Night Thoughts Illustrations

A man lies awake beneath a page of poetry. His cloak covers almost his whole body, but his face remains exposed, turned towards us with an expression of exhaustion. Beside him, a small winged figure descends through a dark, starry space. The words occupy a rectangle above the man; the picture reaches around its edges. Reading and looking begin together, because Edward Young’s opening lines describe precisely the comfort the unhappy speaker cannot obtain: sleep visits the fortunate and leaves the wretched behind. Blake makes that abandonment visible. ^[1][2]

The scene belongs to one of the largest sustained undertakings of William Blake’s career. For Young’s Night Thoughts, he made 537 watercolour designs; forty-three compositions reached the engraved edition published in 1797. The scale can seem daunting, yet an individual page offers a direct entrance. Notice where a hand appears beside the text, where a body disappears behind it, or where a wing carries the eye away from the words. Blake’s margins give thought a place to move. ^[3]

The drawings and the printed book offer related experiences with important differences. The original designs surround actual pages from earlier editions of Young’s poem. The published engravings accompany newly printed text, with a changed arrangement of lines. Following a few pages closely reveals both the imaginative achievement and the practical decisions that shaped it. ^[4][5]

Richard Edwards and an enormous commission

The publisher Richard Edwards employed Blake during the middle of the 1790s to illustrate Young’s poem. Young had divided his work into nine sections, called Nights. Blake’s commission ultimately generated designs across the whole poem, while the edition that reached readers contained the first four Nights. The watercolours belong to the extensive drawn series; the engravings form a much smaller selection prepared for publication. ^[3][4][5]

A report from 1796 allows a glimpse of the work in progress. Joseph Farington recorded information received from Henry Fuseli about Blake surrounding each page of the poem with designs. As G. E. Bentley Jr. recounts the testimony, Blake had asked one hundred guineas for the watercolours, and Edwards offered twenty, which Blake accepted. The report reaches us through other people’s words; it nevertheless places the extraordinary labour beside a definite negotiation over payment. The commission was an arrangement between an artist and a bookseller, as well as an opportunity for imaginative invention. ^[4]

The plans also changed in their reported extent. Fuseli’s information, preserved in Farington’s diary and discussed by Bentley, envisaged about two hundred designs being selected for engraving. Bentley distinguishes that report from a prospectus specifying one hundred and fifty. Sir John Soane’s Museum describes the intended publication as four volumes. These figures record proposals, rather than plates we can assume Blake completed. The realised book contains forty-three illustrations and bears the date 1797. ^[3][4]

Its making required several kinds of work. Blake invented the designs and executed the illustrative plates; Richard Edwards was the publisher and R. Noble the printer. The Metropolitan Museum identifies the illustrations as etching and engraving. The book brought separately produced words and pictures into a common page, giving Blake a different set of conditions from the illuminated books in which his own writing and designs were worked together on the printing surface. Young’s existing poem had to remain readable within Blake’s new visual field. ^[7]

The commission placed unusual demands on an illustrator. Young’s speaker does recount particular losses, but much of the poem consists of reflection, persuasion and sudden metaphor. An artist following it page by page repeatedly encounters ideas instead of incidents. Time, memory, grief, friendship, mortality and divine love must acquire visible actions. Blake answers that challenge through bodies: a sleeper, an archer, a chained figure, an embracing pair, a person lifted or bent beneath a burden. The changing postures allow an argument to become something that can be seen. ^[2]

Young’s complaint and his answer

Young explains in his preface that the narrative is brief and the moral reflection occupies most of the poem. That is an excellent guide to its unusual movement. A memory of a dead friend opens into a consideration of time; a cry of distress becomes an accusation against worldly ambition; an image of the grave leads towards a claim about immortality. The poem does not proceed as a continuous adventure with a stable cast moving through successive locations. Its scenes arise within the speaker’s effort to think through loss. ^[2]

Night I begins with disturbed sleep and a wish for an end to suffering. The speaker then asks for wisdom, turning the darkness around him into a condition of mind as well as a time of day. When a bell strikes, its sound becomes an admonition about lost hours. Young repeatedly changes scale: an individual awake at night considers the condition of humanity, the fate of empires and the limits of earthly existence. A personal wound becomes the beginning of a much wider argument. ^[2]

The violence of that argument should remain audible. The speaker imagines Death as an archer who has struck him repeatedly. He looks back on pleasures that now cause pain because their companions have disappeared. He also enlarges grief into sympathy for others: miners deprived of daylight, people condemned to the oar, wounded soldiers, the sick and those refused charity. The poem’s concern with death includes sharp attention to the injuries people suffer while alive. Its consolation develops amid that pressure. ^[2]

Young addresses Lorenzo as someone who needs to learn how to live. In the opening of Night II, mourning becomes a question of conduct: professing sorrow for a friend has little value if the survivor’s life ignores what that friend would wish. Time is treated as a resource that demands an account, and amusement as a possible means of evading thought. The speaker even acknowledges that he is preaching. His urgency comes from the conviction that an apparently ordinary hour has consequences beyond the life in which it is spent. ^[2]

Such passages help us approach Blake’s figures without immediately assigning them names from his own mythology. Young already supplies an abundance of personification. Time has wings and children; Death hunts, arrests and liberates; thoughts can travel, recoil or become prisoners. Blake’s images can intensify these figures of speech, rearrange their emphasis or give them an unexpected bodily form. Beginning with the nearby verse preserves the particular encounter between illustrator and author. It also leaves room to ask where the image becomes more complicated than the verbal instruction. ^[2]

The broad movement is from complaint towards Christian assurance, but it repeatedly passes through fear and anger. In Night III, the speaker grieves for Narcissa and denounces the religious hostility that denied her a grave. Later in the same Night he presents death as release from confinement, even as the loss remains painful. A reader therefore meets changing descriptions of death within one sustained argument. Blake’s varied Death figures respond to a poem that can make the same power terrifying in one passage and welcome in another. ^[2]

A page made larger

The original watercolours began with an unusual physical arrangement. Pages of Young’s printed poem were mounted within much larger sheets, leaving broad areas for Blake’s inventions. The visible rectangle of type belongs to an older book; the surrounding drawing gives it a new scale and setting. On the opening page, even an ornamental heading from that earlier printing remains inside the text area. Blake’s work changes the conditions under which those familiar words can be encountered. ^[1][4]

Luisa Calè describes this construction as a composite page, drawing attention to its different papers, the red ruled boundary and the off-centre text window. In the 1797 edition, the words were reset more closely, and some illustrated lines moved onto a preceding page. Her account makes a useful practical point: the relationship between a design and its verbal prompt can change during the making of the book. The printed page is a new arrangement of the drawing’s elements. ^[5]

The opening watercolour makes the unequal spaces especially productive. The narrow area on the left accommodates a thin ascending plant. The wider right margin becomes a dark passage for the winged figure. Below, the recumbent man stretches almost the width of the whole image. Each part of the surround has a different task. The rectangle establishes a regular field for reading, while the asymmetry around it gives Blake several directions in which to develop the scene. ^[1]

This is also a question of apparent scale. The wakeful man has a head large enough for his expression to register immediately. Sleep appears smaller, farther away and moving independently. The printed lines between them are neither a landscape nor a neutral strip outside the picture. Their edges become part of the distance separating the figures. If the poetry were removed and replaced by an empty rectangle, much of the scene’s peculiar tension would remain, but its precise account of abandonment would become harder to recover. ^[1][2]

A reproduction cropped to one figure loses that relationship. Blake’s tiny personifications can be beautiful or strange in isolation, yet their placement around the words often supplies the action. A hand that seems oddly detached may belong to a body concealed behind the text. A curved form may carry the eye around a corner before revealing itself as a limb, a garment or an animal. The whole page provides the scale against which each fragment becomes intelligible. ^[1][7]

Sleep leaves the unhappy

In the original drawing for Night I, page 3, the man’s cloak sweeps from his raised head towards his feet in long pale folds. The fabric gathers his body into an almost continuous horizontal shape. His eyes, however, are open. The low position and enclosing cloth suggest rest, while the face denies its relief. Above him the older printed page introduces the poem, and behind that text a second pale recumbent form is partly visible at the top. Blake lets the words obscure as well as disclose. ^[1]

Sleep’s position on the right answers the opening passage more precisely than a general picture of someone sleeping would do. The figure is winged and inverted, passing headfirst through the darkness. Its long pale wings rise towards the top of the margin, while the arms reach downward. The pose gives movement to a power Young describes as selective in its visits. Sleep can arrive elsewhere; the suffering speaker remains where he is. The stillness of one body and movement of the other make the missed encounter legible. ^[1][2]

Young’s first seven lines already contain that difference between repose and waking misery. The speaker’s relief has been short and disturbed. On the next page, he imagines dreams following people even into the grave, then describes thought tossed through a sea of imagined misfortune. The poem does not allow sleep to remain a simple emblem of peace. It can fail to arrive, fail to last or bring its own torments. The first design introduces an uncertainty that the words immediately develop. ^[2]

The reverse of this original leaf, page 4, changes the visual register. A large grey and dark form rises around the rectangle of text, its head bent above the upper edge. Broad washes replace the more open ground of the previous scene. The words occupy a bright enclosed patch within the surrounding darkness. Seen together, the two sides move from an individual unable to sleep towards a more encompassing nocturnal presence. That observation concerns this particular leaf; it does not require every dark figure in the series to receive the same symbolic name. ^[1]

The engraved opening, page 1 of the 1797 edition, retains the wakeful man, the winged figure and the little plant, but the text area has changed substantially. In the coloured Yale reproduction, a large blank space separates the page number from the heading, while the poem continues much farther down than in the original mounted page. The earlier printer’s decorative headpiece has disappeared. The dark surround now accompanies additional lines about the speaker’s disturbed dreams and the relation of night to his distress. The same central invention receives a longer verbal setting. ^[8]

Colour gives the particular printed copy another character. The cloak appears lilac, a yellow passage lies near the man’s neck and chest, and green and ochre colour the low ground. The white wings remain sharply legible against the dark sky. Those colours belong to the reproduced impression we are looking at; they do not establish who coloured every copy. Comparing it with the original makes the distinction helpful: one can follow the continuity of the composition while noticing how a new surface alters its atmosphere. ^[1][8]

Death beside the first Night’s title

The engraved title to Night I gives the reader a much more monumental encounter. In the Metropolitan Museum’s copy, an immense bearded figure sits behind and beside the title panel. The face appears in the broad right margin; the beard descends towards the lower edge. One large hand reaches down near a much smaller standing child. Human life has entered a space governed by a body too large to be contained within the ordinary proportions of the page. ^[7]

The picture uses the title panel to make that immensity felt. Most of the seated figure’s torso is hidden. A foot emerges below the panel at the left, a knee and another foot occupy the lower right, and the head appears above them. We mentally connect these separated parts into a single body. The rectangle therefore does more than cover the figure. It encourages the viewer to imagine the missing extent, turning an interruption into an instrument of scale. ^[7]

Below the title, a seated woman and small children form a compact group. Their delicate gestures and modest dimensions are exposed beside the enormous hands and feet. At the upper right, a pale female form rises from another standing woman, while flying figures reach towards her from above the panel. The composition makes the title’s three concerns—life, death and immortality—available as bodily relations: nurture below, an overwhelming presence around it and an upward passage at the side. ^[7]

Young’s Night I provides several ways to understand such changes of scale. Death can possess empires and stars, yet can also strike the private happiness of a household. The speaker’s protest asks why so vast a power should direct repeated attacks against one small human life. Elsewhere he argues that the grave opens towards a fuller existence. The title design brings these unlike measures into a single page. Its giant and its tiny family can be read against the poem’s movement between universal power and particular grief. ^[2][7]

The old figure’s downcast gaze also complicates the encounter. There is no need to imagine a simple monster triumphantly attacking its victims. His closed or lowered eyes and long falling beard make him seem withdrawn within his immense occupation of the page. The active exchange takes place among the smaller figures above and below him. Looking first at the face, then at the raised arms near the top corner, changes the emotional centre of the image. ^[7]

This is one reason a quick caption can be insufficient. Identifying a personification begins a reading, but the figure’s size, posture and relation to the text shape what the personification does. Death’s presence may surround the world of the little family without exhausting the possibilities shown above it. The page can hold the fact of separation and a promise of passage together, much as Young’s poem keeps returning to both pain and assurance. ^[2][7]

Narcissa and the encircling serpent

The title to Night III makes an arresting comparison between drawing and engraving. In the original watercolour, a huge serpent curls around the upper and left sides of the mounted title. Its patterned body loops beneath the lower corner, and its head reaches across the bottom towards a kneeling woman. She bends back and stretches an arm into a field of light. The text panel occupies a substantial part of the serpent’s coil, as though the animal could continue behind it. ^[9]

The old title page remains visible within that construction, including its dedication, printer’s ornament and statement that it is a second edition. Those details identify the printed object that Blake has surrounded. They also create a remarkable meeting of scales: an earlier publisher’s small ornamental device sits inside a new picture occupied by a colossal animal. The calm alignment of the type persists amid a scene of bodily danger and upward appeal. ^[9]

The Metropolitan Museum’s uncoloured engraving preserves the major arrangement while transforming its surface. The woman’s sweeping drapery spreads across the lower part of the page; the serpent’s open mouth lies beneath her. Repeated engraved marks distinguish its dark patterned body from her pale limbs and flowing cloth. The snake’s topmost loop arches behind the title. In the absence of the original’s strong yellow, red and green passages, light and darkness carry more of the encounter. ^[7][9]

The title names Narcissa, whose death is the subject of Young’s third Night. The poem begins with another awakening from dreams, then accumulates losses: Narcissa follows Philander before grief for him has settled. Young remembers her youth, beauty, song and happiness, and recalls the attempt to take her towards a warmer climate. That effort fails. The pressure of the passage comes from the collision of tenderness with the inability to preserve the person loved. ^[2]

The following account turns outward in anger. People who pity Narcissa nevertheless deny her burial, and the speaker condemns religious zeal that has hardened their hearts. He describes a stolen grave and his own fearfulness in performing the burial. Read in this context, a woman confronting an encompassing danger need not be reduced to an abstract lesson about the soul. The Night begins with a particular lost person and asks how human cruelty compounds bereavement. Blake’s title brings bodily vulnerability before the reader even before that account unfolds. ^[2][9]

Later, Young gathers Narcissa’s circumstances into a striking cluster of serpent imagery. Each circumstance is compared to an asp, their combined force to a many-headed affliction. Still later, he argues that death releases the soul from the confinement of earthly life. These passages provide relevant verbal company for Blake’s coil and the woman’s lifted arm. They do not require us to select one sentence as an exhaustive key. The design can introduce the Night’s encompassing danger while allowing the gesture towards light to carry another possibility. ^[2]

The difference between her raised hand and the serpent’s mouth is especially effective. One reaches beyond the immediate circuit of the body around her; the other opens within it. Her long garment crosses the lower foreground and partly separates her from the head below. The reader’s eye follows a circuit around the title, then finds a movement that resists that circuit. Blake turns the restricted space of a margin into the scene’s central difficulty: how can a figure surrounded by such a power move towards release? ^[7][9]

Colour and the identity of a copy

A coloured Night Thoughts engraving presents another set of decisions. Colour can distinguish a transparent spirit from a body, turn an uncertain shape into a plant or architectural support, and change the apparent depth of a surrounding space. It may also depart from the original watercolour. The existence of a drawing by Blake does not make every painted version of the engraved design an equally direct record of his intentions. Individual copies need individual attention. ^[10]

Michael J. Tolley’s study of the National Gallery of Victoria’s William à Beckett copy is particularly useful here. He identifies an unknown colourist whose scheme differs from the established groups of coloured copies. He also examines differing states of the Night II title, where the figure standing in Time’s lap was altered before the frequently encountered final state. Colouring and changes to the plate are distinct sources of variation. Tolley’s proposed explanations for editorial intervention remain hypotheses. ^[10]

That distinction changes the questions we ask. A green robe may identify the appearance of one copy without proving the date of its colouring. A more rounded body may reflect lines present in a particular plate state, paint applied to them, or both. Comparing copies becomes rewarding when we keep those possibilities open and identify the object before us. Identifying the copy gives those visible differences a firm setting. ^[10]

The original Narcissa title and the Met engraving offer an accessible starting point. Their continuity lies in the coil, panel, woman and lifted arm. Their differences include the physical old title sheet, the newly composed title lettering and the means by which the surrounding world becomes light or dark. Only after those visible distinctions have been established is it helpful to introduce another coloured impression. Otherwise several separate stages of making can collapse into one apparently authoritative image. ^[7][9]

The incomplete published book

The 1797 volume can be confusing when described in abbreviated form. It is a book containing the first four Nights of a nine-Night poem, with forty-three engraved illustrations. NYPL’s record makes the illustrated count more exact by identifying thirty-nine engravings in margins around letterpress text. The other four are the section titles. Neither forty-three illustrated compositions nor ninety-five numbered pages describes the full 537-design watercolour undertaking. A page, a Night, a drawing and a plate answer different questions. ^[3][6]

Nor should incompletion erase what was achieved. The published book sustains the illustrated surround across four sections with different emotional movements. Titles gather a Night’s concerns into a concentrated encounter; the marginal pictures accompany particular turns of speech. An opening page about sleep and a title about Narcissa do different work even when both rely on the central rectangle. Repetition of the format allows changes of scale, posture and mood to become unusually apparent. ^[1][7][8][9]

The reasons the enterprise stopped require care. Soane’s catalogue describes the volume as commercially unsuccessful. Bentley records that Edwards soon retired from bookselling and took a government position in Minorca. Those are useful pieces of publication history, but they do not supply a detailed balance sheet or a complete account of everyone’s decisions. The secure outcome is that the projected continuation did not appear. The surviving outcome leaves room for a more complex history of decisions and circumstances. ^[3][4]

The original drawings nevertheless survived together. Bentley traces their passage through the Edwards family and later collectors, recording that they remained bound in two volumes well into their later exhibition history. They were disbound by May 1928, and Frances White Emerson gave them to the British Museum in 1928. The circumstances remind us that the object now encountered as selected museum sheets once offered the repeated experience of turning pages through an extensive illustrated poem. ^[4]

That survival gives the unfinished commission an unusually rich legacy. We can compare a preparation with a printed result, and we can also encounter designs for portions of the poem that Blake never engraved. The wider series should be approached as an additional body of work, with its own changing imagery. The printed selection provides a manageable entrance, but it cannot stand for every solution Blake devised across the nine Nights. ^[3][4]

The designs after the commission

The project also continued within Blake’s own work. Calè follows his reuse of engraved Night Thoughts proofs in the manuscript of Vala, or The Four Zoas. Proofs lacking Young’s letterpress offered blank areas for new writing, and their rearrangement altered the relationship between the old designs and the poem they now accompanied. A page devised for a commercial edition became material for another act of composition. ^[5]

Blake returned to the illustration of a poem about death in The Grave, published in 1808. That book illustrates Robert Blair, and its plates were executed by Luigi Schiavonetti after Blake’s designs. It belongs to a separate undertaking, with another author, publisher and division of artistic labour. Similar subjects—death, bodily separation, resurrection and consolation—make comparison worthwhile, but a familiar theme does not identify a picture’s series. ^[11]

The same care helps when approaching Blake’s paintings and poetry. A biblical picture of Christ or a personification of Death need not belong to Young’s commission. Conversely, a Night Thoughts design can be an intense imaginative invention while remaining an illustration to another poet’s words. Holding author, page and object together allows the reader to enjoy those connections without losing the particular work being encountered.

Following a page through the series

A rewarding way to begin is to choose a complete page and read the adjacent passage before interpreting the surround. In the opening scene, notice the difference between a body lying down and a body enjoying sleep. On the first Night’s title, connect the giant’s separated hands, feet and head before considering the small family below. With Narcissa, follow the serpent around the panel, then look for the direction established by the woman’s arm. These are small acts of looking with large consequences. ^[1][7][9]

Next compare a drawing with an engraved version, keeping their page numbers separate. Look at the heading, the amount of verse and the place where the final line falls. Those ordinary details can explain why a figure seems more closely connected to the words in one version than in another. Finally, consider the colouring of the particular printed copy. A wash can clarify a body, thicken darkness or suggest an environment that the engraved outlines leave open. ^{[1][5][8][10]}

Blake’s Night Thoughts rewards that patient movement between verse and margin. Young makes grief unfold through arguments, appeals and changing metaphors; Blake gives those movements bodies and spatial relations. The surrounding image can protect the text, interrupt it, tower behind it or lead the eye beyond it. What begins as the illustration of a poem becomes an extended exploration of how a page can carry thought.