Dante in the Empyrean, Drinking at the River of Light

Dante kneels beside a stream so pale that its banks are easier to follow than its water. His red robe folds around his bent body, and his hands rise close to his lowered face. Across from him, Beatrice sits upright with one hand lifted. Between them, a river runs through almost the entire height of the sheet. Tiny bodies inhabit its light, while flowers open beside the poet’s feet. William Blake makes an immense spiritual revelation begin with this small, urgent act of bending towards the water. ^[1]

Dante in the Empyrean, Drinking at the River of Light belongs to Blake’s illustrations to The Divine Comedy, made in 1824–27. Tate owns the graphite and watercolour drawing, whose upright paper support measures 528 by 371 millimetres. Its subject comes from Paradiso XXX, especially lines 61–96, when contact with heavenly light changes the traveller’s capacity to see. ^[1][2]

Entering a heaven of light

By this point in the poem, Beatrice has long been Dante’s guide. This scene follows their journey through the heavens; it is far removed from the difficult earlier encounter Blake represented in Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car. Here she accompanies Dante beyond the last bodily heaven into the Empyrean. Her account of their arrival joins intellectual light, love, happiness and joy, carrying the language beyond the ordinary description of a place. ^[2]

The change begins with an apparent failure of vision. An overpowering radiance surrounds Dante, leaving him unable to see. Beatrice explains this welcome through an image of preparation: the lesser light must be made ready for the greater flame. Almost immediately, Dante recognises an increase in his own power. His renewed sight can endure a brightness that would previously have overwhelmed him. The river becomes visible after that first alteration. ^[2]

This matters to the picture’s quietness. We see no desperate struggle against an attacking force. Dante’s folded posture concentrates his attention, while Beatrice’s seated body provides a steadier presence on the opposite bank. The surrounding world opens upwards around their unequal gestures. The event requires effort and desire, but its difficulty concerns the traveller’s ability to receive what is before him. ^[1][2]

Canto XXIX has already prepared a vocabulary of spiritual illumination. Beatrice discusses the angels, their uninterrupted attention to God, and the different ways divine light is received by countless created beings. Cary’s translation ends the canto with the image of light dispersed through innumerable mirrors while remaining whole at its source. In the next canto, Dante’s own eyes must become better mirrors. The act beside the river belongs to a sustained enquiry into seeing and understanding. ^[2]

Why Dante drinks with his eyes

At first Dante sees a river shining between banks coloured with extraordinary spring flowers. Living sparks rise from the water, settle among the blossoms like rubies mounted in gold, then plunge back into the stream. As one enters, another emerges. Their exchange gives the vision a rhythm: water, flowers and flashes of life continually communicate with one another. ^[2]

Dante wants to know what these appearances mean. Beatrice welcomes the growth of that desire, then tells him that he must drink before his thirst can be satisfied. Knowledge takes the form of thirst because he cannot obtain it simply by having the scene explained. Something must change in the person who looks. Her further explanation makes the point precise: the river, sparks and flowering banks are preliminary appearances accommodated to his present power of sight. Their inadequacy lies in the beholder’s capacity. ^[2]

The poem then reaches for an intensely bodily comparison. Dante bends towards the stream as eagerly as a baby waking late reaches for milk. He wants to improve the mirrors of his eyes, and it is his eyelids that drink. The mingling of nourishment and sight makes this passage stranger than an ordinary scene of someone taking water into the mouth. Desire is satisfied through a new ability to perceive. ^[2]

Blake gives that unusual action a recognisable human shape. Dante leans forward, elbows bent and hands brought towards his face. The red clothing, the pale head and the darker shading beneath the shoulder make him the strongest compact figure near the bottom of the drawing. His body provides a point of entry into a vision that otherwise risks dissolving into faint lines. We can follow the action before we fully understand its object. ^[1][2]

The river changes as soon as Dante drinks. What had seemed long becomes round; flowers and sparks reveal the heavenly companies they had concealed, as people look different when their masks are removed. Later in the canto, the blessed appear in the vast arrangement of a rose. Dante’s improved vision can comprehend its extent without being defeated by height or distance. What looks like a sequence of transformations is also the progressive removal of limits from his sight. ^[2]

Blake retains the long river at the centre of his composition. The sheet therefore gives particular force to the moment of approach and alteration, rather than attempting to map every later appearance described in the canto. Its tall stream lets the eye travel between the kneeling poet and the upper reaches of the picture. The reader who knows what follows can recognise how provisional this visible river is within Dante’s experience. ^[1][2]

Following the figures within the stream

The centre contains much more than empty brightness. Small, lightly outlined human forms appear within and alongside the water. Some are easier to recognise than others: a curving back, a pair of legs, an upturned body. Their scale changes our sense of the river. Seen from a distance it is a pale channel; examined closely, it becomes a gathering of lives. ^[1]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue account relates these little bodies to the living sparkles in Dante’s text, calling them “infant joys”. Blake has supplied the sparks with human form. The change makes the river’s animation visible without requiring each tiny presence to be individually named. The crowded life within its narrow course contrasts with the larger, more isolated figures on the banks. ^[1][2]

At the lower left, flowers and leafy stems are more firmly defined. Pink blossoms, green leaves and small pale faces create a pocket of busy detail beside Dante. The springtime banks described by the poem become an immediate environment around his bent body. Above him, blue-green washes extend across the left bank, while similar pale colour spreads behind the figures on the right. The banks help establish a landscape even where the paper remains comparatively open. ^[1][2]

Beatrice’s posture makes a clear counterweight. Her torso is upright, one knee projects forward beneath pale drapery, and an extended hand turns towards the river and the kneeling traveller. Her hair spreads around her head in a broad, curling outline. She participates in the same luminous space as Dante while occupying a different relation to it: in the poem, she already understands what he has yet to see. ^[1][2]

Canto XXXI gives Beatrice’s guidance a moving completion. Dante thanks her for bringing him from bondage into freedom and for making his spirit whole. She smiles down at him from her place among the blessed, then turns towards the eternal fountain. That gratitude extends the role she performs beside the river: she helps another person gain the power to see. ^[2]

The two bodies also establish the width of the water. Their positions on opposite sides hold the composition open, preventing the central stream from becoming a purely decorative line. Dante reaches inward; Beatrice’s gesture answers across the channel. The picture’s larger mystery is anchored by this readable relationship between a traveller and his guide. ^[1]

A poet, a workshop and unnamed presences

Higher up the left bank sits a bearded figure with a lifted face. Near him, foliage is drawn with a wiry, branching energy. Beneath this figure, a much fainter group appears around a rectangular working surface. Butlin’s catalogue identifies a scene of painting and engraving here, placing the older poet and these activities within the realm of the arts. Small differences in the strength of the lines mean that this company emerges gradually as we look. ^[1]

On the opposite side is another large, lightly drawn figure, separated from Beatrice below by a broad interval of pale space. Dante’s river passage does not describe these additional presences or a scene of artistic work on its bank. Blake extends the population of the vision beyond the poet, his guide and the heavenly beings disclosed through the sparks and flowers. The extra figures make creative activity itself a subject within this imagined heaven. ^[1][2]

Their presence is particularly suggestive beside Dante’s opening confession in canto XXX. Before describing the Empyrean, the poet says that Beatrice’s beauty has exceeded his powers of praise. He has reached the limit of his art. Blake’s gathering of poet, painting and engraving brings the making of art into the very scene where Dante reflects on that limit. The juxtaposition offers a useful way of thinking about the drawing, without establishing that Blake intended a precise illustration of those earlier lines. ^[1][2]

The little working group also rewards a slower kind of attention than the main figures require. The eye first catches Dante’s red clothing and the flowing centre, then begins to distinguish the pale occupations behind him. Blake’s picture accommodates both the traveller’s dramatic action and the quieter activity of making images. The small scene gives those activities a place within the revelation. ^[1]

Roe’s interpretation of Art and Nature

Albert S. Roe gave these additions a more elaborate meaning in his 1953 study of Blake’s Dante illustrations. As summarised by Butlin in Tate’s catalogue, Roe identified the aged poet with a regenerated Urizen, a figure from Blake’s own mythology. The figure on the opposite bank became Enion, an Earth-Mother associated with Nature, while Beatrice was equated with Vala, the Female Will. These names belong to Roe’s interpretation of the drawing. ^[1]

In this account, the river raises Art and Nature into the Eternal World through divine imagination. Figures associated elsewhere in Blake with troubled or fallen conditions appear here in positive forms. The significance lies in renewal: their customary associations need not determine their condition for ever. Roe reads the vision as an imaginative transformation extending beyond Dante’s individual experience. ^[1]

The proposal gives the two banks a connected purpose and explains why Blake might bring his own mythic figures into Dante’s Paradise. Its detailed identifications, however, remain a scholarly reconstruction. The drawing does not label the seated poet Urizen, nor does Dante’s river passage supply Enion or Vala. Recognising the added bodies is a firmer starting point than treating their proposed names as something the artist has explicitly confirmed. ^[1][2]

Tate’s June 2024 display caption preserves a broader and more tentative version of the idea: the two upper figures might represent spiritual forms of Art and Nature in eternity. That framing allows the creative work, the foliage and the opposed presences to suggest a larger relationship without making every symbolic equation compulsory. It also leaves room for the pleasure of looking at figures whose outlines are clearer than their identities. ^[1]

Paper, inscription and the surviving series

The drawing remains visibly uneven in its development. Dante’s robe, the flowers and parts of the left bank have stronger colour and contours than many of the figures farther up the sheet. Graphite lines continue through pale washes, and some forms remain difficult to separate from the surrounding light. This is part of the work’s surviving appearance. It cannot establish how Blake would have developed every area had he continued working on it. ^[1]

Near the lower right, the inscription identifies Paradiso, canto 30. Tate records both an ink inscription and underlying pencil wording, as well as a reference to Hell, canto 26, on the reverse. The scene on the front is securely connected to the river of Paradiso XXX. A different inscription on the back should not displace the subject established by the recto and the poem. The catalogue also records a watermark reading WE; these letters supply no dated statement of paper manufacture. ^[1][2]

Tate acquired the work in 1919, with assistance from a special grant and donations. Its catalogue notes that this is the collection’s only illustration to Paradiso. That local circumstance differs from the surviving drawn series, conventionally counted as seventy-two subjects from Inferno, twenty from Purgatorio and ten from Paradiso. The imbalance explains why Blake’s journey through Hell is much more extensively represented. It does not reveal a fully documented final plan for the series. ^[1]

Nor does the late position of the episode make it the conclusion of The Divine Comedy. In canto XXXI, the rose and its heavenly inhabitants become more fully visible, and Bernard replaces Beatrice beside Dante as guide. The poem still has further stages to reach. The wider history of Blake’s Dante illustrations places this sheet among works left at different levels of completion. ^[1][2]

Here, the decisive movement remains small enough to fit within a bent back and a pair of lowered eyes. Dante’s immense new world comes into view through his own alteration. Around him, Blake gives the light bodies, flowers and the activity of art. The river becomes a meeting place between a poem about learning to see and a drawing that repeatedly asks us to look more closely. ^[1][2]