No one knows how Blake pronounced the names of the Zoas. Two of them, Tharmas and Urthona, seem obvious enough. (The latter recalls “earth owner,” and may have been suggested by a character in one of the faux-Gaelic poems by Ossian fabricated in the 1760s by James Macpherson.) Luvah perhaps sounded like “lover,” which would be appropriate to his role. The real puzzle is Urizen. It is generally agreed that the name derives from a Greek word meaning “horizon,” but it may also imply the English “your reason.” So is it “Your-eye-zon” or “Your rea-son”? Possibly neither, since in many places the rhythm of the verse seems to call for the accent to fall on the first syllable, “your-izen.” Blake may not have cared much about the pronunciation.
Ezekiel’s Vision
The source for John’s vision in the Book of Revelation is a similar vision experienced by Ezekiel during the Babylonian captivity. Blake illustrated that text in a remarkable painting that brings out how complex the relationship of his Zoas is, and also how dynamic. The text in Ezekiel is filled with weird images, and needs to be quoted at length:
Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. . . . I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man, and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. . . . As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. Thus were their faces, and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. . . . Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four.4
This extraordinary vision, mysterious but also inspiring, is invoked in a well-known spiritual: “Ezekiel saw the wheel / Way up in the middle of the air.” Christian interpreters drew on it to symbolize the four Evangelists: a winged man or angel is Matthew, a winged lion Mark (as in the Piazza San Marco in Venice), a winged ox Luke, and an eagle John. The “rings,” incidentally, which are hard to make any sense of, are the rims of the wheels in most modern translations.
Blake didn’t hesitate to give visual embodiment to Ezekiel’s hard-to-visualize imagery. It has so many disparate parts, indeed, that he was the first major artist since Albrecht Dürer to depict the actual vision rather than just the prophet writing about it. A painting by Raphael, The Vision of Ezekiel, does represent the four creatures, together with a winged angel and God enthroned above, but Raphael ignores the wheels and rings and eyes.5
Blake’s picture (figure 32), painted in 1805, is not entirely faithful to the original either. There is no lion or ox or eagle, and only human faces are shown. Each of these must be fourfold, though the fourth face of the central figure can’t be seen, the two at the side margin show only two faces each, and a fourth figure is presumably hidden altogether at the back. These, then, are Blake’s Zoas, and all four are human. Recumbent at the bottom is the tiny figure of Ezekiel himself, an “astonished dreamer,” as Bentley calls him.6
The central figure in the picture, gazing directly at us, has the two sets of wings that Ezekiel describes, and seated between the raised pair of wings is God on his throne. God’s right hand is lifted in blessing, but his expression seems somber and uneasy. Blake could never have endorsed the traditional interpretation of Ezekiel’s vision as the Hebrew Merkabah, chariot of an omnipotent God. In Paradise Lost Ezekiel’s chariot is the vehicle in which Christ crushes the rebel angels; in our day (with the spelling Merkavah) it is the most powerful tank in the Israeli army.
32. Ezekiel’s Vision
The idea of wheels coordinating their motion “within” each other held great appeal for Blake. He thought of this cooperative energy as altogether different from the grinding, externalized gears of industrial machinery:
. . . Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.7
So for Blake the spiritual heart of Ezekiel’s vision is not a presiding deity on an uncanny chariot, but the dynamic forces within the self. As for the eyes within the whirling wheels, he imagined them as successive intuitions of the divine, which he called the Seven Eyes of God; they will be considered later.
In Eternity the Zoas interact harmoniously:
Four mighty ones are in every man; a perfect unity
Cannot exist but from the universal brotherhood of Eden,
The Universal Man. To whom be glory evermore amen.
In the margin next to these lines in The Four Zoas, Blake cites two texts from the Gospel of John, both of which refer to Jesus: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”8 The divine principle that integrates the self is no patriarch on high, but God in human form.
Emanations
As he developed his symbolism of the Zoas, it evidently struck Blake that he needed to account for the female element in the psyche, and he provided each Zoa with a feminine “emanation.” The term came from Neoplatonism, where it referred to forces that emanate from the divine being in order to create the world. The original title of The Four Zoas, begun three years before the move to Felpham, was Vala, and Blake now made Vala the feminine counterpart of Luvah. Ahania is Urizen’s emanation, Enitharmon is Urthona’s, and Enion is Tharmas’s. Vala and Enitharmon often act aggressively and even cruelly; Ahania and Enion are gentler but also less distinct.
Tracing the interactions of not just four characters but eight produces complications that can be desperately hard to keep in focus. At times, Blake himself may have had trouble doing so, especially since he believed he was transmitting a message that had been “given” to him, rather than making it up to suit himself. He knew also that our deepest psychic experiences remain mysterious as well as many-sided. In Milton he acknowledges, “Man cannot know / What passes in his members till periods of space and time / Reveal the secrets of Eternity.”9
For many readers, what emerges most powerfully in The Four Zoas is not the detailed narrative, if indeed it can be called a narrative, but rather the poetic power with which Blake evokes the threat of psychic breakdown. The stress and anguish of that breakdown are made woundingly apparent when each male Zoa suffers the loss of his feminine element. Here, for example, is a magnificent passage in which first Urizen and then Tharmas cries out in anguish when his emanation—Ahania and Enion, respectively—has been torn away:
Ahania fell far into non-entity,
She continued falling. Loud the crash continued loud and hoarse;
From the crash roared a flame of blue sulphureous fire, from the flame
A dolorous groan that struck with dumbness all confusion,
Swallowing up the horrible din in agony on agony,
Through the confusion like a crack across from immense to immense,
Loud strong a universal groan of death, louder
Than all the wracking elements, deafened and rended worse
Than Urizen and all his hosts in curst despair down rushing.
But from the dolorous groan one like a shadow of smoke appeared,
And human bones rattling together in the smoke and stamping
The nether abyss and gnashing in fierce despair, panting in sobs
Thick short incessant bursting sobbing, deep despairing
stamping struggling
Struggling to utter the voice of man struggling to take the features of man, struggling
To take the limbs of man. At length emerging from the smoke
Of Urizen, dashed in pieces from his precipitant fall,
Tharmas reared up his hands and stood on the affrighted ocean;
The dead reared up his voice and stood on the resounding shore,
Crying “Fury in my limbs, destruction in my bones and marrow!
My skull riven into filaments, my eyes into sea jellies
Floating upon the tide wander bubbling and bubbling,
Uttering my lamentations and begetting little monsters
Who sit mocking upon the little pebbles of the tide
In all my rivers and on dried shells that the fish
Have quite forsaken. O fool fool to lose my sweetest bliss!
Where art thou Enion? ah too near too cunning, too far off
And yet too near.”
Andrew Lincoln says, “The rhythms and distorted syntax of the passage vividly enact the desperate struggle for life and expression. The verse itself bursts its bounds and reforms.”10
That is how Urizen and Tharmas experience the breakup of the self, but it is no single event, and there can be no correct version of the story, as Milton insisted there was when he told the story of the Fall in Paradise Lost. It is an ongoing torment that takes place in the nightmare of Albion. In dreams, as Freud says, thoughts and images “are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together, almost like pack-ice.” Each Zoa and each emanation experiences a different version of the psychic catastrophe, and in The Four Zoas there are no fewer than fourteen competing accounts.11
To arrest this chaotic suffering, and to begin the labor of reconstruction, will be the task of the Zoa of imagination. In Eternity his name is Urthona, but Blake apparently decided that after the collective breakup of the primal Albion, he is so changed that he needs a new name in his “fallen” state. That name is Los, and in Milton and Jerusalem he is the hero of Blake’s myth. Los is also the source of creative inspiration: “He is the spirit of prophecy, the ever apparent Elias”—another name for Elijah, who was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind.12 Blake would work out this relationship in Milton: A Poem in Two Books, which was first conceived at Felpham and then worked on for years afterward. It is called Milton because Blake imagined uniting as well with his great English predecessor, summoning the spirit of John Milton from Eternity to reinforce the prophetic mission inspired by Los.
10. THE PROPHETIC CALL
Bringing Milton Back
WHEN he created the Lambeth Books, particularly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America: A Prophecy, Blake was a man with a social message. At Felpham he became convinced that he was more than that: he felt called to be a prophet in the line that stretched from Isaiah and Ezekiel through John of Patmos. “Mark well my words!” he exclaims in Milton, “they are of your eternal salvation.” And in Jerusalem he testifies, as his predecessors had, that the prophet’s obligation is heavy:
Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonished at me,
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards into the worlds of thought: into Eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
O Saviour pour upon me thy spirit of meekness and love:
Annihilate the selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages.1
As Blake understood the role of prophecy, it was to give expression to an individual’s perception of truth. No biblical prophet was infallible, far from it. Nor did prophecy cease after the Bible was compiled. Blake regarded Milton as the most recent of the prophets, and as he worked to elaborate his own personal myth, he became obsessed with his great predecessor.
As a feat of imagination, Paradise Lost was exceptionally appealing to Blake. “To paint things as they are,” Samuel Johnson said, “requires a minute attention, and employs the memory rather than the fancy.” That was just the kind of art that Blake despised. But Johnson went on to say, “Milton’s delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.” Blake would agree with all of that, except to insist that the world of imagination is the true reality, not an escape from it.2
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake had criticized Milton’s theology but honored him as “a true poet.” At Felpham he began to think about Milton more deeply. William Hayley owned many books by and about Milton, and had written a biography in which he speculated about what would happen if Milton could return to earth to correct mistaken interpretations of his life and writings. That suggestion may well have given Blake the idea of bringing Milton back in a poem of his own. But in Blake’s opinion it was Milton himself, and not just his interpreters, who needed correction.3
Milton begins with a long “Bard’s song” that presents a heavily disguised version of Blake’s spiritual struggle with Hayley. That struggle played itself out within Blake’s consciousness, and in all probability Hayley never suspected it. He was never the real target anyway, since Blake gratefully acknowledged how kindly his intentions were. Insofar as Hayley does play a role in Milton, it is by embodying the conventional worldly expectations that Blake had long struggled against and that he had hoped to be liberated from in Felpham. Disillusionment came when he realized that if he followed Hayley’s advice, he would be in artistic bondage just as much as before.
As the poem’s title indicates, its true target is Milton, whom Hayley was seeking to coopt as self-appointed custodian of his reputation. Blake’s attitude toward Milton was deeply complicated. As creator of a mighty mythic narrative, he was an inspiration; as defender of a repressive belief system, he was an obstacle.
Say first! what moved Milton, who walked about in Eternity
One hundred years, pondering the intricate mazes of Providence.
Unhappy though in heaven, he obeyed, he murmured not, he was silent
Viewing his sixfold emanation scattered through the deep
In torment! To go into the deep, her to redeem and himself perish:
What cause at length moved Milton to this unexampled deed?
A Bard’s prophetic song!
The Bard is an idealized version of Blake; the “sixfold emanation” is Milton’s three wives and three daughters, the collective female counterpart over whom he supposedly tyrannized during his lifetime. Since his death, his spirit has been confined unhappily to the bleak heaven he depicted in Paradise Lost, presided over by a tyrant God who declares imperiously in that poem, “What I will is fate.”4
Blake’s aggressive critique of Milton furnishes one of Harold Bloom’s examples of the “anxiety of influence,” in which a “strong poet” achieves his own vision by wrestling with an intimidating predecessor. Blake himself would have said that he was uniting with Milton, not displacing or rejecting him, and that he was rescuing what was inspired in Milton’s vision by purging it of error.5
The majestic title page for Milton (figure 33) shows a naked, muscular figure with his back to us, advancing resolutely into flames of renewal. With his right hand he breaks open his name, MIL–TON, pushing forward into our world and into Blake’s poem. At the bottom of the plate his own mandate in Paradise Lost is quoted: “To justify the ways of God to men.”6 Milton believed that he could justify God by showing that humankind is responsible for its own suffering. Blake will seek to “justify” a conception of the divine very different from that of the seventeenth-century Calvinist.
The Milton who wr
ote Paradise Lost was personally authoritarian, and it is time to free him from his self-righteous ego, or in Blake’s terms from the “false body” of selfhood.
33. Milton, copy C, title page
This is a false body: an incrustation over my immortal
Spirit; a selfhood, which must be put off and annihilated alway
To cleanse the face of my spirit by self-examination,
To bathe in the waters of life: to wash off the not human.
I come in self-annihilation and the grandeur of inspiration
To cast off rational demonstration by faith in the Saviour,
To cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration.7
Milton’s immortal spirit lives on, but the ragged garment of his selfhood—the historical Milton, with all his limitations and biases—must be “annihilated.” In the picture that illustrates these lines (color plate 20) he is again naked, as he was on the title page, but now he is facing us. His face is Christlike, and the sun rises behind him while a radiant halo surrounds his head.
Since it is Blake in Felpham who has summoned Milton back to earth, a crucial event in the poem is their direct encounter. It is described, however, in imagery of surpassing weirdness:
Then first I saw him in the zenith as a falling star
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift,
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, entered there;
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe.
Milton the man no longer exists; it is his spirit that hurtles down from the heavens, taking the form of a shooting star and not a person. The star strikes Blake’s foot, perhaps since he thought of feet as our point of contact with the physical world. It is Jesus’ feet that are invoked in the lyric in Milton known as Jerusalem: “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green!”8
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 15