Ageing as Fading and the Importance of Monument-Making in William Blake’s <i>The Book of Thel</i>

As an apprentice engraver, William Blake wrote his gothic poem ‘Fair Elenor’ ( Poetical Sketches, 1783) whilst drawing the tombs and monuments of Westminster Abbey for Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (1786) and Vetusta Monumenta (1789). A few years later, he would write The Book of Thel (1789) in which he continued to explore his own anxieties about his artistic legacy through the existential crises – centred on the process of ageing – of his female protagonists. Resembling the tombs he drew as an apprentice, Blake creates a funereal monument for Thel. However, through Thel’s reflections on the transience of corporeal existence, Blake reveals his own concerns about his corpus. Thel asks, ‘who shall find my place[?]’ (E4, 2.12). Though Blake himself would be buried in an unmarked grave, his memento mori provides a lasting monument for her ‘grave plot’ (E6, 6.9) and his own creative process. As such, though the physical body ages and fades, the Blakean body of the Imagination endures.