Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
“Secret ministry” is an expression that might make one think of Blake, but we never find Coleridge’s kind of leisurely, loving detail in his poems. It’s not that he isn’t observant of nature, but in Blake observation always expands immediately into symbolic meaning:
There is the nettle that stings with soft down, and there
The indignant thistle whose bitterness is bred in his milk.29
It would never occur to Coleridge or Wordsworth to call a thistle “indignant.”
It needs to be emphasized that what Blake attacks in “nature” is never the actual world of fields and rivers and living things. Those he loved, and he celebrated them from Songs of Innocence right on until the end. In Milton, for example,
First e’er the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms,
Joy even to tears, which the sun rising dries; first the wild thyme
And meadow-sweet, downy and soft waving among the reeds,
Light springing on the air lead the sweet dance. They wake
The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak: the flaunting beauty
Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn, lovely May,
Opens her many lovely eyes. Listening the rose still sleeps,
None dare to wake her; soon she bursts her crimson curtained bed
And comes forth in the majesty of beauty. Every flower:
The pink, the jessamine, the wall-flower, the carnation,
The jonquil, the mild lily opes her heavens! every tree
And flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance,
Yet all in order sweet and lovely, men are sick with love!
Such is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.30
This is a heartfelt appreciation, yet the final line is crucial. As in the imagery in A Sunshine Holiday, Beulah is a place of refuge but not a final home. From the perspective of Eternity, this celebration of nature is a lamentation.
A case can be made that when Blake seems to criticize nature, his real target is often mistaken human constructions of nature. That is certainly what happens in Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau. But Blake also insists that nature, as we normally understand it, is radically inadequate unless animated by the divine imagination. The passage just quoted from Milton evokes the odors of flowers as a joyous dance, and a related passage in the preceding plate does the same kind of thing with sounds:
Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring;
The lark sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn
Appears, listens silent; then springing from the waving cornfield! loud
He leads the choir of day! trill, trill, trill, trill,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse,
Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell.
His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather
On throat and breast and wings vibrates with the effluence divine.
All nature listens silent to him, and the awful sun
Stands still upon the mountain looking on this little bird
With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love and awe.
Keats’s nightingale—we don’t know whether Blake ever read the great Ode to a Nightingale, which was written years after this passage in Milton—represents the collective immortality of nature, by contrast with the “sole self” of the poet. Blake’s nightingale and lark represent nature spiritually transformed, and they sing with such inspiration that the sun itself stands still to listen.31
In this lovely passage, Blake was surely remembering Shakespeare:
And then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
Nature in its ordinary “Romantic” sense was for Blake sullen earth, and that was his quarrel with mainstream Romanticism. Wordsworth urged acceptance of
. . . the very world which is the world
Of all of us—the place in which, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all.32
As Catherine Blake commented, her husband preferred to live in Eternity.
Some lines by a modern heir to the Romantics, Wallace Stevens, likewise bring out the contrast with Blake:
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.33
Blake knew all about the stubborn structure of language, but he could never make peace with the imperfect—or with Mother Nature. No wonder, then, that despite his loathing of institutional religion, he was profoundly religious in a way that few of his contemporaries were. Only a full, living incarnation of the divine within the everyday could render it bearable. Yet that divine spirit must also be wholly human. Trying to understand and articulate this paradoxical ideal became Blake’s lifelong quest.
14. WRESTLING WITH GOD
All Religions Are One
RELIGION was profoundly important to Blake, in a questing and questioning way that is thought-provoking even for readers and viewers who are not religious at all. One of his first experiments in relief etching was a little pamphlet entitled All Religions Are One, which asserts that however much religions may differ in detail, they have a common origin. “The religions of all nations are derived from each nation’s different reception of the poetic genius, which is everywhere called the spirit of prophecy. . . . As all men are alike (though infinitely various) so all religions; and as all similars, have one source. The true Man is the source, he being the poetic genius.”1
That sounds definite, but what, really, is “the true Man”? Answering that question was a lifelong challenge for Blake. He always denied the existence of an omnipotent patriarch in heaven, and he would sometimes insist that the divine was simply a spiritual dimension that all human beings share. Thus, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “All deities reside in the human breast.” And the notebook verses known as The Everlasting Gospel include this unequivocal statement:
Thou art a man God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore.
But as Blake labored long and hard on The Four Zoas, and afterward on the prophecies Milton and Jerusalem, the figure of Jesus took on an increasingly crucial role. Concerned as he was with the breakdown of the self, he needed help from an agency beyond the self; without intervention by “the Saviour even Jesus,” the fall into formlessness would have no end. If Jesus were simply what is best in humanity, what would be the point in calling him “the Saviour” at all?2
The function of religion, in Blake’s view, is to ask ultimate questions about existence, and the questions are more important than the answers. He did declare once, “The Old and New Testaments are the great code of art,” but that doesn’t mean that the Bible has a monopoly on truth. Rather, the Bible is the particular set of symbols that are embedded in the Western imagination, inspiring Blake as it inspired Michelangelo and Raphael before him. But he always read the Bible, as Erdman puts it, counterclockwise, in explicit contrast to orthodox interpretation. As Blake says in The Everlasting Gospel,
Both read the Bible day and night
But thou read’st black where I read white.3
Blake explicitly rejected a great deal in the New Testament, including the doctrine of the virgin birth and the Pauline emphasis on sin. He liked the Old Testament even less, apart from the visionary prophets. The stony tablets of the Ten Commandments are a negative symbol throughout his work, as is the institution of priesthood with its repressive Law: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.” Blake was especially revolted by biblical military history. Reading an Anglican bishop’s claim that it must have been God’s will “to
exterminate so wicked a people” as the Canaanites, he retorted, “To me who believe the Bible and profess myself a Christian, a defence of the wickedness of the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under pretence of a command from God is altogether abominable and blasphemous.”4
The Ancient of Days
One of Blake’s most brilliant reimaginings of the biblical God is the great print known as The Ancient of Days (color plate 36), which is a name for God in the Book of Daniel: “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of Days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.” Blake made a number of versions of this image—the one reproduced here is the frontispiece to his poem Europe—and he was working on yet another in the last days of his life. An early biographer wrote that “he always bestowed more time and enjoyed greater pleasure when colouring [this] print than anything he ever produced.5
The image derives from the Book of Proverbs, in which Wisdom declares, “When he prepared the heavens, I was there, when he set a compass upon the face of the depth.” Milton expanded on the idea:
In his hand
He took the golden compasses, prepared
In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe and all created things.
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, “Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds;
This be thy just circumference, O world!”6
In Blake’s thought, however, there was never an original creation out of nothingness. On the contrary, the creation that is described in Genesis must represent a belated attempt to repair the damage that occurred when the integrated life of Eternity collapsed into fragments. So the creation in Genesis was already a fall. In The Book of Urizen:
He formed a line and a plummet
To divide the abyss beneath.
He formed a dividing rule;
He formed scales to weigh;
He formed massy weights;
He formed a brazen quadrant;
He formed golden compasses
And began to explore the abyss,
And he planted a garden of fruits.7
In contrast to Milton’s elaborately structured language, Blake’s is jerky and short of breath, suggesting dogged repetition rather than effortless mastery. And the “garden of fruits” is the Garden of Eden, where according to orthodox belief—but not according to Blake—one of those fruits was inexplicably forbidden, with fatal consequences.
The most striking thing about the figure in The Ancient of Days is his contorted posture. This God is crouching within the orb of the sun, which he has probably just traced with his compasses—crouching, because the sun is not large enough for him to do otherwise. His left knee is jammed against his shoulder in a posture that is all but impossible anatomically, and he holds the compasses with his “sinister” left arm, which presses awkwardly against his head. An epigram in Blake’s notebook entitled To God is relevant here:
If you have formed a circle to go into,
Go into it yourself and see how you would do.8
In Paradise Lost the compasses create form out of chaos; in Blake’s picture they represent a vain attempt to circumscribe the infinite.
Are we mistaken, then, when we perceive grandeur in The Ancient of Days? By no means. Blake despised agnostics like Voltaire, who commented sarcastically in Candide that “Milton has the Messiah take a big pair of compasses out of a heavenly cupboard to trace out his work.”9 Blake’s Ancient of Days is arrestingly grand in a way that Voltaire could never have understood. Grand—but he is not the omnipotent creator of Genesis, for grander still is the blaze of energy that pours out from behind his newly outlined sun. The windblown hair and beard likewise suggest powerful energy, flowing through an infinite universe far greater than the one the Ancient of Days has just finished making. He participates in that creative energy, but he is not its cause.
Translating ideas into graphic images, Blake often exploited the technical possibilities of his media, and Robert Essick comments that there is a striking embodiment of doubleness in this great picture. “Relief lines define the figure’s body and arm, but the compasses reaching into the void below are executed as white lines—or, more accurately, white areas—against a black relief background. It is as though Blake were combining positive and negative photographic images to make a single design.” The cross-hatching in the clouds may suggest a constricting net of Urizenic control.10
Visitors to Rockefeller Center in New York may not be aware that Lee Lawrie’s 1933 art deco image of “Wisdom” (figure 45), over the main entrance of the GE Building, is a tribute to The Ancient of Days—with, of course, the ambiguity left out. Beneath it is inscribed a very different biblical text from the one in Proverbs: “Wisdom And Knowledge Shall Be The Stability Of Thy Times.”11
The Gloomy Patriarch
When Blake published The Book of Urizen in 1794, his myth of the Zoas was only partly developed, but he was already certain that the patriarch in the sky was a mere human invention, nobody’s daddy, as he called him in a couple of sarcastic poems:
Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed
And said I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering.
In this relatively early work, Blake may not yet have thought of Urizen as one of the four Zoas, but he certainly represents, as he would continue to do, a union of abstract reason with moral repression. In the title page (figure 46), a squatting Urizen is inscribing two books or tablets at the same time, a quill pen in his right hand and an etching needle or paintbrush in his left. He is apparently copying from a book on the ground, tracing its text with his foot, but his eyes are closed; perhaps he is falling asleep. Since the book is sinking roots into the ground, it is probably the book of nature. Behind him are the tablets of the Law, looking like gravestones. Urizen’s world is oppressively heavy. In Morris Eaves’s interpretation, “The force of the Law has tugged the trees into earthbound arches, and the arches are deathly, like everything else in the design. . . . Urizen, who has sunk to the bottom of the design like a stone, is depicted as a man unable to stand erect in a universe of his own creating.”12
45. Wisdom, by Lee Lawrie
46. The Book of Urizen, copy G, title page
In the copy of the plate that is reproduced here, Blake has masked out one word in the title, which in other copies appears as The First Book of Urizen. That was probably an allusion to a common description of Genesis as “the first book of Moses,” and he may have realized that “first” seemed to imply a forthcoming Second Book of Urizen that was never intended. After deleting the word in this copy he extended a branch to fill the gap.
In Genesis, after each day of creation, “God saw that it was good,” and after finishing the job, “Behold, it was very good.” With Urizen it is just the opposite. Fearing energy and disorder, he labors in vain to establish rigid stability:
I have sought for a joy without pain,
For a solid without fluctuation.
All that he is able to achieve, however, is “a wide world of solid obstruction,” and at the cost of pain without joy.13
A full-page image (color plate 37) shows a melancholy Urizen immersed in the sea of materiality. He may be floating, since his beard extends horizontally, or treading water, or even drifting downward. Gilchrist thought it was the latter, describing him as “an old, amphibious-looking giant, with rueful visage, letting himself sink slowly through the waters like a frog.” Then again, he might even be struggling to rise up. In copy B, at the Morgan Library, there is an inscription on the reverse side of this picture. Though not in Blake’s hand, it may reproduce a caption of his that had been trimmed away:
I labour upwards into
futurity
If Urizen
could return to Eternity he would live in an “eternal Now” and would no longer need to anticipate the future.14
It is at this point in The Book of Urizen that Urizen appropriates the role of the biblical God.
Here alone I in books formed of metals
Have written the secrets of wisdom. . . .
Lo! I unfold my darkness, and on
This rock, place with strong hand the book
Of eternal brass, written in my solitude:
Laws of peace, of love, of unity;
Of pity, compassion, forgiveness.
Let each choose one habitation,
His ancient infinite mansion;
One command, one joy, one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure
One king, one God, one Law.
Urizen’s proclamation recalls Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Blake did believe that a divine principle unites all of humanity in “one spirit,” but he would have regarded “laws” of love and compassion as oxymoronic, and he never accepted the authority of a deity above all. It is in another epistle that he finds the proper solution: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law”—the rigidly negative commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai on tablets of stone. And Urizen’s “book of eternal brass” is surely an ironic reminiscence of a hymn by Isaac Watts:
His hand has writ the sacred Word
With an immortal pen;
Engraved as in eternal brass
The mighty Promise shines.15
Another full-page picture (figure 47) shows Urizen shackled, weeping in despair at the hopelessness of his project of patriarchal control.
47. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 11
His soul sickened! he cursed
Both sons and daughters, for he saw
That no flesh nor spirit could keep
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 22