Blake, or Angels in Peckham

jenks

thread death
ackroyd not all bad

ackroyd is a great populiser - Hawksmoor is a tidied up version of Sinclair's poem Lud Heat for example but i don't think we should dismiss his work so flippantly - a judgement made on a cursroy reading of a chapter is hardly enough.
His work on 'cockney visionanaries' is interesting and if you read his original speech is far more challenging than maybe the oddball tv version we got for his London programme - a travesty of an interesting book.
his blake may well have become a standardised version in schools etc but i would claim that blake is just the kind of writer who cannot sit comfortably in a box for long - he resists any attempt t co-opt him into any one reading - back to my quote from an earlier -"i must create my own system or be enslav'd to another mans" - any reading of blake is about engaging with that sysytem in all its ornery awkwardness, its difficulties and contradictions.
people want to talk about the political blake and it is clear that this is what makes him engagingly modern - the republican who wore the red cap of the french revolution before it turned bloody but again he is cussedly contradictiry - he would seem to be influenced by Paine but he states he is no fan, more profit i think can be made in his relationship to Wesley and Walton - the dissenter who dissents from the dissenters, so to speak.
it is interesting how the establishment attempts to co-opt him into the fold through the adoption of Jerusalem - look again at the words, it is not jingoistic but a blatant damnation of industrailisation and a song of rage not celebration.
 

mms

sometimes
i've got a lovely bound editon of songs of innocence made by the tate and the london folio company ages ago. original plates on one side and poem in type on the other. ace. he's not a great artist but he's a great poet and his art is instantly recognisable.
the ep thompson book that talks about blake is the making of the english working class, smashing.
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
luka said:
i'd like to read yeats' book on blake.

Its out from Routledge in their Classics series with an introduction by Tom Paulin. Its basically Yeats' choice of Blake's poetry with a biographical sketch - not hugely fascinating, though the latter is where Yeats makes his infamous and completely erroneous claim that Blake was of Irish extraction. There was also a three volume edition that he did with Edwin Ellis which has more commentary though its hard to say which bits are Yeats and which are Ellis.

So much in Yeats comes from Blake and he is a phrase-maker of at least an equal power. Shame about the crazed authoritarianism ('what is democracy - muck in the yard').
 

luka

Well-known member
it'll be the one with ellis then. i saw kathleen raine talking about it, saying how good it was, and it sounds quite nutty as well, yeats in 'a vision' mode.

as for ackroyd, i think he's a mediocrity, let's just agree to differ, although a whole chapter is more than enough to judge a book by, even more so if its the first chapter.
 

sufi

lala
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some good blake on the web here, also excellent indexed maps of 18th C London
 

rewch

Well-known member
cheers'en ya zul...produced by blake between 1789 & 1818...fifteen complete copies known...hand-coloured
 

jenks

thread death
matthew prior

was reading a poetry anthology last night - the new english book of verse (not all of it , obviously) when i came upon this poem by prior - i know nothing about him,does anybody out there?
the interesting thing is this anthology is chronological and this poem is published in 1717, some 75 ish years before Experience - is it a coincidence or did blake know about this and was therefore parodying it, or what:

A True Maid

NO, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I'll die:
Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?

Matthew Prior
 

rewch

Well-known member
especially after the henry VIII fiasco... unless it's sam taylor-wood you're objecting to, admittedly little better...
 

ripley

Well-known member
came late to this, but count me in as a blake fan.

My parents were beatniks, and if I remember right they have a (record) album of Allan Ginsberg reading Blake. Dunno but I'd guess that was a big American -Blake connection. I don't remember what it sounded like, but I identified a tiger at the zoo as "burning bright!" when I was two or so, so I guess I must have learned it somewhere.

And this one is on my mind of late (apropos of the new pope "Eggs" Benedict)


And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
 

Melmoth

Bruxist
ripley said:
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Ah yes, still gives me the spinal shiver that one, every time. Wonderful.
 

luka

Well-known member
im going to try and get involved in this if theyll let me

Jerusalem in Full
Saturday 25 November 2017 10 am to 9 pm
Waterstones Bookshop, 82 Gower Street, London WC1E 6EQ
To celebrate Blake’s 260th birthday, we will be reading the whole of his last great prophetic book, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, over the course of a single day.
In his Preface to Jerusalem, Blake speaks of producing the cadences of his prophetic poem for ‘the mouth of a true Orator’. This will be a rare opportunity to engage actively with ‘the grandest poem that this world contains’ as Blake himself tells us he shaped it – through the spoken word.
We will be guided through the multiple levels of Blake’s culminating vision by Susanne Sklar, a leading authority on Jerusalem as ‘Visionary Theatre’.
Members are invited to take part in the reading, which will be open to the public. Readers will be assigned specific roles for the leading figures, with a wider group sharing the narration.
If you would like to take part, please register your interest at:
jerusalem@blakesociety.org
 

luka

Well-known member
i just found out about it because im most of the way through my first real comprehensive reading of jerusalem
 

luka

Well-known member
"To Tirzah" by William Blake

Whate'er is born of mortal birth
Must be consumèd with the earth,
To rise from generation free:
Then what have I to do with thee?

The sexes sprung from shame and pride,
Blowed in the morn, in evening died;
But mercy changed death into sleep;
The sexes rose to work and weep.

Thou, mother of my mortal part,
With cruelty didst mould my heart,
And with false self-deceiving tears
Didst bind my nostrils, eyes, and ears,

Didst close my tongue in senseless clay,
And me to mortal life betray.
The death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Is Blake saying here that life itself is sleep?

'But mercy changed death into sleep;
The sexes rose to work and weep.'

That's a striking way of looking at things - from a Christian perspective, life is a sort of sleep preceding the awakening of death.

I must admit that I had to scurry to Wikipedia to understand what this poem was about. The question of what 'I' have to do with 'thee' (the senses, 'generation') is a deep question that survives the death of God, and popped up in one of my mindfulness lectures wot I was listening to yesterday.
 

luka

Well-known member
this is from Chapter 3 of Jerusalem

"O though poor Human Form!" "O thou poor child of woe!
"Why wilt thou wander away form Tirzah? why me compel to bind
thee?
"If thou dost go away from me I shall consume upon these Rocks.
These fibres of thine eyes that used to beam in distant heavens
Away from me, I have bound down with a hot iron.
These nostrils that expanded with delight in morning skies
I have bent downward with lead melted in my roaring furnaces
Of affliction, of love, of sweet despair, of torment unendurable.
My soul is 7 furnaces; incessant roars the bellows
Upon my terribly flaming heart, the molten metal runs
In channels thro' my firey limbs/ O Love, O Pity O Fear
O pain! O the pangs, the bitter pangs of love foresaken!
Ephraim was a wilderness of joy where all my wild beasts ran.
The River Kanah wander'd by my sweet Manasseh's side
To see the boy spring into heavens sounding from my sight!
Go Noah, fetch the girdle of strong brass, heat it red hot,
Press it around the loins of this ever-expanding cruelty.
Shriek not so my only love. I refuse thy joys: I drink
Thy shrieks becasue Hand & Hyle are cruel & obdurate to me."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
WOW.

'These fibres of thine eyes that used to beam in distant heavens
Away from me, I have bound down with a hot iron.
These nostrils that expanded with delight in morning skies
I have bent downward with lead melted in my roaring furnaces'

and

'Go Noah, fetch the girdle of strong brass, heat it red hot,
Press it around the loins of this ever-expanding cruelty.'
 
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