That was an apocryphal legend, but the chariot of fire is in the Bible—not that Blake thought of the Bible as literally true. When Elijah bequeathed his mantle of prophecy to Elisha, “Behold, there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” As Blake adapts the image, it represents the visionary breakthrough he has personally experienced and hopes to share. He says elsewhere, referring to his now-lost painting of the Last Judgment, “If the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought; if he could enter into Noah’s rainbow or into his bosom, or could make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder which always entreats him to leave mortal things as he must know, then would he arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy.” “Enter in” implies active participation, not passive viewing; we are being invited to escape from the living death of mortal existence.15
“Arrows of desire” suggests the erotic energy of Blake’s Orc, and “mental fight” recalls the seventeenth-century revolutionaries who sought to recreate the kingdom of God on earth. Cromwell’s soldiers went into battle singing:
The Lord begins to honour us,
The saints are marching on;
The sword is sharp, the arrows swift
To destroy Babylon.
But for Blake the combat is spiritual, not military. As he says in his final prophetic work, the one that is actually named Jerusalem,
Our wars are wars of life and wounds of love,
With intellectual spears, and long winged arrows of thought.16
The meaning of the “dark Satanic mills” has been much debated, since the industrial system was only in its infancy, and since mills in Blake’s poems can refer to repetitive processes of any kind. But it is not wrong to think of factories. A powerful passage in Jerusalem explicitly contrasts modern industrialism with traditional labor:
Then left the Sons of Urizen the plow and harrow, the loom,
The hammer and the chisel, and the rule and compasses. From London fleeing
They forged the sword on Cheviot, the chariot of war and the battle-ax,
The trumpet fitted to mortal battle, and the flute of summer in Annandale,
And all the arts of life they changed into the arts of death in Albion.
The hourglass contemned, because its simple workmanship
Was like the workmanship of the plowman; and the water wheel
That raises water into cisterns, broken and burned with fire,
Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the shepherd;
And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, wheel without wheel,
To perplex youth in their outgoings, and bind to labours in Albion
Of day and night the myriads of eternity, that they may grind
And polish brass and iron hour after hour laborious task!
“Wheel without wheel” refers to the cogwheels that drive machinery, and brass and iron went into armaments for Britain’s foreign wars. Some years earlier a French visitor described an English cannon foundry: “Amongst these warlike machines, these terrible death-dealing instruments, huge cranes, every kind of windlass, lever and tackle for moving heavy loads, were fixed in suitable places. Their creaking, the piercing noise of the pulleys, the continuous sound of hammering, the ceaseless energy of the men keeping all this machinery in motion, presented a sight as interesting as it was new.” Blake thought such developments were satanic, not “interesting.”17
The Jerusalem lyric unites two ideals that are normally thought of as opposites. One is an Arcadian myth of a golden age in the past, and the other is activist anticipation of utopia in the future. “Blake’s poem,” A. D. Nuttall observes, “combines the two with dream-like intensity, the green England trodden by the feet of Christ, and the holy city we shall build together when tyranny and oppression are obliterated from this happy land.”18 The move from “I” to “we” in the final stanza is a call to collective commitment: “I will not cease . . . Till we have built.”
For this reason Jerusalem has always appealed strongly to reformers. After Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry set it to the now familiar melody in 1916, it acquired the name Jerusalem and became the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement and later of the Women’s Institute; still later it was sung at the conclusion of a 1981 film that took its title from the poem, Chariots of Fire. To be sure, not everyone in Britain saw that as appropriate use of Blake’s lyric. It struck some as an expression of British triumphalism at a time when Margaret Thatcher was waging war in the Falklands. And Blake might not have cared much for the use a recent Conservative prime minister made of the poem. When Prince William married Kate Middleton in 2011, David Cameron exclaimed, “There is something special about singing Jerusalem in Westminster Abbey with the orchestra behind you. You think the roof is going to lift off and there is no better place and no better country to be in. Just wonderful.”19
More congenial to Blake would be Jez Butterworth’s 2009 play Jerusalem, an ironic yet exhilarating view of what actually did become of England’s green and pleasant land. The raffish antihero draws a blank after rattling off correct answers to Trivial Pursuit questions:
Who wrote the words to the popular hymn Jerusalem?
Pause.
Ah, fuck. I know this. Fuck. It’s . . . .20
Surprisingly, in two of the four surviving copies of Milton, Blake deleted this poem. Nobody knows why.
London and Blake’s Myth
Robert Southey, poet laureate from 1813 to 1843, was shown the hundred plates of Jerusalem and thought the poem “perfectly mad.” In support of that judgment he remarked, “Oxford Street is in Jerusalem.” Blake does say that. Not just Oxford Street, in fact, but the whole of London can be seen as Jerusalem in its spiritual form.
The Lamb of God creates himself a bride and wife
That we his children evermore may live in Jerusalem
Which now descendeth out of heaven, a city yet a woman,
Mother of myriads, redeemed and born in her spiritual palaces,
By a new spiritual birth regenerated from death.21
But if London ought to be an ideal Jerusalem in spirit, in reality it is all too tragically a Babylon. An extended lyric in Jerusalem vividly evokes that contrast, and is pervaded by local references to the city in which Blake spent nearly all of his life:
The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint Johns Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.
Her little ones ran on the fields,
The Lamb of God among them seen,
And fair Jerusalem his bride
Among the little meadows green.
Pancras and Kentish Town repose
Among her golden pillars high;
Among her golden arches which
Shine upon the starry sky.
The Jews Harp House and the Green Man,
The ponds where boys to bathe delight,
The fields of cows by Willan’s farm,
Shine in Jerusalem’s pleasant sight.
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side;
And every English child is seen
Children of Jesus and his bride.
Forgiving trespasses and sins
Lest Babylon with cruel Og,
With moral and self-righteous law,
Should crucify in Satan’s synagogue!
What are those golden builders doing
Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington,
Standing above that mighty ruin
Where Satan the first victory won,
Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree,
And the Druids’ golden knife
Rioted in human gore,
In offerings of human life?
> They groaned aloud on London Stone,
They groaned aloud on Tyburn’s brook;
Albion gave his deadly groan,
And all the Atlantic mountains shook.
“Cruel Og” is an Old Testament giant in league with Babylon, the antitype of Jerusalem. But the other names are all real places, familiar to Blake from his boyhood when there was still open countryside within easy walking distance. “The beauty of those scenes in his youth,” Gilchrist writes, “was a lifelong reminiscence with Blake, and stored his mind with lifelong pastoral images.” The Green Man pie house and the Jew’s Harp teahouse lay on the way from Paddington to Islington, separate villages then although soon to be swallowed up in Regent’s Park, and as late as Dickens’s time there were still ponds at Willan’s farm (see frontispiece map). The “golden builders” were occupied with the city’s ongoing expansion, and there may be an allusion to the honey-colored limestone in the terraces that were going up at Regents Park. Paddington, a village of poverty-stricken Irish laborers, is described as “ever-weeping” because builders had dug up bones of Puritan leaders who had been beheaded and buried there.22
London Stone was the central milestone from which distances were measured. Blake associates it with official tyranny because it was close to Newgate Prison as well as to Saint Paul’s Cathedral. As for the “fatal tree,” that was the gallows at Ty-burn at the corner of Hyde Park, not far from the Blakes’ residence after returning from Felpham, where the hanging of criminals had still been shocking public spectacles when they were young. The title of an important modern work on crime and punishment in the eighteenth century is borrowed from Blake: Albion’s Fatal Tree.23
A passage in Milton assembles details from an earlier neighborhood, the one in Lambeth where the Blakes had lived in the 1790s. What look like classical names are actual London ones, invoked for ironic effect:
Beginning at Jerusalem’s inner court, Lambeth ruined and given
To the detestable gods of Priam, to Apollo; and at the Asylum
Given to Hercules, who labour in Tirzah’s looms for bread,
Who set pleasure against duty: who create Olympic crowns
To make learning a burden, and the work of the Holy Spirit strife.
To Thor and cruel Odin who first reared the polar caves,
Lambeth mourns, calling Jerusalem; she weeps and looks abroad
For the Lord’s coming, that Jerusalem may overspread all nations.24
The Blakes’ Lambeth address, to which they had moved in 1790 when there was hope of increasing income, was No. 13 Hercules Buildings, the most spacious quarters they ever had (figure 31). It was a brick row house with two rooms on each of three floors, and a kitchen in a damp basement. The massive rolling press stood in the front room on the ground floor, and the studio was in back, with plenty of light for painting and engraving. It overlooked a garden that harbored a privy and also a vine and a fig tree. When the house was eventually razed in 1918 the tree and vine were still flourishing.25
If the house was pleasant, much of the neighborhood was not. Not far away was the “asylum” mentioned in the poem, a workhouse for orphaned girls that was intended to train “a supply of diligent and sober domestics for the use of that public which, by its contributions, has so nobly acquired a right to their services.” Blake always made clear what he thought of ostensibly charitable institutions like that:
31. No. 23 Hercules Buildings
Children are sold to trades
Of dire necessity, still laboring day and night, till all
Their life extinct, they took the spectre form in dark despair.
Tirzah, whom we will meet again, is Blake’s name for an ominous nature goddess who binds down mortals to the restricted life of the five senses. Odin and his son Thor are Norse gods of war, and “the detestable gods of Priam” preside over the Trojan War. To be sure, the Apollo of classical mythology is not particularly warlike, but Blake names him because a derelict pleasure garden around the corner from his house was called Apollo Gardens. “Jerusalem’s inner court” refers to the courtyards of Lambeth Palace, headquarters of the established church that seemed indifferent to human misery.26
London should aspire to be Jerusalem, but is all too clearly Babylon, the scene of suffering and exploitation on a massive scale.
There Babylon is builded in the waste, founded in human desolation. . . .
But Albion is cast forth to the potter, his children to the builders
To build Babylon because they have forsaken Jerusalem.
The walls of Babylon are souls of men; her gates the groans
Of nations; her towers are the miseries of once happy families.
Her streets are paved with destruction, her houses built with death,
Her palaces with Hell and the grave; her synagogues with torments
Of ever-hardening despair squared and polished with cruel skill.
The groans recall the anguished cries in the lyric London, and the potter comes from a text in Zechariah that Christians saw as an anticipation of Judas: “I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the Lord.” As for Satan’s synagogue, that is Blake’s name for the false religion that honors the cruel powers of this world. “Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the Synagogue of Satan.” It is called a synagogue because it embodies the vengeful law of the Old Testament instead of the New Testament spirit of forgiveness. “Urizen called together the Synagogue of Satan in dire Sanhedrim / To judge the Lamb of God to death as a murderer and robber.”27
Few people who sing “Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land” are aware of how deep is the pessimism from which it springs. And few people, also, realize that this hopeful lyric is embedded in a massive prophetic poem that explores the fragmentation of self and world with harrowing intensity.
9. THE ZOAS AND OURSELVES
The Four Living Creatures
WHEN Blake first invented the bearded, patriarchal Urizen and his antagonist, the flamey-haired Orc, he may have thought of them simply as representing the perennial impulses of authoritarian control and youthful rebellion. Soon afterward, however, he evidently decided that he needed a whole cast of characters to dramatize the dynamics of psychic experience. These he called Zoas, adapting a term from the Book of Revelation.1 Zoon in Greek means a living creature, and Saint John on Patmos sees four of them bearing a vision of God in the air. Blake was studying Greek with William Hayley at Felpham in the early 1800s, and there he anglicized the plural zoa as “Zoas.” The never-printed poem The Four Zoas was the proving ground in which he gradually got to know them. As he developed his personal myth, it grew challengingly complicated and increasingly strange.
No doubt to prevent readers from drawing on prior associations, Blake made up new (and exotic-sounding) names for his Zoas. In general terms, Urizen, who continues to play a major role in the myth, represents reason and moral law. Orc dwindles in significance in these later poems and is replaced by his counterpart in Eternity, Luvah, the emotions. And there are two further Zoas who had not appeared previously. Urthona, mentioned in passing in America but not yet a Zoa there, is creative imagination. Tharmas, the fourth, is passive and shadowy most of the time. At one point he is called the “parent power,” and he seems to represent an instinctual wholeness that keeps the entire structure intact.2These four beings, or forces, are alive in each person. They are the foundational elements of the self.
The reason Blake invented the Zoas seems clear, and is evidence of his profound originality. Existing psychologies were rigidly hierarchical, distributing aspects of the psyche into discrete elements, and placing one of them firmly in control at the top. In the classical model that Christian thinkers took over, reason presides and the passions are kept in subjection below, with the will as an executive agent to make sure they stay there. Or as Plato describes it in the Phaedrus, t
he charioteer of the soul, representing reason, drives an ill-matched pair of horses, one of which is positive moral emotions and the other irrational appetites.
In these traditional models, the ideal is authoritarian stability. Much the same can be said of Freud’s model, though he adds the concept of the superego as the internalized moral code, and in his system Plato’s unruly horse becomes the anarchic energies of the repressed id. “Our mind,” Freud writes, “is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is rather to be compared to a modern state in which a mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class.” One can imagine what Blake would have said about that analogy—class warfare in which privileged superiors discipline the mob. More largely, he would never have accepted Freud’s claim that repression, even if painful, is necessary. For Freud, to resist instinctual gratification is a sign of psychic health; for Blake it is a definition of sickness.3
More congenial to Blake’s conception than Freud’s is Jung’s, which is not surprising, since Jung was interested in many of the same sources that Blake drew on. The Jungian category of thinking could be said to correspond to Urizen, intuition to Urthona, emotion to Luvah, and sense perception to Tharmas. The four interact dynamically, much as the Greek and Hindu gods do, with no controlling element on top.
In Blake’s view, the Zoas are not abstractions. We have noted his tendency to humanize everything, and that is what he does with psychic experience. Each Zoa is an active character who thinks and desires and suffers; each forms alliances, competes, and fights with the others. Borrowing from various mythic and kabbalistic
sources, Blake postulates a universal humanity whom he calls Albion. When Albion falls asleep in Eternity, or rather falls into nightmare, his constituent Zoas break apart and struggle for supremacy. Only when they learn to interact cooperatively can the wholeness of the self be restored.
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 14