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DEATH OF THE STRONG, WICKED MAN, FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”

Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after design by Blake. Published 1808

The stanzas he wrote in dedication to Queen Charlotte form such a fitting introduction to the plates that we quote them:

The door of death is made of gold
That mortal eyes cannot behold,
But when the mortal eyes are closed
And cold and pale the limbs reposed,
The soul awakes and wond’ring sees
In her mild hands the golden keys.
The grave is heaven’s golden gate,
And rich and poor around it wait.
O Shepherdess of England’s fold,
Behold this gate of pearl and gold.
To dedicate to England’s Queen
The visions that my soul has seen,
And, by her kind permission bring,
What I have borne on solemn wing,
From the vast regions of the grave;
Before her throne my wings I wave,
Bowing before my sov’reign’s feet.
The grave produced these blossoms sweet,
In mild repose from earthly strife;
The blossoms of eternal life.

And now Blake comes to close quarters with the subject that had haunted him all his life, the dark web on which he had woven so many bright, half-defined fancies.

Again we discern a point d’appui between him and Michael Angelo. The thoughts of neither of them were long away from death. Michael Angelo wrestled with the dark angel and brought away from the encounter the profound and intimate thoughts that he has enshrined in the Medici Tombs of San Lorenzo. Never has the human soul—save perhaps Beethoven’s—apprehended more closely the mystery, the terror, the mingled shrinking and awe of the grave, yet at the same time its hope, than he did in the Sacristy of the Medici Chapel. And in all plastic art, the only things to which these fateful sculptures may be likened in their qualities of rapt and sincere thinking, united to imagination and insight, are the designs, which Blake made to illustrate Blair’s “Grave.”

The great Florentine, it is true, wrought colossally in enduring marble before all the world, while the obscure Blake, two centuries later, traced out his thoughts on paper, his designs being known to comparatively few persons; but the conceptions of the two brains are allied, and the works of the two hands are own brothers.

Blair’s conventional and smooth verses in Blake’s case have nothing to do with the matter. They merely form the pegs on which he cast the great garment of his thoughts. Death—the Grave!—his intense and fervent spirit so brooded on the subject that the result is no mere illustration of Blair’s text, but invention. The poem in his handling has enlarged itself out of all knowledge, and turned to us an unfamiliar face, new and enriching conceptions. Blair merely indicated the track on which his pioneer spirit journeyed heedfully and musingly, through the dim country of Death. Piercing all conventions, all accepted theology, he would fain seize the very heart of the elusive mystery. “What is Death?” he asks; “let me peer into the grave unshrinkingly and see for myself.” And from the grave he brings this triumphant answer, “Death is Life, this Life only is Death; you have but to die to conquer Death”; or in Walt Whitman’s prosaic but arresting phrase, “To die is different from what anyone supposes, and luckier.”