William Blake and Catherine Boucher: Four Images from The First Book of Urizen

The First Book of Urizen by William Blake is a mythological creation story, a Gnostic parody of Genesis, where the tyrannical deity Urizen (representing cold, oppressive Reason) separates from divine unity to create a restrictive world of law, matter, and sin, trapping humanity in a “Net of Religion” and physical limitation, with the imaginative artist Los and rebellious energy Orc emerging as forces against this enslavement. The book critiques Enlightenment rationalism and dogma, showing creation as a fall from infinite possibility into a world of suffering, countered only by imagination. 

---

Preludium to the Book of Urizen

---

But the wrenching of Urizen heal’d not
Cold, featureless, flesh or clay
Rifted with direful changes
He lay in a dreamless night

Till Los rous’d his fires affrighted
At the formless, unmeasurable Death.

---

The pangs of hope began,
In heavy pain striving, struggling.
Two Ears in close volutions,
From beneath his orbs of vision
Shot spiring out, and petrified
As they grew. And a fourth Age passed
And a state of dismal woe.

---

The globe of life-blood trembled
Branching out into roots:
Fib’rous, writhing upon the winds:
Fibres of blood, milk and tears:
In pangs, eternity on eternity.
At length in tears & cries imbodied,
A female form trembling and pale
Waves before his deathy face.

All Eternity shudder’d at sight
Of the first Female now separate
Pale as a cloud of snow
Waving before the face of Los.

---

Text and images from Voetica.

William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language”. He produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God^“ or “human existence itself”.

Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he came to be highly regarded by later critics and readers for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. A theist who was hostile to almost all forms of organized religion, he was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions. The 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti characterized him as a “glorious luminary”, and “a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors”.

Collaboration with his wife, Catherine Boucher (1762 – 1831) was instrumental in the creation of many of Blake’s books. Boucher worked as a printmaker and colorist for his works. “For almost forty-five years she was the person who lived and worked most closely with Blake, enabling him to realize numerous projects, impossible without her assistance. Catherine was an artist and printer in her own right,” writes literary scholar Angus Whitehead.

[bios adapted from Wiki]