BLAKE & DYLAN

An illustration extracted from page 61 of
William Blake, painter and poet
by Richard Garnett

A plaintive song of Bob Dylan's which was evidently written under the influence of William Blake is titled EVERY GRAIN OF SAND. It was written during what is know as Dylan's Christian period. I see in the song echoes of "Auguries of Innocence" and what may be called the "Jerusalem Hymn" from the beginning of Blake's Milton. Dylan writes of the faith and fears experienced as one travels on the spiritual journey in a world of danger and temptation. Blake's images provide an affirmative note of comfort.


Milton, Plate 1, (E 95)
"And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land."

[Pickering Manuscript], Blake's Notebook, (E 490)
AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE
"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage
A Dove house filld with doves & Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro all its regions
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State"

This poem continues for 132 lines. The final lines were used prominently in the movie "Dead Man".

EVERY GRAIN OF SAND
by Bob Dylan

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay

I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

Copyright © 1981 by Special Rider Music

Emmy Lou Harris singing EVERY GRAIN OF SAND

Not of This World

"you are not of this world" (John 15:19)

The committed Christian may eventually come to realize that; secular people may be oblivious to it. . Most of us jump back and forth between the Kingdom of this World, (which Blake called the Sea of Time and Space) and the Kingdom of God; a handful of spiritual geniuses may see in it their own nature. Such a person was our poet.

Blake has often been called the First Romantic. In Blake's day the word romantic denoted a train of thought outside of what the materialists of the Enlightenment allowed themselves for general discourse; religion was supposed to be private and in positivistic terms meaningless.

But Blake was different: religion (in the fullest sense) was all that mattered to him-- yes, we have to live in the world, but the less we do it the better we are (in Blake that meant in order to put bread on the table).

Here's a morsel from the Vision of the Last Judgment:
"I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty" (Erdman 565)

The Hound of Heaven powerfully portrayed the two kingdoms. The early Blake portrayed the same thing in a contrary way: his (negative) Spectre was just as persistent as Thompson's (positive) hound. Most people carefully hide those ideas from consciousness; for Blake they were a conscious and continuous reality-- "round me night and day".

In Blake's poetry The two kingdom's were first expressed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In his contrary way Blake considered angels to be those most conformed to the world, and devils to be those free from it. (Read it again in that light!)

Announcing that position Blake found himself to a very great degree persona non grata; only a handful of people had any sympathy for his point of view. He proposed a new Way, and his life in many ways resembled that of Paul , uniformly ignored by the intellectual public whom he tried to reach.

For half of Blake's life he had focused on the Spectre, but the true 'hound' came with his meeting with Jesus at the Moment of Truth.

In the Sea of Time and Space various Blake interpreters identify the man on the shore with Apollo or Odysseus; Damon identified him as the red robed Luvah. (The Four Zoas [Nt 1], 13.9; E308. All of these are meaningful.)

What do you make of "one like the Son of God" in the furnace? How about the red robed Luvah in the furnace? Blake had a lot to say about furnaces, but it wasn't until he reached spiritual maturity that he understood who was in the furnace.

"he came into the world", and the world did to him what it would. In Jerusalem Blake identified the redeemed Luvah as Jesus- in contrast to the satanic Urizen.

A Turning Point

The Moment of Grace
Life is made up of turning points, but if you're fortunate, then somewhere along life's crooked path you may take a most significant turning point to the right:

"When he came to himself"(verse 17): the fundamental biblical archetype), and there have been other similar ones since Jesus spoke those words.

In our poet's life that Moment has for me an endless fascination. He might have been a famous man, teacher to the Royal Family, world wide artist; he might have dedicated his life to the Main Chance, but he found a better way. The critical Moment (the darkness before the dawn) came when Hayley had given William and Catherine, a comfortable cottage, a comfortable care free life as a miniaturist, but "he came to himself". He returned to London, penniless, but free. Thereafter the main chance ceased to be a temptation. Blake celebrated that decisive Moment in letter 16 to his true (spiritual) friend, Captain Butts (the First Vision of Light):"...O thou Ram hornd with gold Who awakest from sleep").

He also mentioned it in another letter, this one Letter 51, to William Hayley....
"I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece.......I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.

The prints of that Moment fill the pages of his poetry:

In the 9th Night of The Four Zoas (in Erdman 395-6) you may read of the regeneration and awakening of Vala, the sinless soul" the incorrigible female (this passage owes a lot to the Greek myth, Cupid and Psyche).

After the Moment of Grace annihilation of the Selfhood became a primary theme for Blake. In Milton he put these words in the mouth of the hero returned from Heaven, addressed to Ololon, his emanation:

"But turning toward Ololon in terrible majesty Milton Replied. Obey thou the Words of the Inspired Man
All that can be annihilated must be annihilated
That the Children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery
There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary
The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries
The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man
This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal
Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway
To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination.

[Milton PLATE 41 [48]:
To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination
To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration"
(Erdman 142)

Milton is a difficult poem, but Blake must have written it shortly after his Moment of Grace.

Blake celebrated the (miraculous?) turning point in Odysseus (my, your, Albion's, Everyman's) with his famous Arlington Tempera, called the Circle of Destiny.

In Blake's poetry, above all autobiographical, he marked the moment of truth for Los and all the rest of his characters who made up various elements of his psyche, of mine, yours, Albion's.