‘Something in My Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts

Abstract

William Blake’s illuminated poems naturally invite the hard questions about the relation of visual texts and verbal texts in any illustrated book, and in his in particular. In what follows, I should like to revisit a few of the more troublesome problems that continue to face us as readers and viewers of Blake’s illuminated pages, and to pose some questions about those pages and the ways in which Blake may or may not have intended us to proceed in digesting them. I say ‘digesting’ deliberately, for it seems to me that Blake asks us to ‘consume’ his texts in a manner analogous to that of John of Patmos, by means of a distinctively physical process through which we quite literally internalize the texts. This is ‘informed consumerism’ with a peculiarly Blakean twist. The account in Revelation is that the voice from heaven commanded John to ‘Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth’ (Rev. 10. 8). The result is just what the angel predicts: ‘And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it my belly was bitter’ (Rev. 10. 10). Significantly, the angel makes it clear what must transpire next: ‘And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings’ (Rev. 10. 11). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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