Blake not only produced poems, but also drawings and paintings that explored a rather unconventional side of the psychology of the mind and human existence. He was irreverent, considered insane by many of his contemporaries, and yet his combination of mysticism and skepticism seems to find a resonance in modern audiences (Jones, 2005)
There was no way for the common person to ever have seen such a terrible and fearsome creature as a tiger until British explores brought animals back to form a menagerie. Looking at this creature, with its long fangs, Blake marveled at the sheen of its fur and the manner in which it could be created (Stacy, aural)
To a certain degree, Blake is absorbing through the oral culture of the working class the same revolutionary currents which had been given voice in works like Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which asserted in the wake of the universalist egalitarianism of the French Revolution a reminder that there remained a large disenfranchised class of persons whose existence little interested the philosophes or sans-culottes. In a survey of Blake's overall changing attitudes toward sex and gender, David Aers "in The Visions of the Daughters the chief woman is a libertarian figure challenging male violence and repressiveness" and overall Aers seems to agree with Blake's great ephebe Harold Bloom's interpretation of the poem as a "hymn to free love" (Aers 500)
The full text of Thel's conclusion runs: Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire? The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek Fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har. (Blake, Thel) Marjorie Levinson starts from a standpoint that seriously misreads Thel as "a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large," which ignores -- in her opinion -- the "suggestive identity between Thel and Desire" (Levinson 287)
The full text of Thel's conclusion runs: Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire? The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek Fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har. (Blake, Thel) Marjorie Levinson starts from a standpoint that seriously misreads Thel as "a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large," which ignores -- in her opinion -- the "suggestive identity between Thel and Desire" (Levinson 287)
The full text of Thel's conclusion runs: Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire? The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek Fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har. (Blake, Thel) Marjorie Levinson starts from a standpoint that seriously misreads Thel as "a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large," which ignores -- in her opinion -- the "suggestive identity between Thel and Desire" (Levinson 287)
I can see some glimmer of meaning in it, and some warmth of religion and of goodness; but beginning to be obscured and lost under the infatuating phantasies which at length possessed its author. (Bentley 50) But I think it worth asking whether this reaction -- recorded by Bentley as the only example during Blake's own lifetime when the works in question actually received any extant criticial commentary -- is based on Blake's striking modernity
The text predominates too much, and what design there is follows the text closely and obviously. (Frye 37)
It is unsurprising that he found Thel more congenial, because its form is much milder and more familiar: it seems like a dark fairy tale. Yet we must not read Blake's symbolism as simplistic: Marjorie Levinson mention's "Blake's notorious disdain for allegory -- specifically, for the dualistic ways of thinking it encourages," and his symbols often represent a "union of contraries" presenting deliberate paradoxes (Levinson 287)
In other words, to some degree Blake is presenting a symbolic vision of female sexual desire -- one which, shockingly, in its purest form has no desire for the worm, either as a phallic and penetrative symbol, or as a symbolic baby. (Norvig notes Blake's use of the worm imagery in his poem "The Rose" from Songs of Innocence and Experience has this same dual sense, of phallic penetration and burgeoning parasitic life
We can assume the radical character of Blake's work more or less at first glance -- it resembles nothing else published before or since, and sits oddly with the work of the other Romantic-period poets. In fact, Blake himself detested most of the Romantics, and would claim to his friend the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson that reading Wordsworth's poetry "caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him" (Robinson 15)
This is undoubtable, as Swearingen indicates, due to Blake's derivation of the name Thel itself from a Greek root meaning desire. (Swearingen 123)
He does not mention worship but rather "prayers of distress" and therefore turns to the divine virtues in which he can see in himself. While no doubt Blake had his issues with the church and state, the calm tone that "The Divine Image" sets seems to follow along with this idea of innocence found in the potential for human divinity (through "prayers of distress") rather than the idea of "divine humanity" as obliquely illustrated in "A Divine Image" and "The Human Abstract" as an impossibility (Blake 14)
[3: Deborah Dorfman (Blake in the Nineteenth Century) concludes that "Gilchrist's reviewers… almost unanimously accepted Blake as Hero. They relinquished mad Blake and took to their hearts the gentle and frugal engraver who chanted hymns on his deathbed and died with his debts paid" (Dorfman 83)
In June of 1780, Lord George Gordon's stance on the resistance to the war with America and his anti-Catholic preaching invoked a series of riots throughout London. This appears to be an important turning point in Blake's life -- he was present (either actively or accidentally) in a mob that burned down Newgate Prison (Greenfield 1)
[footnoteRef:2] [2: As a further testament to how he was ignored: in the entirety of all 732 double columned pages of a work entitled Select Works of the British Poets in Chronological Series from Falconer to Sir Walter Scott (1850) (the volume presents itself as a continuation of Aikin's Select Works from Ben Jonson to Beattie, 10th ed.), Blake is excluded altogether in favor of William Jones, William Gifford and James Grahame as well as Burns, Wordsworth and Coleridge (Hilton 135)
Both are false propositions -- no single attribute, nor any sum of attributes, can define God or man or the human form divine. (400)] [6: He writes: "Literature as practice lends itself to the strategy of explanation that Benjamin termed 'constellation' in ways that are suggestive of how legal historians in turn might employ constellation in approaching questions of time and justice" (Tomlins 185)
] [4: Yeats wrote: "Perhaps everybody that pursues that life for however short a time, even, as it were, but to chase it, experiences now and again during sleep bright coherent dreams where something is shown or spoken that grows in meaning with the passage of time. Blake spoke of this 'stronger and better light', called its source 'the human form divine', Shelley's 'harmonious soul of many a soul', or, as we might say, the Divine Purpose" (Yeats 59-60)
(24) We see this in the poet's recollection. As he walks the streets, he sees "marks of weakness, marks of woe" (Blake 4) on the faces of those around him
Here we see entrepreneurs at work while the "weak and woeful state of Londoners comes through their faces" (Pagliaro). Harold Bloom makes a critical point about Blake when he says that he is a "poet in whom the larger apocalyptic impulse always contains the political as a single element in a more complex vision" (Bloom)