Illustration; Page 23

I was instantly drawn to The complaint and the consolation, or Night Thoughts by Edward Young.  While Night Thoughts was not the only book from the set to have accompanying imagery, or even color, there was something bizarre about William Blake’s illustrations that I found off-putting and hypnotizing.  The combination of the heavy subject matter of Young’s poem (Night Thoughts is about death and the fragility of human life) and the soft, almost translucent, color palette of Blake’s prints was unexpected but quite powerful.  I suppose that I would expect a text about death to be illustrated with rich, imposing colors.  Yet, Blake’s use of traditionally soothing tones for illustrations that are peculiar and disturbing resulted in a viewing experience that I found to be unsettling – far more so than if the illustrations had been rendered in dark, dramatic colors.  I have always loved art that can make me feel uncomfortable –an artist must have an understanding of human tolerance for unpleasant experiences; they need to intuitively sense how much is almost too much. Blake most definitely understood, whether cognitively or innately, this balance.

Blake rendered his figures in such a way that, while I knew I was looking at visual representations of ‘other’ humans, I felt that they were somehow different, almost alien.  After spending time with the book, I have decided that this foreignness comes from Night Thought’s characters being incredibly expressive and emotive while also looking almost dead.  The figures seem languid with their fleshy pallor – they heighten the fragile state of human existence that concerns Young’s poem.  Being relatively unfamiliar with William Blake illustrations, I had thought that maybe these sickly figures could just be inline with Blake’s esthetic but upon doing a bit of research on his artistic style I found his Night Thoughts prints to be slightly less epic in their drama than was typical of his other drawings. Blake took time to tailor his illustrations to the needs of the poem – something I appreciated as a viewer.

In my research, I came across this interesting fact: “while Blake based his designs closely on the text, many of the images are based on personifications or metaphors in the poem.  This approach tends to literalize what is only a figure of speech in the text, thereby confounding conventional distinctions between the literal and the metaphoric.”[1] I had noticed this while reading the poem, but I am not sure if I fully grasped the exact relationship between word and image until coming across the above quote.  Out of Blake’s literal interpretation of Young’s poetic metaphors comes the fanciful, otherworldly quality of Night Thoughts that makes the book so intriguing.  I think it is what makes me feel like I am looking into some type of parallel world that is familiar but, in some indescribable way (and I mean this beyond the obvious of floating people, human-like creatures, imaginary landscape etc), different from anything I know.

Illustration; Page 7