Date: 28-11-2004
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 18th Century        

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of William Blake, so this week’s picture-cum-poem is Infant Joy from his hand-coloured illustrated book, The Songs of Innocence. Its theme, appropriate to the poet’s birthday, is the advent of a newborn child into the world: “I have no name, / I am but two days old. / What shall I call thee? / I happy am / Joy is my name, / Sweet joy befall thee! / Pretty joy / Sweet joy but two days old, / Sweet joy I call thee; / Thous dost smile / I sing the while / Sweet joy befall thee.”

The words of Blake’s poem are written in a cursive script that has an unusually organic and almost vegetal character, the many curling “y”s of the incantatorily repeated word “joy”, in particular, resembling the tendrils of a plant. The poem seems in this way to sprout its own illustration, image appearing as a natural outgrowth of text and thereby literally embodying  Blake’s belief that the poet is also a visionary. The vivid and highly stylised flowering plant that curls around the body of the poem’s text issues in two blooms, one furled, one open, resembling tulips but also flames, long associated with visionary experience in mystical literature. The fiery blossom at the top contains a scene of nativity, with a mother and child being watched over by a slender angel with the diaphanous wings of a butterfly. The innocent, whose name is Joy, seems to acknowledge the presence of the angel. This implies that the child is blessed with the capacity to see those who walk in the spiritual realm. Blake told his friends that he too often conversed with angels.

Blake’s first edition of The Songs of Innocence appeared in 1789, when he was in his early thirties. He had been making his living as a commercial engraver, dependent on the tastes of the market, work which he found both onerous and restrictive. He would occasionally recite his poems to a small audience of friends, who included his near neighbours John and Nancy Flaxman. “He was listened to by the company with profound silence,” the author J.T. Smith later recalled, “and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.” The Songs of Innocence was Blake’s first serious attempt to reach a wider public as an independent artist and poet. He claimed that the idea of reproducing his own poems and designs using a method which he called “Illuminated Printing”, came to him in a vision of his beloved younger brother, Robert, who had died in 1787. J.T. Smith tells the story, and also describes Blake’s method in some detail:

“Blake, after deeply perplexing himself as to the mode of accomplishing the publication of his illustrated songs, without their being subject to the expense of a letterpress, his brother Robert stood before him in one of his visionary imaginations, and so decidedly directed him in the way in which he ought to proceed, that he immediately followed his advice, by writing his poetry, and drawing his marginal subjects of embellishments in outline upon the copper plate with an impervious liquid, and then eating the plain parts away with aquafortis considerably below them, so that the outlines were left as a stereotype. The plates in this state were then painted in any tint that he wished, to enable him or Mrs Blake to colour the marginal figures up by hand in imitation of drawings.”

This rather laborious process, which required Blake to learn the art of mirror-writing, among other things, is in effect an inversion of the procedures involved in etching. In etching, the plate is covered with a varnish, into the surface of which the artist cuts his design, which will then be bitten into the plate by exposure to acid. In Blake’s method, the varnish itself is used to create the design, so that when the plate is dipped in acid everything except the part that has been drawn on is corroded away. The technique was not easily adapted to mass production and only a handful of copies of his illuminated books were ever produced. Blake’s persistence with it partly explains why his ambition to reach a wide audience was never realised, in his own lifetime.

But his method was, to him, fundamentally connected to his beliefs. He called “Illuminated Printing” his “infernal method”, explaining its importance to him in a passage that appears in one of his later illuminated books, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” Blake here alludes, somewhat crypically, as was his way, to his hatred for the philosophical empiricism which he felt dominated his age – and particularly to his hatred for the tenet, advanced by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that every human being comes into the world as a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper to be shaped by experience and education alone. Blake felt that this idea was a mechanistic heresy, opposing it with his own passionate belief in the innate soul of every man and woman. His saw his own artistic technique, as demonstrated in the passage quoted above, as a potent metaphor for his spiritual convictions. Conventional etching is Lockean, in the sense that it treats the copper plate as a tabula rasa, into which the design is inscribed. By contrast, Blake’s “infernal method”, in which acid eats away at the whole plate to bring the design deposited within it by the artist into relief, is a perfectly apt metaphor for Blake’s metaphysical view of man – a being who comes into the world with a soul, which life will gradually reveal.

In one of his most vehement passages, Blake fulminates against the belief of Locke and his supporters that man “learns all that he knows … I say on the contrary that man brings all that he has or can have into the world with him, man is born like a garden ready planted and sown.” This is the precise subject of Infant Joy – which, not only in its poetry and imagery, but also in its very technique, embodies one of Blake’s most deeply held spiritual convictions.