feeling blakeish

Don't know where I've been not to know it, but this made me happy of Blake's:

Prayer is the study of Art.
Praise is the Practice of Art.
Fasting &c., all relate to Art.
The outward Ceremony is Antichrist.

Got so pleased about this I started reading Peter Ackroyd's Blake biography and it is excellent. Great stories about him being sent as a teen apprentice to spend day after day drawing the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The statues were painted then, and Ackroyd thinks this (plus stained glass etc) influenced Blake as a colorist. Someone needs to film this I feel, the late 18th c Abbey with all the painted stones. Anyway I need to see it.

BTW for the 1.25 people who read this: I was quite wrong about Don Paterson's Orpheus not being available in the US -- it is, and I'm getting it. Here is another piece.

Consider the flowers: true only to the earth
yet we lend them a fate, from the borders of fate,
and supervise their fadings, their little deaths.
How right that we should author their regret:

everything rises -- and yet we trudge along
laying our heavy selves upon the world.