William Blake

Which William Blake poems should I read first?

Start with the pair. The Lamb, from Songs of Innocence (1789), asks a lamb who made it, and answers. The Tyger, from Songs of Experience (1794), asks a tiger burning bright the same thing and gets no answer: Did he who made the lamb make thee? Then London, a walk through the city where every face shows marks of weakness, marks of woe. Then A Poison Tree, four short stanzas on what anger does when you keep it to yourself. All four are short, and all four are here in full.

Read The Lamb →

Read The Tyger →

Read London →

Read A Poison Tree →

Who is Orc in William Blake?

Orc is a figure Blake invented, and he is the fire. In the mythology Blake built across his own books, Orc is revolt itself in human shape, young, burning, and impossible to keep chained. He shows up in America a Prophecy, which Blake printed in 1793, rising against the guardian spirit of Britain at the time of the American Revolution. His opposite is Urizen, the cold lawgiver who wants everything measured, ruled and obedient. That pair drives the later books. Blake was not writing a history lesson. He was naming the two forces he thought ran a person as much as a country. The one that says no more, and the one that says do as you are told.

• Inner awakening and outer revolution are inseparable. Authentic transformation requires both personal and systemic change.
• Blake's prophetic vision challenged political oppression and religious conformity simultaneously.
• Creating your own system is essential for freedom. Otherwise you are 'enslaved by another man's.'

Listen to the story “Revolutionary Wisdom”

What did Blake mean by cleansing the doors of perception?

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. Blake wrote that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, printed between 1790 and 1793. He is not offering you a new power. He is saying you already have the sight and you have covered it over. The covering is made of habit. You name a thing and stop looking at it. You ask what it is for. You decide where it stops and the next thing starts. Take those off, one layer at a time, and the same street is not the same street.

• Limited perception comes from mental filters, not from reality's nature. The infinite is always present, always obscured.
• Conventional seeing is learned reduction. We are trained to perceive through utilitarian, categorical frameworks that fragment wholeness.
• Cleansing perception means removing filters in stages: naming, utility, boundaries, conceptual overlays.

Listen to the story “Cleansed Perception”

What did William Blake teach?

Blake taught three things and they lock together. Imagination is not escape, it is the sharpest way of seeing, and he called it the Human Existence itself. Contraries next. Opposites are not a fault to be fixed. Without Contraries is no progression, he wrote, and he meant that reason and energy both have to run at full strength or nothing moves. And mind-forged manacles. Most of what holds you is not iron clamped on from outside. It is thought pulled tight from inside, one correction at a time. In the end the cage looks like the shape of the world. He did not only write this. He invented a printing method in 1788 so word and picture could sit on the same plate, and he printed the books himself.

What are Blake's mind-forged manacles?

A boy sees angels in a tree and is told to stop lying. A student draws what he actually sees and is told he is imagining things. Year after year, correction on correction, the chains weave themselves. That is Blake's point. The manacles are not iron that somebody clamped on you. They are thought pulled tight from the inside, until the prison feels like the natural shape of the world. He heard them everywhere. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear. That is from London, a poem in Songs of Experience, which he printed in 1794.

Read London, the whole poem →