William Blake and Isaac Newton in Copenhagen

As we paid a visit to the memorial of the extraordinary artist and poet William Blake in Bunhill Row, London, my friend and I met a young scholar who there for similar purpose. It turned out he had written a thesis on Blake. We chatted about Blake’s regard for nature, and his attitude to it, and I mentioned Isaac Newton.

The gentlemen reminded me of this picture:

Blake depicts Newton studying the known universe, surrounded by the vast unknown. He forms a triangle, as he makes a triangle. His focus is on what is directly in front of him, to the exclusion of all else.

Blake did not romanticise nature, but he believed that without the necessary balance of the spiritual, humanity was merely a slave to reason.

Let’s not forget, as in Copenhagen our politicians try to begin to solve the problems brought upon us over generations, that:

"The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself." – William Blake.