I like snowdrops and in this morning’s New York winter sunshine, while walking our dog Bija, we saw these, our first snowdrops of the year. There’s something about them, my heart always opens with the sight of snowdrops, just look how beautiful they are, and consider too, that all their beauty is focussed totally, exclusively downwards for the pleasure of their mother, the Mother Earth that gave life to them.

A couple of weeks ago, I awoke at 4.30 am and read this poem by William Blake:

If Blake had never painted a picture, he’d be a major poet in the English language. Had he not written a poem, he would be a major artist. The fact that he is both, a man who never went to school for one day, is an extraordinary thing.

William Blake was born in Soho, London, in 1757; and at the age of eight saw a “tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, their bring wings “bespangling every bought like stars”. His visionary gifts, as a painter, engraver and poet, never left him; and when he died, in a two-room garret in Fountain Court, Strand, in 1827, he was singing.

It is to England’s continuing shame, that Blake is still buried in a pauper’s grave, without so much as a statue to commemorate a life as astonishing as his, a man who was a visionary and a prophet. The truth is the English never liked him much. OK, they sing Jerusalem at the last night of the proms, but do they understand what they are singing?

He’s saying that Jesus came to England, a myth that has endured over centuries. Some say he came with Joseph of Arimithea, who was a tin merchant, and England, specifically Cornwall, was the center of the tin industry in the Roman Empire.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen !

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills ?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills ?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire !

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

And what are the ‘dark satanic mills’? They could be the ghastly factories of the early Industrial Revolution, and Lambeth, where he lived, had many of them. But they could be Oxford and Cambridge, for Blake loathed all they stood for. Perhaps he meant both?

From Richard Holmes’ introduction to Songs of Innocence and Experience:

“Blake was a gentle, kindly, generous man; but never a peaceful or a conventional one. Frederick Tatham observed how his broad, stocky body was never still; his hair seemed to flame above his head; his large eyes blazed out, startlingly wide and large; his hands always held a pen, brush or engraver, which he constantly rolled between his fingers. (“My fingers emit sparks of fire with expectation of my future labors”, Blake once wrote.) He would shut himself up to work for a week, or walk forty miles in a single day. Catherine (his wife) although she often helped in his studio, once said: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

Blake’s paradise was often turbulent. In 1780 he joined the Gordon Rioters to watch them burn down Newgate gaol; in 1789 he wore a French revolutionary ‘liberty’ cap in the London streets. (This was a dangerous, even foolhardy thing to do. I once attended a lecture by an American academic in a Lambeth public library, who had sought, in vain, for contemporary references to Blake in papers, magazines and periodicals of the time. But he did discover that there were bands of thugs, recruited and paid for by local businessmen, who would beat up anyone who looked as though they were supporters of revolutionary France, or troublemakers of any kind. They would break up printing presses owned by those printing what the businessmen regarded as seditious reading material. The academic discovered that a group of such thugs were based in the very next street to that of Blake’s home in Lambeth. It seems inconceivable that they would be unaware of Blake, and wearing a red cap, as he did, would be flagging his dissention for all to see. Yet, there is no record or account of these people troubling Blake in any way.) Throughout the 1790′s he associated with political radicals like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft (incorporating many of their ideas into poems); in Lambeth he frequently got into street brawls when intervening in incidents of cruely to women or children; and in 1803 he was charged with sedition and assault at Chichester, after throwing a soldier (a sergeant) out of his garden ( a symbolic gesture if ever there was one).

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake’s death in a letter to Samuel Palmer: