William Blake - ‘cleansing the doors of perception’
INSIGHT’S into the Greats - Priya David
Towards the end of the 18th century the Age of Reason in England had
ceased to be one of Enlightenment. The rational approach to life had
reached a dead end, the influence of the Church, the State and the
ruling classes had become oppressive and repressive. The Industrial
Revolution had begun to blight the countryside and disrupt traditional
ways of life. Art had become repetitive and imitative. There was a need
to discover new modes of thinking and feeling. The French Revolution
across the Channel served to foment the spirit of restlessness.
This was the scene on which the two Williams arrived, Blake and
Wordsworth. As spearheads of the Romantic Revival, both were to disclose
new worlds of experience explorable no longer by the Reason but by the
Imagination. With Wordsworth it was the world of Nature, with William
Blake (!757-1827) it was the world of Human Nature, of which he had a
more profound knowledge than the former.
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William
Blake |
In the “Songs of Innocence and Experience” Blake sets out to
demonstrate these “two contrary states of the human soul.” Innocence is
associated with the joy of childhood, attributable to its freedom from
fear, guilt and oppression and corresponding to man’s Paradisaic state
before the Fall. Experience is associated with the sorrow following the
Fall as caused by corruption and oppression, both of which prevent the
soul from realising its true potential. Accordingly, many of the happy
themes of the first set have their grimmer counterparts in the second,
eg. “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow”, “The Blossom” and “The Sick Rose”.
Blake’s solution is to enable the human soul to achieve its
potential, first by freeing the senses from their domination by the
intellect and having, as he himself put it, “the doors of perception
cleansed”; secondly, by casting off “the mind-forg’d manacles” of human
insitutions and systems. The effect of these resolves on the creative
imagination is captured in what is probably Blake’s best-known quartet
of lines: “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 practice, this means that Blake’s poetic vision and expression are
determined both by a childlike wonder and vitality and by an unshrinking
honesty and energy. It is his ability to synthesize these qualities that
gives his verse its unique appeal, and the best example of this is to be
found, perhaps, in “The Tyger”
“Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright In the forests of the night, What
immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”.....
“And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread
feet?....
“When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with
their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make
thee?” These are only the first, the third and the penultimate of six
verses, but they are enough to demonstrate not only what has been said
above, but the point made by Eliot about Blake, namely that his kind of
poetic honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment.
The terrifyingly mounting impression of the Tiger is achieved not
through descriptive details, other than the reference to its brightness
and symmetry at the outset, but by a series of almost stupefied
questions about the process of its creation. Thus, our attention has
been shifting unawares from the Tiger to its Creator, until, with a
great tonal and rhythmic shift in the penultimat verse, the questions
bear directly on the universal power of the Creator and the “dread”, or
awe-inspiring, implications of his being the maker of the Tiger as well
as of the Lamb.
Central to Blake’s technique is his use of symbolism, as is clear
from the above verses. Blake could actually be called the first and
greatest symbolist in English poetry, anticipating by over a century the
symbolism of Yeats, Eliot and others. Not surprisingly in one who was an
engraver by profession and who personally illustrated the manuscripts of
his poems, he thinks in images rather than in ideas. This faculty
enables him to express the deepest thoughts in the simplest language.
“The Sick Rose” provides the perfect example in just two verses:
“O Rose thou art sick, The invisible worm, That flies in the night In
the howling storm:
“Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy; And his dark secret love Does
thy life destroy.”
We only need to consider the implications of the imagery. The
sickness of the rose suggests the defilement of that which is initially
beautiful and innocent: the invisible worm of the night suggests the
stealthy, ineluctable manner is which the agent of corruption, whether
demonic (“worm” being an ancient alternate for “dragon”) or human, acts.
The howling storm suggests the unrelenting external pressures on any
effort to maintain innocence; crimson joy and dark secret love suggest
the human propensity for corruption and the compulsive nature of illicit
infatuation. The poem horrifyingly epitomises the message of the Songs
of Innocence and Experience and dramatically demonstrates Blake’
profound knowledge of human nature.
Eliot also remarked that Blake’s poetry, because of its honesty, has
the unpleasantness of great poetry. Indeed he was unpopular in his time
for this reason. The above treatment of the rose seemed a travesty of
the conventional concept of the rose as a symbol of true love, vide
Burns; “My Luve’s like a red, red rose.”
This “unpleasantness” is particularly apparent in “London” where
Blake condemns the superior authorities of Church, Crown, State and
Commerce for the hypocrisy and oppression that lead to the
impoverishment and corruption of society. “How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appals; 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.”
Blake’s logic, as these lines show, is essentially a logic of the
imagination. It allows him to suggest a world of meaning in a few brief
but searingly vivid images, omitting connective material.
We are grateful for the sheer honesty of his poetic vision, even when
it is frightening, and the sheer artistry with which he communicates it
to us.
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