Researching Romanticism: William Blake

Illustrations for Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ 1795-7. See images at: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copy.xq?copyid=bb515.1&java=no

William Blake

These illustrations bring together the ethereal and the sublime. Young’s poetry itself explores sublimity and is said to have been an influence for Edmund Burke, author of the seminal ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ (1757). In this image here, faces appear struggling in the rush of water. Above them an angelic yet ominous God-like figure looms, with beautiful wings but a hidden face. There is duality in the sublime, both beautiful and fearful. This continues in the untouched but desolate landscape in this illustration here. This landscape reminded me personally of Shetland, with gentle rolling hills, but are also completely deserted and featureless. 

The simultaneous reaction of fear and sense of beauty is also in the Romantic ruin. Georg Simmel in ‘The Ruin’ (1911) describes nature as both harsh and mysteriously harmonious. His whole essay becomes a discussion on many opposing forces in the ruin - and also in the human soul. He suggest that a conflict between the forces of spirit and nature happens in every human. Every soul wishes to reach upwards, to imagine, create and to aspire to ‘something beyond’ the physical world - yet are also tied to the parameters of the human body and the rules of nature, decay and mortality. This is brilliantly expressed in the final image here. A joyful figure leaps upward into the sky, a place of pure white clouds. The graceful folds in his clothes emphasise this leap upwards and in his hand he holds a lyre, which allows him to appeal to above through lofty music. Yet - his foot is chained to the ground. The viewer can feel the chain’s latent heaviness, about to pull the figure back down to earth. This chain mingles with twisting thorny branches amongst a desolate landscape, possibly Blake’s vision of the wilderness into which Adam and Eve were cast out into. 

Through looking at Blake (together with Simmel’s ideas), I’ve been able to see the ruin as expressive of restless struggle between contrary states - beauty and darkness, spirit ad material, innocence and experience, natural and human (and so also industrial). Our outward fascination with ruins seems to be evidence of our inner struggles, the result of being both of the earth and aware of ‘something other’, a spiritual beyond. The building is our inner imagination made concrete in the real world, and when it begins to ruin, we feel the terrifying - yet inevitable and strangely enchanting - pull of the earth.