APOCALYPSE
The Unveiling of a Gravestone to William Blake
Sunday 12 August 2018 at 3 pm
Bunhill Fields, 38 City Road London EC1Y 1AU
(Old Street Tube Station)
"One power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision."
We welcome all our members, friends or passers-by to pause and share in this belated wake for Blake.
Dear Members and Friends of The Blake Society,
We are unveiling the stone to mark the exact place of burial of William Blake in Bunhill Fields at 3pm on the afternoon of Sunday 12 August. All are welcome!
There were said to be two thousand people present in Bunhill Fields in 1927 when the first stone (which was later moved) was unveiled. So please come!
A memorial card of the event will be given out at the entrance gates.
There will be artists and writers present to speak to the significance of Blake in their lives today including Philip Pullman, Lucy Winkett, Jah Wobble, Lida Cardozo, Malcolm Guite, Stephen Micalef and Will Franken.
Music will be provided by the choir Sansara who will perform A Golden String by the Australian composer Chris Williams. Nicki Wells will sing a set of songs acappella and the vocal trio Blake will perform Jerusalem.
There will be a laying of flowers and the afternoon will end with the lighting of 191 candles representing each of the years since the death of WB on 12 August 1827.
Twelfthphilia !
Tim Heath
Chair
And all the Arts of Life they changd into the Arts of Death in Albion.
The hour-glass contemnd because its simple workmanship
Was like the workmanship of the plowman, & the water-wheel,
That raises water into cisterns: broken & burnd with fire:
Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the shepherd.
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel:
To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion
Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind
And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task!
Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:
In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All.
—William Blake, Jerusalem
William Blake died in 1827, having suffered poverty and lack of recognition in his lifetime. But, in an age of reaction, he died as he had lived, his own man, and a visionary, and that was some achievement in those times. ‘He was and he remained robust, matter-of-fact, and a rebel. He is as downright a rebel in the later religious writings as in his early Radical ones’ (Bronowski 1958: 11).
Nearly three decades after Blake's death, the painter Samuel Palmer recalled him, 'his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy'. ‘He was a man without a mask’. Indeed, yes. As Jacob Bronowski writes, Blake had ‘a truth and a generosity which confound an age’ (Bronowski 1944: 192). But Bronowski goes on to write: ‘This at last is to understand Blake: when we see as one, the vision of indignation in the prophetic mask, and Pity the Human Face of the Songs of Innocence’.
Historian E.P. Thompson sums up Blake’s appeal and everlasting appeal in his conclusion to “Witness against the Beast” (1993):
‘The busy perfectionists and benevolent rationalists of 1791-6 nearly all ended up, by the later 1700’s, as disenchanted men. Human nature, they decided, had let them down and proved stubborn in resistance to enlightenment. But William Blake, by denying even in the Songs of Experience a supreme societal value to rationality, did not suffer from the same kind of disenchantment. His vision had been not into the rational government of man but into the liberation of an unrealised potential, an alternative nature, within man: a nature masked by circumstance, repressed by the Moral Law, concealed by Mystery and self-defeated by the other nature of 'self-love'. It was the intensity of this vision, which derived from sources far older than the Enlightenment, which made it impossible for Blake to fall into the courses of apostasy. When he drew apart from the deists and when the revolutionary fires burned low in the early 1800s, Blake had his own way of 'keeping the divine vision in time of trouble'. This way had been prepared long before by the Ranters and the Diggers in their defeat, who had retired from activist strife to Gerrard Winstanley's “kingdom within, which moth and rust does not corrupt.” And so Blake also took the characteristic antinomian retreat into more esoteric ways, handing on to the initiates 'The Everlasting Gospel'. There is obscurity and perhaps even some oddity in this. But there is never the least sign of submission to “Satan's Kingdom.” Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast.’
Because in time of trouble, he kept the divine vision. Poet Kathleen Raine ‘got it.’
I GIVE you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.…
England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death,
And close her from thy ancient walls?
Thy hills and valleys felt her feet
Gently upon their bosoms move
Thy gates beheld sweet Zion’s ways;
Then was a time of joy and love.
And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult, and London’s towers
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England’s green and pleasant bowers.
William Blake, Jerusalem
Bronowski, J. Blake A Man Without a Mask, Penguin, 1944
Bronowski, J. ed., William Blake: A Selection of Poems and Letters, Penguin, 1958
Thompson, E.P., Witness Against the Beast, The New Press, 1993