Blake as Visionary
In order to start to come to terms
with Blake’s poetry it is important first of all to understand Blake’s
characteristic ‘ways of seeing’. Blake’s visionary perspective which transforms
reality may be unusual but this does not mean that he fails to see the material
world accurately and clearly. This is especially true when he is describing
social abuses.
‘Twas on a
Holy Thursday, those innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two in red and blue and green,
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like
In this example, Blake’s description
is more than documentary. His own capacity for imaginative
insight was superior to the scientific perspective which relied on the eye to
see and the reason to weigh and measure the physical world. Blake blamed this limited
way of seeing on
… May God us keep
From single vision and
(Letter in the form of a poem, to Thomas Butts, 22nd November
1802)
Elsewhere, in the same poem Blake claims that there are even more complex
ways of seeing:
Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision
is given to me
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold always.
‘Here Blake describes different
levels of imaginative perception. While we must always reject the single vision
of the scientists and cultivate twofold vision, there are other levels of
perception which enable us to envisage an earthly paradise (Beulah) - the
threefold vision which comes to us in dreams – and best of all the fourfold
vision which vouchsafes a glimpse of the supreme unity of heaven.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for example, the threefold vision
creates a union of rationality and imagination (i.e. heaven and hell). The result
is that we get a glimpse of an earthly paradise. In this case the liberation of
humanity from the tyranny of Church and Stale. Crucially, Blake believed it was
insufficient to rely on the eye to see the world as the scientists and materialists
did. The eye was a useful tool but insufficient unless working in combination
with the creative imagination which could transform mere sensory impressions
and conjure up the visionary levels.
The fourfold vision is the supreme
Insight which reconciles all of the other levels offering an almost mystical insight
into the nature of the cosmos. The point is made in the wonderful lines which
open the poem entitled Auguries of
Innocence. The Imagination, says Blake, can help us:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your
hand
And eternity in an hour.
In Songs of Innocence there is a repeated pattern in which the poet’s perception
first sees then transforms the material world (twofold vision), then projects an
earthly paradise watched over by a loving God (threefold vision) while conceiving
the whole in terms of a mystical joy immanent throughout the universe (fourfold
vision). An understanding of this, of course, also helps us by contrasts to
come to terms with the evils and corruptions of the fallen, rationalist and
materialist world described in Songs of
Experience.
It is easier to find examples of
different visionary dimensions in Songs
of Innocence, for example in The Echoing
Green. The Lamb, Laughing Song, A Cradle Song, Night,
and A Dream and you can see the ways in which Blake evokes the
particular scene, an ideal and a harmonious universe. However, Experience poems
such as The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found and The Tyger, for
example, also reveal the same process at work.
Blake’s symbolism
A characteristic feature of Blake’s
imaginative vision is his ability to ‘think’ in symbols and images. Because of this,
at first glance it might appear that he is out of touch with everyday life but
this would not be true - and indeed he had a lively awareness of the social and
political realities of his time. As a child, Blake had vivid dreams and nightmares
which evolved into a way of seeing which depended on a complex set of symbols,
and it was through this that he expressed his radical philosophy of life. He dramatized
his ideas by drawing on this symbol system. Properly speaking, this is what we
mean when we describe Blake as a visionary.
Blake’s personal symbol system was
derived from many sources, including his childhood dreams and nightmares, and
from his reading in literature, politics and philosophy. Central to successful
ways of reading Blake, to is to be alert to the novel
way in which he employed some familiar symbols and images. You cannot take it
for granted in Blake’s poems that the symbol means what you expect it to mean.
This is one of the ways in which Blake challenged the conventional values of
his time. For example in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘heaven’ stands for
rationalism, materialism, lack of faith, lack of true humility, repression; ‘hell’
on the other hand, stands for imagination, energy, engagement, freedom, true
spirituality. He even depicts Satan as an heroic,
revolutionary figure.
By careful use of symbolism, the
poem develops from specific observations into a disturbing vision of a society
in crisis. Blake achieves this partly through repetition of words which take on
new levels of symbolic meaning each time they appear.
For example, the first reference to
‘chartered’ sounds innocuous enough and may indeed suggest something worthy - commercial
enterprise, the rights of citizens and so on. But when it is repeated, in the
second line, as a description of the
The poem seems to hinge on the central
symbol of the ‘mind-forged manacles’. In this very powerful symbol, Blake at
once explains the sufferings of the people (their cries and marks) and begins
to open up the causes of their oppression. And while the physical suffering is
real, Blake suggests that the more profound source of the problem lies in
attitudes of mind which are inimical to freedom of thought and imagination. The
manacles signify a prison of contemporary ideologies located in the Church and
State which Blake now goes onto illuminate.
Whenever you read a poem by Blake
you have to explore the symbolism. Some poems will give up their meaning more
easily than others, but some remain elusive and this is part of their power.
Their elusive nature depends crucially on their use of symbolism.
Blake’s Dialectics
In addition to the symbols
themselves, Blake devised particular notions of the nature of symbolic thinking
or ways of thinking in symbols. Blake saw human experience as a constant battle
between two forces, which he called the Spectre and the Emanation. The Spectre was,
all of those things that Blake hated and which he saw as active in late eighteenth-century
life: centrally, the tyranny of the intellect, reason and mechanistic thinking,
all of which gave rise to political oppression and repressive religion. The Emanation, on the other hand, arose from
that which Blake saw as positive: the God-like power of the imagination, instinct
and freedom - all the things that enable human beings to fulfil their
potential. These were the qualities that Blake hoped would be released by the American
and French Revolutions and which he promoted in his own writings.
Blake’s way of seeing is contingent upon
his recognition of the continuing struggle between these opposing forces. This
is what we understand by Blake’s, dialectics: an idea can only be defined by
the existence of its opposite. Thus the dialectical thinker has a love of
paradox, rejects categorisation, and accepts the inevitability of conflict and
change. New perceptions arise from the series of conflicts that arise when
opposing ideas clash. The difference between Blake and what he saw as the oppressors
in eighteenth century
This is dearly illustrated in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell where Blake introduces the doctrine of contraries: without
contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy,
love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring
what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason,
evil is the active springing from energy. Good is heaven; evil is hell.
Blake believed that the French
Revolution marked the beginning of a new era, a new heaven on earth, a heaven of
liberty and equality. This had been initiated, however, by the ‘hell’ of the
revolutionary energies released. The old order of State and Church would
certainly view these events as ‘hell’. Paradoxically, Blake’s vision sees these
‘Infernal’ energies as creating a true ‘heaven’, i.e. the marriage of heaven
and hell.
In Songs of Innocence and of Experience Blake goes onto give poetic expression
to some of these more abstract ideas. In the light of the above, we begin to
develop an understanding of Blake’s motives in pairing collections of poems of
‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’. Blake wants to heighten the reader’s awareness of
the two ‘contrary states of the human soul’ by playing them off against each other.
His dialectical habit of mind is not only evident across the collections, but
also within individual poems in each collection. There are some obviously
paired poems which examine the contrary states but equally, many of the
individual poems in each collection show an awareness of the contrary state, i.e.
some poems in Songs of Innocence,
hint at the perils of experience, while some poems in Songs of Experience resonate with a sense of the absence of
innocence, a sense of loss.