William Blake

by Arthur Symons

But it seemed to him that he could go deeper into the Bible than they, in their practical eagerness, had gone. 'What are the treasures of Heaven,' he asked, 'that we are to lay up for ourselves—are they any other than Mental Studies and Performances?' 'Is the Holy Ghost,' he asked, 'any other than an intellectual Fountain?' It seemed to him that he could harmonise many things once held to be discordant, and adjust the many varying interpretations of the Bible and the other books of ancient religions by a universal application of what had been taken in too personal a way. Hence many of the puzzling 'correspondences' of English cities and the tribe of Judah, of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord.'

There is an outcry in Jerusalem:

'No individual ought to appropriate to Himself
Or to his Emanation, any of the Universal
Characteristics
Of David or of Eve, of the Woman, of the Lord,
Of Reuben or of Benjamin, of Joseph or Judah or
Levi.
Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal
Attributes
Are the Blasphemous Selfhoods and must be broken
asunder.
A Vegetable Christ and a Virgin Eve, are the
Hermaphroditic
Blasphemy: by his Maternal Birth he put off that
Evil One,
And his Maternal Humanity must be put off
Eternally,
Lest the Sexual Generation swallow up
Regeneration:
Come, Lord Jesus, take on Thee the Satanic Body of
Holiness!'

Exactly what is meant here will be seen more clearly if we compare it with a much earlier statement of the same doctrine, in the poem 'To Tirzah' in the Songs of Experience, and the comparison will show us all the difference between the art of Blake in 1794, and what seemed to him the needful manner of his message ten years later. 'Tirzah' is Blake's name for Natural Religion.

'Whatever is Born of Mortal Birth
Must be consumed with the Earth,
To rise from Generation free:
Then what have I to do with thee?
The Sexes sprung from Shame and Pride
Blow'd in the morn; in evening died;
But Mercy changed Death into Sleep;
The Sexes rose to work and weep.
Thou Mother of my Mortal part
With cruelty didst mould my Heart,
And with false, self-deceiving Tears
Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes, and Ears;
Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay,
And me to Mortal Life betray:
The Death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?

Here is expressed briefly and exquisitely a large part of the foundation of Blake's philosophy: that birth into the world, Christ's or ours, is a fall from eternal realities into the material affections of the senses, which are deceptions, and bind us under the bondage of nature, our 'Mother,' who is the Law; and that true life is to be regained only by the death of that self which cuts us off from our part in eternity, which we enter through the eternal reality of the imagination. In the poem, the death of Jesus symbolises that deliverance; in the passage from Jerusalem the Church's narrow conception of the mortal life of Jesus is rebuked, and its universal significance indicated, but in how different, how obscure, how distorted a manner. What has brought about this new manner of saying the same thing?

I think it is an endeavor to do without what had come to seem to Blake the deceiving imageries of nature, to express the truth of contraries at one and the same time, and to render spiritual realities in a literal translation. What he had been writing was poetry; now what he wrote was to be prophecy; or, as he says in Milton:

'In fury of Poetic Inspiration,
To build the Universe Stupendous, Mental Forms
Creating.'

And, seeking always the 'Minute Particulars,' he would make no compromise with earthly things, use no types of humanity, no analogies from nature; for it was against all literal acceptance of nature or the Bible or reason, of any apparent reality, that he was appealing. Hence:

'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.'