When I was a kid, my mom bought this book of poetry for me from some bookstore. I was enthralled because it had poems written in a pretty font that had lots of fun rhymes, and it was beautifully illustrated. Princess Grace Kelly had apparently done a reading of these poems for charity, for some sort of children's charity, as I recall. I ended up memorising 3 of the poems from it, one by an anonymous author, one by Edward Lear, and one by William Blake. There were other Lear and Blake works in the book in addition to the ones I memorised, one of which was called "Songs of Innocence", which I later learned was only an excerpt from a much longer poem. Not only that, but the poem came from a collection he wrote called Songs of Innocence and Experience, so I decided to buy a book with all the poems, and I learned to appreciate his poetry even more. In the "innocence" part of the book, the poems are gleeful, light, and full of hope and childhood wonder; in the "experience" part of the book, the mood is downcast, sad, and at times, painful and full of heartache.
With the advent of the Internet, it has made it easy to learn more about the poet himself. I discovered that he was not only a poet but an artist, and he painted over 100 different works, which you can view here. Since moving to the UK, I've learned that there are all sorts of museums or places dedicated to some of my favourite English authors, and you could easily do a literary tour of the UK if you wanted. So I've started looking up info for some of my favourites, and I found out that William Blake was actually from London and that he actually lived in the Borough where I now live, called Lambeth. And I learned that I could go to the site where the house he used to live in was located (unfortunately, torn down to build multi-unit residences) and that a group of art students reproduced several of his artworks in mosaic form, which are hanging up in these tunnels near where he used to live. The place was just over 20 minutes away by foot, so it seemed like a nice walk to do.
The apartment building that sits on the site where Blake's residence was located has been named after him, William Blake Estates. Outside of that, there are no pubs or anything in the area that he went to so that you could say you went to the same place (there may be in other parts of London as there are several other sites associated with Blake, but this is the only one within walking distance for me). But no matter, since my principal aim was to see the mosaics. If you look at his works in the link above, you'll be able to match the mosaics to these paintings and then know the titles of them. None of the mosaics included the name of the painting, so I'm glad for that ink above that actually has all of them in thumbnail format so you can easily scroll until you find the one you are looking for, for those that are recreations of Blake paintings. I've created collages to show all the mosaics. I thought it might be a better way to show them than just photo after photo of an individual mosaic, so hopefully you can still read some of the text if you can zoom in on the images.
There were three tunnels of mosaics, and they are really well done. It appears that some of them were original designs, not copies of Blake's pieces, inspired by his poetry, and in some cases, his poetry was used in them. In the biographical info posted in the tunnels, I learned that Blake made his living by doing book illustrations for other authors and that he only worked on his own paintings or poetry in the evenings. So he was largely unknown until after his death, when his family felt his works should be published/shown. The other thing I learned was that it was while he was in Lambeth that he wrote Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is one of his best known collections. I was a little awestruck because I used to buy poetry books with babysitting money I'd saved when I was a teenager, and this is one of the collections I would have read in high school or when I was a young university student. Little did I know that almost 3 decades later, I'd be living in the same neighbourhood where Blake lived. He's one of my favourite poets, and having lived now in the area and learned about some of the history here, it really makes his poems for alive and meaningful, giving me new understandings. These are the kinds of eye-opening experiences through travel that I live for.
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