On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Mary holds the child close to her breast while Joseph bends over them. Above the roof, a winged woman descends head first, her arms following the slopes of the stable. Below its floor, another woman lies stretched across the frozen earth. William Blake brings three kinds of existence into one small picture: a family sheltered inside a building, a heavenly messenger arriving from above, and a body almost inseparable from the ground beneath them.

The composition is The Descent of Peace, from Blake’s 1809 illustrations to John Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. It belongs to the six-sheet group made for the Reverend Joseph Thomas, now at the Whitworth, the University of Manchester. Tate’s exhibition catalogue describes the group’s materials as graphite, ink and watercolour on paper. The poem’s familiar title names the larger undertaking; The Descent of Peace identifies this particular scene. ^[1]

Milton supplies the descending figure and the winter earth, but Blake must decide how they can occupy a picture together. His solution makes a quiet act of holding carry consequences beyond the stable. The child remains small enough to rest in a mother’s arms, while the spaces around him open towards the heavens and the whole of Nature.

A commission for reading pictures

Joseph Thomas belonged to the circle through which John Flaxman encouraged Blake’s work. In a biographical note, Karl Josef Höltgen describes Thomas as a collector whose enthusiasm extended to Blake’s illustrated books and watercolours. He records Flaxman’s introduction of a Comus commission in 1801, followed by the Paradise Lost subjects of 1807 and the Nativity illustrations of 1809. These were sustained encounters with Milton across several different poems. ^[2]

Tate’s 2019 exhibition guide gives a practical measure of that support: Thomas paid two pounds for each Nativity design, twice the sum Butts paid for an individual biblical watercolour. Six designs here mean six different subjects, each on its own sheet. Blake subsequently made another group for Thomas Butts. The two patrons’ names distinguish related series, rather than six repetitions of this single image. ^[1]

This setting helps explain the pleasure the pictures offer. A reader can turn from a stanza to a drawing, then back to the poem, testing what has been selected and what has been brought together. Blake’s Paradise Lost illustrations offer a more extended version of that exchange. The Nativity ode gives him a shorter text whose movements between tenderness, cosmic harmony and threatened powers are unusually concentrated.

Three connected spaces

The stable has a sharply pointed roof and a broad opening that exposes its interior. Its posts and floor provide a strong boundary around the family. Yet its upper outline almost continues into Peace’s spread wings and arms. The building appears to receive her descent through its very shape. Blake connects the earthly shelter to the arriving body without dissolving either into the other.

Inside, the figures gather towards the infant. Mary’s lowered face and encircling arms keep the encounter intimate; Joseph’s taller, bending body extends the same movement of attention. At the left, two horned animals face the manger. Straw lies along the floor in long, slanting strokes. These details give the shelter an ordinary function even within its extraordinary surroundings. Animals feed here; a mother sits here; a small body needs supporting.

The planks behind them close the space. There is no opening through the rear wall to lead the eye into a distant landscape. Attention returns to the three figures, then moves outward across the frame to the snowy ground and upward towards Peace. The picture’s principal distances are between these connected levels. Blake makes the viewer look from one kind of body to another rather than travel towards a vanishing point.

Peace’s feet stream towards the upper right while her face and one extended arm incline towards the lower left. Her body crosses the upper field diagonally, beneath sweeping concentric curves. The roof rises against that movement. Where the descending figure and the ascending roof meet, their lines give an otherwise still composition a sense of approach. Something is arriving even though the scene inside remains composed and quiet.

Nature stretches in the opposite part of the image, her head at the lower left and her legs extending right. Her long back repeats the horizontal ground; pale covering settles over her lower body. Her joined hands are close to her lowered face. The stable rises behind her like a second enclosure within the wider winter. Across the sheet, standing, sitting, descending and lying down become distinct ways of inhabiting the same moment.

Peace answers Nature’s fear

Milton’s ode begins with four introductory stanzas before The Hymn. They announce the Christian mystery of divine majesty accepting mortal life. The Son leaves the heavenly council and enters a “darksome house of mortal clay”. Blake places an actual shelter around the child, giving the reader a visible enclosure to consider beside Milton’s image of embodied existence. The stable can be approached as an architectural companion to that bodily metaphor, a connection also made in the Huntington’s commentary on Blake’s later version. ^[13][14]

The opening then turns towards the act of making a poem. Milton asks his heavenly Muse for an offering that can greet the infant before the approaching wise men. The song itself becomes a gift brought to the birth. This matters for an illustrator: the poem does more than recount events. It imagines how an artist might answer them, joining a human voice to the angelic choir. ^[13]

The first two stanzas of The Hymn place the child in a manger and make Nature respond to his presence. She removes her splendid clothing, feels shame and asks the air to hide her exposed condition under snow. The beautiful whiteness therefore enters through discomfort. Its innocence is something she seeks as a covering. Blake gives this predicament a body at the foot of the stable, where her lowered posture and the snowy ground make the poem’s personification visible. ^[13]

Peace arrives in answer to that fear. Milton describes her olive crown, dove’s wing and myrtle wand as she slips down through the moving sphere and divides the clouds. His wording joins the cessation of conflict to signs of love. The RPO editors explain the turtle wing as that of a turtle dove and connect the myrtle with love; their notes identify the turning sphere with the concentric heavens of the older cosmological scheme. Blake’s curved bands and descending, winged woman give these poetic images a coherent spatial relationship. ^[13]

The descent has an addressee. Peace comes because Nature is afraid, while the birth within the stable is the occasion for both fear and reassurance. That sequence changes how the lower figure can be seen. Her position beneath the family does not make her a defeated enemy. In the poem she receives an answer to her distress, and the picture keeps the heavenly messenger within the same field as her vulnerable body. The downward movement invites a connection between them. ^[13]

At the same time, Blake allows the response to remain incomplete as an action. Nature’s face stays close to the earth; her hands remain joined. Peace is still descending. The image holds reassurance in the process of arriving. Its tranquillity includes a body that has yet to rise, leaving the viewer attentive to what a promise of peace might change.

Hearing the rest of Milton’s ode

Reading beyond the first appearance of Peace greatly enlarges the picture. Milton next imagines weapons idle, rulers silent and the sea calm. Stars linger in the sky, and the ordinary sun seems ashamed before a greater light. The shepherds, absorbed in their everyday conversation, are interrupted by music beyond human performance. From that rural scene the poem expands towards angelic ranks and the harmony of the spheres. The birth changes the conduct of the whole created order. ^[13]

Sound is central to this enlargement. Voices answer instruments; echoes prolong the heavenly music; the poet calls upon the spheres to join the angelic ensemble. A painting cannot supply that changing music, but Blake’s organisation offers a visible movement between scales. The curves above, the enclosing roof and the extended earth are all held together around the child. Looking between them gives a spatial experience of relationships that Milton unfolds through successive stanzas.

The poem also questions the immediate fulfilment of its own hope. Its speaker imagines sin dissolving, Hell passing away, and Truth, Justice and Mercy returning to humanity. Then the movement is abruptly checked. Infancy must be followed by the Cross, and final judgement still lies ahead. The ode distinguishes redemption beginning from bliss brought to completion. That interruption prevents its universal peace from becoming a simple report that all suffering has already ended. ^[13]

Blake’s held child is particularly moving beside this passage. The infant’s smallness belongs to the present tenderness of the stable, while the reader knows that the poem will look towards sacrifice. The drawing does not need to display the later events to make room for that knowledge. Mary’s support and Joseph’s bending attention give mortal vulnerability a form that can coexist with the heavenly descent.

The later stanzas turn towards powers losing their authority. The old dragon is restricted; Apollo abandons his shrine; local spirits lament; the gods of Egypt depart. These are Milton’s Christian account of displaced divinities, presented through the forceful and sometimes hostile language of his poem. They should be heard as part of that account, with its convictions and polemic. The sequence makes the infant’s apparent helplessness the centre of an immense change in power. ^[13]

The Whitworth series extends beyond this opening scene to the shepherds, Typhon, Apollo and Moloch before returning to The Night of Peace. Tate’s guide lists those subjects together, placing the first image within the poem’s wider transformation. ^[1] Finally, Milton returns to Mary laying the child to rest, the attending star and ordered angels. After the tumult of departing gods, the poem ends again at the stable. Its closing attention to the sleeping infant gives domestic care the final word. ^[13]

Blake reads Milton before the series

Blake had already recommended the Nativity poem to Butts in a letter of 6 July 1803. He was sending a different picture, a Riposo showing the Holy Family in Egypt protected from Egyptian gods. He explicitly said that Milton’s poem had not come into his thoughts until after he had designed it. The similarity was one he recognised afterwards. His invitation to Butts to read the ode establishes a connection while preserving the independence of that earlier conception. ^[15]

The distinction is valuable. The letter shows Blake thinking about the poem’s relation to his biblical imagery several years before the Thomas series. It also shows him resisting a simple account in which every likeness must begin with a direct literary source. In one case he described an affinity discovered after making an image; in the Nativity watercolours, he undertook a defined illustration project. Those are different artistic relationships, even when the Holy Family and the retreat of threatening powers belong to both. ^[15]

The later Descent of Peace

Blake returned to this design in the group associated with Butts. The Huntington dates its Descent of Peace, accession 000.14, to about 1814–1816. Its catalogue explicitly compares that sheet with the earlier Whitworth composition. ^[14] Looking between the two reveals how much can change inside a retained arrangement of descending Peace, stable and recumbent Nature.

In the later image, the child springs upright into a surrounding glow. Mary leans backwards, Joseph bends towards her, and figures at the left reach towards the infant. A small window opens in the back wall. The sheltered centre has become a scene of bodily release and answering gestures. The child no longer rests securely within the closed circle of his mother’s arms.

The Huntington identifies the additional group as the young John the Baptist and his mother, Elisabeth, with the bearded man behind them probably Zacharias. Its commentary also proposes a relation between the springing infant and Blake’s images of revolutionary energy, while cautioning that Christ and Orc are not equivalent figures. That is a reading of the later design, whose expanded company and active child must be kept distinct from the Whitworth scene. ^[14]

Nature now has her head at the right, turned upwards, and Peace’s body has also changed direction. The relation between the upper and lower figures feels more responsive. In the earlier composition, the distance between the descending messenger and Nature’s lowered head remains unresolved. In the later one, an upward turn begins to answer the movement from above. The revision changes the experience of awakening through a few consequential decisions about direction and posture.

Neither image makes the other redundant. The later design concentrates on emergence, recognition and release. The earlier gives unusual weight to receiving and sustaining life: Mary holds, Joseph bends, and Peace approaches a Nature still pressed close to the ground. Their shared structure brings the difference into focus.

A drawing between the versions

A graphite study at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, preserves another state of the composition. The museum dates the recto to about 1815 and identifies it as The Descent of Peace, 1943.3.9009.a. Those details belong to this drawing, separate from either finished watercolour. Its spare lines make the principal positions easier to compare: Peace above the pointed roof, the family within, and Nature lying below with her head towards the right. ^[16]

The Huntington suggests that the study may form a transition between the two watercolours. ^[14] Peace’s trailing body retains the direction seen in the Whitworth design, while the lower figure and the more animated group within the stable anticipate the later arrangement. The proposal remains a reconstruction from the drawings’ relationships, rather than a surviving written account by Blake of their order.

The study is useful because it exposes the composition as a set of decisions. Moving a head, reversing a descending body or changing a mother’s posture can alter the relation between heaven and earth without replacing the picture’s basic architecture. Blake’s return to the subject becomes visible as a rethinking of how its figures answer one another.

Returning to the earlier image, the mother’s encircling arms look especially deliberate. The immense movement announced by Milton remains gathered around a child being held. Blake allows cosmic peace to approach through that small, supported life. For another encounter between the artist and the poet, Blake’s own Milton: A Poem in Two Books takes their relationship into a different imaginative form. Here, the roof, the descending wings and the body on the snow keep attention on the meeting between an extraordinary promise and the vulnerable world receiving it.