The Poetry and Belief of William Blake

A talk given at Choral Evensong 23 February 2020
 
Introduction

William Blake’s grave is well worth a visit. It’s in Bunhill Fields Cemetery off City Road. The precise spot was only rediscovered two years ago and it has a beautiful new memorial stone. The inscription begins with the words ‘William Blake 1757-1827: Poet Artist Prophet’.

There is something about William Blake that attracts a very wide range of people. Poets and novelists, hippies and ‘New Agers’, politicians and atheists and Christians.
It is odd that those with no faith should be so attracted to a man who has been described as the greatest religious poet since Milton. And it is odd that so many Christians should be attracted to a man who despised organised religion and set foot in church only three times in his life – at his baptism, at his wedding and at his funeral. I suspect Blake would have been amused by this irony – he thrived on contradictions.  ‘Without contraries there is no progression’ he wrote.

I am going to do a quick gallop through my (admittedly limited) understanding of how Blake’s poetry reflected his belief. In doing this, I will not have time to dwell on favourite poems such as ‘The Lamb’ or ‘The Tyger’ and I will definitely not have time to unpack the short poem ‘Jerusalem’ which was set to music by Hubert Parry. Maybe another talk another time on that one.

 ‘Poet. Artist. Prophet’. The last of these is the most important. His art and poetry were vehicles for his prophetic stance. And because he decorated and illustrated his poetry, the poetry and pictures weave together. They illuminate each other.  And they illuminate his prophetic views.
 
Prophet

Blake’s parents were Dissenters and he grew up with a deep love of the Bible. He was inspired by the prophets, particularly Isaiah and Ezekiel and he took from them two aspects of his prophetic mission.  

Vision

Firstly he was a visionary. He saw things that other people did not see. As a child he famously saw angels on Peckham Rye. He saw the sun not as a round object in the sky but ‘an innumerable Company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God almighty’

His vision was biblically inspired. The final verses of ‘The Tyger’  have resonances with the Book of Job, with the creation narrative of Genesis and of course the Lamb of God of the Gospels:
 
Justice

The second element of Blake’s prophetic mission, which he also took from Isaiah and Ezekiel, was a fierce hatred of social injustice.  This probably best heard in ‘London’ from Songs of Innocence and Experience.

            I wander thro’ each charter’d street
            Near where the charter’d Thames doth flow.
            And mark in every face I meet
            Marks of weakness, marks of woe
            In every cry of every Man
            In every Infants cry of fear,
            In every voice; in every ban,
            The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
            How the Chimney-sweepers cry
            Every blackning Church appalls
            And the hapless Soldiers sigh
            Runs in blood down Palace walls
            But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
            How the youthful Harlots curse
            Blasts the new-born Infants tear  
            And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

            (London, Songs of Innocence and Experience)

A vivid picture of those at the bottom of the heap in late 18th century London including children forced to work as chimney sweeps and prostitutes.   It is not surprising that Blake’s biblically inspired desire for social justice merged into political radicalism. As Blake said:

            The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.

            (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 12)
 
The Church

So far so good. But for those of us who profess to be Christians, this is where it starts getting uncomfortable. Blake despised the established church. He hated it for defining and limiting what people should believe. He hated it for its closeness to government and the legitimacy it gave to war and exploitation.

He hated the church for the hypocritical way it abused honourable characteristics for its own ends. Many of the short poems in the ‘Songs of Experience’ express this. The church used humility and meekness to make people complicit in their own exploitation. And it promoted pity and charity to make people feel better about the harm they inflicted on others. In ‘The Human Abstract’ he wrote:

            Pity would be no more
            If we did not make somebody Poor
            And mercy no more could be
            If all were happy as we

            (The Human Abstract)

He also despised the church for the way it limited and condemned the physical expression of love.

So Blake hated the church and he condemned its complicity in the evils of society. But he did this as a prophet and from the standpoint of a deep faith.
 
So what was Blake’s faith?

Blake’s faith and vision did not spring out of nowhere.  It owes much to his dissenting background and his links with sects which dated back to the time of the Civil War, particularly the Swedenborgians and the marvellously named ‘Muggletonians’.

The limits of creation and false religion

We can get a clear-ish picture of his religion in his long prophetic poems. Blake developed his own mythology to tell the Christian story of Creation, Fall and Salvation. He starts his mythology just before the creation story of Genesis. The universe was then the setting for the Eternals, everlasting beings in an unlimited universe. One of their number, Urizen, grows angry and withdraws from the others, creating a world that imprisons himself and everything in that world.

He created a world of matter and space:

            And a roof, vast petrific around,
            On all sides he fram’d: like a womb;
            Where thousands of rivers in veins
            Of blood pour down the mountains to cool
            The eternal fires beating without
            From Eternals; & like a black globe
            View’d by sons of Eternity, standing
            On the shore of the infinite ocean
            Like a human heart struggling and beating
            The vast world of Urizen appear’d.
   
And a world of time:
 
           And turn’d restless the tongs; and the hammer
           Incessant beat; forging chains new & new
           Numb’ring with links, hours, days and years
   
The famous painting the Ancient of Days shows Urizen at work, creating by measuring and limiting. It is the world as conceived by Enlightenment thinkers such as Newton;  the world of reason that limits imagination  Urizen is the false god that Blake thought most people worshipped every Sunday in church: the false god who delighted in punishing Adam and Eve and who required the death of his son to put things right.  The false God whose worship restricts and distorts the human spirit, creating the net of false religion.
 
Urizen, the figure with the compasses, says Mark Vernon, is everything that the true God is not.

God in Christ and in us all

So what, for Blake was true religion? True religion is Jesus Christ, ‘the Eternal Divine Humanity’ (Milton, plate 42). Jesus overcomes the damage inflicted on the world by false religion.  At the heart of this is the Incarnation, God becoming human in the form of Jesus Christ.

          But then I rais’d up Whitefield, Palamabron raisd up Westley.    
God became human in Jesus. It is orthodox Christianity to extend this to see humans as made in the likeness of God, to see something of God in each other. But Blake took this further. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ he said:

          God only acts and is, in existing beings of men  
 
So for Blake, once God had taken human form, then the entirety of God was solely contained within that human form, first in Jesus and then in every human. He once said to a friend:

            He (Christ) is the only God but then so am I and so are you’

And he saw God as being contained, embodied, particularly in the human imagination. The true religion of Jesus is the unrestrained use of imagination.

God in place

Incarnation involves people. It also involves geography. The story of Jesus’ human life is strongly linked to places: Nazareth, Galilee, Bethany, Jerusalem. So too Blake’s mythology is linked to real places, the places he lived in, England and in particular London. We see struggles on a cosmic scale, but the feet rest firmly on known ground. I love this passage from ‘Milton’:
            To Finchley north: to Norwood south…
          Loud sounds the Hammer of Los, and loud his Bellows Is heard
There is plenty more where that came from. Where you are is important. And it is there, wherever it is, that you are called to build Jerusalem.

God in the detail

And for Blake incarnation also involved things as well as people.  Blake’s vision told him that we can see God and the infinite not only in humans but in everything, even the tiniest thing, if we only had the right way of looking. In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ he proclaimed:
 
And from ‘Auguries of Innocence’:
 
There is no separation of matter and spirit, body and soul. The infinite is contained within everything.
 
Conclusion

Blake’s beliefs are Christian, but to misquote Mr Spock, ‘It’s Christianity, Jim, but not necessarily as we know it’. Blake shares with all Christians a strong belief in the great act of salvation, the coming of Jesus to restore humanity to the state of goodness and happiness intended for it.

His understanding of the story of salvation goes beyond that held by many Christians. But this is what makes him so fascinating and this is what makes him accessible to those who do not share in that Christian story. He gives us a vision which calls for an end to oppression and exploitation. A vision in which humanity is at the centre, in which human imagination and creativity are the force for good in the world.

For those of us who profess to be Christians, his vision holds up a challenging and uncomfortable mirror.   What role is our religion, our church, playing in the world? Do we protest when it is silent or complicit when power exploits or causes hurt? Do we protest when it abuses the qualities of humility and obedience to silence people when wrong has been done to them? Do we protest when it calls for pity and charity in the face of injustice, instead of calling for the wrongs to be righted?

However his vision also challenges us to see the story of salvation not as the old old story but something that is happening here and now.  God is here and works here, in us, in Greenwich. (Other places are of course available). Blake’s poetry gives us eyes to see God in our fellow creatures, and the living and inanimate objects all around us.  ‘Every thing that lives is holy’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell plate 27)

Blake is difficult and contradictory, and leaves us with more questions than answers. But as Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James Piccadilly said, God in Christ is big enough to carry all our questions and big enough for all our uncertainties.  Blake’s vision of the world and his attempt at truth telling can be inspiring and energizing. He offers us something precious. We should not be afraid to take hold of it. In the words carved on his new gravestone:
 
          I give you the end of a golden string
          Only wind it into a ball:
          It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
          Built in Jerusalem’s Wall
   
David McEvoy
23 February 2020