Excerpt from Mark Vernon, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (London: Hurst, 2025):
We are inclined to forget that this world is a home, not only physically, in the sense that we depend upon planet Earth and its intricate chains of living interaction, but psychologically. We are a part of a totality and creation is a part of our whole. “Just as our bodies are continuous with the elements, so is all that is visible, audible, tangible to us continuous with our total field of knowledge, our total consciousness,” said the poet and Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine.91 There is no neat division between me and not-me, the animate and inanimate, inner cognition and outer behaviour, which is why Blake writes of dwelling amidst myriad subjectivities.
He [Blake] rejects the idea that we merely project our feelings onto trees and mountains, animals and stars, and thereby give them a faux vitality; that is the lie of misenchantment. We do project for sure, but we can also realise that everything speaks back to us, if we listen. A discourse and exchange is possible. Our imagination connects with the imagination that is expressed in rocks and plants, thereby discovering a mutual ground and shared energy. The alert face of the world looks back at us when we look at its offspring. Sometimes they smile, sometimes grimace, sometimes weep, often they express a mood beyond comprehension. Interactions with unexpected powers and alien personalities offer opportunities for discovery, much as we get to know ourselves and others in relationships with those who are both similar and strange.
We can be aware that all creatures speak; science might, in fact, be described as the effort to encourage even stones to talk.92 Certainly, if we don’t take the task seriously, calamity looms.
Mark Vernon, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (London: Hurst, 2025)
Available at: Bookshop.org, where you can support your local bookstore.
And Amazon.com where a digital version is available. [Trump’s postal policy is interfering in package deliveries from abroad at the moment or I’d link to Hurst in UK.]
At one point in the unfinished poem VALA or The Death and Judgement of the Eternal Man, Blake writes about fallen Urizen, whose self-referential reasoning has lost this capacity. Echoes of contemporary environmental concerns are clear when he suggests how Urizen’s detached voice sounded to the creatures around him. Might this be how the natural world hears humanity now?
- His voice to them was but an inarticulate thunder, for their Ears
Were heavy & dull & their eyes & nostrils closed up.
Oft he stood by, a howling victim Questioning in words
Soothing or Furious; no one answer’d; every one wrap’d up
In his own sorrow howl’d regardless of his words, nor voice
Of sweet response could he obtain tho’ oft assay’d with tears.
He knew they were his Children ruin’d in his ruin’d world.
Oft would he stand & question a fierce scorpion glowing with gold
In vain; the terror heard not. Then a lion he would Sieze
By the fierce mane, staying his howling course. In vain the voice
Of Urizen; vain the Eloquent tongue. A Rock, a Cloud, a Mountain
Were now not Vocal as in Climes of happy Eternity
Where the lamb replies to the infant voice & the lion to the man of years
Giving them sweet instructions; where the Cloud, the River, & the Field
Talk with the husbandman & shepherd. But these attack’d him sore,
Siezing upon his feet & rending the Sinews that in Caves
He hid to recure his obstructed powers with rest & oblivion.93
The field that attacks rather than converses with the husbandman and shepherd echoes a predicament with which we have now become familiar: the denudation of soils and leaching of nitrates into lakes and rivers. But Blake’s aim is not only negative but practical: to restore the conversation and our contribution to nature.
Think of the word “nature” itself, another one with an evolving meaning in the eighteenth century. In Latin, natura means birth and implies a divinely endowed wisdom of regeneration and restoration. Mother Nature, therefore, referred to the active power that births the natural world. However, in Blake’s time, nature was on the way to being redescribed in impersonal terms as “materialized logical process,” to cite T.H. Huxley, also known as Darwin’s bulldog.94 That invokes a very different set of descriptive metaphors—as if nature adheres to laws rather than manifests purposes, is driven by reproduction rather than regeneration, acts automatically rather than with responsive powers. That said, the applicability of this shift of worldview has been much debated. Charles Darwin recognised the aptness of talking about Mother Nature when referring to evolutionary phenomena such as fertility and adaptation, though he simultaneously insisted that natural selection is not a kind of intelligence and warned against taking his references to Mother Nature literally.95 The upshot was that she was forced underground; people forgot how to relate to her and sought all the more to manipulate a world deemed purely material—though notice how she dwells even in that description: the word “matter” is, in part, derived from mater or mother. Blake saw that people were becoming less conscious of Mother Nature and, as can happen when things are repressed, that meant she was becoming frightening and shadowy. In his poems, Vala usually represents nature according to this fallen state of mind. She is experienced as having a dangerous character and isolated from her spiritual aspect, whom Blake names Jerusalem, and that diminishment explains her name: Vala is probably a pun on the Indian word maya, or illusion. That concept describes the ways in which human beings become ignorant of the true character of reality because maya veils it; Blake probably substituted the “m” for a “v” and derived “Vala.”96 The concealing veil makes matter seem like inert stuff and nature rule-bound, with life typically capricious. Blake describes the veil as a net of Cruel Laws, ensnaring the Souls of the Dead: nature red in tooth and claw—alien, not a friend, a presence to tame not know.97 A sense of uneasiness pervades this mindset, to which Urizen gives voice in a lamentation: The Forests fled, | The Corn-fields & the breathing Gardens outside separated, | The Sea, the Stars, the Sun, the Moon, driv’n forth by my disease—his disease being the failure to converse with the sea, stars, sun and moon.98 Conversely, when Vala is united to Jerusalem, and therefore to her visionary as well as material powers, her veil is transformed. It becomes a holy garment—a beautiful net of gold and silver twine.99 Dressed by it, nature’s sacred intelligence is made present. Human beings play the major part in uncoupling Vala from Jerusalem, Blake insists, because science can raise a wall of laws and fog of maths between us and her palpable presence. Again, he is stressing that the generalising character of the scientific study of nature needs correcting, for the truth is that when well-conceived, science can enhance not hinder the relationship. This augmentation is the gift of the exceptional capacities of the human mind: listening to and loving creatures in their own languages.
Further, Mother Nature has things to say to us directly herself, not only through the creatures that she sustains. The traditional way of drawing that distinction is to speak of two aspects of nature. There is natura naturata, or “nature natured,” which is the manifest world of phenomena—sea, stars, sun, moon and so on. And there is natura naturans, or “nature naturing,” which is the creative power of Mother Nature herself: nature as imagination itself. Blake’s work urges us to grow interested again in nature naturing, so as to complement the remarkable success that science has had with the investigation of nature natured. The extension is vital because the power gained by documenting the many things that make up the manifest world tends to go to human heads. The knowledge is exploited to develop technologies from nuclear weaponry to intensive farming. Excesses inevitably result, with the usual way of trying to constrain them being regulations and ethics: setting limits on how the technologies are deployed. But a culture in love with progress readily objects to limits and turns them into targets to exceed. The key missing move, Blake explains, is to redirect that desire for more so as to fall back in love with Nature herself, known once again as an imaginative, responsive presence to respect and collaborate with. Human beings are uniquely positioned to do that because of the capacity consciously to perceive nature naturing. In that, we might establish a relationship that can provide what ethical principles alone cannot: a wisdom of mutuality.
I think that sensing the importance of this possibility lies behind much of the growing appeal of Indigenous ways of knowing. “Indigenous peoples live in relational worldviews,” Melissa Nelson told me. A professor at Arizona State University, whose heritage includes Anishinaabe, Cree, Métis and Norwegian, she researches and preserves the rituals and myths around which Indigenous ways of life are structured. These patterns of organisation are partly practical but hold intelligence, too, joining skills with a lived awareness of the more-than-human. “There is a nurturing quality to the universe that is for us like a natural law, a universal principle that we can tap into: this field of love that is the matrix of the universe,” Nelson continues. Indigenous knowledge invites us to consider the possibility of participating in the world not from assumptions of difference and isolation, but difference and communion. Blake’s mythology can help in that imaginative task.
He also takes the insight a step further. When learning to discourse with Nature’s powers, another revelation becomes clear. The sacred aspect not only re-enchants the world but, when conversing with the subjectivities of Each rock & each hill, Each fountain & rill, Each herb & each tree, Mountain, hill, Earth & Sea, there can be detected something else. Speaking too is the eternal source of all transient things: the third, divine dimension. As with human relationships, so with Mother Nature: we can be alerted not just to other presences but a shared ground of being and source of all vitality. This is why, when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears not myriad but infinite—the infinite being the one fount of Each grain of Sand, Every Stone on the Land, Cloud, Meteor & Star. Heaven is indeed in a wildflower, eternity is indeed in love with the productions of time, because heaven is in the flower, eternity is in the events of time. Blake advises us to enter the transcendent dimension within the immanent world via our imaginations, with words, through the arts, in the sciences. He shows how to make these disciplines a Fiery Chariot of Contemplative Thought that can enable us to make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder, which always intreats [us] to leave mortal things and thereby learn to commune with the immortal.100 Inspiration and intuitions of Eternity will follow as a reminder of Blake’s stress on the primacy of what is immediate: It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too, Both in Art & in Life.101 So he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organised.102
In short, Mother Nature does not treat the natural world as her personal fiefdom because what she tends exists at a threshold to the All. The Vegetable Universe, Blake explains, meaning the world as seen biologically, opens like a flower from the Earth’s center: In which is Eternity. It expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell [the sky’s dome]; And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without.103 Any finite thing reflects, in some manner or mode, an aspect of the infinite and Blake invites us to consider how Nature always displays more than a kaleidoscope of colour and tumble of activity. When imaginatively speaking with Rock, Cloud, Mountain, there can also be felt moving the Spirit which Lives Eternally.104 This divine aspect, implicit in every exchange or encounter, helps foster the shift from possessing to participating, from grasping to loving, as with that larger awareness we are freed from feeling self-concerned, knowing that our life too is held. That awakening might be said to happen in two stages. First, our reception of the world around us is transformed from self-centredness to other-centredness. An example might be what happens when, say, at dusk, a shadowy shape on the roadside turns out to be not a threat but a shrub. In that moment, there is release from self-concerned fear, enabled by self-forgetting attention. That relief might prompt a second stage: a realisation. The shrub shares my path literally and metaphorically, having embarked on a life course, too, and shares a common wellspring. The awakening is one reason Blake remarked, A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.105
The unfolding liberty might inspire a totally changed attitude to transient life, as expressed in the beautiful quatrain entitled Eternity.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.106
Kissing the joy as it flies is the selfless stance of attention, taking delight in what passes because it participates with us in the timelessness of all things; when enjoyed without possessiveness, the All becomes present.
91 Raine, Kathleen, in a lecture given at the first Temenos Conference in 1986, entitled, “Nature, House of the Soul,” retrieved from: https://www.temenosacademy.org/the-first-temenos-conference-1986/
92 I have in mind Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, New York, NY: Harpercollins, 1982.
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94 T.H. Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society (1888), in Collected Essays, Volume IX, London: Macmillan & Co, 1893-95, retrieved from: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/Str.html
95 Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, London: John Murray, 1875, retrieved from: https://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F877.1&viewtype=text
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