Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake
Page 18
The Stubborn Structure
The struggle to achieve the breakthrough is where Golgonooza, Los’s city of art, comes in. It may not be the oddest name Blake invented, but it is certainly odd. Various imaginative associations have been proposed. The most obvious is that Christ was crucified at Golgotha, “the place of the skull,” so the name may imply self-sacrifice. In any event Golgonooza is imperfect, an all too temporary city of imagination that Los erects against the forces of destruction.
Here on the banks of the Thames Los builded Golgonooza,
Outside of the gates of the human heart, beneath Beulah
In the midst of the rocks of the altars of Albion. In fears
He builded it, in rage and in fury. It is the spiritual fourfold
London: continually building and continually decaying desolate!
An illustration in Jerusalem shows a pair of winged angels with their heads in their hands, facing each other across a circle that contains this inscription: “Continually Building. Continually Decaying because of Love and Jealousy.”12 The same could be said of Blake’s myth—it was forever being rebuilt.
In Eternity, buildings and works of art are unnecessary. The Eternals—shadowy and impossible to visualize, as always—communicate in an imaginative mode that we can only guess at.
They conversed together in visionary forms dramatic, which bright
Redounded from their tongues in thunderous majesty.
For us, however, communication is hard work. Referring to Bowlahoola and Allamanda (generally thought to mean the stomach and nervous system), Blake declares,
I call them by their English names: English, the rough basement.
Los built the stubborn structure of the language, acting against
Albion’s melancholy, who must else have been a dumb despair.13
English is Blake’s rough basement, as Italian would be Dante’s, because thoughts have to be communicated through words. But words are generic and degenerate into clichés, so Blake strives continually, like Los at the forge, to force the stubborn structure of language into new shapes. That includes making up “English names” that nobody ever heard before.
The final plate of Jerusalem presents a richly thought-provoking image, but before we look at it we need to consider an earlier image in the poem, a gigantic version of the prehistoric stone structures known as trilithons (color plate 26). Familiar from the surviving example at Stonehenge, the ancient stone circles were believed in Blake’s time to have been built by Druids. At first sight this image is attractive. “The firm drawing,” an art historian says, “in the thick yet graceful lines, is lightly printed and freely and delicately coloured, so the stones are felt as colossal, of enormous mass, but also have a lovely airy cool space around them.”14 The colors are indeed delicate: green fields and hills, the sky in two shades of blue, and a mild yellow sun glowing at the exact center of the plate.
Still, this is not a positive image. The tiny human figures are dwarfed by the enormous rectangular blocks that tower above them, the very opposite of living form. In his address “To the Jews” in Jerusalem Blake declares, “Your ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem, and Noah, who were Druids, as the Druid temples (which are the patriarchal pillars and oak groves) over the whole earth witness to this day.” Worshipping a threatening goddess of nature in dark oaken groves, the Druids sought to propitiate her with human sacrifice, and they sponsored a vicious culture of war:
The wicker man of Scandinavia, in which cruelly consumed
The captives reared to heaven howl in flames among the stars;
Loud the cries of war on the Rhine and Danube with Albion’s sons.
Away from Beulah’s hills and vales break forth the souls of the dead
With cymbal, trumpet, clarion, and the scythed chariots of Britain.
Blake didn’t make up the wicker man. No less an authority than Julius Caesar reported that the Gauls appeased their gods by filling huge wickerwork effigies with living men and then setting them on fire.15 Current events mingle here with ancient legend: “Albion’s sons” were fighting on the Rhine and Danube.
Stonehenge, though mistakenly attributed to Druids, was rightly surmised to have had something to do with tracking the sun and measuring time. To Blake this means that it was disastrously implicated in natural religion.
They build a stupendous building on the plain of Salisbury, with chains
Of rocks round London Stone: of reasonings, of unhewn demonstrations
In labyrinthine arches (mighty Urizen the architect) through which
The heavens might revolve and Eternity be bound in their chain.
Labour unparalleled! a wondrous rocky world of cruel destiny,
Rocks piled on rocks reaching the stars, stretching from pole to pole.
The building is natural religion and its altars natural morality,
A building of eternal death, whose proportions are eternal despair.16
With this as context, we may turn to the final plate of Jerusalem (figure 37). At the center stands Los at his ease, in the pose of the classical Apollo Belvedere, with genitals clearly visible, leaning on his tongs and hammer. He looks weary, and well he should. Building the city of art has been hard labor, gripping red-hot metal with the tongs, while the great hammer—much larger than any actual blacksmith’s hammer—pounded it into shape.
To the right, Los’s dark emanation Enitharmon is associated with a crescent moon from which bloody fibers drip down. In her left hand she holds a distaff (or possibly a shuttle) with which to weave mortal bodies. That is the work of Generation, at once necessary and entrapping. At the left, an assistant springs into the air, bearing a sun on his shoulder like a bricklayer’s hod. Commentators generally agree that this must be the Spectre, but actually they are just guessing. If they are right, then he is now trusted to carry the sun that was once the lantern with which Los, dressed as a watchman, “entered the door of death.” That was shown in the frontispiece to Jerusalem, bookending the poem with this final plate. In the body of the poem the Spectre was threatening and batlike; now—if this identification is correct—he is fully human. The divided selves of Los are reunited at last, and fully cooperative.17 But how this has come to pass is never shown or explained. Blake is piercingly eloquent about conflict and suffering but unwilling or unable to give a convincing account of the breakthrough into wholeness.
37. Jerusalem, copy E, plate 100
But what is the winding structure in the background? This might seem to be yet another strange Blakean invention, but in fact he took it, as we have already noted, directly from a book called Abury: A Temple of the British Druids, by the antiquarian William Stukeley (figure 38). The modern name of the town is Avebury, and the prehistoric remains there were in ruins when Stukeley saw them, having been pillaged over the centuries for local buildings. His illustration is therefore an imaginative reconstruction, based on a mistaken belief that the central circle had originally been flanked by two wings in the form of a serpent, supposedly reflecting the influence of Egyptian religion. Stukeley also imagined Christian parallels: “The circle meant the supreme fountain of all being, the Father; the serpent, the divine emanation from him which was called the Son; the wings, the other divine emanation from them which was called the Spirit.” Blake had his own ideas about what serpent temples were for, and as early as Europe he made Avebury a symbol of repression, expanding to fill the whole of Britain as it “stretches out its shady length along the island white.” (Whiteness is implied in the name “Albion.”)18
What we find in this culminating plate of Jerusalem, then, is symbolism that is equivocal, and almost certainly meant to be. From one point of view Los has recreated and detoxified the old images. In Mitchell’s interpretation, “The serpent temple is Golgonooza, the city of art-in-progress, the ‘new Golgotha’ which is both the new place of sacrifice (self-annihilation) that replaces the old doctrine of atonement, and the new ‘place of the skull,’ the ne
w consciousness of eternity in time rather than beyond it.”19 But from another point of view, the temple’s symmetry is more suggestive of Urizen than of Los, whose expression in this picture seems gloomy rather than triumphant. The symbols are perplexingly mixed, too. The tongs and hammer were for shaping metal in a forge, but the serpent temple must have been hewn out of massive stones. When and how did Los do that—or did he do it? Perhaps the temple doesn’t represent Golgonooza at all, but instead invokes the natural world that resists transformation right up to the very end.
38. Avebury, as reconstructed by William Stukeley
Is the message that the poem Jerusalem has likewise done all it can, and that what happens next is up to us? “It is the poem itself,” Peter Otto says, “the very vehicle which has taken us to this point, which now must be cast off.”20 Jerusalem would turn out to be the last prophetic book Blake ever wrote.
12. “THE TORMENTS OF LOVE AND JEALOUSY”
William and Catherine
CATHERINE BLAKE was an active partner in producing the illuminated books, assisting with the printing process and sometimes applying watercolors to the final product. In The Four Zoas, Enitharmon, Los’s emanation, enacts a similar role: “First he drew a line upon the walls of shining heaven / And Enitharmon tinctured it with beams of blushing love.” Catherine’s loyalty to William was unquestioned. When Hayley got to know the couple at Felpham he described her in his verbose style as “perhaps the very best wife that ever mortal possessed, at least one that most admirably illustrates that expressive appellation ‘a helpmate.’” Hayley added, “They have been married more than seventeen years and are as fond of each other as if their honeymoon were still shining. . . . The good woman is so truly the half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul.”1
Thomas Butts told a story about calling on the Blakes in the 1790s, soon after their move to Lambeth, and finding them naked in their garden reading Paradise Lost. “Come in!” Blake cried, “it’s only Adam and Eve, you know.” Bentley dismisses this anecdote as apocryphal, but Aileen Ward isn’t so sure. She points out that a rebuttal by Butts’s grandson came long afterward and might reflect Victorian uneasiness about nudity rather than actual knowledge. Certainly Blake celebrated nakedness in his pictures and poems—“Intense! naked! a human fire fierce glowing”—and if Butts reacted in shock, Blake’s remark might have been intended to tease him.2
Nevertheless, there were serious tensions in the marriage, which surface repeatedly in poems in Blake’s notebook and throughout his great myth. Early on, Gilchrist heard, there had been a remarkable confrontation:
One day a dispute arose between Robert and Mrs. Blake. She, in the heat of discussion, used words to him his brother (though a husband too) thought unwarrantable. A silent witness thus far, he could now bear it no longer, but with characteristic impetuosity when stirred, rose and said to her: “Kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon directly, or you never see my face again!” A heavy threat, uttered in tones which, from Blake, unmistakably showed it was meant. She, poor thing! thought it very hard, as she would afterwards tell, to beg her brother in law’s pardon when she was not in fault! But being a duteous, devoted wife, though by nature nowise tame or dull of spirit, she did kneel down and meekly murmur, “Robert, I beg your pardon, I am in the wrong.” “Young woman, you lie!” abruptly retorted he: “I am in the wrong!”3
There is no way to know what the dispute was about, or what words were so offensive.
Some poems in Blake’s notebook express an ideal of mutual pleasure:
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
If Alexander Pope had written the first two lines—not that he would have—the final two lines would have undercut them with some witty reversal, showing that women and men want different things. The surprise in Blake’s anti-epigram is the frank acknowledgment that they both want the same thing: to see in each other unmistakable signs of gratification. But on the same notebook page there is a cynical alternative:
In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found,
The lineaments of gratified desire.
Whores appear gratified because they’re paid to do so.4
Most of the notebook poems on love and sex are about conflictedness, not gratification. The ancients associated myrtle with Venus, but Blake’s To My Myrtle presents a grim picture:
To a lovely myrtle bound,
Blossoms show’ring all around,
O how sick and weary I
Underneath my myrtle lie.
Why should I be bound to thee,
O my lovely myrtle tree?
And still more succinctly:
Grown old in love from seven till seven times seven,
I oft have wished for Hell for ease from Heaven.
As for Catherine, someone who knew the couple in old age remembered her saying, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company, he is always in Paradise.”5 That is usually taken as evidence of profound admiration, and Bentley inscribed it just below the title of his biography, The Stranger from Paradise. But surely it is ironic!
Free Love or Frustration and Defilement?
Most of the poets known as Romantics were discreet about sex. Wordsworth barely acknowledges it; Coleridge and Keats are eloquent about unhappiness in love but don’t refer to sex directly; and Shelley’s allusions are idealized and hazy. Byron had a well-deserved reputation as an irresistible seducer, but even so, his poems are relatively inexplicit about sex. Only Blake addresses the subject repeatedly and in depth. Of course the others couldn’t have done so even if they had wanted to, aiming as they did at commercial publication and a wide audience.
Thanks to a few declarations in the earliest works, particularly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake is widely thought to celebrate free love enthusiastically and to regard repression as easily overcome. According to the Voice of the Devil, “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Conversely, the way to perceive existence as infinite is “by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” But before long Blake would take a far gloomier view of erotic relations, and in his myth sexuality would become an ominous trap.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion, one of the early Lambeth Books, has a more connected narrative than most of Blake’s poems. In it a young woman named Oothoon awakens to her sexuality but is almost immediately raped by a brutal male. Regarding her as defiled, her intended partner then repudiates her angrily. She proclaims an ideal of free love and tries to win him back, but without success.
By the end of this remarkable work, the obstacles to gratification seem both inevitable and insoluble. Visions of the Daughters of Albion has affinities with the pioneering feminist analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published just one year before Blake’s poem. Since she and Blake were both connected with the same liberal publisher (he as an illustrator), it is quite possible that they knew each other. In a repeated refrain in Visions that is also the final line of the poem, the Daughters of Albion, speaking for all English women, share in Oothoon’s frustration and pain: “The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.”6
The third plate of the poem, entitled “The Argument,” is exceptionally beautiful (color plate 27) and has evident affinities with a little notebook lyric entitled Eternity:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the wingèd life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.7
A magnificent sunrise is indeed blazing behind Oothoon in the picture, and she does kiss the joy as it flies.
The verses that appear on this plate, however, as contrasted with the notebook poem, seem disconcertingly out of harmony with the picture:
I loved Theotormon
And I
was not ashamed;
I trembled in my virgin fears
And I hid in Leutha’s vale!
I plucked Leutha’s flower
And I rose up from the vale;
But the terrible thunders tore
My virgin mantle in twain.
Theotormon, not previously named, is the wooer who rejects Oothoon. The vale, commentators agree, is the female genitals.8 But why does a deflowering or rape follow immediately after Oothoon plucks the flower? Even if sexuality is experienced initially as innocent pleasure, that is only for the briefest time.
The lines that begin the next plate help to elucidate what is going on, but also complicate it further.
Enslaved, the Daughters of Albion weep: a trembling lamentation
Upon their mountains; in their valleys, sighs toward America.
For the soft soul of America, Oothoon wandered in woe
Along the vales of Leutha seeking flowers to comfort her;
And thus she spoke to the bright Marygold of Leutha’s vale:
“Art thou a flower! art thou a nymph! I see thee now a flower,
Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!”
The golden nymph replied, “Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild,
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
Can never pass away.” She ceased and closed her golden shrine.
Then Oothoon plucked the flower saying, “I pluck thee from thy bed,
Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts,
And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.”
The picture in “The Argument” shows Oothoon placing the flower-nymph between her breasts, kissing it instead of seeking to bind it down. The Marygold—probably spelled that way to suggest a woman’s name—is described as glowing, because according to Erasmus Darwin, marigolds actually emit flashes of light.9