Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Planets revolve endlessly in the solar system, which is mimicked by the serpent temple in which priests propitiate their god with human sacrifice. “Forests of night” recalls the ambiguous creator of The Tyger.

  In America, however, there is also an auspicious image of a serpent, on whose back three children ride at their ease (figure 28). The oldest holds the reins lightly, while the middle child reaches back to help the youngest. The serpentine form is repeated higher up in the neck of a soaring swan whose reins are held by a muscular young man. Above his head appear the words “Boston’s Angel”—he might be an aerial version of Paul Revere. Both swan and serpent can be seen as phallic, and Blake knew of a sculpture from Herculaneum that showed a child riding on an enormous penis.35 Here serpent symbolism is clearly positive, though no one has satisfactorily explained why images of night are glimpsed behind the clouds—a crescent moon, and the constellation of the Pleiades.

  There are other animals in America besides serpents. One lovely picture (color plate 16) presents a total contrast to the furious text on the same plate, in which a wrathful Albion’s Angel, the “spiritual form” of George III, denounces Orc as “serpent-formed . . . blasphemous demon, Antichrist, hater of dignities.” Under a delicate tree on which birds of paradise perch, a naked young woman lies asleep on the ground, and a curly-headed young man rests on the woolly back of a sleeping ram. Very likely they have been making love. In this late, colored copy a sunrise suffuses the sky. It is a vision of Innocence, more explicitly sexualized than in Songs of Innocence, that invokes an alternative reality to rebellion and repression. It also fulfills the declaration that concludes the previous plate, “For empire is now no more, and now the lion and wolf shall cease.”36

  In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell sexuality was positive, and in the heyday of the 1960s counterculture Blake was often invoked to that effect. But he was always aware that sex can be a means of exerting control, and at times he was tormented by it. It is probably no accident that most of the naked bodies in Blake’s pictures are un-erotic, and at times positively repellent. We know that his hero was Michelangelo, about whom an art historian asks, “Why are his Madonnas so unmaternal? Why are his figures of superhuman scale and size?”37

  Here, in Europe, two of the most attractive bodies Blake ever depicted (color plate 17) turn out to have highly negative implications. “No nude, however abstract,” Kenneth Clark says, “should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow—and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.” Insofar as that is true, Blake makes ironic use of it, for what his text describes is “Albion’s Angel smitten with his own plagues,” in consequence of England’s counterrevolutionary war against France. These two shapely figures are in fact fairies scattering blight upon the crops through swirling trumpets. In a kind of visual pun, the trumpets emit blasts of sound just as mildew blasts grain. So England is being punished by the very plague it has brought into being, and the context completely undermines the erotic attractiveness of the picture.38

  28. America: A Prophecy, copy E, plate 13

  A sign of Blake’s disillusionment with revolution is that in one of two copies of America that he printed in 1795, four lines were added on the plate that shows the young man clambering out of the ground:

  The stern Bard ceased, ashamed of his own song; enraged he swung

  His harp aloft sounding, then dashed its shining frame against

  A ruined pillar in glitt’ring fragments; silent he turned away,

  And wandered down the vales of Kent in sick and drear lamentings.

  Smashing a harp was a traditional bardic refusal to perform in slavery.39

  Retreat from Radical Politics

  As early as 1792 a royal proclamation promised “to prosecute with severity all persons guilty of writing and publishing seditious pamphlets tending to alienate the affections of his Majesty’s subjects, and to disturb the peace, order, and tranquility of the State, as well as to prohibit all illegal meetings.” Prosecutions and imprisonment followed, and it must have been especially concerning for Blake that the Stationers’ Company published a “determined resolution utterly to discountenance and discourage all seditious and inflammatory productions whatever.” That resolution was signed by numerous publishers on whom he depended for income, as well as by his former master Basire.40

  Whatever contribution Blake may once have thought of making to the anticipated revolution, by the mid-1790s he was retreating from any active political stance, and the few copies of his early illuminated books that still exist today were all sold or given to trusted friends. Starting with The Book of Urizen, which will be considered later, he turned instead to a critical dialogue with the Bible and then stopped creating illuminated books altogether for over a decade. He genuinely believed that if the authorities should become aware of his writings, his life might be in danger. He wrote in his notebook, “I say I shan’t live five years, and if I live one it will be a wonder. June 1793.” He was talking about legal persecution, not physical health. In 1797, annotating a bishop’s attack on Thomas Paine, he declared, “I have been commanded from Hell not to print this; it is what our enemies wish.”41

  Besides fearing prosecution, Blake was becoming apolitical in any activist sense, and commentators who insist that he never retreated from political commitment are using the term in a very broad sense. In the more usual sense, he wrote in 1810, “I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools; Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools. They seem to me to be something else besides human life.”42

  Blake lived for sixty-nine years, and Britain was at war during half of that time. It fought in vain to hold on to its American colonies, it fought in vain to suppress the French Revolution, and then it fought with success to bring down the Napoleonic empire. Writing about Blake during World War II, Jacob Bronowski commented that “after the eagles and the magnificence, [the age of Napoleon] remains in the memory as Goya savagely pictured it: twenty-two years without conscience, stamping the men and the treasure of Europe into the dirt.”43

  The increasing pessimism of Blake’s later poems has perplexed critics who would like to see him as a forerunner of Marxism, or at least of working-class radicalism. But class solidarity was never part of his thinking, and although he resented many aspects of capitalism, his values were those of an independent artisan. Whatever may have been lost when the dream of revolution faded, as he continued to develop his ideas he wrote no more political poems like America and Europe, and instead explored perennial tensions in human experience in ever-increasing depth. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he had made a declaration that is often quoted as if it were the key to his thought: “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”44 In Blake’s later writings contraries would continue to play a central role, but we no longer hear of forward-trending “progression.” And whereas Urizen would remain a central figure in his mythic thinking, Orc would dwindle from view, and a whole new cast of symbolic characters would need to be invented.

  6. ATOMS AND VISIONARY INSIGHT

  UNDERLYING Blake’s critique of the psychological, political, and religious assumptions of his time was a conviction that modern ways of thought blind us to the fullness of experience. As a stopgap measure in their retreat from belief, eighteenth-century agnostics were fond of recommending deism (from the Latin deus), also known as natural religion, which claimed that anything worth knowing about the deity could be deduced rationally from the orderly processes of nature. Just as a clock must be the work of a skilled clockmaker, so the solar system must be the product of a clockmaker-god. Such a god, of course, need have no interest whatever in human beings, and Blake though
t that an impersonal, detached deity like that was no god at all. But neither was the orthodox Jehovah. The god Blake did acknowledge was the very human Jesus whose benevolent presence pervades Songs of Innocence.

  Blake’s attack on natural religion, and the symbolism with which he counters it, are embodied in an unpublished lyric in his notebook, which has no title and no accompanying picture.

  Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau

  Mock on Mock on! ’tis all in vain!

  You throw the sand against the wind

  And the wind blows it back again

  And every sand becomes a gem

  Reflected in the beams divine

  Blown back they blind the mocking eye

  But still in Israel’s paths they shine

  The atoms of Democritus

  And Newton’s particles of light

  Are sands upon the Red Sea shore

  Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright1

  Always sparing with punctuation, Blake used none at all here except for a pair of exclamation points. He evidently wanted each line to carry its own separate weight, not to slot neatly into place in tidy syntax.

  Voltaire and Rousseau were leading figures in the Enlightenment, so called because it aspired to shed light on the dark places of superstition and tyranny. After the French Revolution the remains of these two great philosophes were reinterred next to each other in the Pantheon, but in life they had thought of themselves as opposites. The worldly, sophisticated Voltaire was a cynical wit, a rich landowner, and an admirer of philosopher-kings. Rousseau was a loner and hermit, a spokesman for “natural” simplicity, and the theorist of a radically new political system that would embody the “general will” of all citizens. From Blake’s point of view, however, the affinities were deeper than the differences. He saw both Voltaire and Rousseau as believers in natural religion, and his own conviction was that the natural world as understood by modern thinkers was a barrier against truth, not a window into it.

  What Blake did approve of in the Enlightenment was its campaign against institutional religion. Voltaire had a favorite slogan, Écrasez l’infâme: “Crush the infamous thing,” meaning the Catholic Church, which controlled French education, imposed orthodox theological doctrine, and rigorously censored publications. He rejected most of orthodox doctrine as moralizing thought control, and so did Blake, who agreed that it was wrong to take the Bible as literally and factually true. “Voltaire was commissioned by God,” he said, “to expose that.”2

  In Blake’s view, the thinkers of the Enlightenment performed a necessary act of destruction with their critique of orthodoxy, but they didn’t know how to reconstruct. In an inspired metaphor, he exploits the fact that although grains of sand can look like inert particles, if thrown up into sunlight they sparkle like jewels. The philosophes made that happen when they stirred up the sands of superstition, but because they foolishly faced into the wind, the sharp crystals stung their eyes into spiritual blindness.

  There is another way to think about sand, though. Theorists of science in Blake’s day thought that nature is best understood through mathematical laws, which supposedly described the interaction of atoms, far too tiny to be seen. Atoms were not conceived of as force fields, as they would be today; they were more like identical marbles in a bag. The ancient philosopher Democritus had imagined them as unbreakably solid building blocks, and in empiricist philosophy they were held to constitute everything that exists, including ourselves. As for the so-called secondary qualities that we perceive as color and taste and odor, they have no real existence at all. They are merely illusions that our brains construct from the sense data that stream in on us. As summarized by a modern historian of science, “The world that people had thought themselves living in [before empiricism]—a world rich with color and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals—was now crowded into minute corners of the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colorless, silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.”3

  Blake understood these implications and utterly despised them. “Deduct from a rose its redness,” he wrote, “from a lily its whiteness, from a diamond its hardness, from a sponge its softness, from an oak its height, from a daisy its lowness, and rectify everything in nature as the philosophers do, and then we shall return to chaos.”4

  Blake and Newton

  Isaac Newton was a major culture hero in the eighteenth century, much as Albert Einstein would be in the twentieth. And like Einstein, Newton advanced theories that only specialists could grasp. His masterpiece was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica—Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. For nonexperts the math was impossibly difficult, but Newton’s other classic, Opticks, was a book that ordinary readers could understand. Using prisms and lenses, he conducted a series of experiments on the properties of light, showing that a prism breaks seemingly white light into all the colors of the spectrum. Alexander Pope wrote a memorable epitaph:

  Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;

  God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

  With similar awe, Blake’s contemporary Wordsworth described a statue at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Newton had once lived and taught:

  Newton with his prism and silent face,

  The marble index of a mind for ever

  Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.5

  Blake would certainly not have disagreed that raindrops and prisms reveal the colors of the rainbow. What he objected to was Newton’s claim that like everything else, light was composed of minute particles, which he called corpuscles. At the creation of the universe, Newton wrote, God “formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles,” which resemble each other just as much “as the sands on the shore.”6 Whenever we open our eyes, the stream of particles strikes our retinas and triggers signals in the brain. Blake invokes Newton’s “sands on the shore” for a very different purpose: for him they suggest the Sinai Desert—“sands upon the Red Sea shore”—through which the Israelites journeyed from Egyptian captivity to the Promised Land. Newton described the ways in which light always behaves; Blake invokes a great symbolic story, the Exodus from bondage to freedom. The light that illuminates that journey is a spiritual force, not a hailstorm of material particles.

  Infinity and Eternity

  There is also a grain of sand in another of Blake’s notebook poems:

  To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

  And eternity in an hour.

  One of Blake’s favorite writers was the seventeenth-century German mystic Jacob Boehme, who wrote, “When I take up a stone or clod of earth and look upon it, then I see that which is above and that which is below; yea, I see the whole world therein.” That kind of mysticism is very different from the kind that dismisses the visible world as mere illusion. Far from wanting to escape to a “higher” realm, Blake, like Boehme, sought richer apprehension of this one. “I can look at a knot in a piece of wood,” he once said, “till I am frightened at it.” Perhaps surprisingly, he was friendly with the far better known painter John Constable. Once, leafing through Constable’s sketchbook, Blake commented on a drawing of trees, “Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration.” “I never knew it before,” Constable replied, no doubt with a smile. “I meant it for drawing.” It is the same real world that we inhabit all the time but seen with new freshness, or with what Robert Frost calls “strangeness.”7

  Infinity, the empiricists thought, was a meaningless concept, since we are unable to comprehend a universe that goes on forever without end. Likewise eternity was meaningless, since all we can ever actually know is the ticktock of each successive second. Blake would agree that those were hopelessly abstract ways
of trying to imagine infinity and eternity, but for him both were immediate and concrete. Infinity is present here and now in the real world we inhabit, not far away in unimaginable endlessness. Eternity, likewise, is present in each moment of lived experience; it is the river of time in which we are continuously immersed. He coined a memorable term for it—“the Eternal Now”—and he would have appreciated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; elsewhere he called time “the mercy of Eternity.”8 Perhaps that means that for mortal men and women, the vastness of Eternity would be overwhelming if we were fully conscious of it. Mercifully, we are aware only of the onward flow of time in which we are immersed.

  Although Blake criticized Newton’s assumptions as reductive, he nevertheless had a generous admiration for Newton’s genius. The great physicist is the subject of an extraordinary picture (color plate 18), though without knowing that its title is Newton one would be hard put to guess what it shows. Here Newton is very much alone, as in Wordsworth’s lines, but not gazing into the heavens as the statue does. On a lichen-encrusted rock at the bottom of the sea, he sits in a constricted posture, compressed almost into a ball, the very opposite of the wide-flung limbs in pictures such as Albion Rose. Tracing a geometric diagram with a pair of compasses, he stares with intense concentration at a little scroll.

  Whereas the Newton of history was a gaunt, ascetic professor, this Newton is a muscular athlete. Hunched over though he is, his powerful body, with clearly articulated muscles, contrasts vividly with the simplified diagram that he believes to be a true picture of reality. Much as Michelangelo would, Blake has thus translated intellectual power into a physical equivalent.9 Newton is shown on the sea floor because Blake adopted from Neoplatonic philosophy the symbolism of water as suffocating materiality. But by implication nothing is stopping him from getting up off his rock and rising to the surface, into the world of sunlight and fresh air. Nor does he show any interest in the intricate and beautiful life-forms that cover his rock. Newton is a mighty genius, but also the prisoner of a reductive intellectual program. Blake’s intention in this picture is not to deny his greatness but to suggest the imaginative bondage that his intellectual system imposed.