VESSELS OF IMMORTAL LIFE

Critics agree that William Blake was one of history's most deeply religious poets and painters--though they cannot agree on what his religion was. In 1761, when he was only four, Blake startled his parents with the announcement that he had seen the Godhead at his window. In 1827, when he was near death, he flabbergasted his friends with a 100-page philosophical poem called Jerusalem, which he not only illustrated but engraved and printed himself. His contemporaries called it "perfectly mad."

Blake tried and failed to sell the only copy of the poem which he published in color. Last week the William Blake Trust put 500 facsimile color reproductions of Jerusalem on sale, at $95 a copy. Buyers would find the text hot & heavy going, the illustrations magnificent.

The simplest interpretation of the illustrations reproduced on the next two pages hints at the poem's obscurity. On the opposite page, naked Jerusalem, symbolizing a sort of spiritual Utopia, chats with veiled Vala, who symbolizes earthbound womanhood. The children point the way upward to glory. At the top of the next page, Jerusalem tries to explain to a flaming workman that the French Revolution was not a happy one. Below stands the central figure of Time, flanked by Man with the sun on his shoulder, and Woman spinning a blood-red thread of mortal life.

The extravagance of Blake's fantasies (and his anticlerical vehemence) blinded his contemporaries to the height and depth of his spirit. In Blake's wide eyes, human beings were vessels of immortal life, beset with evil yet striving mightily for the divine implanted within them. He painted them that way:

For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress.

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