The Great Poets William Blake Read by Robert Glenister • Michael Maloney POETRY Stephen Critchlow NA147212D 1 Auguries of Innocence 7:23 written sometime between 1801–1804 read by Robert Glenister 2 Introduction to Songs of Innocence 0:55 published originally in 1789 read by Michael Maloney 3 A Cradle Song 1:39 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 4 Introduction to Songs of Experience 0:54 published originally in 1794 read by Stephen Critchlow 5 A Dream 1:14 from Songs of Innocence read by Robert Glenister 6 The Chimney Sweeper 1:28 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 7 The Chimney Sweeper 0:51 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 2 8 The Divine Image 1:01 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 9 A Divine Image 0:34 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 10 from The Gates of Paradise 4:15 published 1815 read by Robert Glenister 11 Infant Joy 0:34 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 12 Gnomic Verses 5:39 miscellaneous read by Robert Glenister 13 The Fly 0:43 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 14 Song 0:59 from Poetical Sketches, printed 1783 read by Robert Glenister 3 15 Holy Thursday 1:02 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 16 Holy Thursday 0:50 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 17 Laughing Song 0:38 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 18 The Garden of Love 0:50 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 19 from An Island in the Moon 1:12 printed 1784 read by Robert Glenister 20 A Little Boy Found 0:32 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 21 A Little Boy Lost 1:21 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 4 22 The Little Girl Found 2:05 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 23 A Little Girl Lost 1:24 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 24 I Heard an Angel 1:11 poems from his notebooks, 1791-92 read by Robert Glenister 25 The Human Abstract 1:15 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 26 Night 2:01 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 27 from Jerusalem 4:46 written 1803-04; published 1820 read by Robert Glenister 28 London 0:54 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 5 29 The Land of Dreams 1:25 written at latest 1804 read by Robert Glenister 30 Nurse’s Song 0:46 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 31 Love’s Secret 0:48 poems from his notebooks, 1791-92 read by Robert Glenister 32 A Poison Tree 0:53 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 33 from the Preface to Milton 1:06 probably written 1804; printed 1810-11 read by Robert Glenister 34 The Little Vagabond 0:58 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 35 On Art and Artists 0:57 marginalia and miscellaneous verses read by Robert Glenister 6 36 The Sick Rose 0:28 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 37 Ah, Sunflower 0:33 from Songs of Experience read by Robert Glenister 38 The Voice of the Ancient Bard 0:41 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 39 To The Muses 0:55 from Poetical Sketches, printed 1783 read by Robert Glenister 40 The Lamb 0:55 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney 41 The Tyger 1:39 from Songs of Experience read by Stephen Critchlow 42 On Another’s Sorrow 1:47 from Songs of Innocence read by Michael Maloney Total time: 62:24 7 The Great Poets William Blake William Blake was an engraver, an artist, a ideals, and much of his poetry alludes to this. poet and a visionary, and a creative man of The Gates of Paradise and Jerusalem, for such unique and vivid talents that he stands example, use the wide range of his own apart – almost aloof – from his time, but cosmological imagery and theology to whose writings and drawings have resonated imagine an idealised England (Albion) as it through English literature for over two moves towards a state of harmony with the hundred years. He was born in November creator and becomes a new Jerusalem. 1757 and died nearly seventy years later in He lived at a time of profound revolutions, 1827; and while he nominally lived almost all in America, in France and in the arts. He was his life in London, he lived essentially in a also living in an England wary of individual world of powerful and vibrant imagination, liberty and fearful of invasion; but also at a where his visionary companions were rather time of the flowering of the Romantics in more real than any literary friends. In theology poetry and music. Blake however had nothing and creativity he was a bullish individual, a to do with such schools, not just man never at home in society or societies. He constitutionally (he was too resolutely believed that the political and religious individual to fit comfortably into any literary or hierarchies of his time were oppressive forces artistic movement) but also in terms of the against the individual and his relationship work he produced. He was a hard-working with the divine; and developed a vast and and dedicated artisan professionally, and in his complex mythology of his own, expressed in own works was trying to express something his long works such as Vala, or the Four Zoas, mystic and eternal rather than personal. As Thel, and Urizen. His is a complex world such, he was neither at home in the dying where the traditional values held by the years of the Age of Enlightenment, with its Church and State were often anathema to his emphasis on rationality, nor the early ones of 8 Romanticism which focussed on the man. Blake would be unlikely to view the individual’s sentiments. irony of these verses becoming almost a Some of Blake’s verse has a rhythm and national anthem with equanimity. cadence that stands comparison to the King The apparently endless range of his James Bible; his works for children still sing creative energy was by no means limited to with innocence and delight; many of his his major works. He was expressively angry social polemics are couched in spontaneous, too, and scattered epigrams, seemingly easy stanzas; he produced allusive verses, comments, philosophical or satirical and symbolic works whose poetical strengths couplets and fragments in margins and carry them through generations even without notebooks throughout his life. Some of these their meaning. A good example of the latter are included here, in the tracks named is the work for which he is perhaps best ‘Gnomic Verses’ and ‘On Art and Artists’. At known in Britain – the poem that became the the same time, his visual imagination was as hymn ‘Jerusalem’. This was written as part of vibrant, unique and compelling as his written the preface to a substantial work called works, and he deserves to be considered Milton, but Blake removed the preface from alongside the likes of Turner in the history of later editions. In it, he considers the British art. Engraving and printing may have suggestion that Jesus was brought to Britain been his profession; but the scale and scope, by Joseph of Arimathea, and questions the vigour and expressiveness of his work whether Christ could have allowed the are outstanding and now iconic. Although spiritual deprivation that Blake sees in his this collection is oral rather than visual, contemporary England. The ‘dark satanic it would be wrong – indeed impossible – to mills’ are almost certainly not those of the disentangle the two completely. They were, industrial revolution, but represent the after all, almost always paired together, with enslavement of the individual’s imagination; verses sinewing their way around or into the or possibly the institutions that do the engravings, which themselves were full of enslaving, such as the organised religions, the movement, brilliant colour and hauntingly schools and the legal and political systems powerful images of gods and monsters, that Blake believed overwhelmed the natural symbols and allegories. 9 This selection can serve only as a brief on allowing the children to be free to express introduction to Blake and his works, and it themselves and thus their essential spirituality. draws heavily upon his two best known Songs of Experience was published jointly collections, Songs of Innocence and Songs of with Songs of Innocence five years later and Experience. These contain some of his finest, usually only published in conjunction with it. most beautiful and concentrated works, as However, Blake occasionally continued to well as many of his best known ones. Some publish Songs of Innocence separately. This have the memorability of nursery rhymes, was to some extent a commercial decision, others the darker implications of fairy tales; since the book was in the vein of other some are straightforward, some almost popular books of the time; but Blake is rarely impenetrable; but all carry the stamp of straightforward. For him, the innocence and Blake’s complex world, one where innocence joy of childhood was a symbol of mankind’s is celebrated and mythologised, but innocence and freedom as well, a state to shadowed by the dark and forbidding symbol which he wanted everyone to return. 250 of experience with all the terrors of the years after his birth, William Blake, engraver London of 1795 and its implications for and printmaker, is still calling to us to return, mankind in general.