William Blake

by Arthur Symons

But read the whole book as if it were prose, following the sense for its own sake, and you will find that the prose, when it is not a mere catalogue, has generally a fine biblical roll and swing in it, a rhythm of fine oratory; while if you read each line as if it were meant to be a metrical unit you will come upon such difficulties as this:

'Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues
of the'

That is one line, and the next adds 'Heathen.' There may seem to be small reason for such an arrangement of the lines if we read Jerusalem in the useful printed text of Mr. Russell and Mr. Maclagan; but the reason will be seen if we turn to the original engraved page, where we shall see that Blake had set down in the margin a lovely little bird with outstretched wings, and that the tip of the bird's wing almost touches the last letter of the 'the' and leaves no room for another word. That such a line was meant to be metrical is unthinkable, as unthinkable as that:

'Los stood and stamped the earth, then he threw down
his hammer in rage&
In fury'

Has any reason for existing in this form beyond the mere chance of a hand that writes until all the space of a given line is filled. Working as he did within those limits of his hand's space, he would accustom himself to write for the most part, and and especially when his imagination was most vitally awake, in lines that came roughly within those limits. Thus it will often happen that the most beautiful passages will have the nearest resemblance to a regular metrical scheme, as in such lines as these:

In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.
He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro'
heaven above,
He chokes up the paths of the sky: the Moon is
leprous as snow:
Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest on
high Mona:
Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease over
Albion.
The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earth
is sulphur,
And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a
withering gourd.'

Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'

Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the title-page of Jerusalem, but, with the exception of the two plates called The Ghost of Abel, engraved in 1822, this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities, literally, as he apprehended them. Just as, in the designs which his hand drew as best it could, according to its limited and partly false knowledge, from the visions which his imagination saw with perfect clearness, he was often unable to translate that vision into its real equivalent in design, so in his attempts to put these other mental visions into words he was hampered by an equally false method, and often by reminiscences of what passed for 'picturesque' writing in the work of his contemporaries. He was, after all, of his time, though he was above it, and just as he only knew Michelangelo through bad reproductions, and could never get his own design wholly free, malleable, and virgin to his 'shaping spirit of imagination,' so, in spite of all his marvelous lyrical discoveries, made when his mind was less burdened by the weight of a controlling message, he found himself, when he attempted to make an intelligible system out of the 'improvisations of the spirit,' and to express that system with literal accuracy, the half-helpless captive of formal words, conventional rhythms, a language not drawn direct from its source. Thus we find, in the Prophetic Books, neither achieved poems nor an achieved philosophy. The philosophy has reached us only in splendid fragments (the glimmering of stars out of separate corners of a dark sky), and we shall never know to what extent these fragments were once parts of a whole. Had they been ever really fused, this would have been the only system of philosophy made entirely out of the raw material of poetry. As it has come to us unachieved, the world has still to wait for a philosophy untouched by the materialism of the prose intelligence.

In the Prophetic Books Blake labours at the creation of a myth, which may be figured as the representation in space of a vast spiritual tragedy. It is the tragedy of Man, a tragedy in which the first act is creation. Milton was content to begin with 'Man's first disobedience,' but Blake would track the human soul back into chaos, and beyond. He knows, like Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, that 'above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and eternal, which, when all created things perish, does not perish'; and he sees the soul's birth in that 'inward spiritual world,' from which it falls to mortal life and the body, as into a death. He sees its new, temporal life, hung round with fears and ambushes, out of which, by a new death, the death of that mortal self which separates it from eternity, it may reawaken, even in this life, into the eternal life of imagination. The persons of the drama are the powers and passions of Man, and the spiritual forces which surround him, and are the 'states' through which he passes. Man is seen, as Blake saw all things, fourfold: Man's Humanity, his Spectre, who is Reason, his Emanation, who is Imagination, his Shadow, who is Desire. And the states through which Man passes, friendly or hostile, energies of good or of evil, are also four: the Four Zoas, who are the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel, and are called Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas, and Urthona (or, to mortals, Los). Each Zoa has his Emanation: Ahania, who is the emanation of Intellect, and is named 'eternal delight'; Vala, the emanation of Emotion, who is lovely deceit, and the visible beauty of Nature; Enion, who is the emanation of the Senses, and typifies the maternal instinct; Enitharmon, who is the emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty. The drama is the division, death, and resurrection, in an eternal circle, of the powers of man and of the powers in whose midst he fights and struggles. Of this incommensurable action we are told only in broken hints, as of a chorus crying outside doors where deeds are being done in darkness. Images pass before us, make their gesture, and are gone; the words spoken are ambiguous, and seem to have an under meaning which it is essential for us to apprehend. We see motions of building and of destruction, higher than the topmost towers of the world, and deeper than the abyss of the sea; souls pass through furnaces, and are remade by Time's hammer on the anvil of space; there are obscure crucifixions, and Last Judgments return and are re-enacted.

To Blake, the Prophetic Books were to be the new religious books of a religion which was not indeed new, for it was the Everlasting Gospel' of Jesus, but, because it had been seen anew by Swedenborg and by Wesley and by 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love,' among whom was Teresa, seemed to require a new interpretation to the imagination. Blake wrote when the eighteenth century was coming to an end; he announced the new dispensation which was to come, Swedenborg had said, with the year (which was the year of Blake's birth) 1757. He looked forward steadfastly to the time when 'Sexes must vanish and cease to be,' when 'all their crimes, their punishments, their accusations of sin, all their jealousies, revenges, murders, hidings of cruelty in deceit, appear only on the outward spheres of visionary Space and Time, in the shadows of possibility by mutual forgiveness for evermore, and in the vision and the prophecy, that we may foresee and avoid the terrors of Creation and Redemption and Judgment.' He spoke to literalists, rationalists, materialists; to an age whose very infidels doubted only facts, and whose deists affirmed no more than that man was naturally religious. The rationalist's denial of everything beyond the evidence of his senses seemed to him a criminal blindness; and he has engraved a separate sheet with images and statements of the affirmation: 'There is no Natural Religion.' To Blake the literal meaning of things seemed to be of less than no importance. To worship the 'Goddess Nature' was to worship the 'God of this World,' and so to be an atheist, as even Wordsworth seemed to him to be. Religion was asleep, with Art and Literature in its arms: Blake's was the voice of the awakening angel. What he cried was that only eternal and invisible things were true, and that visible temporal things were a veil and a delusion. In this he knew himself to be on the side of Wesley and Whitefield, and that Voltaire and Rousseau, the voices of the passing age, were against him. He called them 'frozen sons of the feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton, and Locke.' Wesley and Whitefield he calls the 'two servants' of God, his 'two witnesses.'