The Contra-Diction of Design: Blake’s Illustrations to Gray’s "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat"

Abstract

When Blake undertook the illustration of the 1790 edition of Thomas Gray’s Poems for John Flaxman, he did so with characteristic exuberance, providing both illustration and interpretation. Gray represented a contradiction to Blake: while he was a poet of empire aligned with Blake’s aesthetic enemy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gray also wrote the radical indictment of empire, "The Bard." Blake’s illustrations testify to this conflict; and in the "Ode," Blake’s designs offer an other language, a contra-diction, that deconstructs Gray’s conscious—and liberates his unconscious discourse. Blake’s visual language champions desire’s expression, specifically feminine desire, and resists the repression of that desire urged by Gray in his own controlled poetic diction. Blake’s images define the visual field at the margin of discourse as the realm of the unconscious. Further, he demonstrates a number of concepts later argued by Jacques Lacan.