Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  15. Urizen 4.24–40, E72; Ephesians 4:4–6; Galatians 3:13; Isaac Watts, The Faithfulness of God in the Promises, quoted by John Beer, William Blake: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9.

  16. Urizen 23.23–27, E81; Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 106. The tears are not visible in all copies of the poem.

  17. The Human Abstract, E27; Four Zoas 80.9–13, 27, E355–56. Urizen’s first line is repeated in Jerusalem 44.30, E193; see David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 368–69. On the larger relevance of this passage, see Nicholas Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20–21.

  18. Blake’s debt to Alexander Geddes, who was reporting the work of the Lutheran theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, is traced by Jerome J. McGann, “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), 303–24. The “indeterminate” in McGann’s title refers to a suggestion that Blake may have reshuffled the sequence of plates in The Book of Urizen so as to imitate what happens when disparate elements get recombined.

  19. Blake Records, 701.

  20. Zechariah 4:10; Four Zoas 115.50, E381. For details on the Seven Eyes, see S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 388–89, and individual entries in Damon’s Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (reprint ed., Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979; orig. publ. Brown University Press, 1965). Northrop Frye also gives a helpful account: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 128–34.

  21. Hagstrum, Blake: Poet and Painter, 127.

  22. Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49–53. On the Boreas picture, see C. H. Collins Baker, “The Sources of Blake’s Pictorial Expression,” in The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics, ed. Robert N. Essick (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1973), 124–26.

  23. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1995), 312.

  24. Milton 29.64–65, E128; Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

  25. Blake Records, 52n; Jerusalem 48.9–11, E196; Job 1:1, 11–12, 42:12.

  26. Blake Records, 439; John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 144. Full details of the exacting process of engraving and printing are given by Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job,” Print Quarterly 22 (2005), 138–59.

  27. On the Hebrew, see Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43.

  28. Blake Records, 652.

  29. Job 19:23–27.

  30. Ben F. Nelms has studied in detail “Text and Design in Illustrations of the Book of Job,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 336–58.

  31. Revelation 15:4; Marriage 27, E45; Visions 8.10, E51; America 8.13, E54; Four Zoas 34.80, E324; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 28; Four Zoas 3, E300, quoting Ephesians 6:12.

  32. E269; Isaiah 14:12.

  33. Marriage 4, E34; see Morton D. Paley, “The Figure of the Garment in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 119–39.

  34. For the Sexes, E269; Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–45), final line of book 8; Blake Records, 427.

  35. My comments are indebted to Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 166, and to Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17–18.

  36. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E720.

  37. Blake Records, 421.

  38. Blake Records, 453; Jerusalem 35.25–26, E181; For the Sexes, E259.

  39. Four Zoas 106.6, E379; “giving himself for the nations” is at E671. My comments are indebted to Illuminated Blake, 355; W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 210; John E. Grant, “Jesus and the Powers That Be in Blake’s Designs for Young’s Night Thoughts,” in Blake and His Bibles, ed. David V. Erdman (West Cornwall, CT: Locustv Hill, 1990), 105–7; and Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 113–18.

  40. Blake to Butts, Apr. 25, 1803, E728; Jerusalem 97.5–6, E256.

  41. John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 136; Morton Paley, Blake Trust, 1:296, 15.

  42. Tom Hayes, “William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal,” ELH 71 (2004), 156; Susanne Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 248, quoting Jerusalem 69.24, 79.44, E223, 235.

  43. Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 81; Blake Records, 392; Luke 15:20–24.

  CHAPTER 15: THE TRAVELER IN THE EVENING

  1. “Blake’s London,” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/william-blake/william-blakes-london.

  2. Blake to William Hayley, Dec. 4, 1804, E758; notebook memoranda, E694.

  3. Jerusalem 17.59–63, E162.

  4. Blake Records, 320.

  5. Jerusalem 3, E145; Paley, Blake Trust, 1:12. On this remarkable plate, see Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 339; Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11–12, 37; and Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–12.

  6. Blake Records, 753; on the neighborhood, see Angus Whitehead, “‘Humble but Respectable’: Recovering the Neighbourhood Surrounding William and Catherine Blake’s Last Residence, No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, c. 1820–27,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80 (2011), 858–79.

  7. Blake Records, 387.

  8. Blake Records, 402.

  9. Gilchrist, 319, 322; Blake Records, 405, 680.

  10. Blake Records, 438; Blake to John Linnell, Aug. 1, 1826, E780. On the illnesses, see Aileen Ward, “William Blake and the Hagiographers,” in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl, vol. 1 (New York: AMS, 1994), 1–24; and Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s Death,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Summer 1996), 36–49.

  11. Blake Records, 453; Blake to George Cumberland, Apr. 12, 1827, E783; William Upcott’s album, E698.

  12. E269.

  13. Blake Records, 269.

  14. “And his legs carried it like a long fork,” E504.

  15. Blake Records, 682, 459, 464. On the unlikelihood that Blake sang on his deathbed, see the articles cited in n. 10, above.

  16. Blake Records, 493.

  17. Blake Records, 559, 731–32; Marriage 13, E39.

  18. Gilchrist, 384–85.

  19. Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 81; Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 38; T. S. Eliot, “Blake,” in The Sacred Wood, 6th ed. (London: Methuen, 1948), 151, 156–58.

  20. Michael Welland, Sand: The Never-Ending Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), xiii.

  21. Descriptive Catalogue, E550; Vision of the Last Judgment, E566; Marriage 6–7, E35.

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  FIGURES

  Note: Plate numbers from Blake’s illuminated books, as given here, are those in the particular copies being reproduced. They correspond with the “object” numbers in the Blake Archive but often differ from the sequence of plates in David Erdman’s text.

  Frontispiece: Map by Bill Nelson.

  1.
Gravure, en taille-douce, en manière noire, etc. (Paris, 1767). Houghton Library, Harvard University, f Typ 715.67.435.

  2. Etching by Thomas Stothard. Collection of Robert N. Essick. Used with permission.

  3. Democritus. Illustration from Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind (London, 1789). Houghton Library, Harvard University, HOU F Typ 705.89.513 (A).

  4. Sense Runs Wild. Illustration for Edward Young, Night-Thoughts, page 46. Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  5. Catherine Blake, by William Blake. © Tate, London 2014.

  6. William Blake, engraving after a painting by Thomas Phillips. Frontispiece to Robert Blair, The Grave (London, 1808). Houghton Library, Harvard University, HEW 1.13.5.

  7. William Blake, probable self-portrait. Collection of Robert N. Essick. Used with permission.

  8. The Man Who Taught Blake Painting. © Tate, London 2014.

  9. America: A Prophecy. Fragment of the original copperplate for plate 3. By permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

  10. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 3. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  11. A rolling press. Illustration from Abraham Bosse, De la manière de graver à l’eau forte et au burin (Paris, 1758). Houghton Library, Harvard University, HOU GEN Typ 715.58.230.

  12. Father Thames. Illustration for Thomas Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Yale Center for British Art.

  13. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 1. Yale Center for British Art.

  14. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 24. Yale Center for British Art.

  15. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 30. Yale Center for British Art.

  16. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 29. Yale Center for British Art.

  17. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 39. Yale Center for British Art.

  18. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 32. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  19. Manuscript page from Blake’s notebook. Copyright © The British Library Board, Add. MS 49,460, f. 56.

  20. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy L, plate 41. Yale Center for British Art.

  21. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy N, plate 21. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  22. Albion Rose (Glad Day), second state. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

  23. Paris boutique. Photo by Leo Damrosch.

  24. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 4. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  25. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 8. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  26. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 12. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  27. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 10. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  28. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 13. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  29. Newton. Sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi. Photo by Leo Damrosch.

  30. Blake’s cottage at Felpham. By kind permission of Jackson Stops and Staff.

  31. No. 23 Hercules Buildings. Etching by Frederick Adcock. From Arthur S. Adcock, Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London (London: Dent, 1912).

  32. The Whirlwind: Ezekiel’s Vision. Pen and watercolor. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

  33. Milton, copy C, plate 1. New York Public Library.

  34. Milton, copy C, plate 31. New York Public Library.

  35. Milton, copy C, plate 36. New York Public Library.

  36. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 1. Yale Center for British Art.

  37. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 100. Yale Center for British Art.

  38. Avebury. Illustration from William Stukeley, Abury, a Temple of the British Druids (London, 1743). Houghton Library, Harvard University, F Arc 855.214.

  39. Manuscript page from Vala, page 86. Copyright © The British Library Board, Add. MS 39764, f. 48v.

  40. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 1. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  41. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 3. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  42. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 18. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  43. Manuscript page from Vala, page 26. Copyright © The British Library Board, Add. MS 39764, f. 48v.

  44. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32. Yale Center for British Art.

  45. Wisdom. Sculpture by Lee Lawrie, GE Building, Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by David Damrosch.

  46. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 1. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  47. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 11. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  48. Boreas. Engraving by James Basire. Illustration from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 1 (London, 1762). Houghton Library, Harvard University, HOU GEN Arc705.5*.

  49. The Book of Job, plate 11, “Job’s Evil Dreams.” Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  50. For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 21. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. PML 63936. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2014.

  51. No. 17 South Molton Street. Etching by Frederick Adcock. From Arthur S. Adcock, Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London (London: Dent, 1912).

  52. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 3. Yale Center for British Art.

  53. Life mask of William Blake. Copyright © Joanna Kane, from The Somnambulists: Photographic Portraits from before Photography (Stockport, England: Dewi Lewis, 2008).

  54. William Blake, pencil sketch by John Linnell. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

  55. For Children: The Gates of Paradise, copy D, plate 16. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  56. Deaths Door (1805). Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  PLATES

  Note: plate numbers from Blake’s illuminated books, as given here, are those in the particular copies being reproduced. They correspond with the “object” numbers in the Blake Archive but often differ from the sequence of plates in David Erdman’s text.

  1. Pity. © Tate, London 2014.

  2. A Sunshine Holiday. Illustration for John Milton’s L’Allegro. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 1949.4:4. Purchased with the assistance of the Fellows with the special support of Mrs. Landon K. Thorne and Mr. Paul Mellon.

  3. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 3. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  4. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 25. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  5. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 11. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used
with permission.

  6. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 12. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  7. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  8. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 39. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  9. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy F, plate 42. Yale Center for British Art.

  10. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 42. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  11. Albion Rose. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

  12. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 1. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  13. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 21. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  14. America: A Prophecy, copy M, plate 3. Yale Center for British Art.

  15. Europe: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  16. America: A Prophecy, copy M, plate 9. Yale Center for British Art.

  17. Europe: A Prophecy, copy A, plate 10. Yale Center for British Art.

  18. Newton. © Tate, London 2014.

  19. Hyperion, illustration to Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy. Yale Center for British Art.

  20. Milton, copy D, plate 16. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2014 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

  21. The Book of Urizen, copy A, plate 14. Yale Center for British Art.