Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Collectively, Vala and Tirzah represent a force that Blake insists on calling the Female Will, and he gives them an ally in still another version of Mother Nature, Rahab, who is associated with the five senses. (In the Book of Joshua, Rahab is a harlot who conceals Joshua’s spies from their enemies; Blake must have chosen the name for its associations with harlotry, not for that helpful service to the Israelites.)

  Throughout the permutations of Blake’s myth, the emanations tend to divide into two distinct camps. Enion and Ahania, counterparts of Tharmas and Urizen, are passive and sad, but essentially positive. It is Enion to whom Blake gives the heartbreaking song of experience previously quoted—“What is the price of experience? do men buy it for a song, / Or wisdom for a dance in the street?”15—but most of the time she and Ahania are dim and shadowy. Far otherwise are Urthona’s Enitharmon and Luvah’s Vala, the female aspects of imagination and sexuality.

  Enitharmon, like Keats’s Belle Dame sans Merci, entices but withholds and torments, and Vala presides over the tyrannous cycle of nature:

  She cries: “The human is but a worm, and thou O male: thou art

  Thyself female, a male; a breeder of seed: a son and husband; and lo,

  The human divine is woman’s shadow, a vapor in the summer’s heat.

  Go assume papal dignity, thou spectre, thou male harlot! Arthur

  Divide into the kings of Europe in times remote, O woman-born

  And woman-nourished and woman-educated and woman-scorned!”

  By participating in procreation, the male becomes female in a peculiar negative sense, and yet resents being woman-educated and woman-scorned. Arthur is apparently mentioned as an example of a king brought down by a woman.16

  One would think it unarguable that it is men, not women, who are responsible for war, but according to Enitharmon women are actually to blame. In this context, we encounter the secret tabernacle yet again, along with imagery of bloody sacrifices by Mayan priestesses:

  And thus the warriors cry, in the hot day of victory, in songs:

  “Look, the beautiful daughter of Albion sits naked upon the stone,

  Her panting victim beside her, her heart is drunk with blood

  Though her brain is not drunk with wine: she goes forth from Albion

  In pride of beauty: in cruelty of holiness, in the brightness

  Of her tabernacle and her ark and secret place. . . .

  I must rush again to war, for the virgin has frowned and refused.

  Sometimes I curse and sometimes bless thy fascinating beauty.

  Once man was occupied in intellectual pleasures and energies,

  But now my soul is harrowed with grief and fear and love and desire

  And now I hate and now I love and intellect is no more:

  There is no time for any thing but the torments of love and desire.”

  David Fuller comments, “Vala’s prohibitions act like a funnel down which the mind is dragged. The free play of intellect narrows into an obsession with the love that is denied it; love denied narrows to sexual desire; frustrated desire creates an inward chaos, a feeling which is focused and channeled outward into violence.”17 Surely the obsession here is not just the warrior’s but Blake’s.

  One of the bizarre sketches in the Four Zoas manuscript traces Vala’s progress from worm to serpent to dragon (figure 43). In the lines of verse that accompany it, Luvah, the Zoa who corresponds to Vala, is speaking:

  “If I indeed am Vala’s king, and ye O sons of men

  The workmanship of Luvah’s hands; in times of everlasting,

  When I called forth the earthworm from the cold and dark obscure,

  I nurtured her, I fed her with my rains and dews, she grew

  A scaled serpent, yet I fed her though she hated me.

  43. Vala manuscript, page 26

  Day after day she fed upon the mountains in Luvah’s sight;

  I brought her through the wilderness, a dry and thirsty land,

  And I commanded springs to rise for her in the black desert

  Till she became a dragon winged, bright and poisonous.”

  This picture is like a Rorschach test, and each interpreter will have his or her own way of thinking about it. The psychoanalytic critic Brenda Webster offers a comprehensive analysis: “The first sketch of a flying woman with butterfly wings . . . suggests a voracious sexual organ: her frizzy hairdo resembles pubic hair, and Blake gives her a huge (erased) vulva. In the next figure the wings have become those of a bat, and the woman rides a penis and scrotum (complete with pubic hair). Below her is a woman with a phallically dangerous beak, scaly tail, and clearly defined vulva. . . . The final illustration is of a huge dragon with a woman’s head, a serpent’s neck, and bat wings. She has three breasts, the last ambiguously placed on her lower abdomen, and a long scaly tail.”18

  However one interprets these images, they are self-evidently obsessive, and no one is obliged to accept Blake’s system at face value. Yet the myth also contains profound insights into the divided self, a condition that many people experience to some extent and that Blake experienced to a terrifying degree. Even if his fears and obsessions did damage the integrity of his imaginative work, he could never have created it without them.

  Beatrice and Jerusalem

  Although Blake reluctantly acknowledged that his prophetic poems were never likely to reach readers who could understand them, in his last years he did undertake an ambitious project for which recognition seemed possible and in which his symbolism of the female surfaced again. This was a series of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. There are just over a hundred of them, many mere sketches but some gorgeously finished. Seven were also engraved, and he hoped to engrave them all.

  Blake got so interested in the project that he began to learn Italian. He had some sympathy with Roman Catholicism, unlike most radical Protestants who saw modern Rome, like the ancient one, as the Whore of Babylon. According to Gilchrist he would assert, “rather in an opposing mode, that the Romish Church was the only one which taught the forgiveness of sins.” It is true that the Calvinist tradition emphasized guilt and damnation, whereas the Catholic confessional made forgiveness seem not only possible but normal. Gilchrist understood that for Blake “forgiveness of sins was the cornerstone of Christianity.” And although he hated the Catholic Church for its repressive theology and its institutional power, he admired Catholic spirituality. “He was fond of the works of St. Theresa,” Samuel Palmer said, “and often quoted them with other writers on the interior life.”19

  One of the most spectacular of the Dante illustrations is Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car (color plate 34). Bizarre though the imagery may appear, it comes directly from the Purgatorio. The episode needs to be read in full, since it shows how closely Blake followed the text even while systematically challenging it. In particular he detested Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. That attitude, of course, was common among many Protestants, but Blake had two reasons of his own for adopting it. One was his rejection of the idea that sex is impure and that Jesus must therefore not have been conceived in the usual way. But the other reason was his distrust of maternity itself. He thought that venerating the Virgin Mary was worshipping nature, and he associated her with his nature goddesses Tirzah and Vala. In a commentary on the Dante illustrations he declared, “Everything in Dante’s Commedia shows that for tyrannical purposes he has made this world the foundation of all, and the goddess Nature and not the Holy Ghost.”20

  In the Purgatorio, four and twenty elders (representing the twenty-four books of the Old Testament) sing the praises of Beatrice, Dante’s guide. And then:

  As in the sky star follows after star,

  so after these, four living Creatures came,

  each with a wreath of verdant foliage crowned.

  And each of them was feathered with six wings,

  their feathers full of eyes; and these were such,

  as, were they living, Argus’ eyes would be. . . . />
  But read thou in Ezekiel, who depicts them,

  as from the sky’s cold parts he saw them move,

  accompanied by wind and clouds and fire. . . .

  The space extending ’tween the four contained

  a triumph-chariot moving on two wheels,

  which came along drawn by a griffin’s neck.

  Both of his wings the latter stretched on high

  between the mid banner and the three and three,

  so that, by cleaving it, he injured none;

  So high they rose that they were lost to sight.

  His members were of gold as far as bird

  he was, and white the others mixed with red. . . .

  At its right wheel three ladies in a ring

  came dancing on; the first so red, that hardly

  would she be noticed, if in fire she were;

  And such the second was, as if her flesh

  and very bones were made of emerald;

  the third one looked like newly fallen snow.21

  This is the vision of Ezekiel that meant so much to Blake—but with female figures added.

  The griffin traditionally represented Christ, since a lion with the head of an eagle could suggest the union of human and divine. The chariot is the Church Triumphant, and the three ladies are the theological virtues of Faith (white), pointing to the Bible; Hope (green), described elsewhere by Dante as dancing; and Charity (red). Charity was often depicted with infants, and in Blake’s picture her body is lined with them. As for Beatrice herself:

  Within and out the car, a lady, crowned

  with a wreath of olives o’er a pure white veil,

  appeared before me, ’neath a cloak of green,

  clothed with the color of a living flame.

  At far right in Blake’s picture is the pilgrim Dante, gazing up meekly at Beatrice.

  Closely though he has conformed to the text, Blake makes two notable changes. One is to give Beatrice a golden crown instead of an olive wreath, and the other is to represent the chariot wheel as a dynamic swirl. Crowns almost always have negative implications in his pictures, and Beatrice appears here as Queen of Heaven, clad in a diaphanous robe that resembles the veil of Vala. Just as Blake denied the existence of a Urizenic patriarch, he had no use whatever for a heavenly matriarch.

  As for the swirling wheel, which is not in Dante, we have seen it before in Blake’s painting Ezekiel’s Vision. It also suggests another Blakean symbol, the vortex, which is too arcane to describe here, and the Seven Eyes of God, a progressive intuition of the divine that will be discussed later.22

  As Blake continued to labor at his myth, his distrust—or dread—of the female threatened to overwhelm everything else. Probably it was awareness of this tendency that impelled him to imagine a positive female counterweight to Vala, Tirzah, and Rahab. That counterweight is Jerusalem, and her name furnishes the title of the last and longest prophetic book: Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion. She is also, in some never-explained way, the bride of Jesus.

  Thus shall the male and female live the life of Eternity

  Because the Lamb of God creates himself a bride and wife

  That we his children evermore may live in Jerusalem

  Which now descendeth out of heaven, a city yet a woman,

  Mother of myriads redeemed and born in her spiritual palaces,

  By a new spiritual birth regenerated from death.

  In the final lines of Jerusalem she becomes a universal emanation, in whom even inanimate substances are humanized:

  All human forms identified, even tree metal earth and stone, all

  Human forms identified, living, going forth and returning wearied

  Into the planetary lives of years months days and hours; reposing

  And then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality.

  And I heard the name of their emanations: they are named Jerusalem.23

  “I heard” sets the vision in the past, but the verbs express ongoing activity—living, going forth, returning, reposing, awakening.

  Two pictures in Jerusalem illustrate this rehabilitation of the female. One is the title page (color plate 35), remarkable for its brilliant coloring. Hoping to sell this copy of the poem at a high price, Blake made it as opulent as he could, and some of the lettering was done with actual gold leaf. Jerusalem appears at the bottom as one of several figures whom Essick aptly describes as hovering “between the human and the lepidopterous.”24

  Jerusalem is asleep here, just as Albion will sleep through much of the poem. She has three sets of wings. Those at the left contain a sun and earth, and the middle ones contain a waxing and waning moon, suggestive of the cycle of mortality. The lowest pair of wings seems to represent a union of sky and earth: between branching rootlike structures, stars shine through. Folded, these lowest wings are reminiscent of the infant cocoon in For Children. All of these associations evoke the maternal role of the female; as for the sexual, Jerusalem’s limply hanging head and arm recall Fuseli’s Nightmare. The other female figures, probably Jerusalem’s daughters, are evidently mourning her deathlike sleep. No one has satisfactorily explained the weird creature hovering at the top; Erdman calls it a fairy but doesn’t say why.25

  Unexpectedly, eighty-six plates further along in this enormous poem, the images on the title page are explicitly described:

  I see thy form O lovely mild Jerusalem, winged with six wings

  In the opacous bosom of the sleeper, lovely threefold

  In head and heart and reins, three universes of love and beauty.

  Thy forehead bright; holiness to the Lord with gates of pearl

  Reflects Eternity; beneath thy azure wings of feathery down

  Ribbed delicate and clothed with feathered gold and azure and purple

  From thy white shoulders shadowing, purity in holiness!

  Thence feathered with soft crimson of the ruby bright as fire

  Spreading into the azure wings which like a canopy

  Bends over thy immortal head in which Eternity dwells.26

  So the butterfly of immortality will ultimately prevail. On the title page, however, Jerusalem is sound asleep in the death-in-life of Generation. It will be the labor of this long poem to wake her and Albion up.

  In a plate near the middle of the poem (figure 44) Jerusalem stands at the center, resisting the attempt of Vala to lure her into the church of Babylon, which has a dome and cross like Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Blake preferred Gothic form to classical, and the church at right resembles Westminster Abbey. Jerusalem seems to be locking eyes with Vala; Erdman describes her as “almost mesmerized.” Alarmed, her three daughters urge her to break away, and the one who is already soaring into the air points upward. Blake’s androgynous ideal is apparent too. When his women are naked they are almost as muscular as the men; as Connolly says, “they come from the body-building school.”27 He had seen more than enough limp, debile women in the art of his day.

  Nobody seems to have noticed a visual allusion that is surely relevant here. Jerusalem’s posture and her flowing hair resemble those of Venus rising from the sea in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. And the waves at the bottom of the picture, which Erdman identifies as the Thames, look more like ocean surf. In the Botticelli painting Venus is tender and lovely, waiting while an airborne male and female—the wind Zephyr and the breeze Aura—prepare to waft her ashore. At the right-hand side of the picture, the goddess of the seasons waits with a flowery robe to cover Venus’s nakedness. But in classical mythology Venus is not just the goddess of love; she is also the force of reproduction in the natural world. And that, of course, Blake deeply distrusts. So in his picture the flowery cloak is replaced by the veil of Vala, who stands ominously at the “sinister” left-hand side.

  Against Natural Supernaturalism

  With the Sussex countryside and the sea as inspiration, Blake filled Milton with imagery from the natural world (far fewer natural images appear in Jerusalem). Since nature is a ma
jor theme in Romantic poetry, it might seem obvious that in doing so he was performing as a Romantic poet. But his conception of nature was very different from that of Wordsworth, whom he frequently criticized, and of Coleridge and Keats, whom he never mentioned. What Blake deplored in Wordsworth was natural supernaturalism, as M. H. Abrams has defined it: the attempt to locate in nature the ultimate values that religion traditionally provided. “Nature never did betray the heart that loves her,” Wordsworth declares in Tintern Abbey, as if “she” were a maternal deity. In his Excursion Wordsworth declares that the mind is “fitted” to the external world, and in the same way “the external world is fitted to the mind.” In the margin of his copy of the poem Blake retorted, “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting and fitted; I know better and please your Lordship.” Blake thought that nature as described by Wordsworth doesn’t deserve love and will certainly betray us. Blake did admire one of Wordsworth’s poems, the Platonically inspired Ode: Intimations of Immortality, in which children trail clouds of glory as they enter this world from eternity. “It was remarkable,” Crabb Robinson said, “that the parts of Wordsworth’s ode which he most enjoyed were the most obscure and those I the least like and comprehend.”28

  44. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32

  Coleridge occasionally seems closer to Blake than Wordsworth does. The incantatory Kubla Khan is a visionary poem—literally a vision, if it’s true that it originated in an opium dream. But Coleridge’s usual style is meditative blank verse, with close attention to physical details in a very un-Blakean manner. In Frost at Midnight he watches his infant son sleeping by the fireside:

  Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

  Whether the summer clothe the general earth

  With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

  Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

  Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

  Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

  Heard only in the trances of the blast,