Poetry and Science

Eleanor Barr in Bunhill Fields.

Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously, and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to earth, etc., when he burst out: 'It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger'; perhaps with a little covert sophistry, meaning that he thrust his stick out into space, and that, had he stood on the remotest star, he could do no more; the blue sky itself being but the limit of our bodily perceptions of the infinite which encompasses us. Scientific individuals would generally make him come out with something outrageous and unreasonable. For he had an indestructible animosity towards what, to his devout, old-world imagination, seemed the keen polar atmosphere of modern science. In society, once, a cultivated stranger, as a mark of polite attention, was showing him the first number of the Mechanic's Magazine. 'Ah, sir,' remarked Blake, with bland emphasis, 'these things we artists HATE!' The latter years of Blake's life was an era when universal homage was challenged for mechanical science – as for some new evangel; with a triumphant clamour on the part of superficial enthusiasts, which has since subsided.

From the Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist, 1863. Reproduced in Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings