"O, CLOUDS UNFOLD!"

This glorious, image-laden stained glass window commemorating William Blake – artist, engraver, printer and poet – is found in St. Mary's Church, Battersea Church Road, Wandsworth, London. 

 

The work of John Hayward of Edenbridge, Kent, this is one of four windows installed in  St. Mary's between 1976 and 1982, each representing a famous person associated with the church. The other subjects are landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner; General Benedict Arnold of the American Revolutionary War; and the celebrated Eighteenth-Century botanist, William Curtis.

 

William Blake was married to Catherine Boucher in the church in 1782. Many will be surprised to learn that the wife of one of our greatest poets was illiterate, and could only make her mark with a cross in the wedding register. The wedding is suggested by a wedding ring between two pencil portraits; on the left is William drawn by Catherine and, on the right, Catherine as drawn by William. 

 

The design of the rest of the window attempts to give expression to the diversity of Blake’s talents as an artist and poet. Among his more insistent themes are those concerned with how we perceive both the greatest and the smallest elements in our world and the idea that all things contain a male and female principle.

 

The verse on the lower right-hand side of the window is the opening four lines of Blake’s poem, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, assumed to have been written in 1803, but not published until 1863:

 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

 

The figure in the roundel is from Blake’s illustration ‘Albion Rose’, etchings of which carried the artist’s inscription: ‘Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves / Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the dance of Eternal Death’. The figure of Albion, is a personification of humanity and of Britain and is depicted freeing himself from the shackles of materialism.

 

At the bottom right is a picture of the Houses of Parliament to mark the connection with the late William Hamling, MP, in whose memory the window was given.

 

 

[Photo: Brian Sibley, May 2011]