Unlike the previous plate, this one takes the idea of the memento mori to a place many of us would not follow. In short, it's creepy. It was something of struggle to keep as my computer desk top as long as I did (a couple weeks).
The plate depicts a woman, in "conjurer" mode (with her wand), surrounded by a very large worm. The inscription reads: "I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother & my sister." An allusion of sorts to the idea that we're all "food for worms."
I believe this plate displays Blake's discomfort with women and sexuality that we see in some of his other productions in the 1790s (e.g. there's a woman with wand in Songs of Experience, and a plate depicting three women with worms in Urizen--forgive me for not taking the time to find and paste in the links; those works are always worth a perusal, so I invite the reader to find them on their own). The discomfort gets a lot worse as Blake gets older: see the horrific, powerful women in Jerusalem).
Once again, as he's done in the rest of Gates of Paradise, Blake's extravagant (some might say disordered) imagination saps the "spiritual" from this plate. It's just too weird, too surreal, to serve as a memento mori--which may have been Blake's intention: to deconstruct as he constructs his images.
This was the last plate in For the Children (so the boys and girls could go to bed and have their nightmares), but there are three more plates Blake engraved for For the Sexes.
I don't know if I'll miss this series when it's finished.
Posted by jeb at September 20, 2005 8:09 PM | TrackBack