UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA,

MASTER, STUDII DE LIMBĂ ȘI LITERATURI ANGLO-AMERICANE

ANUL II, SEMESTRUL II

CRAIOVA, MAI 2019

THE COMPLEXITY OF WILLIAM BLAKE- POET AND PAINTER

Student: Bărbulescu Consuela Maria

Profesor: Lect. Univ. dr. Georgiana Dilă

When thinking about William Blake, one must consider the many features of his
prolific life: he was a poet who sang of the human soul, a painter, an engraver, and a seer.
Born in 1757 into a humble residence, he was thought the art of engraving, a skill he would
use to illustrate the majority of his own poetical works.

Having a strong sense of religion, he based most of his works on the Bible and did
illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. He also claimed to have
visions, seeing God’s head at his window, or a tree filled with angels; or even having
conversations with Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel. One of his prophetic books, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, convey his own creation and interpretation of symbolic
characters. Satan and Hell stand for freedom and energy, while Heaven is associated with
authoritarianism. The book channels Blake’s personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs,
condemning any kind of realism.

As an artist he studied the works of Raphael and Michelangelo, who influenced his
later drawings of muscular bodies. Having a passion for both visual arts and writing, Blake
created the so called “illuminated printing”, combining the two, after his brother died and
appeared to him in a dream to dictate his first poem. Magnificent drawings accompanied
many of his verses.
 As a poet, he offers originality, personal vision and techniques to his works, being
oftentimes regarded as an early Romantic. Having vision as a background, he stated that, for
him, the poet is a prophet looking deeper into reality. The power of imagination in art is more
important than reason, because it is through imagination that one can experience the world.
Some techniques used in the process of creation are symbolism, repetitions and references to
the senses.

Blake believed in dualism, in one’s fragmentation into spirituality and physical form,
due, in part, to Christianity. In his view, Good and evil are more complementary forces, able
to co-exist in our being, and everyday situation. The oppositions of forces that lead our life
balance each other and confer our life harmony.

In the span of five years, he wrote two memorable collections of poems Songs of
Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794). The first revolves around childhood as a
symbol for innocence. Ballads, and hymn-like Poems show musicality, a simple and playful
language, illustrating the divine present in all creation, a Christian pastoral tradition. Some of
the songs here include: The Shepherd, The Lamb, The Little Black Boy, The Chimney
Sweeper, The Little Boy lost, The Little Boy found, and Holy Thursday.

The latter collection is more pessimistic and complex, written in the hard times of the
French Revolution. It shows how, overcoming the age of innocence, a person deals with
darker, more sophisticated thoughts. The poems are more personal and elusive. The poems
mirror those from the first collection and seem somewhat antagonistic. Cruelty and injustice
of adulthood are complementary to the joy and happiness of childhood. Reality changes the
perspective of a mature person, unable to conserve innocence. Nevertheless, maturity and
experience play an important role in self-development, leading to a creative soul. Here we can
name the following poems: The Little Girl Lost, The Little Girl Found, A Dream, The Tyger,
The Lilly, The Little Vagabond, London, A Poison Tree, To Tirzah and The Voice of the
Ancient Bard. Both collections are acclaimed as two of the most original and poignant in
English poetry.

The Lamb and The Tyger are two powerful contrary poems about creation,
incorporated in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience. On the one hand, the speaker
associates the lamb to the innocence of a child, the sacrificial Jesus, symbolizing Godʼs love,
but he then turns the question to the paradox of creation asking: ”Did he who made the lamb
made thee?” referring to the bold, colorful force of nature, the tiger. This suggests Godʼs
capacity for tenderness and dread, creating both the docile lamb and the fiery tiger. The Lamb
explores the power and majesty of God:” Little Lamb who made thee?/ Dost thou know who
made thee?” Being symbolic of Christ, it is only natural to assume that his counterpart is
Lucifer, symbol of Godʼs anger, a creature made up of a series of unanswered questions. The
second poem takes on the darker side of creation, in comparison with the previous one,
showing the dualism of the human soul. The tiger represents the dark shadows of the soul,
born out of the depths of consciousness. The metaphor of fire is used to describe how the tiger
sees or is perceived, suggesting a hellish beginning. The reader sees the process of
imagination in blending together the elements that make the tiger up: ”And what shoulder, &
what art,/Could twist the sinews of thy heart?”

The poems explore the theme of good and evil, and Blake’s position in depicting the
two creatures is firm. To assume that one is decidedly good and the other is evil would be
wrong, as the meekness of the Lamb: ”For he calls himself a Lamb:/ He is meek & he is mild”
and the brightness and energy of the tiger:” Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the
night;” celebrate the duality of the human spirit.

Amidst his creative works, Blake’s engravings were best known with his peers. In
1828, J.T. Smith reported that:

Blake’s talent is not to be seen in his engravings from the designs of other artists, though he
certainly honestly endeavoured to copy the beauties of Stothard, Flaxman, and those masters
set before him by the few publishers who employed him; but his own engravings from his own
mind are the productions which the man of true feeling must ever admire, and the predictions
of Fuseli and Flaxman may hereafter be verified—‘That a time will come when Blake’s finest
works will be as much sought after and treasured up in the portfolios of men of mind, as those
of Michel Angelo are at present.

In drawing his own illustrations for The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, no two
copies of any one page were ever identical, as the coloring would differ, or Blake would add
details not part of the original design, or even paint out others. In The Lamb, for instance, the
little boy is usually naked, but we can sometimes see him with clothing.
 In the illuminated plate of this poem, the
dialogue between the speaker and the gentle animal and
the play of embracing vines and winding trees are
evocative of a natural habitat for the Lamb.

The “two trees with spreading branches

intertwine around and between the stanzas to frame the
entire pastoral scene of the Lamb and the child into a
single unit” and discloses that “the world of Innocence
includes all that one need know of man’s relation to
God” (Mellor, 1974: 4). In both text and illustration we
can see “the stream”, “the mead”, and “the vales”. But as R. B. Kennedy (1970) suggested, it
is the lamb’s lamb-hood “that is significant, the nature of innocent creature of God. Innocence
has a divine source”.

The tiger of Blake is drawn differently in different copies. Blake himself printed and
numbered the plate in brown. It is a good example of a relief etching print containing both
text and image that also demonstrates the manner in which a plate would be printed in a base
color to which watercolor might be added. The second, elaborately colored copy was printed
and colored after Blake’s death by an
unidentified person. David Erdman suggests
that the expression of the tiger varies in
different copies, from smiling to worried, or to
supercilious or to patient. Erdman points out
that “this picture, like the poem it illuminates,
remains one of Blake’s contrived enigmas—a
contrivance forced upon him by the truth, one
feels” (Erdman, 1975: 84)

A.K. Mellor’s position seems to be the most acceptable one. Mellor (1974:65) observes:

The Creator of the tyger possesses, as all men do potentially, the daring imagination and the
sublime wrath necessary to dominate the forces of reason. Man’s expanding Energy can be
channeled into an awe-inspiring, bounded artistic image, the fearful symmetry of this tyger.
But the energy of this tyger is a development of the Innocence of the Lamb, as the
controversial illustration indicates. The tyger is pictured as a gentle, striped, and peaceful beast
 (in Copies B [M.M.] and Z [T.P.]), a creature that fuses the loving gentleness of the Lamb
with the quiet power of Energy at rest. When the murdering dissections of reason are
annihilated, the tyger and the Lamb will lie down together.

Nelson Hilton (1980) has highlighted that just as the lamb and the tiger have one
common creator, so also, William Blake is the maker of “The Lamb” and that of “The Tyger.”
“The lines present - as does the poem - a scene of writing: of framing: of creation which is the
passage from imagination to text, from Blake’s ‘Eternity’ into time, and so practically done
that through its thirteen ‘words’ we assume that creation” (p. 529). If the meek and mild Jesus
Christ, whom John the Baptist described as ‘the Lamb of God’ (John 1:36), could transform
himself and lash the whips of divine wrath upon the merchants, money changers and tax-
collectors at the temple scene (John 2: 13-17), can’t the Creator God make the Lamb and the
Tiger?

Considering the poems ‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tyger’ as complimentary and explaining
the two contrary states of human soul, and analyzing the lines and pictures together in the
context of the Bible, no better solution can be rendered for understanding these two poems,
and through that reach to the core of the mystery of God’s creation.

William Blake (1757–1827) occupies a unique place in the history of Western art. His
creativity included both the visual and literary arts. In his lifetime he was best known as an
engraver; now he is also recognized for his innovative poetry, printmaking, and painting.
Blake's keen perception of the political and social climate found expression throughout his
work. His strong sense of independence is evident in the complex mythology that he
constructed in response to the age of revolution.

In fine, with regard to such an exquisite artist like William Blake, his poetry should
not be treated merely as the words in different print fonts alone, but must be considered in the
totality of Blake’s illuminated painterly writings combined with the background of the Bible
and set in the context of Innocence and Experience constituting the two essential contrary
states of the human soul.
Bibliography:

1. Erdman, D. V. (Ed.). (1975).The Illuminated Blake. London: Oxford Univ. Press.

2. Hilton, N. (1980). Spears, Spheres, and Spiritual Tears: Blake’s Poetry as ‘The Tyger’,
ll. 17-20. Philological Quarterly, 59, 4.
3. Mellor, A. K. (1974).Blake’s Human Form Divine.California: Univ. of California
Press.
4. Kennedy, R. B. (Ed.). (1970).Blake: Songs of Innocence & of Experience and Other
Works. London: Collins Publishers.
5. J.T.Smith, Nollekens and his Times (1828), repeated substantially in his A Book for a
Rainy Day (1845); see Blake Records (1969), pp. 467, 26.