Flaming energy is one aspect of vital existence, but there are tranquil aspects too. In another image (color plate 13) a naked young man, with genitals frankly exposed, looks up hopefully into the sky. The skull under his knee is a reminder that revolution abolishes bondage to dead ancestors. Horrified by the French Revolution, Burke declared that society is a contract that must not be altered: “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Thomas Paine retorted, “Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. . . . As government is for the living and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.” Blake put it crisply in one of the Proverbs of Hell: “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”16
Remarkably, in every copy of this plate except the one reproduced here, there are no pyramids. They were never in the etched design but were added with water-color on this particular copy. It must have struck Blake as appropriate to introduce a symbol that he often used in his poems, the pyramids of Egypt, recalling the bondage from which the Israelites escaped. In his last poem, Jerusalem, London laborers don’t just make bricks, they become bricks:
Here they take up
The articulations of a man’s soul, and laughing throw it down
Into the frame, then knock it out upon the plank, and souls are baked
In bricks to build the pyramids of Heber and Terah.
(Terah was the father of Abraham, and Heber an earlier patriarch.)17
A memorable section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is entitled “Proverbs of Hell,” which are really anti-proverbs. Ordinary proverbs convey conventional truisms, even when they sometimes contradict each other, as in “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” but also “Out of sight, out of mind.” Blake’s aphorisms are anything but conventional: “Exuberance is beauty”; “The cistern contains, the fountain overflows”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”; “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” At times these anti-proverbs seem deliberately intended to shock: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”18 Blake can’t mean that every possible desire should be acted on, and still less that babies should be murdered, but rather that an unacted desire is like an infanticide. Just as we nurse a grudge, so we may nurse a desire that we are unable or too cowardly to gratify. Yet if that is indeed the meaning, it is not an immediately obvious one. The point of Blake’s proverbs is not to restate what we already know but to make us think.
Since they are so very open-ended, these proverbs are easily detachable from their context. “What is now proved was once only imagined,” says one of the Proverbs of Hell, referring presumably to spiritual insight. But some years ago I encountered it blazoned on the display window of a Paris boutique: what was once only imagined by the designer now dresses the mannequins in the window (figure 23). The library in Donald Trump’s extravagant edifice on Central Park in New York reportedly displays another Proverb of Hell, transformed into a self-congratulatory slogan: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
23. Paris boutique
America: A Prophecy
In 1793, the same year as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake published his most hopeful account of revolution. America: A Prophecy is prophetic in the sense already explained, a commentary on the meaning of events, not a prediction of the future. The illuminated books from this period are known collectively as the Lam-beth Books, after the district south of the Thames where the Blakes were then living. It was amusing that a near neighbor was the archbishop of Canterbury, whose official residence is Lambeth Palace.
The “Preludium” of America introduces a new character, Orc, a name adapted from a Latin word for the infernal regions (it is also the source of an Old English word from which J. R. R. Tolkien named his orcs). Blake’s Orc seems demonic to the established order, for he is the youthful spirit of rebellion, striving to burst his shackles. In America he first appears as a sprawling naked youth fettered to a rock (color plate 14). This late copy, made to appeal to an art collector, is stunningly beautiful. The outline is printed in rich blue, and in applying watercolors great care has been taken to keep the blue sky and yellow leaves from blurring into each other.19 The text is an especially elegant example of Blake’s italic lettering, easily legible but obviously inscribed by hand, and at times it flourishes into life in ways that printed typography never could. In the sixth line, for example, the initial “W” trails a tendril downward, and the “d” of the final word “need” spirals upward.
What exactly are we looking at? Many possibilities have been proposed. The youth resembles Prometheus fettered to his cliff in the Caucasus, and there may also be an allusion to the Crucifixion, since Christ too is a god who suffers on behalf of humankind. The adults in the picture resemble Adam and Eve in traditional depictions of the expulsion from Paradise, but instead of repenting for sin as in the title page of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, they recoil in shock at what they are seeing. Perhaps the young man is a conflated version of their two sons, the martyred Abel and the murderer Cain.20
In the classical myth Prometheus occupies a kind of absolute space, hanging above the world on his rock of agony. In Blake’s picture we are gazing down at the rock, which is really just the surface of the ground, with gnarly humanized roots below. At the bottom a naked man sits huddled and brooding, as if awaiting resurrection, and beneath the text is an earthworm, symbolic of mortality once again. It has six coils because, in a phrase Blake used several times, man is “a worm of sixty winters.”21
In the accompanying text, “red Orc” has reached his fourteenth year, the age of puberty, and yearns to seize “the shadowy daughter of Urthona,” who brings him food and drink. She is not otherwise identified, and for that matter neither is Urthona, though the name may suggest “earth owner.” Perhaps she is the American continent itself.
In the next plate Orc has somehow broken free and is able to gratify his desire.
Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,
The hairy shoulders rend the links; free are the wrists of fire.
Round the terrific loins he seized the panting struggling womb;
It joyed: she put aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile,
As when a black cloud shows its lightnings to the silent deep.
Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry:
“I know thee, I have found thee, and I will not let thee go.”
This is commonly seen as a rape, which is undoubtedly right; similar sexual violence occurs in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which was published in the same year as America. Blake’s ambiguous and often disturbing view of sexuality will be considered later. Here it has to be acknowledged that the violation is apparently welcomed by the “shadowy daughter.” Her womb “joys,” and her speech echoes the Song of Solomon, “I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go.”22
Perhaps Blake’s meaning is that although revolutions are inevitably violent, Orc’s energy is libidinal, not destructive. Otherwise it would be inexplicable that it is Orc who is given this eloquent speech later on:
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
Similarly, the picture that accompanies the lines about Orc’s union with the shadowy daughter (figure 24) is not violent at all. No longer chained down, the young man gazes hopefully into the sky while a grapevine spirals upward from underground roots. This monochrome copy shows Blake’s firm outlines to advantage, and since ten of the copies in the original 1793 printing are uncolored, he may have hoped to sell them cheaply to a wide audience, not just to collectors of art.23
; As Blake imagines it, the American Revolution could have been the spark to ignite a universal uprising, in which the French Revolution would be followed by a British revolution yet to come. Though actual events in America are barely mentioned in the poem, we do meet some familiar characters:
Fury! rage! madness! in a wind swept through America
And the red flames of Orc that folded roaring fierce around
The angry shores, and the fierce rushing of th’ inhabitants together.
The citizens of New York close their books and lock their chests;
The mariners of Boston drop their anchors and unlade;
The scribe of Pennsylvania casts his pen upon the earth;
The builder of Virginia throws his hammer down in fear.
Then had America been lost, o’erwhelmed by the Atlantic,
And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,
But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire.
24. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 4
The mariners are the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Franklin is the scribe of Pennsylvania, and Jefferson is the builder of Virginia. In their own minds those rebels were rejecting the authority of George III but keeping the social order pretty much unchanged. In Blake’s vision it is the people united who “rush together,” much to the alarm of their self-styled leaders, who drop their pen and hammer and lock up their valuables. It didn’t actually happen like that, as he knew perfectly well, but from a prophetic point of view it should have.24
In another picture (figure 25) Orc appears in a pose very similar to one that we saw in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, genitals displayed without shame and a skull at his side. In colored copies he has curly yellow hair, reminiscent of Albion Rose—and of William Blake. Commentators have noted also the relevance of an ancient Roman statue known as the Barberini Faun, in which a dissolute figure lounges in a suggestive posture, dozing and presumably drunk. There is nothing indecent about Blake’s figure, which might be taken to illustrate a Proverb of Hell: “The head sublime, the heart pathos, the genitals beauty, the hands and feet proportion.” Christopher Hobson comments, “Though there is nothing homosexual as such about this design, it is an image of intense, and intensely vulnerable, male beauty.”25
The text in this plate celebrates liberation, in some of the most eloquent lines that Blake ever wrote:
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk and dried
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst.
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field;
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open,
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge.
They look behind at every step and believe it is a dream,
Singing: “The sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night,
For empire is no more, and now the lion and wolf shall cease.”
25. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 8
These lines are full of biblical echoes. The slave at the mill and the watchmen come from the Gospel of Matthew, and the linen clothes from Christ’s empty tomb in the Gospel of John. Ezekiel saw the dry bones revive: “I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together . . . and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.”26
The language is dynamic—shaking, springing, running—but the seated figure is at rest, pondering the future now that the dungeons have been broken open. The plants and small creatures at the bottom of the picture may be allegorical references of some kind, but if so they are obscure. At any rate they seem to be at home in a healthy natural world, very like the creatures in the picture for The Clod and the Pebble.27
Revolution is fed by energy, and in another picture (figure 26) Orc is buoyed up by flames that even invade the text. William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s brother, called Blake “the supreme painter of fire,” and Blake himself coined the memorable phrase “fire delights in its form.” In another work from this period he speaks of the “thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc” (he knew Shakespeare well and may have been recalling Lear’s “sulfurous and thought-executing fires”). As Mitchell says, in this picture the flames “are to be seen as inside him, as an externalization or projection of his consciousness.”28
It could also be said that Orc embodies an aspect of our own consciousness. But he is not the only aspect, and in this picture his expression is uneasy, for he has a mighty antagonist who is equally fundamental to consciousness. That character Blake calls Urizen, a white-bearded patriarch who is associated with God the Father, and with patriarchs of every kind from kings and bishops down to ordinary fathers.
26. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 12
In a visual parallel to the image of Orc in flames, Urizen appears in a similar pose (figure 27), although balanced on the opposite foot, and not naked but robed in a heavy, full-length gown. In the text immediately below,
The terror answered: “I am Orc, wreathed round the accursèd tree.
The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning gins to break;
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust, and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall gather the leaves.”29
The accursed tree is the prohibited tree of knowledge, at whose foot the biblical serpent tempted Eve. The implication is that to the forces of reaction, Orc does appear a diabolical serpent, twining around the forbidden tree. Like the activist Satan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his mission is to smash the repressive law that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone.
Urizen is sitting on heavy clouds, embracing them like boulders, while he gazes gloomily down on the world below. His expression is no more hopeful than Orc’s in the companion picture, but everything about Urizen expresses heaviness, whereas Orc rises upward in his flames, spreading his fingers to catch the updraft. Urizen’s clouds are modeled with elaborate cross-hatching of the kind used in commercial copy engraving, and it has been argued that Blake thought of this laborious technique as a visual sign of repressive control.30
Northrop Frye once described the struggle of Urizen and Orc as an “Orc cycle,” in which every revolution degenerates into repression and every Orc becomes a Urizen. Frye was so persuasive that generations of critics adopted his idea, but in fact there is no basis for it in the poems themselves. Blake understood very well that revolutions can turn cruel, as was happening in France, but Orc and Urizen are not two names for the same thing. An older commentator, Milton Percival, described Orc more accurately as “a deathless phenomenon, the spirit of revolution that arises when energy is repressed.”31
27. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 10
Multiple Serpents
Even in this optimistic early poem, Blake was thinking about revolution from multiple points of view, and his creative deployment of symbols was well suited to expressing that complexity. In conventional art, iconic symbols usually have a stable, consistent meaning; thus a cross signifies Christianity, a pair of scales justice. But Blake’s symbols are dynamic, not iconic. We learn what they mean by observing what they do, and their actions change according to context. Another way of say
ing this is that they play active roles in an ever-evolving myth, and since the myth is being invented by Blake himself, we can’t rely on traditional associations, even when he borrows materials from the Bible or Milton or the Bhagavad Gita.32
The imagery of the serpent is an excellent example of the range of implications in a single dynamic Blakean symbol. The sequel to America is a poem called Europe: A Prophecy, with a startling title page (color plate 15). This spectacular reptile is usually thought to symbolize Orc’s rebellious energy, as perceived by the forces of repression, and perhaps recalling the snake with three coils in the American “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Erdman sees the image as entirely positive, “embodying energy, desire, phallic power, the fiery tongue,” but other interpreters suspect a negative message. Morton Paley asks, “Does the grinning, coiled Orc serpent of the title page suggest that although Energy promises apocalyptic freedom, it actually betrays man to the cycle of history?”33
During the course of Europe, the serpent does in fact become a symbol of nature-worshipping repression. An “ancient temple serpent-formed” is constructed of huge stones in a winding pattern, like the one at Avebury that in Blake’s time was attributed to Druid priests (see figure 38, page 193, below).
Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night. Then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed
And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh.
Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned.34
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 10
