Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  Though not always consistently, Blake generally saw negative implications in the left or “sinister” side. With surprising specificity, he identifies the point of contact here as the tarsus. That is the upper part of the foot that joins the ankle, but Blake must have chosen it because it is also a biblical name: Saul of Tarsus was struck down on the road to Damascus and became Saint Paul. The black cloud may be the false elements of Milton’s former beliefs, now dispersing. Or, since the cloud seems to spread from Blake himself, perhaps he too is complicit in errors that must be exposed and rejected.9

  The moment of Milton’s descent is illustrated with not one image but two, each occupying a full page. The first (figure 34) is positioned as a divider between the two books of Milton. Blake, identified as “William” in the caption, staggers backward at the very instant when the shooting star, trailing light, is about to strike his foot. In one copy of the poem he is naked; in the other three, as here, he wears diaphanous briefs through which his body can be seen. A number of commentators are convinced that his penis is erect, but if so it is very tactfully represented.10

  The other image (figure 35) is altogether surprising. It comes a few plates later, not facing this one as might be expected, but obviously a mirror image of it. Its caption, “Robert,” would have baffled any contemporary viewer, since that name appears nowhere in the poem. This is Blake’s much-loved younger brother, who had died in his teens and whom Blake continued to regard as a kind of alter ego in Eternity. The star may represent Robert’s astral body as imagined in Neoplatonic philosophy, a spiritual projection that can revisit earth from the afterlife.11

  A few months before he moved to Felpham, Blake sent a moving letter of consolation to Hayley, whose teenage son had just died after a long and painful illness.

  I am very sorry for your immense loss, which is a repetition of what all feel in this valley of misery and happiness mixed. . . . I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate—for-give me for expressing to you my enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of since it is to me a source of immortal joy even in this world. By it I am the companion of angels. May you continue to be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time builds mansions in Eternity.12

  All Christians are supposed to believe that their loved ones enjoy eternal life. What is exceptional in Blake is his conviction that Robert has not ascended to some remote heaven, but continues to communicate with him “daily and hourly.” So the letter to Hayley moves from reminiscence—“thirteen years ago”—to “even now” as the words flow from the pen.

  It is hard to know how literally to take Blake’s claim that he communicates directly with Robert. Remarks that are scattered throughout his works suggest that the contact must be with Robert’s essential spirit, which lives on in Eternity but is no longer identical with the young sibling who died in 1787. Blake always criticized orthodox preaching that encouraged people to endure suffering in this life with the promise that their individual selfhood would survive unchanged in Heaven. Similarly, as the paired “William” and “Robert” pictures suggest, Blake’s union with Milton is spiritual and symbolic. After it occurs, we do not see Milton walking the earth with Blake as a novelistic character might. And in any case, the heart of the poem is not so much Blake’s union with Milton as Blake’s union with Los.

  Los Falling, Los Creating

  Los first made his appearance in two of the short Lambeth Books, The Book of Urizen and The Book of Los. In Milton he emerges not as a rebel but as a formidable rival creator to Urizen. Urizen attempts to create after the fashion of the biblical Jehovah: “God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” In contrast, Los creates with intense physical labor, a blacksmith hammering recalcitrant iron on his anvil. This creator is an artist and a craftsman, and in the late Jerusalem Blake imagines himself as an avatar of Los, a blacksmith who uses the Thames as the trough in which to cool the molten metal:

  Round from heaven to earth down falling with heavy blow

  Dead on the anvil, where the red hot wedge groans in pain,

  He quenches it in the black trough of his forge; London’s River

  Feeds the dread forge, trembling and shuddering along the valleys.13

  The “he” in this passage is Rintrah, one of the sons of Los, who was associated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with prophetic wrath.

  In conceiving this blacksmith creator, Blake may well have been thinking of Hephaestus, known to the Romans as Vulcan, the artificer of Olympus who creates the great shield of Achilles. But most important, surely, was Blake’s own experience as an artist and craftsman. A writer like Shelley could think of creativity as wholly mental: “The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.” But Blake’s poems were not fully realized until sharp tools had gouged them into copper plates or until acid had raised the metal outline into relief—“melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid,” as he says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.14

  34. Milton, copy C, plate 31

  35. Milton, copy C, plate 36

  Still, even if Blake was a worker in metal, a tidy engraver’s studio is very different from a hot and smoke-filled smithy, such as he and his contemporaries would have seen constantly—even in the city, horses needed to be shod. It must have been the blacksmith’s associations with flames and muscular energy that appealed to Blake. Perhaps he was thinking of a well-known series of paintings, all entitled A Blacksmith’s Shop, by Joseph Wright of Derby. In the most striking of these, a glowing forge stands out from a shadowy background, and at the center a white-hot metal bar lies beneath the blacksmith’s hammer. Blake may also have remembered Ben Jonson’s use of blacksmith imagery in his tribute to Shakespeare, which likewise captures the heat and effort of the forge, as well as the effect of creation on the artist himself:

  And that he

  Who casts to write a living line, must sweat . . .

  Upon the muses’ anvil: turn the same,

  (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame.

  At the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus invokes the same analogy, with a moral emphasis that is very Blakean: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”15

  As with Blake’s other invented characters, no one knows how he pronounced “Los.” The name is suggestive of “loss,” and may have been pronounced that way, though it seems easier somehow to make it rhyme with “close.”

  Just as the other Zoas do, Los experiences a fall when Albion slips into nightmare; that was when all four Zoas, together with their emanations, broke apart into competing entities. In Eternity, where he represented the unfallen imagination, he was known as Urthona, and the very presence of the new name is a symptom of the disaster.

  What, exactly, Los is falling from is not made clear, since Blake never tries to describe the mysterious life of Eternity or what the Eternals themselves might be like. Their mode of existence is drastically different from our own, so we can only guess at it; at the end of Jerusalem Blake describes the unfallen Zoas as “the four living creatures, chariots of humanity divine, incomprehensible.”16 For that matter, Albion himself is none too easy to understand. Although all four Zoas were once fully integrated within him, they are now bitterly divided, and their quarrelsome interaction is what fills the poems.

  One of the final Lambeth Books, The Book of Los, published in 1795, describes Los’s fall in verse that is tumbling and unstable:

  Falling, falling! Los fell and fell,

  Sunk precipitant heavy down
down

  Times on times, night on night, day on day;

  Truth has bounds, error none. Falling, falling,

  Years on years, and ages on ages

  Still he fell through the void, still a void

  Found for falling, day and night without end,

  For though day or night was not, their spaces

  Were measured by his incessant whirls

  In the horrid vacuity bottomless.17

  The vertiginous fall threatens to go on forever, since error has no bounds. Los tumbles through the void for “ages on ages,” before time as we know it even exists—“day or night was not.” But as he spins it is he himself who begins to define day and night, “measured by his incessant whirls.”

  In Blake’s myth, Los is consistently associated with the measurement of time. While he was falling he measured time involuntarily, but was somehow able to arrest his fall; thereafter he measures time more constructively with rhythmic blows of his blacksmith’s hammer. Blake is not a narrative poet in any conventional sense, and we are not told how the change from fall to reconstruction takes place. Perhaps it can’t be narrated; it is a psychic turn that is felt but not fully understood.

  Los had already appeared as a blacksmith measuring time in The Book of Urizen, published one year before The Book of Los:

  The eternal prophet heaved the dark bellows

  And turned restless the tongs, and the hammer

  Incessant beat; forging chains new and new,

  Numb’ring with links hours, days and years.

  The Eternals, whatever they are, inhabit a perpetual Now, but in our fallen world we desperately need the structuring that is given by time. Thus, in Milton:

  Time is the mercy of Eternity; without time’s swiftness,

  Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.18

  Terrified by formlessness, Urizen tries to create a world of petrified stability. Los rightly breaks it asunder, but that act precipitates his own fall. As described in The Book of Los,

  The prophetic wrath, struggling for vent

  Hurls apart, stamping furious to dust

  And crumbling with bursting sobs; heaves

  The black marble on high into fragments.

  Hurled apart on all sides, as a falling

  Rock, the innumerable fragments away

  Fell asunder; and horrible vacuum

  Beneath him and on all sides round.

  Having smashed Urizen’s rigid and sterile universe, Los wields his mighty hammer to rebuild Urizen himself. In allegorical terms, one might say that imagination comes to the rescue of self-crippled reason.

  Los beat on the anvil, till glorious

  An immense orb of fire he framed. . . .

  Nine ages completed their circles

  When Los heated the glowing mass, casting

  It down into the deeps, the deeps fled

  Away in redounding smoke; the sun

  Stood self-balanced, and Los smiled with joy.

  He the vast spine of Urizen seized

  And bound down to the glowing illusion.19

  “Smiled with joy” recalls “and did he smile his work to see” in The Tyger, published just one year previously. In a sense Los, like Urizen, plays the part of a Neoplatonic or Gnostic demiurge who creates the material world. In this unusually short work—The Book of Los has just five plates—the following words all appear: “hands,” “feet,” “immortal,” “furnaces,” “anvil,” “hammer,” “framed,” “deeps,” and “seizing.” That is the very same vocabulary as in The Tyger.20

  As usual with Blake, there are multiple versions of every “event,” and in an account in The Book of Urizen there is no smiling Los:

  A vast spine writhed in torment

  Upon the winds; shooting pained

  Ribs, like a bending cavern

  And bones of solidness, froze

  Over all his nerves of joy.

  Exhausted by the effort and horrified at the hideous creature he has fabricated,

  In terrors Los shrunk from his task:

  His great hammer fell from his hand.

  The image that illustrates these lines (color plate 21) shows Los experiencing the “dismal woe” that is described just above the image, with a huge fluted column projecting weirdly from his body. It seems grotesquely phallic, and architectural as well; Erdman thinks it’s a leaning tower like that of Pisa, about to topple over. We don’t see the “vast spine” and ribs mentioned in the poem, but Urizen is indeed shockingly skeletal, with neck vertebrae disturbingly visible. Still, the work of reconstruction is under way, and as David Bindman says, he is now “sentient enough to agonize in the flames of the forge.”21 His ankles are shackled to the ground.

  There are many ways to imagine creativity, and the blacksmith’s labor is not the only one. Further on in The Book of Urizen, Los somehow extrudes a globe of organic “life blood” from his head:

  The globe of life blood trembled

  Branching out into roots,

  Fibrous, writhing upon the winds;

  Fibres of blood, milk and tears,

  In pangs, eternity on eternity.

  Anatomists at the time understood the organs to be composed of fibers, and they identified three different types of fluid-bearing vessels. These were blood, lacteals, and tears—the very ones that emerge from Los’s bloody globe. In the picture that corresponds to these lines (color plate 22) he presses his hands forcibly against his head while his hair drips down upon the globe like bloody rain.22

  In still another poem on this theme, The Song of Los, published in the same year as The Book of Los, a weary Los is depicted at rest with a blood-red sun before him (color plate 23). Here he seems melancholy and even tender, though oddly chubby. The just-created sun gives off crimson beams, while a greater source of light and energy spills from beyond it. Los is a creator, but he is not the creator. Creation is an ongoing expression of energy, not the primal event described in Genesis.

  In the densely colored images in the books of this period there is no etching at all, just paint laid directly on the plate and touched up as needed after printing. Robert Essick describes what can be seen in the particular copy that is reproduced here:

  The design is built up by multiple layers of color printing, painting, and perhaps blotting. The major elements of the design were printed in thick, opaque colors that formed large dendritic patterns. These can be seen in areas untouched by subsequent layers, such as the background and just below the figure’s left knee. The man and hammer were then painted with thick colors, but the suns received further printings or blottings. Below the hammer are a number of short hairs stuck to the paper—very likely the remains of a stubble brush used to daub on colors. . . . Subsequent layers of color shimmer above the paper to form a “glowing illusion” like the sun described in the Book of Los.23

  In reproduction, unfortunately, these subtle effects disappear.

  Los as Watchman, Los in the Sun

  When he was first imagining the role of Los, Blake concentrated on mythic origins. In Milton and in its sequel, Jerusalem, Los enters our world, and in the frontispiece to Jerusalem (figure 36) we see him doing so. He is dressed as a night watchman; the sun is now a “globe of fire,” not blood, and serves as his lantern. Strange dark rays shine from inside the archway, and a wind blows Los’s hair and clothing to one side. His hat is a broad-brimmed one such as Blake himself was accustomed to wear, and his garment—blue in the sole colored copy of Jerusalem—is perhaps a printer’s smock. One item is hardly British, however: the sandal, which for Blake symbolizes prophetic vocation. And again we hear of the left foot, which in Milton was the place where Milton’s spirit entered Blake as a falling star. Here he speaks in his own voice:

  All this vegetable world appeared on my left foot

  As a bright sandal formed immortal of precious stones and gold;

  I stooped down and bound it on to walk forward through Eternity.

  “Sounds solid,�
�� Stephen Dedalus reflects as he walks with eyes closed on a Dublin beach, “made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?”24

  Los’s left hand is raised in a gesture that is hard to read. Is he registering apprehension? Just keeping his balance? He is gazing to the right; what does he see that we can’t? Above the archway some lines of verse were originally engraved, deleted from the printed version but recoverable from a proof sheet, and one of them describes this moment: “He entered the door of death for Albion’s sake inspired.”25

  Two biblical texts help to clarify the significance of the watchman. One is in Isaiah: “Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.” And since by entering death’s door Los is enacting a Christlike role, the Gospel of John is relevant too: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.”26

  Just as Milton unites with Blake in Felpham, so does Los, as described at length in a verse letter to Butts. (It is worth remarking that if Blake had not had Butts for a sympathetic correspondent, some of his most memorable statements and poems would not exist.) Setting out from Felpham to meet his sister, who was coming from London for a visit, Blake finds the way threateningly blocked by family demons:

  36. Jerusalem, copy E, frontispiece

  With my father hovering upon the wind

  And my brother Robert just behind

  And my brother John the evil one

  In a black cloud making his moan,

  Though dead they appear upon my path

  Notwithstanding my terrible wrath.

  They beg they entreat they drop their tears

  Filled full of hopes filled full of fears,

  With a thousand angels upon the wind

  Pouring disconsolate from behind

  To drive them off, and before my way

  A frowning thistle implores my stay.