William Blake, Digital Lab

Welcome to the Digital Lab! Here you can explore the various tools to enhance the learing experience. The best part? It's fun!

We enhanced our understanding of Blake's poems by seeing their original shape and form. We used, of course,The Blake Archive. In the illustration accompanying Blake's poem "London" (which you can explore in the frame below), we wondered who the old man and the young child might be, or rather, what they represent:

Examining all copies of Blake's "A Poison Tree" (Songs of Experience 1794) made by Blake, differently colored (which The Blake Archive allows us to do for the FIRST TIME in history) affected our interpretation of it:

In many of the images, there is a stark contrast between the foe and the anger-tree (as here):

But in one particular image, the dead foe, lying beneath the tree, is painted with watercolors to look like a part of the tree root, suggesting that "foes" are created by repressing and nurturing anger ("water[ing] it" with "tears," l. 6):

The Blake Archive allows comparing all copies of "A Poison Tree":

Voyant Tools

A Live Window by Stefanie Davis [SD]:

You can play with Blake's "London" as displayed in one of the Voyant Tools. This window (immediately below) is live because Voyant provides the code needed to embed live windows in your own web pages.