Art History Research Paper

WILLIAM BLAKE'S USE OF WATER AS A SYMBOL IN

THE FIRST BOOK OF URIZEN

Submitted by
Christy L. Rezny
Department of Art

In partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado
Summer 1990
 The purpose of this research paper is to illuminate
William Blake's use of water as a symbol in The First Book of

Urizen. The plate under study (Plate 1) shows Urizen, with

parted beard and blinded eyes, being born, or crucified, in a

placental body of water. Blake's use of water as a symbol is

rich in allegorical content. Water represents the material

world, as derived from Neoplatonic thought, relates to the sea

of time and space, and can be linked to the unconscious.

Urizen is swimming or drowning in a womb, in the sea of time

and space, or in an unknown region of the mind.

The Poet, Prophet, Painter, William Blake (1757-1827)

created, illustrated, and printed The First Book of Urizen in

1794. The text is written in English and describes Urizen's

creation and existence in the material world. The remaining

copies and scattered pages indicate that the original edition

had 28 plates.

Urizen represents fallen man, "he is the limiter of

energy, the lawmaker and the avenging conscience" (Damon

1965:419). The First Book of Urizen depicts the nine-month

gestation process of Urizen.

The plot describes Urizen's secret deeds

in his dark world, then the promulgation
of his tyrannic laws; the opposition
of Los, who binds him iri a human shape;
the division of Los through Pity, which
is the creation of Enitharmon, and
the birth of Ore, Urizen's future opponent;
the travels of Urizen through his world,
 2

and the birth and cursing of his children;

and finally the degeneration of mankind
under Urizen's religion. (Damon 1965:53)

A Blake Dictionary defines water as a symbol for matter

derived from Neoplatonic thought. (Damon 1965:443)

Neoplatonism is a philosophy that interprets Plato.

The manner of that interpretation tends

to associate God with the principle
of unity making him completely transcendent
and related to the world by means
of a series of intermediaries who (or
which) derive from the One by a principle
of emanation. In this view reality
is a graded series from the divine
to the material, and man, who has in
him some parts of the divine, longs
for union with the eternal source of
things. (Reese 1980:385)

Blake looked to Plotinus, the 3rd Century A. D. Egyptian

philosopher, who inaugurated Neoplatonism. Blake's

contemporary, and Platonist, Thomas Taylor, translated and

made available The Enneads of Plotinus. The Enneads affirm

basic themes common to Platonic tradition, such as, the belief

in the immateriality of reality, a conviction that the

material world refers to a higher level of being, ·a nd a
preference for intuitive forms of knowledge over conscious
forms of knowledge.

Blake, in accordance with Neoplatonic thought used water

as a symbol for the material world. For example, Urizen is

inundated by the sensuousness of water. He is in an
exhilarating surf that cuts him off from his own divinity and
 3

he is misguided by the illusion of truth in the physical

world.

Urizen, himself, signifies all error

caused when perception occurs only
through the sensory organs ... Urizen's
name is an elision to "your horizon."
Believing that only what we see, touch,
taste, or feel is real, we find suspicious
everything we cannot encompass by our
senses. (Easson 1978:69)

Blake's engraving, Though Water ist Him with Tears, (Plate

2) demonstrates the anxiety caused by the separation of man

and divinity. In Though Waterist Him with Tears, a grey

haired man sits cross-legged and immobile. His hands and face

show conflict. He is looking into the pool of his own tears

and he sees the "surface of illusion's mirror. 11

· David V.

Erdman comments, "Sit like this and your form of suicide will

be stasis." {Erdman 1974:274) In the same manner, Urizen, in

a crucifixion pose is born to a death. He is also immobile.

Blake was not obsessed with human anatomy. Urizen is not

proportionally accurate because Blake did not seek to imitate

materialistic reality. He refused to imitate nature, and for

this reason, he despised Dutch and Flemish naturalism. Blake

elevated art in the following statement:

Should painting be confined to the sordid

drudgery of fac-simile representations
of merely mortal and perishing substances
and not be as poetry and music are,
elevated to its proper sphere of invent-
tion and visionary conception! No,
it shall not be so! Painting, as well
as poetry and music, exists and exults
in immortal thoughts. (Butlin 1971: 11)
 4

Blake believed that the real world exists within; he

materialized the immaterial and externalized the internal.

Fortunately, according to Kathleen Raine, "Now when facts of

mind are once more being recognized as an order of reality

distinct from the material, Blake is beginning to be

believed." (Raine 1982:56)

The Arlington Court Picture (Plate 3) shows Blake

returning to the Neoplatonic use of water as matter.

Odysseus, the central figure, represents man. Athene stands

behind Odysseus and points to the spiritual world with her

left hand and to the material world with her right hand.

Odysseus crouches at her feet and prepares to plunge into the

Sea of Time and Space. The scene refers to the regeneration
of man, to an eddy of events, the cycle of man's existence.

And what begins as a narrative with a single

character concludes with a large cast
of characters. This seemingly prolific
linearity, nevertheless, is a sterile
cycle, a "dull round", for all the characters
are aspects of Urizen and are contained
within him. Like Urizen, they are
bound down to earth by narrow perceptions.
(Easson 1978:71)
Urizen is drowning in a western conception of the Sea of
Time and Space. Blake rejected the empiricists view that time
and space are elements of the material world.

What all Blake's sources have in common

is that they form a coherent body of
knowledge whose premises are not those
of Western Materialism. Every culture
 5

is established upon certain premises,

and the modern West upon the supposition
that 'matter' is the substance and
basis of the universe, and that matter
exists autonomously outside apart from
the perceiving mind. Other civilizations,
more traditionally orthodox, have held
mind, or spirit, to be the living ground
and 'place' of the universe. Blake
with almost no knowledge of far Eastern
thought had to work within the Western
esoteric tradition ... (Raine 1982: 11-12)

Having much in common with Kant, Blake believed that time and

space are integral parts of the mind.

Kant terms space and time the primary

forms of intuition, intuition being,
"that through which a mode of knowledge
is in immediate relation to objects.
These forms of intuition necessarily
underlie and participate in our knowledge
by allowing us loosely to organize
our experience around the coordinates
of space and time before the understanding
organizes it conceptually. Like the
empiricists, Kant appears to ground
his epistemology in sensation, and
yet here is the vital difference , he
insists that these forms of intuition
are not given in sensation, but are
forms latent in man's mind and contributed
by him to his experience. {Essick 1978: 117)

Urizen is struggling in the Sea of Time and Space, out of

breath and unable to surface. He floats in an outer space

rather than an inner space.

Urizen, with parted beard, is composed of contrary states

or different forms of consciousness. He denies the lawless

energies of his imagination in favor of the forces of reason,

organization, and order. He exists in a false reality, a

 6

world created by infinite perceptions. The blind deluded

Urizen is in search of a world that is solid, without

fluctuation, and so he falls into a world without light. He

sees, but he really doesn't see.

With the belief in the reality of the unconscious, Blake

unknowingly prefigured the work of the contemporary depth

psychologists. For example, Urizen is drowning deep beneath

the surface. He is unable to face the frightening aspects of

his unconscious; he is unwilling to explore the unknown, and

he is distressed at the notion that the infinite cannot be

measured. When repressed material remains contained and his

instincts are unrecognized, Urizen becomes static, never

growing, with a false sense of self-awareness.

Blake had an instinctive desire to span the gap between

the conscious and the unconscious, and al though, "before Freud

it cannot be said that the unconscious was conceived of as a

functioning entity," (Singer 1970: 9) Blake certainly believed

in the reality of it. Freud and Jung demonstrated that the

conscious and the unconscious flow in and out of one another,

that they are streams that merge.

Every phenomenon consciously experienced by

man is . accompanied by it's polar opposite
in the unconscious, and the psychological
site of man is determined by the kind
of relationship which he is able to maintain
between these opposites . (Singer 19 7 0 : 11 )
 7

Blake himself face the frightening darker regions of the

unconscious and this enabled the visionary experience.

Blake looked unashamedly at his own soul,

came face to face with the unconscious,
if you will, and then enunciated principles
which would be empirically tested and
affirmed by Jung, a century later ...
. . . the back and forth between a balanced
tension and a precarious imbalance in the
psyche of Blake was in itself a dynamic,
out of which creative activity could
proceed, in the presence of favorable
conditions. (Singer 1970:12)

Urizen is the manifestation of Blake's inner drama. He is

shown tenaciously exploring his personal inner psyche. In

addition, he represents wider patterns of meaning.

Blake was in search of universal forms of knowledge. For

instance, although Blake denounced politics, he applied

revolutionary principles to the development of the individual.

His work responded to the problems of his contemporary world

in addition to the farther reaching problems of the

individual. Urizen is revolutionary man caught up in

turbulent times, trying to direct the flow of life.

Blake created an independent personal philosophy, but it

is the universal quality of his work that makes him a prophet.

June Singer contends that,

Blake was in so close of a relationship

with his personal unconscious and with
wider unconscious realms that his psychic
experience merged at some point with
the collective experience - that the collective
flowed in and through him and that in some
contexts he was indistinguishable
 8

from it. This seems to be substantiated

by those incidents in Blake's life
which demonstrated his ability to sustain
visions, that were not only beyond an
ordinary sensory capacity but were also beyond
the scope of Blake's personal experience.
{Singer 1970:35)

Blake and his 18th century contemporaries were obsessed

with ancient lore and mythology. Blake was an academic in the

sense that he · borrowed sources. He is considered a

revolutionary, yet his art is enriched by the art of the past,

so he is also considered traditional.

Blake's work is like a river into which two

different colored steams would flow
and mingle; sometimes perfectly blended
sometimes in currents separated to the
eye by their color; one is the modern
and rational thought, the other is the
most ancient and fanciful mythology, or
rather again, a mixture of all mythologies.
{Saurat 1964:;47)

Blake provided spiritual instruction through the use of

symbolism. Water, as a symbol, does not tell us what we

already know; it elevates and transcends, enables

participation in the creative process, and links the known to

the unknown.
 9
(

Plate 1. Urizen
(Easson 1978:16)
 10

Plate 2. Though Waterist Him with Fears

(Klonsky 1977:53)
 11
(

Plate 3. The Arlington Court Picture

(Lister 1986:53)
 12
(
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But 1 in, Mart in . __w__i .....l._.l.....i__a__m-'----B__l __a__k__e__:__A
__c_o_m.....p_l_e_t_e__c_a_t_a_l_o__g__u_e_o_f_t_h_e
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(
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 13

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