A belated happy birthday (November 28, 1757) to William Blake, great poet-artist of 18th century England. Rarely do literary talent and mastery of the visual arts reside in the same person, but William Blake was one of the few exceptions. Born to a London tradesman, he got little formal education, save for a brief apprenticeship to an engraver at the Royal Academy. Self-taught, his distinctive poetry derives from a boyhood immersion in Christian mysticism, and it certainly did not fit in with the literary protocol of his time. His fondness for lyrical sound and rhyming quatrains (as we have in Tyger, Tyger), a throwback to Elizabethan times, did not conform to the prevailing style of his age. The few critics of his time who even recognized the poor and marginal man living in London’s meaner streets considered him and his verse to be “insane.”
Yet Blake’s reputation as a poet (and an artist) has survived most of his contemporaries, an original genius more read (and appreciated) today than ever before. His words are not always easily understood, but his art is there to illustrate his heavenly world that made him a solitary, though serenely happy, man. His wife once said “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company. He is always in Paradise.”
Southern Californians are blessed to have a great collection of 77 items of Blake’s art housed nearby, at the Huntington Library, Art Gallery and Gardens in San Marino. And those looking for a Christmas gift for an art-loving Christian friend might want to consider William Blake by Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon (Princeton University Press), a beautiful book celebrating the multi-gifted prophet-saint of what we now call social justice.
The Tyger
by William Blake
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
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?