The Life of Poet William Blake documentary (1995)

hello and did those feet in ancient times walk upon England's mountain green Jerusalem is known and even sung by almost everyone today the man who wrote the words and many other poems such as Tiger Tiger William Blake died in 1827 in total obscurity William Blake spent his life almost entirely in London working as an engraver by day and pursuing his own personal vision by night he was considered eccentric even mad by his contemporaries he saw angels and conversed with spirits visions which to him were as real as the material world around him a hundred years later Blake was recognized as an enormous literary figure and a powerful and original painter for many - Blake is a prophetic voice almost a religion in himself his was a world in which all of life the imagination reason the concrete and spiritual worlds were connected a view completely at odds with the science of the day but which now charms with some of the thinking emerging at the end of our millennium last week a new biography by Peter Ackroyd was published and in Davy Thomas's film he is our principal guide to Blake's visionary imagination what it would be questioned when the Sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea oh no no I see an innumerable company of the heavenly hosts crying holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty Jerusalem is one of the most complicated poems Blake ever wrote and did those feats refers not Jesus but to Joseph of Arimathea a disciple who came to these islands in 1863 and according to legend established a Christian faith yeah dark satanic Mills now the gentleman impression seems to be that Blake is referring here to the Industrial Revolution and to the north of England in fact he was doing nothing of the kind the Mills for him was an abstract symbol of Newtonian mechanism and Newtonian materialism but more importantly on Blackfriars Road just outside Lambeth where he lived the Albion Mills the first industrial flour processing plant in the country was burnt down in 1791 he would have passed the blackened ruin of the Albion Mills the whole time [Music] the bow a burning gold the hours of desire or one level of course images of sexual gratification a reflection at least of his mundane existence on the earth although aptly transcended those mundane references by turning them into a hymn to spiritual power [Music] plate never left London except once in the whole course of his life he wrote the poem we think in Sussex we all know Jerusalem everyone has sung it at some point or other in their lives and it's become a sort of unofficial national anthem William Blake wrote it here in Feltham but it's not quite the poem it seems it's not a him at all it's not even a poem it's a preface to one of his prophetic books Jerusalem for Blake meant the divine body of Jesus it meant the palace of the imagination it meant the emanation of the giant Albion all concepts which meant a great deal to him but probably don't meal mean a great deal to the people who sing it today it's hardly likely that he would have approved of his words being used as a kind of celebration of national consciousness he was an anti-monarchist he did not support the established church he was at the center in every sense even in this garden he was accused of using treasonous words against the king and was put on trial for sedition in Chichester what happened was this he found a soldier called private John Schofield lounging about as he put it in the garden Blake uttered various seditious sentiments one of them being damned the king he was then summoned to appear in front of a court and the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty but for Blake it was a period of extraordinary nervous fear the whole weight of the state and authority fell down upon him it was as if his entire work was being put on trial blake grew up into a city which was dark violent repressive throughout his lifetime Ingram is almost continually at war with results of blockades famines riots and strikes war crimes against the French Revolution and the Gordon liason 1780 so London was for many days and sometimes weeks an end at the mercy of mobs and the authorities were so fearful that massive measures of the profession were taken so for Blake it was like living in a maelstrom well Blake was in almost every respect typical Londoner born in 4th Street Soho a guy who earned his living orders life he wasn't this mad visionary living in the garret first of all he wasn't engravers apprentice then was a shopkeeper and then he spent the rest of his life as a jobbing engraver but you got to think of this guy earning his living all the time and only able to work on his own time in complete isolation he was disparaged he was neglected he was ignored he was ridiculed his poetry wasn't read his art wasn't taken seriously but he will come to the essential genius of the man he was a cockney he was stubborn he was a visionary he knew these visions were real so what did he do he carried on writing and painting he created a new form of art he created the relief edging technique by which words and images were put together and now we realize that those works which he completed in utter obscurity are some of the finest of the whole 18th century one of his paintings is inscribed the phrase a laborer upward into Futurity I think there came a point when he realized that that was going to be his audience it was the audience of eternity as it were I am perfectly content to carry on my visionary studies here uninvent and eternity see visions dream dreams and prophesy and speak parables free from the doubts of other mortals but only in London can I do this my London it is odd how this city of necessities has become a city of elegance there are as many booksellers as there are butchers and every engraver turns away work he isn't the time to finish yet no one brings work to me mad man I have been called fool they call me yet I wonder which they Envy the or me I laugh at the goddess fortune for I know she's the devil's servant ready to kiss anyone's ass I labour upwards into Futurity I can think of no other great artist in history so cut off from success and even an audience in his time I can think of none there is extent but on the other hand he kept remarkably cheerful didn't he he would talk of the great audience in the sky someday would do injustice as indeed they have but at the time he was compelled to do what he had to do I mean what is the thing about man of talent does what he can mannered genius does what he must remember was a man of genius it was there and also a real sense of joy about life I mean they died singing he sang his poetry always whenever he got the chance to we don't know exactly what melodies he he employed but we know he would sing to friends it's singer parties he'd sing to his wife and sing too you know in gatherings in a sense he thought of himself as a bard now it's important to remember that for him the body cloyce was something very very central it was almost the origin of his genius he had read the Bible as a child he had read Milton and he thought in combining the combining Milton he was creating a public voice and a prophetic voice which would reawaken the spiritual longings of the English people but the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled to create a little flower is the wisdom of Ages piping down the valleys wild piping songs of Pleasant Glee on a cloud I saw a child and he smiling said to me Piper sit thee down and write in a book that all may read so he vanished from my sight and I plucked a holla read and I made a rural pad and I stained the water clear and I wrote my happy songs every child major Lake himself used instruments of the day probably the church organ or the pump organ or harmonium and what I have here on my lap is a miniature pump organ it has a bellows and keys it has two and a half octaves so it's probably not that different from the instrument that Blake may have used he was an 18th century Londoner in an 18th century setting so he what was he listening to street ballads popular songs the Methodist hymns of the period all the songs nares in the air around him and those are precisely the sources from which some of his great lyrics spring was the greatest poet of london in the sense that it's sounds and sights and images and words Berber ate through his prophetic books as well as through his lyrics but for him London was not just the city of the poor and the oppressed as it was but was also the city he called infinite London spiritual 4-fold London he saw eternity in the streets of London for him it was a visionary city as well as a real city and he could understand the visionary truth of his own imagination even as he walked through the streets of London i behold london a human awful wonder of God he says return albian return I give myself for thee my streets are my ideas of imagination I write in South Molton Street what I both see and hear I see thee often parent land in light behold I see [Music] [Applause] [Music] when I was a child I had a similar experience where I was on I think it was Kings Way and I was walking down King's way and very suddenly the people walking through the streets the traffic the the hive of movement suddenly was transformed lines of light which seemed to have some ulterior and grander movement which I didn't quite understand but I I was realized at that time that London itself could be seen as an organism and Blake himself has has the very same sense so for him London was a spiritual reality it was part of the divine vision the fields from Islington to Marylebone to Primrose Hill and st. John's Wood were builded over with pillars of gold and their jerusalem's pillars stood [Music] my mother groaned my father wept into the dangerous world I left helpless naked piping loud like a fiend hidden a cloud I was put to mr. Parr school of drawing in my tenth year the school was on the left-hand side of the Strand as you go city wood there was no drawing from the living figure and ever since then I've thought that drawing from life is more like drawing from death nature weakens deadens and destroys imagination in me as a boy I could stand for hours looking at pictures in simply fascination I was eventually apprenticed at the age of 14 to Bezier the engraver so that I might earn a living he sent me off to Westminster Abbey every day he gave me copy the likenesses of the ancient Nobles from their monuments Blake was the last great religious artist England has ever produced but there was no religious tradition which he could draw upon so he went back to the effigies he knew in Westminster Abbey in order to recreate an art of visionary clarity and so single-handedly he created his own religious iconography a spiritual art which has no predecessors and certainly no successes he saw himself attached to and wanted to become part of an ancient English tradition that's why he was so interested in the Druids that's why he created the myth of Albion which is the old name of England he wanted to connect himself with a medieval Gothic English tradition which he thought was being ignored and despised by his contemporaries and that's why he went back to Westminster Abbey again and again once while I was there I saw a line of monks walk towards me they talked softly amongst themselves and I strained to hear their voices I wanted to call out to them but the vision was so beautiful so serene that I did not dare to break the spell the point about Blake's visions is there were not some romantic epiphany or some occasional phenomenon he saw them continually he saw them from his earliest childhood they distracted him in company that's why sometimes seems so out of place other people because he could see something behind their shoulder perhaps they interfered with his work there are times when he simply couldn't work because there were visions around him they reduced him to poverty sometimes they oppressed him to the point of madness and sometimes they elevated into the point of spiritual vision he started seeing them when he's very very young I think about the age of three or four he saw God peeping from the window in Broad Street it was at the age of four that God first showed me his face when he put his head to the window and set me screaming this was undoubtedly a cause for some concern to my honest parents and I confess I'm eternally grateful to my father for not whipping me then as he threatened to do and to my mother for the curious smile she lent to my defense because of this experience and others like it they were afraid to send me to school and it was my mother who taught me to read and write I taught myself Green and Latin and even now I'm learning Hebrew the Testament is my chief master for it is the true source of all knowledge I thank God I never was sent to school to be flogged into following the style of a fool me instead I would set out on endless walks I was a strange youth no doubt once in a field near Dulwich there was a tree amongst whose branches glistening angels clustered and sang the angels look to me like thoughts be spangling every bough like stars a dearest to my heart was my brother Robert barber when he was ill and the pain wrote too much to bear he would cry out and I would lie down beside him and put my arms round him and hold him while he shook Robert Blake was William Blake's younger brother he of all the Blake family he was the one closest to William Blake himself and the one William Blake shared in some part is genius he said he saw Robert Blake in vision so the spirit of Robert Blake remained with him for the rest of his life in a sense it was Blake's brother Robert who introduced Blake to the work of Emanuel Swedenborg who was a visionary formulating a series of father died very young and Blake set by his bedside for two weeks as he lay dying and then at the moment of death Blake saw the spirit of his dead father rising to the ceiling clapping his hands for joy as he put it one night the room grew cold Robert looked up over my shoulder and pointed to the window I turned to look and at that precise moment I saw a star fall and when I turned back to Robert I saw his soul rising to God clapping his hands for joy and singing in the spirit Swedenborg talked about his visions quite openly he was taken up to heaven and conversed with angels for example now that sense of life that sense of visionary life is of course something which appealed to Blake very deeply here at last was confirmation that someone other than himself conceived of visions in the same way as Blake did swedenborgianism of course was only one of a number of sects in the 1780s and 1790s you see an extravagant may large of political dissenters radicals mesmerist s-- spiritualists sexual magicians conjurer's and so forth that's the community in which Blake really has his being this working-class artisan tradition of dissent whether it's political spiritual or religious when he was a apprentice engraver others of him was the Freemasons poor then the Freemasons to heaven so from a very early age he was used to what you might call the occult or occluded side of spirituality this was in Bloomsbury in great Queen Street now Blake always had a very strong sense of place there's no one who had quite a strong sense of place as he did and he knew London to be a vision of eternity the peculiar thing is that in the area he knew very well which is the area Bloomsbury radical cults surfaced throughout the period of his own life and the same area still houses other spiritual or radical sects and we have the British Museum itself of which one of its most famous librarians was an astrologist which had garnet we have the Theosophists we have the order of the Golden Dawn we have the astrological bookshop and the occult bookshop we have the Freemasons we have the Swedenborg Ian's still and what was it about the the Swedenborg in three sets which so attractive what were the what was specifically different and unique about well it was sort of as I understand it a new understanding of what Christianity should really be about and a new understanding of what is in the Bible and I think things are particularly appealed to many was the idea of the reality of the afterlife I remember the Blake just before he joined the Swedenborg in church had had a vision of his brother Robert on his deathbed yes I can explain about that process of the spiritual the physical form being you assumed well Swede Burke says this world is just a preparation for our future life to Eternity and that there is another world it's not in time and space but it is around us all the time and the spirits are around us but we don't see them in our earth with our earthly eyes but when we die people are that go to this other world where they live a life very similar to this one and human formed exactly yes and if they are happy together they live together even as husband and wife which again was a very appealing idea to some people so father like making his wife you know serving Kathryn says as I speak after his death I speak to William hourly and daily in the spirit you think that might be literally true yes that's what she understood and you think that's nothing absurd not at all I've been married for 45 years - my dear Catherine Kate she is a remarkable woman and she has never complained in all these years Kate knows that I'm commanded by the spirits to write and to paint so when the cupboard is bare she simply lays an empty plate on the table to remind me that we must eat hate the point about Katherine I think that without her presence in his life he probably would never been able to create she cooked his food she made his clothes she cooked with their poverty but more importantly she shared his visions throughout his life Blake emphasized what he called sexual energy energies eternal delight she used to say even at the end of his life he was talking about the importance of polygamy and promiscuity as emblems of the human condition there's that marvelous line in his poetry about what a man and woman does desire the lineaments of gratified desire now as far as one can tell that was a theoretical statement in his part there's no evidence he was everyone faithful to captain but it's very important to realize that part of his visionary and spiritual capacity and understanding was this celebration of sexual license celebration of energy celebration of desire he said sooner murder an infant in a cradle than the Sun active desires and he joined the Swedenborgian new church in 1789 above the portal of the chapel were the words now it is allowable because as far as he was concerned the enemy was the established Church I went to the garden of love and saw what I never had seen that chapel was built in the myths where I used to play on the green and the gates of this chapel was shut and thou shalt not read over the door so I turned to the garden of love that so many sweet flowers bore and I saw it was filled with graves and tombstones where flowers should be and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires love there is a smile of love and there is a smile of deceit and there is a smile of smiles in which these two smiles meet even say no word is an accident it has to be right but are the priests in black gowns are making their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires no wonder first of all generation looked again at him and thought there was more to him than what was being sung in schools in Jerusalem and the and the big albert hall meetings and began to listen Tyger Tyger burning bright in the forests of the night what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry paradigm in what distant deeps or skies burned the fire on what Lee there he is fired what the hand dare seize the fire what art could twist the sinews of my heart and when my heart began to beat what and then what red feet first of all the rhythm as trochaic is exquisite representation of heartbeat open boom boom boom and when the heart began to beat what dread and and what red so that the consonants of the heartbeat and the trochaic rhythm are the same and then you realize that the poem means is that the both the tiger and the Lambros out of the human imaginative heart that we created these polar opposites out of our own hearts bodies imagination then the whole thing is a car a unified crystal what the hammer what the chain in what furnace was thy brain what the anvil what dread grasp dare its deadly terrors clasp 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 Tyger Tyger burning bright in the forests of the night what immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry [Music] when Blake exhibited his paintings of course they were ridiculed as being offensive muddy uninteresting to primitive it was considered the work of a madman of a fool who was getting too big for his boots portrait painting I'll be damned if we stoop to portrait painting we'd start with a line the outline the bounding line the great and golden rule of art as well as of life is this the more distinct sharp and wiry the bounding line the more perfect the work of heart great inventors in all ages knew this and they know each other by this line Raphael and Michelangelo and albert durer are known by this and by this alone leave out this line and you leave out life itself for all is chaos again Blake thoughts on one level as an art of outline it's not a pure form that's because like dura dura said my figures come from within by which he meant he painted from his imagination he didn't paint or we produce the natural world that was exactly Blake's own sense of his art that's why I love medieval art in general he wanted an art which was almost monumental stark heroic he wanted an art which was both grand but also very clear he wanted an art which suggested the spiritual outline of the human form rather than the visible outline of the human form as a result he hated what he called the blots and blurs of oil painting he loathed the prettifying tendencies of a against bur for example so what did he see around him when he began his career as a painter he saw the Salomon art of the fashionable figurative painter to the period whether Reynolds or Gainsbourg he saw the art which was admired by the Royal Academy that you want so Joshua Ramos the eminent dwarf of the art world who founded the Royal Academy so that numbered fools should be in the arts you say there is obviously very little art in this old fool I need to take classes I should study study if I could be learned so Josh as you propose we should have been hunted Raphael and Michelangelo's to succeed and then improve upon each other but it isn't so you delirious dilettante keep away from my canvas the question in England thanks to you is not other a menace talent and genius but whether he is passive and polite a virtuous asks obedient to the opinions of noble men though a man can never become a horse or an ass sir Josh some are born with the shapes of men who are both you and your cohort Gainsborough blot and blur one against the other do you've to fight to the whole English world between you with your damn portrait painting and I am hid some love to see the sweet outlines and beauteous forms that love does where some seem to find out patches paint bracelets and stays and powdered hair now get out of here you you Blue Boy you want your kind of time Iron Man Blake with something to talk about his conversations with other artists but he didn't let me have this gift he elaborated upon it he used it as the center of his work he painted the coast of a flea for example he painted various visionary heads which he summoned up so these spirits were as real to him as the people he saw walking around him and it was so matter-of-fact that he would talk about them to friend say Oh their son sold and talking Sansa they were like the inhabitants of as well there was there were comrades there were collaborators they were colleagues like Michelangelo who contained an angel Michelangelo good how do you know I know for I sat for him I am the Archangel Gabriel you are I you almost have better assurance on that of a wandering voice you may be an evil spirit there are such in the land you shall have good assurance can an evil spirit do this I looked whence the voice came and was then aware of a shining shape with bright wings who diffused much light as I looked the shape dilated more and more he waved his hands the roof of my study opened he ascended into heaven he stood in the Sun and beckoning to me moved the universe it was the Archangel Gabriel Blake saw the world as part of eternity he's not talking simply about some ghost coming to see and he's talking about an intimate spiritual communion with the arts of the past and an art which he believed he was preserving or reaffirming in a century which paid no attention to it of course 200 years before he would have been considered blessed because of these visions the only argument would be where they came from God or the devil but the actual fact of the visions would be taken almost for granted it was his tragedy I suppose to be born into the age of burgeoning materialism and industrialism which banished these visions to the fringes of human consciousness there's a wonderful lipid Gram goddess keep from single vision and Newton's sleep now what he meant by that was that Isaac Newton was for him the embodiment of the mechanical material universe here was a scientist who talked about voids and particles in measurement that was the world which Blake despised because he knew it was not the world not the reality he knew and not the reality which is poetry and painting celebrates Newton of course was a rationalist and a mathematical genius sort of opposite poles but if you're ever looking for a definition of genius you have to perfect types you've still find in the scientific world absolute mutant archetypes and you still find in the r12 sort of Blake in Mavericks I like to think I belong to the latter some of the Newton's ideas have been reexamined and been overhauled and outdistance whereas i think there will always be a new meaning in for blake because of his trapeze the arch priest of spirituality well I have this postcard here you what Blake is showing there is a fallen angel trapped in the cave of his perceptions do you see anything else in other words I mean what using well I think the the idea of a fallen angel is a very good one because angels are beings of light before they fall and or something still divine in the form of Newton but what he's doing is drawing these abstractions these lines on paper a two-dimensional geometrical model in a world full of color and quality and movement and form and in that sense I think like pictures it very well I mean there is something noble about Newton and inspiring that's the whole of the 18th century rationalist movement the so called enlightenment was based on the center of Newtonian reason as the ultimate but what's wrong with it is that it's a limited form of Reason a limited vision of things and in this picture you can see the say much else in the world and interestingly enough what Newton left out in his abstract geometries is something that modern science is now beginning to bring back in through chaos and fractals the new kind of mathematical imagery we have has left Newtonian abstractions far behind even within Orthodox science and yet not surprised that someone like Blake would have reacted against this ferocious they're calling it the tree of death and so forth it must have struck at the nightmare called within him it would indeed have been a nightmare there was no spirit there was no soul Nature was dead and inanimate there were no angels or consciousness is in you know in the universe and animals and plants were machines and I think it's had a huge impact on our civilization it's split the sciences from the Arts it's split science from religion it's fragmented our whole culture and I suppose Blake in a sense was relatively prescient wasn't he in his attacks upon Newtonian science for example he denied causation he said every natural effect has a spiritual cause and he talked about when the organs of perception change objects seem to change that seems to strike a very modern call doesn't it in modern science there's been a recognition of the obvious in quantum physics that all observations depend on observers and so the human mind has come back in inner albeit in a very stripped-down and and not very interesting form but it's had to be admitted at last by scientists and our observations depend on us our theories of products of our in minds his essential perception was that the imagination is human existence itself that it that it looks into eternity from all its angles is that something you would agree with him about but I think the imagination has to be seen off as much larger than our merely limited human minds and since Blake believed in angels and God there's a whole realm of consciousness of imagination goes far beyond human realm if I understand Blake correctly he was talking about a living world and were permeated by consciousness and spirit full of life and quality I think the science of the next millennium certainly the next century will be much closer to the kind of view that Blake was trying to give man is born like a garden ready planted and sown this world is too poor to produce one seed and I have fought for all these years armed with the one power alone which makes a poet imagination divine vision all 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 but when I read a 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 your life destroy it's almost hard to think about it's so extraordinary so aware that that day I've been one poem changed my life it would be there I found him immensely relevant as I went through University and then went into business I've never very far from vague I find him a presence that I find incredibly practical and useful I think it's wise fathers in power and business to maintain that respect I find him in that sense meeting his eye sometimes he saw the balance of humanity was under threat because he had after all been born in the middle of a period of enlightenment where reason reigned clip seeing everything else he saw as we look back now as a prophet saw that there were real dangers in the Satanic novels and I feel that that anti materialism which so isolated him in his time would isolate him now actually he's actually crucial to the health of modern society the kings and Nobles of the land have done it here it not heaven ye ministers have done it behold London the human awful wonder of God I wander through each dirty street near where the dirty Thames does flow and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness marks of wall in every cry of every man in every infant's cry of fear in every voice in every band the mind forged manacles I hear how the chimney sweepers cry blackens or the church's walls and the hapless soldiers i runs in blood down palace walls but most amid night harlots curse from every dismal street I hear weaves around the marriages and blasts the new-born infirmity Blake so very clearly what was happening to England and to London he saw is being turned into mechanism into reproductive imagery into salesmanship into information rather than understanding into all the arts which he called the arts of death which the 19th and 20th centuries exploited to their utmost extent The Beggar's rags fluttering in air dust does to rag the heavens tear one could sticks in your mind and you wonder what it means really until you finally puzzle out in the 20th century that any nation that would allow many beggars in rags supplying in doorsteps looking its heaven for their ragged sleeves would be a kind of desensitized society that would punch a hole in the ozone layer and tear the heavens to rags literally it's as if his fall from normal life had broken him open to all sorts of perceptions which seem to us very modern for example his belief that war and repressed sexuality were connected his belief that animals should not be treated badly and as the poem about every cry from a hunted hare a fiber from the brain does tear there's the famous poem little black boy in which he suggests or asserts that all human beings a part of a divine family and that there should be no to use a modern face discrimination against various sorts of people so in all those respects he was remarkably aligned to late 20th sections of human reality he also in a sense created his own religion and there are plenty of people who even now find in Blake solace comfort consolation and more importantly belief he believed he might be build use to them in London and did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountain's Green and was the holy Lamb of God and England's Pleasant pastures scene and did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded Hills and was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic Mills [Music] because it's quite impossible to summarize blades vision in the phrase in the lifetime learning aspiring trying to understand but if there's one sentence which comes close to the heart of his vision its when he says to see a world in a grain of sand because for him the universe was a total entity and integrated whole things seen things unseen things corporeal incorporeal the past the present the future were part of this total entity this spiritual entity which for him was the universe itself to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour he was the greatest religious poet England has ever produced reality for him was the whole vision of eternity which surrounded him night and day as he talks about angels surrounding him night and day and then in the end he talks about how his works are being admired in the palaces of eternity how the angels are celebrating his work and that again is part of his sense of eternity being present to the wise continually he says at one point a fool he's not the same tree as a wise man sees this of course goes back to his earlier visions of Peckham rye where he saw trees filled with angels but it's it also emphasizes more important truth that if you could divest yourself of material vision as he says everyone will see what I see and what we come to understand at the end of our own present century is that his vision is so prescient Hizb is poetry and painting so marvelous that he's at the same stature as milton as Chaucer as Shakespeare did I tell you I was Socrates or a sort of brother I must have had conversations with him I also had conversations with Jesus Christ I have an obscure recollection of being with both of them I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame but whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory I wish to do nothing for profit I wish to live for art I want nothing whatever I am quite happy here the voice of the bard who present past and future sees whose ears have heard the holy word that walked among the ancient trees calling the Lapps soul and weeping in the evening Dew that might control the starry polar and fallen fallen light renew worth o earth return arise from out the dewy grass night is worn and the morn rises from the slumbrous masts turn away no more why wilt thou turn away the starry floor the watery Shore is given thee till break of day the eye altering alters all you you

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

Views: 121,687

Rating: 4.9144168 out of 5

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Id: wDAIzERYzcY

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/halfbisaigue]

Thought I knew something of WB, turns out he was much more extraordinary than I originally thought. Not your typical biographical doc; a good portion of it is Blake’s own words delivered as soliloquy by an actor who does a bang-up job. Thanks for posting, I’ve watched it twice!