William Blake's haunting 1820 painting "The Ghost of a Flea" presents a massive, muscular figure that dominates the entire frame despite being painted on a tiny hardwood panel measuring just 8.42 by 6.23 inches. The creature steps forward with the right side of his body facing the viewer, holding a bleeding bowl made from an acorn in one outstretched hand and a curved thorn serving as a knife in the other. His tongue protrudes between his teeth, his eyes bulge from his head, and his pointed ears feature frills or gills that appear almost reptilian.
The painting's intricate details reveal Blake's masterful technique and symbolic intent. White paint dots the creature's eye, creating the illusion that he is simultaneously looking ahead and directly at the viewer. The figure stands balanced on his toes on a stage between curtains, with a backdrop of stars and one falling in a blaze of light, suggesting both a dance-like movement and a predatory creep toward his victim. Blake used thick brown tempera – a pigment bound in water and egg or oil and egg – which has cracked with age, while gold leaf provides the painting's luminous quality across the creature's muscles, the falling stars, the acorn bowl's rim, the parted curtains, and the stage boards that undulate under his step.
This artwork originated as part of Blake's "visionary heads" series – chalk and pencil drawings of historical and mythical characters that Blake claimed to see in visions. Blake had reported seeing and speaking with spirits since childhood, and during a series of late-night seances, watercolor artist and astrologer John Varley persuaded Blake to draw these visions to illustrate Varley's 1828 book "Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy." The Ghost of a Flea developed from one of these original sketches into a fully realized painting that captures the paradoxical nature of the creature's essence.
Contemporary poet Sarah Corbett found profound personal resonance in Blake's work, using it as inspiration for her own poem of the same title in her 2018 collection "A Perfect Mirror." Corbett recalls Blake's vision of the flea's ghost as a means of processing terrifying childhood experiences triggered by trauma. These experiences involved severe dissociation where she would lose all sense of scale, with her body in space becoming "both impossibly tiny and horrifically vast: at once huge and far away, immensely tiny and close." Blake's monstrous ghost became the perfect embodiment of a horror she couldn't name or shape for many years, describing it as "The corner of the bedroom housed him / gigantic in a speck of dust."
Corbett's childhood during the Cold War era deeply influenced her interpretation of Blake's work. The constant threat of nuclear annihilation affected her profoundly, creating a sense of horror that extended beyond personal trauma to encompass millions of souls that might be released from their bodies by nuclear catastrophe. In her poem, the white eyes of the flea's apparition transform into "soft white pods of spider nests / where the million bodies might / any minute come rushing," connecting personal terror with global anxiety about mass destruction.
The therapeutic value of artistic expression lies not in the act of creation itself, but in the distance it creates between the traumatic experience and the creator. Through the processes of shaping, crafting, rewriting, and editing, artists and writers can transform raw experience into structured art forms. Blake frames his monster between draped curtains on the tiny hardwood panel, while Corbett frames her frightening memories and images within lines and stanzas, demonstrating how the very act of framing draws attention to the artistic process and enables the transmutation of experience through artistic artifice.
Visual images play a central role in both poetry and visual art, often providing more readily available access to meaning than purely textual approaches. These powerful visual images function like dreams, coding meaning and experience in ways that reach the subconscious mind and impart understanding that might otherwise remain hidden. As poet John Keats expressed it, such understanding "must be proved upon our pulse" without requiring full articulation of the experience, making ekphrastic writing – writing that describes another art form – particularly valuable for processing complex emotions and memories.
True ekphrastic work extends far beyond simple recreation or description of visual art. According to Corbett, effective ekphrasis should create a conversation between art forms that can range from discussion to expansion or departure from the ideas and motifs the original works evoke. Most importantly, ekphrastic work should synthesize the original artwork with new ideas and thinking to create a new work of art that stands independently while honoring its inspiration.
As part of exploring works that tackle similar themes to canonical pieces, Corbett recommends Laurie Anderson's three-hour opera "Ark," which blends song and story with images in an essay about the apocalypse. Anderson's performance opens with an image of the doomsday clock, which Corbett recalls seeing on her bedroom wall as a child, "counting me down to my own destruction." She describes having to count backward from 100 to balance the second hand threatening to strike midnight, finding courage to escape her room at the last moment, only for the nightmare to return the next evening.
Despite the multiple threats humanity currently faces – from nuclear war to artificial intelligence to climate collapse – Anderson's performance seeks ways to bring people together in collective healing. Corbett reflects that she "found poetry – or perhaps, more accurately, poetry found me," emphasizing that art's function extends beyond awakening us to surrounding truths to providing ways to reimagine our future. Through this lens, both Blake's 19th-century vision and contemporary artistic responses demonstrate art's enduring power to transform personal and collective trauma into vehicles for understanding and healing.
