The man with the child in his eyes
Visionary poet and artist William Blake’s little engraving, smaller than a playing card, is an early fantasy of lunar travel. The tiny figure who announces their desire to get to the moon with a child’s cry, “I want! I want!”, has a similarly child-like solution when it comes to transport: a really big ladder.
Simple mind
TS Eliot commended the “extraordinary labour of simplification” Blake used to “exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul”. This work, one of 18 engravings in For Children: The Gates Of Paradise, is strikingly simple, with its pared-down figures and crescent moon.
Brave new world
Its message, though, is ambivalent. Is this would-be astronaut a metaphor for the poet’s solitary road? He has the imagination to strike out alone from the Earth, leaving the frightened, clinging couple behind. Is his innocence – the highest value for Blake – the key to a new world?
Ask for the moon
Or is this a satire, where ambition will be undone by possibility? Its historical context suggests so. Like his Romantic peers, Blake had supported the French Revolution. In the 1790s, however, the utopian dream had been reduced to a violent hell.
Part of Towards Night, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, to 22 Jan
