AristophanesBertolt BrechtAnton ChekhovHenrik IbsenBen JohnsonChristopher Marlowe Arthur MillerEugene O’NeillShakespeare’ s Comedies Shakespeare’ s… [602581]

BlakeWilliam

CURRENTL Y A V AILABLE
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BlakeWilliam

Bloom’s Major Poets: William Blake
© 2003 by Infobase PublishingIntroduction © 2003 by Harold BloomAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in
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William Blake / Harold Bloom, ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’ s major poets)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-6812-91. Blake William, 1757–1857—Criticism and interpretation.
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CONTENTS
User’ s Guide 7
About the Editor 8
Editor’ s Note 9
Introduction 10
Biography of William Blake 12
Critical Analysis of “The Tyger” 17
Critical Views on “The Tyger” 20
Hazard Adams on Blake’ s System 20
John E. Grant’ s Questions for the Reader and Writer 22
Harold Pagliaro on the Changing View of “The Tyger” 26
Martin K. Nurmi on “Tyger” Revisions’ Mirroring Changes 29
in Society
Stewart Crehan on “The Tyger” as a Sign of Revolutionary 32
Times
Morton D. Paley on Differing Viewpoints on “The Tyger” 34Martin Price on Terror and Symmetry in “The Tyger” 38
Critical Analysis of “London” 41
Critical Views on “London” 44
David V . Erdman on People in Blake’ s “London” 44
Kenneth Johnston on the V ocabulary of Blake’ s “London” 47E.P . Thompson on the Ways in Which Words Change “London” 49John Beer on “London” as Open to Interpretation 51
Stewart Crehan on the Social System of “London” 54
Gavin Edwards on Repetition in “London” 57
Harold Bloom on Wandering Through “London” 61
Critical Analysis of “The Mental Traveller” 63
Critical Views on “The Mental Traveller” 66
Northrop Frye on “The Mental Traveller” as a Life Journey 66John H. Sutherland on Irony and Oppression 68
David Wagenknecht on Blake’ s History 72
Harold Bloom on “The Mental Traveller” as Standing Alone 74Alicia Ostriker on Sound and Structure 77
Victor Paananen on Nature 79
Nicholas Williams on the Unconditional, Non-traditional Blake 82

Critical Analysis of “The Crystal Cabinet” 86
Critical Views on “The Crystal Cabinet” 89
Irene H. Chayes on the Influence of Myth 89
Robert E. Simmons on Blake’ s Balance 92
Hazard Adams on Innocence and Images 94
Victor N. Paananen on Sexual Expression 97
Kathleen Raine on Alchemy in “The Crystal Cabinet” 99
Critical Analysis on “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” 103
Critical Views on “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” 107
Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. on Parody of Religious Writings 107Max Plowman on Hope and Fear 110
David V . Erdman on Spirituality Versus Society 112
Harold Bloom on the Contraries in “The Marriage of Heaven 116
and Hell”
W .J.T. Mitchell on the Marriage of Images and Words 120Algernon Charles Swinburne on Music and Meaning 124Mark Bracher on How “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” 125
Changes the Reader
Works by William Blake 129
Works about William Blake 134
Acknowledgments 138
Index of Themes and Ideas 141

7USER’S GUIDE
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and biblio-
graphical information on the author and the author’ s best-known ormost important short stories. Following Harold Bloom’ s editor’ s noteand introduction is a concise biography of the author that discussesmajor life events and important literary accomplishments. A plotsummary of each story follows, tracing significant themes, patterns,and motifs in the work. An annotated list of characters supplies briefinformation on the main characters in each story. As with any studyguide, it is recommended that the reader read the story beforehand,and have a copy of the story being discussed available for quick ref-erence.
A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously published
material, follows each character list. In most cases, these extractsrepresent the best analysis available from a number of leading crit-ics. Because these extracts are derived from previously publishedmaterial, they will include the original notations and referenceswhen available. Each extract is cited, and readers are encouraged tocheck the original publication as they continue their research. A bib-liography of the author’ s writings, a list of additional books and arti-cles on the author and their work, and an index of themes and ideasconclude the volume.

8ABOUT THE EDITOR
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Y ale
University and Henry W . and Albert A. Berg Professor of English atthe New Y ork University Graduate School. He is the author of over20 books, and the editor of more than 30 anthologies of literary crit-icism.
Professor Bloom’ s works include Shelly’ s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’ s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats
(1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The
American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens
of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection(1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’ s
provocative theory of the literary relationships between the greatwriters and their predecessors. His most recent books includeShakespeare: The Invention of the Human , a 1998 National Book
Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), and Stories and Poems
for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (2001).
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Y ale University in 1955
and has served on the Y ale faculty since then. He is a 1985MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the CharlesEliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 1987–88.In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious American Academy of Artsand Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. Professor Bloom is the edi-tor of several other Chelsea House series in literary criticism, includ-ing B
LOOM ’SMAJOR SHORT STORY WRITERS , B LOOM ’SMAJOR
NOVELISTS , B LOOM ’SMAJOR DRAMATISTS , M ODERN CRITICAL
INTERPRETATIONS , M ODERN CRITICAL VIEWS , and B LOOM ’S
BIOCRITIQUES .

9EDITOR’S NOTE
My Introduction leaps forward to Blake’ s final phase, so as to
round off this little volume.
On “The Tyger” I particularly admire Martin Price’ s balancings of
terror and symmetry, while I find David Erdman illuminates the
historical background of “London” better than anyone else could do.
“The Mental Traveller” is viewed by Northrop Frye as an ironic
vision of Blake’ s Orc cycle, after which John Sutherland furtheradumbrates the poem’ s complexities.
“The Crystal Cabinet” is studied as a mythic text by Irene Chayes
and as alchemy by Kathleen Raine.
I analyze the “Contraries” of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”,
and W .J.T. Mitchell and the great Victorian poet Swinburnesensitively examine the rhetorical splendors of Blake’ s wonderfulprose poem.

10INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
After Jerusalem, Blake wrote very little poetry, and devoted himself
to his work as painter and engraver. The most considerable poem left
in manuscript from his later years is The Everlasting Gospel, a seriesof notebook fragments on the theme of the necessity for theforgiveness of sins. There are powerful passages among thesefragments, but they do not add anything to Jerusalem as imaginative
thought, and Blake did not bother to arrange them in any definiteform. The rhetorical directness of some of the fragments has madethem popular, but their very freedom from the inventiveness ofBlake’ s mythmaking has the effect of rendering them poeticallyuninteresting.
This is not true of Blake’ s last engraved poem, “The Ghost of
Abel”, a dramatic scene composed in 1822 as a reply to Byron’ sdrama Cain. Byron’ s Cain fights free of natural religion and its fears
only to succumb to a murderous dialectic by which every spiritualemancipation of a gifted individual is paid for through alienationfrom his brethren, the consequence being that a dissenter from theorthodoxy of negations in moral values is compelled to become anunwary Satanist. Blake’ s very subtle point is that the covenant ofChrist, as he interprets it, takes man beyond the “cloven fiction” ofmoral good and moral evil, the “hateful siege of contraries”experienced by Milton’ s Satan on Mount Niphates, and into theclarification of seeing that only a part of what is called moral goodis actually good to the imagination of real life of man. Vengeanceand every similar mode of hindering another can have no part in animaginative morality, and for Blake there is no other morality worthyof the name. The Ghost of Abel, which makes surprisingly effective
use of Blake’ s long line, the fourteener, as a medium for dramaticdialog, is the true coda to Blake’ s poetry, rather than The EverlastingGospel, for it makes explicit the moral basis of the laconic Marriage
of Heaven and Hell.
At about the time he wrote The Everlasting Gospel, Blake re-
engraved a little emblem-book, The Gates of Paradise , which he had
first engraved as early as 1793, adding a number of rhymed coupletsand an epilogue in two quatrains to the engravings and their

11inscriptions. The Gates of Paradise are “Mutual Forgiveness of each
Vice”, and the story told in epilogue is something rarer, an address“To the Accuser who is the God of This World”, and one of Blake’ smost perfect short poems:
Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,
And dost not know the Garment from the Man.Every Harlot was a Virgin once,Nor can’ st thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Tho’ thou are Worship’ d by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art stillThe Son of Morn in weary Night’ s decline,The lost Traveller’ s Dream under the Hill.
The tone of this is unique in Blake, and I have not found the
equivalent in any other poet. There is enormous irony here, mitigated
by a gentle and mocking pity for the great antagonist, the Satanadored as Jesus and Jehovah by the religious of this world. Blake ispast argument here; he has gone beyond prophetic anger andapocalyptic impatience. The Accuser is everywhere and at all timesapparently triumphant, yet he is a delusion and so but a dunce. Hecannot distinguish the phenomenal garment from the Real Man, theImagination, and his spouse Rahab is only a delusion also.
States change; individuals endure. The god of the churches is still
that light-bearer, son of the morning, who fell, and he is now in hisweary night’ s decline as history moves to a judging climax. Thevision of a restored man, Blake’ s vision, is the clear sight of a MentalTraveller in the open world of poetry. The Accuser is the dream of alost traveler in the phenomenal world, but Blake has found his wayhome, and need not dream.

BIOGRAPHY OF
William Blake
Poet, artist, and engraver William Blake was born in London on
November 28, 1757, the second or third child born to James Blake,a hosiery merchant, and Catherine Hermitage, whose first husbandhad left to her a similar business. The couple had united theirenterprises with their lives in Westminster in October of 1752.
Blake was raised in his parents’ home, above their business at
Broad and Marshall Streets. It was an area where many merchantsand tradesmen did business. The faith of his parents is uncertain;they were Christian—they were married in one Anglican church andbaptized most or all of their children in another—but they did notalways quite follow the Anglican or the Catholic Church. Politically,Catherine and John Blake held radical views, and the influence ofthis early radicalism would manifest itself throughout Blake’ s work.Blake’ s personal relationships with his family are obscure. He seemsto have felt great affection for his youngest brother, Robert, and hereferred to another brother, John, as “the evil one”; apparently, Blakebelieved his parents favored John. Still, it seems his parents didencourage the young artist: His mother hung Blake’ s drawings andverses in her chambers, and his father bought engravings and plastercasts for Blake to study. In any case, Blake would later discount hisparents’ influence on his life or work.
Blake learned the basics of reading and writing in school. When
he was ten, his parents sent him to study drawing with Henry Pars(or Pars) of the Strand—whose establishment was one of London’ sbest art schools. In the next five years, he gained a background in arthistory and many skills. On his own he was a great reader, readingavidly the Bible, Greek classics, and the works of Milton andShakespeare. He was writing as early as 1767 or 1768, when hebegan what would become his Poetical Sketches.
Blake’ s schooling in art finally became too costly for his parents
to support, and in 1771 he was apprenticed to engraver James Basireof Lincoln’ s Inn Fields, whose assignments to sketch WestminsterAbbey may mark the first stirrings of Blake’ s later Gothictendencies. His first engraving, “Joseph of Arimathea Among the
12

Rocks of Albion”, dates to 1773, and “The Body of Edward I in His
Coffin” followed a year later. When he finished his apprenticeshipafter years, he did not join the Stationers’ Guild, which was the usualpath to professional engraving; instead, he applied to the RoyalAcademy of Arts, into which he was accepted, in 1779, as anengraver. He studied and exhibited his engravings and watercolorsthere for several somewhat spotty years, despite an intense dislike ofthe Academy’ s head; to 1779 date “Edward and Eleanor,” “Penanceof Jane Shore in St. Paul’ s Church,” and “Lear and Cordelia inPrison.” One year after starting his studies, he completed his firstproject as a professional engraver and began to earn a living in thetrade, working for Joseph Johnson, a purveyor of subversiveliterature.
In 1782, at the age of 25, he married Catherine Boucher, the
daughter of a vegetable farmer. Blake taught her to read and write,and she would later assist him in his work; it is to her, too, thatcriticism owes the salvation of Blake’ s original manuscripts, for thepoet felt that once his work had been published there was no need tokeep its raw materials. Their marriage would last some 45 years butproduce no children.
In this period, Blake began to associate with a circle of London
intellectuals that included Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine,sculptor and draftsman John Flaxman, William Godwin, Rev.Anthony S. and Harriet Mathew (through Flaxman), and paintersThomas Stothard and Henri Fuseli. Mathew and his wife inparticular became Blake’ s artistic allies; he was the center ofattention at entertainments in their home, and it was Harriet Mathewand Flaxman who funded the publication of 50 copies of Blake’ sfirst book of poetry. This book, Poetical Sketches, containing the
work of some 16 years, was released in 1783. Throughout thisperiod, he continued to create and to exhibit artwork on bothreligious and secular themes; in 1784, he wrote An Island in the
Moon, satirizing his progressive friends of the Joseph Johnsoncircle. Also in 1784, with friend and fellow apprentice James Parker,Blake opened his own print shop; this would eventually enable himto publish his own poetry. He developed his technique of“illuminated printing”: he engraved words and artwork on copperplates and, having made the ink himself, printed his work onto paper.
13

Catherine was in the habit of sewing covers onto the printed books.
Each illustration would be colored by hand. This was a very time-consuming process and limited the number of copies Blake couldproduce and thus his income and audience.
Blake supported himself and his wife through engraving by his
own process and through providing engraved illustrations oncommission; the latter projects resulted in connections betweenBlake and many radical thinkers of the 18th century. Beginning in1789, Blake experienced a period of great literary activity,producing Songs of Innocence (1789), The Book of Thel (1789),
Tiriel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (early 1790s), and
Songs of Experience (1794). It was in the same year, 1789, that theFrench Revolution began; that uprising and the American Revolutionof a decade before influenced Blake’ s work and thought extensively.
Throughout Blake’ s work and literary life are allusions to
spiritual concerns; indeed these, combined with the sensibilities of apolitical radical, inform much of his work. “I write whencommanded by the spirits,” he once said to a friend, “and themoment I have written I see the words fly about the room in alldirections.” Visions had been part of Blake’ s lonely childhood asearly as his fifth year. Walking the streets of London, he hadexperienced them elaborately: a tree at Peckham Rye filled withangels, men at work in a field with angels. Blake was not the onlymember of his family with a clairvoyance of this sort. His olderbrother James claimed to see Moses and Abraham. The Blakeparents did not support the visions; Catherine Blake beat youngWilliam once for describing what he saw, and on at least one otheroccasion his father threatened the same. Still, Blake’ s clairvoyanceextended into his adulthood: he claimed to have seen the spirit of hisbrother Robert, with whom he had always had a close relationship,leap from Robert’ s body at the moment of death. Indeed, it wasRobert’ s spirit, Blake said, that had described to him the process ofilluminated printing. In any case, it was shortly after this experiencethat Blake discovered the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Swedenborg’ s Church of the New Jerusalem, preaching a gentle,
mystical interpretation of Christianity, had a major influence onBlake’ s life and work, though because Blake seems to have bothexalted and satirized Swedenborg’ s work the nature of this influence
14

is unclear. By even the late 1780s, Blake was producing work with
religious themes: “There Is No Natural Religion” (1788), forexample, and “All Religions Are One” (1788). By 1796, he hadstrayed far enough from orthodoxy to create the etching “Lucifer andthe Pope in Hell.” By the end of the 18th century, Blake wasproducing works of Biblical theme, especially images withovertones of mysticism and divine mystery, almost exclusively.
Blake’ s works of lesser distinction of the mid- to late 1790s
include some biographically noteworthy political material suited tothe internationally turbulent times: America: A Prophecy (1793) and
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The Song of Los (1795)
and The Four Zoas (1795, originally entitled V ala). Between 1800
and 1803, Blake and Catherine lived in the seaside town of Felphamin Sussex, southern England, under the patronage of William Hayley,for whom Blake would work on a number of paintings andengravings; and it was then that Blake’ s political views had a directeffect on his freedom. While living there, he violently expelled aninebriated soldier, one John Scofield or Scolfield, from his gardenand spoke some ill-advised words concerning the King andEngland’ s state of military preparedness. He soon was charged withsedition, and he was tried in 1803. It was around the time of hisacquittal in 1804 that he began one of his best-known and mostimportant works, the two-volume poem Milton, both inspired by and
based largely on Milton’ s Paradise Lost; the year 1805, too, saw thepublication of Macpherson’ s scurrilous Ossian poems—a collectionof verse purported to be by a Celtic bard—for which Blakedeveloped a passion. Milton was composed and etched through 1805
and the following three years.
In 1809, Blake held an exhibition of his paintings at a brother’ s
house, hoping the event would publicize his work. It was not verywell attended, and it may mark the beginning of the end of hiscreative period. The years following the exhibition were marked byfailed enterprises and commercial errors and a few more works, suchas L ’Allegro (1815); the Blakes at this time have been described as
“still poor still dirty,” and Blake is known to have been turning outwork for the Wedgwood catalogue and on commission. His mostsignificant literary achievements of this period are The EverlastingGospel (ca. 1818); Jerusalem (1820), his longest “prophetic” book;
15

and one of his best-known works of art, a 21-plate series illustrating
the Book of Job that had been commissioned in the early 1820s byartist and patron John Linnell and was published in 1826. Blake alsoillustrated Dante’ s Divine Comedy in his later years; his last
illustrated book, The Ghost of Abel, was written in 1821. In 1822, the
Royal Academy voted to give to the Blakes the sum of £25 againsttheir obvious poverty.
The artistic wasteland that followed the disappointing exhibition
of 1809–1810 was mitigated to some extent by Blake’ s developmentof a new following: a group of young artists, including SamuelPalmer, who called themselves “The Ancients” and revered Blakeand his work. The support of this group encouraged Blake’ sproduction of some imaginative work of the variety that he hadwanted to produce all his life. Still, Blake died in his usual poverty,relatively unknown, on August 12, 1827, having continued his workin coloring and engraving until the time of his death. He was 69years old. Catherine Blake was forced to borrow the moneynecessary for his burial, on the day before the 45th anniversary oftheir marriage. It would be nearly forty years before a biographywould turn public attention back to Blake and a century before Blakewould be appreciated and admired as an artist and poet. Now, he isconsidered the first, and among the greatest, of the EnglishRomantics.
16

CRITICAL ANAL YSIS OF
“The Tyger”
The 24 lines of “The Tyger” are often all of Blake’ s work with which
readers become acquainted. Readers find in the verses 14 questions.This is a creative work, centered on creation: the very origin of thisfearsome jungle cat. Blake captures the wildness of the beast—itsburning eyes, its strength—with his words. The powerful openingverse is repeated to complete the poem.
In the first stanza, we meet “The Tyger.” The luminous creature
roams the forest at night. The writer is struck by the beauty, strength,and balance of the beast and questions what inspiration is behind itscreation. Some scholars believe the tiger is Blake’ s version of theangel Lucifer. Like Lucifer, the tiger works alone and inspiresthoughts of death; it also is strong and beautiful, as the Bibleportrays the fallen angel.
The second stanza continues the powerful imagery, comparing
the fire in the tiger’ s eyes and the fire used to create it, suggestingthat the tiger is a reflection of the fires of Hell. Also given is theimage of wings: a reinforcement of the connection between the tigerand angels—or possibly an image inspired by Greek mythology,particularly the myths of Prometheus and of Icarus.
Next, Blake poses more questions to the creator of the tiger, first
pondering the two tiers of strength needed to mastermind the mightyanimal: The architect who created the animal had to be physicallystrong to create its powerful heart and emotionally strong to stand upto the cat’ s intimidating form and nature. Then Blake mulls over thetiger’ s first fearful footsteps. Images follow that remind the reader ofa blacksmith’ s shop. The verse turns to talk of the hammer, chain,and anvil used to forge the tiger and indicates the force needed to putthe animal together.
The raw power of the tiger appears to be too much for the
heavens to take. Blake describes the denial of dominance over theanimal. The stars give up rather than fight for mastery of the tiger.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’ d heaven with their tears:
17

18The writer then wonders if the Divine Being responsible for the
tiger was pleased with the creation. He asks outright if the same
being produced “The Tyger and The Lamb.” This sets in contrast thegentle lamb with the wild-eyed “Tyger.” To close out the poem, thefirst stanza is repeated:
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:What immortal hand or eye,Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The words do emphasize the beauty and strength of the animal.
Seeing them again also reinforces the image of the strong animal,the night hunter, inspiring fear in all who see it. The last verseappears to be a refrain worth repeating. The reciting of these wordsagain also strengthens the sound of the rhyme and rhythm of thework.
Blake’ s “Tyger” takes on a terrifying form. Brute strength and the
ability to inspire fear are just two of the mighty cat’ s characteristics.Its creator must also have similar traits: strong shoulders to bear theresponsibility of such an animal; a big heart to survive the tests ofdread and fear; and a strong spirit to look into its fiery eyes and tomaster “The Tyger.” Line by line, the tiger grows more powerful andfrightening: a beast without boundaries. Y et, the speaker tries toreason with the mighty animal, asking about its creator and itsopposite of the animal kingdom: the lamb. The work bears asimilarity to Blake’ s “The Lamb”, which appears, appropriately, inthe “Innocence” part of the volume of poems. “The Tyger” is part ofthe “Experience.” Did Blake believe that transformation from thegentle lamb into the powerful tiger is an integral part of maturation?
Students of Blake believe many of his writings reflect the major
changes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For example, therevolutions: Industrial, American, and French. These changes in theeconomy, society, and politics changed the way people lived. Blake’ stiger is strong, intimidating—a solitary, peripheral creature,independent of its shifting surroundings.
While attracted to Christianity, Blake did not subscribe to the
tenets of one faith or another for very long during his life. Certainlythe images of the lion and the lamb are rooted in the Bible. PerhapsBlake wishes to point out the Creator’ s hand in each animal and yet

suggests the flames seen in the tiger’ s eyes are a reflection of the
fires of Hell. Further still, the wings mentioned in the second versecan be compared to the wings of an angel. Is Blake remindingreaders that the Divine Being who created the meek and gentle lamb,is the same who created the intimidating tiger? Or perhaps it ismankind who is responsible for the beast, creating it out ofmankind’ s worst traits. If God created the tiger, then is this creaturesupposed to be everything that the Lamb is not—a relationshipmeant to symbolize the symbiosis between good and evil? If so, thendoes Blake mean evil to appear stronger and more attractive than themild goodness of the Lamb?
It would be simplistic to state that “The Lamb” is good and “The
Tyger” is evil. And it is probably not what Blake intended. “TheTyger” is experience. It is bright, energetic, and vital. It is familiarwith its domain and is assertive in its environment. While the Lambmerely follows the flock, the tiger has learned from experience andis autonomous. No longer following the crowd or a single shepherd,the tiger is a hunter directly in search of satisfaction. Knowledge hasgiven the animal its power: the intensity of it is seen in the beast’ sbright eyes.
There is one major discrepancy. While Blake’ s words describe
power, the artwork that accompanies the poem paints a very differentpicture of “The Tyger”—a feline by no means ferocious. Some callthe picture timid; was it Blake’ s intention to mitigate the effect of histextual work? While he describes a horrific animal, he paints apicture of a tame one. Why describe vivid colors and burning eyesand then offer the image of an animal clearly close to domestication?Further still, why pair imagery of a hammer and an anvil with anillustration of docility?
19

CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Tyger”
HAZARD ADAMS ON BLAKE ’SSYSTEM
[Hazard Adams is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative
Literature at the University of Washington. His publicationsinclude Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision ,William
Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems , and the novels
Many Pretty Toys and Home. In this selection, he explains
how Blake’ s system of writing makes the work so powerful.]
Readers have generally assumed that “The Tyger” is one of Blake’ stwo or three greatest lyrics. For this reason, it is interesting to seethat “The Tyger” most fully and particularly assimilates the whole ofBlake’ s great system.
11If we take as our criterion Blake’ s own view
of what a poem should be, we discover that we have not overrated it.This leads us to suspect two things: that Blake’ s own standard is areasonable one, at least insofar as the kind of poetry he wrote isconcerned; and that an interpretation of Blake’ s shorter poems in thelight of other and usually later expressions of the system is not onlyallowable but also perhaps imperative, if we are to understand whatthese poems really are. The meaning of “The Tyger” has remained asource of endless speculation; commentaries upon it have beengeneral, fragmentary, or specialized. The excellent general approachto Blake of Frye, for example, puts us in a position to understand thepoem but does not treat it in any detail. The interesting commentaryof David V . Erdman, on the other hand, is limited by his specialconcern with Blake’ s politics.
12
Here it is in the form which perhaps satisfied its author—the form
in which Blake engraved it:13
Tyger Tyger. burning bright, [.]
In the forests of the night: [;]What immortal hand or eye. [,]Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
20

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?And when thy heart began to beat,What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?What the anvil? what dread grasp, [.]Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’ d heaven with their tears: [;]Did he smile his work to see?Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night; [:]What immortal hand or eye, [.]Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“The Tyger” is a poem of rather simple form, clearly and cleanly
proportioned, all of its statements contributing to a single, sustained,
dramatic gesture. Read aloud, it is powerful enough to move manylisteners (small children, for example) without their having muchunderstanding of the poem beyond its literal expression of adramatic situation. But Blake warns us that there is a great gulfbetween simplicity and insipidity. The total force of the poem comesnot only from its immediate rhetorical power but also from itssymbolical structure.
Blake’ s images, at first sensuous, are to continued inspection
symbolic. Things which burn, even tigers perhaps, are eitherpurifying something or being purified. In the dark of night, in aforest, a tiger’ s eyes would seem to burn. The tiger’ s striped bodysuggests this same conflagration. In any case, Blake is trying toestablish a kind of brilliance about his image.
The tiger, on the other hand, is presented ambiguously. In spite of
its natural viciousness, it seems to suggest also clarity and energy. Ifthe reader has had prolonged experience with poetry and mythology,
21

other associations will sharpen these ideas. He will perhaps
associate the “forests of the night” with the traditional dark night ordark journey of the soul through the dens of demons and beasts. Thetiger’ s brightness may suggest the force which the sun so oftensymbolizes in mythology.
NOTES
11. In the last chapter of his recent book, The Piper and the Bard (Detroit,
1959), pp. 277–287, published after this essay was completed, Robert F .
Gleckner discusses parallels between “The Tyger” and The Four Zoas. He
reaches some conclusions similar to my own, but he approaches them from anopposite direction, being interested primarily in how “The Tyger” as a song ofexperience throws light upon the later poem. My own discussion is aconsiderable development of some ideas originally presented in Blake and
Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca, 1955), pp. 236–240.
12. Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), particularly pp. 178–181.
13. Blake’ s punctuation was inconsistent, particularly in his use of commas andperiods, colons and semicolons. This inconsistency is made even moreconfusing (if that is possible) by his tendency to write commas that look likeperiods and semicolons that look like colons. This problem is well illustrated bythe plate from Songs of Experience on which “The School Boy” is engraved
(reproduced in Northrop Frye’ s Modern Library selection of Blake). In the word“nip’ d” of line one, stanza five, the apostrophe looks like a period, though in“strip’ d” of line three it is clearly an apostrophe. I have chosen to reproduceBlake’ s punctuation as best I can without being swayed by a desire forconsistency. Possible alternative readings appear in the brackets. No two Blakescholars have agreed on the correct transcription; it is clear that subtleties ofinterpretation cannot often be based upon Blakes punctuation
.
—Hazard Adams, “Reading Blake’ s Lyrics: ‘The Tyger’,” Discussionsof William Blake, ed. John E. Grant (Boston: D.C. Heath andCompany, 1961), 53–54.
JOHN E. G RANT ’SQUESTIONS FOR THE READER AND WRITER
[John E. Grant taught at the University of Iowa, edited
Discussions of William Blake, and co-edited Blake’ s
Visionary Forms Dramatic with David V . Erdman. In this
detailed analysis, “The Art and Argument of ‘The Tyger’”,Grant poses questions to both the reader and the writer.]
22

The reader may become wearied with tracing the nuances of doubt
because Blake’ s own ideas are usually precise and definite. But in“The Tyger,” as in such poems as “Earth’ s Answer,” “The LittleVagabond,” or the opening stanzas of “A Little Boy Lost,” thespeaker is not Blake. Nevertheless, in these cases the speaker istreated with sympathy and patient understanding. After havinglearned much of what Blake knew, a number of Blake scholars havedisplayed a very un-Blakean impatience with those of Blake’ scharacters who have not achieved comparable illumination, thoughBlake himself had great sympathy for those like Tom Paine whowere finally on the side of the “devils,” no matter how much doubtand error they spread.
If we follow the poem through, interpreting it word for word and
bearing Blake’ s heavy punctuation and powerful measured cadence,we should be able to establish a basic reading against which to testany general interpretation. Since such a reading has never reallybeen attempted before,
6I shall mention a number of quite obvious
things.7The speaker begins by addressing the Tyger, and in the
heavy alliteration and primarily trochaic beat of his words the beastis envisioned as burning in the darkness of nocturnal forests.
8Flame
is a clear symbol for passion9and is set off by the blackness of the
nocturnal forests. Forests per se are sinister symbols in Blake,corresponding to Dante’ s selva oscura, for they stand for the merelyor triumphantly vegetable world he elsewhere calls the “stems ofvegetation” at the bottom of the state of generation. A beast whosenatural home is in such a place would therefore likewise be ominous.The contrast between fire and night, of course, corresponds to thecontrast of yellow and black stripes ringing the Tyger itself.
As a paraphrase for the question Blake’ s speaker puts to the Tyger
about its origins, “What immortal made you?” is totally inadequate.Part of the force in the questioning of the first stanza derives fromthe fact that the fourth line is iambic. The movement from trochaicto iambic in the third line corresponds to the shift from vision toquestion.
10With this in mind we can better paraphrase the import of
the question itself as follows: “What immortal organ could produce(by hand) or even conceive (with the eye), shape, or limit yourfearful or terrifying balance or proportion?” The grammaticalpossibilities are: “How in the world did he have either the ability or
23

the courage, etc., to do it?” or “Why did he presume against the
Tyger’ s nature—or transgress against man—to do so?” And “frame”means to form, contrive, or limit (like a picture or a prison). Idealismso pervades Blake’ s thought that every incarnate thing can beconsidered to be in a trap. Most readings seem to assume that thefirst alternatives for “could” and “frame” are the only relevant ones,but nothing in the poem necessitates such restricted interpretations.The speaker is too bemused to attain certainty.
Stanza two inquires first into the source of the material cause of
the beast and then into the antecedent circumstances of its efficientcause or maker. We oversimplify the first question if we take it to askwhether the fire in the Tyger’ s eyes came from hell (“deeps”) orheaven (“skies”), but this is better than Bateson’ s suggestion that the“deeps” are “perhaps volcanoes rather than oceans.”
11Neither of
Bateson’ s equivalents is at all satisfactory, because the reader knowsby this time that a metaphysical creature like the Tyger could neverhave had a merely physical place of origin. Observe, however, that“deeps or skies” does not imply traditional metaphysics and it hasthe exact combination of definiteness and suggestive vaguenesswhich characterizes both the question and the questioner. The merelyconceptual translation “hell or heaven” obscures the realsignificance implied by the question, namely, that the speakerdoesn’t know. It is also necessary to observe that the poem hasmoved from a concern with the creator’ s eye in the first stanza to thatof the Tyger here, thus beginning to link the two.
The exact implication of the last two lines of the second stanza is
even harder to spell out. “Did the creator go under his own power(wings) or that of another?” or “What remarkable wings wouldenable him—to aspire?” “Aspire” seems to mean “soar,” “mount,” or“tower” as in “Ah! Sun-flower” (though there a goal is indicated) tosome vaguely understood place up in the “skies” where the creatorcould get the fire of the Tyger’ s eyes. But if we follow Blake’ spunctuation, “aspire” means aspiration for its own sake and thus itwould indicate ambitious pride, a state of mind very objectionable tothe orthodox, though not in the same sense to Blake. And the word“dare” can be taken to reinforce the suggestion of a dubiousaudacity, though it may simply imply courage. The parallel structureof the fourth line also maintains this dual ambiguity; it asks “What
24

kind of hand would have the courage or presumption to seize (i.e.,
grasp decisively, or steal) the fire (which is shown in the Tyger’ seyes).” It should also be observed that “dare” is probably the presentsubjunctive tense of the verb, a fact which tends to bring thesepresumably past events into the imagination’ s present focus as thequestioner meditates on them.
The sinister overtones of the creator’ s actions have been scarcely
regarded by criticism based on the supposition that Blake is thespeaker, but there is nothing in the poem which rules them out. Since“All Religions are One,” it is useful to observe parallels to the actionof the poem in myth. Bateson recalls Prometheus, the fire bringer—and (co-)maker of man—who stole fire from heaven.
12A creative
blacksmith reminds us of Hephaestus. Both had trouble With Zeus,a fact which becomes relevant to “The Tyger” when we begin to askwhy the creator would have to “aspire,” above himself.
NOTES
6. The nearest approach to this kind of study, except for Mr. Adams’
accompanying essay, is contained in Stanley Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil
(Oxford, 1954), pp. 123–130. But even Gardner is more concerned with theresonances of the major symbols than in the poem as a developing whole.
7. A complete rhetorical analysis should be coordinated with a prosodic one and
both should be combined with a semantic study. Among the things one wouldwish most to note is the subtle and brilliant use of the words “In” and “What”especially in the initial position of the lines which follow their first introductionin lines 2 and 3. But the coordination of this material would make this essay toocomplicated.
8. “Nocturnal forests” does not, indeed, properly render the overtones of
“forests of the night,” though it is better than the other annotational suggestion,“forests at night,” given by F . W . Bateson in his edition, Selected Poems of
William Blake (London, 1957), p. 118. (Hereafter called Bateson.) These
paraphrases give priority to the forests, whereas the poem has it the other wayaround. We get closer to the spirit of Blake’ s image by recalling that Miltonicvoid that is “the realm of Chaos and Old Night.”
9. A friend draws my attention to the adverb “bright,” a word with primarily
favorable overtones. But if the Tyger is partly admired for its brightness, it isseen by this speaker only as a bonfire, not as a forest fire that will burn up theforests of error.in the apocalypse. Only a Reprobate could see it in this way. Forthe forest fire image, see David V . Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire(Princeton, 1954), p. 181, where Jeremiah 21: 12–14 is cited.
25

2610. The meter of this line is remarkable, for it seems (to me, and to at least one
other reader) to start out trochaic and melt into iambic. This correlates with atendency on the reader’ s part to read “What” as exclamatory until he discoversin line four that it is interrogative.
11. P . 118.12. P . 118.
—John E. Grant, “The Art and Argument of ‘The Tyger’,”
Discussions of William Blake, ed. John E. Grant (Boston: D.C. Heathand Company, 1961), 66–68.
HAROLD PAGLIARO ON THE CHANGING VIEW OF “THETYGER ”
[Harold Pagliaro taught at Columbia University and was a
Professor at Swarthmore College. He wrote HenryFielding: A Literary Life, Naked Heart: A Soldier’ s Journey
to the Front, and Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’ s
Songs. In his Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’ s Songs , he
offers an explanation as to why the words in “The Tyger” areso different from the artwork illustrating it.]
Clearly for him a fixed state of things has passed. In perceiving theTyger as he has, he is compelled to define Tyger, Creator, Lamb, andhimself anew, in such a way as to integrate them into a new schemeof things. If he is in any sense compelled to wonder whether theCreator of the Tyger is also the creator of the Lamb—”Did he whomade the Lamb make thee?”—then one must conclude there was atime when he believed, however unconsciously, that the answer wasno. One must also conclude he is at least on the verge of admittingto consciousness that Lamb, Tyger, and speaker are parts of a singlesystem, however different they may be from each other. And inunderstanding this special unity of the Creator’ s devising, thespeaker “accepts” the creation which is both deadly and loving, andhe also recognizes that he himself includes the Tyger no less than theLamb. The speaker has passed from “deadly terror” to a newknowledge of the system of things of which he is a part. Thisimplies, equally, his passage to a new knowledge of himself.
In the final stanza, “dare” for “could” is the first gloss on this new
condition; the apparently benign Tyger of the illustration is the

second. “Could” in the context implies the speaker’ s willingness to
search for the capacity to create the Tyger. “Dare” implies theknowledge that a creator is available, the remaining question havingto do with the “willingness” to create it and what such willingnessrepresents. The movement from “could” to “dare” represents no shiftin objective fact, only a changed perception of the speaker. Havingwondered “could?” he has come to imagine “dare!” with all itimplies for the power and morality of the Creator and himself. Hehas acknowledged the fact that the Tyger’ s fearful symmetry hasbeen framed. And in some sense he himself has framed it within thelimits of his statement, whose final stanza returns to the centralissue, with “dare” representing something like the fait accompli, in
which he has participated. The mystery of the Tyger’ s creation hasnot been dispelled, but it has been looked at, it has provoked arecognition, and it has been incorporated by the speaker into a newsense of himself. At least some of his Selfhood has died to make wayfor new life, and he may now be able to deal with the deadly state ofthings he has dared to see.
The illustration in which the poem is set extends its verbal
implications by various means. Several of the picture’ s elements areimportant in this regard. First, the Tyger is not fierce, but neither islike a cat essentially; rather, he is a cat with human features. Second,his stripes and those of the tree, the tree of Death, are almostindistinguishable, in some copies, especially where the two merge.And finally, it is the tree, somehow joined with or possibly sprungfrom the Tyger, that dominates the picture, though it seems to do sowith less than maximum potential force. Obviously the Tyger firstrecognized by the speaker of the poem is very different from theTyger depicted in the illustration. It seems reasonable to try toexplain the difference between the two by assuming a developmentin meaning from the first to the second. Having written the poem,Blake provided for it a pictorial setting appropriate to its “ultimate”meaning. If the salient elements of the illustration are indeed a Tygerwith crucially human features, a merger of human Tyger with thetree of Death and of the knowledge of good and evil, and thedominance of the world of the poem by that tree in a somewhatattenuated form of itself, then important correlations between textand picture are apparent.
27

28First, the poem’ s tentative softening of the starkness of discrete
and sometimes opposed entities is brought to partial resolution in the
picture. In “The Lamb,” speaker, child, Lamb, and Savior areidentical: “I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name.” In“The Tyger,” speaker, Tyger, Creator, and Lamb are in the firstinstance supposed to be very different. But the perceptual progressof the speaker, as it is indicated by his questions about the Tyger’ sCreator and the Lamb’ s, implies the inaccuracy of this initial view.The speaker of “The Tyger,” who begins by seeing the Tyger as aunique terror, recognizes in the course of his thinking that he, withthe rest of creation, is himself the Tyger in some sense. He who madethe Lamb made the Tyger, and he made man as well, who is bothLamb and Tyger and more. In this perception of created things, it isappropriate that the human Tyger should not look terrifying; it islikewise appropriate that the tree of Death and of knowledge shouldbe associated with the Tyger and with the speaker, who is responsibleboth for the creation of the Tyger and for the knowledge representedby the tree.
The discrete forces earlier perceived have not been so assimilated
that the speaker has returned to Eden. (Lamb and Tyger do not liedown together.) Quite the contrary, what he has achieved is a newconsciousness of his state, which includes his knowing that theworld is overhung by the branches of the threatening tree associatedwith the loss of innocence and death. The illustration represents thefact that in the face of this recognition, the distance between himselfand the Tyger who engendered the terrible vision in the first place isgreatly closed. Both seem less than significant beneath that tree,though they give it life (the tree seems to grow out of them), andthough the speaker has shown he has the visionary capacity to movebeyond its inhibiting implications. Paradoxically increased anddiminished by his experience, the speaker is for the moment in thecondition of rest and hope. The deadly tree’ s leaflessness, the eagleof genius above, and the pink sky beyond are among the signs of hispotential redemption. But his changing definition of himself is thechief sign, though it must for the moment appear to arrest hopeentirely.
—Harold Pagliaro, Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’ s Songs
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987),86–88.

MARTIN K. N URMI ON “TYGER ” REVISIONS ’M IRRORING
CHANGES IN SOCIETY
[Martin K. Nurmi taught at Kent State University and co-
authored A Blake Bibliography in 1977. He has also written
numerous articles on and reviews of many of Blake’ s works.In this essay, “Blake’ s Revisions of ‘The Tyger’”, heexplains how the changes reflect events transpiring in theworld at the time of the poem’ s recomposition.]
It seems to me that the change of mood which we have observedBlake to pass through in his first two stages can be most easilyaccounted for as responses to events in France in the late summerand early autumn of 1792. Several lines of evidence converge tosuggest this: the date of the drafts, the historical echoes in the pivotalfifth stanza and above all the fact that the course of the revolution inthis period was, such that it could—and did—arouse this kind ofresponse among humanitarian republicans.
Such cruel excesses of revolutionary energy as the Rising of the
10th of August and the September Massacres furnish a plausibleoccasion for Blake’ s troubled mood in the first stage. There wasalways something of the “gentle visionary” about Blake, and he musthave deplored these early terrors, despite his ardent Jacobinism.Though his apocalypses may sometimes stream with blood (e.g., theend of Milton), he preferred to think of revolutions as bloodless,
hoping in The French Revolution that the struggle would end by the
king’ s soldier simply embracing the “meek peasant.” Even inAmerica, where he must treat a military victory won by Americanarmies, he would rather not show the Americans as actually fighting;they merely “rush together,” owing their victory to the fact of theirsolidarity and to the spiritual manifestation of revolution in theflaming Orc.
Then in late September came news that violence was apparently
over, news which could have prompted the shift in mood seen inBlake’ s second stage. Viewed prophetically, such events as the defeatof the Austrians at Valmy on the 20th (to which Erdman, p. 178, hascalled attention in connection with the fifth stanza), the formation ofthe National Convention on the 21st, and the announcement of the
29

French Republic on the 22nd must have made the attainment of
Innocence seem close enough to cast the bloody actions of Augustand mid-September pretty well into the background. This view,according to Wordsworth and Coleridge, was even typical. The“lamentable crimes” of the September Massacres, writesWordsworth, remembering the period after the announcement of theRepublic,
were past,
Earth free from them for ever, as was thought,—
Ephemeral monsters, to be seen but once!Things that could only show themselves and die.
1
“The dissonance ceased,” recalls Coleridge, “and all seemed calm
and bright . . .”2
Blake is not, to be sure, writing merely a revolutionary lyric. His
tiger is not another Orc, another portrayal of the spirit of revolt, butsomething much more inclusive, a symbol showing the creativepower of energy, even of wrathful energy, wherever it appears. Butbecause the revolution was for Blake a crucial contemporarymanifestation of energy, events in the progress of the revolutionwould affect even his larger conception.
3
For Blake to have been thus affected by contemporary events, his
Notebook would have had to lie idle for a period of ten days or evenseveral weeks, since the MS. drafts are on successive pages. This iseasily possible. He did not write in his Notebook exclusively orconstantly, but used it at this time for lyrics, which, according toH. M. Margoliouth, were written in response to events of one kindor another.
4Moreover, if his uncertainty concerning such an
important concept as that of energy was unresolved during his firststage, it is unlikely that he could work very productively until it wasresolved, in the second stage. That an interruption did occur issuggested, indeed, by the appearance of the pages of the MS.—andeven the appearance of a MS. page could conceivably have had somesignificance for the inventor of “illuminated printing.” Whereas thefirst draft ends a page crowded with lyrics, the other drafts occupy apage that is otherwise blank, except for a light sketch. The emptyspace at the top of the second page, coming after the profusion ofpoems on the first, thus seems a visual parallel to the mournful andunproductive “blank in Nature” declared by Los in Milton (p. 383).
30

Blake’ s last revision is another matter. The final poem cannot be
accounted for as a response to specific events. Though the Terror of
late 1792 and early 1793 could have shown him that his relativelymild tiger of the second stage was premature, his restoration ofdreadfulness to the poem in its final version does not show theinfluence of events—and certainly not of events like the Terror—asdo his exaggerations of the two earlier stages. On the contrary,Blake’ s being able to handle dreadfulness and assimilate it in theunified symmetry of the final poem shows him to gain precisely thatcontrol of his material which his concern with revolution seems tohave prevented him from gaining in his earlier stages. He is now ableto transcend the limitations of specific events and give his symbolthe comprehensive scope of an “eternal principle.” This is the resultof hard thought, not of events. Blake can now give the tiger’ sdreadfulness symbolic distance because he can see it in a perspectivein which it no longer has the immediacy of an issue. And he canportray its symmetry as containing a really fearful componentbecause he can see clearly and fully, at this point, the place of thetiger in the divine plan.
NOTES
1. Prelude (1850), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1926), x, 41–47.
2. “France: An Ode,” Poems, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London, 1912), p. 245.3. The Orc component of the tiger may be seen in the general similarities
between the tiger and Orc in America, who, like the tiger, burns in the night asif he had been forged, glowing “as the wedge / Of iron heated in the furnace” (p.202), and whose origin is a little ambiguously either in the Satanic deeps or thedivine Atlantic mountains (p. 202). Very bloody revolutionary tigers indeed areassociated with Orc in Europe, where Enitharmon’ s premature belief that Edenhad come—a situation parallel to Blake’ s 2nd stage of composition—isshattered by the resumption of strife (p. 219). These tigers, however, are farremoved from the tiger of the poem, representing a limit of this use of thesymbol by Blake. Blake’ s later disillusionment with Orc in 1801 (asNapoleon—Erdman, p. 292) is parallel to his use of the “forms of tygers & ofLions” to show men “dishumanized” by war in night
VIof The Four Zoas (p.
303). (The edition of Blake cited is Blake’ s Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey
Keynes (London, 1948).—Ed.]
4. William Blake (London, 1951), p. 54. Margoliouth remarks that the occasion
of The Tyger is unknown, but believes that this poem is occasional (p. 58).
31

—Martin K. Nurmi, “Blake’ s Revisions of ‘The Tyger,’” Twentieth-
Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed.
Morton D. Paley (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969), 104–106.
STEWART CREHAN ON “THETYGER ” AS A SIGN OF
REVOLUTIONAR Y TIMES
[Stewart Crehan is a Professor of English at the University
of the Transkei in South Africa. He has written Blake in
Context and Nature’ s Excess: Physiocratic Theory and
Romanticism. In Blake in Context, Crehan shows how thework is informed by the historical, political, and socialchanges of the era.]
The Tyger is a response to the terrible, new-born beauty of violent
revolution. The poet now confronts his own antinomian energies asan external creation, whose ‘fearful symmetry’ obeys no knownlaws, and yet has a manifest, organised (and ferocious) presence.Whether as subjective potentiality or as political upheaval, the Tygercannot be ignored:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,What immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake conveys violent, revolutionary energy by his use of a
resonating poetic symbol (the wild beast in the forest) and theinvention of a persona, whose thirteen unanswered questions, bound
by the six hammered stanzas, give the poem its peculiarlycompressed verbal power.
Blake’ s dual symbol had a history. More important, it had a
political context. By examining both, the contextual meaning of thepoem becomes clearer.
In the opening of Dante’ s Inferno, the poet is seen trying to leave
the dark wood of Error, which is ‘savage and harsh and dense’, buthe is turned back by wild animals—the leopard of incontinence, thelion of bestiality and the wolf of malice and fraud. Wild beastssymbolise the dehumanisation of man through sin: whereas unfallen
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man is noble and godlike, sinful man is bestial; wild beasts are the
sign of his degradation. In Milton’ s Comus, the dark wood reappears
as a ‘close dungeon of unnumerable boughs’, where Comus theenchanter and his ‘rout of monsters’ make their ‘riotous and unrulynoise’. Each has been changed
Into some brutish form of wolf, or bear,
Or ounce, or tiger, hog or bearded goat
—or, again, they prowl in the hideous wood ‘Like stabled wolves, or
tigers at their prey’. Placed in its social and political context, andmediated through Milton’ s puritan consciousness, this monstrousrout of bestial passions can be equated with the licentious rapacityof a depraved aristocracy; on the other hand, it might just as easilybe the brutalised and intemperate mob. Comus’ unruly train have thequalities of both.
Wild passions in dark woods inevitably carry social as well as
psychological implications. The dark recesses of the soul can oftenbe traced to their social locations. Bearing in mind, then, thetraditional meanings of the dual symbol (fallen man, bestial passion,social depravity), what immediately strikes us about Blake’ s poem isnot—as Kathleen Raine would have it—that the Tyger is ‘a symbolof competitive, predatious selfhood’, but that this ‘predatiousselfhood’ has acquired a new splendour. Moreover, the beast inquestion had leapt to the centre of consciousness in such a way thatthe speaker is unable to judge it or categorise it according totraditional schemas; the emblem has burst out of its religious frame.There is even the feeling that this old symbol of bestial passion maybe the one point of purifying, if destructive brightness in thetraditional forests of Error.
In an important essay, Martin K. Nurmi argued that Blake’ s The
Tyger was a direct response to events in France, and that the ‘cruel
excesses’ of the August Rising and the September Massacres of1792 provoked an initially horrified reaction (hence the ‘horrid ribs’and ‘sanguine woe’ in the first draft), but that this was modifiedwhen the National Convention was formed (21 September) and theFrench Republic was announced (22 September). The final draft,says Nurmi, was ‘the result of hard thought, not of events’; the tiger’ s‘dreadfulness’ could now be seen in perspective, as part of ‘thedivine plan’. This is convincing, but it is not the only evidence for
33

34the poem’ s topicality. The Tyger is a symbolist poem. By unearthing
the currency of Blake’ s symbol at the time he wrote the poem, we
might gain a further insight into its political meaning.
It can be argued, in fact, that Blake was not only consciously
transforming a traditional symbolism, but that he was criticising,through the speaker of The Tyger, a prevailing conservative ideologythat viewed revolution merely as a horrifying, dehumanisingprocess.
—Stewart Crehan, Blake in Context (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
Humanities Press, 1984), 125–127.
MORTON D. P ALEY ON DIFFERING VIEWPOINTS ON
“THETYGER ”
[Morton D. Paley is a Professor Emeritus of English at theUniversity of California at Berkeley and edits Blake: AnIllustrated Quarterly. He is the author of a study on Blake’ sthought called Energy and the Imagination. In this essay,“Tyger of Wrath”, Paley compares and contrasts scholars’varying points of view on the poem.]
Swinburne reads the poem as a piece of Romantic Satanism. Makinguse of Blake’ s Notebook, then in the possession of Dante GabrielRossetti, Swinburne prints an earlier version of the second stanza,then paraphrases it and some of the rest of the poem as follows:
Burnt in distant deeps or skies
The cruel fire of thine eyes?Could heart descend or wings aspire?What the hand dare seize the fire?
Could God bring down his heart to the making of a thing so
deadly and strong? or could any lesser daemonic force of nature take
to itself wings and fly high enough to assume power equal to such acreation? Could spiritual force so far descend or material force so faraspire? Or, when the very stars, and all the armed children of heaven,the “helmed cherubim” that guide and the “sworded seraphim” thatguard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at sight of this newforce of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire ofmenace to man—

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?10
By calling the Tyger a “new force of monstrous matter” and “a fire
of menace to man,” Swinburne distorts the question. He also ignoresthe typical meaning of stars in Blake’ s symbolism as well as thesignificance of a cancelled stanza’ s being a cancelled stanza. Y eatsand Ellis, editors of the first collection of Blake’ s complete works,take a different view in their brief comment: “The ‘Tiger’ is, ofcourse, the tiger of wrath, wiser in his own way than the horse ofinstruction, but always, like the roaring of lions and the destructivesword, so terrible as to be a portion of eternity too great for the eyeof man.’”
11S. Foster Damon, in his monumental William Blake: His
Philosophy and Symbols , first published in 1924, finds the question
of the poem to be “how to reconcile the Forgiveness of Sins (theLamb) with the Punishment of Sins (the Tyger).” The Wrath of theTyger had to be of divine origin (“His God was essentially personal;therefore Evil must be his Wrath”). The purpose of Wrath is “toconsume Error, to annihilate those stubborn beliefs which cannot beremoved by the tame ‘horses of instruction.’” Y et Damon also thinksthat “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” is “not anexclamation of wonder, but a very real question, whose answerBlake was not sure of.”
12
For Joseph H. Wicksteed, author of the most detailed commentary
on the Songs, the poem’ s questions do seem to have a definiteanswer. “The whole thesis of ‘The Tyger,’” he writes, “is that he is aspiritual expression of the Creator himself . . . ‘The Tyger’ is atremendous treatise enunciating the nature of the God that doesexist—the God that is mightily and terribly visible in hismanifestations.” Attempting to discover the history of Blake’ s innerlife through the visions and revisions of the Notebook, Wicksteeddecided that “the composition of this great poem registers (perhapseffects) a change in Blake’ s mind,” carrying him beyond the worldview of the Songs of Experience to that of the prophecies.
13
Since the time of these pioneer critics, writers on the poem have
continued to disagree about whether the Tyger is “good,” created bythe Lamb’ s creator; ambiguous, its creator unknown and the questionof the poem unanswerable; or “evil,” created by some maleficent
35

force. The first of these views has been given succinct expression by
Mark Schorer:
The juxtaposition of lamb and tiger points not merely to the oppo-
sition of innocence and experience, but to the resolution of theparadox they present. The innocent impulses of the lamb havebeen curbed by restraints, and the lamb has turned into somethingelse, indeed into the tiger. Innocence is converted to experience. Itdoes not rest there. Energy can be curbed but it cannot bedestroyed, and when it reaches the limits of its endurance, it burstsforth in revolutionary wrath.
14
Similar to Schorer’ s interpretation in this respect are those of David
V . Erdman, Stanley Gardner, Martin K. Nurmi, F . W . Bateson, andMartin Price.
15
Among those who have seen the Tyger as either ambiguous or
ambivalent are Northrop Frye, Hazard Adams, Robert F . Gleckner,John E. Grant, Paul Miner, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Philip Hobsbaum.Frye advises the reader of the poem to “leave it a question.” Adams,in his generally valuable essay on “The Tyger,” finds two viewswithin the poem; however, he emphasizes the “visionary” one,according to which “the tiger symbolizes the primal spiritual energywhich may bring form out of chaos and unite man with that part ofhis own being which he has allowed somehow to sleep walk into thedreadful forests of material darkness.” Gleckner, setting “The Tyger”against some passages in The Four Zoas, also finds two views.
Grant, in his finely considered discussion, “The Art and Argumentof ‘The Tyger,’” indicates agreement with Wicksteed but, unlikeWicksteed, finds only conditional answers.
If he who made the Lamb also made the Tyger, it is because the
two beasts are contraries . . . . If the creator smiles because he seesthat in the end the Tyger will leave the forest along with man, aman may feel justified in asking why it is his lot now to be castamong savage beasts. This question cannot be removed from “TheTyger,” and, in spite of assertions to the contrary, it was one of thequestions which continued to concern Blake throughout his life.
Both Miner and Hirsch find two different perspectives maintained
throughout the poem, though they see its final answer as affirmative.Hobsbaum cautions readers against answering the questions, as heregards Blake himself as being in doubt about them.
16
36

37Two recent commentators on the poem consider the Tyger to be
perceived as evil. Harold Bloom regards this perception as the error
of the “speaker” of the poem, which he thinks of as a monologuedelivered by a Bard in the fallen state of Experience. “The Bard ofExperience is in mental darkness . . . The Bard is one of theRedeemed, capable of imaginative salvation, but before the poemends he has worked his frenzy into the self-enclosure of the ElectAngels, prostrate before a mystery entirely of his own creation.”
17
This Bard, whom I cannot help regarding as entirely read into thepoem, would resemble Adams’ shadowy first speaker, for whom thecreator of the Tyger must be a Urizenic God, a “devil-maker.”
18Miss
Kathleen Raine, pursuing a different method, comes to a parallelconclusion: that the creator of the Tyger is such a devil-maker. Shesuggests sources in Gnostic and Hermetic mysticism as proof that“the Lamb was made by the son of God, the second person of theTrinity . . . the Tiger was made by the demiurge, the third person ofthe (Gnostic and Cabbalistic) trinity. Lamb and Tiger inhabit differentworlds, and are the work of different creators.” To Miss Raine theTyger seems “a symbol of competitive, predacious selfhood.”
19
The meaning of “The Tyger” has been and continues to be
disputed. I would like to suggest that our understanding of the poemcan be deepened and enhanced if we regard it against the traditionsI have mentioned: that of Jakob Boehme, his predecessor Paracelsus,and his disciple William Law; and that of the British theoreticians ofthe sublime in the eighteenth century. These disparate traditions haveat least one nexus other than their meeting in the mind of WilliamBlake: for quite different reasons, the expression of the Wrath ofGod in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, is of greatimportance to each of them. This Biblical material also bears directlyon Blake’ s theme in “The Tyger.” I shall propose that “The Tyger” isan apostrophe to Wrath as a “sublime” phenomenon, to Wrath bothin the Prophetic sense and as what Boehme calls the First Principle.The images and rhetoric of the poem will be found to support suchan interpretation.
NOTES
10. London, 1868, p. 120. For Blake’ s actual spelling and punctuation, see The
Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1966), pp.
172, 173, 214. This edition will hereafter be cited as K.

11. Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Y eats, The Works of William Blake
(London, 1893), II, 14.
12. Pp. 277–278.13. Blake’ s Innocence and Experience (London, 1928), pp. 196, 212.
14. William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New Y ork, 1946), pp. 250–251.
15. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), pp. 179–180.
Erdman, like Schorer, regards the questions of the poem as rhetorical. Gardner,
Infinity on the Anvil (Oxford, 1954), pp. 123–130. Nurmi, “Blake’ s Revisions of
The Tyger,” PMLA,
LXXI (1956), 669–685. [An excerpt from this essay is
included among the selections in this volume.] Bateson, Selected Poems of
William Blake, pp. 117–119. Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (Garden City,
N.Y .), 1964, pp. 398–400. [See “The Vision of Innocence,” included among theselections in this volume.]
16. Frye, “Blake After Two Centuries,” UTQ,
XXVII (1957), 12. Adams, William
Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle, 1963), p. 73. Gleckner, The
Piper & the Bard (Detroit, 1959), pp. 275–290. [An extract from this book is
included among the selections in this volume.] Grant (ed.), Discussions of
William Blake (Boston, 1961), p. 75. Miner, “‘The Tyger’: Genesis and
Evolution in the Poetry of William Blake,” Criticism, IV(1962), 59–73. Hirsch,
Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven, 1964), pp.
244–252. Hobsbaum, “A Rhetorical Question Answered: Blake’ s Tyger and Its
Critics,” Neophilologus, XL VIII (1964), 151–155.
17. Blake’ s Apocalypse (Garden City, N.Y ., 1963), pp. 137–138.
18. William Blake, p. 65.
19. “Who Made the Tyger?” Encounter, II(1954). 48, 43
—Morton D. Paley, “Tyger of Wrath.” In Twentieth-CenturyInterpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Morton
D. Paley (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969), 70–74.
MARTIN PRICE ON TERROR AND SYMMETR Y IN “THETYGER ”
[Martin Price of Y ale University wrote To the Palace of
Wisdom and Swift’ s Rhetorical Art. In the essay, “The Vision
of Innocence”, he offers another interpretation of this work,considering complex imagery and confusion in “TheTyger”.]
38

39‘The Tyger’ is the best known of Blake’ s songs and the most
frequently and elaborately interpreted. The phrase ‘fearfulsymmetry’—whatever its possible symbolic suggestions—is clearlythe initial puzzle: the ‘symmetry’ implies an ordering hand orintelligence, the ‘fearful’ throws doubt on the benevolence of theCreator. The ‘forests of the night’ are the darkness out of which thetiger looms, brilliant in contrast; they, also embody the doubt orconfusion that surrounds the origins of the tiger. In the case of ‘TheLamb’, the Creator ‘calls himself a Lamb. / He is meek, & he ismild; / He became a little child’. In ‘The Tyger’ the Creator again islike what he creates, and the form that must be supplied him now isthe Promethean smith working violently at his forge. The lastalteration we have of this much altered poem insists upon thelikeness of Creator and created: ‘What dread hand Form’ d thy dreadfeet?’ The tiger is an image of the Creator; its ‘deadly terrors’ mustbe His.
The most puzzling stanza of the poem is the next-to-last:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’ d heaven with their tears,Did he smile his work to see?Did he who made the Lamb make-thee?
The first two lines are the crux of the poem. (. . .)
The ‘spiritual sword / That lays open the hidden heart’ is a
counterpart of the tiger we see in the Songs of Experience . The wrath
serves the ultimate end of redemption and becomes one with mercy.If the God of apparent wrath is also the God of forgiveness, thetiger’ s form is only superficially ‘fearful’. In the words of Pope:
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind
(Essay on Man, II, 109–10).
‘The Tyger’ dramatizes the terrors of the shocked doubter, but it
moves with assurance—in the stanza I have quoted—to an assertionof faith (faith in the oneness of God, in the goodness of wrath, in theholiness of prophetic rage). When the last stanza repeats the first,

but for the alteration of ‘could’ to ‘dare,’ the question has been
answered. The inconceivable of the first stanza has become themajestic certainty of the last: the daring of the Creator—whetherGod or man—is the cleansing wrath of the tiger.
—Martin Price, “The Vision of Innocence,” Critics on Blake:
Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. Judith O’Neill (Coral Gables:
University of Miami Press, 1970), 106–107.
40

CRITICAL ANAL YSIS OF
“London”
It is impossible to study William Blake’ s “London” without an
understanding of the time in which it was written; in Blake’ s opinion,the Industrial Revolution had changed the city for worse. Themanufacturing work being done in factories created filth andpollution. London was dirty. Thick, black smoke from factories leftbehind a nasty residue where it landed. The river Thames waspolluted with the byproducts of industry. The new type of workchanged the city socially, economically, and topographically.Although the new industrial economy created many jobs, the wagesof these jobs were low. Long hours of hard labor did not guarantee aliving wage. The poor worked themselves to death in unsafe,unsanitary, and unhealthful conditions. The suffering in the streets ofthe city affected Blake profoundly. While he could not changesociety, he could observe, and express his opinion of the changes inhis art.
Scholars point to the many versions of this poem found in Blake’ s
notes. Writing and re-writing, Blake edited his work down to everydetail. Carefully selected words paint a bleak picture of London lifein the late 18th century. Looking at the language he chose inprevious drafts of the poem, students of Blake find he was verydeliberate in his selections. His word choices are important on manylevels. Scholars devote chapters to the selection of one word in thefinished version of one work. Blake considered the impact of eachvivid description before “London” was finished. Understanding themultiple meanings of words and being familiar with history aresome of the background needed to fully grasp and appreciate thepoem. An early draft began the poem:
I wander thro each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
whereas the finished version reads:
I wander thro’ each charter’ d streetNear where the charter’ d Thames does flow
41

The change from dirty to charter’ d is significant. Charter’ d is a word
of multiple meanings. According to E.P . Thompson, charter’ d is
associated with commerce and cheating. A charter is also a
document that grants rights to individuals, at the same time limiting
the rights of others. The semantic instability of such choices formsthe basis of much of the body of Blake criticism.
The speaker starts by searching the streets of London for
inspiration, planning to describe what he sees there. What he findsis troubling: “weakness” and “woe” in the face of every person hemeets. It’ s a weary life for people in Blake’ s London.
In the second verse, we find more despair; it becomes a common
thread in the fabric of London life. Every man, every woman, andevery child can expect life and the law to produce the same misery.The challenges of life in London weigh heavy on the minds ofcitizens. Blake believes Londoners are shackled to an unpleasant lifeand that the worst of it is that the Londoners’ imprisonment is oftheir own conception. How can one break free when thought hascreated the prison? Where can a Londoner find relief? Is there anypeace for weary workers or comfort for a wounded spirit? Not inthese four verses.
The third verse vividly shows us what Blake means. It provides
an extremely grim picture of life in London, a worst-case scenario.Chimney sweeps faced some of the worst working conditions of theday. They worked outdoors at great heights, affected by the elements,the ubiquitous smog of London, and their own fear. The work wasexhausting. They inhaled the layers of soot and ash that they cleanedfrom the chimneys, and what they didn’t inhale ended up on theirclothing. Furthermore, the job was seasonal, and many were left tobeg for a living when their brooms were not busy. This was a sadimage of a working life: when on the job, he risked life and limb toprovide for his family, and when not working he faced desperationin the streets. The chimney sweep was forced to ask for charity. ByBlake’ s standards, the job that cost so much personally offered littlein the way of satisfaction.
Nor is the House of God a source of comfort for the speaker of
“London”: the image of the “Blackening Church” is particularlytroubling. The environment of London is causing physical andspiritual decay. Industrialization is polluting the outer structure of
42

the churches. Inside, those seeking salvation have trouble finding it.
The hard work in the factories and the bleak outlook on life is“blackening” the hearts the faithful. Instead of enlightenment,religion has become just another obligation. Instead of strengtheningspirits, the churches impede peace. Blake’ s opinions on organizedreligion, particularly on Swedenborgism, or the Church of the NewJerusalem, appear in other poems, satirically, as well.
According to the speaker, Londoners are finding no comfort in
prayer and no solace in the monarchy. Behind the palace walls,England’ s reigning family is removed from the strife in the streets.The King fails to address the problems facing the working people.Soldiers, sighing, blood: the images are bleak. England is losing itspeople to the Industrial Revolution and to the American Revolution.There is blood on the palace walls because of the losing battles: goneare both a part of the Empire and a way of life.
As Blake brings “London” to a close, we find that night, too, is
powerless to bring peace to the crowded streets of the city, thatdarkness does not disguise despair. The speaker describes what hehears: Prostitutes curse. Babies cry. And why shouldn’t they cry?The life into which they have been born is not an easy one. It is notcomfortable and promises no joy. Parents find married lifeunsatisfying. Blake frames the union of woman and man in terms ofcrisis and death, and the last word of the poem is hearse. Indeed, this
may be the only place in which a citizen in Blake’ s “London” canfind rest. The hard life is finally over: a beaten spirit can leave themisery of the streets.
Family life in “London” is difficult, work is hard, the streets are
dirty, and the air is filthy. There is little comfort in religion or inpatriarchy. For Blake’ s speaker, the late 18th century is a terribletime in which to be living in London.
43

CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“London”
DA VID V. E RDMAN ON PEOPLE IN BLAKE ’S“LONDON ”
[David V . Erdman taught at the State University of New
Y ork at Stony Brook. He edited The Poetry and Prose of
William Blake and wrote Blake: Prophet Against Empire
and Concordance of the Works of Blake . He also was editor
of publications at the New Y ork Public Library. In thiswriting, Erdman explores the ways in which the lives of18th-century London influenced Blake’ s vision of the city.]
When we turn now to ‘London’, Blake’ s ‘mightiest brief poem’,
10
our minds ringing with Blakean themes, we come upon infinitecurses in a little room, a world at war in a grain of London soot. Onthe illuminated page a child is leading a bent old man along thecobblestones and a little vagabond is warming his hands at a fire inthe open street. But it is Blake who speaks . . . .
In his first draft Blake wrote ‘dirty street’ and ‘dirty Thames’ as
plain statement of fact, reversing the sarcastic ‘golden London’ and‘silver Thames’ of his early parody of Thomson’ s ‘Rule Britannia’.And the harlot’ s curse sounded in every ‘dismal’ street. The changeto ‘charter’ d’ (with an intermediate ‘cheating’)
11mocks Thomson’ s
boast that ‘the charter of the land’ keeps Britons free, and it suggestsagreement with (perhaps was even suggested by) Paine’ scondemnation of ‘charters and corporations’ in the Second Part ofThe Rights of Man, where Paine argues that all charters are purelynegative in effect and that city charters, by annulling the rights of themajority, cheat the inhabitants and destroy the town’ s prosperity—even London being ‘capable of bearing up against the political evilsof a corporation’ only from its advantageous situation on theThames.
12Paine’ s work was circulated by shopkeepers chafing
under corporation rule and weary, like Blake, of the ‘cheating wavesof charter’ d streams’ of monopolized commerce ( N. 113).
In the notebook fragment just quoted Blake speaks of shrinking
‘at the little blasts of fear That the hireling blows into my ear’, thus
44

indicating that when he writes of the ‘mind-forg’ d manacles’ in every
cry of fear and every ban he is not saying simply that people arevoluntarily forging manacles in their own minds. Hireling informersor mercenaries promote the fear; Pitt’ s proclamations are the bans,linked with an order to dragoons ‘to assemble on Hounslow Heath’and ‘be within one hour’ s march of the metropolis’.
13A rejected
reading, ‘german forged links’, points to several manacles forgedostensibly in the mind of Hanoverian George: the Prussianmanoeuvres on the heath, the British alliance with Prussia andAustria against France, and the landing of Hessian and Hanoverianmercenaries in England allegedly en route to battlefronts in France.
Blake may have written ‘London’ before this last development,
but before he completed his publication there was a flurry of alarmamong freeborn Englishmen at the presence of German hirelings.‘Will you wait till BARRACKS are erected in every village,’exclaimed a London Corresponding Society speaker in January1794, ‘and till subsidized Hessians and Hanoverians are upon us?”
14
In Parliament Lord Stanhope expressed the hope that honest Britonswould meet this Prussian invasion ‘by OPPOSING FORCE BYFORCE’. And the editor of Politics for the People, reporting that one
Hessian had stabbed an Englishman in a street quarrel, cried that allwere brought ‘to cut the throats of Englishmen’. He urged citizens toarm and to fraternize with their fellow countrymen, the Britishcommon soldiers.
15
The latter are Blake’ s ‘hapless Soldiers’ whose ‘sigh Runs in
blood down Palace walls’—and whose frequently exhibitedinclination in 1792–1793 to turn from grumbling to mutiny
16is not
taken into account by those who interpret the blood as the soldier’ sown and who overlook the potentially forceful meaning of ‘sigh’ ineighteenth century diction.
17In the structure of the poem the
soldier’ s utterance that puts blood on palace walls is parallel to theharlot’ s curse that blasts and blights. And Blake would have knownthat curses were often chalked or painted on the royal walls. InOctober 1792 Lady Malmesbury’ s Louisa saw ‘written upon thePrivy Garden-wall, “No coach-tax; d—Pitt! d—n the Duke ofRichmond! no King”’.
18
A number of cognate passages in which Blake mentions blood on
palace walls indicate that the blood is an apocalyptic omen of mutiny
45

46and civil war involving regicide. In The French Revolution people
and soldiers fraternize, and when their ‘murmur’ (sigh) reaches the
palace, blood runs down the ancient pillars. In The Four Zoas , Night
I, similar ‘wailing’ affects the people; ‘But most the polish’ d Palaces,dark, silent, bow with dread.’ ‘But most’ is a phrase straight from‘London’. And in Night IX the people’ s sighs and cries of fear mountto ‘furious’ rage, apocalyptic blood ‘pours down incessant’, and‘Kings in their palaces lie drownd’ in it, torn ‘limb from limb’.
19In
the same passage the marks of weakness and woe of ‘London’ arespelled out as ‘all the marks . . . of the slave’ s scourge & tyrant’ scrown’. In ‘London’ Blake is talking about what he hears in thestreets, about the moral stain of the battlefield sigh of expiringsoldiers.
NOTES
10. Oliver Elton’ s phrase, I forgot where.
11. The ‘cheating’ variant is in N. 113; see E464, 772/K166.
12. Paine, I, 407; Nancy Bogen ( Notes and Queries , XV, January 1968) finds
Paine also calling ‘every chartered town . . . an aristocratic monopoly’ in the
First Part (1791) as well. On chartered boroughs see Cowper, The Task, iv. 671;
also John Butler, Brief Reflections, 1791, a pamphlet reply to Burke cited in J. T.Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke , Toronto,
1963, p. 193.
13. Gazette, Dec. 1, 1792. In the note just cited, Mrs Bogen suggests that Blake’ s
choice, in the Thames poem, of the Ohio as the river to wash Thames stains from
a Londoner ‘born a slave’ and aspiring ‘to be free’ was influenced by GilbertImlay’ s Topographical Description , London, 1792. On the Ohio Imlay found
escape from ‘musty forms’ that ‘lead you into labyrinths of doubt andperplexity’ and freedom from priestcraft which elsewhere ‘seems to have forgedfetters for the human mind’.
14. Address at Globe Tavern, Jan. 20, 1794 (pamphlet).15. Eaton, Politics for the People,
II, no. 7, March 15, 1794.
16. The Royal Proclamation cited efforts to ‘delude the judgment of the lower
classes’ and ‘debauch the soldiery. Wilberforce feared that ‘the soldiers areeverywhere tampered with. Gilbert Elliot in November expressed a commonbelief that armies and navies would prove ‘but brittle weapons’ against thespreading French ideas. Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot First Earl of Minto,3 vols., London, 1874,
II, 74. Through the winter and spring there were sporadic

47attacks of the populace on press gangs and recruiting houses. Mutiny and
rumours of mutiny were reported in the General Evening Post, Apr. 20, July 20,
Aug. 3, 7, 31, Oct. 28, 30, 1793. In Ireland the mutiny of embodied regimentsbroached into a small civil war. See also Lucyle Werkmeister, A NewspaperHistory of England , 1792–1793, Lincoln, Neb., 1968, items indexed under
‘Insurrection, phantom’, and ‘Ireland’.
17. S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols , Boston and
London, 1924, p. 283, reads it as the battlefield ‘death-sigh’ which morally ‘is
a stain upon the State’. Joseph H. Wicksteed, Blake’ s Innocence & Experience,
N.Y ., 1928, p. 253, has it that the soldier who promotes peace is quelling the‘tumult and war’ of a ‘radically unstable’ society. But Blake was not one to lookupon riot-quelling as a securing of freedom and peace! Alfred Kazin, The
Portable Blake, p. 15, with a suggestion ‘that the Soldier’ s desperation runs, likehis own blood, in accusation down the walls of the ruling Palace’, comes closerto the spirit of indignation which Blake reflects.
18. Elliot,
II, 71. Verbally Blake’ s epithet may be traced back, I suppose, to
‘hapless Warren!’, Barlow’ s phrase for the patriot general dying at Bunker Hill
(changed to ‘glorious Warren’ in 1793).19. F .R.241–246: K145; F .Z. i. 396: K275; ix. 73–74, 230–255: K359,363.
—David V . Erdman, “Infinite London: The Songs of Experience in
their Historical Setting,” Critics on Blake: Readings in LiteraryCriticism, ed. Judith O’Neill (Coral Gables: University of MiamiPress, 1970), 65–68.
KENNETH JOHNSTON ON THE VOCABULAR Y OF BLAKE ’S
“LONDON ”
[Kenneth Johnston is a Professor of English at Indiana
University. He has written The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet,Lover, Rebel, Spy and edited Romantic Revolutions: Theory
and Criticism and The Age of William Wordsworth . This
essay, like Erdman’ s above, examines the people of London.Johnson believes Blake sees the people of the city victimsof circumstance. He explains how the artwork and thewords combine to paint a harsh picture of daily life.]
The chimney sweeper, the conscripted soldier, and the prostitute inthe poem are undeniably victims, but Blake’ s changes point to hisconviction that repression is not simply the result of “bans” handeddown from above. German George III issues the bans, Blake knows,

but even he cannot forge the manacles with which we shackle our
spirits into obeying them; man’ s “marks of weakness” are partiallythe cause of his “marks of woe.”
The design across the top of London {18} is an excellent example
of the way in which Blake’ s designs at their best enrich the verbalstatement of the poems. Because it does not relate directly toanything in the text, the design at first confuses, but its effect doesjar the reader’ s perceptions out of the verbal and into the visualmode. On first viewing, the aged cripple and the child who seems tobe leading him appear as two victims of the evils of contemporaryLondon, but on closer inspection—of independent visual elementscounterpointing independent verbal elements—we recognize adramatization of the statement of the first stanza: the child and theancient “mark” (see) in each other’ s face “woe” and “weakness,”respectively. Or, more simply (since the old man may be blind), theyarethe marks—evidences—themselves. Furthermore, there is a
profound irony in the situation if, as seems likely, the child issupposed to be leading the old man. Viewed against the text this is amockery, since every stanza after the first contains a detail about thevictimization of children in London. But what seems a mockery tocommon sense may be a profoundly sustained ironic contrast to theauthor of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . If we generalize the
child as Innocence and the aged cripple as Experience, we caninterpret the design in the larger context of the Songs Of Innocenceand Of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the HumanSoul. Does the design parallel the text by showing the inadequaciesof Innocence and Experience as separated modes of consciousness,
or is it to be read counter to the text, as a hopeful sign of humanprogress, a glimpse of the day when the wisdom of Experiencemoves forward in the city guided by the fresh simplicity of Innocentdesires?
7
NOTE
7. Cf. John Grant, “The Colors of Prophecy,” The Nation, CC(25 January 1965),
92; E. D. Hirsch, Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake , New
Haven, 1964, 265. Both Grant and Hirsch see the design optimistically contrary
to the text. Hirsch sees both the old man and the child as emblems of weaknessand woe: “Like the poem, the design telescopes cause and effect.”
48

—Kenneth Johnston, “Blake’ s Cities: Romantic Forms of Urban
Renewal,” Blake’ s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V . Erdman
and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970),417–419.
E.P . T HOMPSON ON THE WAY S I N WHICH WORDS CHANGE
“LONDON ”
[E.P . Thompson authored Witness Against the Beast:
William Blake and the Moral Law . In this essay, Thompson
takes a look at Blake’ s revisions in the writing of “London”.
He shows us how some seemingly simple changes have amajor impact on the images and meaning of the work.]
Thus ‘charter’ d’ arose in Blake’ s mind in association with ‘cheating’and with the ‘little blasts of fear’ of the ‘hireling’. The secondassociation is an obvious political allusion. To reformers the corruptpolitical system was a refuge for hirelings: indeed, Dr. Johnson haddefined in his dictionary a ‘Pension’ as ‘in England it is generallyunderstood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to hiscountry.’ David Erdman is undoubtedly right that the ‘little blasts offear’ suggest the proclamations, the Paine-burnings, and the politicalrepressions of the State and of Reeves’ s Association for PreservingLiberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers whichdominated the year in which these poems were written.
4In the
revised version of ‘Thames’ Blake introduces the paradox which wascontinually to be in the mouths of radicals and factory reformers inthe next fifty years: the slavery of the English poor. And he pointsalso (‘I was born a slave but I go to be free’) to the first wave ofemigration of reformers from the attention of Church-and-Kingmobs or hirelings.
But ‘charter’ d’ is more particularly associated with ‘cheating.’ It
is clearly a word to be associated with commerce: one might thinkof the Chartered Companies which, increasingly drained of function,were bastions of privilege within the government of the city. Or,again, one might think of the monopolistic privileges of the EastIndia Company, whose ships were so prominent in the commerce ofthe Thames, which applied in 1793 for twenty years’ renewal of its
49

charter, and which was under bitter attack in the reformers’ press.5
But ‘charter’ d’ is, for Blake, a stronger and more complex word
than that, which he endows with more generalized symbolic power.
It has the feel of a word which Blake has recently discovered, as,years later, he was to ‘discover’ the word ‘golden’ (which,nevertheless, he had been using for years). He is savouring it,weighing its poetic possibilities in his hand. It is in no sense a ‘new’word, but he has found a way to use it with a new ironic inversion.For the word is standing at an intellectual and political cross-roads.On the one hand it was a stale counter of the customary libertarianrhetoric of the polite culture. Blake himself had used it in much thisway in his early ‘King Edward the Third’:
Let Liberty, the charter’ d right of Englishmen,
Won by our fathers in many a glorious field,Enerve my soldiers; let LibertyBlaze in each countenance, and fire the battle.The enemy fight in chains, invisible chains, but heavy;Their minds are fetter’ d; then how can they be free?
6
It would be only boring to accumulate endless examples from
eighteenth-century constitutional rhetoric or poetry of the use ofchartered rights, chartered liberties, magna carta: the word is at thecentre of Whig ideology.
There is, however, an obvious point to be made about this tedious
usage of ‘charter’. A charter of liberty is, simultaneously, a denial ofthese liberties to others. A charter is something given or ceded; it isbestowed upon some group by some authority; it is not claimed as ofright. And the liberties (or privileges) granted to this guild, company,corporation or even nation exclude others from the enjoyment of
these liberties. A charter is, in its nature, exclusive.
NOTES
4. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, revised edn. (New Y ork,
1969) which fully argues these points on pp. 272–9. These poems were ‘forged
in the heat of the Y ear One of Equality (September 1792 to 1793) and temperedin the “grey-brow’ d snows” of Antijacobin alarms and proclamations’. See alsoA. Mitchell. ‘The Association Movement of 1792–3’, Historical Journal,
IV: 1
(1961), 56–77; E. P . Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 115–26; D. E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist AssociationMovement, 1792–3’, Historical Journal,
IV: 2 (1966), 179–90.
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5. ‘The cheating waves of charter’ d streams’ and ‘the cheating banks of Thames’
should prompt one to think carefully of this as the source which first gave toBlake this use of ‘charter’ d’. The fullest attack from a Painite source on the EastIndia Company did not appear until 1794: see the editorial articles in foursuccessive numbers of Daniel Isaac Eaton’ s Politics for the People,
II: 8–11 :
‘The East India Charter Considered’. These constituted a full-blooded attack onthe Company’ s commercial and military imperialism (‘If it be deemed expedientto murder half the inhabitants of India, and rob the remainder, surely it is not
requisite to call it governing them?’) which carried to their furthest point
criticisms of the Company to be found in the reforming and Foxite press of1792–3. No social historian can be surprised to find the banks of the Thamesdescribed as ‘cheating’ in the eighteenth century: every kind of fraud and racket,big, small and indifferent, flourished around the docks. The association of thebanks of Thames with commerce was already traditional when Samuel Johnsonrenewed it in his ‘London’ (1738), esp. lines 20–30. Johnson’ s attitude is alreadyambiguous: ‘Britannia’ s glories’ (‘The guard of commerce, and the dread ofSpain’) are invoked retrospectively, in conventional terms: but on Thames-sidealready ‘all are slaves to gold, / Where looks are merchandise, and smiles aresold’. Erdman argues that the ‘golden London’ and ‘silver Thames’ of Blake’ s‘King Edward the Third’ have already assimilated this conventional contrast inthe form of irony: see Erdman, Prophet against Empire, pp. 80–1.
6. E415/K18: If we take the intention of this fragment to be ironic, then Blake
was already regarding the word as suspect rhetoric.
—E.P . Thompson, “London.” In Interpreting Blake, ed. M. Phillips
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5–8.
JOHN BEER ON “LONDON ” ASOPEN TO INTERPRETATION
[John Beer wrote Blake’ s Humanism and Blake’ s Visionary
Universe and the essays “Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth:
Some Cross Currents and Parallels, 1789–1805” and
“Influence and Independence in Blake”. In this essay, Beershows how Blake’ s poems can be interpreted on severaldifferent levels. Beer believes that the poem defiescomplacent interpretation.]
One’ s judgement in so delicately balanced a matter is likely to beswayed by one’ s sense of Blake’ s work as a whole at this time; it isfrom my own sense of it, certainly, that I question whether ‘London’is primarily an ‘apocalyptic’ poem—at least in the common sense of
51

52the word. Edward Thompson argues it to be a virtue of such an
interpretation that in making all the final images ones of commerceand of forthcoming doom it allows the poem to ‘shut like a box’.With most eighteenth-century poets this would indeed be a virtue,but I am not sure that the same applies to Blake. For his poems havea habit (irritating when first encountered) of springing open againjust when one thinks one has closed them—almost as if they werethe work of a man who believed that a poem which shut like a boxmight also be a prison. Despite my own strong interest in thestructures of ideas in Blake’ s poems, and the undoubted existence ofan apocalyptic note in them, I also feel that the interpretations whichare most faithful to their total effect are those which (like Dr Glen’ s)preserve an antinomian quality in the very meanings of the poemsthemselves.
There is on the other hand a price to be paid for such openness;
for there will be times when we simply do not have the means todecide between possible interpretations. To take up one of Dr Glen’ sown claims, it is hard to see how we can be sure that the observer in‘London’ who ‘marks’ the marks in the faces that he sees is therebydemonstrating an abstracting and mechanical mental narrowness ofhis own. The obsessive focussing of his gaze on those of othersmight be a sign of extreme and generous humanity rather than itsopposite.
One answer to such problems, of course, is to regard them as
demonstrating the hermeneutic versatility of Blake’ s poetry andadding to their richness; but that will not quite do either. There issomething about the very intensity of his writing in such placeswhich urges the reader to interpret it directly. On any particularoccasion, therefore, it is likely that the reader will make up his or hermind one way or the other. What our discussion seems todemonstrate is that in certain cases the reading of a single word maybe decisive in fixing the balance of interpretation: in so short a poemas ‘London’ the leading significance assigned to ‘mark’ is enough toswing the dominant tone of the whole.
Investigation of a single word in Blake can prove equally fruitful
elsewhere—and especially so if it turns out to unravel a conciseshorthand for some complicated train of thought and imagery.Another word which repays study is ‘intellectual’, as in the line ‘A

tear is an intellectual thing’. Although that line no doubt makes
gratifying reading to sentimental theoreticians, it stands outstrangely in Blake—particularly since the specific use of‘intellectual’ as we have come to know it belongs to a later period.At this point, however, we can turn to Kathleen Raine, who pointsout that ‘intellect’ is a term which appears in Thomas Taylor’ stranslations from the Platonists. She quotes, for example, a passagewhich begins as follows: ‘Intellect indeed is beautiful, and the mostbeautiful of all things, being situated in a pure light and in a puresplendor, and comprehending in itself the nature of beings, of whichindeed this our beautiful material world is but the shadow and image. . . ’
44A passage such as this certainly seems to be echoed by Blake,
who, after speaking in Jerusalem of Imagination as ‘the real &
eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faintshadow’,
45goes on to inquire whether the Holy Ghost is any other
than an ‘Intellectual Fountain’.46Shortly afterwards he describes
God as ‘the intellectual fountain of Humanity’.47The coupling of
the two favourite neo-Platonist concepts of ‘intellect’ and ‘fountain’as attributes of the divine provides strong evidence for the existenceof a direct influence.
Although these are comparatively late statements, moreover, they
seem to reflect an earlier formulation of Blake’ s, for his earlier usesof ‘intellect’ also carry a charge which suggests that he thinks of itin dynamic terms, as an in-dwelling power—directly linked, as inPlotinus, to a realm of intellect which transcends the world ofgeneration and death.
NOTES
44. Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (2 vols, London, 1969), vol. II, p. 195,
citing T. Taylor, Five Books of Plotinus (1794), pp. 243–4.
45. Jerusalem 77 (Raine, Tradition).
46. Jerusalem 77 (not in Raine).
47. Jerusalem 91.11 (not in Raine).
—John Beer, “Influence and Independence in Blake.” In Interpreting
Blake, ed. M. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 220–222.
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54STEWART CREHAN ON THE SOCIAL SYSTEM OF “LONDON ”
[Stewart Crehan is a Professor of English at the Manchester
Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. He haswritten Blake in Context and Nature’ s Excess: Physiocratic
Theory and Romanticism . In this essay, Crehan explains that
Blake paints a bleak picture of life in “London”. He believesthat religion, politics, and marriage all act negatively on thepeople of the city. While the poem is politically and sociallycritical, “London” also describes the life of the citizens.]
Though clearly a poem of protest, London transcends the rhetoric of
contemporary radical protest in several important ways. First of all,the ‘I’ of the poem does not overtly accuse, but simply wandersthrough ‘each charter’ d street’, passively recording what he sees andhears. The lack of any overt crusading outburst makes the signs ofsocial misery (‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’) seem all themore inescapable. Their presence overwhelms us. The monotonousrepetitions of the first two stanzas (‘charter’ d’, ‘marks’ and ‘every’),together with the Johnsonian generality of the ‘hapless Soldier’ s’ and‘the youthful Harlot’ s’, register an ineluctable—that is, social
condition. The perception of a doomed and rotten society is heard
rather than seen: what we see we can choose not to see, but what wehear is less easily shut out. Individual moral outrage or denunciationis redundant in a poem whose shock effect lies in the objective forceof the human images themselves.
This is, of course, a mark of Blake’ s success as a poet. In Book
VII of The Prelude, Wordsworth describes how as an idle resident he
walked London’ s streets, observing, with wonder and awe, the‘endless stream of men and moving things’. Recording a never-ending spectacle, the poet suggests a multitudinous yet confusinglytrivial variety of human specimens, but it is interesting to note thatthe three central figures in Blake’ s poem—the chimney sweeper, thesoldier and the harlot—do not occur anywhere in Wordsworth’ scompendious observations. Although they loom large in Blake’ surban landscape, they were not empirically the obvious figures to
choose.
Contemporary social protest often added the threat of divine
vengeance, but in Blake’ s poem no heavenly judgment is needed,

55since both the judgment and the threat come from within the urban
system itself. Biblical, apocalyptic allusions are present, but theworkings of society revealed in the poem have an apocalyptic logicof their own. The voice of protest has been objectified. Themillenarian Richard Brothers wrote of London:
her streets are full of Prostitutes, and many of her houses are full
of crimes; it is for such exceeding great wickedness that St. John
spiritually calls London in his chapter (Revelation 11:8) by the
name of Sodom . . . . For my designation is, and the commands ofGod to me are, that I shall walk through the great thoroughfare-street of the city, to pronounce his judgements, and declare themirrevocable . . .
And a follower of Brothers, Thomas Taylor, addressed the ‘opulent
possessors of property’ as follows:
Know you, that the cries of the Widow, Fatherless Children, and
the defenceless oppressed Poor, are come up unto the ears of theLord of Hosts. He is ready to undertake their cause: and if yourepent not of your evil deeds, He will consume you , with the
breath of his mouth.
In Blake’ s London the possibility of that kind of judgment and
repentance is excluded, since what is exposed is not ‘crimes’,
‘wickedness’ and ‘evil deeds’, but a whole social system.
The images in the last two stanzas show how established religion
is bound up with exploitation, politics is bound up with war, andmarriage is bound up with prostitution. The chimney sweeper’ s cry,instead of coming ‘up unto the ears of the Lords of Hosts’, casts a
pall over every ‘black’ning Church’, whose blackness, caused by thesmoke from the chimneys that the sweeps clean, and darkening,instead of brightening, the lives of those who live under it, makes thetarget—here, the guilty clergy’ s hypocritical concern—concretelyvisible. The ‘hapless Soldier’ s sigh’ is not heard by God, butbecomes visible as blood running down ‘Palace walls’. The imageboth exposes and indicts the ‘hapless’ soldier’ s trueenemy, which is
not Republican France, but king, parliament and archbishop who,from the safety of their respective palaces, urge poor labouring mento die for their country, fighting the foreigner. The image, however,is ambiguous, and as such contains a prophetic warning: the bloodcould one day be the oppressor’ s. Finally, it is not the breath of the

Lord that consumes, but the ‘Harlot’ s curse’. The curse is syphilis,
whose contagion indiscriminately blinds the new-born infant andturns the marriage bed into a ‘hearse’. But the plagues with whichthe harlot blights the ‘Marriage hearse’ are also symbolic. They area verbal curse on the confining hypocrisy of legalised, monogamous
marriage itself. (. . .)
London is a poem of political and social protest; it is also a poem
about London, and the experience of living in London. The freedomto wander the streets is shown to be illusory when a mercantilesystem that annuls the rights of the majority is so complete that eventhe Thames is ‘charter’ d’. By his ‘marking’ the speaker relates toothers at a less than human level, in a vast city where all arestrangers. As E. P . Thompson has shown, the word ‘mark’ wouldhave had a number of associations for Blake’ s readers. Revelation13:17 speaks of ‘the mark of the beast’ on those who buy and sell.London’ s streets were full of the cries of street-sellers, in whichBlake’ s speaker hears only ‘mind-forg’ d manacles’. The freedom tobuy and sell shackles ‘every Man’— including the speaker—in a de-
personalising system based, not on genuine human contact, but onthe exchange of goods and money. There is no possibility within thespeaker’ s mode of perception, trapped as he is in this impersonalsystem, of hearing a street-cry, say, as a poetic utterance, an assertionof something human behind the figure of the seller. (To illustrate thispoint, a ‘flower man’ during the French wars was heard to cry: ‘Allalive! all alive! Growing, blowing; all alive!’ and a blind man,accompanied by his wife and children, cried his mats and brooms inrhyming couplets, ending: ‘So I in darkness am oblig’ d to go;/To sellmy goods I wander to and fro.’) Blake’ s speaker, as a ‘free’individual wandering the streets, marks every other ‘free’ individualnot as a person, but as a face with ‘marks’ in it. Into every face hemeets he also draws the marks of his own weakness and woe; he
tellingly picks out, with a deceptive lack of conscious choice, thosemost degraded by the system, a system in which the labour-power ofinfants and the charms of female children could be bought in thestreets.
The urban experience in London is not only alienating, but is one
in which growing violence and incipient revolt are strongly felt.Though the speaker makes no direct accusation, rising protest is
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heard in the tone of voice, from ‘I wander’ to ‘But most . . .’. The
poem moves from a kind of weary aimlessness (suggested by thelong vowel sounds in ‘charter’ d’ and ‘mark(s)’) to the shockedexclamations (‘How . . .’ etc.) of stanza three, with its emphatictrochaic rhythm, to the verbal violence of the climactic final stanza,with its rasping ‘curse’, ‘Blasts’, ‘blights’ and ‘plagues’. The poemis a violent crescendo of verbal sounds and meanings, held within atightly disciplined form. Its hyperbolic extremism is an imaginativerevelation of a whole urban process, as the poem moves fromalienation and distress to inarticulate violence.
—Stewart Crehan, Blake in Context (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
Humanities Press, 1984), 72–79.
GA VIN EDWARDS ON REPETITION IN “LONDON ”
[Gavin Edwards has taught at the Universities of Sydneyand Gothenburg and at St. David’ s University College. Hehas published George Crabbe’ s Poetry on Border Land and
George Crabbe: Selected Poems. In this essay, “Repeating
the Same Dull Sound”, Edwards probes the meanings of thewords charter’ d, ban, curse, and mark within the context of
“London”.]
‘London’ (and I am taking the word as the title of the poem beneathit rather than the caption of the picture above it) obviously involvesa sequence of voices heard in the street, over and over again. But itsinterest is wider than that; it includes a whole range of acts ofvocalisation and scription: sighs and charters and marks as well ascurses and bans. Four of Blake’ s words are particularly interesting inthe present context: ‘charter’ d’, ‘ban’, ‘curse’, and ‘mark’. They areall words that, in other grammatical forms, can act as performatives.Briefly, performative utterance are utterances that themselvesperform the actions to which they refer. Thus:
Lawyers when talking about legal instruments will distinguish the
preamble, which recites the circumstances in which a transactionis effected, and on the other hand the operative part—the part ofit which actually performs the legal act which it is the purpose of
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the instrument to perform. . . . ‘I give and bequeath my watch to
my brother’ would be an operative clause and is a performativeutterance.
This example Is pertinent for a number of reasons. First, it
demonstrates that written discourse (a charter, for instance) caninvolve performative utterances. Second, ‘I give and bequeath x to y’is clearly a formula, a repeated phrase, and it needs to be if theinstrument is to be legally binding. Furthermore such ritualperformatives are clearly always of particular significance whereconventional relationships are being established in a conventionalcontext—such as the fixing of rights of property and inheritance(charters for the incorporation of companies or towns), socialcontracts between rulers and ruled (Magna Carta), articles ofapprenticeship (such as those signed by James Blake and JamesBasire), marriage ceremonies (the ‘I do’ of William Blake andCatherine Boucher, the ‘I declare you man and wife’ of the parson),and baptisms (I name this child . . .’). Such situations provide mostof J. L. Austin’ s examples, and Blake’ s poem is overwhelminglyconcerned with the overlapping areas of Church, Law, property,generational inheritance, and marriage.
As for the words themselves, ‘I curse’ would be a performative,
as would ‘I ban’, and the poem also alludes to the banns of marriage,which gives us the parson’ s ‘I publish the banns of marriage between. . . .’ Charters are legal instruments that have to involve performativeutterances, though I have not come across a charter in which theword itself is used performatively (as in ‘I/We charter’). Finally,‘mark’ is a special case to which I shall return.
Evidently these words in Blake’ s poem (‘charter’ d’, ‘ban’, and
curse’) are not themselves performative. But as nouns or participialadjectives, they are what Barbara Johnson has called ‘deactivatedperformatives’. And the particular force that seems to animate themin the poem derives, I believe, from their direct reference tosituations in which those same words help to constitute performativeutterances. Austin points out that in performative words there is an‘asymmetry of a systematic kind [with respect to] other persons and
tenses of the very same word’. For instance, ‘I curse you’ is aperformative utterance, whereas ‘he curses you’, like ‘I hear you’, isnot since it refers to an event independent of the referring utterance.
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The words in the poem—‘charter’ d’, ‘ban’, and curse’—derive at
least some of their force from how they embody this asymmetry.They refer to conditions in the world outside the poem, but how theyso refer is determined by the fact that, as deactivated performatives,they are also existentially linked to actual performative utterances.The poem’ s words actually do bear the operative power ofperformative utterance within themselves, in a congealed form.Consequently the social conditions to which the words refer, as wellas the words themselves, appear as the marks of acts performedanother grammatical form by the utterance of those very samewords. Those social conditions are represented therefore not somuch as facts but as faits accomplis. The word ‘charter’ d’ bears
repetition in the poem because of the force to which it is linked.These performatives are uttered in Churches and law Courts wheretheir force is inseparable from the fact that they have been saidbefore and will be said again.
Blake’ s use of these words tends to confirm another of Austin’ s
contentions, that performative utterances depend for theirplausibility on at least a tacit acceptance by the interlocutor of theconventions involved in their use. Indeed to describe the situationsof their use as conventional implies as much. Most of Austin’ sexamples, and these three words from the poem, are concerned withhuman power relationships. And the poem’ s use of these wordssuggests that to be at the receiving end of performative utterances ofthis kind is to be more than labelled: it is to take the label to heart,to assume it as one’ s identity, even unwittingly. The religious andjuridical act of christening could be taken as exemplary in thisrespect. It is an act of labelling imposed arbitrarily on the basis ofour father’ s name and our parents’ wishes that we take as the sign ofour personal identity. The achievement of the poem is to registersuch acts as the imposition of arbitrary labels that are neverthelessnot external to those who receive them: as marks inscribed byauthority that are also signs of an inward condition, marks ‘Ofweakness and of woe’.
There is only one actual performative in Blake’ s poem, and that is
‘I . . . mark’. Of course, one sense of the verb mark in the poem is
‘to observe’. In this sense the word reports on the poet’ s action as hewalks the streets and is not performative. But since the same word
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used as a noun in ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ refers to
physical alterations of the human body, and since the practice inwhich the poet is actually engaged involves inscription on paper andthe subsequent biting of the copper plate by acid to reveal the lettersin relief, then surely there is also a reference in ‘I . . . mark’ to itself.In so far as ‘I . . . mark’ means ‘I observe’, the relationship established
between the marked faces and the poet who marks them is of thefatally reflexive kind that Heather Glen has so accurately described.Blake, she argues, shows us what it means to be both at odds withand yet conditioned by one’ s cultural ethos:
The relentless, restricting categorising which stamps the Thames
as surely as it does the streets is like his own mode of relating tothe world. He may ‘wander’ freely enough, but he can only ‘mark’one repetitive set of ‘marks’ in all the different faces before him.
And this is still the case if one admits the sense of ‘mark’ as an act
of perception involving a registering or noting of what is perceived.The writer and reader implied by that registering are still caughtwithin the same kind of specular relationship, in a poetic utterancethat presents itself as an unmeditated survey of the reality it simplyrepeats. But in so far as ‘I . . . mark’ refers also to itself as an act ofinscription, all those mirror-relationships are fissured, marked,rendered problematic. The best way to explain this effect is in termsof the different forms of the present tense that the ways of reading‘I . . . mark’ imply. The poem employs a generalising present tense,one that describes ‘what I am doing’ but ‘what I do’ (repeatedly). Butin so far as ‘I not . . . mark’ is self-referential, it introduces thepresent tense of ‘what I am doing,’ and this has a number ofconsequences. First, it links the poetic utterance existentially to thewriting self, in a way that can be associated with the existential linkthat I have argued for between the deactivated performatives and theactual performative utterances to which they refer. But, second, thisself is not the unitary entity that its grammatical name, ‘first personsingular’, suggests; it is not the anterior source of the utterance.‘I . . . mark’ is self-referential both in the sense that it refers to theself and in the sense that it refers to itself. ‘I . . . mark’ describes mein the act of scription, but it also isthe act of scription. Consequently
the present it reveals is not a moment but a movement, and there isno governing Subject but a continual differentiation in which the
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subject of the act of writing and the subject of what is written never
finally coincide or separate.
—Gavin Edwards, “Repeating the Same Dull Round,” New
Casebooks: William Blake, ed. David Punter (New Y ork, St. Martin’ s
Press, 1996), 108–120.
HAROLD BLOOM ON WANDERING THROUGH “LONDON ”
[Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at
Y ale University. He has written more than 16 books andedited more than 30 anthologies, including Blake’ s
Apocalypse, William Blake’ s Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, and Modern Critical Views: William Blake. In
this writing, he compares Blake to a Biblical prophet whowanders through the city creating verse full of words worthstudying.]
Blake begins: “I wander thro’ each charter’ d street,” and so we beginalso, with that wandering and that chartering, in order to define that“I.” Is it an Ezekiel-like prophet, or someone whose role andfunction are altogether different? To “wander” is to have nodestination and no purpose. A biblical prophet may wander when heis cast out into the desert, when his voice becomes a voice in thewilderness, but he does not wander when he goes through the midstof the city, through the midst of Jerusalem the City of God. There,his inspired voice always has purpose, and his inspired feet alwayshave destination. Blake knew all this, and knew it with a knowingbeyond our knowing. When he begins by saying that he wanders in
London, his Jerusalem, his City of God, then he begins also bysaying “I am not Ezekiel, I am not a prophet, I am too fearful to bethe prophet I ought to be, I am hid.”
“Charter’ d” is as crucial as “wander.” The word is even richer with
multiple significations and rhetorical ironics, in this context, thancriticism so far has noticed. Here are the relevant shades of meaning:There is certainly a reference to London having been createdoriginally as a city by a charter to that effect. As certainly, there is anironic allusion to the celebrated political slogan: “the chartered
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rights of Englishmen.” More subtly, as we will see, there is a
reference to writing, because to be chartered is to be written, since acharter is a written grant from authority, or a document outlining aprocess of incorporation. In addition, there are the commercialnotions of hiring, or leasing, indeed of binding or covenanting,always crucial in a prophetic context. Most important, I think, in thispoem that turns upon a mark of salvation or destruction, is theaccepted meaning that to be chartered is to be awarded a specialprivilege or a particular immunity, which is established by a writtendocument. Finally, there is a meaning opposed to “wandering,”which is charting or mapping, so as to preclude mere wandering. Thestreets of London are chartered, Blake says, and so he adds is theThames, and we can surmise that for Blake, the adjective is primarilynegative in its ironics, since his manuscript drafts show that hesubstituted the word “chartered” for the word “dirty” in bothinstances.
—Harold Bloom, “Blake and Revisionism,” William Blake’ s Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, ed. Harold Bloom (New Y ork, Chelsea
House, 1987), 55–58.
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CRITICAL ANAL YSIS OF
“The Mental Traveller”
Like many of Blake’ s poems, “The Mental Traveller” challenges
scholars. Some try to compare the symbolism to other Blake poems;others believe “The Mental Traveller” cannot be compared to the restof Blake’ s work. It is tempting, too, to interpret the poem as an auto-biographical piece; in any case, “The Mental Traveller” recounts thetravels of an emotionally troubled man through life, unable to con-nect with the people who mean the most to him.
The work starts with the description of a journey; the narrator is
traveling the earth. He comes across the birth of a child and decidesto follow this person through the course of his life. While the birthis celebrated, there are tears associated with its beginning. Perhapsthe parents have a hard life, or the child was not conceived in love.The tears could spring from the pain of childbirth, or perhaps thepain of knowledge: the knowledge of the hard life ahead for thenewborn baby. The child is given to a “woman old” to be cared for.At this point, Blake’ s prose becomes Biblical: the images in the nextstanza evoke the suffering of Christ. The child suffers as Christ did,crowned with thorns and wounded on the hands and feet as if nailedto a cross.
Dark images continue to plague the boy. It appears that the
“woman old”, the child’ s caretaker, enjoys his suffering; she “livesupon his shrieks and cries” and “grows young as he grows old”.True, as a child matures, the worries about its raising are trans-formed into new anxieties; true also, the additional responsibilitiescan weigh heavier on—and thereby age—the child. But is the oldwoman really parasitic, or does Blake mean to imply that caring fora child can be a nourishing or even a regenerative process?
The poem seems to describe an unhealthy mother-child relation-
ship; this relationship becomes a pattern in the subject’ s life. The boybecomes a man. He replaces the “woman old” with a partner of somesort. Because he feels he was not raised in a loving manner, he treatsthe new woman in his life as he was treated as a child.
The narrator tells us about the sadness in the life of the subject.
He appears to be going through life as if already dead. He is wealthy
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but unhappy. While he does not mention regrets, he does seem to
have unfulfilled wishes. His suffering continues to grow. “They arehis meat they are his drink.” His misery feeds itself, growing largeras life goes on. The narrator seems to think that his suffering as anadult, as it was in his infancy, is enjoyed by others.
There seems to be a new happiness in his life with the birth of the
boy’ s daughter. Emotionally, he appears to be incapable of oneaspect of parenting: love. He feels unworthy to give his daughter thelove she is looking for. As she grows up, she finds love in others, andher Father has lost another opportunity in his life. This inspires achange:
He wanders weeping far away
Until some other take him in
Self-pity has the subject, and apparently someone else, feeling sorry
for him. To feel better, he takes a lover. The physical expression oflove changes his world. “The flat Earth becomes a ball.” The sun andmoon pull away. He loses all sense of time, with no reminders of dayand night, and only his lover exists:
A desart vast without a bound
And nothing left to eat or drinkAnd a dark desart all around
The desert may represent the place in his life where love can grow.
It is a space of extremes: like agony and bliss, peace and anger, loveand hatred. Beautiful things can blossom and grow in the desert, butthey are short-lived.
The subject of the work feels the love he has found rejuvenates
him. He is enjoying the emotions that come from finding a partner.They get to know each other.
And on the desart wild they bothWander in terror & dismay
Apparently, what she has learned about the speaker is too much forher to handle. Instead of working out their problems, she choosesanother course of action:
Like the wild stag she flees away
Her fear plants a thicket wild
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While he pursues her night & day
By various arts of Love beguild
Clearly, she is trying to distance herself from the Speaker; she tries
to prevent the success of their union by withholding her heart. Thesubject of the poem finds himself desperate to continue the relation-ship and tries to win her back. His lack of success in recreating thelove they shared devastates him. After being spurned, he returns tohis old way of thinking, but this time the “desert” of his soulbecomes “Labyrinths of wayward Love”—a maze that he alone cannavigate. This transformation, while protecting his heart, willimpede the next affair, and whereas before he was dysfunctional,now he is a broken man.
A pathetic creature now heads into the later years of his life. He
has become like an infant again, needing care. The end of his life issimilar to its beginning: the woman he has taken as his lover hasbecome a “weeping Woman Old.” Weeping perhaps, for her lostyouth, or the loss of her life with her lover. It appears that he is try-ing to reach out to others in his advanced age, having become veryaware of the passage of time. He opens again:
To all who in the desart roam
Till many a City there is BuiltAnd many a pleasant Shepherds home
Relationships allow the speaker a measure of peace, instead of death
in the desert of his soul. He builds a foundation of friendship withothers.
When death approaches, though, fear grips the speaker. Those
close to him abandon him in his hour of need—this too recalls theBible, specifically Christ in the garden. Those who reach out to thedying man fear the worst and find that his decaying physical statehas made his company unpleasant. He dies alone. All around himhave left, with one notable exception: the old woman. Thus Blakereturns to the beginning of the poem; in death, the subject of thepoem faces the same future as at his birth.
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CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Mental Traveller”
NORTHROP FRY E O N “THEMENTAL TRA VELLER ” AS A LIFE
JOURNEY
[Northrop Frye taught at the University of Toronto and was
a well-known and respected literary theorist. His majorworks include Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, and
The Great Code. This writing examines the work andcompares it to a man’ s life: infancy, adulthood, death andrebirth.]
In traditional Christian symbolism, God the Creator is symbolicallymale, and all human souls, whether of men or of women, arecreatures, and therefore symbolically female. In Blake, the real manis creating man; hence all human beings, men or women, aresymbolically male. The symbolic female in Blake is what we callnature, and has four relations to humanity, depending on the qualityof the vision. In the world of death, or Satan, which Blake calls Ulro,the human body is completely absorbed in the body of nature—a‘dark Hermaphrodite’, as Blake says in The Gates of Paradise. In the
ordinary world of experience, which Blake calls Generation, therelation of humanity to nature is that of subject to object. In theusually frustrated and suppressed world of sexual desire, whichBlake calls Beulah, the relation is that of lover to beloved, and in thepurely imaginative or creative state, called Eden, the relation is thatof creator to creature. In the first two worlds, nature is a remote andtantalizing ‘female will’; in the last two she is an ‘emanation’.Human women are associated with this female nature only when intheir behaviour they dramatize its characteristics. The relationsbetween man and nature in the individual and historical cycles aredifferent, and are summarized in The Mental Traveller, a poem asclosely related to the cyclical symbolism of twentieth-century poetryas Keats’ s La Belle Dame Sans Merci is to pre-Raphaelite poetry.
The Mental Traveller traces the life of a ‘Boy’ from infancy
through manhood to death and rebirth. This Boy represents
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humanity, and consequently the cycle he goes through can be read
either individually and psychologically, or socially and historically.The latter reading is easier and closer to the centre of gravity of whatBlake is talking about. The poem traces a cycle, but the cycle differsfrom that of the single vision in that the emphasis is thrown onrebirth and return instead of on death. A female principle, nature,cycles in contrary motion against the Boy, growing young as hegrows old and vice versa, and producing four phases that we maycall son and mother, husband and wife, father and daughter, ghost(Blake’ s ‘spectre’), and ghostly bride (Blake’ s ‘emanation’). Havingset them down, we next observe that not one of these relations isgenuine: the mother is not really a mother, nor the daughter really adaughter, and similarly with the other states. The ‘Woman Old’, thenurse who takes charge of the Boy, is Mother Nature, whom Blakecalls Tirzah, and who ensures that everyone enters this world in themutilated and imprisoned form of the physical body. The sacrifice ofthe dying god repeats this symbolism, which is why the birth of theBoy also contains the symbols of the Passion (we should comparethis part of The Mental Traveller with the end of Jerusalem 67).
As the Boy grows up, he subdues a part of nature to his will,
which thereupon becomes his mistress: a stage representedelsewhere in the Preludium to America. As the cycle completes whatY eats would call its first gyre, we reach the opposite pole of a‘Female Babe’ whom, like the newborn Boy, no one dares touch.This female represents the ‘emanation’ or accumulated form of whatthe Boy has created in his life. If she were a real daughter and not achangeling, she would be the Boy’ s own permanent creation, asJerusalem is the daughter of Albion, ‘a City, yet a Woman’; and withthe appearance of such a permanent creation, the cycle of naturewould come to an end. But in this world all creative achievementsare inherited by someone else and are lost to their creator. Thisfailure to take possession of one’ s own deepest experience is thetheme of The Crystal Cabinet (by comparing the imagery of this
latter poem with Jerusalem 70 we discover that the Female Babe’ s
name, in this context, is Rahab). The Boy, now an old man at thepoint of death, acquires, like the aged King David, another ‘maiden’to keep his body warm on his death-bed. He is now in the desert orwilderness, which symbolizes the end of a cycle, and his maiden is
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Lilith, the bride of the desert, whom Blake elsewhere calls the
Shadowy Female. The Boy as an old man is in an ‘alastor’ relation toher: he ought to be still making the kind of creative effort thatproduced the Female Babe, but instead he keeps seeking his‘emanation’ or created form outside himself, until eventually thedesert is partially renewed by his efforts, he comes again into theplace of seed, and the cycle starts once more.
—Northrop Frye, “The Keys to the Gates,” Modern Critical Views:
William Blake, ed. Harold Bloom (New Y ork: Chelsea House, 1985),56–57.
JOHN H. S UTHERLAND ON IRONY AND OPPRESSION
[John H. Sutherland was a Professor at the University of
Pennsylvania and edited Colby Quarterly. In this essay,
Sutherland examines the reasons behind Blake’ s ironic toneand the influence of man and spirit on the work.]
In ‘The Mental Traveller’, Blake is intensely, and ironically, aware ofthe value of suffering to the tyrant: ‘They [groans and sighs] are hismeat, they are his drink.’ Blake is purposely ironic as he records theaged Shadow’ s generosity with this kind of riches: ‘He feeds theBeggar & the Poor.’ His door is ‘for ever open’ to those who arevulnerable to human pain. Moreover, this is a give-and-takearrangement. The groans and sighs seem to be deliberatelyconceived as ambivalent: they are produced by poor, oppressedmortals for the delectation of the tyrant Shadow, and they aredistributed as food (or in lieu of food) to the poor and oppressed bythe Shadow.
This is the normal end of the Orc cycle. The next step would be
the breakdown of the static and corrupt establishment, a falling backinto a period of gestation, and then the rebirth of the young spirit torepeat the process. However, as a mental traveller with creativevision, Blake did not see man as inexorably caught by such a pagannightmare. Stanza eleven records what can happen if people in thecottage (i.e., on earth) find, to the aged Shadow’ s grief, some way ofexercising their creative powers:
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His [the Shadow’ s] grief is their eternal joy;
They make the roofs & walls [heaven and earth] to ring;Till from the fire on the hearthA little Female Babe does spring.
The Female Babe springs from fire—symbolically the source of
energy and inspiration. She is described in stanza twelve as being
‘all of solid fire / And gems & gold’—so awe-inspiring that no onedares to touch her. The aged Shadow (in stanza thirteen called the‘aged Host’) fears and hates this splendid product of man’ s creativepowers. He feeds on man’ s grief; it makes perfect sense that thecreative imagination, which can free man from grief, is the source ofhis grief. In terms of the ideas symbolized, the exact, mechanical,and limiting principles in the universe must have something to limitin order to exist at all. Thus, when applied to man, they exist,literally, because of man’ s grief. When men find their way throughto some source of creative energy, they free themselves and bringgrief to that power which previously had oppressed them.
In stanza thirteen, the Female Babe is presented as an archetypal
spirit closely akin to a muse. She is described as coming ‘to the Manshe loves’ (the artist, and perhaps the mystic and the saint); together,the man and the Female Babe drive out ‘the aged Host, / A Beggarat another’ s door’. (Here ‘the Man she loves’ seems to be primarilythe human individual, who can, through creative inspiration, freehimself from the dead hand of Urizen; however, it may also refer tomankind as a whole, since the fate of the aged Host after he loses hiskingdom is described in symbolic terms which can apply at anylevel. He could be losing control of one man and one man’ s world;he could also be losing control of the whole planet, as mankind nowknows it through its fallen senses.)
Once Urizen has been driven out, he tries, more and more
desperately, to find some person or thing to impose himself on. Hefinally wins a ‘Maiden’:
And to allay his freezing Age
The Poor Man takes her in his arms;The Cottage fades before his sight,The Garden & its lovely Charms.
The maiden seems to represent materialism and the world of the
fallen senses. The aged Shadow, now appropriately called the ‘Poor
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Man’, embraces materialism as a last resort, and very naturally falls
out of the world of archetypes in Eternity into the limited worldwhich is the lowest common denominator of sensory apprehension.There is nothing said here of vortexes, in the sense Blake used theterm when explaining the nature of infinity in Milton; however, it is
quite clear that the aged Shadow has passed through the vortexes ofthe material world and now sees things from a point of view similarto that of a person on this earth. In Eternity, Earth was but a cottage,and its inhabitants were all together. To the fallen senses, Earthseems a vast ball, and its inhabitants appear to be separated by greatdistances:
The Guests are scatter’ d thro’ the land,
For the Eye altering alters all;The Senses roll themselves in fear,And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
The stars, sun, Moon, all shrink away,
A desart vast without a bound,And nothing left to eat or drink,And a dark desart all around.
Although Blake does not say so directly anywhere in the poem, it
seems likely that the maiden the cast-out aged Host turns to is a
frustrated female Babe, grown older without finding ‘the Man sheloves’. Just as it was natural for the male Babe, Orc, to cease torepresent energy and revolt, so it is natural for a female Babe—oncea muse—to degenerate into a coquette and sensualist. It isnoteworthy that sensuality and the artifices of physical andemotional love have an entirely different effect on her than they doon the aged Shadow. His part is to pursue the fleeting pleasure ofsimple indulgence, and this, very naturally, makes an infant of him.Her part is to lead him through ‘Labyrinths of wayward Love’ bymeans of ‘various arts of Love & Hate’. Just as naturally, this makesan old woman of her.
There is violence and inaccuracy in the giving of abstract
equivalents for these figures at any of the stages of theirdevelopment. However, if one allows for that, it seems illuminatingto consider the direct proportion here suggested: the female Babe isto the Maiden (who becomes the weeping Woman Old), as the maleBabe is to the bleeding youth (who becomes the aged Host). This is
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to say: creative imagination is to sexual love (which ages into the
cruelty of ‘Mother’ Nature), as creative energy is to physicalconstruction (which ages into the conservative principle of tyrannyand repression).
The principal weakness of this proportion is that it suggests static
balance while Blake is talking about cyclical flux. The relationshipof the two figures in the poem follows the general line of therelationship in the proportion, but it is dynamic, and constantlyshifting, as is necessary for the continuation of their cyclicalexistence. Near the end of the poem, the conservative principlereverts again to infancy as it is betrayed and teased in the world ofthe senses. The cycle is completed when ‘he becomes a waywardBabe, / And she a weeping Woman Old’. At the same time theyreturn from out the fallen world into Eternity as ‘The Sun & Starsare nearer roll’ d’. (Note that most of these relationships aresupported directly by the text of the poem. The hypotheticalconnection between the female Babe and the Maiden only addsdetail to the structure.)
The return to Eternity does not involve physical travelling—it is
brought about by an improvement in the sense organs. In TheMarriage of Heaven and Hell Blake explains the process this way:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ nar-
row chinks of his cavern.
In ‘The Mental Traveller’, the improvement in apprehension
seems to come at least partly because of the improvement inenvironment. Paradoxically, although the fall seems to have beenpartially due to fear (‘The Senses roll themselves in fear, / And theflat Earth becomes a Ball’), the planting of the desert is also partlydue to fear (‘Like the wild Stag she flees away, / Her fear plantsmany a thicket wild’). Those thickets which are not due to fear arethe result of a kind of love which is very closely related to fear: ‘ . .. the wide desart planted o’er / With Labyrinths of wayward Love, /Where roam the Lion, Wolf & Boar.’ Thus, that which helped causethe fall from Eternity is an indirect cause of the temporary regainingof Eternity.
These thickets of passion are very like those described in greater
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72detail in some of the Songs of Experience (‘A Poison Tree, ‘The
Garden of Love’, ‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’). They are far from being
happy products, but they are—like the jungle—symbols of simplefertility. As such, they are a necessary background to thedevelopment of love, and to the growth of cities and civilization.Love and civilization represented creative achievement to Blake; hethought of them as important stages on the road to seeing things (atleast partially) in their eternal forms. Thus, at the very time that thethickets of love have made a Babe of the aged Host, and a WomanOld of the Maiden, they have made an environment in which ‘manya Lover wanders’, and which helps bring about the return to Eternity.
—John H. Sutherland, “Blake’ s Mental Traveller,” Critics on Blake:
Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. Judith O’Neill (Coral Gables:University of Miami Press, 1970), 74–77.
DA VID WAGENKNECHT ON BLAKE ’SHISTOR Y
[David Wagenknecht was an Associate Professor of English
at Boston University and editor of Studies in Romanticism.
He wrote Blake’ s Night: William Blake and the Idea ofPastoral. This passage illustrates how “The Mental
Traveller” is a poetic timeline of Blake’ s life; according toWagenknecht, this work is not the first time this theme hasappeared.]
Blake seemed to know that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Theworm is born a child, and, in sinister parody of Milton’ s “NativityHymn,” “a shriek ran thro’ Eternity: / And a paralytic stroke” (E78).Orc’ s appearance is disturbing enough that the Eternals secure thestakes of the Tent, thereby preventing Los from beholding Eternityany more. Orc’ s post-partum career is just as ambiguous. Orc grows,and his father correspondingly grows jealous, forging link by painfullink a chain of jealousy, with which Orc is chained, like Prometheus,to a rock “beneath Urizens deathful shadow” (E79). Then,
5. The dead heard the voice of the child
And began to awake from sleepAll things. heard the voice of the childAnd began to awake to life.
(E79)

73the passage suggests Adonis, Orpheus, and the triumph of eros over
thanatos. Whether resurrection in this case is a happy event is less
certain.
In other important instances Blake muffles ambiguity and anxiety
by presenting the career of Vala in terms of a historical cycle whichseems tantalizingly to progress but which, eventually, like the drift ofThel’ s imagery, loops back on itself. His ultimate presentation ofsuch a cycle, as I have noted, is in “The Mental Traveller” (which henever published) in which four distinct stages of cycle aredistinguished but seen to drive each other like meshed cogwheels.The end of the fourth stage can be taken to illustrate how Blakecould apply his doubts about Generation to historical analysis. Itcorresponds generally to the second stage of the process as relatedby Luvah in V ala/The Four Zoas , where pursuit of Nature as elusive
female (in fact a chimera) and construction of a labyrinth is mistakenfor the constructive power of civilization and progress towardenlightenment:
Till the wide desart planted oer
With Labyrinths of wayward LoveWhere roams the Lion Wolf & BoarTill he becomes a wayward BabeAnd she a weeping Woman OldThen many a Lover wanders hereThe Sun & Stars are nearer rolld
The trees bring forth sweet Extacy
To all who in the desart roamTill many a City there is BuiltAnd many a pleasant Shepherds home
(E477)
The last two lines suggest Blake’ s England, with its urban life and
proliferation of country retreats, and the reference to the “waywardBabe” should suggest Lyca, whose poems also bore reference to thepoet’ s own time. But Blake’ s sense of history is complex, foralthough it may have been Newton who helped to roll the sun andstars nearer, “the trees bring[ing] forth sweet Extacy” suggest. theFall for “all who in the desart roam.” Apparently Blake is describinga case where city planning (or, more generally, culture) recapitulatesphylogeny. And again Blake compounds the Old Adam and the New,for immediately we are told,

74But when they find the frowning Babe
Terror strikes thro the region wideThey cry the Babe the Babe is BornAnd flee away on Every side
(E477)
The Babe is saviour perhaps only in the odd Blakean sense that (like
Milton’ s Satan) he withers Nature, but the sense of natural law isstrong enough to overpower even such upstarts, and—terrifying ornot—the “frowning Babe” is nailed down upon the rock by “aWoman Old.”
—David Wagenknecht, Blake’ s Night: William Blake and the Idea of
Pastoral (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 169–171.
HAROLD BLOOM ON “THEMENTAL TRA VELLER ” ASSTANDING
ALONE
[Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of the Humanities atY ale University. He has written more than 16 books andedited more than 30 anthologies, including Blake’ s
Apocalypse, William Blake’ s Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, and Modern Critical Views: William Blake.
This essay points out that the work does not follow thepattern of Blake’ s other poems. Bloom shows us how thework is able to affect readers and fit into the pattern of life.]
What counts most about The Mental Traveller is its openness and
vigor; the marching rhythms and easy diction suggest that Blake isattempting his own kind of lyrical ballad, and consciously wants togive the reader a story so direct and passionate in its grim ironiesthat the quite overt moral will ring out unmistakably in the poem’ slast line: “And all is done as I have told.” The Orc cycle, thewithering of desire into restraint, is the theme of The MentalTraveller as it was of much of The Four Zoas , but to say that The
Mental Traveller is “about” the Orc cycle is to schematize too
quickly. A descriptive account of the poem ought to emphasize thelarge movements of its drama; the symbolic vision will emerge of

itself, for that is the poem’ s greatness. The reader is compelled by the
poem’ s very starkness to solve the relationship betweenrepetitiveness in the poem’ s events and the pattern of similar ironicrepetitiveness in the reader’ s own life.
The poem’ s title clearly refers to the “I” who chants its events, and
whose wondering observation of the cycle of natural life determinesthe poem’ s fresh and startled tone. The poem is a report of a strangeand distorted planet given by a being who has stumbled upon it andcannot altogether believe the horrors he has seen. His nervousvibrancy is felt in every stanza, as he strives to communicate to us,the poem’ s implied audience, the grim marvels of an existence thatby the poem’ s largest irony, is already our own:
I travel’ d thro’ a Land of Men,
A Land of Men & Women too,And heard & saw such dreadful thingsAs cold Earth wanderers never knew.
This Traveller, who is presumably one of Blake’ s unfallen
Eternals, moves mentally through our world, expecting that a Land
of Men will yield him human images. But he sees that the humanimage is already divided; the Sexes have sprung from shame andpride, and it is a Land of Men and Women too. He hears, sees andalso knows what the cold wanderers of Earth hear and see also, but
cannot apprehend as knowledge, which is one of the poem’ s majorpoints. If you cannot learn from experience, then you must suffer itover and over again. In the next stanza the Mental Traveler contraststhe fallen process of birth with the Eternal progression reachedthrough the liberating strife of contraries:
For there the Babe is born in joy
That was begotten in dire woe;Just as we Reap in joy the fruitWhich we in bitter tears did sow.
The sexual meeting of fallen man and woman seems a “dire
work” to this being, who compares it to the intellectual warfare of
Eternity. The fruit of Eternity is a liberated creation, but the fruit ofearthly intercourse is a Babe who suffers the fate of the Norse TitanLoki, of Jesus, and of Prometheus, three incarnations of Luvah as asuffering Orc, or simply three dying man-gods:
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And if the Babe is born a Boy
He’ s given to a Woman Old,Who nails him down upon a rock,Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.
She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands & feet,She cuts his heart out at his sideTo make it feel both cold & heat.
Loki, punished for his part in the slaying of Balder, suffered
precisely as the Babe does in the first of these stanzas, and the
allusions to Jesus and Prometheus are unmistakable in the second.But, more directly, this is any new human child, and every new
human impulse, idea, creation, fresh life of all kinds. An old woman,a nurse or foster mother, nature itself, receives this new imaginativeforce, and nails him down to the rock of material existence, thefallen body and its limitations. The Babe’ s shrieks are precious toher, as Loki’ s are to the gods, for they are evidences of her continueddominion over man. She makes a martyr lest she have to contendwith a fully human antagonist. The iron thorns are not only anallusion to Jesus, but also to Blake’ s ironclad Spectre of Urthona, thecrippled, anxiety-ridden temporal will of man. The pierced handsand feet betoken the impairment of man by nature, and the exposedheart is the depraved natural heart, bereft of the affective powers ofEternity. For death feeds upon life, nature on the human, the OldWoman on the Babe:
Her fingers number every Nerve,
Just as a Miser counts his gold;She lives upon his shrieks & cries,And she grows young as he grows old.
This is horror, the genuine obscenity of a vampire will, natural
and female, nourishing itself on the only wealth we have, the
substance of our hope, the possibility manifested in a human child.But the horror is ours; the poem’ s speaker maintains his grimly leveltone, as he continues to describe a world so different from his own.
It begins to be clear that the poem has two cycles moving in it, in
opposite directions, and out of phase with one another. The femaleor natural cycle is moving backwards, the male or human cycle
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forward: “And she grows young as he grows old.” At mid-phase they
meet, and enact a scene akin to the “Preludium” of America, whereOrc rends up his manacles and possesses the nameless female whohad cared for him:
Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
And she becomes a Virgin bright;Then he rends up his ManaclesAnd binds her down for his delight.
He plants himself in all her Nerves,
Just as a Husbandman his mould;And she becomes his dwelling placeAnd Garden fruitful seventy fold.
—Harold Bloom, Blake’ s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 289–292.
ALICIA OSTRIKER ON SOUND AND STRUCTURE
[Alicia Ostriker is a Professor of English at Rutgers
University and a poet and critic. She is the author of Vision
and V erse in William Blake and the editor of William Blake:
The Complete Poems. Her poetry has been published asSongs and A Dream of Springtime. This work describes the
ways in which alliteration helps to form the vivid images ofBlake’ s symbolism.]
When he leaves proper names and explicit moralizing behind, as in‘My Spectre around me,” “The Golden Net,” “The Mental Traveller,”and—almost—in “The Grey Monk,” he achieves finer results. Thesesemi-dramatic narratives all rely on a self-consistent symbolicstructure in the same way that Blake’ s prophecies do; that is, theymake no compromise with, popular understanding. Let the readerbeware, now that Blake has entered the maze of his system and shutthe door behind him. An outsider will receive only minimalassistance from the conventional meanings of some of Blake’ s keysymbols.
5
“The Mental Traveller,” most finished and best constructed of this
group, employs meter with an almost passionate monotony which
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78betrays all along what the last lines will declare plainly: that a cyclic
futility poisons the veins of human history. We do not quite realizethis until the conclusion. The ironic seeming significance of “such
dreadful things” as the narrative relates is produced by the startlingimagery, by the packed, declarative syntactical structure whichmakes almost every stanza appear a completed “episode,” and by theindividual fingering of his lines. Despite confinement to iambs, witha few trochaic inversions, almost no anapests, and only occasionalemphatic pauses, Blake achieves sufficient variety by degrees ofaccenting and placing of slight pauses. (. . .)
The sound patterns, combining alliteration and a rich vowel range,
give additional vividness. Note how “Catches his shrieks with cupsof gold” modulates from harsh, to high, to deep and cold vowel. Butthis vividness is spurious, fantastic, like a surrealist landscape or apainting by De Chirico, where distinct detail only enhances thepervasive unreality, and one is uncomfortably conscious of theempty spaces. Blake was describing the tedium of abortive changein a world without apocalypse, a theme he expanded for the epicsdealing with what Northrop Frye calls the “Orc cycle.”
5
The other poems in this group are strongest when, like “The
Mental Traveller,” they keep within the iamb–trochee gamut. Theyare weakest when they lapse loosely into anapests without structuralor rhetorical justification. Nothing about them outrages the ear, forthe poet has not lost his competence. Few things ravish it, either, forhe has lost some of his interest in making every syllable of his lyricscount. Except for “The Mental Traveller,” these poems areinteresting mainly for their attempt to condense prophetic matterinto lyric scope.
NOTE
5. Fearful Symmetry, a Study of William Blake (Princeton, 1947), pp. 207–35.
—Alicia Ostriker, Vision and V erse in William Blake (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 94–99.

79VICTOR PAANANEN ON NATURE
[Victor Paananen wrote William Blake, and William Blake:
Updated Edition and edited British Marxist Criticism. In
this analysis of the work, Paananen shows how nature, or
human nature to be exact, is the story behind “The MentalTraveller”. It is an idea that influences many of Blake’ spoems.]
The most challenging of the cyclic poems is the difficult “TheMental Traveller,” in which the repetitions seem to be the mostmocking. The speaker of the poem is a “mental traveller” who willoffer a visionary account of life in our fallen world, the world ofGeneration (“A Land of Men & Women too”). We are told howNature—Tirzah in Blake’ s myth—repeats the binding of Orc inevery human life, dictating the acceptance of the suffering withinnature that Jesus knew at the crucifixion and forming in the processthe suffering natural heart:
She binds iron thorns upon his head,
She pierces both his hands & feet,She cuts his heart out at his sideTo make it feel both cold & heat. ( CW. 425)
It is this heart that leads human beings first to sexual love and
then to the practice of the fallen virtue of pity, a virtue only possible
when we accept an inadequate world. Pity is often institutionalized
into charitable organizations:
An aged Shadow, soon he fades,
Wand’ring round an Earthly Cot,Full filled all with gems & goldWhich he by industry had got.
And these are the gems of the Human Soul,
The rubies & pearls of a lovesick eye,The Countless gold of the akeing heart,The martyr’ s groan & the lover’ s sigh.

80They are his meat, they are his drink;
He feeds the Beggar & the PoorAnd the wayfaring Traveller:For ever open is his door. ( CW .425)
In the same way that political liberalism is based on an acceptance
of capitalism as “natural,” liberal institutions such as this elderlyman embodies are based on an acceptance of the world as it appears.The ideological foundations of such philanthropy cannot endure thebirth of a new concept such as that represented by ‘A little FemaleBabe”:
And she is all of solid fire
And gems & gold, that none his handDares stretch to touch her Baby form,Or wrap her in his swaddling-band. ( CW . 425)
The infant Orc, victim of Nature, has turned into the ancient Urizen:
he is no longer a creative “male” who can recognize the revolutionary“female” creation that should be the result of his own effort to changethe world but instead frightens him. In the world of Generation—theworld of separate subject and object, characterized by the existenceof the sexes—“male” and “female” are in perpetual conflict, as Losand Enitharmon have already shown in the mythic works.
The reaction that the Urizenic figure brings into being, an
analogue to political reaction, destroys even the charitableinstitutions to leave us face to face with the desert of ratioperception:
The Senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
The stars, sun, Moon, all shrink away,
A desart vast without a bound.And nothing left to eat or drink,And a dark desart all around. ( CW. 426)
Y et, on the other hand, a new idea has come into being that has in
fact jolted the male figure out of his liberalism and into aconservatism that is unacceptable for the continuation of human life(“nothing left to eat or drink”). The Urizenic figure thus casts off hisideological baggage to become rapidly more youthful until he isagain the infant Orc who is not yet victim to the ancient abstraction“Nature”:

81he becomes a wayward Babe,
And she a weeping Woman Old.
Then many a Lover wanders here;The Sun & Stars are nearer roll’ d. (CW . 426)
The world becomes momentarily more human as lovers walk in
freedom again and as the stars cease to be quite as remote as theyusually are. But, because the “female” is restrictive nature again,reaction is inevitable:
They cry “The Babe! the Babe is Born!”
And flee away on Every side.
For who dare touch the frowning form,
His arm is wither’ d to its root;Lions, Boars, Wolves, all howling flee,And every Tree does shed its fruit.
And none can touch that frowning form,
Except it be a Woman Old;She nails him down upon the Rock,And all is done as I have its told. ( CW .427)
No hope of satisfaction—or of a human life at all—is possible if one
continues to accept “nature” as both given and determining. Politicalchange is a source of hope only when it is based on a philosophicunderstanding that permits an active intervention into that world thatseems fixed. If political faiths are based on an acceptance of natureas given in the natural cycles, and therefore also based on anacceptance through empirical epistemology of both a commodifiedworld and a commodified humanity, they too will fail. Ourhappiness is to be found only when we can shatter all the enclosingwheels of nature and history, put an end to alienation and thedivision of labor, and establish a fully human existence.
As William Adams has very well explained, in the future that
Marx envisions after the end of private property, “The eye hasbecome a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human
object, made by man for man.” Blake would make the sameprojection, calling this life Eternity, as experienced by our DivineHumanity.
—Victor N. Paananen, William Blake: Updated Edition (New Y ork:
Twayne, 1996), 120–123.

NICHOLAS WILLIAMS ON THE UNCONDITIONAL ,
NON-TRADITIONAL BLAKE
[Nicholas Williams is an Associate Professor at Indiana
University. He has written Ideology and Utopia in thePoetry of William Blake and many essays on the Romantics.
In this essay, Williams finds that “The Mental Traveller” hasa ‘poetic voice like no other’ of Blake’ s works. He feels thepoem is unusually written and takes a different path thanBlake’ s usual imagery.]
“The Mental Traveller” is an odd production not only for itsappearing in this context of manuscript verse, but for the way itrehearses some of the major themes of his poetry without recourseto the mythological apparatus for which he is best (and mostfearsomely) known. Even without this apparatus, the startlingnewness of Blake’ s vision is apparent in the double story of a “Babe”given to a “Woman Old,” who gets progressively older as shebecomes young, only to end once again as an infant, a “frowningform” whose fate recapitulates the poem’ s opening:
And none can touch that frowning form
Except it be a Woman OldShe nails him down upon the RockAnd all is done as I have its told. (101–5, E486)
The elements of this text which mark it as “Blakean,” and which
have encouraged some to see Blake as a creator distinct from hishistorical setting, are the seeming freedom from traditional framesof reference and the unusual vividness of the stark imagery. If this isan allegory, and as much is suggested by Blake’ s tone of normativeexplanation (“And if the Babe is born a Boy / He’ s given to a WomanOld” [9, 10]), then it is an allegory like no other, whose ties toestablished cultural codes (the Christian story, classical myth, etc.)are at best oblique. Despite attempts to translate it by reference tothese codes or to Blake’ s own “mythology,” the poem retains thecharacteristics of an interpretive scandal, and seems always fresh inits capacity to resist easy codification.
But if the poem carries with it a shock of newness, a sensation
that here is a poetic voice like no other, such a feeling rests uneasily
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beside the subject matter of the poem itself. That tone of normative
certainty which gives to Blake’ s poems their sense of urgency andimportance, also lends to them a claustrophobic sense of limitation,of already determined futures and of indefinite repetition. That taletold by the Mental Traveller is one of mental bondage and violence,the Old Woman’ s crucifixion of the Babe mirrored by his laterrevenge:
Till he becomes a bleeding youth
And she becomes a Virgin brightThen he rends up his ManaclesAnd binds her down for his delight (21–4, E484)
Indeed, the persistent mirroring in the poem—the boy “Babe” of the
opening and the “Female Babe” of the middle, the Old woman andthe man “blind & age-bent” (55), as well as the parallel bindings atthe poem core—all suggest that this world’ s inhabitants are forced torepeat the same limited repertoire of actions again and again. (. . .)
What are we to make of such an anomaly, such a discontinuity
between a seeming originality of insight and the apparent denial ofany originality whatsoever? One option, of course, is to attempt totranslate the allegory, to figure out what Blake “means” by thisstrange narrative, most often by interpreting his characters as theequivalents of general concepts, of external Nature (the Woman) orHumanity (the Man). But in addition to not respecting thenonspecific terms of Blake’ s poem, such an approach risksoverlooking a central element of its powerful effect. It attempts, in asense, to overstep the boundaries that Blake evocatively establishesin the poem’ s opening stanza:
I travld thro’ a Land of Men
A Land of Men & Women tooAnd heard & saw such dreadful thingsAs cold Earth wanderers never knew. (1–4, E483)
We might take the speaker here to mean that he is reporting on a
non-Earthly scene in the lines that follow, that he is a kind of proto-spaceman recording extra-terrestrial happenings for the home planet(such science-fictional frameworks are not inappropriate for theauthor of “Air Island in the Moon”). But what is more likely is alogical opposition of the “Mental Traveller” of the title and the
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“Earth wanderers” of line 4, distinguishing between two modes of
travel rather than two destinations. What the lines suggest, in otherwords, is an even more striking anomaly at work in the poem, acontradiction between the uniformity of event described (“all is doneas I have told”) and the complete lack of knowledge of those eventson the part of those who are forced to suffer through them. Onemight, of course, simply take this as an assertion of poetic vision, inthe transhistorical sense, making a claim for the poet’ s ability to seebeyond the time-bound, mundane conceptions of the “Earthwanderers” to the effulgent realities of transcendent truth. By suchan interpretation, the poem’ s opening stanza represents a stronginstance of what might be called the “aesthetic ideology” or, evenmore specifically, the “Romantic ideology,” in its privileging of theideal over the real, the mental over the physical, the intellectual overthe corporeal. But what complicates this picture is the fact that whatthe Mental Traveller sees is a vision of extreme corporeality, or, toput it another way, what the poem develops is itself a theory ofideology. If the opening stanza proposes an opposition between whatthe Mental Traveller can hear and see and what the Earthlywanderers can know, we have yet to consider the later description ofthe perceptual abilities of the “Guests” who invade the old man’ scottage:
The Guests are scatter’ d thro’ the land
For the Eye altering alters allThe Senses roll themselves in fearAnd the flat Earth becomes a Ball. (61–4, E485)
Juxtaposed with the magisterial eye of the Mental Traveller, whose
vision seems to be raised above the physical, we have this verymaterial, sense-bound “Eye” whose power, or lack of power,effectively creates the world around it. (. . .)
The Mental Traveller tells stories of limited sensual abilities,
paralyzed consciousness, but the very ability to tell these storiespresumes a point beyond their purview, a point from which they canbe “known” and, in some cases, changed. I take as a foundingpresupposition of what follows that Blake’ s goal in most of his workis a kind of traveling, a kind of change, but that rather than besatisfied with mere “mental traveling,” the path of this career is a
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search for the route to that total engagement of human capacities, in
both individual and social forms, which he called “Eden.” The pathto Eden will not he found by an evasion of ideology, by a mentalizedideal vision of easeful love (what Blake called Beulah), but instead
by a harsh imagining and reimagining of the ideological world. It isin this sense of a hard-won and reimagined vision of the ideologicalworld that I will call Blake’ s Edenic visions “utopian,”distinguishing this use of the word from its other, less politicallyviable meanings.
—Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of
William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–5.
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86CRITICAL ANAL YSIS OF
“The Crystal Cabinet”
The essays that follow attempt to untangle the web of images and
messages in Blake’ s “The Crystal Cabinet.” One critic findsallusions to alchemy in the verses; while another traces similaritiesbetween “The Crystal Cabinet” and other Blake poems. A third seesthe work as a warning about sex. If the mark of a great work of artis its capacity to reflect each member of its audience in a waydifferent from the reflection of each other member, then “TheCrystal Cabinet” meets the criterion.
As the poem starts, its speaker claims to be happy, dancing in the
wild. He meets a woman and ends up locked up in her cabinet,though he seems to have put up little fight if any at all. The image ofentrapment is common in Blake’ s poems. This time, it seems he hasentered the state of love without reservation. He becomesentranced—“[l]ockd up with a golden key”, a key whose strengthcomes not from its composition but from its beauty—and, at thispoint in the poem, does not struggle against his imprisonment.Indeed, he becomes upset when his confinement ends. The romanticunion has opened up a new world to the speaker:
. . . within it opens into a World
And a little lovely Moony Night
The night brings the soft, flattering glow of moonlight, which casts
a gentle spell on everything in its path; the speaker is enchanted.Under the spell of his love, the speaker’ s vision itself seems altered:
Another England there I saw
Another London with its TowerAnother Thames & other HillsAnd another pleasant Surrey Bower
His emotions influence his perceptions. The speaker doesn’t say he’ s
found a better England, just a different one. Other writings make it
clear that Blake had much to say about the state of politics andeconomy in his London. Perhaps the “lovely Moony Night” showsLondon in an unjustifiably favorable light, or distorted views of theriver Thames. Or does the speaker’ s love blind him to the problemsof a newly industrialized London?

87After a small series of another, Blake adds another another:
another maiden. Is this the same woman, seen in “another” way—
“Another Maiden like herself ”—or is it someone new?
Next, Blake makes mention of the first of three instances of
threefold in “The Crystal Cabinet”—a triple vision that will become
his undoing. He continues:
O what a smile a threefold Smile
Filld me that like a flame I burndI bent to Kiss the lovely MaidAnd found a Threefold Kiss returnd
In this verse are the other two instances of the word threefold—three
in total as a seemingly obvious reference to the Holy Trinity.
Although his beliefs did not conform to those of any establishedreligion, did Blake mention the word three times for some spiritualpurpose? The line “Threefold each in the other closed” recalls theCatholic and Anglican tenet of the three forms of God in one being.Is the lovely maiden the speaker kisses the Virgin Mary? She’ sdescribed as “[t]ranslucent lovely shining clear”, similar to theCatholic or Anglican idea of the Mother of God. Is the kiss thespeaker gave to the “maiden” returned by the Father, the Son, and theHoly Spirit? The speaker “strives to seize the inmost form,” as iflooking for understanding or perhaps searching for religiousenlightenment. In his work, Blake often questioned Protestantreligious teachings, and he tended to satirize religious beliefs.Perhaps “The Crystal Cabinet” represents another example ofBlake’ s skeptical approach to organized religion.
The word “weeping” will also make a triple appearance in “The
Crystal Cabinet.” The speaker weeps after the “Crystal Cabinet” isbroken when the speaker tries to seize its core. His passion leads toloss. Blake uses the word “burst” to describe the destruction of theCabinet; the triple mirror is shattered. This is a violent eruption,causing irreparable damage, and the speaker weeps not for a brokenheart but for a broken life. Indeed, it is because the speaker now willhave to begin life anew that Blake transforms him into an infant. Acrying woman, pale and weak after surviving the destruction of “TheCrystal Cabinet”, enters the picture.
The last two lines of the poem are amazingly clear:

And in the outward Air again
I filld with woes the passing Wind
The speaker is in a fog, as if intoxicated or clearing his head after a
bad dream. “The Crystal Cabinet” ends with a bit of sadness: love islost, a life is starting over, and the speaker is surrounded by his ownwoe.
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CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Crystal Cabinet”
IRENE H. C HA YES ON THE INFLUENCE OF MYTH
[Irene H. Chayes taught at the University of Maryland. She
has written extensively about the Romantic Poets, includingthe essays “Some Versions of the Antique” and“Michelangelo’ s ‘The Last Judgment’”. In this passage,Chayes shows how several of Blake’ s poems demonstratethe legacy of Greek and Roman mythology. She examines“The Crystal Cabinet” in the context of the story of Cupidand Psyche.]
How do source studies contribute to an understanding of Blake’ s“visionary forms”? What is the relation of traditional iconography tothe imagery in both his poetry and his designs? In his case, it isespecially true that the work is to be trusted more than the man, andin spite of his strictures on “the classics” his work itself shows thatBlake was sufficiently a product of his age to draw on the traditionalGreek and Roman myths as well as on more esoteric material for thecomplex purposes of his two parallel arts. Behind the eccentricproper names and the composite episodes of the epics we canrecognize from time to time the familiar figures of Demeter andPersephone, Zeus and Prometheus, Apollo, Poseidon, or Hephaestus.Among the designs, there may be the surprise effect of a fall ofLucifer that is also the fall of Phaëthon, as on plate 5 of The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell , or, on the last plate of Europe: A
Prophecy, a revision of Aeneas’ flight from Troy, in which the deadCreusa seems to be substituted for the aged Anchises. It is true thatthese are usually only fleeting echoes or allusions with a limitedfunction, and the very familiarity of the originals undoubtedly leftlittle for Blake to do by way of adaptation or variation that wouldhave been an adequate challenge to his imagination. There was oneclassical myth, however, whose special history and associations setit apart from those that had become hackneyed through overuse bythe time Blake began work.
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This was the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which is best known as
an interpolated story, or parable, or fable, in The Metamorphoses (IV,
28– VI, 24), popularly called The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of
Madaura. Apuleius, in turn, had received his material from a
tradition of myth and ritual which may have originated in the OrphicMysteries and which has survived mainly in the iconography of avariety of minor antique works of art—funerary reliefs, statuary,frescoes, mosaics, engraved gems. In a third tradition, the writers onmythology in later ages, from Fulgentius in the sixth century, toBoccaccio, to the speculative mythographers of the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries, preserved a continuity of their own indiscussions of Cupid and Psyche, both together and separately, asindependent mythic figures. By the time of the Romantics, whenthere was a new interest in Cupid and Psyche among major andminor writers alike,
1all three traditions were available and in
varying combinations affected the way in which the myth wasunderstood, even when Apuleius’ literary version continued to be themain source. Through his training in art and his professional work asan engraver, as well as through his more conventional literaryinterests, Blake was in a position to regard the two figures and themyth from more than one standpoint and in more than one contextof meaning. The evidence is that he did precisely that, and from whathe saw chose motifs for both his poetry and his designs whichfurnished him with considerably more than a means of appealing towhat his audience already knew or of acknowledging that “theclassics” sometimes had anticipated his own characters andsituations. Although the results remain purely Blake’ s own, to tracethe separate motifs back to their probable origins and forward in newvariations and combinations is to learn much that is valuable aboutthe workings of his imagination, both verbal and visual, and aboutthe relation of his two arts to each other. (. . .)
In The Crystal Cabinet, from a later time, the male speaker
undergoes a fall like Psyche’ s when he tries to exceed the limits seton his enjoyment of the miniature world within the Cabinet; instriving to seize “the inmost Form,” he breaks the Crystal Cabinet(as an image, a variant of Psyche’ s magic palace) and finds himselfexiled and weeping “upon the Wild.” Even The Sick Rose is
ambiguous in its relation to the chapters in The Golden Ass. The
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uncommon use of the second person, the curious tone, with its hint
of Schadenfreude, and the reference to the nocturnal visits of the
corrupting “invisible worm” recall not the voice of the narrator butthe slanders of the jealous sisters, who tell Psyche that her unseenhusband is actually a monstrous, poisonous snake and whoeventually destroy themselves in their successive efforts to replaceher in Cupid’ s favor. (. . .)
Male and female contend for power and possession in The Crystal
Cabinet, which begins with the Maiden as pursuer and the dancingmale speaker as her captive, a reversal of earlier roles until hebecomes possessive in turn. In The Mental Traveller, where the myth
is most fully realized, the archetypal man and woman alternate in arising and falling pattern of conflict, disparity, and frustration whichcoincides with a highly complex, cyclical pattern of human andcosmic ages.
23The Fly is a step toward both, linking them with
“How sweet I roam’ d” of long before by way of the motif ofbutterfly- and bird-hunting. Logically and chronologically, however,the evolution of Blake’ s sexual myth is not complete without twoother poems, which have not yet been mentioned. Like The Fly they
belong to Songs of Innocence and of Experience , and their relation
to the iconography of Cupid and Psyche also involves their relationto each other.
NOTES
1. Thomas Taylor’ s prose translation of Apuleius’ fable (1795) was followed by
adaptations in verse by Mary Tighe (1795) and Hudson Gurney (1799); MaryShelley began a translation of her own in 1817 but left it unfinished. ErasmusDarwin and Thomas Moore as well as Keats and Coleridge wrote poems withspecific allusions to the myth; references to Cupid and Psyche both together andseparately recur among Coleridge’ s published and unpublished prose. Onsources of the myth in literature and art that were available to the Romantics, seeE. H. Haight, Apuleius and His Influence , reprinted New Y ork, 1963, chs. 6 and
7, and Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art , Oxford, 1967, ch. 12.
Work on this essay was assisted in part by grants from the American Council
of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. For informationand courtesies, I am indebted also to the Prints Division of the New Y ork PublicLibrary, the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum, and P .& D. Colnaghi & Co., Ltd., of London.
23. On The Mental Traveller, see my “Plato’ s Statesman Myth in Shelley and
Blake,” Comparative Literature,
XIII(1961), 361–368.
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92—Irene H. Chayes, “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche,” Blake’ s
Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V . Erdman and John E. Grant
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 214–217.
ROBERT E. S IMMONS ON BLAKE ’SBALANCE
[Robert E. Simmons is an Associate Professor of English at
Y ork University’ s Glendon Campus. He has written The
Language of Literature: A Stylistic Introduction toLiterature . This passage takes a look at the mathematical
precision with which Blake crafted his words. Simmonssays “The Crystal Cabinet” is almost scientific in itssymbolism.]
The second point of emphasis is the usefulness of a symmetricalmodel” for describing, and thus reading, Blake. Northrop Frye usesa “diabolical” and “divine” symmetry for elucidating Blake’ simagery, but I would stress the symmetrical forms of hisstructures—and even his grammar—as well. The Songs of
Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
are obvious examples. The Tyger, The Crystal Cabinet, The Mental
Traveller all end where they begin, with the difference of a mirror
image. The last plate of Job reflects the first—with a significant
difference. America, Europe, and the “Asia” and “Africa” sections of
The Son of Los combine to form a symmetrical structure related to
the four continents. The Book of Los (four chapters) and The Book of
Ahania (five chapters) frame The Book of Urizen (nine chapters) to
form another symmetrical structure.
The similarity of the structure of The Four Zoas (nine nights) to
Urizen (nine chapters) might also be remarked upon, together with
the fact that material from Urizen recurs in all the long prophecies.
The orientation, or directional, symbolism of Urizen also recurs,
suggesting that the investigation of structural symmetries in the lateworks may well be profitable.
But the concept of symmetry not only may be applied broadly to
other Blake works, it may also be used in much greater depth, with

more precision and delicacy, on individual works than has been
possible in the limited space of this essay. Such an exact applicationand description may reveal that Blake’ s “system” of symbolism iseven more systematic and extensive than it has been thought to be.This suggestion, if it is confirmed, would fit in well both with thebasic concept of the fallen world as symmetrical and cyclical andwith Blake’ s very extensive knowledge and use of contemporaryscience as revealed in his imagery.
11
The Crystal Cabinet illustrates these points in miniature. The
poem turns on the notion of a “three-fold” symmetry. The speakerenters a “crystal” and sees three women where once was one. Hetries to seize the “inmost form,” or fix the exact, mathematical shapeof these images, and breaks the crystal instead, thus revealing theirthreefold symmetry as illusory. But symmetry, the exact, repeatedlife in the crystal world, now seems to him delightful, and he is filledwith woe to find himself outside once more with what seems to himto be the anguished chaos of a nature impossible to organize intosuch pretty, repeated shapes. The final point of this analysis is thatin the science of crystallography, or the analysis of the symmetriesof crystals, “three-fold” symmetry (the same terminology is used) isone of the commonest forms and is illustrated by rock quartz.
NOTES
11 J.H.H.: It might be well, at the same time, to take into account the tradition
of chiasmus, a basic form of Hebrew poetry, where the climax is in the middle,
and where one moves in the following fashion:
A
B
CC’
B’
A’
This form explains much in Blake and is somewhat truer both to his traditionand to his own manner of proceeding than is the overworked term “cyclical.”
—Robert E. Simmons, “Urizen: The Symmetry of Fear,” Blake’ sVisionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V . Erdman and John E. Grant(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 167–169.
93

HAZARD ADAMS ON INNOCENCE AND IMAGES
[Hazard Adams is a Professor Emeritus in Comparative
Literature at the University of Washington. His publicationsinclude Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision ,William
Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems , and the novels
Many Pretty Toys and Home. Here, Adams explains the
images of Innocence in “The Crystal Cabinet” and offersseveral interpretations of the work.]
The speaker recalls a state of unrestrained innocence represented byhis dance. He has discovered there a shape-changing female, whoperforms an act analogous to the crucifixion of Orc in “The MentalTraveller.” The difference is that the maiden has seduced the speaker.Distinctions rigidly adhered to in “The Mental Traveller” aresomewhat blurred or collapsed, for this speaker is not certain aboutthe experience himself. Tirzah the mother and Rahab the seductressare not distinguished from one another, for the speaker is time-borne. Tirzah is forgotten, though her action is described asaccomplished by Rahab. In considering the sexual aspect of thesymbolism—cabinet, lock, key, etc.—we move at once toencompass a simple Freudian reading and see that the clearly sexualimagery is symbolic of a meaning larger than itself; for the femaleis the whole of the outer world as well as her sexual self. In thespeaker’ s eyes, the two actions of “The Mental Traveller”—captureby the earth mother and rape of the virgin bright—are suddenly oneand the same in remembrance. We can think of the capture of thespeaker as following the last part of the cycle of “The MentalTraveller,” if we assume that the speaker remembers the female not
as a Tirzah but only as a Rahab.
What we discover is that the male has been contained by the
female rather than encompassing her. The crystal cabinet is an areajust short of vision, holding within itself all the possibilities ofvision. It is clearly related to what Blake calls Beulah, the state ofthreefold vision, passive pleasure, and moony nights. But Beulah ispart of the fallen world here, the uppermost area below Eden; it is apart of the triple form which is nature—Beulah, Generation, andUlro. In some respects it is a gate, but a gate has two directions and
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95no one is capable of staying in the gate itself for long, just as each
moment in fallen time must disappear.
The action in Beulah is very nearly successful, but the danger of
Beulah is its seductivity and the tendency of the passive dreamer ofmoony nights to abstract his vision from himself and assume itsseparate existence. The result is the familiar fall into multiplicity,seen here as an infinite regress in which the vision of the “other,”really the self, becomes a series of mirrors or a crystal. The “othermaiden” whom the speaker sees is really, then, the same maiden splitinto a triple form by the process of “reflecting” upon an outer world.The number three in Blake is associated with a vision of naturehalfway between the chaotic area of Generation and the fourfoldvision of Eden. In Beulah, if man externalizes the threefold maidenand thus fails to encompass within his own imaginative form thetriple world of nature which she represents, he falls into Ulro.
We notice, then, that within Beulah a choice is presented to the
speaker. He may expand his vision to encompass all of a beautifulspiritual England, all of London—a city like the woman that Albionfinally marries in Jerusalem. The vision is that of London within
England (Albion). To make this choice would be to expand inwardin that paradoxical Blakean fashion that always puts Eden at the stillpoint of the circle and Ulro at the circumference. Or to put it anotherway:
What is Above is Within, for every-thing in Eternity is translucent:
The Circumference is Within: Without, is formed the Selfish Center
(Jerusalem, Ch. 3, K 709)
Such an interpretation seems to contradict the preceding statement,
but the terms are simply reversed. The real or upright world is reallythe world of mental forms without material substance. The trueexpansion to the infinite circumference of God, which istraditionally both everywhere and nowhere in measurable space, istherefore within, while to assume oneself the center of the materialuniverse is to enclose oneself in the Urizenic cave of the ego. Thespeaker, in other words, can proceed from the sexual to the humanvision, where nature is no longer a surrounding physical existencebut a city within the spirit.
The second choice, or perhaps we should call it temptation, is to

turn around, or inside out, and instead of looking within look
without. Then the true England becomes a triple female namedRahab, an indefinite cyclical conception or crystal mirror suggestingsomething beyond herself (translucent) but actually reflecting adebased image of the self. Although this mirror woman can return akiss, to grasp her is as impossible as to reach successfully through amirror. The result is, of course, a shattering of the glass itself.
Now any bursting forth might, on first appearance, suggest an
apocalyptic assertion of new life similar to breaking the shell of thetraditional cosmic egg or ascension from the grave. But if we acceptBlake’ s paradoxical spatial imagery we see that the true rebirth doesnot come from breaking out of the crystal cabinet into anothermerely larger cyclical world. Such action might go on indefinitely,the infinite space of modern physical science providing the wandererwith shell after shell to be broken through. Instead, proper vision liesin an inward expansion in which one’ s own spiritual body surroundsthat “other England” within the grain of sand. Any violent readingout destroys the vision. From within the crystal cabinet thetranslucence, which is really reflection, suggests a tantalizingpossibility of something beyond the perceivable or visionary fact.And yet with that translucence smashed, the reflection of the self isapparently translucent again, on a larger more remote concavesurface. This should be the spiritual lesson of modern science.
We may note the paradoxical aspects of the crystal cabinet by
observing that it is related, on the one hand, to the “crystal house” ofEurope, where it is a symbol of the cyclical enclosure of fallen timeand space ruled over by a nature-goddess, Enitharmon:
Then Enitharmon saw her sons & daughters rise around.
Like pearly clouds they meet together in the crystal house.
(Europe, “A Prophecy”)
On the other hand, it has aspects of “the grain of sand” image in
Blake which appears frequently to illustrate the paradox of inwardvisionary expansion. The grain of sand appears most prominently inthe following places: at the beginning of “Auguries of Innocence,”where it is used to express the identity of macrocosm and microcosm(that which is above is that which is within).
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97NOTE
Citations marked “K” are to Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of
William Blake (London: The Nonesuch Press; New Y ork: Random House,
1957). References are to page numbers. [E D.]
—Hazard Adams, “The Crystal Cabinet and the Golden Net,” Blake:
A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1966), 80–83.
VICTOR N. P AANANEN ON SEXUAL EXPRESSION
[Victor N. Paananen wrote William Blake, and William
Blake: Updated Edition and edited British Marxist
Criticism. In this essay, Paananen explores Blake’ s warning
about sex—that sexual love does not provide escape fromlife’ s problems.]
If “The Mental Traveller” offers hints about the impossibility ofsuccess in political endeavor that is based on an acceptance of theworld as it is currently constituted, “The Crystal Cabinet” offers aclear warning against a reliance on sexuality to lead totranscendence of our condition. In this poem, the speaker encountersa maiden who seems to be able to offer film entry into a realm thatis, somehow, this physical world repeated in a finer tone:
She put me into her Cabinet
And Lock’ d me up with a golden Key.
The Cabinet is form’ d of Gold
And Pearl & Crystal shining bright,And within it opens into a WorldAnd a little lovely Moony Night.
Another England there I saw,
Another London with its Tower,Another Thames & other Hills,And another pleasant Surrey Bower. ( CW, 429)

If he could possess her here, he might possess a Keatsian—or
Lawrentian—eternity:
like a flame I burn’ d;
I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid,
And found a Threefold Kiss return’ d. (CW, 429)
But his attempt must fall, and his actual subservience to nature is
instead emphasized:
I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardor fierce & hands of flame,But burst the Crystal Cabinet,And like a Weeping Babe became—
A weeping Babe upon the wild,
And Weeping Woman pale reclin’ d,And in the outward air againI fill’ d with woes the passing Wind. ( CW, 429–30)
Nature is to be destroyed or transcended. Its “inmost Form,” could
it be grasped, provides only the grounds for the despair of the
empiricist. If we do not strive for change that is fundamental androunded in a philosophy and theology that breaks with theempiricists, neither politics nor sexual love hold out hope for thesatisfaction of human needs.
These three cyclical poems offer it particularly effective
statement against trusting either political reformism or indeed asexual “revolution,” such as we were said to have experienced in the1960s, as a final answer. Blake was, like Marx, a thoroughgoingrevolutionary in his quest for an end to human alienation, and forBlake that goal meant pressing onto the full freedom of Eternity.“Many persons, such as Paine & V oltaire, with some of the AncientGreeks, say: ‘we will not converse concerning Good & Evil; we willlive in Paradise & Liberty.’ Y ou may do so in Spirit, but not in theMortal Body as you pretend, till after the Last Judgment” ( CW,
615–16). (It is worth recalling here Blake’ s explanation of how theLast Judgment occurs: “Whenever an Individual rejects Error &Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual” [ CW,
613].) The trap that PaIne or V oltaire creates in accepting nature isreproduced in the structure of these poems: nature’ s seasons or thealternations of revolution and counterrevolution enclose us, as do the
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tiger patterns of repeated incident and repeated phrase. The three
cyclical poems, taken together with the other manuscript poems,remind us that, even though Blake chose to devote much of hiscareer to works on a larger scale, he had few peers in the fusion ofform and meaning in the short poem.
—Victor N. Paananen, William Blake: Updated Edition (New Y ork:
Twayne Publishers, 1996), 123–124.
KATHLEEN RAINE ON ALCHEMY IN “THECR YSTAL CABINET ”
[Kathleen Raine has authored Blake and Tradition and
Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William
Blake and has co-edited a selection of the writings of
Thomas Taylor. She also has published several volumes ofpoetry, including her own. This selection compares a beliefin alchemy, a medieval science, to the structure andsymbolism in “The Crystal Cabinet”.]
There is a more elaborate alchemical myth which Blake seems tohave known—again, probably from Vaughan. The Crystal Cabinet,
an unpublished poem in the Pickering Manuscript, containsrecondite alchemical symbolism which Blake may have found inVaughan’ s Aula Lucis. There is no means of knowing when this
poem was written. The existing fair copy was made in about 1803,and it is certainly later than the myth of Enion and Tharmas. But the“shining tent” of Thel (1789) suggests that the symbolism may have
been known to Blake earlier. The crystal cabinet, the “shining tent,and possibly the “crystal house” of Enitharmon are the alchemical“house of light”—matter—under its usual symbol of water:
Matter . . . is the House of Light , here hee (i.e. the light) dwels and
builds for himself, and to speake Truth, hee takes up his lodging
in sight of all the World . When he first enters it, it is a glorious
transparent Roome, a Chrystall Castle, and hee lives like a
Familiar in Diamonds. Hee hath then the Libertie to look out at
the Windows , his love is all in his sight, I meane that liquid V enus,
which lures him in, but this continues not very long. Hee is busie
as all Lovers are, labours for a more close Union, insinuates and
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conveyes himself into the very substance of his Love, so that his
Heat and action stirre up her moyst Essences, by whose meanes
he becomes an absolute Prisoner. For at last the Earth growes
over him out of the water, so that he is quite shut up in darknesse.
Blake’ s poem tells of the capturing of a spirit by a “Maiden”:
The Maiden caught me in the Wild,
Where I was dancing merrily;She put me into her CabinetAnd Lock’ d me up with a golden Key.
(Is the merry dancer a sunbeam?) “Cabinet” is a word that Vaughan
constantly uses in just this sense: “to say that the soul formed thebody because she is in the body is to say that the jewel made thecabinet because she is in the cabinet”—and Vaughan in his turn isremembering Paracelsus’ coffers in which the senses are generated.”
Is the poem a paraphrase of Vaughan’ s allegory? Many of the
images and phrases suggest it: “Now as soone as the Passive spiritattracts the Anima . . . then the aethereall water in a moment
attracts the Passive spirit, for this is the first visible Receptaclewherein the superiour Natures are Concentrated. The Soule being
thus confined and imprisoned by lawful] Magick in this Liquid
Chrystall, the Light which is in her streams thorough the Water, andthen it is Lux manifeste visibilis ad oculum .”
Vaughan’ s “lawfull magick” seems to describe the power of
Blake’ s maiden. But the most striking feature of Blake’ s poem is thethreefold nature of the maiden. The cabinet is of gold, pearl, andcrystal; and the maiden of the cabinet is threefold. The outer“cabinet” or body opens into
Another Maiden like herself,
Translucent, lovely, shining clear,Threefold each in the other clos’ d—O, what a pleasant trembling fear!
O, what a smile! a threefold Smile
Fill’ d me, that like a flame I burn’ d;I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid,And found a Threefold Kiss return’ d.
I strove to sieze the inmost Form
With ardor fierce & hands of flame
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This triplicity is an alchemical theme. Vaughan elaborates on the
feminine principle, who “below” corresponds to the masculine deity“above,” and who is likewise a trinity. He describes the naturaltriplicity, or “three mothers”: “For there are Three above and threebeneath, Three—as St. John saith—in Heaven and three on earth.The inferior bear witness of the Superior and are their only properreceptacles. They are signatures and created books wherein we mayread the Mysteries of the Supernatural Trinity.” Thus the “superior ismasculine and eternal, the inferior is feminine and mortal.” Thisfeminine trinity Vaughan equates with the three “mothers” ofcabalism: “Emes, or Aleph, Mem and Shin, are Air, Water and Fire
. . . The Heavens were made of the Fire, the Earth was made of theWater . . . and the Ayre proceeded from a middle spirit.” Elsewherehe calls these the elementary earth (water), the celestial earth (air),and the spiritual earth (fire). Blake’ s attempt to grasp the threefoldmaiden reflects a process commonly described by the alchemists,whose teaching is that the descent into generation takes place inthree stages. The fiery soul must initiate the process by wrappingitself in the aerial vestment, and clothed in this airy body, descendinto the watery envelope of matter. This process Vaughan describesin his Anima Magica Abscondita . A similar triplicity is described by
Plutarch (see above, p. 251).
Such, then, is the background of Blake’ s mysterious little poem,
whose simplicity is, as so often, deceptive. The maiden is Vaughan’ s“liquid Venus,” and the soul of light, who has “liberty to look out ofthe windows,” becomes, in Blake, the lover who tells that
. . . within it opens into a World
And a little lovely Moony Night.
Another England there I saw,
Another London with its Tower
But in Blake’ s poem, as in Vaughan’ s allegory, the “ardor fierce” of
the lover leads not to the end he had hoped for but to anincarceration. In Vaughan the earth “grows over” the light; in Blake’ spoem the spirit becomes “a Weeping Babe”:
I strove to sieze the inmost Form
With ardor fierce & hands of flame,But burst the Crystal Cabinet,
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And like a Weeping Babe became—
A weeping Babe upon the wild,And Weeping Woman pale reclin’ d,And in the outward air againI fill’ d with woes the passing Wind.
The spirit, lured to become the lover of the “liquid Venus” in her
crystal house of matter, finds himself snared, taken, and generated.
—Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition , vol. I (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 274–276.
102

103CRITICAL ANAL YSIS OF
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
Blake’ s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is the longest of his
works included in this volume. This free-flowing series of writingsbegins as a poem; then offers a series of observations about life andbrief stories about Biblical prophets, angels and devils; and endswith an almost apocalyptic verse. Blake questions and criticizesChristian beliefs, citing Roman and Greek mythology and the workof Milton to support his arguments. The final line of the work istelling: “For every thing that lives is Holy.” Blake is opposed toorganized religion, and in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” heexplains the evolution in his spiritual life to his current beliefs.
The work starts with a section of prose, “The Argument”, that
describes the taking of a dangerous journey through life whose goalis arrival in Heaven. The holy path is treacherous, and a misstep canbe fatal. A “villain” chases the good person off the path and into thewild to find his way among lions, problematizing the journey. In astyle typical of Blake’ s poetic work, such as “The Tyger,” the firstlines are repeated to end the poem. In “The Marriage of Heaven andHell” this device is effective.
The next writing describes “a new heaven.” It is the first Easter
Sunday. Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist andtheologian who founded the Church of the New Jerusalem, is theangel guarding the tomb of Christ. His writings are compared to theshroud of linen that covered Christ in death. Blake makes his viewsvery clear: that humankind needs Heaven and Hell because withoutchoice and opposites mankind would have no reason to evolve:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human exis-tence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active spring-ing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

104The next segment criticizes the Bible and points out its errors.
Simply put: Man has a body and a soul; energy is evil; reason is
good. The body craves energy, which is evil. Blake criticizes theBible for claiming that God will punish man for “following hisEnergies”. Blake’ s truth is that the body and soul cannot beseparated, that energy is life and reason surrounds energy. Instead of“energy” as man’ s temptation and ultimate downfall, then, it is hiseternal delight. Blake cites Milton’ s Paradise Lost as an example of
the result of desire denied.
At this point in the work, Blake breaks from arguing his theories
on humankind and God to recount fables. The first of these“Memorable Fancies” takes Blake to Hell. There, he is among“Genius; which to the Angels look like torment and insanity.” Heuses the story as a segue to his “Proverbs of Hell”, a series ofmaxims about life such as
“A wholsom food is caught without a net or trap”
“Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of
Religion.”
“The fox condemns the trap, not himself.”“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship”“The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.”
The next segment discusses the gods of ancient Greece and
Rome. There, poets named the deities and ascribed to them
characteristics of nature. The people in these times prayed andsacrificed to gods created by writers. This leads to the second“Memorable Fancy”; this time, Blake is having a conversation withthe prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. In this fictional tale, the Prophetssay they made up the God of the Jews—a divinity different from thegods of other countries. Isaiah and Ezekiel told Blake in this fantasythat the hardships they suffered were similar to what poets in ancientGreece and Rome and American Indians did for their art and beliefs.
When the dream ends, Blake predicts that the world will be
destroyed by fire six thousand years after its creation. The flameswill purify all, and all will live forever. He then says it is his missionto clarify the myth that man’ s body and soul are separate. He will dothis by printing his word in the “infernal method”; and this he did do,publishing his own works by engraving on copper plates in a verylabor-intensive and time-consuming process that prevented his

105publishing as many books as he might have done through more
conventional methods. In any case, Blake compares his form ofprinting to Hell: the flames of Hell melt away the superficial to showthat all is infinite.
A theme of printing forms a bridge to the next “Memorable
Fancy”: a trip to Hell’ s printing house. There dragons, a viper, aneagle, and lions take books from their creation, dress them up, buildthem up, and then put them in libraries. It is not the most positivedescription of the industry.
Blake now gets back to the “contraries” mentioned earlier in the
work. He contends that there are only two kinds of people, theProlific and the Devouring, and that these opposites are bothinimical to each other and necessary—for if they were reconciledmankind would cease to exist. Blake accuses religion of trying tounite these opposites and explains that even Jesus Christ came not tounite but to divide.
In the next “Memorable Fancy,” Blake debates an angel. The
angel warns Blake that the path he is on will lead to damnation andthen asks the angel to show him the eternal choices, that he mightdecide which is the better. The speaker sees the fiery abyss, spiders,and horrific storms that would plague him forever in Hell; he thensees a moonlit river, near which a harp plays in peace. The speakerdresses in a white robe and takes the angel and the writings ofSwedenborg to a place between the planet Saturn and the stars. Theyenter a church, pass through the Bible, and enter a pit. Here they findmonkeys, chained up and scratching each other. The monkeyspretend to care for each other, then devour their own. The angel isupset by what he has seen. Blake ends the vision by telling the angelthat attempts at the religious conversion of others are futile.
In “Opposition Is True Friendship,” Blake attacks Swedenborg.
He criticizes the theologian’ s writings as offering no new insightsinto religion, only old lies. He says Swedenborg’ s approach is one-sided, dealing only with angels and not with devils. With no“contraries” in his professed faith, Blake claims, he condemnshumankind.
The next “Memorable Fancy” portrays Blake as witness to a
discussion between an angel and a devil. The devil describes theworship of God as the appreciation of God’ s gifts in other people; ifone is jealous of another’ s gifts, by the devil’ s reasoning, then one

does not love God. The angel replies that God is visible in Jesus
Christ and Christ gave his blessing to the Ten Commandments. Thedevil retorts that Jesus did not always follow the TenCommandments or any other tenet of Judaism. The angel then turnsinto the prophet Elijah; Blake calls the angel a devil, and they readthe Bible together.
As we near the end of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, the
work takes on an almost apocalyptic tone. “A Song of Liberty”offers a violent description of the end, painting England as a victimof a fiery destruction and military defeat. Ultimately, the King criesout, “The Empire is no more!” The “chorus” that followsforeshadows the end of the Church. The final line—“For every thingthat lives is Holy”—reflects Blake’ s own beliefs. While his spirituallife exceeded the boundaries of established spirituality, the Churchfilled the necessary function of opposition: “Without contrariesthere is no progression.”
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CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
JOSEPH ANTHONY WITTREICH JR. ONPARODY OF RELIGIOUS
WRITINGS
[Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. taught at the University of
Wisconsin and co-edited Blake’ s Sublime Allegory. He also
wrote Nineteenth-Century Accounts of William Blake and
the essay “Painted Prophecies: The Tradition of Blake’ sIlluminated Books”. This essay compares “The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell” to the Bible’ s Book of Revelation andBlake’ s interpretation to those of Milton and Swedenborg.]
Swedenborg had announced a “new heaven” in 1757, but as Blakelooks around himself he discovers that Swedenborg’ s “heaven” is“the Eternal Hell revive[d],” that Swedenborg is, by his owndefinition, the devil in that hell (MHH 3: 34). In The Apocalypse
Revealed, Swedenborg distinguishes between the hell called “theDevil,” by which he means the hell created by those “who are in thelove of self,” and the hell called “Satan,” by which he means the hellcreated by those who live by “falsities” and “who are in the pride oftheir own intelligence.”
20Swedenborg begins The Apocalypse
Revealed with a proclamation: “There are many who labored in the
explanation of the Apocalypse; but, as the spiritual sense of the Wordhad been hitherto unknown they could not see the arcana which heconcealed therein. for the spiritual sense alone discloses these.” Thenhe makes a pronouncement: I am the visionary with “a particular
enlightenment” and will now reveal the Book of Revelation.
21From
Blake’ s viewpoint, Swedenborg “conciev’ d himself as much wiser”than be really was. Swedenborg “shews the folly of churches, &exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, & himselfthe single one on earth that ever broke a net.” However, this is the“plain fact,” says Blake: “Swedenborg has not written one new truth:Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods” (MHH21–22; 41–42). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is structured
around the opposition between the true and false prophet represented
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in the satire by Milton and Swedenborg respectively. Like Newton,
Swedenborg tried to reduce the spiritual sense, the sublime allegory,of Revelation to corporeal understanding and thereby perverted truereligion into a corrupt orthodoxy. Like Milton, Blake preserves thevisionary dimension of prophecy, even if doing so requirestransforming all the Lord’ s people into prophets. Rather thanperverting sublime allegory into falsehood, Blake would convert anentire civilization into a nation of visionaries. This Newton refusedto do and Swedenborg failed to do, both of them by bruising SaintJohn’ s minute articulations, and Newton by denying that God everdesigned to make people into prophets.
22
Even so, if Newton and Swedenborg were seen by Blake, on
occasion, as types of the false prophet, they were also seen by him,on other occasions, in the posture of the redeemed man. BothNewton and Swedenborg articulated conceptions of prophecycompatible with Blake’ s own, which explains why in Milton
Swedenborg is represented as “strongest of men” (22: 50) and whyin Jerusalem Newton rides a chariot when, “at the clangor of the
Arrows of intellect,” the apocalypse occurs (98: 7). Preciselybecause Newton was bound to his own religious culture, heunderstood that the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation wererelated not only to one another but to all other scriptural prophecies,“so that all of them together make but one complete Prophecy” that“consists of two parts, an introductory Prophecy, and anInterpretation thereof.”
23Each prophet is both creator of his visions
and interpreter of them; and every subsequent prophet repeats thepattern but, in the process, becomes an interpreter both of his ownvisions and of the vision of his predecessors. Behind Newton’ sunderstanding is the perception that the Apocalypse subsumes allprevious prophetic structures. The Apocalypse is simultaneously aninterpretation and a prophecy; by way of repeating all previousprophecies it comments on them, but it also introduces a series ofseven new visions, each of which interprets the one it supersedesuntil in the final vision all things burst into clarity. Swedenborgreveals exactly this understanding when he depicts chapter 22 ofRevelation as both in individual vision and a revelation of the totalmeaning of the Apocalypse.
From Newton and Swedenborg incidentally and from Spenser and
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Milton quite centrally, Blake took his prophetic stance; and from
them all he learned that prophecy had a structure, which epic poetrycould appropriate and accommodate. Austin Farrer has observedquite perceptively that in composing the Book of Revelation “St.John was making a new form of literature,” but he concludes quitemistakenly that John “had no successor.”
24In Blake’ s epics,
conventional structures are subdued, though not fully eliminated, andthe living form of Revelation prophecy imparts the “new” epicstructure. Blake’ s epics turn to Saint John, the last great prophet inScripture, and to John Milton, the last great prophet in the epicmode; and then they turn, for their structural model, to theculminating vision of each prophet: Milton’ s vision of paradiseregained and John’ s of apocalypse. In those prophecies, “the summeof Religion is shewed,” and it is Blake’ s task to reveal the essence ofthose visions, which commentators on Revelation understood as“allegories,” penetrable by only the initiated, and which eighteenth-century commentators on Milton seemed not to have understood atall.
25
NOTES
20. Translated by John Whitehead (New Y ork: Swedenborg Foundation, 1931),
I, 113.
21. Ibid., p. iii.22. See Newton, Observations, esp. pp. 251–252, where he says that “the folly
of Interpreters” has been to speak “as if God designed to make them Prophets,”
and then argues that “the design of God was much otherwise.”
23. Ibid., p. 254.24. A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’ s Apocalypse (London: Dacre
Press, 1919), p. 305.25. See Hugh Broughton, A Revelation of the Holy Apocalypse ([London],
1610), and my Introduction to Milton’ s “Paradise Regained”: Two Eighteenth-
Century Critiques by Richard Meadowcoart and Charles Dunster (Gainesville,
Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971).
—Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr., “Opening the Seals: Blake’ s Epics
and the Milton Tradition,” Blake’ s Sublime Allegory, ed. Stuart Curran
and Joseph Anthony Wittreich (Madison: The University of WisconsinPress, 1973), 29–32.
MAXPLOWMAN ON HOPE AND FEAR
109

[Max Plowman wrote An Introduction to the Study of Blake
in 1927. In this excerpt, Plowman discusses Blake’ s Heavenand Hell as representations of man’ s hopes and fears.]
Blake suddenly saw these two great contraries as complementary. Sohe joined them in holy wedlock and wrote The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell. He solved the mystery in himself. Heaven, the realm ofHope, lay before him. Hell, the region of Fear, lay behind. Visionwas the synchronization of the two. The meeting of hope and fearwas vision, and vision was the perception of identity itself.
The spiritual life descended and was from Heaven. The instinctive
life ascended and was from Hell. As the plant had its roots in theground while its shoots aspired towards the sky, so man, rooted inHell, aspired to Heaven and flowered upon Earth. Life instead ofbeing, as the Churches taught, the opportunity for exercising moralvirtue or goodness, and thus showing that man was one with theDivine Essence, was the means by which man achieved consciousindividual identity, which identity had nothing to do with good orevil, being an eternal reality awaiting human recognition. ThisPrinciple of identity held good for all things. Sheep and goats, angelsand devils, good men and evil men, cunning and courageous,prolific and devourers—all were necessary to human existence, forWithout contraries human life was unthinkable. Mortality was notthe opportunity for man’ s pathetic effort towards eternal sameness,but was immortality made visible: distinction and differencerevealed so that every living thing might exhibit its eternal form, andby showing its eternal form reveal its individual holiness.
Thus at one bound Blake released himself from the toils of
morality and surpassed not only Swedenborg but his old friend themoralist Lavater. Henceforth Good and Evil ceased to be theessential differences; the essential differences lay deeper and werenot to be resisted, being as necessary to human life as the contraryacts of respiration were to the body.
For a moment Blake rejoiced in the sense of freedom that always
ensues when we have put behind us restraints not of our ownmaking, and all restraint seems to be the work of the devil. But ofcourse Blake had not solved the insoluble problem of duality: he had
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only raised the standard. The moment we cease to conform to
external discipline, in that moment life imposes upon us thenecessity of conforming to a far more rigorous discipline—the self-discipline upon which true form depends. Blake passed from thediscipline of good and evil to the far more rigorous discipline ofimaginative or unimaginative life, and having written theenfranchising Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he was soon to find, in
tears of repentance, that the very means whereby we achievespiritual enfranchisement quickly turns to pride unless we pass fromvision to vision. God made duality that man might know thesupreme joy of balance in the ecstasy of creation; but when visionfades and we eat in pride the fruits of vision, fancying that we haveattained, we turn our joy to sorrow. In his moment of insight Blakeenfranchised the human body as a part of the human soul; but unlessI misinterpret the tears of Urizen in the Fifth Night of V ala, the body,in Blake’ s idea, assumed a pride in its own glory during the yearsthat intervened, and taught Blake that Gods may “combine againstMan setting their dominion above The Human Form Divine”, andthat none is so ready to do this as a rightly-enfranchised instinct.
But now Blake saw very clearly what has since been
demonstrated psychologically, that the repression of energy onlychanges its shape.
How did this discovery appear in the light of Christian dogma?The Christianity that was based upon the Ten Commandments
appeared to exist chiefly to exercise this restraint upon humaninstinct. It put division between the soul and body and by this puttingasunder attempted to frustrate the essential purpose of mortal lifewhich was the manifestation of the soul in form. It separated humanlife from the continuous life of Eternity by making moral perfection,which was only possible to God as essence, the ideal of human life;the true ideal being the complete revelation of individual identity. Inconsequence it necessarily destroyed the whole purpose ofincarnation. God was removed from earth and transplanted to theabstract heaven, and Jesus, instead of being the Incarnate Word,became merely an ideal historical character.
Blake regarded the Christianity of his day as the spiritual atavism
Jesus came to destroy. It was the worship of God as light, a worshipwhich Blake indicates in “The Little Black Boy” as natural and right
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to man in the childhood of the race, but atavistic and wrong to those
who lived in the imaginative manhood of the race. The Divine Imagea human form displayed. Even the Little Black Boy, living in thechildhood of the race as he is, learns that he is put on earth a littlespace not only that he may learn to bear the beams of love, but thatwhen he has done this, it may be for the express purpose of shading,his white brother: of being “like him” and thus discovering theDivine Image in a human form.
Blake saw the crux of the whole matter lay in the denial of
spiritual purpose to instinctive life. So The Marriage resolves itself
into a justification of instinct. Not the restraint, but the imaginativeredemption of instinct is the purpose of experience; for when this iscomplete, not only will the five senses appear as “inlets of soul”, butthe cherub with his flaming sword will leave his guard at the Tree ofLife and everything will appear as it is, infinite and holy. Everythingthat lives is holy, for everything possesses within itself its ownsacred law of life, a law that can only be contravened by theimposition of any external law.
—Max Plowman, An Introduction to the Study of Blake (New Y ork:
Barnes & Noble, 1967), 116–119.
DA VID V. E RDMAN ON SPIRITUALITY VERSUS SOCIETY
[David V . Erdman taught at the State University of NewY ork, Stony Brook. He edited The Poetry and Prose of
William Blake and wrote Blake: Prophet Against Empire
and the Concordance of the Works of Blake ; he also served
as editor of the publications of the New Y ork Public Library.This essay contrasts the spiritual side of the writing to thework’ s social implications.]
Blake’ s Marriage of Heaven and Hell mocks those who can accept a
spiritual apocalypse but are terrified at a resurrection of the body ofsociety itself. “Energy is the only life and is from the Body,”announces the Devil, and it is “Eternal Delight” though the religiousmay call it Evil (pl. 4). The birth and resurrection of Christ are notthe equal and opposite exhalations of the theosophists but
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progressive stages in the life of man.8Blake rejects Swedenborg’ s
“spiritual equilibrium” between good and evil for a theory of
spiraling “Contraries” that will account for progress. “Attraction andRepulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary toHuman existence” (pl. 3). Such unnecessary opposites as Bastilles
and Moral Codes and the “omissions” due to poverty are merelyhindrances that may be scattered abroad “to the four winds as a tornbook, & none shall gather the leaves.” They “spring from” thenecessary Contraries but are not to be confused with them. Christ
stamped the ten commandments to dust, and history will not returnto them except perversely.
Blake is half in jest when he speaks of the “marriage” of Heaven
and Hell, for Hell does not exist except as the negative way oflooking at Energy, while the Heaven of things-as-they-are is really adelusion like the senile “innocence” of Har and Heva which springsfrom a denial of the true Heaven of progression. Blake’ s theoryadmits of a true or necessary Reason as “the bound or outwardcircumference of Energy” but leaves it no role in “life” except to bepushed about. Reason is the horizon kept constantly on the move byman’ s infinite desire. The moment it exerts a will of its own andattempts to restrain desire, it turns into that negative and unnecessaryReason which enforces obedience with dungeons, armies, andpriestcraft and which Blake refers to, as “the restrainer” whichusurps the place of desire and “governs the unwilling.” Tiriel wassuch a deity, and so is the dismal god of the Archbishop of Paris whocan no longer restrain the millions from bursting the bars of Chaos.Blake will soon invent for this sterile god a comic name, Nobodaddy(old daddy Nobody), and an epic name, Urizen, signifying your
reason (not mine) and the limiting horizon (Greek . . ., to bound).
9
The poet’ s hostility toward this “Governor or Reason” is thoroughlyrepublican or, to the modern mind, socialistic.
Blake’ s intransigence toward any marriage of convenience
between Hell and Heaven appears further in an extended metaphorof conflict which he introduces with a play upon Rousseau’ spronouncement that man is born free but is everywhere in chains:
“The Giants who formed this world . . . and now seem to live
in it in chains are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of
all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of the weak and tame
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minds, which have power to resist energy . . . .
“Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the
Devouring: to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his
chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fan-cies that the whole.”
10
There is a substratum of reference here to the economic struggle
of producer and exploiter or producer and consumer, not without a
Mandevillean echo. This struggle is “eternal” in the sense that theproducer and consumer even in the false relationships of slavery andcommerce are doing what must always be done to sustain life. Theyare doing it the cheerless way, but even in the freedom of a classlessparadise there will always be work and always an audience for theartist-workman, for “the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unlessthe Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights.”
But Blake’ s more immediate focus is upon the politics of moral
restraint, and he is condemning the conservatism which seeks toconfine the oppressed to a passive acceptance of tyranny. “Religionis an endeavour to reconcile” the “two classes of men” who “shouldbe enemies,” i.e. to unite the lion and its prey. But “Jesus Christ didnot wish to unite but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep andgoats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.”
11The
illusion that energy can be quietly repressed by celestial “wisdom”is exploded by the very fact of revolution. But the fear thatrevolution means the cessation of all productive relations and of thevery means of existence is equally illusory, as Blake proceeds todemonstrate in his fourth “Memorable Fancy.”
In this parable Blake and a conservative Angel who is alarmed at
his radical “career” undertake to show each other the post-revolutionary future from their respective points of view. The Angelis unwilling to plunge with Blake into the void of the comingcentury to see whether the Swedenborgian “providence is here also,”because what he sees ahead is a “monstrous serpent” with a foreheadcolored “green & purple” like “a tygers” (17–18). This is what theRevolution looks like to a Tory, and it is symbolic of the fear of Hellwhich makes him restrain desire. The monster that terrifies him boilsup out of the nether deep beside a “cataract of blood mixed withfire” in a manner that prefigures the birth of Orc in America which
terrifies the King of England.
13Blake’ s “friend the Angel” is
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frightened away. But Blake stands his ground; and since he does not
allow himself to be imposed upon by the Angel’ s “metaphysics,” hefinds that he ends up, not in the belly of a monster, but sittingpeacefully “on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearinga harper who sung to the harp, & his theme was, The man who neveralters his opinion is like standing. water, & breeds reptiles of themind.”
14The Angel is quite surprised to find that Blake has
“escaped” alive. But it is only to the stagnant mind that the energyof revolution appears reptilian and sympathy with rebellion a careerleading to a “hot burning dungeon . . . to all eternity” (18).
Blake then “imposes upon” the Tory in his turn, showing this
Guildenstern a vision of his future lot, assuming the SwedenborgianHell to be true. The Tory’ s clinging to the status quo means that heaccepts a phantasmal eternity of cannibalistic relations betweenProducers and Devourers. A person who assumes that people belongin chains and who scorns the multitude as swinish has nothing tolook forward to but a loathly conflict of “monkeys, baboons, & allof that species chain’ d by the middle.” The Devourers, politician-like, grin and kiss “with seeming fondness” the body of a victim theyare devouring limb by limb.
15The implication seems to be that only
those who cannot imagine progressive social change must view theNegations as eternal and assume that human relations will be foreverthose of joyless slavery.
NOTES
8. To Swedenborg “the delight of the body” is definitely “not heavenly.” And his
ordered hierarchy of identical but opposite celestial and infernal institutionssuggests an essentially static universe. The rich and poor remain rich and poorin Heaven—and presumably in Hell—and the wise Angel, as Swedenborg hasbeen told by Angels of distinction, does not aspire above his rank. Heaven and
Hell, pars. 35, 375–381, 537.
9. The “reason” in “Urizen” has long been accepted. First to note the “horizon”
in it was F . E. Pierce, in 1931. “Nobody’ s daddy” for “old Nobodaddy” wassuggested by John Sampson in 1905.
10. M.H.H. 16. A discussion of the “Argument” of The Marriage, proper at this
point, will be found below (p. 186)—because I originally believed it to be of
later vintage; I now see, from the style of lettering, that it cannot have beenetched later than 1791.11. M.H.H. 17; cf. An Answer to the Parson, N. 103: “Why of the sheep do you
115

116not learn peace[?] Because I don’t want you to shear my fleece.”
In M.H.H. Blake is, as he hints, turning back from Swedenborg’ s sweetness
to the “Wrath” of Boehme, who wrote that “unless there were a contrarium in
God, there would be . . . nothing . . . merely God . . . in a sweet meekness,”
and that strife “between the fierceness and the meekness” must continue, toeternity. See citations in Stephen Hobhouse, Selected Mystical Writings of
William Law, New Y ork, 1948, p. 370. For Blake’ s use of Swedenborg andBoehme in M.H.H. see Nurmi, Blake’ s Marriage of Heaven and Hell , pp.
25–59.
12. A suggestion for the passage may be seen in Swedenborg’ s True Christian
Religion, par. 74, in which the seer himself is the spokesman of a doctrine that
alarms his auditors (they are shocked at how much his stress on “order” seemsto bind the Omnipotent; he advises those who see a Leviathan in this to hack
through it as Alexander did the Gordian knot).
13. The monster is sighted “in the east, distant about, three degrees” or about the
distance of Paris from London, as Nurmi points out.
14. M.H.H. 19. The harper is doubtless Welsh. In 1791 Blake was employed by
Johnson to illustrate a small book by Mary Wollstonecraft. His pictures are
faithful to the text with the exception of “The Welsh harper in the hut.” Here thestory calls for an elderly bard, but Blake has drawn an eager-faced youth.
Note the later ironic comment, in J.65, during the long war: “ . . . this is no
gentle harp . . . nor shadow of a mirtle tree.”
15. M.H.H. 20. Blake elaborates with Dantesque literalness here Swedenborg’ s
par. 575 on “the gnashing of teeth.” He also draws heavily on par. 585 for the
cavern entrance to Hell, for an allusion to “stagnant pools,” and for a descriptionof the “continual quarrels, enmities, blows, and fightings” in one of the hells.And of course Blake is making the most of Swedenborg’ s own definition of thefires etc. of Hell as only “appearances.”
—David V . Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969), 178–182.
HAROLD BLOOM ON THE CONTRARIES IN “THEMARRIAGE OF
HEA VEN AND HELL”
[Harold Bloom is a Sterling Professor of the Humanities at
Y ale University. He has written more than 16 books andedited more than 30 anthologies, including Blake’ s
Apocalypse, William Blake’ s Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, and Modern Critical Views: William Blake. In
this extract, Bloom considers the various contraries

presented in the poem and how they relate to what is human.
He also touches on the irony of progress with respect to thecyclical nature of the poem.]
The poem that opens the Marriage as “argument” has not been much
admired, nor much understood. Rintrah, the angry man in Blake’ spantheon, rears and shakes his fires in the burdened air; clouds,hungry with menace, swag on the deep. The poem is a prelude,establishing the tone of prophetic fury that is to run beneath theMarriage; the indignation of Rintrah presages the turning over of acycle.
The poem itself has the cyclic irony of The Mental Traveller. The
“just man” or “Devil” now rages in the wilds as outcast, having beendriven out of “perilous paths” by the “villain” or “Angel.” Thisreversal is simple enough, if it is true reversal, which it is not. Theinitial complication is provided by the sixth to ninth lines of thepoem:
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heathSing the honey bees.
Grow, not grew; sing, not sang. We are already involved in the
contraries. Cliff is opposed to river, tomb to spring, bleached bones
to the red clay of Adam (literal Hebrew meaning). The turning of thiscycle converts the meek just man into the prophetic rager, the easefulvillain into the serpent sneaking along in mild humility. The triplerepetition of “perilous path” compounds the complication. First thejust man keeps the perilous path as he moves toward death. But “ then
the perilous path was planted . . . / Tillthe villain left the path of
ease, / To walk in perilous paths.”
We grasp the point by embracing both contraries, not by
reconciling them. There is progression here, but only in the ironicsense of cycle. The path, the way of generation that can only lead todeath, is always being planted, the just man is always being drivenout; the villain is always usurping the path of life-in-death. When thejust man returns from being a voice in the wilderness, he drives thevillain back into the nonexistence of “paths of ease.” But “just man”and “villain” are very nearly broken down as categories here; theequivocal “Devil” and “Angel” begin tn loom as the Marriage’s
117

118contraries. The advent of the villain upon the perilous path marks the
beginning of a new “heaven,” a “mild humility” of angelic restraint.So Blake leaves his argument and plunges into his satiric nuptial Song:
As a new heaven is begun and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent, the Eternal Hell revives.
Swedenborg, writing in his True Christian Religion, had placed
the Last Judgment in the spiritual world in 1757, the year of Blake’ sbirth. In 1758 Swedenborg published hisvision of judgment,
Heaven and Hell. Now, writing in 1790, at the Christological age ofthirty-three, Blake celebrates in himself the reviving of the EternalHell, the voice of desire and rebellion crying aloud in desert placesagainst the institution of a new divine restraint, albeit that of thevisionary Swedenborg, himself a Devil rolled round by cycle intoAngelic category.
Before the Marriage moves into diabolical gear, Blake states the
law of his dialectic:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason
and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
The key here is Human, which is both descriptive and honorific.
This is a dialectic without transcendence, in which heaven and hell
are to be married but without becoming altogether one flesh or onefamily. By the “marriage” of contraries Blake means only that we areto cease valuing one contrary above the other in any way. Echoes ofIsaiah xxxiv and xxxv crowd through the Marriage, and a specific
reference to those chapters is given here by Blake. Reading Isaiah inits infernal sense, as he read Paradise Lost, Blake can acknowledge
its apocalypse as his own. As the imaginative hell revives, the heavenof restraint comes down.
And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens
shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall falldown. (Isaiah xxxiv.4)
(. . .)
Therefore, the contraries, when next stated in the famous “V oice
of the Devil” passage, have ceased strictly to be contraries. Blake’ s
lower or earthly paradise, Beulah Land, is a state of being or placewhere contraries are equally true, but the Marriage is written out of
the state of Generation, our world in its everyday aspect, whereprogression is necessary. Christian dualism is therefore a negation,

hindrance, not action, and is cast out beyond the balance of
contraries. Blake does not build truth by dialectic, being neither arational mystic like Plato nor a mystic rationalist like Hegel. Nothingeternal abides behind forms for Blake; he seeks reality inappearances, though he rejects appearance as it is perceived by thelowest-common-denominator kind of observer. Between the clovenfiction of St. Paul’ s mind–body split and the emotionalism of thecelebrator of a state of nature exists the complex apocalyptichumanism of the Marriage, denying metaphysics, accepting the hardgiven of this world, but only insofar as this appearance is altogetherhuman.
Here it has been too easy to mistake Blake for Nietzsche, for
D. H. Lawrence, for Y eats, for whatever heroic vitalist you happenmost to admire. The Marriage preaches the risen body breaking
bounds, exploding upward into psychic abundance. But here Blakeis as earnest as Lawrence, and will not tolerate the vision ofrecurrence, as Nietzsche and Y eats do. The altogether human escapescycle, evades irony, cannot be categorized discursively. But Blake isunlike Lawrence, even where they touch. The Angel teaches lightwithout heat, the vitalist—or Devil—heat without light; Blake wantsboth, hence the marriage of contraries. (. . .)
In crude terms, the problem is where the stuff of life comes from;
where does Reason, divinity of the “Angels,” obtain the substancethat it binds and orders, the energy that it restrains? By stealing itfrom the Urgund of the abyss, is Blake’ s diabolic answer. We are
almost in the scheme of The Four Zoas : the Messiah fell, stole the
stuff of creativity, and formed “heaven.” One contrary is here as trueas another: this history has been adopted by both parties. One party,come again to dominance among us, now condemns Blake as apersuasive misreader of Paradise Lost. When, in another turn of thecritical wheel, we go back to reading Paradise Lost in its infernal or
poetic sense, as Blake, Shelley, and a host of nineteenth-centurypoets and scholars did, we will have to condemn a generation ofcritical dogmatists for not having understood the place of dialectic inliterary analysis.
The “Memorable Fancies,” brilliant exercises in satire and
humanism, form the bulk of the Marriage, and tend to evade Blake’ sown dialectic, being, as they are, assaults, furious and funny, on
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120Angelic culpability. The dialectic of the Marriage receives its
definitive statement once more in the work, in the opposition of the
Prolific and the Devouring. If one grasps that complex passage, oneis fortified to move frontally against the most formidable andproperly most famous section of the Marriage, the “Proverbs of
Hell,” where dialectic and rhetoric come together combatively inwhat could be judged the most brilliant aphorisms written inEnglish, seventy gnomic reflections and admonitions on the themeof diabolic vision.
—Harold Bloom, The Ringers in th eTower: Studies in Romanntic
Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 56–60.
W. J. T. M ITCHELL ON THE MARRIAGE OF IMAGES AND WORDS
[W .J.T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Distinguished Service
Professor of Art and Literature at the University of Chicago.His publications include Blake’ s Composite Art, Picture
Theory, and the essays “Visible Language: Blake’ sWond’rous Art of Writing” and “Metamorphoses of theV ortex: Hogarth, Turner and Blake”. In this writing,Mitchell explains how the artwork accompanying “TheMarriage of Heaven and Hell” complements thecombination of contraries.]
It is important to remember the adjective “apparent” when talkingabout the discrepancies between Blake’ s designs and text, however,for if we are correct, the most disparate pictorial and verbalstructures must conceal a subtle identity of significance. The titlepage of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell {3} exemplifies the way
in which the apparent unrelatedness of content in design and textbelies the close affinities of formal arrangement. A pair of nudesembrace in a subterranean scene at the bottom of the page, the oneon the left emerging from flames, the one on the right from clouds.The top of the page is framed by a pair of trees, between which aretwo sets of human figures. No scene in the poem corresponds to thispicture,
17and yet it is a perfect representation of the poem’ s theme,
the marriage of contraries:

121Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from
Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. ( MHH 3)
Every aspect of the composition is deployed to present this vision of
contraries: flames versus clouds, red versus blue, the aggressiveinward thrust of the female flying up from the left versus thereceptive outward pose of the figure on the right. At the top, the treeson the left reach their branches across to the right, while the trees onthe right recoil into themselves. The couple beneath the trees on theleft walk hand in hand toward the right. The couple on the right faceaway, and are separated, one kneeling, the other lying on the ground.This last detail suggests that the composition is not simply a visualblending of contraries, but also a statement about their relative value.The active side presents a harmonious vision of the sexes; thepassive, an inharmonious division, in which the male seems to betrying to woo the female from her indifference by playing on amusical instrument.
18This tipping of the balance in favor of the
“Devil’ s Party” is accentuated by the direction of movement thatpervades the whole design. If we were simply to have a balancedpresentation of contraries such as the text suggests, we would expecta simple symmetrical arrangement, with a vertical axis down thecenter. But, in fact, the whole kinesis of the composition,accentuated by the flying nudes in the center, produces an axis whichgoes from the lower left corner to the upper right. If one were todraw vectors indicating the probable course of the figures in thecenter of the design, the result would be [a] diagonal axis.
This tilting of the symmetry of the contraries, is, of course,
exactly what happens to the theme of the Marriage as Blake treats it.
Although the contraries are theoretically equal, Blake has all his funby identifying himself with the side of the devils. The poem is notsimply a self-contained dialectic; it is a dialogue with Blake’ s owntime, and he felt that the “Angels” already had plenty of spokesmen,such as Swedenborg and the apologists for traditional religion andmorality. At his particular historical moment, Blake felt that the axisneeded to be tilted in favor of energy. Hence, all the good lines in thework and the advantageous pictorial treatments are reserved for the

representatives of Hell. But the style of lettering in the title page
returns us to the theoretical equality which Blake sees between thecontraries. Both “Heaven” and “Hell” are printed in rather starkblock letters; the flamboyant, energetic style of free-flowing linesand swirls is reserved for the key term in the poem, “Marriage.”
Blake’ s departure from the literalist implications of ut pictura
poesis was not, however, simply confined to the avoidance, in his
own work, of mere illustration. The doctrine also had implicationsfor the nature of poetry and painting in general, apart from theiremployment in a composite form like the illustrated book. Theconcept of the ideal unity of the arts was used to encourage, on theone hand, “painterly,” descriptive poetry like Thomson’ s, and on theother, “poetical,” literary painting like Hogarth’ s. Poetry was tobecome pictorial by evoking a flood of images which could bereconstituted in the reader’ s mind into a detailed scene. Painting wasto become poetical by imitating a significant action, with beginning,middle, and end.
19not just a fleeting moment, and by representing
not only the surfaces of things but also the interior passions andcharacters of men. Each art was expected to transcend its temporalor spatial limitation by moving toward the condition of its sister.
NOTES
17. It has been suggested by John E. Grant that the title page “illustrates” the
text of MHH 24, which describes the dialogue of an angel and devil, and the
conversion of the former into the latter. A considerable number of qualificationswould have to accompany this view of the relationship: 1) the textual devil andangel are males, while the pictured figures are female; 2) the text describes aconversation followed by a self-immolation, while the design depicts a sexualencounter; 3) the other details of the design do not seem to refer to the text ofplate 24. An accurate understanding of the relationship between the design andany textual echoes of its details must take into account, it seems to me, thecomplex transformations involved in transposing the elements of one to theother. One could argue, for instance, that self-immolation and sexuality are akind of natural metaphor, and certainly a very Blakean one; yet this would stillonly scratch the surface of the complex metaphorical layers that would beinvolved in any equation of MHH 1 with MHH 24.
J.E.G.: I agree that some of these reservations need to be borne in mind lest
one assume, as Damon does, that the episode depicted is intended as an“illustration” in the sense of a literal depiction of the last Memorable Fancy. Thehazards of descriptive generalizations based on a single copy, however, need
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also to be guarded against: the round buttocks and long hair on the figure at the
left in copy F (Blake Trust facsimile) make the figure seem female, the moresvelte buttocks in copy H (Dent facsimile) could easily be those of a male; hairlength is not a safe guide; and Blake often chose not to depict the genitalia ofindubitably male figures. One could argue that the pictured “Devil” and “Angel”are both androgynes, but it seems simplest to treat them as male and femalerespectively, as I have done in my discussion of the page in “Two Flowers in theGarden of Experience,” in Rosenfeld, Essays for Damon , 363–364. For one
thing, the word “Marriage” in the title and these embracing figures on the samepage (though the page contains other details, since it is designed for viewers, notjust readers) require readers to concern themselves with implications that makesense of the conversion of the Angel at the end of the poem. This conversion isdescribed as his encountering “a Devil in a flame of fire” (cf. the left-handfigure in flames in the title page) and, from where he sits “on a cloud” (cf. theright-hand figure), stretching “out his arms embracing the flame of fire”—uponwhich “he was consumed and arose as Elijah,” who, we are reminded later,“comprehends all the Prophetic Characters” (VLJ 83). To summarize this as
“self-immolation” is to ignore the transparent and traditional sexual symbolismand to forget there was a Devil in this flame. Were not Blake’ s title and title pagedesigned to make the human presence of a long-haired Devil in the flameembarrassingly obvious to angelic readers? One must, so to speak, take a BlackPanther to lunch before he is fit to enter the kingdom of prophecy.
Those who find anything but the expression of this principle anachronistic
are invited to observe several facts. The first is that in copy F , the Blake Trustfacsimile, the figure at the right is colored dark brown, quite dark enough to becounted as “black” either in the eighteenth century or now, especially when it iscontrasted with the very pinkish “white” figure at the left. It would be moreconvenient for the reader if this color symbolism were reversed so that theinfernal character were black, but the viewer will find the further ironies of theactual coloration both intelligible and satisfying. He will also observe that Blakedid not employ this color symbolism in most versions of the book, butunderstand that this does not negate the significance in copies where he did so.
If a contemporary racist, such as Gillray, had seen the title page of copy F ,
he might have concluded that Blake was advocating miscegenation. But twoother considerations will assist the appreciation of Blake’ s point in all versionsof this design. Although the relationships indicated in the background are moreintimate, the central consummation depicted is clearly no more than a kiss. Inthe text of MHH 24 Blake neglects to mention the human form in the flame
embraced by the Angel—and thus prevents the conversion of angelic characterfrom seeming easy. In the introduction to this section, in plate 22, Blakedeclares that the writings of Dante are infinitely more informative than those ofthe angelic Swedenborg; perhaps Blake had already read that episode in thePurgatorio where Dante, like all pilgrims to eternity, must pass through the
circumambient fire of love to return, like Adam into paradise, to where Beatrice is.
There have been many accounts of what The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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is about. I say it is about the education of the Prophetic Character. Blake is
committed to showing how much pain and dislocation such an educationdemands. Though he was honest about the magnitude of the task, he was gladto join with Moses and Milton in praying that all the Lord’ s people becomeprophets.
18. The reclining figure is clearly a woman in copy C (Morgan Library) and in
copy D and the Trianon Press facsimile of this copy; the instrument held by thekneeling figure is only suggestively etched—probably a flute or shepherd’ s pipe,or it could be a lyre.
19. See ch. 9, “The Unity of Action,” in Lee’ s “‘Ut Pictura Poesis.’”
—W .J.T. Mitchell, “Blake’ s Composite Art,” Blake’ s Visionary Forms
Dramatic, ed. David V . Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1970), 63–66.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE ON MUSIC AND MEANING
[Algernon Charles Swinburne, an influential 19th-century
poet and literary critic, was a great admirer of Blake. Hisessays were published in The Complete Works of A.C.Swinburne. In this excerpt, Swinburne, praising the musicalquality of the prose, calls the poem Blake’ s greatest workand comments on Blake’ s message.]
In 1790 Blake produced the greatest of all his books; a work indeedwhich we rank as about the greatest produced by the eighteenthcentury in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation. TheMarriage of Heaven and Hell gives us the high-water mark of his
intellect. None of his lyrical writings show the same sustainedstrength and radiance of mind; none of his other works in verse orprose give more than a hint here and a trace there of the sameharmonious and humorous power, of the same choice of eloquentwords, the same noble command and liberal music of thought; smallthings he could often do perfectly, and great things oftenimperfectly; here for once he has written a book as perfect as hismost faultless song, as great as his most imperfect rhapsody. His fireof spirit fills it from end to end; but never deforms the body, neversinges the surface of the work, as too often in the still noble booksof his later life. Across the flicker of flame, under the roll and roar
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125of water, which seems to flash and resound throughout the poem, a
stately music, shrill now as laughter and now again sonorous as apsalm, is audible through shifting notes and fitful metres of sound.The book swarms with heresies and eccentricities; every sentencebristles with some paradox, every page seethes with blind foam andsurf of stormy doctrine; the humour is of that fierce grave sort,whose cool insanity of manner is more horrible and more obscure tothe Philistine than any sharp edge of burlesque or glitter of irony; itis huge, swift, inexplicable; hardly laughable through its enormity oflaughter, hardly significant through its condensation of meaning; butas true and thoughtful as the greatest humourist’ s. The variety andaudacity of thoughts and words are incomparable: not less so theirfervour and beauty. ‘No bird soars too high if he soars with his ownwings.’ This proverb might serve as a motto to the book: it is one ofmany ‘Proverbs of Hell’.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Critics on Blake: 1803–1941,”
Critics on Blake: Readings in Literary Criticism, ed. Judith O’Neill(Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970), 21–22.
MARKBRACHER ON HOW“THEMARRIAGE OF HEA VEN AND
HELL” CHANGES THE READER
[Mark Bracher is Assistant Professor of English and
Associate Director of the Center for Literature andPsychoanalysis at Kent State University. His publishedwork includes Being Form’ d: Thinking Through Blake’ sMilton and several articles on Blake and psychoanalytic
approaches to reading. In this essay, Bracher explores theimpact of Blake’ s writing on his readers.]
In the past half century Blakeans have made considerable progressin comprehending these difficult and often intractable elements, butrelatively few attempts have been made to understand how theseelements might work to effect that psychological transformation ofthe reader that Blake so expressly desired. Though manycommentators refer to “the reader” in discussing Blake’ s poetry,their attention tends to focus on the reader’ s immediate (and

transient) response, rather than on more substantial and permanent
transformations that the poetry might promote. The only long-termchanges that are even considered are alterations of the reader’ sphilosophical ideas—i.e., the reader’ s “sacred code” ( MHH 4)—and
even here, little is said about how such alteration is elicited, or aboutits significance for the reader’ s total psychic economy. This omissionis of course easily explained by the fact that criticism has untilrecently lacked the tools to carry out such an investigation: it has hadno clear notion of how literature might promote psychologicaltransformation. Now, however, although a comprehensive theory ofsuch transformation has still not been developed, advances in ourunderstanding of the role language plays in the psychic economymake it possible to begin to analyze and assess Blake’ s poetry in theterms in which he himself clearly viewed it: as a force capable ofpromoting change in the reader. (. . .)
Such, at least, is one path our interpretation can take through the
discourse of the Prolific and the Devouring. In the memorable fancythat follows (MHH 17–20), we have little choice: we are thrust upon
this path by a powerful interpellation. Here we are forced toexperience, with the speaker, the power of language from both sides:that of being interpellated, imposed upon, castrated by it, and that ofusing it to express one’ s own subjective realities and force others torecognize them. In the first episode of the fancy, we see the “eternallot” of the speaker as that lot is determined by the angel’ s orthodoxcode. We are made to experience a series of repulsive images, which,however, disappear as soon as the angel leaves, to be replaced by apleasant scene. What we thus experience is the fact that any givencode automatically interpellates a hearer into a particular positionthat entails a proximity with certain specific images and fantasies,together with their attendant anxieties and desires. This is statedquite explicitly when the speaker declares to the angel: “All that wesaw was owing to your metaphysics”—i.e., to the fundamentalsignifying chains of the angel’ s code. In the second episode of thefancy, we experience the same fact, only this time from the otherposition, that of phallic potency, as the speaker, with whom we haveidentified, shows the angel the angel’ s lot. In this fancy we thusexperience in both the imaginary and the symbolic registers thepower of the symbolic code to determine imaginary, subjective
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experience—i.e., the code’ s phallic/castrating power.
After a condemnation of logic and systematic reasoning—of
remaining within a particular symbolic system, not conversing with
devils (desire) and thus opening up the symbolic to the imaginary—we encounter the poem’ s final memorable fancy, in which we are ledthrough an experience of how our desire can express itself evenwhen we are within an alienating code that denies recognition to ourdesire. This phallic potency resides in interpretation, and weexperience interpretation here in what is perhaps its most potentform—a proto-deconstructive reading. One key term of the orthodoxcode, “Jesus,” is interpreted in such a way as to contradict anotherkey term, the “ten commandments,” which the orthodox code placesin concord with “Jesus” (as the angel puts it, “Has not Jesus Christgiven his sanction to the law of ten commandments?”). In this way,“Jesus,” the supreme point de capiton of the sacred code, is placed
in opposition to other points de capiton and, in fact, to codes as such:
“Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules.” Thisinterpretation allows recognition not only for particular desiresforbidden by the ten commandments, but for all desire whatsoever.Desire, the antithesis of system, is thus inscribed as a radically self-deconstructing element of the symbolic system itself, and desire assuch thus acquires being.
Hence, through this final fancy, we experience two ways of
overcoming the castrating power of language and regaining phallicpotency: we can accept the code but interpret it in such a way that itaccommodates our desire (the speaker’ s strategy), or we can refuseto accept the given code (Jesus’ strategy) and thus (implicitly orexplicitly) subscribe to an alternative code. Our desire, that is, cangain recognition either through (strong) reading or (strong, poetic)writing. As Blake’ s speaker indicates at the first ending of The
Marriage, we can either “read the Bible,” the given code, “in itsinfernal or diabolical sense,” or we can write a “Bible of Hell,” a newcode in which desires are explicitly recognized, legitimized.
As we have seen, it is in such recognition of desire—such a
marriage of heaven (the sacred code) and hell (desire)—thatLacanian psychoanalysis locates the efficacy of the psychoanalyticprocess. By evoking our repressed desires, by providing us with anew code that offers fuller recognition of our desire, and by
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interpellating us to a position where we must either accept such a
code or construct it through interpretation, Blake’ s poem arouses ourfaculties to act in such a way as to enact a marriage that constitutespsychological transformation. This process constitutes a marriage ofheaven and hell in another sense as well: by eliciting deep fantasiesof phallic potency and castration within a metaphysical context, thepoem allows our desire to assume more coherent, less conflictingforms, in which a (displaced and sublimated) fulfillment (heaven) ispossible even in face of the inescapable reality of castration, orhuman finitude (hell).
—Mark Bracher, “Rouzing the Faculties: Lacanian Psychoanalysis
and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the Reader,” Critical Paths:Blake and the Argument of Method , ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher,
and Donald Ault (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 168.
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WORKS BY
William Blake
“Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion” (engraving)
(1773)
“The Body of Edward I in his Coffin” (sketch) (1774)
“Edward and Eleanor” (engraving) (1779)“Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’ s Church” (watercolor) (1779)“Lear and Cordelia in Prison” (watercolor) (1779)Exhibition of “The Death of Earl Godwin” at the Royal Academy
of Art (1780)
“Glad Day” (drawing) (1780)Poetical Sketches printed (1783)“Witch of Endor Raising the Spirit of Samuel” (1783)“An Allegory of the Bible” (watercolor) (1783)“The Good Farmer” (1783)“Three Figures in a Landscape” (1783)“War” and “A Breach in the City” exhibited at the Royal Academy
(1784)
An Island in the Moon (1784)
“Joseph’ s Brethren Bowing Before Him” (1785)“Joseph Ordering Simeon to be Bound” (1785)“Joseph Making Himself known to his Brethren” (1785)“Shakespeare’ s Midsummer Night’ s Dream” (watercolor) (1785)
“All Religions Are One” (1788)“There Is No Natural Religion” (1788)Sketches for Tiriel (1789)
Tiriel (1789)
Songs of Innocence (1789)
The Book of Thel (1789)
“The Beggar’ s Opera, Act III” (engraving) (1789)“The House of Death” (1789)
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Plates for Original Stories from Real Life (Wollstonecraft) (1791)
America (1791)
Plates for Narrative of a Five Year’ s Expedition, against the
Revolted Negroes of Surinam (Stedman) (1791–1793, published
1796)
Notebook: lyrics (1791)
The French Revolution (1791, not published)
A Song of Liberty (1792)
“The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul’ s Church” (revised) (1793)For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)
America: A Dream of Thirlaltha (1793)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
Prospectus: To the Public (1793)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794)
The Songs of Experience (published with The Songs of Innocence )
(1794)
Europe: A Prophecy (1794)
The Book of Urizen (1794)
A Divine Image (1794)The Book of Los (1795)
The Book of Ahania (1795)
“Christ Appearing to the Apostles After the Resurrection”
(watercolor) (1795)
Plates for Young’ s Night Thoughts (Edwards’ s edition; completed
in 1797) (1795)
“God Judging Adam” (engraving) (1795)“The Elohim Creating Adam” (1795)“Elijah About to Ascend in the Chariot of Fire” (watercolor) (1795)“The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child”
(watercolor) (1795)
“Nebuchadnezzar” (watercolor) (1795)“Lamech and his Two Wives” (watercolor) (1795)“The Lazar House” (watercolor) (1795)
130

“Pity” (watercolor) (1795)
“Glad Day” (1795)“Non Angeli” (1795)“Sad Angeli” (1795)“Hecate” / “The Night of Enitharmon’ s Joy” (watercolor) (1795)“Newton” (watercolor) (1795)Illustrates Leonora (Burger) (1796)
“Lucifer and the Pope in Hell” (etching) (1796)Plates for Thoughts on Outline (for friend George Cumberland)
(1796, begun 1794–1795)
Narrative (Stedman) published (1796)
V ala (1797)
“The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve” (watercolor) (1799)“Bathsheba at the Bath” (tempera) (1799)“Eve Tempted by the Serpent” (1799)“The Agony in the Garden” (tempera) (1799)“Lot and His Daughters” (tempera) (1799)“Landscape near Felpham” (watercolor) (1800)Plates for Little Tom the Sailor (Hayley) (1800)
“The Death of the Virgin” (watercolor) (1803)Plates for Life of William Cowper (Hayley) (1803)
Plates for Triumphs of Temper (Hayley) (1803)
“Pickering” manuscripts (1803)Milton (1804)
“Ezekiel’ s Wheels” (1804)“Goliath Cursing David” (1804)
“The Entombment” (watercolor) (1805)
“Jacob’ s Dream” (1805)“God Blessing the Seventh Day” (1805)“Clothed with the Sun” (1805)“Satan in his Original Glory” (watercolor) (1805)
131

“Thou Wast Perfect Till Iniquity Was Found in Thee” (1805)
“David Delivered Out of Many” (watercolor) (1805)Illustrations for Paradise Lost (1807)“Jacob’ s Dream” (watercolor) (1808)“Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels” (watercolor) (1808)“Vision of Judgement” (1808)“The Angel Rolling Away the Stone From the Sepulchre:
The Resurrection” (1808)
“Canterbury Pilgrims” (oil) (1809)“The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth” (tempera) (1809)“The Bard, from Gray” (tempera) (1809)“The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan” (tempera)
(1809)
“Milton” (engraving) (1809)“The Whore of Babylon” (engraving) (1809)Jerusalem (begun 1804) (1810)
“The Great Red Dragon” (watercolor) (1810)“The Woman Clothed with the Sun” (watercolor) (1810)Public Address (1810)
“A Vision of the Last Judgement” (1810)Illustrations for On the Morning of Christ’ s Nativity (Milton)
(1815)
Designs for L ’Allegro (1816)
Designs for Il Penseroso (1816)
Hesiod (1817)
“For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise” (1818)The Everlasting Gospel (1818)
“Visionary Heads” (1819)Jerusalem printed (1820)
Woodcuts for The Pastorals of Virgil (Thornton) (1820)
“On Homer’ s Poetry” (1820)“Old Parr When Y oung” (1820)
132

“On Virgil” (1820)
“Mirth and Her Companions” (1820)“The Laocoon” (1820)Jobseries (watercolors) (1821)
The Ghost of Abel (1821)
“Epitome of James Hervey’ s Meditations Among the Tombs”
(1821)
Designs for The Pilgrim’ s Progress (Bunyan) (1824)
“Moses Placed in the Ark of Bulrushes” (watercolor) (1824)“Winter” (tempera) (1824)Dante drawings (1825)“Virgin & Child (Black Madonna)” (1825)Jobpublished (1825)
“The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve” (tempera) (1826)“Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils” (tempera) (1826)“Ancient of Days” (watercolor) (1826)
133

WORKS ABOUT
William Blake
Abrahams, Cecil Anthony. William Blake’ s Fourfold Man. Bonn:
Bouvier, 1978.
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New Y ork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Ault, Donald D. Visionary Physics: Blake’ s Response to Newton.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Behrendt, Stephen C. Reading William Blake. London: Macmillan,
1992.
Bentley, G.E., Jr. Blake Records. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.
Bloom, Harold. Blake’ s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970.
———. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic
Poetry. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971.
———, ed. Modern Critical Views: William Blake. New Y ork:
Chelsea House, 1985.
———, ed. William Blake’ s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
New Y ork: Chelsea House, 1987.
Bronowsji, Jacob. William Blake and the Age of Revolution . New
Y ork: Harper and Row, 1965.
Cantor, Paul A. Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English
Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’ s Thought.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
Crehan, Stewart. Blake in Context. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
Humanities Press, 1984.
Curran, Stuart, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, eds. Blake’ s Sublime
Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1973.
Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols .
1924. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958.
Damrosch Jr, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’ s Myth. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980.
134

135Davis, Michael. William Blake: A New Kind of Man . Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977.
Erdman, David V . Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1969.
Erdman, David V ., ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William
Blake. With commentary by Harold Bloom. 1965. Rev. ed.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Erdman, David V ., ed. and Grant, John E., ed. Blake’ s Visionary
Forms Dramatic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.
Ferber, Michael. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
Frye, Northrop. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
———. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake . Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1947.
Fuller, David. Blake’ s Heroic Argument. London: Croom Helm,
1988.
Gallant, Christine. Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos . Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978.
Grant, John E., ed. Discussions of William Blake. Boston: D.C.
Heath and Company, 1961.
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Romantic Body: Love and Sexuality in Keats,
Wordsworth, and Blake . Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1985.
Harper, George Mills. The Neoplatonism of William Blake. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.
Hilton, Nelson, ed. Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake,
1970–1984. Hamden: Anchor, 1986.
Keynes, Geoffrey. Blake Studies. 1949. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon,
1971.
Lindsay, Jack. William Blake: His Life and Work. London:
Constable, 1978.
Mellor, Anne K. Blake’ s Human Form Divine. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974.

136Miller, Dan, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault, eds. Critical Paths:
Blake and the Argument of Method . Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1987.
Murry, John Middleton. William Blake. London: Jonathan Cape,
1933.
Nurmi, Martin K. William Blake. Kent: Kent State University Press,
1976.
O’Neill, Judith, ed. Critics on Blake. Coral Gables: University of
Miami Press, 1970.
Ostriker, Alicia. Vision and V erse in William Blake . Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
Paananen, Victor. William Blake: Updated Edition. New Y ork:
Twayne, 1996.
Pagliaro, Harold. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’ s Songs .
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987.
Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the
Development of Blake’ s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.
Paley, Morton D., ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Songs of
Innocence and Experience. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1969.
Percival, Milton. William Blake’ s Circle of Destiny. New Y ork:
Columbia University Press, 1938.
Phillips, Michael, ed. Interpreting Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1978.
Plowman, Max. An Introduction to the Study of Blake. New Y ork:
Barnes and Noble, 1967.
Punter, David, ed. New Casebooks: William Blake . New Y ork: St.
Martin’ s, 1996.
Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Princeton: Bollingen
Foundation, 1968.
———. Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William
Blake. Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1991.
Rothenberg, Molly Anne. Rethinking Blake’ s Textuality. Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. New Y ork:
Henry Holt and Company, 1946.
Wagenknecht, David. Blake’ s Night: William Blake and the Idea of
Pastoral. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Williams, Nicholas. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William
Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
137

138ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Reading Blake’ s Lyrics: ‘The Tyger’” by Hazard Adams from
Discussions of William Blake © 1961 by Heath and Company.
Reprinted by Permission.
“The Art and Argument of ‘The Tyger’” by John E. Grant from
Discussions of William Blake © 1961 by Heath and Company.
Reprinted by Permission.
Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’ s Songs by Harold Pagliaro © 1987
by The Pennsylvania State University Press. Reprinted by
Permission.
“Blake’ s Revisions of the Tyger” by Martin K. Nurmi from Twentieth
Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience©1969 by Prentice Hall. Reprinted by Permission.
Blake in Context by Stewart Crehan © 1984 by Gill and Macmillan
Humanities Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“Tyger of Wrath” by Morton D. Paley from Twentieth Century
Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience © 1969 by
Prentice Hall. Reprinted by Permission.
“The Vision of Innocence” by Martin Price from Critics on Blake:
Readings in Literary Criticism © 1970 by the University of Miami
Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“Infinite London: The Songs of Experience in their Historical Setting”
by David V . Erdman from Critics on Blake: Readings in LiteraryCriticism © 1970 by the University of Miami Press. Reprinted by
Permission.
“Blake’ s Cities: Romantic Forms of Urban Renewal” by Kenneth
Johnston from Blake’ s Visionary Forms Dramatic © 1970 by
Princeton University Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“London” by E.P . Thompson from Interpreting Blake © 1978 by
Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“Influence and Independence in Blake” by John Beer from Interpreting
Blake © 1978 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by
Permission.

139“Repeating the Same Dull Round” by Gavin Edwards from New
Casebooks: William Blake © 1996 by St. Martin’ s Press. Reprinted
by Permission.
“Blake and Revisionism” by Harold Bloom from William Blake’ s Songs
of Innocence and of Experience © 1987 by Chelsea House
Publishers. Reprinted by Permission.
“The Keys to the Gates” by Northrop Frye from Modern Critical Views:
William Blake © 1985 by Chelsea House Publishers. Reprinted by
Permission.
“Blake’ s Mental Traveller” by John H. Sutherland from Critics on
Blake: Readings in Literary Criticism © 1970 by the University of
Miami Press. Reprinted by Permission.
Blake’ s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral by David
Wagenknecht © 1973 by Harvard University Press. Reprinted byPermission.
Blake’ s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument by Harold Bloom ©
1963 by Cornell University Press. Reprinted by Permission.
Vision and V erse in William Blake by Alice Ostriker © 1965. Reprinted
by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.
William Blake: Updated Edition by Victor N. Paananen © 1996 by
Twayne Publishers. Reprinted by Permission.
Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake by Nicholas M.
Williams © 1998 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted byPermission.
“The Presence of Cupid and Psyche” by Irene H. Chayes from Blake’ s
Visionary Forms Dramatic © 1970 by Princeton University Press.
Reprinted by Permission.
“Urizen: The Symmetry of Fear” by Robert E. Simmons from Blake’ s
Visionary Forms Dramatic © 1970 by Princeton University Press.
Reprinted by Permission.
“The Crystal Cabinet and the Golden Net” by Hazard Adams from
Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays © 1966 by Prentice Hall, Inc.
Reprinted by Permission.

Blake and Tradition, V olume I by Kathleen Raine © 1968 by the Trustees
of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Reprinted by
Permission of Princeton University Press.
“Opening the Seals: Blake’ s Epics and the Milton Tradition” by Joseph
Anthony Weittreich Jr. from Blake’ s Sublime Allegory © 1973 by The
University of Wisconsin Press. Reprinted by Permission.
An Introduction to the Study of Blake by Max Plowman © 1967 by
Barnes and Noble, Inc. Reprinted by Permission.
Blake: Prophet Against Empire by David V . Erdman © 1954, 1969 by
Princeton University Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“Blake’ s Composite Art” by W .J.T. Mitchell from Blake’ s Visionary
Forms Dramatic © 1970 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted
by Permission.
“Critics on Blake: 1803-1941” by Algernon Charles Swinburne from
Critics on Blake: Readings in Literary Criticism © 1970 by the
University of Miami Press. Reprinted by Permission.
“Rousing the Faculties: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Marriage of
Heaven and Hell in the Reader” by Mark Bracher from Critical
Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method , ed. Dan Miller. © 1987
by Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permis-sion of Duke University Press.
140

INDEX OF
Themes and Ideas
BLAKE, WILLIAM: attack on Swedenborg, 105-108; balance of, 92-
94; biography of, 12-16; change of mood, 29-32; edenic vision, 85;
as a gentle visionary, 29; history in writing, 72-74; ideas of, 23-26;the unconditional vs. nonconditional, 82-85; works about, 134-137;works by, 129-133
“CR YSTAL CABINET, THE”, 82-102; alchemy in, 86, 99-102; and
Vaughan, 100-101; balance in, 92-94; and Bealah, 92-94; capturingthe spirit in, 100; critical analysis, 86-88; critical views, 89-102;cyclical enclosure, 96, 98; the ending of, 88; the eternal in, 98; andThe Golden Ass, 90; influence of myth in, 89-92; the ‘invisible’worm, 91; and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , 89; paradox, 96;
political endeavor and lack of success, 97; power and possessionstruggle, 91, 94; sexual expression in, 97-99; and The Sick Rose, 90;
simplicity as deceptive, 101-102; speaker, 86-91, and his choice, 95-96; symbolism in, 96, 99-100, and its mode, 92; three-fold in, 87, 93,100-101; as a warning, 86
“EARTH’S ANSWER”, 23
“GATES OF PARADISE, THE”, 66“GOLDEN NET, THE”, 77“GREY MONKEY , THE”, 77“LITTLE BOY LOST, A”, 23“LITTLE V AGABOND, THE”, 23“LONDON”, 41-62; an apocalyptic poem, 51-53; associations in, 49;
‘blackening’ church image, 42-43; and ‘charter’ d’, 49-50, 61; critical
analysis, 41-43; critical views, 44-62; designs as enriching, 48;echoes of Blake in, 53; family life in, 43, and as grim, 42; the‘hapless’ soldier, 45; hermeneutic versatility, 52; and the IndustrialRevolution, 41-42, 44-46, 49-51, 54-57; innocence and experiencesin, 48; ironic allusions, 61-62; many versions of, 41-44; as his‘mightiest’ brief poem, 44; as an open interpretation, 51-54; peoplein, 44-47; the perfomative in, 59-61; as a poem of protest, 54-57;social system in, 54-57 and exposing it, 55-57, 59; speaker, 42-43;tedious word usage in, 50, 58; true enemy in, 55; urban experience,
141

56-57; vocabulary of, 47-49, and word change, 49-51; and the
‘wanderer’, 61-62; wandering through, 61-62; and Wordsworth’ s The
Prelude, 54-55
“MARRIAGE OF HEA VEN AND HELL, THE”, 103-128; the angel in,
114-115, 121-122; and “The Argument”, 103, as misunderstood,117; and Christianity, 111-113, 118-119; contraries in, 105, 116-120,symmetry of, 121-122, visions of, 121; critical analysis, 103-106;critical views, 107-128; cyclic irony, 117; discrepancies in designand text, 120-121; as evoking repressed desires, 128; freedoms in,110-111; and Greek myth, 104; hope and fear in, 110-112, ascomplementary, 110-111; human as descriptive and horrific, 118-119; the imaginative vs. the unimaginative, 111; justification ofinstinct, 112; the marriage of images and words in, 120-124; and“Memorable Fancies”, 105-119; mocking in, 112-113; and“Opposition is True Friendship, 105; Orc as terrifying, 114-115;parody of religious writing, 107-110; phallic potency, 127; theprolific and devouring, 126-127; and “Proverb to Hell”, 104;recounting fables in, 104; and “A Song of Liberty”, 106; spiritualityvs. society, 112-116; strength and reliance of mind, 124; subduedstructures, 109; and Swedenborg’ s “The Apocalypse revealed”, 107-109, and his True Christian Vision, 118; and “The Tyger”, 103; unityof art in, 122; the ‘voice devil’ passage, 118-119
“MENTAL TRA VELER, THE”, 63-85; as an anomaly, 83; aged shadow
in, 69-70; as autobiographical, 63, 72-74; biblical prose, 63, 65; birthand death, 65; boy in, 66-85, and his cycle of life, 67-69, 73, 75-77,and humanity of, 64; as challenging to scholars, 63; condensedprophetic matter in, 78; critical analysis, 63-65; critical views, 66-85;and “The Crystal Cabinet”, 67; as cyclic poem, 79; dark images, 63;direct proportions and weaknesses in, 70-71; eternal progression in,75; female babe in, 69, as archetypical spirit, 69-70; female vs. malecycle, 76, 81; and The Gates of Paradise, 66; and history, 72-74;
human images as divided, 75; irony and suspicion, 68-72; andJerusalem, 67, 70; and Keats’ s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 66; as a
life journey, 63, 66-68; maiden in, 67-70; and “The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell”, 71; meter and monotony, 77-78; mother in, 64-65;nature, 79-82; narrator, 63-64; odd production, 82-83; openness andvigor, 74-75; and Orc, 69-70, 72, 80; real man vs. creating man, 66;representation of desert, 64, 67-68; return to Eternity, 72; self-pity,64, 79-80; shock of newness, 82-83; as standing alone, 77-79;symbolism, 67-68; unconditional vs. nonconditional, 82-85;unhealthy mother-child relationship, 63-64; Urizen, 69-70, 80-81;value of suffering, 68

“MY SPECTRE AROUND ME”,
“TYGER, THE”, 17-40; and Blake’ s system, 20-22; change of mood,
29-31; changing views, 26-28; creator of Tyger, 17, 26-29; critical
analysis, 17-19; critical views, 20-40; criticism in, 25; and Dante’ sInferno, 32-33; deadly tree, 28; differing viewpoints, 34-38;discrepancies in, 19; the Divine being, 18; doubt in, 37; as expressionof spirituality, 35; form, 20-21; fourteen questions in, 17; andGleckner’ s The Four Zoas , 36-37; initial puzzle in, 39; lamb in, 18-
19, 26-29; last revision of, 31; mystery of creation, 27; meaning of,20, 37; powerful imagery in, 17, 21; questions for the reader andwriter, 22-26; phenomenon, 37; religious attack, 18-19, 28, 34-35;response to violence, 32-34; revisions as mirroring society, 29-31;revolutionary times in, 32-34; as romantic Satanism, 34; speaker, 23,26-29; speculation in, 20; symbolism in, 30, 34; terror in, 18, 27, 32-34, and its symmetry, 31-40; transformation in, 18; the Tyger, 17-40,and ambiguity of, 21-22, and melting of, 17-18, and raw power, 17-18
143