William Blake

Felpham

 

Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there, Blake wrote when he left London, and Heaven he seems to have found it. He would address his letters from "Felpham Cottage, of cottages the prettiest;" he declared that no other house could please him so well, nor could he be persuaded that it could be improved in beauty or use, and all about him in this hamlet by the sea he felt the vision of the unseen world in which he Lived.

 

William Blake's cottage at Felpham

 

To him the ladder of angels descended from the Turret, winding through the village and ending at his cot. Here he saw fairies in the grass, majestic forms in shadows, God in everything:

 

I stood in the stream Of Heaven's bright beam, And saw Felpham sweet Beneath my bright feet.

On all sides here, he said, Heaven opened her golden gates, voices of celestials were more distinctly heard and their forms more distinctly seen, and his cottage was a shadow of their heavenly houses. He wrote to his best friend Flaxman that he ardently desired to entertain him beneath his thatched roof of rusted gold. And yet he had his trials here.

There was the trouble with the drunken soldier who would not leave his garden and was pushed out (perhaps through these very gateposts). The man invented a ridiculous charge of sedition and declared that Blake had sworn at him and spoken treason, but Blake was acquitted at Chichester. And there were troubles deeper still, for Blake, while in this Sussex heaven, would feel himself at times in anywhere but Paradise, and he wrote that nothing but Hayley's goodwill had kept him safe through spiritual terrors not known to men on earth.

Yet his three years at Felpham must be counted to him for happiness and for many of those earthly and heavenly adventures that were all in all to him.

 

 

 

 

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