When the Morning Stars Sang Together

Four winged figures rise against a deep blue sky, their arms lifted and their mouths open in song. Beneath them, an old man spreads his arms across almost the whole width of the picture. Lower still, five people kneel or crouch within a dark enclosure, looking upwards. William Blake’s When the Morning Stars Sang Together makes a cosmic revelation depend on these differences between bodies: the singers stretch, the divine figure opens his hands, and the human witnesses gather themselves tightly together. ^[1]

The watercolour belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, accession 2001.76. Drawn in pen and black ink with watercolour over graphite on paper, it measures 280 × 179 mm. The Morgan’s drawing catalogue dates it to about 1805–1810; its Drawings Labels gives about 1804–1807. It is number fourteen in the first set of Job illustrations made for Thomas Butts. Within a sheet roughly eleven inches high, Blake brings the beginning of the world before a suffering man. ^{[1] [2]}

The song inside God’s question

The title comes from the divine address in Job 38. God answers Job from the whirlwind and asks where he was when the earth’s foundations were laid. Questions about its measurements, supporting foundations and cornerstone lead directly into the singing of the morning stars and the joyful shouting of the sons of God. The song belongs to a creation that preceded Job’s life. It is part of a question addressed to someone who could never have witnessed that beginning. ^[14]

Blake gives that inaccessible moment a visible present. The singers occupy the upper sky, while Job remains below with his wife and three friends. He is being shown something that the biblical speech recalls. The Morgan describes the scene as God reenacting creation, a useful way of understanding the picture’s strange meeting of times: the ancient beginning appears before people gathered during Job’s ordeal. ^{[1] [14]}

The surrounding chapters make this encounter more demanding than a pleasant celestial concert. Job has wanted the Almighty to answer him. The answer opens into questions about light, darkness, weather, stars and living creatures, continuing through the tremendous descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan. Blake selects a passage of rejoicing from that larger address, allowing its joy to fill the space above people whose suffering has not simply disappeared. ^[14]

The wording also leaves room for Blake’s invention. Job 38 speaks of stars singing and sons of God shouting; it does not describe four winged youths in a row. Blake puts both music and celestial life into human form. Small white stars remain scattered around the singers, so that stars as points of light and stars imagined as living beings share the same blue field. The picture can hold both at once. ^{[1] [14]}

Four bodies make a chorus

The four figures have an extraordinary vertical reach. Their feet rest on the pale cloud above the divine figure’s shoulders, but their wings continue beyond the upper edge. Raised forearms cross the long feathers, and open palms spread near the top of the sheet. The repeated movement gives the chorus its unity, while small differences in their faces and hair keep the figures from becoming identical signs. ^[1]

Their song has no pictured instrument. It seems to pass through the whole body: open mouth, lifted chest, extended arms and feet poised on cloud. The pale figures stand out sharply against the blue, with thin lines articulating ribs, knees and feathers. Long folds sweep down between their legs and turn out beside their ankles. These lines carry the upward movement through bodies that might otherwise look rigidly aligned. ^[1]

There is a rhythm to the spaces between them as well. Triangles of blue separate the legs and wings; white stars interrupt the darkness at different heights. The row therefore has intervals as well as repeated figures, something like the spacing that allows separate voices to be heard within a chorus. This is a visual analogy, but it grows from the picture’s precise arrangement of bodies and gaps. ^[1]

Their youth contrasts with the great beard immediately below. The heavenly gathering contains distinct kinds of presence: these light, elongated singers and the seated figure whose drapery descends in heavy folds. Both belong above the cloud that encloses the mortals. Their differences make the upper world feel inhabited through recognisable variations of age, movement and expression. ^[1]

The outstretched arms and the two lights

The central figure’s hands face upwards. His arms reach across the picture, following the broad cloud on either side, while his raised knee and descending robe anchor him at the centre. The gesture gives the scene breadth to balance the singers’ height. Looking from his face along either arm brings us towards the two smaller figures emerging below. ^[1]

On the left, a golden-haired youth stretches forward above a team of horses. Yellow light streams behind his head and shoulders, and the horses’ pale faces press towards the edge. Across the picture, a winged figure bends out into darkness beneath a crescent moon. Coiling, scaled serpents occupy the space below. Their orange bodies and blue heads make an especially vivid contrast with the pale divine robe. ^[1]

These are the sun and moon given bodies and vehicles. Penelope Minney identifies the pair as Helios and Selene in her study of the Job illustrations; Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue reports the same names through Bo Lindberg’s interpretation of the engraved version. Both writers use classical names to explain the chariots, horses and serpents that Blake introduces into the biblical scene. ^{[15] [16]}

The colour makes their difference immediate. One side carries yellow rays and forward-driving horses; the other gathers a dark wing, a slender crescent and densely patterned coils. The central arms encompass both. Day and night can be seen together here, their customary alternation suspended within a single act of showing. The dark side is as carefully inhabited as the bright one. ^[1]

Minney reads the divine figure as Christ revealing creation. She also argues that his outstretched arms establish a contrast between the freedom of the angels above and the cramped existence of the people below. Her interpretation gives the gesture several related tasks: it releases the heavenly lights, connects opposed regions and opens a revelation to the human group. It is a Christian reading of Blake’s Old Testament subject, grounded in her wider argument about the sequence. ^[15]

The people under the cloud

Job’s wife kneels at the lower left, her palms together before her chest. Job occupies the centre, his long beard raised towards the light. One forearm crosses his body, while the other hand rises beside his face. On the right, the friends crowd together at different depths; the nearest man turns his bearded profile upwards, while another face appears over his shoulder. Five people share the space, but their hands and heads give each a separate response. ^[1]

Their enclosure is made from the same cloud forms that support the figures above. Its pale rim curls down the sides of the lower scene and almost touches Job’s head. A narrow green strip runs beneath the kneeling bodies. There is little room to stand, and their robes gather into the corners. The contrast with the long, open bodies of the singers can be felt before it is explained. ^[1]

Yet the boundary does not prevent attention from passing through it. Every human face turns into the revelation. The wife’s upright prayer, Job’s lifted gaze and the friends’ more crowded postures make a sequence of responses below the vast horizontal arms. Blake gives the lower figures enough individuality to keep cosmic scale connected to a particular human encounter. We can follow what happens to a hand or a face even when the scene concerns the making of the world. ^[1]

Minney compares the confined lower space to Plato’s cave. The comparison describes the pressure of the enclosure and the difference between mortal restriction and the freedom of the vision. The drawing already gives the relationship a tangible form: the witnesses have scarcely enough room for their bodies, while the creation shown to them opens above their heads. ^[15]

The presence of Job’s wife also matters. The divine speech in Job 38 addresses Job, yet Blake makes the encounter shared. She kneels beside him through the revelation, with a clear place of her own at the front of the group. The picture’s human world extends beyond the man named in its source: his experience has a companion and witnesses. ^{[1] [14]}

From hearing to seeing

Job’s answer in chapter 42 distinguishes what he had heard from what his eye now sees. Blake develops that change across several illustrations rather than compressing it into one decisive instant. Here the act of seeing is still full of physical effort. Heads tilt, hands rise, bodies remain close to the ground, and the great figure above mediates between the people and the chorus. ^{[14] [15]}

Sound remains central to this act of seeing. Before God speaks, Elihu describes thunder as a voice and asks Job to attend to the wonders of God’s work. Chapter 38 then places music at the earth’s foundations. Blake draws an experience in which looking and listening belong together: the viewer sees open mouths, raised arms and rejoicing bodies, while the title supplies the sound those bodies make. ^[14]

The song is also a different use of the open mouth from the arguments that precede the divine address. The celestial figures praise together; the human witnesses attend. Their relationship offers a temporary release from the demand that every voice defeat another. Attention passes from accusation towards a shared vision, while the book’s difficult argument about suffering remains larger than this moment of rejoicing. ^{[1] [14]}

The later engraving gives creation a border

Blake returned to the composition in the fourteenth engraving of Illustrations of the Book of Job. The Yale Center for British Art’s impression, B1978.43.1516, is a separate object, dated 1826 in its official digital record. Tate’s impression, A00025, is catalogued as 1825, reprinted 1874. These dates describe the prints and their histories; the Morgan watercolour belongs to the earlier Butts set. The broader development is explored in the complete Book of Job series. ^{[16] [17]}

The engraved chorus has additional arms entering at the upper sides, with their owners beyond the picture’s edge. Butlin notes this change from the preceding watercolours and reads it as suggesting an endless company of angels. It gives the four visible singers a surrounding multitude. The comparison also changes the experience of light: closely spaced dark lines establish the sky, while the bodies, stars and halo emerge through paler areas of the paper. ^{[16] [17]}

Butlin traces the frieze of raised, crossing arms through Blake’s earlier illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts and his two versions of Milton’s Nativity Ode. He proposes an older source in a relief from Persepolis engraved in Basire’s workshop during Blake’s apprenticeship. Butlin’s proposed genealogy follows a repeated gesture that gives Blake a way to make separate figures act together. ^[16]

Around the main picture, six small compartments introduce the days of creation from Genesis. Light, the firmament and the separation of dry land from water descend on the left. The two great lights, birds and aquatic creatures, and land animals occupy the right. Short inscriptions accompany them. Their place outside the central frame allows the eye to move between the concentrated vision and a sequence of distinct acts of making. These compartments belong to the engraving, not to the Morgan drawing. ^{[16] [17]}

Genesis gives the heavenly lights a particular task: dividing day from night and marking seasons, days and years. The printed compartment with its labelled sun and moon places that scriptural account beside Blake’s chariot figures. At the top of the engraving, a question from Job 38:31 asks about binding the Pleiades and loosening Orion. The border brings together the ordered succession of Genesis and the searching questions of Job. ^{[14] [16]}

Its movement continues at the bottom, where an enormous scaled body curves beneath the principal inscription. Neither head nor tail appears within the sheet. Minney identifies it as a sea-serpent too vast to be shown whole. The border thus carries another change of scale: tiny creation scenes surround the human witnesses, while a creature’s partial body stretches beneath their world. The neighbouring Behemoth and Leviathan develops the encounter with immense creatures as its central subject. ^{[15] [17]}

Returning to the watercolour removes this surrounding sequence of words and small pictures. Blue sky, yellow rays, orange scales and pale clouds resume their full force. Its narrow sheet holds an expansive gesture, four rising voices and five attentive human faces. The distance between those groups remains visible, yet so does their connection: the singers’ feet rest just above the opened arms, and the light reaches the people gathered below. ^[1]