Author: William Blake

William Blake’s Plate 11 from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ancient poets gave objects gods, priesthood later literalised them, and men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

Two extracts from Blake’s Jerusalem: a vision of Jerusalem’s golden pillars standing among the fields of north London, and the line that in his exchanges every land shall walk, building Jerusalem together.

Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ from Songs of Experience asks how children can be left in misery and poverty in a rich and fruitful land.

An extract from Blake’s ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ presenting Jesus as defiant towards rulers and humble only to God, and telling the reader to adore their own humanity.

Blake’s ‘The Divine Image’ presents Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love as God and as the human form divine, while ‘The Human Abstract’ shows how cruelty and religious mystery grow in the human brain.

An extract from William Blake’s Jerusalem imagining the Lamb of God and a golden Jerusalem among the fields and farms of north London.

The closing lyric of Blake’s Jerusalem, on the human form divine and its withering by laws of sacrifice for sin, ending with Jesus’s human face and hands.

William Blake’s poem ‘A Poison Tree’, in which anger spoken is ended but anger hidden grows into a poisonous fruit that kills the foe.