THIS is a compelling and timely book. It is compelling, because the reader shares Mark Vernon’s sense of excitement as he delves deeper and deeper into William Blake’s imaginative world and the way in which Blake’s visionary poetry also gives us vision: helps us see more deeply into the dilemmas and mysteries both of our own lives and the age in which we live.
And the book is timely because the Blakean insights that Vernon sets out so lucidly in this book are prophetic for our own age, both in the sense that Blake anticipates and foresees so much that is dystopian and alienating in modern materialist secularism, and also in the sense that he unveils the deeper powers at work and shows us a way out from “single vision” or “Newton’s sleep”, as Blake calls materialism, and back into a more numinous, enchanted, and joyful vision of the world.
There are, of course, many books on Blake, ranging from exact and detailed studies of his imagery and mythology, such as Kathleen Raine’s monumental Blake and the Tradition, to compelling biographies, for example Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake: A biography. So, what distinguishes Vernon’s new book?
I think the single most important contribution that Vernon makes to the literature is his choice at the outset to take Blake’s visions, his encounters with angels, apostles, prophets, and even God himself, seriously: to take Blake at his word and to see where that word leads us. So many writers on Blake never leave the modern secular mind-set, and so they patronise Blake rather than learn from him. They psychologise or medicalise his visions and speculate about migraines or psychotic episodes, and, likewise, they treat his poetry as an aesthetic or literary artefact rather than, as Blake intended, a call to awaken from sleep and see the world anew.
Given Vernon’s expertise and experience as a psychotherapist, one might have feared that he would do the same. Not so. By taking Blake seriously as a visionary, a prophet, and a teacher, he has written an exciting and refreshing book, which offers us what he calls “a Blakean education” in how to live well, which he summarises under four headings: “first, savvy innocence, second, perceptual openness, third, confident imagination, fourth, fearless critique”.
These approaches to life are set out in a series of chapters that skilfully combine biography of the poet with close reading of the works that he was writing at the various stages of his life. It is not that Vernon seeks the biography through the works and so reads them only as evidence for the life, but, rather, that his account of what is happening in Blake’s life gives us a context and a point of entry for the poems, not to read them back into Blake’s life, but to let them speak more clearly into ours.
The book is divided into three parts: Foundation, Energy, and Divinity, and it is the third of these which may be of special interest to readers of the Church Times. Here again, unlike some other writers who tend to psychologise or marginalise the importance to Blake of the Bible, and especially the person and work of Jesus, Vernon takes Blake’s religion seriously and teases out what it might have to offer us. The heart of the gospel for Blake is forgiveness and the mutual indwelling of God in us and us in God, in and through Christ.
Blake famously offered us what he called “the end of a golden string”: “I give you the end of a golden string Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” Vernon’s book is an excellent guide to finding, holding, and following that golden string.
The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter.
Awake!: William Blake and the power of the imagination
Mark Vernon
Hurst £27.50
(978-1-911723-97-4)
Church Times Bookshop £24.75
