Featured on PDR in the collection William Blake’s The Gates of Paradise (1787-93)

“In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity”, writes Peter Ackroyd in his biography of William Blake. What holds true for this prophetic poet’s collected works also appears in miniature within The Gates of Paradise. Babies lay dormant, cocooned and buried, while an elderly man enters the dark behind death’s door. But there is no clear order. The old man may well discover that his threshold leads back into the earth, from which he will emerge as a child again.