New Implications: Blake and James Hervey's Meditations

Abstract

ALTHOUGH scholars have repeatedly called attention to William Blake's detailed familiarity with the works of James Hervey (1714–58), an Anglican minister associated with the Graveyard School of Poets,1 important allusions to Hervey have been overlooked. Details are as follows. In An Island in the Moon, c.1784–5, Blake refers to Hervey's multi-volume ‘Theron & Aspasio’, which appeared in 1755, and to ‘Meditations among the tombs’ (E 456),2 first published in 1745, Blake later executing an allegorical ‘Epitome of Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs’ (E 691). Blake repeatedly turned to Hervey's Meditations for inspiration, a solemn work that addresses the ‘promiscuous multitude’ in the graveyard, in which ‘The [deceased] man of years and experience … was content to lie down at the feet of a [dead innocent] babe,’ while ‘the poor indigent lay as softly … as the most opulent possessor’ of the grave (Hervey's...