Born in London in 1757, William Blake lived through both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and witnessed the vicious repression in Britain after these events by the ruling class. Although a deeply spiritual, religious, man, he was nevertheless appalled by the condition of his fellow human beings and laid the blame squarely on the twin evils of Church and state.
Blake was part of a group of close-knit skilled artisans who placed more weight on the moral value of their products than the market value. The fierce independence Blake sought throughout his life manifested itself in trying to obtain total control over the labour process. He published his own illuminated books, in which the text and illustrations could be printed from a single plate, etched in relief before being sold direct to the buyers for a fair price. But the process was so time consuming Blake never gained materially and he never escaped the hated, but much needed, patronage of patrons.
Blake’s independent spirit was evident in his involvement in a dispute in the Swedenborgians at the end of the 18th century. Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish spiritual philosopher and the Swedenborgians stood for a millenarian proclamation of a New Age, hostility to priest craft, a positive view of human sexuality and a visionary reading of the material world. Their split was over the movement’s aim of creating a New Church and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s attitudes to sexuality. (Swedenborg had a vision of an overtly sexual heaven and tolerated concubinage).
Blake identified with the expelled minority who opposed this vision but he also had differences with it. Opposition to Swedenborg was grouped around his publisher Jacob Johnson and his journal the Analytical Review. But Blake was not a joiner of organisations. He always stood with the oppressed as an individual.
Although like all dissenters Blake identified with the French Revolution and defended Thomas Paine’s republicanism from reactionary attacks, he also had a lifelong enthusiasm for visionary experiences which gave him a correlative scepticism about the power of reason. This marked him out from both the Painite Republican Deists and the Johnson circle.
Blake’s poem French Revolution was not printed. There is a proof copy of the first of seven intended poems. Unlike all other poems the intention was to print it rather than engrave it and use language that was far more direct. Blake’s hope was to break out of the circle of 50 or so admirers in a way that Tom Paine was doing with his Common Sense and Rights of Man. However Blake’s publisher Joseph Johnson (also publisher of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 and Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793) saw the reaction to the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791 and this ceased printing the further six books of poems. Blake himself packed Paine off to France from Joseph Johnson’s twenty minutes before a warrant arrived under the Royal Proclamation against Divers Wicked Seditious Writings in May 1792.
‘Let the Brothels of Paris be opened
‘With many an alluring dance,
‘To awake the Physicians thro’ the city,’
Said the beautiful Queen of France.
The King awoke on his couch of gold,
As soon as he heard these tidings told:
“Arise and come, both fife and drum,
And the Famine shall eat both crust and crumb.”
Then he swore a great and solemn oath:
To kill the people I am loth,
But if they rebel, they must go to hell:
They shall have a Priest and a passing bell.
French Revolution
Central to Blake’s differences with others in his circle were his ideas about selfhood and his attitudes to sexuality. Blake was willing to put “the self” into hazard in the interests of his prophetic vision: “Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life” he declared. This contrasted with the Painite idea of the autonomous individual. The modern day equivalent might be a kind of idealist self-help New Ager, working on oneself in order to liberate humanity.
For instance, Blake’s Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the “single-vision” of scientific materialism.
And Blake saw sexuality as unruly and depicted sexual difference as an unstable rather than a fixed part of human nature (see his Visions of the Daughters of Albion).
What Blake shared with Paine however was a rough handling of the Bible. In Paine’s Age of Reason the Bible was dismissed as a priestly distortion of Hebrew folk tradition. And Blake wrote in his Notebook:
The Hebrew nation did not write it,
Avarice and Chastity did shite it.
Notebook, E 516.
Blake supported Paine for the latter’s attacks on the Bible’s “perversions of Christ’s words and acts”.
But if radical politics abstracted the individual from the sum of human brotherhood, in its stress on the autonomy of human reasoning power, then it would perpetuate, in Blakes’ view, a mystery as destructive of human potential as the “state religion” it wished to replace.
Visions of the Daughter of Albion (1793) contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon and Bromion are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
Many of Blake’s most angry poems were published in the collection Songs of Innocence and Experience.
In the Chimney Sweeper Blake contrasts the drudgery and shocking lives of a child chimney sweep with the intoxicating image of a promised afterlife in Tom's dream of an Angel — a thinly disguised attack on the Church. If you submit to misery and don’t resist oppression we will give you a dream. The form and language of the poem give a sense of fate for the life of the child slave. It’s a poem that still matters today, given the scale of child and sweatshop labour that still exists in the 21st century.
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue.
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curl'd like a lamb’s back, was shav'd: so I said
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’__
And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
The Chimney Sweeper
In Holy Thursday Blake describes an annual procession, when thousands of the poorest children in London were marched from charity schools to St Pauls. There they demonstrate their piety while their patrons look on. There is an ironic attack on the “wise guardians of the poor”.
Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,
Grey headed beadles walking before with wands as white as snow;
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.
Oh what a multitude they seemed, those flowers of London town.
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs:
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.
Beneath them sit the agéd men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
Holy Thursday
In Holy Thursday of Experience Blake contrasts the bounty of nature in a rich and bountiful land with the poverty and misery of the children. The disbelief of the speaker serves to emphasise the absurdity of plentiful nature and poverty existing side by side reinforcing its unnaturalness. But the children are also seen as a force and the poem uses plainer imagery to suggest that both anger and nature will end this oppression.
In the Garden of Love the innocence and natural development of childhood that took place in the past is distorted in the present by priests and their draconian church laws. Every element of the poem — its form, language, repetition and syllables contribute to the portrayal of a world that is full of despair and oppression; the poem becoming darker and darker with each line. The Garden reveals a loss of innocence and a denial of natural sexuality with the graves representing the death of pleasure and beauty — namely his complete opposition to chastity, shame and marriage.
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
The Garden Of Love
London is also full of anger at the state of society.
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
London
The poems’ power lies in the juxtaposition of powerful images as Blake wanders through the streets of London — its key words are “Mind forg’d Manacles” — Blake’s equivalent of Marx’s false consciousness.
People are imprisoned by their fears and false beliefs, “the cop in all our heads” — this leads to fatalism and false despair. In other words mental imprisonment, manipulation and psychological oppression were not abstract concepts for Blake but as much a prison as bars and steel doors. If you couldn’t imagine a society without oppression and exploitation, you really were in a prison. He attacks the monarchy, militarism and imperialism and their hypocrisy and in the last stanza also has a pop at marriage and its corollary — prostitution.
In the Prophetic Books Blake continues with these themes. America — a Prophecy dramatises the revolutionary war in America. Blake seeing the war as a step forward for world wide liberty and an opportunity for the British ruling class to see the futility of militaristic policy. Blake’s Europe — a Prophecy progresses onwards from America describing war and revolution in Europe, but with plates of Blake’s illustrations illuminated in code because of the fierce political repression of those who identified with the French Revolution. The poem tells the British establishment to head the warning of a failed militaristic policy in America.
The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of Blake, taking its name from the character Urizen in Blake’s mythology, who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the “primeval priest”, and describes how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen’s fallen universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom. He is symbolic of the French and American revolutions. In form the book is a parody of the Book of Genesis.
Blake moves on from specific instances of oppression and injustice in the Songs to talk about underlying causes. It’s the ruling class that has invented heaven and Church laws with its “Thou shall not” bans, policed by black gowned priests, economic power and slavery in London’s “charter’d street”, cemented by personal fear and self imposed limitations in a corrupt world. Fear corrupts the powerful, the individual and society which, in turn, lead to a hardening of the individual and society when the repression is not honestly addressed and fought against by us all.
“Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of Religion”. Charity is a crime as it reinforces an unequal status quo and ignores the cause — we would say, capitalism.
“As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys”; “Shame is Pride’s cloak”; “A dead body revenges not injuries”; “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity”. Proverbs of Hell.
Religion, Patriotism, Commerce and War are all hypocritical excuses for a status quo that exploits the poorest and weakest. Its cause, for Blake, was a lack of vision and imagination and an over-emphasis on Reason at the expense of the former.
The Prophetic Books present a vision of a dynamic, dialectical process in society, Blake seeing oppression and division followed by revolution as cyclical.
He gives the different energies, forces and desires that exist within societies at different stages of development coded symbolic names, characteristics and stories and saw change occurring as a product of the unfolding of “contraries”. In doing so he revealed eternal truths abut humanity through the specific injustices of his time making Blake a revolutionary. “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.
Blake’s vision of Jerusalem was not just rational government for the people by the people, as it was for his radical contemporaries. He wanted the liberation of all the unrealised potential he saw in his fellow man — sexual, artistic and creative. But he believed that political change alone could not bring about this liberation. While he always bitterly opposed repressive institutions and inequalities, and wanted them destroyed, Blake also thought that humanity would need to experience some kind of spiritual leap in order to be truly liberated. So in Blake’s work there is the collision of revolutionary inspiration with the rational radicalism of Paine and Wollstonecraft, and the older traditions of Antinomian dissent.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Preface to Milton
