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William Blake's Nature And The Vegetable Glass Of Nature

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The noun “nature” and the adjective “natural” is very often used pejoratively in Blake’s texts, it stands for something negative, as in the passage from A Vision of the Last Judgement “This World (of Imagination) is Infinite & Eternal whereas the world of Generation or Vegetation is Finite & Temporal. There exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature” (2; K 605). This is because Blake’s usage of the word is in fact very often ironic and quite contrary to the way the words “nature” and “natural” are used conventionally, in everyday speech, and to the way they are defined in dictionaries - “All the animals, plants, rocks, etc. in the world and all the features, forces, and processes that happen or exist independently of people”, “as found in nature and not involving anything made or done by people”, “A natural ability or characteristic is one that you were born with” (“nature”). For example when Blake speaks of “Natural Religion”, he means deism, “a philosophy of the Age of Reason, [which] attempted to make religion intellectually respectable by the application of common sense” (Damon 298), that is not something customarily associated with, with the term “religion”. In Blake poems “nature” is a human construct, a model of reality, a notion that is essentially man-made, as it is a product of a certain mode of perception, which is, according to Blake, selective and imprisoning - “If the doors of
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