Though this is one of the more stark and depressing images in the book so far, I actually enjoyed having this image as my computer wallpaper for a week or so.
I find this image quite well executed--especially compared with the previous plate, which features stick figures drawn in a slppy, seemingly child-like hand.
The central image of the drowning man (?) is visually compelling, and the action it narrates viscerally affective.
I mention, as I do on almost every plate, that this seems too terrifying a scene in which to include in an emblem book for children, which was the original intention for this plate, before being re-cast in the "For Adults" version. I suppose it's high time I asked: was a child audience really the one Blake was aiming for? If so, his sense of an audience was almost delusional. This would explain of course why Blake labored in obscurity, why he never sold many books, in his lifetime. He had a terrible grasp of the market. Which Blake, of course, may have considered his only honorable course as a "prophet-bard."
As a spiritual statement, this image is unflinching, to the point of despair. It might even be characterized as proto-existential. A man drowns while a heedless, stony sky rages in storm. As in Plate 5, the sky seems more like a terrestial force, a huge weight of crushing stone. The sea itself, fairly calm, is no ally of the drowning man either. LIke a python, it quietly consumes its victim.
This drowning figure might very well be Icarus, particularly as W.H. Auden (and Brueghel) depict him. The man is dying but neither the sky nor the sea care. And there are no human figures to witness the scene, and if there were, they would probably look away.
This is an emblem of the individual alone in the world. He/she cries "Help! Help!" but there is no one to help. Even God looks away, leaving the clouds unparted, allowing the criminally calm sea to swallow up a human life.
I suppose it is its poignancy that attracts me in this image, and the thought that here, in the simplest terms, Blake may have depicted his own crisis of faith, his own dark night of the soul, perhaps in the wake of the revelations of the increasingly mindless and vindictive actions of the French revolutionaries, in which he had placed so much hope.
I now, per Blake's intentions perhaps, have to turn away, the last witness is gone, leaving the drowning figure to finally slip beneath the waves, lost to the world, his/her fate unrecorded, disappeared without a trace.
Posted by jeb at February 21, 2005 8:53 PM | TrackBack