It was with this conviction that Blake returned to London in September 1803, where he resumed work on a vast symbolic poem he had begun six years previously, at first entitled Vala and afterward The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgment of Albion the Ancient Man. It grew to 140 pages in manuscript, some carefully copied out and the rest densely scribbled over, and was never published. But elements from it would be incorporated in the two long “prophecies,” Milton and Jerusalem, which were his first works in relief etching since 1795.
An Artistic Conversion
If the years at Felpham were the seedbed of the great myth that informs those poems, the decisive impulse to dedicate himself to it came to Blake in 1804, in still another conversion experience. This one was artistic as well as spiritual. He wrote joyfully to Hayley:
I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. . . . I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters. O lovely Felpham, parent of immortal friendship, to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years’ rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy! Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.
What happened was that after a lifetime of knowing the old masters only in engraved copies, Blake came face to face with actual paintings. These were a nine-hundred-piece collection which an Austrian, Count Truchsess, hoped to sell to the British nation. Among them were, according to the catalog, a Last Judgment by Michelangelo, a triptych of the Virgin attributed to his school, a Woman Taken in Adultery by Giulio Romano, and several paintings by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, whom Blake is known to have admired. There were also a large number of Dutch and Flemish paintings, including seven by Antony van Dyck, eight by Rembrandt van Rijn, and five by Rubens.16
It was soon apparent to experts that most of these paintings were fakes and practically worthless, but a skillful copy can give a good sense of the original. Blake suddenly grasped that he had allowed himself to stray from his artistic vision. He was usually careful about dates, and when he mentions “exactly” twenty years of error, he must have been remembering his father’s death in 1784, when a small inheritance allowed him to open a print shop and optimistically launch an artistic career. Since then he had tried conscientiously to imitate the most admired Venetian and Dutch painters, Titian and Rembrandt above all, but at the Truchsessian Gallery he suddenly realized how destructively his imagination had been invaded by theirs. Venetian painting, as already noted, featured colors that merged into each other, altogether unlike Blake’s own characteristic distinct outlines and solid colors. And Dutch painting was minutely realistic in a way that seemed to him the very opposite of visionary insight. He would have agreed with Michelangelo’s statement: “In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some people, is done without reason or art.” Michelangelo also commented that a great painting might depict a single human figure, and Blake thought so too.17
This Truchsessian Gallery revelation was so crucial a turning point that Blake’s two long prophetic poems, though not completed for many years after that, both bear the date “1804” on their title pages.
8. UNDERSTANDING BLAKE’S MYTH
“I Must Create a System”
FREUD once observed, “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.” Each version of Blake’s myth ends in an apocalypse that makes all things new, but in his actual experience it was the struggle with those demons that tormented him. Still, the endless quest for self-knowledge was valuable in itself. Freud also said, “Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps you will avoid falling ill in future.” In Blake’s more optimistic words,
O search and see: turn your eyes inward: open O thou world
Of love and harmony in man: expand thy ever lovely gates.1
Another psychiatrist, Anthony Storr, notes that creative people are often distinguished by “an exceptional degree of division between opposites” and that they possess “an exceptional awareness of this division.” Artistic creation can be an attempt to resolve that inner division, and it was surely this motivation that kept Blake laboring at his vast, complicated myth even though he did so in complete obscurity. Only four copies of Milton were ever printed in his lifetime, and five of Jerusalem. William Hayley, long before Blake knew him, had called for a new kind of epic that would embody “extremes of harmony and discord,” for which a “new mythology” would need to be created in order to express the “copious spring of visionary force.”2 Right under his nose Blake was doing exactly that, and Hayley, who may never even have looked at his poems, was too conventional to realize it.
As he continued to work on The Four Zoas and then to quarry the manuscript for Milton and Jerusalem, Blake’s unique myth grew richer, subtler, and stranger. “I must create a system,” he wrote in Jerusalem, “or be enslaved by another man’s.” “System” does not mean intellectualized abstraction, for “I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Instead, it means a dynamic myth of the self and of the entire universe, drawing on existing philosophies and mythologies but uniquely Blake’s own. He speaks also of “striving with systems to deliver individuals from those systems.” The expression “striving with” can be understood in two senses: working within his own personal system, but also using it to wrestle with the systems of others.3
The early Lambeth Books—The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, Europe—had been inspired by hope for revolutionary change. Now, a decade later, the emphasis is on an interior breakthrough and mutual forgiveness.
Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonished at me,
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards into the worlds of thought: into Eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
O Saviour pour upon me thy spirit of meekness and love:
Annihilate the selfhood in me, be thou all my life!4
This Saviour is the Jesus of the Songs of Innocence, fully human, but also a divine presence that is greater than any individual person.
Blake’s myth went through many permutations, and each of the three long poems explores it from a different perspective. The Four Zoas develops a symbolism of the self as constituted by four psychic components, the Zoas, who collapse into fragmentation and then struggle to regain wholeness. Milton is about the Puritan poet’s quest to renounce his errors, reunite with his feminine element, and overcome selfhood. And Jerusalem is about the rehabilitation of the universal man, Albion, who is at once the English people and all of humanity.
A foundational idea is expressed in verses that Blake sent from Felpham to his friend Thomas Butts:
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me.
’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep.
Single vision is the positivist worldview of empiricism, sometimes called Ulro by Blake, which accepts nothing as real unless it can
be mathematically expressed and measured. Twofold vision belongs to Generation, the cycle of birth and death, haunted always by mortality. In some ways Beulah (a biblical name meaning “the married land”) resembles the Christian idea of heaven:
There is a place where contrarieties are equally true;
This place is called Beulah. It is a pleasant lovely shadow
Where no dispute can come. . . .
Beulah is evermore created around Eternity, appearing
To the inhabitants of Eden around them on all sides.
But Beulah to its inhabitants appears within each district
As the beloved infant in his mother’s bosom round encircled
With arms of love and pity and sweet compassion. But to
The sons of Eden the moony habitations of Beulah
Are from Great Eternity a mild and pleasant rest.5
This is very like Blake’s Innocence, and it differs from the traditional heaven in important ways: it is fully alive to sexual pleasure, and it is a temporary place of rest, not a final destination.
As was evident in A Sunshine Holiday, from Beulah one can go either down or up. Below is Generation, the realm of birth and death, in which sexual relations can turn possessive and even sadistic—the world of Experience. Above is Eden: not the peace that passes understanding or the saints’ everlasting rest, as preachers commonly described it, but an active strife of contraries that reflects the dynamism of human nature. Eden experiences a kind of warfare, but spiritual warfare that is creative and constructive.
It was a profound insight that no heaven worth imagining could exist without energetic activity. Like many of his contemporaries, including Hegel of whom he may never have heard, Blake believed that conflict and opposition are fundamental to life. And it follows that although his ideal Eden aspires to unity, such a state can never be static. Its inhabitants, a brotherhood of Eternals, are entirely capable of confusion and error, and one or more of them may fall back into the lower levels of existence. Just such a fall, described as nightmarish slumber, happens to “Albion the Ancient Man” at the beginning of The Four Zoas.
Trying to Understand the Long Poems
Many parts of the long poems are difficult, at times impenetrably so. Even specialists can be frustrated by Blake’s obscurity; the time is long past when critics followed Northrop Frye in dismissing as imaginatively impaired anyone who found him obscure. One commentary on The Four Zoas compares trying to understand it to picking up a bowling ball that has no finger holes.6
The fourth and final book of Jerusalem is headed by this quatrain:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
That invitation is far from easy to act on. A leading specialist observes that although Jerusalem can be thrilling to read, “If anyone has been able to follow that string I don’t know it.” Another says, “As a prophet Blake seems to presuppose a reader equipped like himself. It seems unlikely that any such reader has yet appeared.”7
Coleridge was familiar with Blake’s Neoplatonic sources, but even the Songs of Innocence and of Experience provoked this comment from him: “You perhaps smile at my calling another poet a mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common sense compared with Mr. Blake, apo-or rather ana-calyptic poet and painter.” “Apocalyptic” means “taking off a veil,” as in the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. “Anacalyptic,” then, would mean “putting on a veil,” which is indeed what Blake does, inventing new symbols and deploying them in bewildering ways. Coleridge also referred acutely to Blake’s “despotism in symbols.”8
Blake’s long prophecies used to be called epics, but that makes no sense. An epic is a narrative based on strict chronology. Even when the narration begins in the middle, as in the Iliad or Paradise Lost, the essential sequence is never in question. More recently it has been fashionable to call Blake’s method cinematic, but in films the continuity of scenes is normally established by careful editing. Blake has no interest in conventional continuity, and in his poems multiple versions of the “same” events occur over and over again. Since he changed the order of plates in the various copies, they don’t even recur in the same sequence.
A better analogy than film is music. One commentator calls the poems symphonic, with “broken continuities, stop-and-start development, repetitions, key changes, and tempo contrasts.” Another says that they resemble oratorios with solos and choruses; a third speaks persuasively of “performing Blake.”9
For Blake the most important model is the final and most baffling book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation. Remarkably, what the eighth-century theologian Alcuin of York says of that book can be applied word for word to Blake’s Jerusalem:
This is the sequence of the narration. Sometimes it starts with the arrival of the Lord and carries through to the end of time. Sometimes it starts with the arrival of the Lord, and before it finishes, it returns to the beginning, and by repeating in different figures both what it has left out and what it has said, it hastens to the second coming of the Lord. . . . Sometimes, in order to narrate, it temporarily abandons its themes and introduces something totally unconnected. . . . Sometimes, in this kind of style, a figure is changed in such a way that it is confused, as it were, with other things so that it signifies something quite other than what it began to represent.10
It helps to read Blake’s poems aloud. In an address “To the Public” with which Jerusalem begins, he calls himself “a true orator” for whom even blank verse is too confining; and in The Four Zoas he declares, “The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.” He was greatly interested in a theory lately advanced by Bishop Robert Lowth that Hebrew poetry was based on rhythm and parallelism, and his increasingly long poetic lines refuse metrical regularity in any familiar sense. They are sometimes called “fourteeners,” an old-fashioned term for the style of verse favored by some earlier writers, with seven stresses to a line instead of the five of pentameter, as in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid:
Now have I brought a work to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrath, Nor sword, nor fire, nor fretting age with all the force it hath. . . .
But Blake’s stresses, though always rhythmic, are unpredictable:
The sóng of the áged móther which shóok the héavens with wráth
Héaring the márch of lóng resóunding stróng heróic vérse
Márshalled in órder for the dáy of intelléctual báttle.11
Most readers will probably hear seven stresses in the middle line, but six in the first line and five in the last.
David Fuller has performed a valuable experiment by recasting the printed layout of Blake’s lines as if they were modernist poetry, which approximates what happens if one reads them aloud with proper expression. Here is a passage from The Four Zoas that may well seem congested and awkward as Blake wrote it:
His nostrils breathe a fiery flame, his locks are like the forests
Of wild beasts, there the lion glares, the tyger and wolf howl there,
And there the eagle hides her young in cliffs and precipices.
His bosom is like starry heaven expanded, all the stars
Sing round. There waves the harvest and the vintage rejoices, the springs
Flow into rivers of delight; there the spontaneous flowers
Drink, laugh and sing, the grasshopper, the emmet and the fly;
The golden moth builds there a house and spreads her silken bed.
How different the same words seem in the patterns that the speaking voice would give them!
His nostrils breathe a fiery flame.
His locks are like the forests of wild beasts,
there the lion glares,
the tyger and wolf howl there,
and there the eagle hides her young in cliffs and precipices.
His bosom is like starry heaven expanded; all the star
s sing round.
There waves the harvest and the vintage rejoices,
the springs flow into rivers of delight;
there the spontaneous flowers drink, laugh and sing,
the grasshopper the emmet and the fly;
the golden moth builds there a house and spreads her silken bed.12
Satanic Mills and Arrows of Desire
Though Blake no longer expected imminent political and social revolution, there was never anything otherworldly about his message, which always focused on imaginative renovation of this world. Expressions of profound moral outrage appear throughout Milton and Jerusalem, together with occasional lyric passages of great beauty. One of these lyrics, commonly known as Jerusalem though Blake didn’t call it that, may be his best-loved poem, and it has inspired people who hold a wide range of social and political opinions. Confusingly, it doesn’t in fact come from the poem entitled Jerusalem but instead is from Milton.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Immediately following this poem in Milton, Blake quotes Moses: “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.”13
“And did those feet” recalls a legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail—the chalice used at the Last Supper—to Glastonbury in England, and that Jesus then came to bless the church that housed it. Feet are emphasized to confirm his physical presence on the land, with an allusion as well to Isaiah: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good.”14
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