ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a number of aspects of Blake’s attention to work. The whole philosophical effort of Blake’s early work, not only the poetry but also the various annotations and the tracts, is directed towards a central opposition between passivity and activity. The problem Blake found with the thinkers of the eighteenth century was that they assumed that the nature of man was static, and that all actions carried the same existential weight. All the societal principles, according to Blake, culminate in institutions designed to ‘catch the joys of Eternity’, and imprison imaginative potential; thus the possibility of human fulfilment becomes further and further exiled. The ‘Kings of Asia’ are symbols of unrepentant domination archaically imaged in feudalism, disturbed like spiders in their webs by rumours of revolution in Europe. ‘The Mental Traveller’ is a schematic poem; its terseness and tight narrative are geared to other purposes than expansion on Blake’s major themes of work and suffering.
