William Blake’s childhood vision on Peckham Rye is well known. Sauntering along, he looks up and, according to an early biographer, ‘sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. On another occasion, he ran indoors declaring he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. His wife, Catherine, later reported that Blake first saw God at the age of four. I love that ‘first’.
The Bible’s vivid prophetic and visceral apocalyptic imagery stirred him as well. It ‘overawed his imagination’ so that ‘he saw it materialising around him,’ Peter Ackroyd reports in his biography Blake (1995). When as an adult he became an engraver, artist and poet, Blake was driven to enable others to apprehend such sights. In one of his epic poems, ‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’ (1804-20), he declared:
… I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of man …
At the time, there were few with the eyes to see and ears to hear him. The industrial age was booming, manifesting the insights of the scientific revolution. It was a tangibly, visibly changing society, fostering an almost irresistible focus on the physical aspects of reality. The narrowing of outlook is captured in one of Blake’s best-known images, entitled ‘Newton’ (1795-1805). It depicts the natural philosopher on the seabed, leaning over a scroll, compass in hand. He draws a circle. It’s an imaginative act. Only, it’s imagination rapt in the material world alone, devoted to studying what’s measurable. For Blake, Isaac Newton represents a mentality trapped within epicycles of thought. While claiming to study reality, it isolates itself from reality, and so induces, as he wrote in a letter to his patron Thomas Butts, ‘Single vision and Newton’s sleep’.