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| William Blake is a particularly complex
figure in terms of a romantic natural history. On the one hand, Blake was
hostile to "vegetable" nature in all its forms. He saw the natural world
as a sign of our "fallen" condition, and his antimaterialism disdained
all forms of embodied "spirit," a category that includes at least humans
and perhaps other aspects of "animate nature" as well. At the same time,
Blake makes powerful use of natural imagery throughout his poems and artistic
productions. For Blake, to be
in nature is to be always removed
from the idealized world of visionary imagination, but that does not prevent
him from suggesting an interconnectedness that links all living things.
As a result, his caterpillars and butterflies often have human faces, while
his human figures sometimes sprout roots and branches. His birds' tails
and wings echo flower stalks and vines, while his mythic figures often
connect the human form "divine" with the botanic or the bestial.
Blake may have distrusted "nature" in visionary terms, but he celebrated its physical beauty, its sensuous details, and its crucial role in our awareness of our human place in the cosmos. In "Auguries of Innocence," for example, he reveals the cost of human ignorance of those connections that unite all aspects of creation: "The wanton Boy that kills the Fly / Shall feel the Spider's enmity"--"He who shall hurt the little Wren / Shall never be belov'd by Men." In many of his songs and short lyrics, Blake suggests that it is only human beings who upset balances existing throughout the rest of the natural world. "The Book of Thel," presents a cloud, lily, clod of clay, and worm that all accept their roles in a cycle of organic life and death in a way that Thel cannot. The Four Zoas imagines an idealized future state in which the fallen aspects of human psychic integrity are reunited with themselves and with the rest of animate creation. "The Sick Rose," by contrast, suggests that nature employs destructive processes that are at odds with human hope and optimism: "And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy." At his most cryptic, of course, Blake understands that "nature" is a category created by us, even as we are creatures bound up in its material reality: "Where man is not, nature is barren" ("The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"). (A.N.) |
| Blake's comments on the natural world
"The Sick Rose" "Gendering
Nature: Blake's 'Thel' and the Eros of Butterflies"
"Unfurling
the Worm: Insecto-Theology in William Blake's 'Thel'"
The Blake Archive (University of Virginia) |