Blake Notes
Context William Blake was born in London in 1757. ... As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. ... Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. ... Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety about the publics apathy toward his work and about the financial straits in which he so regularly found himself. When his self-curated exhibition of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. ... Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. ... Blake does not identify himself wholly with either view; most of the poems are dramatic--that is, in the voice of a speaker other than the poet himself. Blake stands outside innocence and experience, in a distanced position from which he hopes to be able to recognize and correct the fallacies of both. ... Others take a more critical stance toward innocent purity: for example, while Blake draws touching portraits of the emotional power of rudimentary Christian values, he also exposes--over the heads, as it were, of the innocent--Christianitys capacity for promoting injustice and cruelty. ... Blake frequently employs the familiar meters of ballads, nursery rhymes, and hymns, applying them to his own, often unorthodox conceptions. ... Blake builds the poem on clear imagery of light and dark. ... The black boy internalizes his mothers lesson and applies it in his relations with the outer world; specifically, Blake shows us what happens when the boy applies it to his relationship with a white child. ... The lines have none of the lilting quality so typical of Blake; the poems didactic tone and austere subject matter occasion the harsh, severe rhythms he employs. ... " The poem does not explicitly mention Christ, but the four virtues that Blake assigns alternately to man and God are the ones conventionally associated with Jesus. ... Blake himself favors a more direct identification between what is human and what is divine. ... Commentary In the poem "Holy Thursday" from Songs of Innocence, Blake described the public appearance of charity school children in St. ... This poem, like many of the Songs of Innocence, accepts what Blake saw as the more positive aspects of conventional Christian belief. ... They offer a good instance of how Blake himself stands somewhere outside the perspectives of innocence and experience he projects. ... Signs of human suffering abound, but a complete human form--the human form that Blake has used repeatedly in the Songs to personify and render natural phenomena--is lacking. ... Indeed, it is crucial to Blakes commentary that neither the citys victims nor their oppressors ever appear in body: Blake does not simply blame a set of institutions or a system of enslavement for the citys woes; rather, the victims help to make their own "mind-forgd manacles," more powerful than material chains could ever be. ... The "crimson joy" of the rose connotes both sexual pleasure and shame, thus joining the two concepts in a way that Blake thought was perverted and unhealthy. ... Blake is building on the conventional idea that nature, like a work of art, must in some way contain a reflection of its creator. ... The smithy represents a traditional image of artistic creation; here Blake applies it to the divine creation of the natural world.