William Blake (1757-1827)

There is a wonderful painting by Blake that now hangs in Tate Britain in London. It is called The Personification of Man Limited by Reason, and shows a muscular and naked male sitting on a steep shelf of rocks apparently at the bottom of the ocean. He is bent over, a pair of compasses in one hand, concentrating intently on a mathematical formula sketched out on a scroll before him.

The man represented by Blake in this picture is the greatest scientist of the Age of Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton, who solved many of the physical riddles of the Universe.

What the artist says about the scientist he depicts is that reason, or the intellect, however piercing or insightful, is never enough in itself. To be fully human and realise your human potential you have to look up, and use your imagination if you wish to see beyond the mutable material world and grasp a greater reality and more lasting truths. The power of the imagination and the creativity it can inspire cannot always be measured or quantified or even defined, but it is the single most important human quality that Blake, and after him Pullman, values above almost everything else.

Innocence & Experience

William Blake is an artist whose radical sympathies led Pullman to claim him as “one of the founding fathers of the republic of Heaven.” The first, and perhaps most striking, of Pullman’s allusions to Blake occurs in the beginning of the final volume of the trilogy, when Lyra is in the power of Mrs Coulter. The girl in a drugged sleep, since her mother wishes to preserve her from meeting the prophesied temptation, and thus precipitating the second Fall. Pullman’s epigraph to the chapter signposts the similarity between Lyra’s situation and that of Lyca, ‘The Little Girl Lost’ in Blake’s poem of that name in the ‘Songs of Experience’; it consists of the last three lines from stanza 9 of Blake’s poem:

Sleeping Lyca lay;

While the beasts of prey,

Come from caverns deep,

View’d the maid asleep.