby Thames could be glimpsed from a window, and Blake said it sometimes looked “like a bar of gold.” The apartment itself was unprepossessing, but he didn’t mind: “I live in a hole here, but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere.”6

  52. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 3 (detail)

  There are a number of striking images of Blake from these last years. In 1823, when he was sixty-six, a phrenologist named James Deville made a cast of his head “as representative of the imaginative faculty.” The result is haunting (figure 53). The solemn expression, however, was uncharacteristic, having been caused by the uncomfortable process Blake had to undergo. As his friend George Richmond explained,

  That is not like dear Blake’s mouth. Such a look of severity was foreign to him, an expression of sweetness and sensibility being habitual; but Blake experienced a good deal of pain when the cast was taken, as the plaster pulled out a quantity of his hair. Mrs. Blake did not like the mask, perhaps the reason being that she was familiar with varying expressions of her husband’s fine face from daily observation. Indeed it was difficult to please her with any portrait—she never liked Phillips’s portrait; but Blake’s friends liked the mask.7

  53. Life mask of William Blake

  More engaging is a sketch made on Hampstead Heath by John Linnell, who lived there with his family (figure 54). Blake often visited them on foot, five miles each way, and it was there that he met Coleridge. Samuel Palmer, in his late teens at the time, sometimes accompanied him. Palmer’s son remembered hearing that “as the two friends neared the farm, a merry troop hurried out to meet them, led by a little fair-haired girl of some six years old. To this day she remembers cold winter nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs. Linnell, and sent his homeward way with the servant, lantern in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road.” When the Linnells’ daughter grew up she married Palmer and would tell their son how Blake used to recite The Chimney Sweeper and The Tyger while she sat at his knee.8

  Palmer and Richmond, who was just fifteen when he met Blake in 1824, were members of a group of young disciples who referred to themselves playfully as the Ancients. They called No. 3 Fountain Court the House of the Interpreter, after an episode in Pilgrim’s Progress. As Palmer remembered Blake, “He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforward, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy. . . . He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life who are not, in some way or other, ‘double minded’ and inconsistent with themselves.” Consistent he may have been, but not untroubled. Another Ancient, Frederick Tatham, said that he was “a subject of much temptation and mental suffering, and required sometimes much soothing.”9

  During these years Blake endured chronic illness. In 1825 he told Crabb Robinson that reading Wordsworth’s Excursion “caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him.” The sarcasm is amusing, but not the complaint. It seems likely that he suffered for years from inflammatory bowel disease, and probably also cirrhosis of the liver and cholangitis, an inflammation of the bile duct. His letters are full of references to fevers, chills, and sweating, and also to intense stomach pain and dysentery, all of which would be due to these causes. There is a strong probability that it was his art that made him sick—years of inhaling copper dust, as well as fumes from nitric acid biting into copper. Toward the end he described himself as “only bones and sinews, all strings and bobbins like a weaver’s loom.”10

  54. William Blake, by John Linnell

  Old friends were passing away: Henry Fuseli in 1825, John Flaxman in 1826, his brother James Blake in 1827. When Robinson told Blake that Flaxman had died, “His first observation was with a smile: ‘I thought I should have gone first.’ He then said, ‘I cannot consider death as anything but a removing from one room to another.’” In April 1827 he wrote to Cumberland, “I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old man feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I am stronger and stronger as this foolish body decays.” In a way, Blake felt that he had already removed to another room. He wrote in a friend’s autograph album, “WILLIAM BLAKE one who is very much delighted with being in good company,” and added, “Born 28 Novr 1757 in London & has died several times since.”11

  An engraving made many years before, in the emblem book For Children (figure 55), anticipates Blake’s mood as the end approached. It is captioned “The Traveller hasteth in the Evening,” and when the emblems were reissued as For the Sexes these lines were added:

  But when once I did descry

  The immortal man that cannot die,

  Through evening shades I haste away

  To close the labours of my day.12

  Wearing a Blakean broad-brimmed hat, the traveler strides confidently forward.

  In For Children there was also a picture of “Deaths Door,” in which an aged man on a crutch enters a massive stone tomb. But it was always Blake’s belief that the spirit lives on in Eternity, though not identical to the mortal self. In 1805, for a projected edition of Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, he reconceived the death’s door motif in a new way (figure 56). The old man and the tomb are still there, but above them is a naked youthful figure who had appeared first in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and again in America: A Prophecy (see figure 25, page 109, above, and color plate 13). The publisher of The Grave, Robert Cromek, added a comment: “The door opening seems to make utter darkness visible; age, on crutches, is hurried by a tempest into it. Above is the renovated man seated in light and glory.”13 Remarkably, Walt Whitman had his own tomb in Camden, New Jersey, modeled on this image. He had become friendly with Anne Gilchrist, widow of the biographer Alexander Gilchrist, who showed him some of Blake’s pictures.

  55. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 16

  The Grave was supposed to have been a lucrative commission, but Blake’s bold white-line style struck Cromek as commercially unpromising, and the job was reassigned to Louis Schiavonetti, who executed the designs in a more fashionable style and was paid the enormous sum of £549, which Blake had expected to receive himself. As it turned out, this disappointment marked just about the end of his employment as a commercial engraver. In his notebook he dubbed Cromek and Schiavonetti “Screwmuch” and “Assassinetti.”14

  According to Frederick Tatham, Blake was working on a copy of The Ancient of Days shortly before he died, setting it aside only to sketch his wife: “Kate, I will draw your portrait; you have been a good wife to me.” He died on August 12, 1727, aged sixty-nine, and Richmond closed his eyes “to keep the vision in.” Shortly afterward Richmond wrote to Palmer, who was out of town at the time: “He said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out in singing of the things he saw in heaven. In truth he died like a saint.” If that did happen it probably wasn’t at the very end, since in all likelihood Blake’s illness would have rendered him comatose.15

  56. Deaths Door

  Catherine lived another four years, looked after by Linnell and Tatham, who sold copies of her husband’s works for her when they could. According to an anonymous but well-informed writer in a magazine,

  His widow, an estimable woman, saw Blake frequently after his decease: he used to come and sit with her two or three hours every day. These hallowed visitations were her only comforts. He took his chair and talked to her, just as he w
ould have done had he been alive; he advised with her as to the best mode of selling his engravings. She knew that he was in the grave, but she felt satisfied that his spirit visited, condoled, and directed her. When he had been dead a twelvemonth, the devoted and affectionate relict would acquiesce in nothing “until she had had an opportunity of consulting Mr. Blake.”16

  After Catherine’s death in 1831, Tatham high-handedly appropriated all of the remaining Blake materials, much to the indignation of Linnell, who had long been the Blakes’ chief source of support. Still worse, Tatham became convinced that many of the papers were morally objectionable and burned a large number. Preparing her late husband’s biography for publication, Anne Gilchrist mentioned “the holocaust of Blake manuscripts.” A contemporary art collector underlined this passage and commented, “Why not tell the truth! F. T. burnt hundreds of them at the desire of Edward Irving, who said ‘they were done under the instigation of the Devil.’ This I know for I saw it done.” Irving was a friend of Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle but also a prophet, faith healer, and founder of the short-lived Irvingite or Holy Catholic Apostolic Church. In time Tatham grew disenchanted with Irving and regretted what he had done. We must hope that what the prophets told Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell would also apply here: “I asked Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works; he said none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel said the same of his.”17