A Tree Full of Angels
A Poetry Tale about William Blake, told by Hello Doggo.
William Blake started early. According to his wife, the first time he saw God, he was four years old.
God put his head to the window. And the little boy screamed.
That’s how Catherine Blake is said to have reminded him of it, years later. A few years on, at eight or ten perhaps, young William is out walking on Peckham Rye, south of London. He looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, every bough bespangled with bright wings, like stars.
He goes home and tells his parents. His father, an honest hosier, decides the boy is lying, and gets ready to give him a thrashing. Only his mother’s pleading saves him.
Now, all of this reaches us second-hand. Alexander Gilchrist put it into print in eighteen sixty-three, decades after Blake died, from the memories of people who knew him. And another early account has a darker twist. When the boy announced he’d seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields, it was his mother who beat him.
The lesson didn’t take. Blake went on seeing angels, prophets and spirits for the rest of his life, and he told anyone who would listen.
And when he came to write a little poem for children, he handed the child the biggest question there is. Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?
Blake thought he knew. He’d seen him at the window.
Sources
- Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863), chapter 2, for the angels on Peckham Rye and the father’s threatened thrashing.
- Catherine Blake’s remark that Blake first saw God at four, “and He put His head to the window and set you a-screaming”, was recorded by Henry Crabb Robinson in his Reminiscences; printed in G. E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records (1969; 2nd ed. 2004).
- The Ezekiel story, with the mother administering the beating, is among the early accounts collected in Bentley, Blake Records.
- “The Lamb”, Songs of Innocence (1789).
Notes
- Blake died in 1827. All of these childhood stories were set down by others, decades later, from the memories of people who knew him. Bentley’s Blake Records is the collection of all the surviving contemporary and near-contemporary testimony.