Talk:William Blake's illustrations of On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

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A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 26, 2008.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that William Blake sought in his illustrations of Milton's Nativity Ode (example pictured) to depict the rebirth of John Milton's poetry into the creative imagination of Christ?

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Notes

From Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry:

p. 204 "The pathetic fallacy is pathetic because it is a fallacy. But when we are dealing with themes of resurrection and apocalypse, in which man is seen rising into a spiritual world completely subject to his imaginative power, a ritual symbolism, like that of the Nativity Ode, in which halcyon days accompany the birth of Christ... is appropriate."

p. 262 A slight echo of the Nativity Ode underlines the reference to Jesus at the beginning of Europe, and in Enitharmon's roll-call of her thirteen children with their strange names there is both imitation and parody of Milton's catalogue of defeated gods."

Lincoln, Andrew. "From America to The Four Zoas" in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

p. 212 "Under the influence of Los, Orc's messianic energy is simultaneously elevated and bound. We might take as an example of such bardic activity Milton's ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which has often been cited as a model for Blake's poem. The captivating music and enchanting aerial atmosophere of Milton's ode seem to dematerialize the incarnation it celebrates; in Blake's terms, it represses as it idealizes."

From Bentley Jr The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake

p. 24 "The Apollo Belvedere is apparently the model for ... Apollo in "The Overthrow of Apollo" (c. 1815) for Milton's "Nativity Ode"

p. 195 designs made for Butts (6 designs, 1815?)

p. 222 Made for Thomas Six (1809)

p. 288 "painted at least thirty-three more pictures for Butts" between 1811 and 1820, including the Nativity

p. 357 "These Milton illustrations were a kind of work which Blake could not resist. He called on the famous bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin to talk about them, and Dibdin recalled..."

p. 461 1809 - "John Milton, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 4o, Rev Joseph Thomas set, 6 watercolours (Whitworth Art Gallery) (Pl. 68), repeated in c. 1815

I hope this helps. I'll post more when I find it. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:51, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Notes 2

More:

From Warner, Nicholas. "The Iconic Mode of William Blake". Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (1982): 219-234

pp. 223-234: "Throughout Blake's work the fleur-de-lis has a negative iconographic function, as in "The Flight of Molock," one of Blake's illustrations to Milton's "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (see plate 3). Here the fleur-de-list crowns the scepter of the Satanic, child-devouring monster. If ew return for a moment to "Christ the Mediator" and place it side by side with "Moloch," the effect of a fleur-de-list scepter in the nads of God becomes even more striking than before, as it disrupts the established mental sets with which we regard the depiction of God in art and the traditionally positive emblem of the fleur-de-list."

Ottava Rima (talk) 18:16, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]