A Blake Bestiary: Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects, and Supernatural Beings in Blake’s Words and Designs1—Part I: Blake’s Acquaintance with Animals

Abstract

This is the first attempt to record Blake’s depictions of and references to living creatures. ² No one has previously recorded and analysed the animals Blake mentions and portrays. The evidence here derives from designs and texts in Blake’s writings in conventional typography, manuscript, illuminated printing, watercolours and temperas, ³ separate prints, commercial book engravings, and from Blake’s conversations. ⁴ There are animals in Blake’s two best known poems, the ‘Jerusalem’ lyric from Milton (‘And did those feet in ancient time’), which has become a kind of alternative British national anthem, and ‘The Tyger’ from Songs of Experience. However, most readers and singers have never seen Blake’s designs of ‘the Holy Lamb of God’ as in the ‘Jerusalem’ lyric or the ‘dread’ ‘Tyger, burning bright, | In the forests of the night’. Were they to see the design that accompanies ‘The Tyger’ ( Illus. 1), they might be surprised that the beast is not dreadful at all, that his ‘forests’ consists of a single tree, and that he seems to be no threat to anyone. Perhaps the ‘immortal hand’ that framed his ‘fearful symmetry’ is not so fearsome after all. Perhaps the dread and the fear are in the mind of the beholder. Tygers are not necessarily terrifying. In ‘The Little Girl Lost’ from Songs of Innocence, ‘tygers play’, and in Eden like the lion, they lay down with the lamb. ⁵