Blake’s Fourfold Vision vs. Jung’s Visionary Mode

1. Blake’s Fourfold Vision vs. Jung’s Visionary Mode Dr. Matthew Fike Winthrop University Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Loyola University, July 25, 2013

2. Letter to Thomas Butts, November 22, 1802 And a fourfold vision is given to me; ’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep.

3. Blake’s Four Types of Vision

4. My Thesis • My thesis is this single point: that Blake’s vision was of a more fourfold nature than previous critics have been willing to grant.

5. G. E. Bentley, Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake 19-20 “From his earliest childhood Blake saw visions. When he was four years old, God put his head to the window and set the child screaming, and once ‘his mother beat him for running in & saying that he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a Tree in the Fields.’ Later, when he was eight or ten, one day as he was walking on Peckham Rye, near Dulwich Hill in the Surry countryside not far from his grandfather’s residence in Rotherhithe . . . he saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. When he told this story at home, it was ‘only through his mother’s intercession . . . [that he escaped] a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie.’”

6. George Richmond, qtd. in Peter Ackroyd, Blake 311 “Blake spoke most tenderly of an old nurse[.] ’Twas to her he related his first vision—when a lad out walking at harvest time he saw some reapers on the fields & amongst them angels[;] he came home & told his friends but all of them laughed at him excepting this old nurse, who believed what he told her—He always spoke of her with great affection.”

7. Letter to John Flaxman, September 12, 1800 “Angels stand round my Spirit in Heaven, the blessed of Heaven are my friends upon Earth. / . . . Now my lot in the Heavens is this, Milton lov’d me in childhood & shew’d me his face.”

8. Crabb Robinson, qtd. in Dennis Saurat, Blake and Milton 99 “I have seen him as a youth and as an old man with a long, flowing beard. He came lately as an old man—he said he came to ask a favour of me. He said he had committed an error in his Paradise Lost, which he wanted me to correct, in a poem or a picture. But I declined. I said I had my own duties to perform. . . . He wished me to expose the falsehood of his doctrine taught in the Paradise Lost. . . .”

9. Desiree Hirst, “What Did Blake Believe? A Study of William Blake’s Religion,” The Aligarh Critical Miscellany 1.1 (1988): 76. “[Visionary experiences] were repeated during his time in the Abbey when he was sometimes actually locked in the great church after hours and once suddenly saw it ‘fill with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers, and his entranced ear heard the chant of plain-song and chorale, while the vaulted roof trembled to the sound of organ music’. This kind of time traveling proved not unusual in Blake’s life.”

10. Letter to John Flaxman, September 21, 1800; and Blake, Jerusalem, plate 77 Letter: Blake calls Flaxman his “Friend & companion from Eternity” and mentions “our ancient days before this Earth appear’d in its vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes.” Jerusalem: “Imagination [is] the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal bodies are no more.”

11. Letter to William Hayley, September 21, 1800 “I am very sorry for your immense loss [the death of Hayley’s son, Thomas Alphonso Hayley, four days earlier]. . . . I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother [Robert, his youngest brother, who had died in February 1787] & with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate. Forgive me for Expressing to you my Enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of Since it is to me a Source of Immortal Joy: even in this world by it I am the companion of Angels. May you continue to be so more & more & to be more & more perswaded that every Mortal loss is an Immortal Gain. The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity.”

12. Bentley, The Stranger 226; letter to Flaxman, September 21, 1800 From Bentley: “‘My Angel Artist in the skies[,] / Thou mayst inspire & control / a Failing Brother’s Hand & eyes / or temper his eccentric Soul.’” Letter: “I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well concieve. In my Brain are studies & Chambers fill’d with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels.”

13. Letter to Butts, July 6, 1803 “ . . . a Sublime Allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity. I consider it as the Grandest Poem that this World Contains. Allegory address’d to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry.”

14. Letter to John Trusler, August 16, 1799 “But I hope that none of my Designs will be destitute of Infinite Particulars which will present themselves to the Contemplator. And tho’ I call them Mine, I know that they are not Mine, being of the same opinion with Milton when he says That the Muse visits his Slumbers & awakes & governs his Song when Morn purples the East, & being also in the predicament of that prophet who says: I cannot go beyond the command of the Lord, to speak good or bad.”

15. Letter to George Cumberland, August 26, 1799; R. H. Cromek, letter to Blake, May 1807 Letter quoting Trusler: “Your Fancy, from what I have seen of it, & I have seen variety at Mr Cumberland’s, seems to be in the other world or the World of Spirits, which accords not with my Intentions, which, whilst living in This World, Wish to follow the Nature of it.” Cromek: “I have imposed on myself yet more grossly in believing you to be one altogether abstracted from this world, holding converse with the world of spirits! simple, unoffending, a combination of the serpent and the dove. I really blush when I reflect how I have been cheated in this respect.”

16. Letter to Butts, April 25, 1803;Letter to Flaxman, September 21, 1800 To Butts: “I converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals. . . .” To Flaxman: “Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen, & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.”

17. Letter to Butts, October 2, 1800 “Receive from me a return of verses, such as Felpham produces by me, tho’ not such as she produces by her eldest Son [his patron, Hayley]. . . .” “My Eyes did Expand / Into regions of air / . . . Into regions of fire,” as well as “My eyes more & more / Like a Sea without shore / Continue Expanding. . . .”

18. Letter to Butts, April 25, 1803 “But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years’ Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts; for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme, Similar to Homer’s Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted). I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d Non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life, all produc’d without Labour or Study. I mention this to shew you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here.”