108 Fun Facts About William Blake

In which London district was William Blake born in 1757?

Soho stayed part of his story: Blake was born above the family shop in Broad Street, and in 1809 he staged his own exhibition in his brother's shop on the same street.

What was the trade of Blake's father, James?

Hosier James Blake kept a moderately prosperous shop in Broad Street and backed his son's talent, buying him prints and plaster casts to draw from.

Blake engraved plates for the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life, a children's book by which writer?

Mary Wollstonecraft and Blake shared a publisher, the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, who often gave Blake illustrating work and had him design the plates for her book.

As a boy on Peckham Rye, Blake claimed to have seen a tree filled with what?

Blake said he saw a tree on Peckham Rye filled with angels, bright wings bespangling every bough; his father nearly thrashed him for lying until his mother intervened.

As a child, Blake said he saw which Old Testament prophet under a tree in the fields?

Ezekiel under a tree in the fields was one of Blake's childhood visions; at four, by a friend's account, he had seen God put his head to the window.

To which engraver was Blake apprenticed for seven years from 1772?

James Basire got the boy after a first choice fell through: Blake reportedly refused William Ryland, saying he looked as if he would live to be hanged, and Ryland was, for forgery, in 1783.

Sketching the monuments of which building during his apprenticeship shaped Blake's Gothic style?

Westminster Abbey is where his master sent the teenage Blake to draw the royal tombs for an antiquary's book, reportedly to keep him clear of quarrels among the other apprentices.

As a young man, Blake was swept along by a mob that stormed Newgate Prison during which upheaval?

The Gordon Riots of June 1780, anti-Catholic riots provoked by the Papists Act of 1778, burned Newgate Prison and freed its prisoners; Blake was reportedly carried along at the front of the crowd.

Which institution's founding president, Joshua Reynolds, did the student Blake rebel against in 1779?

Blake entered the Royal Academy schools in October 1779 and despised its first president Joshua Reynolds, yet exhibited there himself, first in 1780 with The Death of Earl Goodwin.

In which church did Blake marry Catherine Boucher in August 1782?

St Mary's, Battersea, was the bride's family church; Blake had met her in the village a year earlier while smarting from a rejected courtship, and reportedly won her by asking 'Do you pity me?'

How did Catherine Boucher sign the register at her 1782 wedding to Blake?

With an X: she could not yet write her name, so Blake taught her to read and write, and she went on to help him print and colour his illuminated books.

What was Blake's first book of poems, printed in 1783 after his drawing-room recitals won him patrons?

Poetical Sketches gathered verse he had written from the age of twelve; after he sang his poems at Mrs Mathew's gatherings, her husband and the sculptor John Flaxman shared the cost of printing.

What printing method did Blake invent in 1788 to put his poems and pictures on one plate?

Relief etching came to him, Blake said, in a vision: his dead brother Robert appeared and showed him how to draw poem and picture on copper in acid-proof varnish, then etch the rest away.

Which title did Blake use in both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience?

Holy Thursday comes twice: in Innocence the charity children file into church with 'innocent faces clean', while the Experience poem asks how such poverty can exist in a rich and fruitful land.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is subtitled 'Shewing the Two Contrary States' of what?

The Human Soul: Blake first issued Songs of Innocence on its own in 1789, and only five years later joined it to the darker Songs of Experience under this shared title.

'The Tyger' was written as the counterpart to which poem from Songs of Innocence?

The Lamb asks 'Little Lamb, who made thee?' and answers at once; The Tyger puts the same question to a predator, 'Did he who made the Lamb make thee?', and leaves it hanging.

What metre is 'The Tyger' largely written in?

Trochaic tetrameter, four falling beats as in 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright', drives most of the poem, though a few lines, such as 'Could frame thy fearful symmetry?', slip into a rising iambic beat.

Blake's title The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an ironic reference to a book by which theologian?

Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1758) supplied the title; Blake's Marriage, begun about 1790, attacks him directly, declaring that Swedenborg 'has not written one new truth'.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake's aphorisms in praise of energy and desire go under what title?

The Proverbs of Hell include 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'; Blake's Hell is no place of punishment but unrepressed energy itself, so its sayings cheer what the pious forbid.

Aldous Huxley took the title of which book from a line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?

The Doors of Perception (1954) records what Huxley saw on mescaline in May 1953; its title is Blake's line 'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite'.

In Blake's mythology, which bearded figure embodies conventional reason and law?

Urizen is Blake's bearded lawgiver; in America the rebel Orc accuses him of perverting 'fiery joy' into the Ten Commandments and vows to stamp that 'stony law' to dust.

Blake's design The Ancient of Days first appeared as the frontispiece to which 1794 work?

Europe a Prophecy opens with the image, a favourite Blake kept copying: he coloured one last impression in 1827, shortly before he died, and reportedly declared, 'There, that will do! I cannot mend it.'

Blake's 1795 print Newton shows the scientist drawing on a scroll with which instrument?

A compass, a smaller version of the one his creator-god wields in The Ancient of Days: Blake meant the print as a rebuke to a mind that sees only what it can measure.

Blake's Newton belongs to a set of twelve large colour prints that also shows which Babylonian king?

Nebuchadnezzar crawls naked on all fours with claw-like nails: he is the proud king of the Book of Daniel who lost his mind and was driven out to eat grass like an ox.

Eduardo Paolozzi's giant bronze Newton, modelled on Blake's print, sits outside which London institution?

The British Library has had the bronze in its piazza since 1995; Blake drew Newton to attack his narrow science, yet the figure now sits at a national library's door.

In which Sussex village did Blake spend his only three years outside London?

Felpham delighted him at first: he wrote that 'Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates', but he came to resent his patron's commissions and went back to London.

In 1800 Blake moved to a Sussex cottage to work for which poet, his new patron?

William Hayley found him work and patrons, and Blake wrote that he 'acts like a Prince'; later, in his notebook, he begged the same man in rhyme, 'Do be my enemy for friendship's sake!'

A soldier's claim that Blake shouted what led to his 1804 trial for sedition?

'Damn the King' headed the words the soldier John Schofield swore to after Blake marched him out of his garden in August 1803; a Chichester jury acquitted Blake in January 1804, to uproar in court.

Despite the hymn's popular title, 'And did those feet in ancient time' comes from the preface to which Blake book?

Milton grew out of a vision at his Sussex cottage in which, Blake said, the dead poet's spirit fell like a star and entered him; the lyric sits in its preface, not in his other long poem, Jerusalem.

Who set 'And did those feet in ancient time' to music in 1916?

Hubert Parry wrote the tune for a 1916 Fight for Right rally at Queen's Hall, then handed the manuscript to the conductor Walford Davies with the words 'do what you like with it'.

Whose 1922 orchestration of 'Jerusalem' became the version sung at the Last Night of the Proms?

Edward Elgar re-scored the hymn for a very large orchestra for the 1922 Leeds Festival, four years after its composer died, and his version has overshadowed the composer's own orchestration.

Which organisation held the copyright of the hymn 'Jerusalem' from 1928 to 1968?

The composer gave the copyright to the suffragists' NUWSS in 1918; when that body wound up it passed in 1928 to the Women's Institutes, who kept it until it expired in 1968.

Which band named two albums of the 2010s after Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience?

U2 released Songs of Innocence in 2014 as a free album pushed to every iTunes customer, a giveaway that drew complaints and an apology from Bono; Songs of Experience followed in 2017.

Which political party used 'Jerusalem' as a campaign slogan in the 1945 general election?

Labour campaigned in 1945 under the banner of building 'a new Jerusalem', Clement Attlee's promise of a welfare state that swept the party to power.

Which king is said to have preferred 'Jerusalem' to the national anthem, 'God Save the King'?

George V, legend has it, liked the hymn better than his own anthem; England's Commonwealth Games team later made the same choice, picking 'Jerusalem' by public vote in 2010 as its victory anthem.

Blake's one-man exhibition of 1809 promoted his picture of a procession of pilgrims from which work?

The Canterbury Tales picture hung above his brother's shop with fifteen other works; the show's only review, in The Examiner, called Blake 'an unfortunate lunatic'.

Which patron, a government clerk, bought more than a hundred of Blake's Bible paintings?

Thomas Butts worked in the army's muster office and took some 135 Bible pictures; he is also the caller who, in a much-told story, found the Blakes naked in their garden, reciting Paradise Lost as Adam and Eve.

Which young painter, met in 1818, became the patron who paid for Blake's last great series of engravings?

John Linnell, thirty-five years his junior, kept Blake in commissions through his last decade and brought round the young painters who became his disciples, Samuel Palmer among them.

Blake learned Italian in his sixties to read and illustrate which classic?

The Divine Comedy: he made 102 drawings for it, bolstered up in bed to go on with them through his last illness, but only seven engravings were under way when he died in 1827.

Samuel Palmer and other young disciples of Blake, who looked back to a better age, took what name?

The Ancients, as Palmer, Edward Calvert and George Richmond called themselves, revered the old man and nicknamed his lodgings 'the House of the Interpreter'.

Which watercolourist and astrologer coaxed Blake into drawing 'Visionary Heads' of the famous dead at late-night sittings?

John Varley would sit up with Blake far into the night calling for Moses or Julius Caesar, straining to see the spirit himself while Blake answered 'There he is' and drew.

Which creature's ghost did Blake paint as a striding, muscular monster with a bowl for blood?

A flea: Blake said its spirit appeared to him and explained that fleas hold the souls of men who were bloodthirsty to excess; the gold-flecked painting is under nine inches tall.

Where did Blake spend his last years, working and sleeping in two cramped rooms?

Fountain Court, off the Strand, is where he died on 12 August 1827, by his disciple George Richmond's account singing of the things he saw in heaven.

Blake was buried in which burial ground for religious dissenters, alongside Bunyan and Defoe?

Bunhill Fields was his own choice, since his parents and brother lay there; yet for the service he asked for the Church of England's rather than a dissenting minister's.

Which 1980s British film takes its title from a line in the Blake hymn 'Jerusalem'?

Chariots of Fire echoes Blake's cry 'Bring me my Chariot of fire!', and a choir sings the hymn in the film's closing scenes.

Which Irish writer co-edited a three-volume edition of Blake's works in 1893 and drew on his symbolism?

W.B. Yeats and Edwin Ellis put much of Blake's prophetic poetry into print for the first time, though later scholars found their three volumes riddled with misreadings and invented facts.

Which poet said Blake's madness interested him 'more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott'?

William Wordsworth made the remark to the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson after reading a number of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Blake wrote in 1800 that he was famed in Heaven, where his works were 'the delight and study' of whom?

Archangels, he told his friend John Flaxman, were reading books and pictures he had made 'in ages of eternity' before his birth, so why be anxious about riches or fame on earth?

Which long poem, left in manuscript and never published by Blake, is the first to name the Four Zoas?

Vala was drafted and redrafted for about a decade, partly while he illustrated Young's Night Thoughts, then retitled after its four Zoas and abandoned; it reached print only in 1893.

Which London gallery's 2019 Blake exhibition gave particular attention to his wife Catherine's part in his work?

Tate Britain's curators, mounting its largest Blake show in a generation, presented Catherine as his working partner, who mixed and applied colours and helped at the press; a book cover she coloured was on show.

Blake had great hopes for the French Revolution and reportedly wore what in solidarity?

Gilchrist records that Blake alone among his circle dared to wear the Phrygian cap, the red bonnet of liberty, in the London streets; he put it away for good after the September Massacres of 1792.

Which 1960s rock frontman lifted a couplet from Blake's Auguries of Innocence for his band's song End of the Night?

Jim Morrison sang Blake's 'Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night' on his band's 1967 debut album; the song's title came from a French novel, Céline's Journey to the End of the Night.

In Blake's A Poison Tree, the speaker's hidden anger grows until it bears what fruit?

An apple, bright enough to tempt his foe into the garden by night; in the morning the speaker is glad to find him stretched out beneath the tree.

Blake printed his illuminated books by hand: at most how many of his copies of any one title survive?

30 at most: he printed them in small batches, going back to press when stock ran low, and he and his wife Catherine coloured and stitched each copy by hand.

Vaughan Williams's 1931 masque for dancing was based on Blake's illustrations of which biblical book?

Job: the Blake scholar Geoffrey Keynes drew up the scenario from the engravings to mark the centenary of the artist's death in 1927, and Vaughan Williams styled the result a masque rather than a ballet.

Which acquaintance allegedly burned Blake manuscripts he thought heretical after joining the Irvingites?

Frederick Tatham took over the unsold works when Blake's widow died, saying she had left them to him; that is how the manuscripts he is supposed to have destroyed came into his hands.

In Blake's mythology, which of the Four Zoas represents the heart and love?

Luvah stands for love and passion among the Zoas, and Blake links him to the Son of God; in his fall that love turns to hate and he becomes the fiery rebel Orc.

Blake's mother had belonged to which church, newly arrived from Germany, before he was born?

The Moravians admitted her and her first husband to their London congregation in 1750; widowed, she left to marry James Blake in an Anglican church, and William was christened in the Church of England.

In William Blake's A Poison Tree, the speaker's wrath ends at once when he speaks of it to whom?

His friend hears about the anger and it is over within a single line. The wrath he keeps from an enemy takes the rest of the poem to ripen.

In William Blake's A Poison Tree, the speaker waters his hidden wrath night and morning with what?

His tears water the wrath like a seedling, and his fears feed it too. Blake turns a grudge into a plant that needs tending twice a day.

In William Blake's A Poison Tree, the speaker suns his growing wrath with deceitful wiles and with what else?

Smiles are the sunshine: the speaker is pleasant to his enemy's face while the grudge ripens out of sight. The politeness is the poison.

In William Blake's A Poison Tree, the enemy steals by night into which place belonging to the speaker?

His garden is where the bright fruit hangs, and the enemy creeps in to take it once darkness has veiled the sky. The theft is the trap.

In William Blake's A Poison Tree, what does the speaker feel on finding his enemy dead beneath the tree?

Gladness is all he reports: he is glad to see the body in the morning light. Blake gives him no remorse, and that is what chills the ending.

Which title did William Blake first give A Poison Tree in his notebook, before renaming it for print?

Christian Forbearance was the working title, aimed at the virtue of swallowing anger, which in the poem is exactly what grows the deadly tree.

Blake drafted A Poison Tree in a notebook now named after which Pre-Raphaelite painter, who bought it in 1847?

Rossetti bought the notebook from a brother of Blake's pupil Samuel Palmer. It holds about 170 poems and has carried his name ever since.

The tree of William Blake's A Poison Tree returns, named as a tree of Mystery, in which other Song of Experience?

The Human Abstract ends with the gods searching all of nature for the tree in vain, because it grows in the human brain.

Scholars link the tree in William Blake's A Poison Tree to his idea of which biblical event?

The Fall of Man shadows the poem: some readers even see the speaker as a godlike figure who uses the tree to lure mankind into disgrace.

Which English singer-songwriter adapted William Blake's A Poison Tree for a track on her 2012 album Sugaring Season?

Beth Orton shares the writing credit with Blake on Poison Tree, keeping some of his words and adding her own more than two centuries later.

In William Blake's The Tyger, some shoulder and some art are pictured twisting the sinews of which organ?

Its heart is twisted into shape and then begins to beat, the moment in the poem when the made thing comes alive.

How does William Blake's The Tyger handle its question about the animal's maker, unlike its gentler twin poem?

The poem never answers it, ending on almost the same question it began with. Blake leaves each reader to decide what kind of maker stands behind such a beast.

Which English composer set William Blake's The Lamb for choir in 1982 and then The Tyger in 1987?

John Tavener's setting of the first of the pair has become a fixture of church services around Christmas.

The speaker of William Blake's The Lamb says the animal's maker 'calls himself a Lamb', pointing to which figure?

Jesus Christ is called the Lamb of God in the Gospel of John, so the animal, its maker and the speaker all end up sharing one name.

In the famous opening lines of William Blake's The Tyger, where is the animal said to be burning bright?

Forests of the night frames the whole poem: the same two opening lines return word for word at the start of the last stanza.

Who is the speaker of William Blake's The Lamb, putting questions to the animal and then answering them?

A child does the talking, and says so near the end, setting speaker and animal side by side as namesakes of their maker.

The first stanza of William Blake's The Tyger asks what immortal hand or eye could frame the animal's fearful what?

Symmetry is the word, rhymed by Blake with 'eye'. The critic Northrop Frye took the full phrase as the title of his 1947 study of the poet.

In William Blake's The Lamb, where does the animal's maker bid it feed, as well as over the mead?

By the stream and over the mead is the pasture the poem paints, a calm daylight world set against the darkness of its fierce counterpart.

The last stanza of William Blake's The Tyger repeats the first but swaps the word 'could' for which verb?

Dare turns a question about power into one about nerve: the poem stops asking who was able to make the beast and asks who had the audacity.

Which pair of adjectives does the speaker of William Blake's The Lamb use for the maker who shares the animal's name?

Meek and mild is the maker's portrait here. Five years later the companion poem pictures a maker at work with a hammer and a furnace.

In William Blake's The Sick Rose, which creature has found out the flower's bed of joy?

An invisible worm is the culprit, a pest that cannot be seen or caught. An early draft called it 'her' before Blake settled on 'his'.

In William Blake's The Sick Rose, the flower's attacker comes flying through what kind of weather?

A howling storm carries the attacker in, yet Blake's own illustration for the poem shows the sky calm and clear.

In William Blake's The Sick Rose, the flower's bed of joy is given which rich colour?

Crimson is the bed's colour, one of just 34 words in a poem that one critic called among the most baffling in the English language.

Which composer set William Blake's The Sick Rose as the Elegy of his 1943 Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings?

Benjamin Britten wrote the Serenade in wartime at the request of the horn player Dennis Brain, who shared the first performance with the tenor Peter Pears.

Which Beat poet said he heard William Blake's voice reciting The Sick Rose in a Harlem apartment in 1948?

Allen Ginsberg called it his Blake vision, and two decades later he recorded an album of the Songs set to tunes of his own.

Kathleen Raine argued that William Blake's The Sick Rose draws on which love story from The Golden Ass?

Cupid and Psyche is the tale of a bride visited only in darkness by a husband she cannot see, and The Golden Ass was a favourite book of Blake's.

Which rhyme scheme do the two four-line stanzas of William Blake's The Sick Rose both follow?

ABCB leaves the first and third lines of each stanza unrhymed, and the lines run to uneven lengths of four to six syllables.

Which experimental band borrowed words from Blake's The Sick Rose for the 1991 title track of Love's Secret Domain?

Coil stitched Blake's opening words into a track that also lifts from a Roy Orbison ballad and an Arthur Machen short story.

In William Blake's The Sick Rose, what does the attacker's dark secret love finally do to the flower?

It destroys its life, and the poem stops there. The piece is often read as one of Blake's warnings about predatory love.

In William Blake's The Sick Rose, at what time does the flower's attacker fly in to find its bed?

In the night is when the attacker flies, which earned the poem a place in a famous 1943 song cycle of six English poems about the hours of darkness.

The best-known choral setting of William Blake's The Lamb was written in 1982 as a birthday present for whom?

The composer's nephew Simon was turning three, and the music, by its writer's account, arrived fully grown and only needed writing down.

A 1982 choral setting of Blake's The Lamb found fame when which Cambridge college sang it on Christmas Eve?

King's College sang it in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols just two days after its premiere, and the exposure made it a seasonal standard.

A choral setting of William Blake's The Lamb is heard on the soundtrack of which 2013 film by Paolo Sorrentino?

The Great Beauty, filmed in Rome, went on to win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, along with the Golden Globe and the BAFTA.

In William Blake's The Lamb, the animal's tender voice is said to make all of what rejoice?

The vales, meaning valleys, rejoice at the sound. The voice is the last of the gifts the poem lists, after life, food and clothing.

The speaker of William Blake's The Lamb calls the animal's soft, woolly, bright coat its clothing of what?

Delight is the word: the fleece is pictured as a present chosen to please its wearer, one of several the poem thanks the maker for.

How does William Blake's The Lamb end, in a line addressed to the animal and said twice over?

With a blessing: the speaker asks God to bless the little animal, twice, having just explained who its maker is.

Vaughan Williams set Blake's The Lamb in his 1958 Ten Blake Songs for voice and which single instrument?

The oboe is the singer's only partner across the cycle. The composer said he hated the poem and set it anyway, at 85.

The 1982 choral setting of Blake's The Lamb features a chord its composer named after which pair of feelings?

Joy and sorrow meet in a four-note chord sung on the word 'Lamb', a device its composer also used in other pieces.

William Blake is said to have set The Lamb to music himself; what became of his tune?

It was lost: no copy of Blake's own melody survives, which is why composers have been supplying new ones ever since.

In William Blake's The Tyger, the speaker asks in what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of which feature?

Its eyes hold the fire, the first of several body parts the poem inspects one by one, as if watching the beast being put together.

In William Blake's The Tyger, which part of the animal does the speaker picture being formed in a furnace?

Its brain comes out of the furnace, so the beast's thinking, and not only its body, is imagined as something made in fierce heat.

The fourth stanza of William Blake's The Tyger names a hammer, a chain, a furnace and which other tool?

An anvil completes the list of forge tools, so the animal is pictured as hammered into shape from hot metal rather than born.

In the fifth stanza of William Blake's The Tyger, what do the stars throw down before they weep?

Their spears fall just before the poem's pivotal question: whether the maker of the gentlest of animals also made this one.

Which Rudyard Kipling collection of 1894 includes a story titled 'Tiger! Tiger!' after William Blake's The Tyger?

The Jungle Book uses the title for its third story, in which Mowgli leaves the wolf pack for a village and faces the tiger Shere Khan again.

In which American crime drama does the serial killer Red John recite William Blake's The Tyger to the hero?

The Mentalist built a conspiracy on it: Red John runs a secret network called the Blake Association, whose members identify themselves with the poem's first two words.

Which electronic band built their 1987 album Tyger around the poetry of William Blake, singing three of his poems?

Tangerine Dream brought in the singer Jocelyn B. Smith to deliver Blake's words on three tracks, with his poem London among them.

Scholars suggest William Blake's The Tyger was prompted by a 1792 tiger attack that killed the son of which general?

Hector Munro lost his teenage son to a tiger on an island in the Bay of Bengal, a death later turned into a popular Staffordshire pottery scene.

Which 1956 science-fiction novel, first titled Tiger! Tiger!, opens with the first verse of Blake's The Tyger?

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, follows a castaway spacer who has the mask of a tiger tattooed across his face.

William Blake's The Tyger was published while he was living at 13 Hercules Buildings in which London district?

Lambeth, across the Thames from his birthplace, was Blake's home from 1790 to 1800, the years of his Songs of Experience.

Readers link Blake's The Sick Rose to which Renaissance physician and alchemist, a major influence on his thinking?

Paracelsus wrote that idle fantasies could be carried off by spirits and hatched into serpents, toads and other impure creatures.