William Blake in 2014! Heaven in a Wild Flower!

What a great start to our excursion into William Blake territory… and great to be back with you all again! So what did we cover today! We explored something of WB’s background especially the politics of his time and his reaction to this. Most importantly we began to get a sense of WB’s mystical sense of the sacred, the fact that when we “see with the eye” we are failing to see through to another dimension of reality. This is the “fourfold” reality in which Blake lived his own life and which he tries to convey to his audience. Someone who clearly did manage to taste this fourfold reality was the beat, hippy poet Allen Ginsberg and you can hear him here tuning himself in to WB’s vibes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BImgrnzIfnM

So here are a few starter questions for your first blogs:

1/ Does Allen Ginsberg’s account (page 519) of his experience with WB give you any sense of the power of Blake’s art (poetry and painting)?

2/ Take any single line of a poem by Blake and construct a Blakean poem with your own content.

3/ Write a letter to Samuel Palmer (514-516)telling him how much you appreciate his insights into Blake’s character.

4/ Create a Transmedia news item telling the world about Blake’s importance in 2014.

5/ Create your own blog on any aspect of Blake not covered above (this will be a standard recurring question).

Remember to comment on a peer and post that comment into your own blog as a new entry so that you can credit for your hard work!

And for those of you who can’t get into the bush this week click on this image which I took on my iphone last Saturday in Galston Gorge: talk about “Heaven in a Wild Flower”- these are Sydney Boronias, literally bursting out of the earth!