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“The stationary blasts of waterfalls”
Blake, the Wordsworths, and the Dung
“
Would to God that all the Lord ’s people
were Prophets.” When William Blake (1757–1827) echoed this biblical cry, he
might have been thinking of the mad visionary Christopher Smart. Yet Blake
had his own revolutionary fix on the world. “One thought fills immensity,” he
assures us, and “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would
appear as it is, infinite.” And this brash absolute: “Where man is not, nature
is barren.” Blake believed Innocence meant “To see a World in a Grain of
Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” His vision burns through the natu-
ral world. Material, vegetable, corporeal things he turns spiritual, making the
spirit ’s eye, not the body’s, his organ of perception.
Blake ’s spirit reaches into the present, touching Whitman, Yeats, Eliot who
felt the force of “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night,”
Britain’s Labour Party whose hymn is Blake ’s “Jerusalem,” Pablo Neruda,
Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception on the good of hallucinogens, Allen
Ginsberg’s entire career, Sixties rebels and rock groups like The Doors.
Crying to “the lapsèd Soul,” Blake took on the Hebrew prophets’ voice: “O
Earth, O Earth, return! / Arise from out the dewy grass.” To redeem the Fall
meant penetrating our visible world with visionary radiance “Till we have built
Jerusalem / In England ’s green and pleasant land.” Abhorring pure Reason, he
painted Urizen creating the world with an immense pair of compasses, domin-
ion’s measuring tool and the destroyer of imagination. (plate 1)