“People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”~Wallace Stevens

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake was an odd sort of genius. He was a poet, a painter, and a printmaker. He did not attend school as a child and was educated at home by his mother. His father bought him some drawings of Greek antiquities, and Blake began to copy them. Then, he took art lessons. Then, he was apprenticed for seven years, from age 14 to 21, to an engraver.

Blake revered the Bible, but had his own idiosyncratic and probably heretical interpretation of it. He hated the Church of England. Blake and his wife Catherine practiced nudity (in their own garden), and he may have proposed that he bring a concubine into their marriage bed, although there’s no evidence that he actually did so. He claimed throughout his life that he saw visions of God and of angels, among other things, and believed that he was personally instructed by Archangels in his work.

I nevertheless have hope that he placed his trust in Christ in spite of his sometimes odd ideas.

George Richmond on William Blake’s death:
He died … in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ — Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.