By Stuart Mitchner

I feel that a man may be happy in this world.

—William Blake (1757-1827)

Responding to a critic of his art, William Blake writes, “Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.” In his study Fearful Symmetry (Princeton University Press Classics, 2025), after quoting Blake (“Thought is act”), Northrop Frye comments, “No one can begin to think straight unless he has a passionate desire to think and an intense joy in thinking.”

The Songs of August 12

On the day of his death, August 12, 1827, according to Peter Ackroyd’s 1995 biography (Knopf), Blake stops working and turns to his wife Catherine, who is in tears. “Stay, Kate!” he says, “keep just as you are — I’ll draw your portrait — for you’ve ever been an angel to me.” When he’s done, he puts it aside and begins singing verses and hymns, telling her “My beloved, they are not mine — no — they are not mine.” What she hears are “songs of joy and Triumph.” After telling her that they will never be parted, that he will be with her always, he dies at six o’clock in the evening “in a most glorious manner,” says a friend. “His Countenance became fair. His eyes brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”

Dylan and Ginsberg

In a film made a century and a half later, within yards of Fountain Court off the Strand in London, where Blake sang his last song, Bob Dylan is displaying and tossing aside the flash cards of the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” while Allen Ginsberg, whose life was changed forever when he heard Blake’s voice, silently prowls and pontificates on the fringes. Dylan and Ginsberg shared the Blake connection, getting together in 1971 to compose, play, and record poems from his work including “Nurse’s Song,” “A Dream,” and the best known of his poems, “Tyger, Tyger,” which Dylan incorporated decades later into his song for John Lennon, “Roll on John,” where “burning bright” is the refrain coming round to its source in the penultimate verse: (“Tiger tiger, burning bright/I pray the lord my soul to keep/In the forest of the night/Cover him over and let him sleep”).

Blake in the House

The year we lived in Bristol, my wife’s desk was under a relatively benign poster from Songs of Experience and mine was under the Ancient of Days, the frontispiece for Europe: A Prophecy, also the cover image of the Princeton Classics edition of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry. I’d like to think there’s a hint of Blakean symmetry in the fact that the book I was writing in England was published the month my son was born at the old Princeton hospital two days before a friend’s card enclosing the poem “I am but two days old” from Songs of Innocence gave us his middle name.

Blake’s Book of Job

Although my father was a Medievalist who taught Chaucer and English Grammar for Teachers at Indiana University and had no academic relationship with Blake, the 1950 United Book Guild edition of Illustrations of The Book of Job, Invented & Engraved by William Blake was a fixture in the landscape of our Bloomington living room from 1950 until it traveled with him to Key West on his retirement 25 years later. It’s the sort of book, being a large, thin, flat black object, that visitors over the years (as well as this writer and his friends) might have been tempted to pick up, open, and explore. The bookseller offering it online for $35 notes that the 22 full-page back-and-white plates of Blake’s illustrations are accompanied on facing pages by S. Foster Damon’s “Doctrine of Job,” which, thanks to Damon’s last name, gave the book a sinister aura, at least for a 10-year-old reader of Classic Comics.

Disreputable Condition

I doubt the abovementioned bookseller would ask $35 for the copy I took to Princeton from Key West after my father’s death in July 1986. For one thing, although the book has held together well, its 48 pages clear and unblemished, the foxed endpapers give evidence of 10 years exposed to the weather of the Keys, and any fair description of the cover would require “the eyes of the man of imagination” with “a passionate desire to think and an intense joy in thinking.” Pasted near the top is a faded, much reduced image of Blake’s “The Lord Answering Job Out of the Whirlwind” under the title JOB in huge letters. There are several marks suggestive of glass rims on the flat surface of the cover, with its unfortunate resemblance to a tray, that suggest the book could have come in harm’s way during the convivial chaos of a faculty cocktail party. But there’s no explaining or imagining what produced the large, whitish, weirdly Disneyesque stain directly under Blake’s “Whirlwind.”

“The Ancient of Days”

Shortly before his death, Blake was busy working on the image of a giant deity known as The Ancient of Days (shown here), an early composition he continued “making beautiful in color as already grand in design.” This was the vision he saw “hovering at the top of his staircase” and that “made a more powerful impression upon his mind than all he had ever been visited by.” In time that image, like so many other words and images created in the cottage industry of his workshop, found its way into the 20th and 21st century on all manner of decorative objects, cards, textiles, plates, and posters.

3 Fountain Court

With the help of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, it’s possible to visualize the scene that took place on August 12, 1827, in the “plain, red-brick house of three stories” adjacent to the future site of opera impresario D’Oyly-Carte’s luxury hotel, the Savoy. The Blakes had moved into two rooms on the first floor in the spring of 1820. From their bedroom they could see a section of the Thames “like a bar of gold” between the buildings on either side of the court. In the other room there was a small fireplace, a table and chairs, and the table Blake worked at. As he busied himself with sketches, watercolors, and engravings to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy, he looked more the working man than the artist, his clothes “threadbare, and his grey trousers … worn black and shiny in front, like a mechanic’s.” The rooms were “clean and orderly,” however, “everything in its place,” and the voices of children could be heard in the courtyard below. Listening, Blake was heard to say, “This is heaven.” One among those children, perhaps, a young girl who had seen him on the street, with his “uncommonly bright eyes,” asked her father who he was, and was told, “He is a strange man. He thinks he sees spirits.”

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This article contains revised excerpts from previous columns, most recently November 26, 2025 (“Thanksgiving with William Blake and Patti Smith”).