“Then walks the weak infant in sorrow, compelled to number footsteps
Upon the sand. And when the drone has reached his crawling length,
Black berries appear that poison all round him. Such was Tiriel
Compelled to pray repugnant, and to humble the immortal spirit;
Till I am subtle as a serpent in a paradise,
Consuming all, both flowers and fruits, insects and warbling birds.”
Blake was thinking of his father and his own early whippings. But really fathers are not absolutely necessary, for the mother, the nurse, the elder sister, and the public school, can do the job a great deal more effectually. The other poem, The Book of Thel, 1789, is Swedenborgian throughout. Thel, youngest daughter of the Seraphim, bewails the transitoriness of life and all beautiful things, herself included. Then the humble Lily of the Valley, a little Cloud, a Worm, and a Clod of Clay, all in their respective ways preach to her that “Everything that lives, lives not alone nor for itself.” When she has reached the utter selflessness of a Clod of Clay, then only will she be able to behold steadfastly the seeming transitoriness of youth and beautiful things; seeming, for like the lowly lily they melt to flourish in eternal vales.
Here Blake endorses the Swedenborgian selflessness, and extols the Swedenborgian lowliness, modesty, and humility. Swedenborg believed in no doctrine of self-realization. To him the self was always an evil till lost in the Lord. It was the remains in him of German mysticism. Blake slowly and surely came to set a high value on the true self. But unlike the more modern preacher of self-realization, he believed that a man found his real self only after he had given himself passionately to Jesus the eternal life and the eternal imagination. Then he was no longer to value the humility and modesty attached to selflessness. Their place was to be taken by a new kind of humility and a new kind of modesty of such flaming quality, that he wished to drop the old names and find others that more nearly described their sovereign reality.
Thel is finally invited by the matron Clay to enter her house, with the assurance that she may return. Immediately the terrific Porter of the Eternal Gates lifted the northern bar.
This is a well-known gate, among Swedenborgians, into the unseen world. But it is very terrible. According to Garth Wilkinson it was the only gate that Blake knew, and he accounts by this means for Blake’s apotheosis of the self and the passions. At this time Blake saw through this gate what Swedenborg saw; but later, when he had shaken him off and changed his state, his vision changed accordingly, and the objects were stripped of their horror. He was also to know all the four gates leading into the unseen.
Thel, entering, “wandered in the land of clouds through valleys dark, list’ning dolours and lamentations” till she came even to her own grave-plot. Through such a gate it matters not whether one views this world or the other. Both must appear sad and joyless in the extreme, and enmesh the beholder in blackest pessimism. Thel, hearing a voice wailing like the ecclesiastic dirge of the disillusioned King, shrieked with terror, and fled back unhindered into the vales of Har.
Thel is sweet, even heavenly in the Swedenborgian sense. But its sweetness cloys. Christ, like the Law before Him, made a sparing use of honey, preferring the more indispensable salt, which He enjoined His disciples to have in themselves at all times. Blake was to recover plentiful salt, but not until he had drawn Swedenborg’s line between heaven and hell in a wholly different place.
Swedenborg’s influence is pleasantly found at work in the Songs of Innocence. Innocence was a favourite word, and Swedenborg saw the celestial angels both innocent and naked. There is nothing more innocent than a lamb, and therefore Blake by a sure instinct and in childlike joy piped his song about the lamb, satisfying at once his feeling for the lamb, the child, and the Maker of the lamb who was called the Lamb of God.
The song called The Divine Image shows Swedenborg’s influence at its best. So many men with Blake’s mystic proclivities rush into vague abstractions. To-day we hear of Infinite Love and Infinite Wisdom, Infinite Life, and all personality denied to God. Yet these are mere high-sounding abstractions, and are quite meaningless apart from concrete personality. Swedenborg was clear as day here, and it was he who taught Blake the pure wisdom contained in his verses:
“For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.”