David Delivered out of Many Waters

An old man lies almost submerged at the foot of the picture, his arms stretched wide and his body bound with ropes. Above him, seven winged figures carry a radiant Christ towards the dark water. Their wings overlap in a pattern of sweeping curves; their faces include children, mature men and white-bearded elders. William Blake brings the danger below and the ordered company above into a single, narrow field of vision. The man cannot free himself, but the descending figure has already turned towards him. ^[1]

David Delivered out of Many Waters interprets Psalm 18, a song of rescue from enemies. Blake’s original is an ink and watercolour drawing in Tate, dated about 1805. The museum also owns a much later copy, catalogued as after Blake. These are separate objects: the discussion here follows the original composition, while the precise physical sheet represented by this page’s main illustration remains unconfirmed. ^{[1] [2]}

A body at the bottom of the picture

David occupies the lowest strip of Blake’s upright composition. His pale arms spread almost from edge to edge, following the water’s surface. Bands of rope wrap around them and pass across his upper body. His head tips backwards, lifting his face towards the company overhead. Curling hair and a long beard distinguish him from the smooth-faced youth immediately above. The waves close around him, with dark hollows between pale, twisting crests. There is little open water in which his body could move. ^[1]

Above this constriction, wings rise and cross. The central cherub’s wings extend downwards into a broad X, while those on either side form repeated curves and diagonals. Their feathered edges almost touch the water. The arrangement gives the heavenly company a visible structure, carrying our eye upwards through successive faces to Christ. Its symmetry feels especially powerful beside the irregular waves. David remains isolated beneath this closely joined group. ^[1]

Christ spreads his arms across the upper portion of the sheet. His garment falls in long folds between the cherubim, and his head inclines towards David. He has room to extend himself freely; the man below repeats that open shape under restraint. The distance between them matters, but so does their resemblance. Before a hand actually reaches into the water, the picture establishes a relationship through the two bodies. The saving figure answers the sufferer’s posture. ^[1]

This is a scene of impending release. David remains bound, and the image holds him at the point where help becomes visible. Naomi Billingsley draws attention to precisely this difference between the mirrored gestures: Christ’s arms are free, David’s tied. In her reading, the upper figure’s downward gaze and forward inclination focus the promise of deliverance upon the person below. We look upwards with David, then follow Christ’s attention back to him. ^[13]

The poem behind the water

Psalm 18 supplies a sequence of images rather than a straightforward account of a sea rescue. Its superscription presents it as David’s song to the Lord after deliverance from his enemies and from Saul. The opening praises God as protector and source of strength. Danger then arrives in the language of death, floods and snares; David cries out, and his cry is heard. The poem moves from the speaker’s extreme vulnerability to an immense disturbance of the world around him. ^[14]

Earth and hills shake. Smoke and fire accompany the divine response; the heavens bow, and the Lord descends through darkness. Verse 10 gives the striking image of flight upon a single cherub. Thunder, hail and lightning follow, before the depths of the waters are exposed. Finally, verse 16 brings this overwhelming action into a personal relationship: the speaker is taken from above and drawn out of the waters. Blake combines the threat, the flying rescuer and the endangered body within one view. ^{[1] [14]}

The water therefore has two kinds of force. It is convincing enough to surround a struggling human body, but it also gives form to the psalmist’s description of enemies who exceed his own strength. The superscription and verses immediately after the rescue identify human hostility as the occasion for the song. Blake makes that experience bodily. The ropes impede David’s limbs, the waves hem him in, and the descending company offers an escape that his own exertion cannot accomplish. ^{[1] [14]}

Reading beyond the selected verses clarifies Blake’s emphasis. The psalm continues through declarations of righteousness, divine protection and strength in battle. Its speaker pursues enemies, defeats them and receives power over peoples; it ends with praise for deliverance granted to David and his descendants. The watercolour concentrates on helplessness and rescue before those later assertions of military success. There are no defeated soldiers under David’s feet, no weapons in his hands and no visible kingdom to possess. The chosen moment makes dependence, rather than the subsequent exercise of strength, the centre of attention. ^{[1] [14]}

The poem is also spoken retrospectively: its singer gives thanks for help already received. Blake’s image returns us to the crisis itself. We see the old man still exposed to what has endangered him, even as the movement above promises the outcome named in the title. This difference between the song’s recollection and the picture’s suspended action allows gratitude and fear to inhabit the same composition. ^{[1] [14]}

Why is David tied with ropes?

The ropes are among the most consequential details in the drawing. They turn outstretched arms into evidence of captivity and make David’s likeness to a crucified body difficult to miss. Yet the familiar main text of the King James Version begins verse 4 with “The sorrows of death compassed me”. Its language suggests anguish surrounding the speaker; it does not explicitly place cords around his arms. ^{[1] [14]}

Michael J. Tolley addressed this point in his 1972 review of Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue. Responding to an earlier suggestion that Blake needed access to another translation, Tolley explained that the Authorised Version’s translators supplied marginal alternatives which many later editions omit. He identified cords as the marginal alternative to sorrows in this verse. Butlin’s later catalogue incorporates the explanation. The connection is a reported feature of that translation tradition, rather than proof that Blake consulted Hebrew or a particular surviving Bible. ^{[1] [15]}

The distinction changes how we understand Blake’s freedom with scripture. One of his most forceful visual additions may develop wording available alongside the main verse. The ropes give the surrounding terror a tangible form: they tighten around flesh and interrupt the reach of the arms. At the same time, their placement makes an older biblical singer resemble the suffering Christ. A small variation in language opens into the picture’s larger Christian interpretation. ^{[1] [15]}

Butlin reads the lower figure’s crucifixion-like attitude as a foreshadowing of salvation through Christ. This kind of reading treats an Old Testament person or event as anticipating a Christian fulfilment. Here the link is made visibly, by two bodies with similarly extended arms. The figure who recalls the Crucifixion is the one awaiting deliverance, while Christ approaches him in freedom. The image joins suffering and redemption across the space of the sheet. ^[1]

Seven cherubim and four ages

Blake’s most conspicuous departure from the King James wording is numerical. The psalm describes the Lord riding upon one cherub; Blake supplies seven. They are human-faced, winged beings whose different ages prevent the group from becoming a row of interchangeable attendants. Three paired types flank a single central youth. Children occupy the higher outer positions, white-bearded faces appear below them, and darker-bearded men stand lower down. The youthful central face looks directly towards us beneath Christ’s falling garment. ^{[1] [14]}

This arrangement has encouraged attempts to identify David within the heavenly company. Butlin notes that the central youth has sometimes been understood as David when young. Tolley’s review explains the proposal more fully through his account of John E. Grant’s interpretation: Grant connected several faces with the young David in another Blake design and organised the figures into overlapping triangles. Tolley questioned those groupings, distinguishing the central cherub from the upper children and Christ from the mature male types. The youthful face’s identity remains an interpretation, not a name supplied by the psalm. ^{[1] [15]}

Tolley proposed that the cherubim represent the Seven Eyes or Spirits of God acting together with Christ as a force of redemption. This offers a purpose for Blake’s multiplication of the single biblical cherub: the heavenly company becomes an organised saving power. His formulation was tentative, and he acknowledged difficulties in reconciling the symbolism with other Blake works. Butlin subsequently adopted the Seven Eyes interpretation in the Tate catalogue. It remains most useful when attached to this particular arrangement and to its named interpreter. ^{[1] [15]}

Even without accepting a complete symbolic key, the differences among the faces matter. Childhood, maturity and age appear together in a single movement towards the endangered man. The varied heads belong to one connected pattern of wings. Their repeated open hands and lifted arms extend the gesture that joins Christ to David, spreading it through the company. The picture makes cooperation visible before we decide exactly how to name every participant. ^[1]

The colour contributes to this connection. Cream-coloured bodies and pale drapery emerge against dark water, while touches of warm pink pass through wings and hair. The upper light gathers around Christ, but it does not isolate him from the others. Long contours lead downwards through garments and feathers towards the lowest body. Our eye can travel continuously from the bright upper figure to the man among the waves. That continuity carries the promise of rescue through a composition whose figures remain physically distinct. ^[1]

The original, its titles and a later copy

Tate’s original sheet, accession N02230, measures 415 by 348 millimetres and bears Blake’s initials at the lower left. Butlin records its passage from Thomas Butts to his son, followed by sale at Foster’s on 29 June 1853. The buyer was recorded as Money. By 1876 it belonged to George Thomas Saul, who presented it to the National Gallery in 1878; it transferred to Tate in 1909. These details describe Blake’s original watercolour. ^[1]

The sale also preserves an alternative way of naming the scene. In 1853 the work was called He rode upon the Cherubim, emphasising the airborne company and using the plural visible in Blake’s image. Butlin suggests that this wording might preserve a lost title associated with the drawing, though that remains a possibility. He records William Michael Rossetti’s later use of David delivered out of Many Waters, with a reference to Psalm 18:16. One title directs us towards the rescuer’s vehicle; the other towards the person rescued. Both draw attention to essential parts of the composition. ^[1]

The second Tate sheet, N05197, is catalogued as after William Blake, in graphite and watercolour. Its current record gives a support measurement of 422 by 356 millimetres. Butlin dates the copy to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and tentatively suggests that Alice G. E. Carthew might have made it. Carthew bequeathed that sheet in 1940. The possible copyist is not securely identified, and the bequest does not belong to the history of Blake’s original. ^[2]

A shared title can conceal these different histories. Blake’s design can be discussed through the original and its documented interpretations without treating every reproduction of it as a photograph of the same physical object. The main illustration here shows the composition, but its exact sheet has not been independently established. The original’s date, materials and ownership history should therefore be understood as facts about N02230. ^{[1] [2]}

Water has another role in Blake’s The River of Life, where an inhabited stream belongs to Revelation’s promise of renewed existence. ^[16] Here the water surrounds a bound person and makes his vulnerability immediate. The turning point lies above him: open arms answer constrained arms, and the varied heavenly company moves towards the solitary man. Psalm 18’s vast rescue becomes an encounter that can be followed from one face to another. ^{[1] [14]}