The Portable Blake

by William Blake

  Blake was not a “naif,” a “wild man” piecing his philosophy together from “odds and ends” around the house. He was a very learned man who felt challenged and uneasy by what he had learned. One of the reasons why he labored so hard to create a new literature equal to his own vision is that he could never free himself of the models others had created. When we look at his first poems in Poetical Sketches, we can see solemn imitations of Shakespeare, Ossian, Gray, and Spenser; his first beautiful songs move slowly away from neo-classic form. His tracts, There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One, imitate the geometrical order of philosophic propositions that was the carry-over from mathematics to natural philosophy. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a parody of sources to which Blake was deeply indebted for his form: Genesis, the Proverbs, the Apocalypse, and Swedenborg. The Prophetic Books are an attempt to create a new classical literature, after all the sources. Nothing shows so clearly the tremendous inner conflicts in Blake as the ghosts of other men’s books in his own. It is impossible, for anyone who has studied the Prophetic Books carefully, to see him as an enraptured scribe singing above the clouds. His visions in these books were an attempt to force down his own uneasiness. He could find his peace only by creating an epic world so singularly his own that it would supplant every other. He never succeeded. His task was beyond all human strength and all art. He created myths endlessly and represented them as human beings in endlessly energetic and turgid postures of struggle, oppression, and liberation. But he never gave up the myth. The “mad” Blake, whose wildest sayings furnish so much biographical chit-chat about him, was the man who still believed the myth long after suffering and alienation had dulled in his mind the objects it represented. Without the myth he would have been entirely lost, intolerably isolated. So he went even further—John Milton believed in it, too; and—the significant last chapter of Blake’s thought—Jesus was above all a Blakean.

  The last Prophetic Books are a jungle, but it is possible—if you have nothing else to do—to get through them. What Joyce said so lightly Blake would have repeated with absolute assurance—he demanded nothing less of his readers than that they should devote their lives to the elucidation of his works. Yet there are whole areas of the first Prophetic Books that represent Blake’s art and thought at their purest; the illuminated designs, even to a fantastic jumble like Jerasalem, are overwhelming in their beauty and power. To labor over works like The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem for the sake of intellectual exegesis is against the whole spirit of art. Where Blake does not write poetry, he orates; and when he orates it is “the will trying to do the work cf the imagination.” Yet his rhetorical resources were so overwhelming that they flow like hot lava over the stereotypes of the myth. He obviously felt so little the consecutiveness of his “argument” that in at least one copy of Jerusalem he allowed misplaced pages to remain where they were. His concern is not with the coherence of his theme, but with his need to get everything in. Even within the assumed order of the myth the characters lose their symbolic references when they do not transfer them among each other. They came to represent so much of Blake’s private life as well as his public vision that he interrupted himself at regular intervals to preach against jealousy and the domination of man by woman.

  Blake was never jarred by the tumult of all the conflicts he revealed in his Prophetic Books. His loneliness as a man and thinker was so overwhelming that he took his gifts as the measure of human insight. He was a lyric poet of genius and a very bad dramatic poet; but he suffered from the illusion that his poetic gift was also a dramatic and representational one. The gift of creating character is inseparable from an interest in history. Just as the novel owes its principal development to the modem consciousness that society is man-made, so the ability to create character is impossible without an understanding of men in relation to other men; in short, of man as a creature of process and conflict. Blake’s characters are names attached arbitrarily to absolute human faculties and states of being. The name of the character may have a punning or derived relation to the faculty he represents, as Urizen is the god of this world and its sterility who is “your reason,” or Ore, Blake’s first hero, came into his mind from Norse mythology. So Albion is the central figure of man, “the eternal man,” and Enitharmon is the “universal” woman. But when Blake sets them to orating against each other, their nominal identity is only the line which he must desperately hold on to to bring up the deep-sea fish of human passions, errors, lamentations. The figure of Urizen is an oppressor; Oric is the spirit of visionary emancipation; Los, who comes in later, is the spirit of time working to rejoin man to his lost unity, and the “Eternal Prophet.” Through them, and many other characters, Blake is seeking to explain how man lost the gift of vision. Urizen is the false God, the Satan who separated himself from the prime unity and set in motion the divisions in man, the search after the analytical and the inhuman.

  Blake is not interested in character. His figures are the human faculties at war with each other. He is trying to explain, in the form of a new Genesis, how the split in man occurred, and to show the necessary present struggle of man to unify himself back to an integral and imaginative human nature. He is also raging against all those who would hold him in—from the analytical God of Newton to the scepticism of Voltaire, from the successful painters of the day to “the shadowy female,” who torments man by jealousy. But since he has no interest in history, the beginning, the present, and the future dissolve into each other. What was begun in error is suffered through error now. He is fighting his own sorrows even as he is trying to impose the massive structure of his hazardously built myth onto the contemporary world: to bring himself to us, and the England he actually lived in. Hence the bewildering jump from Old Testament names to English streets, cities, and counties, in which Blake’s own cries were never heard:

  O dreadful Loom of death! 0 piteous Female forms, compell’ d

  To weave the Woof of Death! On Camberwell Tirzah’s courts,

  Malah’s on Blackheath; Rahab & Noah dwell on Windsor’s heights,

  Where once the Cherubs of Jesusalem spread to Lambeth’s Vale.

  Milcah’s Pillars shine from Harrow to Hampstead, where Hoglah

  On Highgate’s heights magnificent Weaves over trembling Thames

  To Shooter’s Hill and thence to Blackheath, the dark Woof. Loud,

  Loud roll the Weights & Spindles over the whole Earth, let down

  On all sides round to the Four Quarters of the World, eastward on

  Europe to Euphrates & Hindu, to Nile & back in Clouds Of Death across the Atlantic to America North & South.

  Hence, too, the poetic atrocities:In torrents of mud settling thick

  With Eggs of unnatural production

  Which is dreadful, but only a paraphrase of the noble rant which deafens and dulls us all through the later books:

  But in the Optic vegetative Nerves Sleep was transformed To Death in old time by Satan, the father of Sin & Death: And Satan is the Spectre of Orc, &. Ore is the generate Luvah.

  Blake cannot get away from the materialist trappings, the naturalistic “spectre”; no one can, and his collapse as an artist in the later Prophetic Books is due to his effort to dispel the natural forms by a mythological explanation of them. He created his myth to contain his defiance, as it were; when he found it insufficient, he let it supplant life itself. On the subject of God, he even borrowed a thought from the Gnostic heresy, as he was indebted to the Jewish Cabala for his vision of the man who anciently contained all things of heaven and earth in himself. The Gnostic heresy is one the Catholic Church understandably rooted out in furious alarm—for it held that the world was dominated by Satan. It is not hard to understand how comforting this thought must have been to Blake. If this world is a mere deception, and all its natural appearances a masquerade through which man must look for spiritual vision, it is because the “real” God has been supplanted by Satan. So all spiritual vision leads us back to the “real”
God, who is now Jesus. Blake’s Jesus is the defiant iconoclast, the friend of artists and revolutionaries. When one reads Jerusalem, one thinks of Nietzsche, who when he went mad signed himself “The Crucified One,” and of that old cry from the defeated—“Thou has conquered, O Galilean!”

  Blake does not “yield” to Jesus; he creates Jesus in his own image.

  The Son, O how unlike the Father! First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.

  But not before he has shown us the inner thread in his snarled Prophetic Books—which is the lament against his own “selfhood” and the appeal against the Accuser, “who is the God of this World.” It is impossible to read Blake’s vehement and repeated cries against the “Accuser” without being moved by the tremendous burden of guilt he carried despite his revolt and independence. The “Accuser” is Satan, who rules this world, which is “the Empire of nothing.” It is he who tormented man with a sense of sin; who made men and women look upon their own human nature as evil; who plunged us into the cardinal human heresy, which is the heresy against man’s own right and capacity to live. The “Accuser” is the age in which Blake lived and it is the false god whose spectre mocks our thirst for life. It is the spirit, to Blake, of all that limits man, shames man, and drives him in fear. The Accuser is the spirit of the machine, which leads man himself into “machination.” He is jealousy, unbelief, and cynicism. But his dominion is only in you; and he is only a specter.

  The Accuser is the prime enemy, yet he is a fiction; he need not exist. But Blake fought him so bitterly that he acknowledged how great a price he had paid for his own audacity. What was it that made him long at the end, above everything else, for “forgiveness?” What was it he had to be “forgiven” for?

  And now let me finish with assuring you that, Tho’ I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again Emerged into the light of day; I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God; but I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquer’d, and shall go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser. My enthusiasm is still what it was, only Enlarged and confirmed.

  We do not know—his only name for his “guilt” remains “selfhood”—that is, the full force of his individual claim to self-assertion. Blake was a prophet who was not delivered by his own prophecy. But if he succumbed at all to the “Accuser,” he did more than anyone else to expose him. If he failed at the complete harmony to which all his own thought is directed, it is because man, though he is a little world in himself, is little indeed when measured against the whole of a creation that was not made for him alone—or for him to know everlasting certainty in it. Blake’s tragedy was the human tragedy, made more difficult because his own fierce will to a better life prevented him from accepting any part of it. Laboring after the infinite, he felt himself shadowed by the Accuser. That is the personal cost he paid for his vision, as it helps us to understand his need of a myth that would do away with tragedy. But as there is something deeper than tragedy in Blake’s life, so at the heart of his work there is always the call to us to recover our lost sight. Blake was a man who had all the contraries of human existence in his hands, and he never forgot that it is the function of man to resolve them.

  Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions, or have no Passions, but because they have cultivated their Understandings.

  ALFRED KAZIN

  PROSPECTUS

  October 10, 1793.

  TO THE PUBLIC

  The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.

  This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-Press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.

  If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

  Mr. Blake’s powers of invention very early engaged the attention of many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been regularly enabled to bring before the Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country: among which are two large highly finished engravings (and two more are nearly ready) which will commence a Series of subjects from the Bible, and another from the History of England.

  The following are the Subjects of the several Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blake’s, No. 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth.

  1. Job, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 7½ in. by 1 ft 2 in.: price 12s.

  2. Edward and Elinor, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 6½ in. by 1 ft.: price 10s. 6d.

  3. America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 18 designs: price 10s. 6d.

  4. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 8 designs, price 7s. 6d.

  5. The Book of Thel, a Poem in Illuminated Printing. Quarto, with 6 designs, price 3s.

  6. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Illuminated Printing. Quarto, with 14 designs, price 7s. 6d.

  7. Songs of Innocence, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25 designs, price 5s.

  8. Songs of Experience, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25 designs, price 5s.

  9. The History of England, a small book of Engravings. Price 3s.

  10. The Gates of Paradise, a small book of Engravings. Price 3s.

  The Illuminated Books are Printed in Colours, and on the most beautiful wove paper that could be procured.

  No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them to sale at a fair price.

  I.

  THE YOUNG BLAKE

  From POETICAL SKETCHES

  (1783)

  TO THE MUSES

  Whether on Ida’s shady brow,

  Or in the chambers of the East,

  The chambers of the sun, that now

  From antient melody have ceas’d;

  Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair,

  Or. the green comers of the earth,

  Or the blue regions of the air,

  Where the melodious winds have birth;

  Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,

  Beneath the bosom of the sea

  Wand’ring in many a coral grove,

  Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

  How have you left the antient love

  That bards of old enjoy’d in you!

  The languid strings do scarcely move!

  The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

  TO THE EVENING STAR

  Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,

  Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light

  Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown

  Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!

  Smile on our loves, and, while thou drawest the

  Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew

  On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes

  In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on

  The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,

  And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,

  Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,

  And the lion glares thro’ the dun forest:

  The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with

  Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence.

  TO MORNING

  O holy virgin! clad
in purest white,

  Unlock heav’n’s golden gates, and issue forth;

  Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light

  Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring

  The honied dew that cometh on waking day.

  O radiant morning, salute the sun,

  Rouz’d like a huntsman to the chace, and, with

  Thy buskin’d feet, appear upon our hills.

  SONG

  How sweet I roam’d from field to field,

  And tasted all the summer’s pride,

  ’Till I the prince of love beheld,

  Who in the sunny beams did glide!

  He shew’d me lilies for my hair,