Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  What to others a trifle appears

  Fills me full of smiles or tears,

  For double the vision my eyes do see

  And a double vision is always with me.

  With my inward eye ’tis an old man grey,

  With my outward a thistle across my way.

  “If thou goest back,” the thistle said

  “Thou art to endless woe betrayed,

  For here does Theotormon lower

  And here is Enitharmon’s bower

  And Los the terrible thus hath sworn

  Because thou backward dost return

  Poverty envy old age and fear

  Shall bring thy wife upon a bier.”27

  (“Theotormon” here is one of the sons of Los.)

  This is a vision, not a hallucination. But if to other people a thistle is just a thistle, to Blake it looms as a figure of stern reproof, accusing him of failing to support his depressed and sickly wife. Catherine was ill a good deal of the time at Felpham, and Blake evidently felt that she was reproaching him for failing to bring in more income—but the way to do that would be to abandon his original work and to drudge full-time at tiresome commissions secured by Hayley. By invoking Los, the thistle uses Blake’s own mythic character against him, provoking a crisis of self-doubt. He passes the test and kicks the thistle aside. Suddenly an epiphany bursts upon him:

  Then Los appeared in all his power;

  In the sun he appeared descending before

  My face in fierce flames; in my double sight

  ’Twas outward a sun, inward Los in his might. . . .

  With the bows of my mind and the arrows of thought,

  My bowstring fierce with ardour breathes,

  My arrows glow in their golden sheaves.

  My brothers and father march before,

  The heavens drop with human gore.

  Now I a fourfold vision see

  And a fourfold vision is given to me.

  ’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

  And threefold in soft Beulah’s night

  And twofold always. May God us keep

  From single vision and Newton’s sleep.

  Strikingly, the family members are all male. There is no mention of Blake’s mother, or for that matter of the sister who is about to arrive. And why do the heavens drip with “human gore”? Has Blake wounded the familial blocking figures with his arrows of thought?

  At any rate, the mandate must not be refused, and the bow and arrows are the ones that Blake will invoke again in the lyric that introduces Milton: “Bring me my bow of burning gold, / Bring me my arrows of desire.” When this episode is recapitulated in Milton, the relatives and the blood are no longer mentioned.

  While Los heard indistinct in fear, what time I bound my sandals

  On, to walk forward through Eternity, Los descended to me,

  And Los behind me stood, a terrible flaming sun, just close

  Behind my back. I turned round in terror, and behold,

  Los stood in that fierce glowing fire; and he also stooped down

  And bound my sandals on in Udan-Adan. Trembling I stood

  Exceedingly with fear and terror, standing in the vale

  Of Lambeth: but he kissed me and wished me health,

  And I became one man with him arising in my strength.

  ’Twas too late now to recede; Los had entered into my soul:

  His terrors now possessed me whole! I arose in fury and strength.28

  This moment is illustrated by a full-page design (color plate 24) in which an impressively muscular Blake—as usual, blond—pauses from strapping on his sandal and turns “in terror” as Los steps forward out of the sun. (Commentators suggest that his name implies the sun—sol, its Latin name, spelled backward.) Why is Blake’s head positioned at the level of Los’s crotch? Mitchell long ago suspected “homoerotic implications,” while a more recent commentator objects that the conjunction of head and loins may be merely a botched attempt to suggest three-dimensional depth. Christopher Hobson, in his judicious Blake and Homosexuality, argues that Blake was tolerant of all sexual practices but not personally homosexual, and points out that in this picture “Blake’s posture of twisting to face someone behind him is an unlikely configuration for an actual sexual act or kiss.”29 But even if, as does seem likely, no literal sexual encounter is implied, the location of the head is surely not accidental. As in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and in America, energy is libidinal, and Los is transmitting that potency to Blake.

  Painful though the struggle was, Blake has accepted his prophetic calling—but that is only the beginning. Acting as an avatar of the inspiring Los, he must now strive to bring about a breakthrough into Eternity. Each of the three major prophecies—The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem—ends with an apocalypse, which is described in imagery from the Book of Revelation that was once familiar to everybody, as in “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” According to Revelation, that apocalypse lies in the future, when the entire universe will end. In Blake’s myth it is an interior Last Judgment that takes place “whenever any individual rejects error and embraces truth.”30 It is thus constructive, not destructive, apprehending Eternity within the world of time.

  11. BREAKTHROUGH TO APOCALYPSE

  Mastering the Spectre

  LONG as Jerusalem is—and it is very long—it is not really a poem in which events “happen.” Even Northrop Frye, its most passionate admirer, conceded that it is a “dehydrated epic.” It is far from obvious that it should be called an epic at all. Frye also says, “Each part of Jerusalem presents a phase of imaginative vision simultaneously with the body of error which it clarifies.” Not everyone will agree that what goes on is clarifying, but the myriad forms of error are displayed in bewildering detail. For example, Blake expects us to make sense of a succession of twenty-seven “churches” in human history, the first nine of which are “hermaphroditic,” the second nine “female males,” and the final nine “male females.” There are passages of great eloquence throughout the poem but also long pedestrian stretches, such as a ninety-line passage listing correspondences between British names and biblical ones (a brief excerpt will suffice):

  And the names of the thirty-two counties of Ireland are these:

  Under Judah and Issachar and Zebulun are Lowth Longford

  Eastmeath Westmeath Dublin Kildare Kings County

  Queens County Wicklow Catherloh Wexford Kilkenny. . . .1

  One threat, in particular, permeates Jerusalem. Far more than in Milton, and more even than in The Four Zoas, Blake is preoccupied by what he calls the Female Will. The culmination of the poem will be Albion’s reunion with his emanation Jerusalem, though she is more like a daughter than an equal partner. But it is a confederacy of nature goddesses that dominates the poem. Vala seduces Albion away from Jerusalem, and she is abetted thereafter by characters called Tirzah and Rahab. Blake’s symbolism of the female is of great importance to him, but most readers today are likely to find it repellent; it will be taken up separately later on.

  There is also a male incarnation of error, and here Blake addresses his experience as an artist in a powerfully imaginative way. A picture near the beginning of Jerusalem shows Los resting after hard labor at his blazing forge (color plate 25). Hovering above him is a new addition to the cast of characters, the Spectre. As the text on this plate indicates, it has separated out from Los himself, “divided from his back,” and is threatening him with doubts about his vocation.

  In pain the Spectre divided, in pain of hunger and thirst,

  To devour Los’s human perfection; but when he saw that Los

  Was living, panting like a frighted wolf and howling

  He stood over the Immortal, in the solitude and darkness:

  Upon the darkening Thames, across the whole island westward,

  A horrible Shadow of Death, among the furnaces, beneath

&
nbsp; The pillar of folding smoke; and he sought by other means

  To lure Los: by tears, by arguments of science, and by terrors:

  Terrors in every nerve, by spasms and extended pains.

  Yet Los is unafraid. In the picture he gazes up at the howling Spectre, whose hands are pressed against its ears to shut out anything he might say, and “answered unterrified to the opaque blackening fiend.”2

  The symbolism of the Spectre is a striking example of the zeitgeist at work. Many writers at the time were fascinated by the idea of a shadowy double or doppelgänger (the word was coined by Jean Paul Richter in 1796); the best known is the monster that acts out Dr. Frankenstein’s unconscious aggression, successively strangling his brother, his best friend, and his fiancée. At times Blake imagines a spectre as emerging when a Zoa and his emanation split apart. At other times it represents an interior division that is somehow present from the very start: “Man is born a spectre or Satan and is altogether an evil, and requires a new selfhood continually and must continually be changed into his direct contrary.”3 By now, when Blake speaks of Satan he no longer means the figure of fiery energy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; rather, he has in mind a “state” of negativity and resistance that individuals may fall into but may also escape from. When the mild-mannered William Hayley seeks to dominate Blake, he is described as being temporarily in the state of Satan.

  As Blake’s sympathy with the “mad” poet Cowper confirms, he did have fears of despair. In its separated state the Spectre cries out in anguish,

  O that I could cease to be! Despair! I am despair,

  Created to be the great example of horror and agony; also my Prayer is vain. I called for compassion: compassion mocked; Mercy and pity threw the grave stone over me, and with lead And iron bound it over me for ever.4

  Threatening though the Spectre is, there is no possibility of rejecting it outright, for it is an essential element in the self. When Albion fell into nightmare and his constituent Zoas broke away, the Zoa formerly known as Urthona split into three elements: Los, Enitharmon, and the Spectre. All must be reintegrated. Enitharmon plays what Blake regards as a “feminine” role in artistic creation, adding coloring to Los’s firm outlines. As for the Spectre, it represents the practical execution of Blake’s visionary conceptions, which are not embodied until words and images have been etched into metal plates.

  In its separated state, the Spectre seeks to intimidate Los, or even to destroy him.

  While Los spoke, the terrible Spectre fell shuddering before him, Watching his time with glowing eyes to leap upon his prey.

  But Los proves more powerful, and he forces the Spectre to cooperate in the work of imaginative creation. “Take thou this hammer,” he commands, “and in patience heave the thundering bellows, / Take thou these tongs: strike thou alternate with me, labour obedient.” The hammer is obviously phallic in the picture, and there can be no doubt that sexual energy is implied. Just how the bat-winged “fiend” is supposed to wield the hammer is far from clear, however; we are probably not expected to visualize it.

  Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza,

  Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty. Trembling in fear,

  The Spectre weeps, but Los unmoved by tears or threats remains.

  “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s;

  I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

  So Los, in fury and strength, in indignation and burning wrath.

  Shudd’ring the Spectre howls, his howlings terrify the night.

  He stamps around the anvil, beating blows of stern despair.5

  Golgonooza is Blake’s city of artistic creation, of which more presently.

  Once tamed and assimilated, the Spectre pretty much drops out of sight. What evidently matters to Blake is the idea of its role in creation, rather than its continued activity as a character in the poem. Or to put it differently, in its separated state the Spectre is all too vividly real, as we will see later in a powerful notebook poem that begins, “My Spectre around me night and day / Like a wild beast guards my way.”6 Reintegrated into the creative self, it ceases to have a distinct existence of its own.

  This disappearance of the Spectre is characteristic of Blake’s prophecies. In a very broad sense, each of them has a plot, but not in an ordinary cause-and-effect way. They are more like kaleidoscopic dreams than coherent narratives. Each is a dizzying medley of refractions, repetitions, and metamorphoses. Though Albion disappears from view most of the time, in effect he is constantly present throughout, since everything that happens is the shifting imagery of his ongoing nightmare. In the original draft of The Four Zoas, entitled Vala, the subtitle was The Death and Judgment of the Ancient Man, a Dream of Nine Nights. But we never get to know Albion; it is his discordant components that are all too visibly alive.

  Apocalypse

  In Milton and Jerusalem, the culminating apocalypse—the breakthrough into Eternity when Albion awakens—is only briefly described, but in The Four Zoas it is described at great length. The chronology of these three works is not entirely clear, but their sequence is. Blake began The Four Zoas in 1797 and revised that never-engraved manuscript at various times. Some of its material was recycled in the fifty-plate Milton in 1804, which was first printed in 1811. By then Blake had gotten started on Jerusalem, possibly as early as 1808, and he continued to enlarge that poem over many years. In its final form it filled a hundred plates, divided rather arbitrarily into four books of equal size, and was printed at last in 1820. And although each of the final two prophecies ends with an apocalypse, it is almost endlessly deferred and surprisingly anticlimactic when it finally arrives.

  In The Four Zoas, it is Los who precipitates the apocalypse by ripping Urizen’s rigid heavens apart:

  His right hand branching out in fibrous strength

  Seized the sun, his left hand like dark roots covered the moon,

  And tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense.

  Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud and shrill

  Sound of loud trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven,

  A mighty sound articulate: “Awake ye dead and come

  To judgment from the four winds, awake and come away!”7

  This breakthrough is a colossal expansion of the liberation of humanity that had been anticipated in America: A Prophecy. Now, however, the cruelty is far more shocking than in that optimistic early work.

  The tree of Mystery went up in folding flames;

  Blood issued out in mighty volumes pouring in whirlpools fierce

  From out the flood gates of the sky.

  The gates are burst, down pour The torrents black upon the earth, the blood pours down incessant;

  Kings in their palaces lie drowned, shepherds their flocks their tents

  Roll down the mountains in black torrents, cities villages

  High spires and castles drowned in the black deluge; shoal on shoal

  Float the dead carcasses of men and beasts driven to and fro on waves

  Of foaming blood beneath the black incessant sky till all

  Mystery’s tyrants are cut off and not one left on earth. . . .

  From the clotted gore and from the hollow den

  Start forth the trembling millions into flames of mental fire,

  Bathing their limbs in the bright visions of Eternity.

  The grapes of wrath from Revelation are explicitly invoked:

  But in the wine presses the human grapes sing not nor dance,

  They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming.8

  Insofar as a historical apocalypse has taken place, this may refer to the bloodshed of the French Revolution and the counterrevolutionary wars that followed. Insofar as the apocalypse is internal, it is the psychic pain that accompanies any deep, far-reaching change, which entails a drastic reordering of the self.

  It is apparent that by the time Blake e
ngraved Milton and Jerusalem, he no longer thought that an apocalyptic liberation of humanity could be fully attained. In Milton it never occurs at all, but is only described as about to happen. At the end of Milton two sons of Los very briefly anticipate the event:

  Rintrah and Palamabron view the human harvest beneath.

  Their winepresses and barns stand open; the ovens are prepared, The wagons ready. Terrific lions and tygers sport and play, All animals upon the earth are prepared in all their strength To go forth to the great harvest and vintage of the nations.

  In Jerusalem the apocalypse does happen, but it is more like a release from frustration than a fulfilling breakthrough. As Essick comments, “Jerusalem is highly repetitious in its imagery and actions. We are tossed about with maximum sound and fury but appear to get nowhere until suddenly, on the last few plates, the poem ends with an apocalyptic big-bang.”9

  Traditional Blake scholarship used to celebrate the apocalypse as fully achieved, rather than acknowledging that it is a fantasized alternative to life as people actually experience it. The comments of a psychoanalyst who is familiar with Blake’s writings are worth pondering. Ronald Britton observes that a dread of psychic fragmentation and of the void is characteristic of borderline personalities, and he suggests that Blake’s apocalyptic breakthrough can be seen as compensatory fantasy: “He unashamedly propounds as the route to salvation what in psychoanalysis has been called infantile megalomania. In this state, he claims, we are what we imagine we are, and our imagination is our share of the divine.”10

  Generations of critics have indeed echoed Frye’s extravagant claim that “imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept.” In what possible sense more real? Britton’s persuasive conclusion is that what is most powerful in Blake’s poems is the representation of Experience, “a sadder and grimmer place than in The Songs of Innocence, and less blissful than Beulah, but with the great advantage of being as real as it sounds.”11 And this may well be the reason why the apocalypse, when it finally comes, seems almost cursory in Milton and Jerusalem. For Blake it is a deeply longed-for goal, but his real subject is the arduous struggle to get there.