William Blake’s environmental poetics & vision of natural paradise in an industrialising world

“Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face 
Terror the Human Form Divine 
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.”

In every era of existence, there comes a time when the truth of human perception needs to be blurted out over the noise of overrationality, because only that is the solution to a global problem. The simple fact may be around for everyone to see but jargon and the thick layers of the developing discourse have obfuscated it for anyone to pinpoint. In such an atmosphere, only those individuals — who are still in touch with their inner child and have not been entirely moulded by the conditions of society — whose sharp senses can pierce through the fog of bureaucratic arguments, can dare to speak the truth as it is. They may be misunderstood or dismissed by contemporaries, but when the storm has settled, their words ring loud in the collective memory of humanity. Poet William Blake was this person in 18th-19th century Britain that was in a tearing hurry to industrialise, with little time to notice how the changes were affecting Earth and its people, and a recent performance of his poems in Delhi was a timely reminder that his warnings about swift urbanisation and unsustainable development still hold water. In the most simple and effective words he told us, once again two centuries later, that we need to stop this uncalculated, mindless consumption and find balance and fairness in the way we lead our lives. 

Simplicity was also the strength of the performance titled ‘A Golden String’, where the incredible vocal artist Susheela Raman blended music with Blake’s words to present a powerful and memorable understanding of his works. Accompanied by Sam Mills on the guitar, Raman’s compositions blended with the mystic philosopher’s literary cast to acquire hypnotic qualities. Poet and musician Jeet Thayil and author William Dalrymple recited works by poets who influenced Blake or were inspired by him. 

Raman’s renditions of some of Blake’s seminal works such as The Tyger, The Sick Rose, Jerusalem, London, A Memorable Fancy aptly depicted his concerns about mechanisation, the exploitation of nature and the loss of spiritual connection with Earth.

Blake lived his entire life during the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, witnessing dramatic changes to the urban and rural landscapes of Britain. His experiences in London — a city he described as filled with “marks of weakness, marks of woe” — shaped his deep ambivalence about urbanisation and industrial progress.

Not only did he see ecological destruction, air and rivers choking with pollutants, blights in fields and sudden illnesses afflicting people around him, he also witnessed the sooty faces of poor children forced into labour, corruption and fellow human beings exploiting each other.

In London, from Songs of Experience (1794), Blake wrote:

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.”

The repetition of “charter’d” — a word connoting ownership and commodification — applied both to the streets and the river, highlighting how public spaces and even natural bodies like the Thames were being brought under commercial control. As Kevin Hutchings, professor of English and research chair at the University of Northern British Columbia, observed in Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics, Blake used such language to critique “the subjugation of both human and environmental subjects to the logic of commercial profit”.

The smoke billowing from the mills and chimneys and the erosion of the social and moral fabric that came with industrialisation triggered Blake’s cynicism about the future of humanity. As he witnessed the skies turning dark with pollution and the poor being exploited by the greedy and power-hungry lots, he began picturing London as hell. 

By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”

Blake’s environmentalism was not rooted in science or policy but in a theological and imaginative worldview. He believed that all of nature was a manifestation of the divine. “Every thing that lives is holy,” Blake declared in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This was not poetic flourish — it reflected a cosmology in which nature, spirit and imagination were inseparably entwined.

He claimed to have seen visions of angels in trees as a child — an encounter that marked the beginning of a lifetime of spiritual experiences through natural forms. Such visions revealed to him the sacredness of the natural world, a view that stood in direct opposition to the mechanical worldview emerging in Enlightenment Britain.

A key element of Blake’s ecological vision is his use of anthropomorphism — attributing human traits to non-human beings. This device, far from being mere metaphor, expressed his belief that nature was alive, conscious and capable of moral and spiritual engagement.

In poems such as The Tyger and The Fly, Blake gives animals subjectivity and agency. In The Fly, he wrote:

“Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?”

Here, Blake dissolves the boundary between human and insect, inviting empathy and identification across species. As Hutchings argued, this “anthropomorphic sensibility” signals Blake’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, which sought to objectify and dominate nature. Instead, Blake sought a “relational ecology” — one in which all beings shared a divine essence and moral worth.

In Auguries of Innocence, Blake assigns emotional and spiritual attributes to non-human beings:

“A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.”

This line portrays the suffering of a bird as cosmically significant, making clear that the confinement of even a small creature disturbs the moral fabric of the universe. Hutchings notes that Blake’s frequent use of anthropomorphism “is not merely a literary device, but a declaration of his ecological vision” — a vision in which nature is not inert but emotionally and spiritually expressive.

This approach aligns with modern ecocritical thought, which challenges the anthropocentric divide between human and non-human, subject and object. Blake’s anthropomorphism resists objectification and opens space for ethical regard.

While Blake mourned the physical destruction caused by industrialisation, his deeper critique was philosophical. He viewed Enlightenment science and industrial capitalism as promoting a mechanical view of nature that stripped it of spirit. In Jerusalem, he writes:

“The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; and when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel…”

Angela Heagy, faculty member at Southern New Hampshire University, noted that Blake “resisted Enlightenment narratives that regarded nature as a passive object to be analysed and consumed”. For him, the problem was not technology per se, but the mindset that turned nature into a lifeless resource. 

This critique is memorably captured in Jerusalem, where Blake imagines a pastoral England marred by “dark Satanic Mills”. While the mills have long been interpreted symbolically, Hutchings clarifies that Blake was directly engaging with the destruction of rural life caused by industry.
But this obsession with ‘human nature’ brought him criticism that he wasn’t truly a nature’s poet like his Romantic contemporaries. Specifically, his critique of William Wordsworth, with whom he shared a relationship of mutual admiration, turned him into an ‘adversary of nature’ in the eyes of critics. 

The two, standing in the same London, simply focused on different aspects — where Wordsworth saw ethereal beauty and ‘smokeless air’, Blake saw the mosaic of green fields being swallowed by grey concrete of factories. Blake’s intimate view of nature clashed with Wordsworth’s distant appreciation of nature as an external object. “Blake was in all likelihood offended by the passivity implicit in Wordsworth’s depiction of human-nature relations,” Hutchings wrote. 

Blake’s three-year residence in Felpham, West Sussex (1800-1803), was transformative. Removed from the chaos of London, he found spiritual renewal in rural life. As Hutchings observed, this period marked a shift in Blake’s work — from the polemic to the pastoral, and from the apocalyptic to the ecological.

He gardened, observed the changing skies and described in his letters a deeper communion with the natural world: “In the morning I see my Saviour by the Light of the Sun” (Blake, Letters, 1800). The Finding Blake project noted that these years allowed Blake to envision a society founded not on exploitation, but on ecological and spiritual harmony.

Blake’s concern for children — particularly those subjected to industrial labour — paralleled his concern for nature. In The Chimney Sweeper, he highlights the violence of both social and environmental systems:

“They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.”

The image of a child blackened by soot reflected both the human cost of industrialism and the spiritual pollution of society. Just as children were being commodified, so too was nature. For Blake, both required protection and reverence.

He also wrote against organised religion, equating the Church with the oppressive State that benefitted from the torture and unfair treatment of children. The Church, he believed, played the role of convincing poor families that it is their spiritual duty to provide their labour for the growth of the nation. From The Chimney Sweeper:

“And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery."

In Garden of Love, he voiced his disdain for institutionalised religion more plainly, painting chapels in the same brush as concrete factories.

“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.”

In Blake’s universe, nature becomes a form of resistance to oppressive systems. His poetry often celebrates the overlooked and the fragile, such as in Auguries of Innocence:

“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.”

Blake’s sacred minimalism challenges modernity’s scale and speed. Nature, in its smallest details, contains cosmic significance. This view dismantles the hierarchy of beings and affirms the dignity of all life.

William Blake was not an environmentalist in the conventional sense. He proposed no conservation laws, led no protests. But his poetry remains one of the most radical environmental visions in English literature. He called on humanity to see nature not as object, but as subject; not as resource, but as kin.

His anthropomorphism, mystical vision and resistance to industrial modernity anticipated many of today’s ecological philosophies. In a world grappling with climate collapse and ecological grief, Blake’s voice offers a sacred atmosphere — one in which “every thing that lives is holy,” and every robin’s suffering matters.