ABSTRACT
William Blake saw everything as proceeding from the Divine Essence and possessing the power of again raying out beams from the divine source. In the Descriptive Catalogue he extols “the flush of health in flesh exposed to the open air”, and continues, “as to the modern man, stripped from his load of clothing, he is like a dead corpse”. But Blake’s respect for the sun went far beyond that: he gave the sun spiritual potency and made it the medium of divine as well as physical power, and so thoroughly deserves canonization. Blake, the arch-enemy of materialism, believed that spiritual man was not the progeny of an anthropoid ape, but a descendant of divine beings whose senses were capable of infinite expansion and contraction at will. An equally apt and poetic symbol to those of light and darkness, expansion and contraction, Blake found in the idea of the skeleton of the human body and the living man.
