Taken out of context, the poetry of William Blake might seem a trifle whimsical. He is probably best remembered, for example, for an unprepossessing rhyme which at first glance might almost be described as "nursery":
Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry.
And few others, even if meteorologically inspired, could imagine chimney sweeps, deceased, as:
Naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind?
Blake, however, could also use the weather to be bleak, and large sections of his verse contrast the innocence of childhood with the corruption and repression of the adult world; of children raised in poverty, he says:
Their sun does never shine, And their fields are bleak and bare, And their ways are filled with thorns: It is eternal winter there.
William Blake lived most of his life in London, where he was born in 1757. Trained as a printer, he afterwards studied art at the Royal Academy, then dominated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, before ultimately eking out a meagre living as an engraver and an illustrator.
Much of his more enduring art-work appeared as illustrations for his own poems, and his artistic style defied the sober 18th-century conventions. In many instances he made skilful use of aspects of weather to achieve his desired effect.
In the line engraving Job, for example, Blake captures to perfection the nuances of a quiet nocturnal sky while, by contrast, in his water-colour The Wise and Foolish Virgins the skies are dark and menacing. The Rainbow over the Flood provides a vigorous representation of a stormy sea, and in a more gentle vein, in an illustration to Hayley's Ballad entitled The Eagle and the Child, altostratus clouds in the familiar lenticular form are used as background to a rocky crag to emphasise the elevation.
Blake's feeling for the weather is most evident, however, in the series of etchings of the four elements air, water, earth and fire that he produced as illustrations for The Gates of Paradise. In Air, for example, a figure borne aloft by the clouds captures to perfection the cold, rarefied and buoyant ambience of an invisible atmosphere. In Water the focus, understandably, is rain and its inherent wetness.
Materially, life was not always kind to William Blake, and his final years were spent in abject poverty. He died in London, 170 years ago today, on August 12th, 1827.