Reading Response 3

William Cole’s “An Unknown Fragment by William Blake: Text, Discovery, and Interpretation” shares his viewpoint on William Blake’s art work and how they have connections, and deeper meanings to his poems. In this article William Cole seems to describe how Blake used specific oil paintings to connect his pictures towards his poems. While reading this article Cole states that the painting “Albian Rose” had very weird, nightmarish objects in the painting. William Cole described the painting “It depicted a naked young male figure standing gracefully on a sketchy landscape, his arms outspread and light emanating from him. Between his shins is an enormous bat-winged moth, and a large millipede (or perhaps the tail of an unseen monster) slithers into the background.” As you can tell from this description of the plate (what Blake’s paintings were called) he used very strange objects when trying to incorporate the poem into the plate without the words. This article helps my blog because my blog is all about how Blake’s poems are shown in his artwork, so without this article I would have been kind of lost because it helps explain some of the artwork. But what I don’t understand is why would Blake want to incorporate his poems into his plates? William Cole states in another section of the article “I considered it wildly unlikely that Blake had used this print as a piece of scrap paper –he had doubtless intended to imply some sort of relationship between image and text, perhaps trying to make us see the figure in the print as a representation of the risen Christ. But there didn’t seem to be all that much to it.” I believe that Cole was trying to make a point that Blake is trying to make a connection to us that his painting and poems together mean a connection of Christ, but how does that make sense? William Blake I think connected his plates and poems because he wants us to see a visual understanding of the poem itself.

What I believe is that Blake wanted to incorporate certain poems with plates because he wanted us to understand the deeper meaning of the poems, but why would he make it so hard to interpretate the plates? In the article I think that William Cole made a great point when he said that the plates were uncolored, and they had some sort of mysterious vibe to them. While I was reading some of Blake’s poems and looking at the paintings of that poem, I could see what he was trying to do. When you take the time to interpretate the poem and then do the same for the painting and look at the resemblance you can see a connection. In the poem “Cradle Song” William Blake painted a picture of a mom rocking a cradle. That poem to me is describing how kids have nightmares and how when they wake up from the nightmare they feel a lot safer because they are no longer in the dark. In The painting of the poem “Cradle Song” I Believe that he incorporated the mother figure because he wanted to show that parents are always there for us and that no matter what us as kids are always safe. So when you actually take the time and dig deeper into certain things, you’ll understand that person’s concept. So honestly I think that William Coles article helped me with my blog and that without it, I wouldn’t have known how to interpretate William Blake’s artwork. So with that try reading some of Blake’s poems and look at some of his artwork and compare the two. After that, tell me how everything worked out. How I analyzed the article was that once I read everything through once, I went through the article again and I really broke down every part and understood what Cole was trying to say. William Cole decided to incorporate two paintings into the article and then I looked up the poems and then looked at the paintings and I figured out what the poems meant. I think that when I compare Cole’s article to my blogs interpretations that they are somewhat similar because I took in consideration what he did and I used that as my resources as well, and that resource was my own creativity and what I thought personally about how the plate and poem were connected.