Showing posts with label blake rilke paterson orpheus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blake rilke paterson orpheus. Show all posts

Friday, October 3, 2008

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.