Also posted at Invictus
Happy 250th birthday to the English poet and champion of human liberty, William Blake!
From his America, A Prophecy, 1793:
Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll’d
Around their shores, indignant burning with the fires of Orc;
And Boston’s Angel cried aloud as they flew thro’ the dark night.
He cried: `Why trembles honesty; and, like a murderer,
Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station?
Must the generous tremble, and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence
That mock him? Who commanded this? What God? What Angel?
To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestrain’d performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is giv’n to the strong?
What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest?
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs?
What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself
In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!’So cried he, rending off his robe and throwing down his sceptre
In sight of Albion’s Guardian; and all the Thirteen Angels
Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, and threw their golden sceptres
Down on the land of America; indignant they descendedHeadlong from out their heav’nly heights, descending swift as fires
Over the land; naked and flaming are their lineaments seen
In the deep gloom; by Washington and Paine and Warren they stood;
And the flame folded, roaring fierce within the pitchy night…
Blake was a rebel, a mystic, an engraver, and an amazing poet. He was arrested in 1803 for “high treason” for uttering “Damn the King, damn all his subjects…” Luckily, he was acquitted.
Blake’s critique of the Industrial Revolution’s brutal materialism, and his search for a poetic and religious freedom that would break the chains of human bondage mark him as one of the most important writers giving birth to the modern age. He protested slavery, and believed in racial and sexual equality: “As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various)”.
Generations of poets and writers have found great inspriation in the massive, if often obscure, poetry of his “Prophetic Books.” His Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were lyrical portraits of childlike innocence and terror, and a protest against a world that would swallow up human souls in the “demonic mills” of rising capitalism.
Oh, that we could use the spirit of Blake to walk among us today!
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
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almost as much as the poetry. Such a energy is not ignored. He draws you to his mystic visions and they are real across time and space the doors he saw through, still need cleansing but his visions burn bright and light.
…when seeing a blog on a beloved author, especially one long dead and out of copyright, I googled….and found The William Blake Archive. You need java installed to take best advantage of it…but it has a great many of his books scanned in, complete as printed. It is rather amazing and cool…
http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
The “click below to enter” button on the bottom is, eh, invisible, but just click in the general area where the button should be and it comes up fine. If you’d rather skip that, and have java, you can go straight in with
http://blake-dev.lib.unc.edu/blake/main.html?java=yes
Since these are reproductions they give instructions on setting monitor gamma and whatnot via the first link…eh…but the books themselves are very cool 🙂
who inspired many other rebel poets
They’re painting the passports brown…
And to those that haven’t read it, I’d suggest Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It relates very much to this theme of trying to describe, comprehend, understand, the destruction caused by industry, any industry.
Apocalypse Now was based on the book and the parallels are spooky.
Videos using William Blake poems and images are here:
http://www.youtube.com/results…
for your literary knowledge, but rather I applaud, and cherish the gems so causally dropped.
Bookmarked this diary be, in order to return once again and see, with whom it is I should spend a winters night’s lot.
Frivolously penned in my ignorance so burning, solace only in my heart’s deep yearning, I go now to earn, working away, today’s miserable profit
Thanks for the leads