WILLIAM BLAKE

As a Visionary Poet

William Blake (1757-1827) was not a lyrical poet but a great visionary.

How visionary
As a visionary, he always looks for things beyond what is immediate and palpable. His search for the glories and the terrors of the world of spirit is innate, and

Compare
unlike Wordsworth who discovers pantheistic entity that is both immanent in and transcendent from the universe, manifest in the gracious spirit of nature, Blake feels with the eye of one who cannot help dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The visionary in him may and will overpower the artist, and a wild confusion of imagery often blurs his work whether as a draughtsman and a singer. But if at times it drowns his clarity and simplicity, it gives a phantom touch of extraordinary subtlety, and to much of his poetry an extraordinary beauty, that lifts his lyric faculty into an insurmountable height.
He drew like Burns, the peasant of Scotland, inspiration from nature, but with a mystical rapture alien to the Scots singer. Blake cares for the splendour of human love, or the rapture of the sun and the sky, only so far as it carries him to experience the state of some inner illumination.

Industrial Revolution
While the Industrial revolution disgusted him, he saw in the simple joys and cheeriness of ordinary life a Paradise regained. And In the Songs of Innocence, he entered an Eden from which man had long been alienated. No poet, not even Wordsworth, drew charm from simpler sources than Blake; and none revelled with such gay and exquisite feelings of discovery. If he had the naturalness and the spontaneity of a child, he had also his wild luxurious fancy; and a quaint, delicious fantasy binds by threads of shimmering gossamer all living things, uniting them in a spirit of joyous abandon and tender sympathy. But the rapture of Blake is not altogether unreflective; while he loves Eden, he is not deaf to the ugly clamour of the world outside. If he wrote the Songs of Innocence, he also wrote Songs of Experience. Side by side with the rapturous joy he felt the bitterness of hate and the miseries and complexities that afflict the soul of an adult man.

Both the naturalism and mysticism of the Romantic Revival found expression in Blake. On this point, he differs from pioneers like Burns, who is simply naturalistic, or Cowper, who is only slightly touched by mysticism. On the naturalistic side, he deals with the simplest phases of life; with the love of flowers, hills and streams, the blue sky, the brooding clouds. But the mystical vision of the poet is always transforming these familiar things, unearthing their obscure aspects and spiritualising the commonplace into something strange and wonderful.


Mysticism
Mysticism in poetry is blended usually with a wistful melancholy. “The desire of the moth for the star and the night for the morrow” animates the poet’s soul; and in his thirst for eternity, he feels more and more dissatisfied with the show of life.

Blake as Mystic
But Blake is an exception. He is joyful mystic; for him the morning stars sing together, and the splendour of life outweighs its shadows. There are mournful regrets in his verse, no sighing for a day that is dead. Evil rouses his anger, not his tears. Sorrow he accepts cheerfully as a necessary twin of joy.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine ;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And, when this we rightly know,
Safely through the world we go.