The Sun at his Eastern Gate

A young man steps forward with his arms spread wide. Flames rise behind his shoulders, and smaller figures stream around him, reaching, bearing objects and turning towards the light. Far below, a plough crosses a field and people begin their country occupations. William Blake gives dawn a body large enough to fill almost the whole sheet, while leaving room for the everyday world at its feet.

The Sun at His Eastern Gate is the third of Blake’s six illustrations to John Milton’s L’Allegro. It belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, where the current collection record describes it as watercolour over graphite on paper and gives its dimensions as 161 × 122 millimetres. This immense-looking apparition occupies a drawing only a little over sixteen centimetres high. ^[1]

Blake made the group, together with six designs for Milton’s companion poem Il Penseroso, for his patron Thomas Butts around 1816–20. Each picture has an accompanying manuscript in which Blake copied the relevant poetry and explained his design. Reading the words beside the image reveals how carefully he moves between Milton’s language, his own inventions and the small acts of human life. ^[2]

Milton’s morning

The passage Blake selected begins with a walk beside hedgerow elms. The walker faces east as the sun commences its splendid appearance, dressed in flame and amber light, with clouds arrayed like a great household’s servants. Nearby, the ploughman whistles, the milkmaid sings and the mower sharpens his blade. The passage ends with a shepherd beneath a hawthorn. Blake transcribed these twelve lines, corresponding to lines 57–68 of L’Allegro, above his explanation. ^[13][14]

Milton has already prepared the reader for this personified morning. The poem first dismisses a frightening Melancholy and calls for Mirth, accompanied by laughter, dancing and liberty. When the rural day begins, birds and human sounds help bring it into being: the lark sings, the cock scatters darkness and the hunting horn wakes the morning. Sunrise belongs to an experience of hearing as well as seeing. The cheerful life imagined by the speaker unfolds through encounters with a world already stirring around him. ^[13]

In the selected passage, the sun’s appearance and the workers’ activities share one extended movement of verse. The sky has grandeur, but the field has music and purposeful action. Blake preserves that connection while radically changing its proportions. A reader moving through the poem encounters one pleasure after another; a viewer of the picture receives the huge radiant figure immediately and must then look down to discover the smaller lives beneath it.

The rest of L’Allegro matters to this moment. After the sunrise come wider prospects, country meals, communal dancing, evening stories, the city, the theatre and music capable of releasing the soul from care. Rural morning is an early possibility within the speaker’s desired life, rather than the poem’s entire subject. The closing appeal to Mirth makes that life conditional upon the delights she can offer. Blake’s picture concentrates one episode in this larger search for a way of living. ^[13]

A sun with open arms

The central figure faces outward, with his chest open and his legs close together. One foot reaches slightly below the other, giving the standing pose a sense of arrival. His face remains composed while the shapes surrounding it twist and flare. The contrast lets the viewer register two kinds of movement at once: the youth’s measured emergence and the turbulent circulation of light around him.

His arms do not form a perfectly level cross. The arm on the viewer’s right rises towards a cluster of attendants, while the other extends towards the long diagonal staff. That sloping object connects the figure to the left edge and draws the eye across the surrounding figures. Its shape and placement give him something of a ruler’s bearing, a visual response to the ceremonial language Milton uses for the sun’s entrance. The staff can be understood as part of that majesty without assigning the figure a further identity absent from Blake’s description.

A bright disk sits behind the head. Pointed locks or rays spread around the hair, and the larger flames run down either side of the torso before gathering near the feet. Red passages curl against yellow; darker bands give the surrounding light substance and depth. The nude body is exposed to the viewer, yet enclosed by a flame-shaped covering. Blake has made the poem’s fiery clothing into an environment that the figure seems able to open or pass through.

In his commentary Blake identifies the central presence directly as the great sun clothed in flames. He describes the surrounding clouds as being in their liveries and carrying out different offices at the eastern gate. The apparently decorative company therefore has a stated role: these are the clouds imagined as attending figures. Blake calls these activities “their various Offices”, developing Milton’s comparison until the sky resembles a populous court. ^[14]

The attendants reward a slower circuit around the image. At the upper left, several pale bodies stretch diagonally towards the centre, their arms lifting small rounded objects. Other figures gather near the upper right; farther down, faces and hands emerge between the sweeping bands of colour. Some carry things, some reach, and some seem to travel along the curving boundary itself. Their varied actions make Blake’s reference to different offices visible without supplying a fixed name for every person.

The large enclosure is almost circular around the upper body, then narrows below. Its luminous edge fills the centre of the sheet, while trees and the thin landscape continue outside it. The eastern gate is thus experienced as an opening in light and figure. Looking for a conventional doorway would miss the way Blake has organised the entrance: the threshold takes its shape from flame, cloud and the sun’s extended body.

The arrangement also gives the small attendants an unexpected importance. They make the central figure look colossal, but they prevent the radiance from becoming an empty halo. Even the sky contains particular people doing particular things. The movement from the centre towards the edges repeatedly turns splendour into activity.

The people beneath the vision

Blake’s explanation directs attention downwards after describing the sun. He identifies small figures of Milton walking beside the elms, the ploughman, the milkmaid, the mower sharpening his scythe, and a shepherd with his lass beneath the hawthorn. These identifications come from the artist’s accompanying text. At the picture’s small scale, the occupations would be much harder to assign confidently from the marks alone. ^[14]

Along the bottom edge, the plough and its team occupy a strip of yellow field. Nearby people are reduced to fine upright strokes, while the tree at either side helps establish a recognisable country setting. The scale change is sudden. The sun’s foot is large enough to dominate the ground directly beneath it, while the people continue through their separate movements across the horizon of the field.

Blake has not enlarged every element to match his central figure. The unequal proportions allow the picture to hold a celestial apparition and a rural morning together. Neither scene needs to disappear for the other to be seen. The little plough remains a working object, and the trees remain places beside which someone can walk or sit, even while the sky becomes a human assembly.

Milton’s presence is one of Blake’s interpretive decisions. The poem gives us a speaker imagining the pleasures he would enjoy with Mirth; it does not stop to label that walker with the author’s name. Blake explicitly calls him Milton. The writer of the words becomes a participant within the landscape those words describe. We can consequently read the tiny walker as a poet encountering a world made visible by his own language, while recognising that this identification belongs to the illustrator. ^[13][14]

The shepherd and his companion offer an even more particular example. Milton’s line says that every shepherd tells his tale. In his notes to the poem, the editor Samuel Thurber interprets this as counting a flock, drawing on the older meanings of telling and tale as enumeration. Blake’s explanation instead specifies a shepherd and his lass. His picture turns the ending of the passage towards a meeting between two people. Thurber hears a working shepherd counting sheep; Blake shows a relationship as well as an occupation. The difference makes the illustrator’s contribution particularly clear. ^[13][14]

That couple brings another kind of attention into a picture full of public display. The sun stands frontally, surrounded by servants in motion, while the small pair share a place under a tree. The grand entrance above and the close human association below belong to one morning. Blake preserves room for private companionship within a composition that initially seems to announce only overwhelming power.

The rural figures also restore something of the poem’s sound. A painted mouth cannot make the ploughman’s whistle or the milkmaid’s song audible, but the occupations identified in Blake’s text recall those sounds for a reader. The mower’s tool adds another imagined noise: the edge being prepared for work. Returning to the picture after reading the lines changes the quiet strip of landscape into a place with voices, labour and movement.

Light made with watercolour

The present collection record identifies a drawing in watercolour over graphite. Looking closely, one can see how much Blake asks painted colour and drawn contour to do together. Thin boundaries keep the limbs and faces legible inside the moving washes. The central torso is modelled with subdued grey tones, while brighter yellow and red move around it. The body appears illuminated partly because its more restrained colour is surrounded by heat. ^[1]

The most concentrated light does not dissolve all the edges. Fingers, profiles and the long staff remain distinct, and the flames have dark borders that can be followed through the composition. This is a useful picture through which to reconsider the assumption that radiance must make forms vague. Blake builds brilliance out of differences between adjoining shapes, allowing the eye to move from a definite face to an almost flowing band of colour.

Joseph Viscomi singles out The Sun at His Eastern Gate in his discussion of Blake’s later career as a graphic artist. Comparing the painterly finish of late illuminated books with earlier copies, he uses this watercolour as an example of Blake’s skill in the medium at the time. His comparison joins the maker of individual drawings to the artist who finished printed pages with colour. It gives this little sheet a place in a larger history of increasingly elaborate painted surfaces. ^[15]

The comparison is especially helpful when looking at the cloud figures. Their faces remain individual even where several heads press closely together; red accents, yellow ground and grey modelling operate within a very crowded space. Blake can give a large body visual weight and still reserve attention for a much smaller hand or profile. The picture’s visionary amplitude depends upon that sustained work at an intimate scale.

A different experience of daylight

The companion poem Il Penseroso imagines another relationship to the same world. Its speaker welcomes contemplative Melancholy, seeks the nightingale and the wandering moon, and eventually asks for shelter when the sun begins to cast its fierce beams. Groves and shade offer protection from the exposed brightness of day. In L’Allegro, by contrast, the sunrise stands among the pleasures that the speaker hopes to enjoy. The paired poems make the experience of light depend upon the person encountering it. ^[13]

Even their walking phrases differ. The cheerful speaker moves through the countryside available to others’ sight; the contemplative speaker walks unseen. Blake’s small, visible Milton below the great sun answers the former condition. The poet occupies an inhabited landscape, among people whose work and companionship continue around him. His walk belongs to the morning’s shared life. ^[13][14]

The distinction need not become a simple judgement that daylight is good and darkness bad. The full companion poem makes thought, poetry, music and eventual insight available through its quieter pleasures. Here, the great open body and the moving company of clouds give one particular form to the cheerfulness of L’Allegro. The design gains precision when placed beside that alternative, without requiring the other poem to be treated as a defeated opponent. ^[13]

These lyric illustrations form a separate undertaking from Blake’s Paradise Lost watercolours. The action comes from a short passage about a morning walk, enlarged to an almost epic visual scale. Its drama grows from the relation between a personified sun and the small country world below. Holding onto that literary setting keeps the splendour close to the ordinary pleasures that called it forth.

The drawing and its accompanying words

The twelve lyric watercolours are now together at the Morgan. The museum records that the two groups were separated in 1903 and reunited through their acquisition in 1949, the first purchase of its newly formed Association of Fellows. Their present unity lets the viewer place this exuberant morning beside the other ways of seeing and imagining developed across the two poems. ^[2]

The separate explanatory sheet is an equally useful companion. Catalogued as III, 45q, it contains twenty written lines: twelve of Milton’s verse followed by Blake’s account of his own design. The distinction is visible in the change of task. First the artist preserves the language that prompted the picture; then he tells us which figures he has made and how they occupy its space. His commentary gives the viewer a route from the dazzling centre to the small pastoral figures below. ^[14]

Following that route brings the picture into focus. The great sun commands the first glance; the cloud attendants turn radiance into service and movement; the little people return attention to walking, working and being together. The difference in their sizes makes the shared space surprising. A morning that might have passed unnoticed becomes an encounter between bodily magnificence and the activities through which a day is lived.