Blake's wife, Catherine, once said, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise." By Paradise she probably didn't mean only the world of delight which the word conjures up for us, but the extremely complicated world of William Blake's imagination. Still, for much of the time, especially in the early years of his writing, his world was indeed a delightful, sweet and innocent place; at least, that was what Blake concentrated on in Songs of Innocence, the group of poems which was published in 1789 -- you may recognize that as the year of the French Revolution. In these happy little verses, Blake looks at everything which appears to him in the natural world with pure joy, and seems to ignore anything which might clash with his pleasure. Some people think there may be hints of a darker underside to life in at least some of these poems, but I can't seem to find them. For instance, there's this one --
"Laughing Song":

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing "Ha ha he!"

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha ha he!"

In the late 18th century, rationalism was the guiding philosophy. People lived in their heads, and Blake was telling them to live in their bodies, and like it. If you trust your instincts, he said, you find that the world is a good place, with kindly spirits taking care of all creatures, human and animal. In a poem called "Night", he paints a word-picture of angels pouring blessings on all creation:

They look in every thoughtless nest,
Where birds are covered warm:
They visit caves of every beast,
To keep them all from harm.
If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping,
They pour sleep on their head,
And sit down by their bed.

For a large part of his life, Blake lived in a small house in Lambeth, which was then acountry suburb of London, and had a pleasant garden with flowers and an arbor with a grapevine. Blake saw the vine as a symbol of intertwining life (he saw almost everything as symbolic of something) and he refused to prune the grapevine. It was in this arbor of vines that a neighbour, with the mundane name of Thomas Butts, one evening dropped in for a visit and discovered Blake and his wife sitting and reading Milton's Paradise Lost, as naked as Adam and Eve before the Fall. It doesn't seem to have affected the friendship between the Butts and the Blakes; everyone knew that Blake was a bit dotty, and being a nudist was not much more peculiar than refusing to cut back your grapevine.

At Lambeth, Blake was happy, productive and relatively prosperous. He created many complicated mythological and allegorical works, full of revolutionary ideas, particularly about sexual freedom, and he wrote lines like this:

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

And, "The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled", "Exuberance is Beauty", "Energy is Eternal Delight", "Everything that lives is holy", and "No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings." For him, everything he could see was full of divine secrets, and there was revelation everywhere, even in the smallest things. A few years ago, a friend gave me a magnet for my fridge with Blake's most famous lines on it, which you heard as our Opening Words today, and Blake might enjoy the fact that everytime I go to get an ice-cube I'm reminded

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.

This was a kind of innocence that Blake never lost. All through his life he was an advocate for the child -- the child who finds it natural to see Heaven in a wild flower and who says "Of course!" to the notion that "Energy is Eternal Delight". Blake's Songs of Innocence weren't so much outgrown as integrated, later, with his experience.

Five years after Songs of Innocence were published, Blake added a sequel and published a volume with the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Almost all the additional poems express the sense that, after all, innocence is no protection from harsh reality, heedless delight is threatened by unsuspected dangers, and unrestrained pleasure has to give way to acceptance of pain. Experience goes along with a kind of unhappy resentment as the innocent soul discovers evil. Blake now recognized, although very reluctantly, that the child must leave the Garden of Eden and battle with a world which isn't Paradise at all. The wrongness of the world has to be acknowledged and understood. But this is a sad understanding. Sorrow is the underlying feeling of the Songs of Experience. In Songs of Innocence, the "Nurse's Song" has this happy beginning:

When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

But the corresponding "Nurse's Song" in Songs of Experience expresses a different feeling:

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp'rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring, your day, are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.

In the first book, there's a poem called "The Chimney Sweeper" which has a kind of innocent hopefulness about it; in the second book there's a poem of the same name, but it's about a miserably experienced little boy. Here it is:

A little black thing amid the snow,
Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe!
Where are thy father and mother? Say!" --
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and His priest and king,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."

Blake was taking a hard look at a dark blot on England's experience, the exploitation of children's labour in the Industrial Revolution. He used this as a way to analyze the problems of the responsibility of parents for children and the responsibility of society at large for individual people, especially helpless people. "The Chimney Sweeper" is full of contrasts and paradox. For instance, the innocent child in his grimy landscape is shown as black against white. In an earlier poem, "The Little Black Boy", which some of you may know, Blake had the child say, "I am black, but O! my soul is white." But in this poem it's a "white" child whose whole experience is black. Blake's making one of his favourite points about the gap between appearance and reality, between the inner being and the outer being. And the " 'weep! 'weep!" which the little boy calls is the sweeper's street cry, but because of a lisp in the pronunciation it becomes a lamentation, "weep, weep".

The little chimney sweeper isn't an orphan in the usual sense; his parents are still alive, but they've abandoned him by going to church, to fulfill the rituals of religion instead of looking after their child. As far as Blake is concerned, the ritual of prayer is the very opposite of the things parents ought to do for their children. He would have wanted them to play and cuddle with their child instead. But child labour was more marketable than adult labour at the time and attending church may have been the only thing the parents could do, if they couldn't get work.

It seems in the poem as if the child thinks his parents put him out to work because he was happy and innocent. "Why am I in this state?" the little chimney sweeper may have asked himself, and it looks to him as if the answer was: "Because of something I did or was". Blake suggests that this is one of the heavy chains that imprison the human spirit, the unearned guilt which has been introjected, swallowed like mother's milk in the form of the church's teaching, and our parents' teaching, about our innate depravity as human beings and how we deserve to be miserable.

The child was like a little lamb, frolicking in the snow on the heath, until his parents decided to subdue him with black sweep's garments and ritual chanting. But they couldn't squash his spirit; he still says, "I am happy and dance and sing". He's still cheerful, even being a chimney sweeper, which makes his parents "praise God and His Priest and King." This trio, "God and His Priest and King" was an "Unholy Trinity" as far as Blake was concerned. The Church and the State were a powerful alliance; they had a vested interest in the status quo, and Church and State conspired together to "make up" the idea of a happy hereafter for poor people, so that they would be more accepting of their miserable conditions. It was a conspiracy of oppression.

There are other themes like this, which first appeared in Songs of Innocence and which Blake showed in harsher light in Songs of Experience. One of them is "Little Boy Lost": in the first book the little boy in the poem is happily found; but in the second book he's seized by a sanctimonious priest and burned to death. (You may have noticed by this point that Blake doesn't think much of priests and organized religion.) Everything in these poems of experience has a sadness which comes with the disenchantments of time. A rose is sick because an invisible worm has found it and destroyed its life; a tree which is watered with fear becomes a tree full of poison; the garden of love is desecrated by having a chapel built on it and being filled with graves. In a poem called "London", the sights and sounds which once delighted Blake have changed into cries of despair:

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

For a while, Blake was a follower of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish philosopher who imagined God as the Divine Man, infinitely loving in a human way, more loving than the best person. But in the end Blake couldn't go along with Swedenborg's ideas of eternal goodness; he recognized too clearly the power of evil. He even saw it as a strangely affirmative force, certainly more constructive than sanctimonious virtue. He wrote, "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." He turned away from Swedenborg and plunged deeper and deeper into his own strange mixture of heretical speculations. (If you think Unitarians and Universalists are heretics, you should have known Blake!) In a long poem called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he delved into free will and destiny, revolution and revelation, the smug, self-satisfied Christianity which he saw all round him, and his own ideas of a violently antagonistic religion, in which the angels are hypocrites and the devils are rebellious superior intelligences. He saw Jesus as a forgiving figure, sympathetic to human beings who are struggling between conflicting and confusing drives -- but Jesus is pitted against the punishing Jehovah, the authoritarian who can't be pleased and who's ready to find guilt in all his children. The modern poet, W. H. Auden, said that the whole of Sigmund Freud's psychological teachings could be found in this poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

As Blake grew older, he found that conformity and acting like ordinary people was more and more difficult -- and finally, impossible. He got mixed up with all kinds of rebels and reformers, and he considered that every curb on the human spirit was an imposition; every form of oppression was wicked in his eyes, whether it was industrial exploitation or indissoluble marriage. He met Thomas Paine, who wrote The Rights of Man, and he indirectly saved Paine's life by warning him he was going to be arrested and probably hanged. Blake also did the illustrations for a book by Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist who wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women. But he was having financial troubles, and even political ones -- he got into trouble with the law for seditious words and gestures; apparently at one point he uttered the words, "Damn the King and damn all his subjects!"

Blake still had pleasant little hallucinations, like glimpses of fairies in his garden and angels coming down ladders to his cottage, but he didn't feel he was quite as able as before to do what he described as "converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, prophecy and speak parables unobserved and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals." He was living out all the dualities and conflicts that we see in his poems: attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, good and evil, the punishing God and the protesting Satan, and he was showing signs of being torn apart by these opposites. As he saw it, misery and delight are always present in life; so are freedom and oppression, reason (which was evil for him) and energy (which was good). They aren't always present in equal measure, and they aren't spread around evenly -- "Some to misery are born ... some are born to sweet delight."

There was almost no way Blake could live with the awful misery he saw around him, other than simply resigning himself to it, which he never did. Simply resigning himself would have been the worst of all -- it would have been the lukewarmness which he hated so much: he must have loved the Biblical passage in Revelation which has God saying, "Because you are neither hot nor cold but are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth."

So what was Blake's answer to evil? It was Imagination. You've already sensed, I expect, that Blake lived in a world of imagination, a spiritual world, most of the time. He was what's usually known as crazy, because he refused to be bound by usual ideas about reality. The attempt to make divisions between "real" and "imaginary" seemed to him not only futile but vicious; the human imagination was for him the most powerful and real force in the universe. And it could transform the world we live in. The poem called Jerusalem which Blake wrote 200 years ago, and which was set to music in the last century and learned by many of us with a British heritage, and which is printed in your order of service, -- this poem is a summing up of everything that Blake believed about misery and injustice and how to overcome it. You do it by setting free the magical power of the mind. How Blake would have loved John Lennon's song, "Imagine", but how he would have hated to see it commercially enslaved.

Blake saw the whole of nature as an organism, a body, an interdependent web, if you like, something like a person. (I suspect he would have aligned himself with Gaia consciousness if he'd been around today). And just as we as persons are motivated and guided by our thinking, so the whole of nature, the universe, is moved and guided by an imaginative force, a mind. Each of us is a microcosm of that universal mind or imagination; each of us is God in our power to make reality. We can see a World in a grain of sand, a Heaven in a wild flower, and our seeing makes it so. The world is not in the grain of sand until we make it there; a wild flower is not a Heaven until we see it as a Heaven; Jesus does not walk in our familiar surroundings until we visualize those surroundings as a holy city. As we might say cynically, Blake would say reverently: "It's all in your mind". With our minds, Blake said, we could liberate everything and everyone who was oppressed and imprisoned, we could bring about a new Jerusalem. His poetry tries to lead our imaginations to believe that. "The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative", he said; "it is an attempt to restore what the ancients called the Golden Age."

Since Blake's time, we have another couple of hundred years behind us of seeing a division between mind and body, between imagination and actuality. This distinction became accepted with the rise of science in the Renaissance; it had really become entrenched by Blake's time, and I think that Unitarian Universalists in some ways are very much creatures of that time. We're fond of reason, and the evidence of the senses, and the scientific method, and we tend to downplay experiences which we can't easily reconcile with what we already know.

Blake would have loved our promotion of freedom and sensuality, but he would have hated our dependence on reason. Reason was what led to the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution; reason was what led to systematic theology and organized religion; reason was what kept people in chains without their even knowing it. The only way out was to recognize imaginatively, not by reason, the unity underlying all the dualities. Soul, or imagination, is the primary reality; material things, nature, our own bodies, are products of this imagination. For Blake, the material world is the energy, or activity, of God: "God only acts, and is, in existing beings," he said. He believed that Christ was God, "and so am I", he added, "and so are you ... We are all co-existent with God -- all members of the divine body."

Blake knew people thought he was insane, but he was quite convinced that it was he who saw things as they really were, with trees full of angels, and other people who were trapped in a very limited frame of reference. He said our eyes were for seeing through rather than with, and that when we look through them we see transcendent visions. He refused to pretend that he was "normal" in the sense of being like everyone else, and he wrote: "It will be questioned, When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk somewhat like a gold guinea? Oh, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!"