DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31843#0045
THE BEAUTIFUL BOOK
every page. The figures are of the current convention of the time, though
they move with a peculiar spring and buoyancy. But the way in which
the text seems to leaf and flower and scatter into its margins wandering
tendrils and little fluttering flames is all Blake's own. The best pages,
and the most original, are Infant Joy, The Divine Image, and The Blossom,
which have in common a motive unlike anything in any other art, Blake s
strange vision of flowers as things which grow and waver up like flames
and actually become flames in form and movement. The mediseval
illuminators, according as the bent of their school is towards naturalism
or decoration, delight us by exquisite reminders in their borders of the
glory of actual rose, and pink, and violet, and daisy, or else by a mesh of
floral and foliated ornament, enlivened with blue, vermilion, and gold.
Blake gives us neither of these. His flowers and leaves rarely remind us
of any plants we know, but they have the spring and movement of plants
that live, if their life be only in a world of imagination. They refuse
to be tamed into any system of ornament; their forms and colours
are not abstracted from nature, but belong to a parallel nature of their
own.
The Songs of Experience bring in deeper notes, and the designs corre-
spond. This book did not, of course, immediately follow the Songs of
Innocence, but conformed to it in technique, as they were intended to be
bound up together.
In the page headed Introduction, ** Hear the voice of the Bard, we have
the first use of a motive to be used in later books with magnificent effect.
This is the conception of a white cloud, bearing the text, floating in deep
skies; and the contrast of dark and light has an extraordinary effect of
exhilaration, as of being lifted into the air. The single floating figure
strikes the key-note, and makes all the difference of animation to the
design. In other pages the running and fluttering lines of decoration
now begin to show a kind of sinister luxuriance, as in Earth’s Answer,
where they twist and flame in fantastic shoots and coils about the text.
Holy Thursday has been already mentioned. But how original is the
tragic page of the Poison Tree, where the corpse lies outstretched and the
poisonous depending fibres make a dark mesh against the sky, almost
like a terrible rain !
With Thel the scheme is changed. The text, more finely written, is
separate from the design; the two harmonize, but do not intermingle
with each other ; there are no overflowings of ornament about the lettermg.
25
every page. The figures are of the current convention of the time, though
they move with a peculiar spring and buoyancy. But the way in which
the text seems to leaf and flower and scatter into its margins wandering
tendrils and little fluttering flames is all Blake's own. The best pages,
and the most original, are Infant Joy, The Divine Image, and The Blossom,
which have in common a motive unlike anything in any other art, Blake s
strange vision of flowers as things which grow and waver up like flames
and actually become flames in form and movement. The mediseval
illuminators, according as the bent of their school is towards naturalism
or decoration, delight us by exquisite reminders in their borders of the
glory of actual rose, and pink, and violet, and daisy, or else by a mesh of
floral and foliated ornament, enlivened with blue, vermilion, and gold.
Blake gives us neither of these. His flowers and leaves rarely remind us
of any plants we know, but they have the spring and movement of plants
that live, if their life be only in a world of imagination. They refuse
to be tamed into any system of ornament; their forms and colours
are not abstracted from nature, but belong to a parallel nature of their
own.
The Songs of Experience bring in deeper notes, and the designs corre-
spond. This book did not, of course, immediately follow the Songs of
Innocence, but conformed to it in technique, as they were intended to be
bound up together.
In the page headed Introduction, ** Hear the voice of the Bard, we have
the first use of a motive to be used in later books with magnificent effect.
This is the conception of a white cloud, bearing the text, floating in deep
skies; and the contrast of dark and light has an extraordinary effect of
exhilaration, as of being lifted into the air. The single floating figure
strikes the key-note, and makes all the difference of animation to the
design. In other pages the running and fluttering lines of decoration
now begin to show a kind of sinister luxuriance, as in Earth’s Answer,
where they twist and flame in fantastic shoots and coils about the text.
Holy Thursday has been already mentioned. But how original is the
tragic page of the Poison Tree, where the corpse lies outstretched and the
poisonous depending fibres make a dark mesh against the sky, almost
like a terrible rain !
With Thel the scheme is changed. The text, more finely written, is
separate from the design; the two harmonize, but do not intermingle
with each other ; there are no overflowings of ornament about the lettermg.
25