Blake and Coleridge – an imagined conversation!

The Frontispiece of Blake’s prophetic poem Jerusalem

There is a passage in my new book ‘Mariner’ in which I tell the story of how Coleridge met William Bake, then an old man living in almost complete obscurity and poverty in Fountain Court in London. The meeting was arranged by Charles Augustus Tulk, a Swedenborgian who had been inspired by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to get poets and writers campaigning for the first factory act, limiting the working hours and improving the conditions of children working in he new factories. Coleridge was active and successful in this campaign. Having lent Coleridge Blake’s poems, Tulke brough the two great sages together. He says ‘Blake and Coleridge, when in company seemed like congenial beings from another sphere breathing for a while on our earth’. Unfortunately he doesn’t tell us what they actually said!

I was honoured to be invited by the William Blake Society to see if I could reconstruct, or at least encourage us to imagine, what that unrecorded conversation might have been like, and last night, at a meeting of the Blake society in Waterstones on Piccadilly I did just that. The substance of all that I imagined them saying is drawn from their letters and published works and I gave a handout with the sources which I also print here, along with a recording of the talk. I got rather carried away and paced around a bit and I occasionally move from the microphone so the sound comes and goes a little, but I think it is all audible.

At the core of this conversation as I imagine it, is the way both men recognised Jesus as the Divine Imagination and Love bodied forth for us and kindling afresh in us the love and imagination which is God’s lost image deep in our souls. Both men were calling for England (‘Albion’ in Blakes terms) to awaken from the sleep of materialism, greed and conquest, and to be renewed in Christ through an awakening of the spiritual imagination. I hope some sense of the power and urgency of that unfinished task, and the call to continue it, comes through in this recording:

Albion comes to Christ and repents: “O Human Imagination O Divine Body I have Crucified
I have turned my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law”

Here is the text of the handout giving the sources of my quotations:

• To see a World in a Grain of Sand
  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
  And Eternity in an hour (from Auguries of Innocence)

 

• I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep
  And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow.
  I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once
  Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
  That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose.
  For Bacon & Newton sheathd in dismal steel, their terrors hang
  Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
  Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
  I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
  And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
  Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth
  In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
  Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
  Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
  Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace. (From Jerusalem)

 

• so shalt thou see and hear
  The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
  Of that eternal language, which thy God
  Utters, who from eternity doth teach
  Himself in all, and all things in himself.
  Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
  Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. (from Frost at Midnight)

 

• Be not afraid, that I shall join the party of the Little-ists – I believe, that I shall delight you by the detection of their artifices – Now Mr Locke was the founder of this sect, himself a perfect Little-ist. My opinion is this – that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind & therefore to you, that I believe the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakspere or a Milton. But if it please the Almighty to grant me health, hope, and a steady mind, (always the 3 clauses of my hourly prayers) before my 30th year I will thoroughly understand the whole of Newton’s works – At present, I must content myself with endeavouring to make myself master of his easier work, that on Optics. I am exceedingly delighted with the beauty & neatness of his experiment, & with the accuracy of his immediate Deductions from them – but the opinions found on these Deductions, and indeed his whole Theory is, I am persuaded, so exceedingly superficial as without impropriety to be deemed false. Newton was a mere materialist – Mind in his system is always passive – a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the sublimest sense – the Image of the Creator – there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system. (Coleridge letter to Thomas Poole)

 

• They and only they can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them. (From Biographia Literaria)
• ‘The imagination then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. (From Biographia Literaria)

 

• Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.
  Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
  To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
  Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
  Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination
  O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
  Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!

Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination
(Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever). (Jerusalem)

• O Human Imagination O Divine Body I have Crucified
  I have turned my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law (Jerusalem)
• I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. (Jerusalem)

 

• For the writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to a ord my soul either food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire through- out the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. Biographia Literaria