Wrestling with their weird and wonderful presence is central to Blake: dodging that, out of distaste or embarrassment, is really dodging him. They are central to what is intriguing and, to be frank, fun about him.
The colourful stories of Blake’s second sight, remembered by so many who knew him that they can’t be discounted, reach back into his early childhood. Catherine Blake, his wife, one day dropped this causal remark into a conversation: “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and He put His head to the window, and set you screaming.” I love that “first.” What happened when God appeared the second time, the third?
Alexander Gilchrist, an early biographer who was seminal in securing the reputation that Blake has come to enjoy, records perhaps the most famous vision. One day, as a young lad, William was walking on Peckham Rye, a grassy rise that is a mile or two east of the lovely hills of Camberwell south of the River Thames. “Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” He sped home and told his parents, who chastised him: don’t lie, they said. Luckily, he obeyed them and told many such stories. On another occasion, whilst still young, he saw hay-makers in the evening, who were a frequent sight in his youth because London’s outskirts quickly gave way to arable fields. The late summer light not only gilded the grasses and workers but “amid them angelic figures walking,” Blake reported.
Further tales of the unexpected abound and clearly such sightings were not infrequent. Thrashings were threatened when he ran in and announced that he had just seen the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel under the trees, as happened on another day. His lucidity reached beyond perceiving the holy as well. There is a further story from his early years in which he interrupted a traveller who was describing the wonders of a foreign city. “Do you call that splendid?” the precocious William interjected. “I should call a city splendid in which the houses were of gold, the pavements of silver, the gates ornamented with precious stones.” You get the sense that he glimpsed such glorious abodes and didn’t just make things up. He had no need to.
The sightings continued as he matured, which he later said was key as, for others, the seeing fades and ceases. During his late teens, he worked for a while in Westminster Abbey, which enchanted him. The building is medieval and gothic, not neoclassical as was the favoured Georgian style, and Blake loved the architecture’s “living form,” as he put it; amidst the criss-cross of aisles and reaching up of arches, he detected the “livid twilight of past days,” and in the Abbey his clairvoyance spontaneously kicked in. He saw long-dead monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers processing around the royal tombs. Personally, I’m unsurprised at this particular instance of strange espying as I was once myself locked into Westminster Abbey after hours. I play the organ and the evening is the time a novice can practice. I longed to feel the marvellous power of the instrument at my fingertips, but as I pulled out the stops and reached forward to strike a crashing cord, a fear gripped me. Who or what might such a terrific noise disturb in the shadows?
Blake clearly enjoyed his visions and could joke about them. One day, he showed a picture he had made to his great friend, Johann Fuseli, another visionary artist. Blake was proud of it and said as much, to which Blake replied: “Yes. The Virgin Mary appeared to me, and told me it was very fine,” then adding: “What can you say to that?” Equal in wit, Fuseli retorted: “Say! Why nothing, only her ladyship has not an immaculate taste.” I imagine Blake chortled. Another droll incident captures the practical reality of living with spirits. The story relates how Blake was busy working when there was an unexpected banging on the door. He rose patiently to attend to the interruption; he never knew whether a disturbance might be an angel calling. Only this time, he was met by no gleaming vision but a grimy coalman humping a great sack. Sometimes a knock at the door is just a knock at the door.
Some of Blake’s visions do test credulity, given that those I’ve cited so far have not already slipped from the intriguing to straightforwardly dubious. There was a lady who happened to sit next to him at a tea-party or soirée, whom he turned to and asked, “Did you ever see a fairy’s funeral, madam?” She instantly retorted, “Never, sir!” At which point Blake continued by saying that he hadn’t either,
not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden, there was a great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.
Wow—or should that be, what? Or maybe the existence of garden fairies seems as unlikely as the existence of heavenly spirits, with the upshot that once you admit one, you admit the lot. Only there is a serious issue attending these marvels and a question of discernment.
The novelist Salley Vickers, whose bestseller Miss Garnet’s Angel features said beings, argues that we need fairies, to resist “the reign of those grim twin isms, reductionism and materialism.” She continues: “We once inhabited a world that was animate, in which humans were creatures who not only perceived but were themselves perceived.” The world could answer back, not least in the form of nymphs and sprites, who have designs of their own and are resistant to human control, will and desire. Cross the little people and you can expect to find they aren’t so little. Blake would have agreed that fairies and angels are expressions of immaterial intelligences that elude narrowed perceptions. If not seen, they no less press us by their company.
Fairies, angels, prophets, God. If you are not going to opt for either glib dismissals or assertions of madness, and also not for uncritical, unthinking acceptance, then what of Blake’s visions? I’m trusting that their meaning and significance is revealed by not deciding too quickly, either with an easy affirmation or accounting for them in such a way that a materialistic worldview is left safely beyond question. Blake would insist that visionary sight must be developed before a judgement can be made and this plea is fundamental to learning from him. He offers both an invitation and a challenge. Can you too see more?
Here is an analogy. Consider the multidimensional aspects of awareness that must emerge in order to understand a language. Think first of a child, aged about two, and imagine saying to them, “I am a tiger.” The toddler would be confused; if you repeated the remark, insistently, they might become upset. But if you said, “I am a tiger” to a child a year or so older, aged about three, they might think your statement funny. They might giggle and retort, “Don’t be silly! No you’re not!” A child at that age can push back. A shift has occurred.
If you say, “I am a tiger” to a child about the age of five, they may wonder what you mean. If I myself say it, a youngster might think that I am referring to my ginger hair, which might be said to look a bit tiger-like. A slightly more mature child could countenance something further, an inner meaning: might I mean that I’ve a fierce temper burning bright, analogous to a tiger’s growl?
As a child becomes agile with language, further dimensions of the same phrase would become apparent, which is also to say that previously hidden aspects of reality start to reveal themselves through the phrase. Maybe it is a reference to being tiger-like in a particular context, when a passionate fire burns in the eyes? Or could it be a reference to a dark side of the human psyche, a fearful symmetry, in marked contrast to a calm exterior? This might then lead to the realisation of a truth about human beings in general: one person can have several sides to them, which often exist in tension or conflict. A young person who hears “I am a tiger” in this way is starting to see that humans can be seized by tiger-like demons, as if possessed by deadly terrors. They might ask, In what furnace was thy brain?—to cite once more Blake’s probably most famous poem, “The Tyger.”
The reflections needn’t stop there. Someone on the cusp of adulthood might ponder whether human individuals are ever really a coherent unity or, rather, whether they are more like an erratic burn of character flares and quivering instincts? And then further: do the things that affect us come equally from outside as inside our psyches, forged in scattered furnaces, driven by alien imperatives? This further possibility is available for consideration not because of literal-mindedness or naivety, but because of a capacity to contemplate complex features of existence. Blake certainly had such a high-quality intelligence. He was to become immensely, subtly perceptive.
What matters when it comes to sightings of angels and the like, then, is the quality of the mind making the assertions. With what level of sophistication do they speak or, if they are straightforwardly against the supernatural, what assumptions may limit their sight? That Blake was no fool is implied in another anecdote. He was relating an incident in which he had seen what, at first sight, looked like an ordinary bucolic scene transform into a ravishing sublime tableau. One of his listeners, gripped by the tale of the metamorphosis, thought that she would like to take her children to see the spectacle, as it would entertain them. So she asked Blake where he saw the glorious display. He replied, “Here, madam” and tapped his forehead. They might go to exactly the same spot and see nothing untoward.
Gilchrist, who records this exchange, uses it to insist that Blake did not hallucinate as if unhinged, nor was he like a medium who impresses by channelling. There was plenty of table-turning and panel-knocking going on amongst the Spiritualists of Georgian England, and Blake was not one of those. Rather, his capacities of sight were coupled to wit and discernment, like a person advanced in the nuances of speech and language. What he encountered were “phenomena seen by his imagination: realities none the less for that, but transacted within the realm of mind,” Gilchrist continues. What might be accomplished by this imaginative agency was a central concern for Blake. He did not seek to disregard such experiences but to examine them, on occasion questioning them quite directly.
This happened, on another day, when exasperated he sighed, “who can paint an angel?” He muttered the question to himself and, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, heard an answer: “Michelangelo could.” Being Blake, he decided to address the voice. The story continues:
“And how do you know,” I said, looking round me, but I saw nothing save a greater light than usual. “I know,” said the voice, “for I sat for him: I am the archangel Gabriel.” “Oho!” I answered, “you are, are you: I must have better assurance than that of a wandering voice; you may be an evil spirit—there are such in the land.” “You shall have good assurance,” said the voice, “can an evil spirit do this?” I looked whence the voice came and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun and beckoning me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that—it was the archangel Gabriel.
Blake tested what happened, which is a venerable response to visions. In the ancient Greek world, for example, when a lucky pilgrim received a message from the oracle at Delphi, their next task was to question what had been said. Hence, when Socrates heard that the priestess had said that no one was wiser than him, he went about Athens seeking someone who was. He couldn’t find anyone and only then did he realise what Apollo was communicating to him: he was wise because he was conscious of the limits of his knowledge. Similarly, when Jesus was baptised and heard God’s voice in blessing, he immediately went into the wilderness to work out what the voice might mean in practice. Or again, after the prophet Mohammed had received his first visitation from the angel Gabriel, which initiated his receipt of the Quran, he was terrified and only began to realise what was happening with the assistance of his wife, Khadijah.
Blake was active in his engagement with these experiences; he made much of them, not in a crazy way, but creatively.
Reprinted with permission from Mark Vernon’s Awake!: William Blake and the Power of Imagination, published September 1, 2025 by Hurst.
