The Books: The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

Time to leave behind The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (all posts here), and move on to the next book on my shelf, which is The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, an enormous book, and I have barely cracked the surface of it.

“I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bit excessive?”
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake.”
Pause.
“William Blake?”
“William Blake!”
“William Blake???”
“William Blake!!!”
— BULL DURHAM

“It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.” – T.S. Eliot on William Blake

William Blake was a poet (virtually unknown in his own lifetime), and also an engraver. He did illustrations for children’s books, religious books, volumes of poetry … and now his stuff is considered priceless.

William Blake was born in 1757 in London, the third of five children. He went to school until he was 14 and then had to go to work. He got a job as an apprentice to an engraver, which is how he ended up making his paltry living. He lived in pretty much poverty for his entire life. He married at 25 the illiterate Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her how to read, and they ended up becoming collaborators in bringing out volumes of his poetry. He did engravings to illustrate his poems. Catherine was the one who bound the books, and got them ready for publication. The entire thing was a joint production. They did all the work themselves.

The two of them never had any children. They were extremely unconventional, and visitors tell of stopping by the Blake house to find the two of them sitting out in their back garden completely naked. Just hangin’ out, in the buff.

William Blake had visions. .When he was a young boy, he said he looked up into a tree and saw that it was full of winged angels. He spoke about these things openly and much of his work has a phantasmagorical religious feeling to it (although much of it is also biting social critique, along the lines of Dickens. He wrote about the poor, about social conditions, about the vicious treatment of children. As TS Eliot said of him, “He is very eighteenth century.”)

Along these lines, Camille Paglia wrote in Break, Blow, Burn:

Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake’s ‘The Chimey Sweeper’, written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet’s dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep’s gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us.

He is one of the most quotable of poets. I would imagine that many people quote him, without realizing that he is the source. Similar to Shakespeare, his thoughts/images have entered the common lexicon.

Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.

His long-ass poem Marriage of Heaven and Hell is overwhelmingly brilliant and I can only take it in small doses. Every line is so inspiring, so transcendent. There is poetry here, yes, but there is also real thought, real philosophy. If you listen to Blake, he is showing you a way to live. Not many poets can do that. They try, but they fall into cliche. He never does. He was absolutely unique. A nutbag, in many respects, but lots of geniuses are. For those of you who are interested, here is “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in its entirety (accompanied by more of Blake’s engravings). Just go with it. Just succumb.

His poetry is the literary version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Van Gogh was not interpreting the sky. Van Gogh was actually painting what he saw. William Blake is the same way. What may seem symbolic to his readers, is actually how he experienced being alive. His stuff is still relevant and radical.

Allen Ginsberg helped promote William Blake again in the mid-20th century, feeling that he was his heir. People read “Tyger Tyger” in school, and perhaps the poems about the chimney sweeps, but how about everything else? The book I have lying beside me is fat. It is huge. This man was prolific. He wrote novel-length poems, long long poems on The French Revolution, on America (all of these illustrated with his own engravings), and much of this is now obscured to the general reader. Ginsberg was on a mission. Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets:

“In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a ‘dark night of the soul sort of,’ his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him – ‘I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of “Ah, Sun-flower,” and it suddenly appeared – the poem I’d read a lot of times before.’ He began to understand the poem, and ‘suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,’ he ‘heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.’ This ‘apparitional voice’ became his guiding spirit: ‘It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.’ On Ginsberg this ‘anciency fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. ‘The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.’ Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

Blake leant himself to that wild time, although he was from another era entirely, an indication of how far his work can travel.

Blake wrote:

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

He should know.

The poem I will excerpt today is indeed one of his best-known (and not as dauntingly long as some of his others), and I love it so much. It is one of the poems he wrote about chimney sweeps (there are more). The poem is an indictment of the society in which he lives, a society that treats its most innocent members with brutality and uncaring indifference. He is a visionary poet, yes, but he did not turn his eyes away from earthly matters. Far from it.

There is heartbreak here, too, in the fact that the little child is so small that he can’t even pronounce “sweep” properly yet. It comes out as “weep, weep, weep”, a double-meaning, of course, but every time I read it, all I can hear is a small high child’s voice, calling out, old before his time.

This isn’t fancy stuff. His poems are the opposite of opaque. They are blunt, powerful, and emotional.

The Chimney Sweep

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 curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved: 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 locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and 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 and 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, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Some of William Blake’s extraordinary engravings below:

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11 Responses to The Books: The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake

  1. nightfly says:

    The engraving of Newton is a favorite – mostly because the mental image of the bewigged, knickered, elderly eccentric fellow of popular imagination is thrown over by a lively and muscular youth, almost hewn from the rocks, chasing down the calculus. He gets a lot of dynamic flow in that picture, and it’s just a guy sitting on a rock, doing maths.

    I think about the genius/madness debate we had years ago (also in relation to Blake, wasn’t it?) – now older and understanding myself a bit better, I see much more of your point. Chaos precedes the creation – the ordering of things starts first with no things, with only the raw elements that are not yet formed into things. Blake was completely in his element there. I think now that part of “madness” is in losing one’s identity in that chaos, with it disordering you rather than the reverse. A genius may have that happen, just from being in the maelstrom so much – many a sailing ship goes to bottom – but a rare few sail on afterward. Blake must have been such a one.

    Maybe my quarrel with the touch of madness is in knowing that I would not go on after capsizing like that. I realize now that it’s an old fear. Like you say, though, you have to “go there” to get anywhere useful. “Make journeys. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.” Common theme, isn’t it? The difference between art and just pretty words in a row. If I really give a crap it’s terrible to just duck out like this.

    I’ve been introspecting a lot lately. I’m glad you put this up when I was finally in a place to hear it.

  2. sheila says:

    Nightfly – to quote my friend Mitchell, “Who knew Isaac Newton was so ripped?”

    I think sometimes you just have to leave room for genius. Madman? Genius? Very fine line. William Blake had a powerful unique mode of expression – you could pick out one of his poems in a lineup in a dark alley – his voice is that distinct. I read his stuff and while it is insane that he was unknown during his lifetime (at least not the way he is known now) and think: “This is his only option.” He HAD to write. I haven’t read any proper biographies of him so I do not know his struggles (beyond making a living), but he seems pretty clear-thinking. Not on the edge. He was extremely religious, but that word has connotations that aren’t really appropriate for Blake – his was a LIVED faith. It was not proper or polite. Perhaps it was just that he had an awesome imagination – but I fully believe that he saw angels in that tree as a little boy. It was a vision of grace and protection that stayed with him his entire life.

  3. david foster says:

    Sheila,

    What do you make of the last couple of lines of “The Chimney Sweep?”

  4. sheila says:

    I think it’s bitterly angry and sarcastic.

  5. DBW says:

    I don’t think the last lines are bitter, or sarcastic, but I am a HUGE pollyanna. Given Blake’s reverance for the bible(reverance may be too strong a word), I read those lines as accepting of a tough lot in life–full of the knowledge that there are better things to come, and hopeful for that ultimate reward. Although I can see your interpretation, too.

  6. sheila says:

    Nah. I don’t think so. He was a social critic -way ahead of his time – and seen in light of his other angry poems about children being made to work until they dropped dead (in the Songs of Innocence Series) and other pressing social issues, I can only see that line as sarcastic. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are just amazing – what he was able to see, and perceive – long before the child-labor laws and all of the social progress came about at the end of the 19th century. He was calling it like he saw it.

    I wouldn’t say he was “reverent” toward the Bible, either. Many people were scandalized by him and many people still are. His was a lived faith, a visionary faith (you never get any points for that from the religious nitwits – he would have been burned at the stake in an earlier age) and very individual in his practice of said faith.

    Better things to come? Not when you’re 5 years old and you have black lungs! That’s far too complacent for someone like Blake (especially because he wrote so many poems about poverty-struck children and how bad it was for them). Or maybe death would be a relief to that chimney sweep, but I hear an indictment in Blake’s poem – an indictment that that should be so.

    Also, I think it is a far more interesting poem if it’s angry. I personally lose interest entirely if he actually means that milksop in the last line. It reads like a religious tract, and that’s not Blake’s voice at all. Even in his most divine passages (divine, literally), he doesn’t read like a complacent church-going Bible-believer. He is way way “out there”.

  7. DBW says:

    When I said “better things to come,” I meant the afterlife. I’m at work, so I’m a little time-constricted. I said reverance might be too strong a word, and it is. I know he was a believer, and that he was influenced by the Bible, but he was greatly bothered by the realities and challenges that day-to-day existence presented the average person–and the effects those realities had on people. I should say that I consider him one of the more inspired, forward-thinking individuals ever to walk this planet. Some say insane, some say brilliant. Put me in the latter camp.

  8. DBW says:

    BTW–don’t you just love how I’m always commenting on something from days before. “C’mon, you jagweed, keep up!”

  9. mutecypher says:

    To misquote Yoda and apply it to Blake, “Luminous Beings are we, not this crude flesh.” He was as luminous as the angels he saw in the trees. I think I’ve commented during one of your past Blake posts, I recall crying when he died at the end of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography.

  10. sheila says:

    DBW – jagweed! A new one! I like it!!

    There’s something really intense and intuitive in the way he writes about children – they are heartbreaking poems. I can’t believe that he felt ‘well, a better life is coming for you, my child’ – I know that’s not what you meant, but your comment has made me wonder what other critics have said about that last line. I am with Paglia (no surprise there, ha) that this poem turns the spotlight back onto his audience, saying, in essence, “So. Here is the problem. What are you gonna do about it?”

  11. sheila says:

    Mutecypher – his stuff (and he) does emit a blinding light, doesn’t it? I find him actually hard to take sometimes. I have to sneak up on him in order to bear it.

    I haven’t read the biography. I must!

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