William Blake's spiritual visions

we're in bun Hill fields burial ground which is near Finsbury just outside the walls of the city where Blake was buried in 1827 and the point of this isn't some nonconformist burial ground as for the unofficial religionists it's for the people who had dissident and difficult and so they're put just outside the city in this little oasis with fig trees a place of real car one special aspect of Blake is the way he sees his visions and the visions changed throughout his life as a child is this some sickly child feverish seeing visions I don't think so something else he takes long walks out of Soho where he lives into the fields and he's in Peckham rye sees a tree of angels he sees a tree shimmering it looks like angels he sees angels they're angels to him he sees figures at the window of his bedroom and as life goes on these visions become more challenging the old prophets or Gruffalo paint or some great figure he wants to discuss things with appears in his chamber it's a kind of sales other people find it difficult for him not and he's in that heightened sense of perception that other people achieve much later through peyote or drugs or some kind of experience that they push their visionary entity he didn't need to it was it was natural it was ingrained in him thing is impossible to detach Blake's radical spiritual beliefs from the radical political beliefs because they all grew out of the same soil Blake's spiritual beliefs sit on his own eccentric learning and studies this idea that he must create his own system to avoid being enslaved by someone else's and he dives into the Old Testament but he's also reading about Egyptian mythology he's involved with the alchemists magicians of Europe he reads Paracelsus and Burma and he loves them because they're working men who've suddenly been overcome by a sense of vision and he translated that into the substance of London so that always beneath the gray and the overcast skies and the slate like streets there would be a vein of gold shining and he would locate it William Blake has the notion that if you're on top of Primrose Hill you can see London reborn as a kind of Jerusalem that the fields of his Meadows of his childhood growing up in Soho and walking out into the landscape around him he finds the attributes of a holy city and he believes that the pillars are there in Marylebone and Lambeth and so on Islington but it's a metaphor it's a metaphor for renewing London which becomes the poem Jerusalem but also behind it are these dark satanic Mills the sense of the forces of industry the forces of the new machines are hammering and firing the fires the darkness all of that makes them tremendous apocalyptic theater of which he's the master craftsman what people find a little difficult sometimes is to understand the schizophrenic split between an ordinary man working way in in his little house in Lambeth and the visionary prophet who seen great golden cities and how that argues with what's going on in the human world of industries developing machines turning out flower the noise the dirt the chimney sweeps the prostitutes and it's that there's a grain of something in him that stands him apart and is sometimes defined as a madness more and more respectable poets sometimes thought he was brilliant sometimes thought this is insane this is derangement how can someone talk to prophets you know that that's what we have to understand is that that the potentiality was there for the two things the real world and the great worlds the imagination if someone like Blake living in London was at risk he could have been hanged for his parts in the new game or and his attacks on owners who'd maltreated children or any of his arguments he got into so he's on the fringe of being arrested origin of being declared a mad one possible explanation is the Blake's revolutionary hopes when he's wearing the red bonnet when he's excited by the American colonies throwing off the yoke and the French getting rid of their king that great moment disappears it becomes bloody and apocalyptic and dark and the forces of repression and the soldiers are closing it down in London so maybe in some senses Blake withdraws from that political world and puts all of those energies into the spiritual world so he then has to invent on an epic scale even more terrifying wrestling's and collisions and damage chains forges manacles all of those fetishistic items become part of his poems and his great human entities are struggling with them

Channel: The British Library

Views: 76,159

Rating: 4.9752321 out of 5

Keywords: William Blake, Iain Sinclair, Songs Of Innocence And Experience (Book), And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time (Poem), Bunhill Fields (Cemetery), Spirituality (Literary Genre), Spiritualism (Religion), Mysticism (Literary School Or Movement), Romantic Poetry (Literature Subject), Poetry (Literary School Or Movement), Poet (Profession), Literature (Literary School Or Movement), Discovering Literature

Id: F8hcQ_jPIZA

Length: 6min 23sec (383 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 06 2014