At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent
designs known as _Morning, or Glad Day_. It is the real Blake with only
one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his
grub state--caterpillar and moth--at his feet. The rays of the light are
darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before
him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain
that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he
was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the
No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob,
London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned
in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who
found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.
It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time.
It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that
he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs,
and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme,
Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.
But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative
passion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to
view all things in the light of eternity, he was passionately in love with
the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as
windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to "a
lively little girl" called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a
while. Polly's conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent
entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she
understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking
them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of
tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly
shook him off with a sharp stroke, "Are you a fool?" and left him feeling
very lacerated and sorry for himself.
Blake had not long to wait for another manifestation of the eternal
feminine. Recovering from an illness at Kew, where he was staying at the
house of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his grief to the
gardener's daughter Catherine, who declared that she pitied him from the
heart. There was the authentic voice of the eternal feminine. "Do you pity
me?" he gasped. "Yes! I do most sincerely" the voice continued. "Then I
love you!" and his fate was sealed. William Blake and Catherine Boucher
were married quietly at St Mary's Church, Battersea, on August 18th, 1782,
and the happy pair, leaving their parental nests, made their first little
home together in lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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