Sound and Vision in Blake’s London

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the relationship between sound and image through the work of William Blake, considering Blake as both a writer of songs and a mediator of the popular music culture of Romantic period London. Many of the Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789, 1794) draw on elements from the urban soundscape, including the psalm singing of ‘Holy Thursday’, the street cries of ‘The Chimney Sweep’, and the host of voices in ‘London’. These poems are both about and part of this soundscape, the simple diction, rhythms and rhymes situating the collection among the street ballads, national airs, lullabies, drinking songs and devotional hymns that formed the main elements of non-elite music culture. The chapter moves from accounts of Blake performing his own songs to the status of melody and harmony in his later prophetic books. The description of prelapsarian melody in these texts points towards a transformed way of hearing, and the final section shows how works from ‘London’ to the late Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825) seek to convey an auditory mode of visionary experience.