At last, a green and pleasant end for a great Londoner

Historic: Bunhill Fields
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Melanie McDonagh3 August 2018
WEST END FINAL

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Later this month, on August 12, the great Londoner, William Blake, will get his due: a gravestone over his burial place in Bunhill Fields commissioned by The Blake Society, with a splendid ceremony to match. It will be led by the author Philip Pullman, whose love of Blake goes back to his first encounter with him at the age of 16, and will include specially commissioned music and readings from his works. There will be 191 candles, one for every year since his death in 1827.

The occasion for the event is the rediscovery of the actual resting place of the poet, which was lost in the Sixties when burial monuments in Bunhill Fields were displaced in order to create a grass leisure area. Now, following detective work by The Blake Society, we know that it is by a plane tree, not far from the grave of John Bunyan. In fact, Bunhill Fields is one of London’s most fascinating burial grounds: both Daniel Defoe and Bunyan are buried there, along with Blake’s mother and wife. It was a favourite resting place for Nonconformists of all sorts.

Blake was pre-eminently a Londoner. Barring three years in Felpham, Suffolk, his entire life was spent in the city. One of Blake’s earliest visions as a child was of the Prophet Ezekiel in a field, at a time when he was still living in Broadwick Street in Soho (when he told his mother, she smacked him). So all his fantastical visions and prophetic extravagances took place in this very city.

GK Chesterton observed that Blake was, at heart, a cockney, which he felt gave him a quality of wild imagination. This was notwithstanding the fact that his father, John Blake, a hosier, was almost certainly Irish.

From Soho where he was born, to St James’s Piccadilly where he was baptised, to his drawing school in the Strand, to Great Queen Street where he studied engraving, to his lodgings off Oxford Street, Blake was infused with the spirit of the city. It’s unfortunate that his poem London is one of his less cheerful works, which sees him “mark in every face I meet; marks of sadness, marks of woe”.

The truth is that he could hardly have flourished anywhere else. Here his remarkable genius, his wild eccentricity and his matter-of-fact insanity came into their own. He was the most English of poets and artists, but for him, England really meant London. And London was his new Jerusalem.

The inscription on the gravestone that The Blake Society has commissioned is from his poem, Jerusalem: “I give you the end of a golden string/Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate/ Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” But it concludes with lines from England! Awake! Awake! Awake!: “And now the time has come again/ Our souls exult; and London’s towers/ Receive the Lamb of God to dwell/ In England’s green and pleasant bowers.”

It’s good that Blake is finally getting his due; perhaps we should go and pay our respects in Bunhill Fields.

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