The frontispiece gives us a reminiscence of Thel. A chrysalis, like a swaddled baby, lies on a leaf, while on the spray above a caterpillar—the emblem of motherhood—watches over it. Underneath is inscribed, significantly enough, the words, “What is man?” Blake’s thoughts were never long away from this subject. To find an answer to the question was his deepest preoccupation and concern, and the following designs are all variations on this one dominant theme. Plate No. 1 represents a woman gathering babies like flowers from among the clustering ivy at the foot of a tree. In glad haste she plucks up one more to put with the others already lying, like St. Elizabeth’s roses, in the folds of her apron. The child is found symbolically at the root of what Mr. Swinburne thinks is the tree of physical life, embedded in the earth from which all things issue, and to which all things return. The next four plates are embodiments of the four elements, which in Blake’s thoughts always teemed with “spiritual correspondences”—according to the Swedenborgian phrase. “Water” seems to be an emblem of folly and instability, and is embodied in the form of a man seated on the very roots of the tree of physical life, his feet set upon no firm earth, but upon the sand at the verge of the water. The foolish, helpless face, and hands spread out on knees, and the driving rain that descends with pitiless energy on all, go far to convey the idea of the perpetual flux and flow, the “unshapeableness” of the element “Water.” A gnome-like man in a crevice represents “Earth.” He is inclosed, bound down, weighted with clay. Sitting on a high white cloud amid the starry spaces of the sky, “Air” sits in form like a naked man, pressing his hands to his forehead in fear and giddiness at the vast immensity unrolled before his eyes.
“Blind in fire with shield and spear,” a man strides in Plate 5. Is this fire an emblem of the fierce elemental fires of Desire and Hatred—both of which are blind?
Plate 6 is entitled “At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell,” and a delicious cherub having broken the egg proceeds to climb out of it into the sunlit air. Symbol of the material life which forms a concrete circumference around the soul of eternal man, the eggshell is broken, when “at length for hatching ripe,” the veil of death is rent by the liberated spirit.
“I WANT! I WANT!”
Engraving from the “Gates of Paradise,” 1793
In Plate 7 and its successors Blake takes us back again to incidents characteristic of the life of man on earth.—“Alas!” exhibits a boy wantonly catching and killing bright little loves, which flutter across his path like butterflies. Plate 8 is a youth throwing barbed darts at an old man who sits on ruins sword in hand.
“My son, my son, thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee,”
writes Blake, suggesting the numerous cases of friction and cruel offence which must result from the education of the human soul in selfishness and vainglory.
There is nothing in the series to equal the colossal daring of “I want, I want.” Just a little cross-hatching, a little rough spluttering work with the burin, and we have this bit of marvellous irony. A group of tiny pigmies on a spit of land have reared an enormous ladder against the moon, and are about to start on their journey through star-bespread darkness to the pale crescent so far above them. Mr. Swinburne says that this was originally an ironical sketch satirizing the methods of Art study pursued by “amateurs and connoisseurs”—“scaling with ladders of logic the heaven of invention,” and presuming to measure, reach and gauge the intangible ideal. But in this series Blake has expanded the meaning of the design into the passionate yearning and aching desire of man after things spiritual.