Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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This year England is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake (1757-1827): poet, painter, engraver and, in the opinion of some critics, visionary mystic. Reading about the celebration in the Sunday Times' Books supplement brought back some of my university memories. I began to imagine our lecturer of poetry, Mr Holloway, reading Blake's famous poem The Tiger to us:

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry

Mr Holloway believed that poetry should be recited, not silently read, and he always presented us with a dramatised performance. I still remember him describing Blake's life, and the ups and downs he went through.

Born on 28 November, 1757, the son of a haberdasher, he lived almost all his life in London. Hence, his being described as "a master spirit of London".

In the article in the Times' Book Supplement, Peter Ackroyed describes Blake as "a great cockney visionary who saw the infinite world, the fiery world, in the streets of the capital. Blake loved London and was known to have enjoyed walking in its streets, wandering through its alleys and courtyards." He left London only once, since, in the words of Ackroyed London was "his inheritance, the landscape of his imagination".

Blake was a revolutionary and when he was 18 he rallied behind America's Declaration of Independence which inspired not only America but idealists everywhere.

He sympathised with the French Revolution in 1789. In some ways he was a socialist, opposing private property and the established church.

Blake's poetry reflects the contradictions of London. He attacked the moral degradation created by brutal competitiveness. He drew attention to its victims: chimney sweeps, street walkers, orphans and beggars.

This is reflected in his poem London :

I wander through each chartered street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the chimney-sweeper's cry

Every blackening church appalls;

And the hapless soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down palace walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear

How the youthful harlot's curse

Blasts the newborn infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

His solution was not the Romantic Exodus to the country or the mountains. It was to render the "hellish city" a "City of the God". His aim was to create what he described as a "New Jerusalem". And in his poem Jerusalem, that vision can be found in the very heart of London:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walks upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded her

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 England's green and pleasant land.

This poem is regarded by critics as being prophetic, almost a blueprint for the future. In a simple, emotional and direct manner, he sums up the two lines of the poem.

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills

Celebrating Blake's 250th anniversary, the Sunday Times is arranging guided walks of Blake's London. When I read about this the idea of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo immediately sprang to my mind.