Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  According to a trenchant Proverb of Hell, “Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.”34 The distinction is thought-provoking. Stone is a natural substance, hard and durable, shaped with effort and skill into building blocks. Blake unquestionably believed that the criminal justice system in England was corrupt and unjust, but he would not have denied that societies do need laws. Bricks are not stones but mock-stones, soft clay held together with straw and cast in identical molds. And it is religion that builds brothels with them, for the policing of sex by religion is what creates the incentive for brothels to exist.

  In the notebook poem known as Auguries of Innocence, we hear the harlot’s cry again, together with the rhyme on “curse” and “hearse.”

  The whore and gambler by the state

  Licensed build that nation’s fate;

  The harlot’s cry from street to street

  Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

  The winners shout, the losers curse,

  Dance before dead England’s hearse.

  Every night and every morn

  Some to misery are born;

  Every morn and every night

  Some are born to sweet delight.

  Some are born to sweet delight,

  Some are born to endless night.

  Quoted by themselves, as they often are, “sweet delight” and “endless night” may seem to acknowledge inevitable human differences, but they are not inevitable at all. The key insight is in the phrase “by the state licensed.” Without it, David Punter observes, “the extract would be mere lamentation; with it, it becomes already a diagnosis.” In London, in just sixteen lines, Blake manages to indict the church, the law, the monarchy, property, and marriage. In marriage, as he sees it, nearly all of the others are combined—maybe even all of them, if one thinks of monarchy as the symbolic embodiment of patriarchy.35

  It might seem that London would serve as an appropriate culmination to Songs of Experience, and it does usually appear near the end, but not as the final poem. Just as in Songs of Innocence, Blake varied the sequence of poems from one copy to another. In copy N, the one reproduced here, London is fifth from the end, followed by The Little Vagabond, Holy Thursday, Nurse’s Song, and finally a rather mild poem called The Schoolboy. The Tyger, in the two copies reproduced here, is ninth from the end in copy F and thirteenth in copy Z.

  “What Is the Price of Experience?”

  In part because his poems were issued in such limited editions, but also because they are undeniably strange, Blake was virtually unknown as a poet during his lifetime. The few people who bought his illuminated books paid little attention to the texts. Even as an artist he was marginalized, known for little else besides the illustrations to Night Thoughts and The Grave. In his annotations to Reynolds he wrote bitterly, “Fuseli almost hid himself—I am hid.”36 He first wrote, “I was hid,” and then changed “was” to “am.” Henry Fuseli was a mentor and friend, more successful as an artist than Blake, but likewise regarded as eccentric and outside the mainstream.

  A few of the early lyrics did find their way into print, for example, the Innocence version of The Chimney Sweeper in a reformist treatise entitled The Chimney Sweeper’s Friend and Climbing Boy’s Album. A reviewer commented, “We know not how to characterize the song given from Blake’s Songs of Innocence. It is wild and strange, like the singing of a ‘maid in Bedlam in the spring;’ but it is the madness of genius.”37 That this perfectly straightforward poem could be called mad suggests just how conventional most readers’ tastes were.

  A friend of Blake’s named Benjamin Heath Malkin included a number of the poems, including The Tyger, in a little volume in 1806, and reviewers were even more dismissive. One said condescendingly that the poems were “not devoid of merit,” another that “the poetry of Mr. Blake does not rise above mediocrity.” Shortly after his death someone who knew him well had this to say: “The poetry of these songs is wild, irregular, and highly mystical, but of not great degree of elegance or excellence, and their prevailing feature is a tone of complaint of the misery of man-kind.”38 “Complaint” is a feeble description of Blake’s searing exposure of cruelty, hypocrisy, and exploitation.

  Through their mutual friend Henry Crabb Robinson, two great poets, Words-worth and Coleridge, did hear of Blake near the end of his life. Coleridge actually paid him a visit, and Robinson reported that Coleridge “talks finely about him,” though without mentioning what he said. Wordsworth responded favorably to the Songs; he and his sister Dorothy copied out several of them, including The Tyger. But according to Robinson their admiration was qualified. “There is no doubt that this man is mad,” he remembered Wordsworth saying, “but there is something in this madness which I enjoy more than the sense of Walter Scott or Lord Byron.” Coleridge too borrowed Robinson’s copy of the Songs and used a system of markings to indicate the ones he liked best and least, putting Infant Joy at the top. He thought The Sick Rose was good and The Tyger still better, but he ranked The Chimney Sweeper (probably the Experience version) and The Blossom at the very bottom.39

  It was a long time before even Wordsworth and Coleridge attained the prestige they now enjoy. When Samuel Johnson’s friend Charles Burney reviewed their breakthrough volume, Lyrical Ballads, he found the poems entertaining but concluded, “We cannot regard them as poetry, of a class to be cultivated at the expense of a higher species of versification.” During that era the most admired poets were Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, Samuel Rogers, and Thomas Moore.40

  An eloquent lament in The Four Zoas, begun in the late 1790s, captures all too convincingly the story of Blake’s career:

  What is the price of experience? do men buy it for a song,

  Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price

  Of all that a man hath, his house his wife his children.

  Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

  And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.41

  5. REVOLUTION

  Albion Rose

  DURING the early 1790s, inspired by the French Revolution, an organized campaign developed for British political reform. Its focus was on extending the franchise so that more men could vote (not women, of course) and on restructuring parliamentary districts so that the rapidly growing industrial cities would have proper representation. There was also a call to abolish so-called pocket boroughs, in which local magnates would choose members of parliament to suit themselves, as well as rotten boroughs, seats established in the Middle Ages but now with few inhabitants, and in some scandalous instances none whatsoever.

  These were important goals, and it took forty years to achieve them if only partially, in the Reform Bill of 1832. Still, the reformers were attempting to work within the political system, not to overthrow it. A small number of radicals saw this program as pitifully inadequate and hoped instead to ignite a vast remaking of the entire social order. Historians have tried hard to identify these people, but that is far from easy, since they were compelled to operate in secrecy. What is clear is that they shared many ideas with the revolutionaries of the 1640s who had executed King Charles I and who proudly appropriated a biblical description of the early Christians as “these that have turned the world upside down.” Those seventeenth-century radicals were known as antinomians, meaning “against the law,” from the Greek nomos. Detesting institutional religion, they believed that the Law of the Old Testament had been abolished, and they anticipated that Puritan victory would ignite a revolution far more profound than mere political change. Jerusalem was to be created anew and an age of brotherhood achieved, as had long been prophesied under the name of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase from the Book of Revelation.1 One of Blake’s notebook poems is The Everlasting Gospel.

  After the Puritans gained power in the 1650s, however, they turned conservative, and made it clear that their radical fringe was no longer welcome. As it turned ou
t, their own rule was short-lived, and the English people welcomed back King Charles II in the Restoration of 1660. Thereafter the antinomians were fiercely persecuted and driven underground, all but invisible until they began to surface again in Blake’s time, a century and a half later. They were never organized and never had a collective program, but the most extreme among them still hoped to get rid of the monarchy, and even to abolish class distinctions altogether.

  What contacts Blake may have had with the radical fringe of his day is unknown. The eminent historian E. P. Thompson was convinced that he must have been connected with a tiny splinter group known as Muggletonians, which had a few dozen members at most, but he was never a joiner, and anyway the Muggletonian writings are conventional and obvious by comparison with his.2

  Whatever Blake’s personal connection with the radical underground may have been, he certainly sympathized with many of its ideas. It is less illuminating to associate him, as is sometimes done, with self-styled prophets such as Richard Brothers, who proclaimed himself Prince of the Hebrews and was institutionalized for insanity. Blake never claimed to be specially appointed, and he stated explicitly that he was not a prophet in any literal sense. “Prophets in the modern sense of the word,” he wrote, “have never existed. . . . Every honest man is a prophet; he utters his opinion both of private and public matters. Thus, if you go on so, the result is so. He never says such a thing shall happen, let you do what you will. A prophet is a seer, not an arbitrary dictator.” At another time Blake quoted Moses: “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets!”3

  A magnificent color print known as Albion Rose (color plate 11) epitomizes Blake’s vision of national rebirth. The print exists in several versions made over a period of years, and its meaning probably changed for him during that time. The copy reproduced here, now in the Huntington Library in Pasadena, is the second impression from a printing that was done in 1795 or 1796 (the first impression is in the British Museum). Since paint was not reapplied after each printing, it inevitably got thinner after the first copy was made. In this one, lines show through that reveal that the design was engraved on copper before colors were applied.4

  At first the print was untitled, and Gilchrist, just guessing, called it Glad Day, a name it continued to go by for a long time. But Blake’s own title is indicated by an inscription he added to a final copy around 1804:

  Albion rose from where he laboured at the mill with slaves

  Giving himself for the nations he danced the dance of eternal death

  “Death” for Blake means what we normally call life—the living death of isolated selfhood in a mechanical universe. In an early work, There Is No Natural Religion, he likens that existence to the endless grinding of a mill: “The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.”5

  Albion was a traditional poetic name for England, and in Blake’s early works it refers simply to the land, as it does in Spenser and Milton. But in his poems in the 1800s, when this inscription was added, Albion becomes a full personification, a giant form in whom all the people of England are embodied. “At the mill with slaves” alludes to Milton’s blind Samson, forced to labor “eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.” Like Samson, Albion triumphs through death, but in Blake’s symbolism that self-sacrifice is actually an ascent into life, “giving himself for the nations.” He must have been thinking also of a famous passage in Milton’s Areopagitica: “Me-thinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.”6

  On the final state of the print Blake inscribed “W.B. inv 1780.” “Inv” was the printmakers’ term for “invenit,” referring to the “invention” of the design. But it is not likely that he actually engraved it at that early date, for in that case he would have added “sculp” for “sculpsit,” the sculptural process of incising lines into the plate. What he probably meant is that he first conceived the design, perhaps in the form of a sketch, in 1780, even though he didn’t produce the print until fifteen years later.7

  The 1780 date suggests at least two implications. That was the year when Blake completed his apprenticeship and was free at last to develop his own style. And it was also when he found himself unexpectedly swept along in what became known as the Gordon Riots. An enraged mob, inflamed by anti-Catholic feeling but also by general grievances, surged through the streets and broke open Newgate Prison, allowing hundreds of prisoners to escape. After a week of anarchy the army was called out and opened fire indiscriminately, killing nearly three hundred rioters. Albion Rose may well have been originally conceived as a symbol of popular insurrection, and when Blake later added the reference to the dance of death he may have been thinking of Edmund Burke’s contemptuous phrase, “the death dance of democratic revolution,” which implied that calls for reform were really just a cover for mob anarchy.8

  With a radiant sunrise behind him, Albion’s pose is expansive. As W. J. T. Mitchell says, the picture gives an impression of “a human body glowing with vitality, radiating an aura of sensuous light and heat—the image of Albion dancing in liberated ecstasy.” Mitchell notes also that while the posture recalls Renaissance diagrams of ideal human proportions, they usually center on the navel, whereas this one is centered on the genitals. There may even be a personal reference in Albion’s curly golden hair. Frederick Tatham said that in Blake’s youth “his hair was of a yellow brown, and curled with the utmost crispness and luxuriance. His locks, instead of falling down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like radiations.”9

  In the late, uncolored 1804 print of Albion Rose (figure 22) two creatures have been added. In the original version Albion’s feet had rested on stone covered with mottled vegetation. In this revised print the vegetation is gone, the right foot is in the air, and the left foot tramples on what may be an earthworm, or else the larval form of the moth taking wing above it. As already noted, earthworms are a recurring symbol of the cycle of mortality, and moths or butterflies of the soul’s liberation from it. But then, why does this weird moth have wings like a bat? Bats are negative symbols for Blake. One possible interpretation is that Albion is indeed liberated and that the bat-moth is an oppressive fiend from which he has joyfully escaped. But it may also be that these additions reflect disillusionment with revolution. Just as the French Revolution, which Blake had eagerly hailed in 1789, degenerated into the horrific Terror, so in the perspective of 1804 Albion’s dance may be a true dance of death after all.10

  22. Albion Rose, second state

  Marrying Heaven and Hell

  Blake’s most overtly antinomian work is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, probably published in 1793. It seems to have begun as a limited satire on the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, who struck Blake as a conventional church founder only pretending to be an inspired visionary.11 Soon, however, it grew into a wide-ranging challenge to orthodox morality, in an extraordinary medley of biblical imitation, prose satire, poetry, and homemade proverbs.

  In celebrating what he calls Hell, Blake has in mind something very different from the usual connotations of that word. The fundamental idea in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is that theologians and preachers have wrongly stigmatized energy as diabolical, even though it is absolutely essential to existence. They claim that “good is the passive that obeys reason; evil is the active springing from energy.”12 Blake’s counterclaim is that Heaven and Hell must interact as vital contraries, like partners in a marriage who are different yet joined. Both are equally important, though in his enthusiastic polemic Hell gets the better of the argument.

  The title page (color plate 12) magnificently embodies these ideas. Gilchrist may not have understood it fully, but he described it well: “The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page se
em to move and quiver within its boundaries.”13

  In a rather pallid scene at the top, a courting couple strolls demurely and a woman reclines while her suitor reads to her (or perhaps plays a musical instrument). The trees above them are drooping and leafless. But from below, energy surges powerfully up, and a pair of naked figures embrace. An antinomian devil rises from the flames, and an orthodox angel rests upon a cloud; their union is repeated above in the small soaring couples. But the torsion in the embrace is striking: although they are locked in a kiss, their bodies extend and twist in opposing directions. Marriage is not identity, and for that matter, gender is not necessarily its basis. Both figures are female, as is clearly apparent in an uncolored copy, although the one on the left—the devil, presumably—is more voluptuous.14 Over the years Blake’s ideal figures would become increasingly androgynous.

  A recurring theme of Blake’s work is that his symbols express what goes on in our minds, and it is possible to see in this title page design the shape of a human head. The trees outline its hairy scalp, the courting couples are its eyes, and the circle around the word “and” is its mouth. Our world as we normally perceive it lies above the line that runs, as it were, from ear to ear. Beneath burns the energy that makes life possible. And both worlds, Heaven and Hell, exist within human consciousness.15