S. Eliot’s

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

Blake’s poetic urge, it is clear, was not to startle, to tease the. mind into fresh combinations, but to make tangible, out of the wealth of relationships he carried in his mind, some portion of it equal to his vision of the life of man. How swiftly and emphatically he turns, at the first line of the fourth stanza, to

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

But most stands for: what I have described thus far is not the full horror of London, my city; not anything like what I have to tell you! And he then gives back, in eighteen words, the city in which young girls are forced into prostitution; in which their exile from respectable society, like the unhappiness of the Soldier, expresses itself in a physical threat to another. The Soldier accuses the Palace with his blood; the prostitute curses with infection the young husband who has been with her; the “plague” finally kills the new-born child. The carriage that went to the church for a marriage ends at the grave as a hearse. Nothing can equal the bite of “blights with plagues,” the almost visible thrust of the infection. And thanks to Blake’s happy feeling for capitals, which he used with a painter’s eye to distinguish the height of his concepts, Marriage stands above the rest in the last sentence of the poem, and swiftly falls into a hearse.

 

These are some of the poem’s details, but they are not the poem. For the poem is to be grasped only by the moral imagination, as a shuddering vision of the mind. The title is a city, as the city is the present human world on the threshold of the industrial revolution. We are to read from the title to the last word, from London to its inner death, in one movement of human sympathy and arousal. This, in its simplest sense, is the key to Blake’s meaning of vision. Vision is his master-word, not mysticism or soul. For vision represents the total imagination of man made tangible and direct in works of art. And as the metric structure of the poem encloses, in each line-frame of sharply enclosed syllables, the sight of man entering fully into the city with all his being—hearing “the mind-forg’d manacles,” the harlot’s disease blasting “the new born infant’s tear,” so the whole poem carries us along, in a single page, while the border designs meanwhile extend the vision by another art.

Blake was artist and poet; he designed his poems to form a single picture. Trained to engraving as a boy, he invented for himself a method of etching a hand-printed poem and an accompanying design on the same page. Only two of his works were ever printed—his first book, Poetical Sketches, most of which he wrote between the ages of twelve and twenty-one, and a long and declamatory celebration of the new world after ’89 called The French Revolution. Neither of these works was ever published. Poetical Sketches was run off for him, with a patronizing and apologetic preface by a Reverend Mathew, who with his wife formed a provincial intellectual society that Blake burlesqued in An Island In The Moon. The French Revolution was printed by a bookseller, Joseph Johnson, who was the center of a radical circle in London that included Blake, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. After England became embroiled with France and a reactionary witch-hunt set after radical intellectuals and sympathizers with the French Republic, Johnson became panicky and left the book in proof. Some of Blake’s greatest poems—“The Everlasting Gospel,” “Auguries of Innocence,” the lyrics that follow Songs of Innocence and of Experience—were found in “The Rossetti Manuscript,” which was bought by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for ten shillings from an attendant at the British Museum. Blake’s most famous works, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, along with his Prophetic Books—The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, Milton, Jerusalem, etc.—were done entirely by his method of “illuminated printing.” Blake said he got the inspiration for this technique from the spirit of his dead brother Robert, the only member of his family with whom he had common sympathies. This may be true, but it is a pity that Blake had to say so, for it has given people the idea ever since that Blake’s visions were of the kind limited to a séance.

Blake’s general technique is now clear. He etched his poems and designs in relief, with acid on copper. He corroded with acid the unused portions of the plate—characteristically, this became a symbol in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell of the corrosion of dead matter by the visionary human imagination. Each print-page as it was taken off the press was colored by hand. Each copy of a work was planned in a different color scheme. There are probably no handmade books in the world more beautiful. The only models for Blake were, of course, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But Blake worked in an entirely different spirit.