The Columbia History of British Poetry (79 page)

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far from an unambiguous endorsement of feminism. Blake's ambivalence can be seen in Oothoon's masochistic "calling Theotormons Eagles to prey upon her flesh" (2:13) and in her offer to catch other girls for Theotormon to enjoy while she watches their love play. The Daughters of Albion, the women of England, passively "hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs" (7:13). The poem brilliantly presents the problematization of the female libido but offers no solution.
Another work that combines the elements of Innocence and Experience is
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(17901793?). Written in part as a satire on the Swedenborgians with whom Blake had associated not long before, this prose poem ironically undermines all forms of dualism. "The voice of the Devil" proclaims that "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul," and Milton is shown to be "a true Poet and of the devils party without knowing it." Swedenborg's error lay in conversing with Angels and not with Devils, for in the world of
The Marriage
Angels are self-righteous, priggish, and life-denying, while Devils inhabit the flames of Energy. The Contraries of the
Songs
are necessary to human existence, for ''Without Contraries is no progression" (3). All the same, these Contraries occupy positive and negative poles: one would rather be among what Blake called the "Prolific" than what he called the "Devouring," just as the narrator of
The Marriage
prefers the ambience of Milton's Hell to the "Vacuum" of his Holy Ghost. The statements made in
The Marriage
must be referred to their satirical framework; they are not necessarily aphorisms that can be wrenched out of place and turned into good advice. Blake probably would have preferred that we not take too literally Proverbs like "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" (10).
Visions
and
The Marriage
are among the books Blake produced while living at Lambeth, south of the Thames, from autumn 1790. The other "Lambeth books," as they have come to be called, are six works comprising "the Bible of Hell" that Blake promised his readers in
The Marriage
(24). The first two of these,
America
(dated 1793 on its title page) and
Europe
(1794), are the only poems that Blake himself subtitled
A Prophecy
. With Unitarian radicals like Joseph Priestley and the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Blake viewed the history of his own times, the times following the American and French Revolutions, as fulfillments of the writings of the Old Testament prophets; his Prophecies are not predictions of the future but expositions of forms and forces
 
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underlying historical events. "A Prophet is a Seer," as Blake once noted, "not an Arbitrary Dictator."
America
begins with a "Preludium," in which Orc, the "hairy youth" who incarnates Energy, is in chains, tended by the shadowy female figure who will be called Vala in Blake's later works. She is an earth goddess who is speechless until Orc's ''fierce embrace" shocks her into recognition: "Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa" (2:8). In the Prophecy itself, "warlike men" appear on America's shore to confront the forces of "Albions Angel," England's ruler. In the conflict that follows, Orc proclaims freedom in terms combining the millennial prophecies of Isaiah with the Resurrection in the Gospels (plate 6). However, Orc already has both human and serpent forms, suggesting the dual possibilities of revolution as they appeared to Blake in the mid-1790s: it might humanize the world, or it might become bound into the cyclical recurrence of history. With the defeat of Albion's Angel, Britain itself is threatened by the revolutionary flames of Orc; but at a crucial moment the father god Urizen comes to the aid of his viceroy, freezing the situation with his "stored snows" (16:9). The ensuing respite for "Angels & weak men" is only temporary, for "their end should come, when France reciev'd the Demons light" (6:1415).
Europe
has its own "Preludium," in which the shadowy female laments the "all devouring fiery kings" to whom she must give birth, "Devouring & devoured" (1:45); but she is relieved by a vision of the birth of a divine child. Then the Prophecy itself moves from an imitation of Milton's ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" through "the night of Nature" (9:3)eighteen centuries of historyto the point at which
America
ended, with Albion's Angel and his councillors lying defeated. The poem ends with the apocalyptic manifestation of Orc in "the vineyards of red France" (15:1) and "the strife of blood" (15:10) that begins the wars of the allied powers against the French Revolution.
With
The Book of Urizen
(1794), Blake turned to the cosmogonic aspect of his myth.
Urizen
presents itself as a parody of Genesis, playing on the idea of a biblical text with its double columns and its division into chapters and verses. Its God is a patriarch who combines the most repressive aspects of reason and religion. His withdrawal from a harmonious union of Eternals in something like the Neoplatonist Pleroma precipitates the creation of the material world. Los, the Eternal Prophet, keeps Urizen from falling further by chaining him, but this
 
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activity has a deleterious effect on Los himself, making him divide into male and female. In a version of the ironical myth assigned to Aristophanes in
The Symposium
, Los pursues his female counterpart, Enitharmon. As a result of their union, Orc is born, then chained to a mountaintop by his jealous father, bringing the situation round to that of the "Preludium" to
America
. However, the general tone of events has become darker, and the primordial creation myth, expanded in
The Book of Los
(1795), approaches the dualism that Blake had satirized in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
.
If matter is so far removed from Eternity, how could even the most energetic human efforts create a millennial society? The answer is not to be found among the Lambeth books. In
The Song of Los
(1795) "the darkness of Asia was startled / At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc" (6:5); but the poem concludes with a premature, grisly resurrection in which "The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes / Her hollow womb" (7:356).
The Book of Ahania
(1795), a sequel to
Urizen
, presents a new rebel, Fuzon, who maims Urizen only to be killed by him, as Blake sees the France of Robespierre's Terror becoming what it beheld. The Lambeth period, as we can see, had been a fertile time for Blake. Then, after 1795, Blake published no new illuminated books until he issued
Milton
in 1808 or later. Part of the reason was a temporary redirection of his energies, for in 1795 he was commissioned to illustrate Young's
Night Thoughts
, which led him to execute the astonishing number of 537 water color designs and 43 engravings. However, the
Night Thoughts
edition was published in 1797, and still no new illuminated works appeared. Blake may have been intimidated by increased government repression, and the arrest of Richard Brothers, the self-styled "Prince of the Hebrews," may have been a cautionary example. Brothers, too, had written books of prophecies, and he, too, had denounced war and empire. In March 1795 Brothers was arrested under an Elizabethan act ''against fond and fantastical prophecies"; after being examined by the Privy Council, he was confined in a madhouse. The example can hardly have been lost upon Blake, who later wrote on the title page of Bishop Richard Watson's
Apology for the Bible
"To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life" (p. 611).
By 1798 Blake was certainly writing, if not publishing, prophetic verse. 1797 is the date on the title page of the manuscript he at first called
Vala
, but work on the poem continued, amid many other projects,
 
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for perhaps a decade. The original plan called for a combination of the cosmogonic subject matter of the Books of
Urizen
and
Los
with the political mythology of
America
and
Europe
, all embodied in a fourfold structure that would avoid the dualism implied by his earlier creation myth. It centers upon four androgynous beings, whom Blake at some point began calling "Zoas" (from the Greek for "living creature," the ''four beasts" of Revelation 4:6).
These are the component physical/psychic forces of the Eternal Man, Albion. Their separations into male and female and their wars against one another precipitate a series of falls of which humanity is the passive victim. Tharmas, the "Parent power" (3:6) of perception and sensation, is at the beginning already separate from the earth mother, Enion. She gives birth to Los and Enitharmon, whose fierce contentions are modeled upon those of William and Catherine Blake. Luvah, incarnating human desire, and Vala, the world of nature that is its object, engage in a Romantic agony that further reduces the human condition. Urizen casts out Ahania, who, a rejected Wisdom figure, falls far into Non Entity. These conflicts are at the same time a
psychomachia
taking place within Albion and an allegorization of the wars of Europe in Blake's time.
Orc is born in Night the Fifth very much as in
Urizen
, and then bound with the Chain of Jealousy. Blake could hardly carry over the political myth of
America
at this point, as he may originally have expected to do, since France must have been well on the road to Empire by the time he got to this point of composition. Therefore in Night the Seventh he made Orc, instructed by his old enemy Urizen, abandon his human form entirely and become a serpent, rising in power among the stars of Urizen. No longer offering a possibility of millennial peace, Orc himself is consumed by the flames of the final conflagration in Night the Ninth.
This would have left the work without a redemptive center of gravity had Blake not introduced new poetic conceptions and changed others in the later written parts and in additions to earlier Nights. The role of Los was deepened so that he would not be merely one of four Zoas but the agent of Albion's regeneration, and the resolution of the conflict among Los, his reasoning Spectre, and his Emanation became a major theme. A body called the Council of God was introduced to observe and occasionally direct events, and the Lamb of God was made to descend wearing Luvah's robes of blood. This new material is related to
 
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a series of visionary experiences Blake had in the very early 1800s. While they provide the poem, finally called
The Four Zoas
, with some of its most memorable passages, these elements do not jibe very well with the structure Blake had developed for
Vala
, and reading the palimpsest manuscript, one has the sense of a series of desperate rescue attempts being made by the author. Perhaps it was his own recognition of this situation that led Blake to abandon the manuscript at last and to concentrate upon the ambitious but realizable projects of
Milton
and
Jerusalem
.
The background of
Milton
lies in what Blake later called his three years' slumber on the banks of the Ocean. In 1800 the world was suddenly changed for William and Catherine, for in September of that year they moved to the village of Felpham in Sussex. The occasion was what seemed a major professional opportunity provided by a very minor poet. William Hayley, author of
The Triumphs of Temper
, was writing the biography of William Cowper, a poet whom Blake also admired. He engaged Blake to engrave the illustrations, and he also set about finding other ways to help Blake earn money by illustrating Hayley's own ballads and by painting miniature portraits. At the same time, Blake thought he could carry out his own projects in painting and poetry. The problem was that the two agendas were incompatible. Blake increasingly felt that Hayley was condescending to him and was reducing him to mechanical drudgery out of envy of his creative talents. His growing personal unhappiness at Felpham was compensated for by a series of visionary experiences that confirmed his sense of identity as a poet-artist.
On April 25, 1803, he informed his friend and patron Thomas Butts, "That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed. . . ." Before he could put this decision into practice, however, Blake quarreled with a drunken soldier whom he ejected from his cottage garden, and he consequently found himself charged with damning the King and other seditious utterances. Although he was acquitted (with the help of Hayley, who provided a lawyer), Blake was deeply shaken by this experience. His accusers, judges, and Hayley himself all found their way into his two most ambitious illuminated books.
Milton
is "a Poem in 2 [originally 12] Books," but this does not indicate the true divisions of the work. It begins with a single-page "Preface" in prose and verse and then, after a brief epic invocation and thematic statement, goes on with the "Bards prophetic Song''2:23 to 13 [14]:
 
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44that provides a background myth for the descent of Milton into the world of Generation and his investing Blake with prophetic/poetic power. At 27 [28]: 66 a new movement begins, describing regenerate Nature as a vision of the creator-God Elohim; this section straddles the "2 Books," merging with the next great movement, the descent of Milton's sixfold Emanation Ololon, which begins at 31 [34] and culminates in her union with Milton in Blake's garden at Felpham in 42 [49]. This apocalyptic event is preceded by the manifestation of Satan as Antichrist and followed at the close of the poem by the "Human Harvest" that begins the Last Judgment. While these events must necessarily seem diachronic as here described, Blake means us to imagine them synchronically, as he indicates by having episodes like Milton's struggle with Urizen and Milton's entering Blake's left foot occur at several points, as if everything in the poem were happening at once.
The "Preface" is an expression of the new confidence Blake felt as a result of his recent visions. "The Sublime of the Bible" is set above (and behind) all classical models, and "Young Men of the New Age"Blake's hoped-for audienceare exhorted to renew the arts and to reject war. In verses reminiscent of one of Charles Wesley's hymns, Blake transplants the life of Jesus to England, figuratively reversing Richard Brothers's Anglo-Israelite theoryrather than settling in the historical Jerusalem, Britons are to build the city of hope in their own green and pleasant land. The Bard's Prophetic Song then recounts in coded terms Blake's view of his years at Felpham.
This is a roman à clef whose key only partially fits its lock, for Blake took such care lest the prototype characters recognize themselves that some of their identities remain conjectural. Still, the broad outline is clear. Mild-mannered Satan is William Hayley trying to do the work of the true poet-artist, Palamabron-Blake. When they exhange roles at Satan's instigation, the result is threatened chaos. The ensuing controversy reaches up to the Halls of the Sons of Albion and threatens to cause disruption there as well. Then Milton, already "Unhappy tho in heav'n" (2:18) is moved to significant action. Milton wishes to redeem his past error of having driven his sixfold emanation, comprising his wives and daughters, into Ulro, the subbasement of reality, exiling the female part of his identity. He had also, in the eyes of the Blake of the 1800s, contributed to the division of humanity in taking part in the international politics of his era. To redeem these errors, he voluntarily descends into the lower world.

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