William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter and engraver who invented a method of printing that let him publish his own poems with his own designs, and who used it, between 1788 and 1820, to build in twelve “illuminated books” a complete mythology of the fall, division and resurrection of Man. A London tradesman’s son, trained as a reproductive engraver and never out of the trade, he was known in his lifetime, when he was known at all, as the eccentric illustrator of Young’s Night Thoughts and Blair’s Grave, as the author of some lyrics that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb admired in manuscript or in borrowed copies, and as a man who said that he talked with angels and drew the spirits of the dead. He sold his books in a few dozen copies, painted for two patrons, held one exhibition, which received one review, and was buried in a common grave. What he left was a body of work in three media which his admirers have since read as one thing: the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93) and the prophecies of the Lambeth decade; the three long poems Vala, or The Four Zoas (c. 1797–1807), Milton (1804–c. 1811) and Jerusalem (1804–c. 1820); the twelve large colour prints of 1795; the biblical pictures for Thomas Butts; the illustrations to Milton, Job and Dante; and a mass of annotations, letters and manuscript verse in which the doctrine of the poems is stated as prose. That doctrine, which he called “the Religion of Jesus” and “the Everlasting Gospel”, holds that the human imagination is the divine body, “God himself”; that the creation we perceive is a contraction of that body, seen through “narrow chinks” of a cavern; that the fall was a division of one Man into warring faculties and separated sexes; that the God of law, vengeance and moral virtue is Satan “Named by the Divine Name”; that the only remedy is the “annihilation” of the Selfhood in mutual forgiveness; and that every act of true art is a piece of that remedy. He found materials for it in the Bible and Milton, in Swedenborg, whose church he briefly joined, in Boehme and Paracelsus, whom he named as his masters, in the Neoplatonism, Kabbalah and Druid antiquarianism that circulated in the London of the 1780s, and in the radical Dissent of his mother’s Moravian congregation; but he insisted that he had it by inspiration, “from immediate Dictation”, and that he must “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans”.¹

Life#

Broad Street (1757–1772)#

Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, in the parish of St James’s, Westminster, where he was christened on 11 December, and where his father James Blake kept a hosier’s shop. His mother, Catherine, born Wright at Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire and christened there on 21 November 1725, had been the wife of Thomas Armitage, hosier, of the same street; both Armitages had been received into the Moravian congregation at Fetter Lane on 26 November 1750, and her own letter of application survives in the Moravian archive, with its “I have very littell to say of my self for I am a pore crature and full of wants but my Dear Saviour will satisfy them all.” Thomas died in November 1751; the widow “left the Congregation” and married James Blake at the Mayfair Chapel on 15 October 1752. This discovery, published by Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard in 2004, replaced two older accounts of the family’s religion — the tradition that Blake’s father was a Swedenborgian, which Morton Paley had already shown to be an anachronism (the New Church was not founded until 1787), and E. P. Thompson’s hypothesis of a Muggletonian connection through a “Hermitage” family — and it is the only documented religious affiliation of either parent. Whether James Blake ever joined the Moravians is not known. There were six children: James (1753), the heir to the shop; a John who died in infancy; a second John (1760), the family’s black sheep; William; Robert, christened Richard in 1762 and the brother to whom William was closest; and Catherine (1764).²

The visions began, by his own later account and his friends’ report, in childhood. Gilchrist’s Life (1863) has the boy of four screaming when God “put his head to the window”, and the boy of eight or ten coming home from Peckham Rye to say that he had seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”, an account that his father was only prevented from thrashing him for by his mother’s intercession; Frederick Tatham, who had the story from Catherine Blake, adds Ezekiel seen under a tree in the fields. None of the three anecdotes is contemporary, and all three come from the last years of his life; what is contemporary is that from 1799 to 1827 every witness who knew him reports that he spoke of such seeing as an ordinary faculty, and that he was, in Samuel Palmer’s phrase, “a man without a mask”. He was not sent to school — Tatham says his father “dared not” — but at about ten was put to Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand, where he stayed until about 1772, buying at the auction rooms cheap prints after Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer and Giulio Romano, the masters of the “hard, wirey” line to whom he stayed loyal against the taste of his century. The Advertisement to Poetical Sketches says that he began to write verse in his twelfth year, and Benjamin Heath Malkin, who had the facts from Blake himself in 1806, that the song “How sweet I roam’d” was written before he was fourteen.³

Apprentice and student (1772–1782)#

On 4 August 1772 James Blake paid £52 10s. to bind his son for seven years to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, at 31 Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The apprenticeship was a conservative choice — Basire practised the old line-engraving that the fashionable stipple and mezzotint were displacing — and it decided the whole of Blake’s technical life; the story that his father first thought of the more fashionable William Wynne Ryland, and that the boy said, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged” (as Ryland was, for forgery, in 1783), is Tatham’s and Gilchrist’s. In his second year Basire sent him to draw the tombs in Westminster Abbey and other churches for Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments, and the years spent among the effigies of the Plantagenets — Malkin says he had himself almost become a Gothic monument — gave him the “Gothic” that he set against “Grecian” for the rest of his life, and, he said, a vision of Christ and the apostles walking in the aisles. His first surviving separate engraving, Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (1773, after Michelangelo), he re-engraved about 1820–25 with the inscription that it showed “one of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages Wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the World was not worthy”. On 8 October 1779, his indenture ended, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, where he quarrelled — the only witness is his own annotation to Reynolds thirty years later — with the Keeper, George Michael Moser, who took Raphael and Michelangelo out of his hands as “old Hard Stiff & Dry Unfinishd Works” and gave him Le Brun and Rubens: “These things that you call Finishd are not Even Begun how can they then, be Finishd?”⁴

He exhibited a watercolour, The Death of Earl Godwin, at the Academy in 1780, and again in 1784, 1785, 1799 and 1808; he never sought its membership. Two episodes of 1780 belong to the biographies. On 6 June, according to Gilchrist, the crowd of the Gordon Riots carried him to Newgate, where he watched the prison burn; the story rests on Gilchrist alone. About September, sketching on the Medway near the Chatham dockyard with Thomas Stothard and a third man, he was arrested as a suspected French spy and held at Upnor Castle until the Royal Academy vouched for the party — an episode recorded in Stothard’s own etching The Camp of Stothard, Blake, Ogleby and in the Stothard family’s memoir. He made his living, from 1780, as an engraver for the booksellers — a plate after Stothard for Olivier’s Fencing Familiarized in 1780, eight more after Stothard for the Novelist’s Magazine in 1782–83 — and he stayed a jobbing engraver to the end; the Blake who wrote the prophecies also engraved, for hire, plates for Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, Flaxman’s Iliad and Hesiod, the Wedgwood catalogue and Rees’s Cyclopaedia.⁵

Marriage, the Sketches and the death of Robert (1782–1790)#

On 18 August 1782 he married Catherine Boucher (the register has “Butcher”), daughter of a Battersea market-gardener, at St Mary’s, Battersea; she was twenty, born 25 April 1762, and signed the register with a cross. The story that he met her on the rebound from a Polly Wood and that she “pitied him from her heart” is Tatham’s. He taught her to read, to write, to draw and to print, and she became, as the recent study of the illuminated books has shown, his workshop partner: she inked and printed, coloured copies of the books, and in some cases painted designs of her own; on the one dated occasion when Blake is recorded as attending a meeting of any organisation, the General Conference of the New Jerusalem Church in April 1789, “W. Blake” and “C. Blake” signed side by side. The couple were childless. The marriage, by every witness, was a close one, and the traditions of trouble in it — Swinburne’s story, from the Gilchrist circle, that Catherine wept when Blake proposed taking a second wife in the manner of the patriarchs, and the whole thesis of Marsha Keith Schuchard’s Why Mrs Blake Cried (2006) — rest, in G. E. Bentley’s words, on a “remarkably frail” foundation. The couple lived at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields (1782–84); at 27 Broad Street, next door to the family shop, where after his father’s burial on 4 July 1784 Blake opened a print shop with his fellow-apprentice James Parker (1784–85); and at 28 Poland Street (1785–91).⁶

Through Flaxman, whom he had known since about 1779, Blake was taken up by the Revd Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet, whose drawing-room in Rathbone Place was a minor centre of the bluestocking London of the day, and it was at their and Flaxman’s expense that his juvenilia were printed in 1783 as Poetical Sketches, “by W. B.”, with an “Advertisement” apologising for the “irregularities and defects” of poems written “in his twelfth” to “his twentieth year”; the sheets were given to the author, who gave some away and never published the rest. The satire An Island in the Moon (c. 1784–85), in which the Mathew circle is guyed, is where the first lyrics of Songs of Innocence appear, sung by the company, and where the first, torn-out account of a new way of printing is hinted at. That method was born of the event that Blake counted the turning-point of his life. His brother Robert, whom he had taught to draw and whose sketchbook he used for the rest of his life, died in February 1787 and was buried at Bunhill Fields on 11 February; Blake, who had nursed him for a fortnight without sleep, said that he saw the released spirit ascend through the ceiling “clapping its hands for joy”, and slept for three days. J. T. Smith, who knew both brothers, reports (1828) that Blake afterwards said that Robert appeared to him in a vision and told him how to publish his poems — by writing text and design together in an acid-resisting varnish on copper and etching the plate in relief, so that the words stood up to be inked like type — and Blake himself, in Milton, drew “William” and “Robert” as twin figures struck by the same falling star. The first products of the “relief etching” were the two little tractates All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788); Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel followed in 1789.⁷

Between 1788 and 1790 he read Lavater and Swedenborg pen in hand, and in April 1789 he and Catherine attended the five-day conference at which the readers of Swedenborg in London constituted themselves a church. His annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom are those of a disciple who has already seen further than the master (“He who Loves feels love descend into him & if he has wisdom may percieve it is from the Poetic Genius which is the Lord”); those to the Divine Providence of 1790 are those of an enemy (“Is not this Predestination?”; “Cursed Folly!”); and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93), which dates itself from “thirty-three years” after the Swedenborgian last judgment of 1757, is the record of the breach. It is also the first statement of the doctrine of contraries, the first appearance of the “Bible of Hell” that the Lambeth books were to be, and the first naming of Paracelsus and Boehme as the masters beside whom Swedenborg “only holds a candle in sunshine”.⁸

Lambeth (1790–1800)#

In 1791 (Bentley’s date; the older biographies say 1790) the Blakes moved across the river to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, a house with a garden and a vine, where they lived for nine years and where almost all the illuminated books were made. Blake was now working for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson of St Paul’s Churchyard, for whom he engraved and at whose dinners, by Gilchrist’s and Tatham’s account, he met Paine, Godwin, Priestley, Holcroft and Mary Wollstonecraft. The traditions that he wore the bonnet rouge in the streets until the September massacres, and that he warned Paine to flee to France in September 1792 the night before the warrant was issued, are Gilchrist’s and Tatham’s and have no documentary support (Tatham sends Paine to “America”); what is documented is that Johnson set up in type The French Revolution: A Poem in Seven Books, “Book the First”, in 1791 and never published it, the single set of page-proofs surviving until it was printed in 1913. The mother died in September 1792. In the Prospectus “To the Public” of 10 October 1793 Blake announced “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet” and offered, at prices from 3s. to 10s. 6d., America, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Thel, the Marriage, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the Gates of Paradise and the “History of England”; Europe, The Book of Urizen, The Song of Los, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los followed in 1794–95. The buyers, so far as they are known, were friends and a few collectors — Flaxman, George Cumberland, Ozias Humphry, Isaac D’Israeli, Thomas Butts, later Charles Augustus Tulk and John Linnell — and no book of Blake’s was ever printed in more than about thirty copies. In 1795, in the studio at Lambeth, he also made the twelve large colour prints — Elohim Creating Adam, Newton, Nebuchadnezzar, Pity, The Good and Evil Angels and the rest — that are, with the Job engravings, the summit of his visual art.⁹

The commercial hope of the decade was Richard Edwards’s Night Thoughts: between 1795 and 1797 Blake made 537 watercolour designs around the text of Young’s poem, of which forty-three were engraved for the one part that appeared (1797) before the project collapsed; he then made 116 designs for Gray’s poems (1797–98) for Flaxman’s wife. The failure of the Night Thoughts was, he wrote in 1799, the moment when “Even Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my Graver”; “I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist”. What saved him was Thomas Butts, a clerk in the office of the Commissary General of Musters and the one patron who bought steadily for twenty years: in August 1799 Blake reported “an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea each”, the temperas from the Bible that began a series continued in watercolour until about 1809. In the same year the Revd John Trusler, who had commissioned a watercolour and disliked it, drew from him the letter of 23 August 1799 that is the first full statement of his theory of vision: “I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike … As a man is So he Sees.” It was also in these years, on the backs of the Night Thoughts proofs, that he began the manuscript epic Vala, dated 1797 on its title-page.¹⁰

Felpham (1800–1803)#

On 18 September 1800, at the invitation of William Hayley — the “Hermit of Eartham”, biographer of Cowper, a rich and kindly poetaster who meant to employ him on the engravings for the Life of Cowper and on miniatures of the neighbours — the Blakes moved to a thatched cottage at Felpham on the Sussex coast, rented at £20 a year. The first letters are ecstatic. To Flaxman, in verse, on 12 September: “Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face … Paracelsus & Behmen appeard to me.” To Butts on 2 October, the “first Vision of Light” on the sands, in which “each particle” of the sunlight was “a Man / Human formd”, “Each grain of Sand / Every Stone on the Land … Are Men Seen Afar”, and the whole gathered “as One Man” into whose bosom he was taken. To Flaxman’s wife: “Away to Sweet Felpham for Heaven is there / The Ladder of Angels descends thro the air.” Hayley taught him Greek and Latin, set him to Hebrew, and gave him work; and within a year the relation had gone wrong. In the letters to Butts of 1802–03 — the fullest account we have of Blake’s inner life — he speaks of a “Spiritual Enemy” who is also his “Corporeal Friend”, of being “under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly”, of the “Threats” he had heard when he was tempted to bury his talent, of “temptations … on the right hand & left”, and, on 22 November 1802, of the fourfold vision that he had on the road to Lavant: “Now I a fourfold vision see / And a fourfold vision is given to me / Tis fourfold in my supreme delight / And three fold in soft Beulahs night / And twofold Always. May God us keep / From Single vision & Newtons sleep.” On 25 April 1803 he told Butts that he had “composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost”, written “from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will”, and on 6 July that he dared not “pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity”; the poem is Milton, whose second book is set in the Felpham garden, or the Vala manuscript, or both. He had decided to go back to London when, on 12 August 1803, he put a soldier, Private John Scolfield of the Royal Dragoons, out of his garden by force. Scolfield and a comrade swore that Blake had said “Damn the King and Country and all his subjects” and that “the Soldiers are all slaves”; at Petworth on 4 October a true bill for sedition was found; Blake, bound over on his own recognisance of £100 with Hayley and the Chichester printer Joseph Seagrave as sureties in £50 each, returned to London that autumn; and at the Chichester Quarter Sessions on 11 January 1804, defended by Samuel Rose at Hayley’s expense before a bench chaired by the Duke of Richmond, he was acquitted, the soldiers’ evidence being contradictory. Scolfield, Cock, the justices Quantock, Peachey and Brereton, and Hayley himself as “Hyle”, were taken into Jerusalem as Sons of Albion.¹¹

South Molton Street (1803–1821)#

The Blakes lived from October 1803 to 1821 in two rooms at 17 South Molton Street, off Oxford Street, and these eighteen years, in which the two great illuminated epics were etched, were outwardly the worst of his life. On 23 October 1804 he wrote to Hayley that “on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures” (Count Truchsess’s exhibition of old masters in the New Road) “I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters”, and that he had “reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station” — the fiend being, in the poems he was then writing, the Spectre. In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek commissioned designs for Blair’s Grave; Blake made them, understood that he would engrave them, and saw the engraving given to Louis Schiavonetti, whose smooth stipple made the book of 1808 a success from which Blake earned only the fee for the designs. His conviction that Cromek then stole from him the idea of a picture of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, executed by Stothard and exhibited in 1807, cannot be supported from the documents; his own tempera and his engraving of 1810 were his answer. In May 1809 he opened, in the rooms above his brother’s shop at 28 Broad Street, an exhibition of sixteen works, with A Descriptive Catalogue at 2s. 6d. as the ticket of admission: the Canterbury Pilgrims, the “spiritual forms” of Nelson and Pitt, The Ancient Britons and the Bard, with the manifesto of the “hard and wirey line”. The only notice was Robert Hunt’s in The Examiner of 17 September 1809, which called him “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement”, his pictures “wretched”, and the catalogue “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain”. Nothing sold. Hunt and his brothers became “Hand”, the first of the Sons of Albion. Henry Crabb Robinson, who bought the catalogue and visited the exhibition, wrote the first essay on Blake for a foreign public in the Hamburg Vaterländisches Museum (1811) and read the Songs to Wordsworth, who thought Blake had “the elements of poetry a thousand times more than either Byron or Scott”. A second showing, of the Pilgrims, Nelson, Pitt and “Detached Specimens” of Jerusalem, with the Associated Painters in Water Colours in 1812, ended with the landlord seizing the works for rent.¹²

The years 1810–18 are the obscurest of the life. He wrote the Public Address and A Vision of the Last Judgment in the Notebook (c. 1810), painted the Milton series for Butts, engraved for Flaxman’s Hesiod (1817) and Rees’s Cyclopaedia, drew the Wedgwood catalogue, and etched Milton (four copies, from c. 1811) and the hundred plates of Jerusalem (finished by 1820). Charles Augustus Tulk lent the Songs to Coleridge, who wrote to Cary in February 1818 that Blake was “a man of Genius—and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian—certainly, a mystic emphatically”, and ranked the poems one by one for Tulk. In June 1818 Cumberland’s son introduced him to John Linnell, a painter of twenty-six, who employed him, bought from him, and was the friend of the last decade. Through Linnell he met John Varley, painter and astrologer, for whom, in evening sittings from about 1819, he drew the “Visionary Heads” — Wat Tyler, Edward I, Socrates, “The Man who built the Pyramids” and the Ghost of a Flea — with a composure that Varley took for evidence and Blake’s later friends for play. Robert Thornton’s school Virgil of 1821 carried his seventeen wood-engravings, the only ones he made, reprieved from the block-cutter by Linnell and by Lawrence; the “visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise” in them were, for Samuel Palmer, the beginning of a new art.¹³

Fountain Court (1821–1827)#

In 1821, having sold his collection of prints to Colnaghi, Blake moved to two rooms on the first floor of 3 Fountain Court, Strand, the house of Catherine’s brother-in-law, with a view of the river between the houses. Linnell commissioned, by an agreement of 25 March 1823, the Illustrations of the Book of Job, twenty-one engravings after the watercolours made for Butts in 1805–06 and re-made for Linnell in 1821; the plates, dated 1825, were published in March 1826, and the £150 or so that Linnell paid over the years was the largest sum Blake ever earned for a work of his own. In 1824 Linnell set him to Dante: 102 watercolours, in every state from pencil to finish, and seven engravings, occupied the three years he had left, on a copy of Cary with an Italian text he learned to read for the purpose. It was to Fountain Court that, from 9 October 1824, Linnell brought Samuel Palmer, and Palmer brought Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Francis Oliver Finch and Frederick Tatham — the young painters who called themselves “the Ancients”, called Blake “the Interpreter” and his two rooms “the House of the Interpreter”, and who walked with him to Palmer’s valley at Shoreham. And it was there that Henry Crabb Robinson, from 10 December 1825, kept the record of his conversation which, with the Reminiscences he wrote from it in 1852, is the nearest thing to a transcript of Blake’s speech: “He is the only God … And so am I and so are you”; Swedenborg “a divine teacher” whose “sexual religion is dangerous”; Dante “an Atheist” and Wordsworth “a pagan”, because “Nature is the work of the Devil”; the God of Genesis “not Jehovah, but the Elohim”; the Atonement “a horrible doctrine”; Jacob Boehme “a divinely inspired Man”, whose figures in Law’s translation “Michael Angelo could not have surpassed”; the “spiritual Sun” that he had seen “on Primrose Hill” and that was “not like the Greek Apollo, He is Satan”; and the claim to have written “six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and 20 tragedies” that have never been found. Robinson thought him “an insane man of genius”, and had the honesty to write down what the insane man said.¹⁴

Blake’s last illness — “the gall mixing with the blood” in Tatham’s phrase, a disease of the bile-ducts and liver in the modern retrospective diagnosis, with the acids and copper of his trade as a possible cause — can be traced in the letters from the spring of 1825 to the jaundice of his last letter, of 3 July 1827; he worked on the Dante and on a Genesis manuscript for Linnell to the end, and on 12 April 1827 wrote to Cumberland that he had “been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays.” He died at Fountain Court on Sunday 12 August 1827, about six in the evening. Tatham’s account has him colouring a copy of The Ancient of Days for him that afternoon — “It is the best I ever finished. I hope Mr. Tatham will like it” — then throwing it down to draw his wife: “Stay Kate! keep just as you are — I will draw your portrait — for you have ever been an angel to me”; Richmond wrote that “just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven”; the accounts agree that he sang. He was buried on 17 August in a common grave at Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters’ ground; the funeral cost £10 18s.; the exact spot was located from the burial-ground plans in 2006, and a ledger stone was laid there by the Blake Society on 12 August 2018. Catherine, who lived first with Linnell and then as Tatham’s housekeeper, died on 18 October 1831, having sold copies of the books and drawings and, it was said, consulted her husband daily. Tatham, who inherited what was left, became an Irvingite, and the tradition, which goes back to Swinburne in 1868, that he burned manuscripts as the work of the devil is unproven in its extent; enough survived — the Four Zoas manuscript, the Notebook, the Pickering Manuscript, the Island in the Moon, Tiriel — to show what a printed Blake would have been.¹⁵

Thought#

The system in outline#

Blake never wrote a summary of his system; he built it, over thirty years, in poems whose personages change their names and functions from book to book, and stated its principles in aphorisms, marginalia and letters. Read together, they make a single and consistent teaching, which can be set out in plain terms before its parts are examined.

There is one reality, and it is a Man. The universe as it truly exists is not a space containing bodies but a living human form, “the Eternal Great Humanity Divine”, of which every human being, every animal, plant, stone and star is a member; “every thing that lives is Holy”, and “All deities reside in the human breast”. The faculty by which this reality is known and created is the Imagination, which Blake also calls the Poetic Genius, the Divine Vision, the Divine Body, the Saviour and Jesus. “The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION. that is God himself.” Imagination is not fancy, memory or the capacity for images; it is the act of perceiving and making the human form of things, and it is the same act in God and in man, because “God is Man & exists in us & we in him.”

This one Man, whom Blake names Albion, has fallen asleep. His sleep is what we call the creation: the world of separate bodies in space and time, of matter opaque to the spirit, of a sun that is “somewhat like a Guinea” and a body of flesh with five senses. The sleep is also a division. Albion’s four eternal faculties — Blake calls them Zoas, from the “living creatures” of Ezekiel and Revelation — were in eternity a single life; in the fall they separate and war: Urizen, the reason and the law; Luvah, the passions and love; Tharmas, the body and the senses; Urthona, the imagination, who in time appears as Los, the blacksmith-prophet. Each has an Emanation, a feminine counterpart who in eternity is his own creative outflow and in the fall becomes a separate and jealous will: Ahania, Vala, Enion, Enitharmon; the Emanation of the whole Man is Jerusalem, who is Liberty. Each also throws off a Spectre, the “Reasoning Power” cut off from imagination and turned to abstraction, doubt and accusation — “an Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing”. The sexes as we know them are a product of the fall; so are natural religion, moral law, war and empire, which are the works of the Spectre worshipping itself as God.

The fall has a floor. The Saviour set two “Limits” to it, “the Limit of Opacity”, named Satan, and “the Limit of Contraction”, named Adam, so that Man might not fall for ever into non-entity; and the whole apparatus of the created world — time, space, the body, the “Mundane Shell” of the visible heavens — is built by Los as a mercy, a “Space” in which error may take a body and so be cast off. “Time is the mercy of Eternity”. Human history is six thousand years of that mercy, ordered under “Seven Eyes of God” — the successive conceptions of the divine, from Lucifer through the Elohim and Jehovah to Jesus — and “Twenty-seven Churches”, the successive religions from Adam to Luther, after which the cycle would begin again unless it is broken.

The levels of reality, from the point of view of the perceiver, are four. Ulro is the world of single vision: matter, abstraction, the “Newtonian” void, hell. Generation is the world of ordinary human life, of birth and death, sexual love and work, where the fall is being repaired. Beulah is the “married land” of the Song of Songs, a state of rest, dream, love and the forgiveness of contraries, “where no dispute can come”; it is the moon to Eden’s sun, and both a refuge and a temptation, since to sleep in Beulah too long is to sink into Ulro. Eden is eternity itself, the “Great Wars of Eternity” in which the immortals contend by “Mental Fight” and “the fury of Poetic Inspiration”, and “the words of man to man” build “Mental forms”. Blake’s own word for the perception of these four is “fourfold vision”: single vision is “Newtons sleep”, twofold is the seeing of a thing and its human meaning together, threefold is Beulah, fourfold is Eden.

What went wrong can be repaired, and the repair is not a return but an awakening. Its instrument is the distinction between States and Individuals. “States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease”: a man is not his error; Satan, Adam, Rahab, “the Elect” are states through which the spirit passes and from which it can be delivered, and the whole purpose of the created world is “the Creation of States & the deliverance of Individuals”. The act by which an individual leaves the state of Satan is what Blake calls the annihilation of the Selfhood — the giving-up of the self-righteous, accusing, “Female-Male” identity that wants to be a god, and its replacement by forgiveness: “Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice”. Forgiveness, not virtue, is the religion of Jesus; “the Glory of Christianity is, To Conquer by Forgiveness”; and Jesus himself is the pattern, “for Man is Love: / As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death / In the Divine Image”. The Last Judgment is not an event at the end of time but a change of perception that “passes upon” any individual who “Rejects Error & Embraces Truth”, and Blake claimed to have seen it, and painted it, more than once.

The ethical rule follows. Since the creator of this world, as it is perceived by the fallen senses, is “a very Cruel Being”, and since the God of the churches is that creator enthroned as judge, the first duty is not to obey him; “Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sins” worships “Satan, Named by the Divine Name”. Sin is a state, not a substance, and the only sin that Blake consistently names is the accusation of sin: “the Accuser” is Satan’s proper title. Energy is not to be restrained but given form. “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”. The work of the human being in this world is art — “Prayer is the Study of Art / Praise is the Practise of Art” — because art is the exercise of the faculty by which the world is known in its human and eternal form, and “the whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common”. The end is not the escape of the soul from the body, which Blake denied was a separate thing, but the consumption of the fallen creation by “an improvement of sensual enjoyment”, after which “the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy”. The following sections take these elements in order: the doctrine of imagination and vision; the fall and the Zoas; time, space and the mercy of creation; States, Selfhood and forgiveness; contraries, energy and the moral law; art as religion; the sources of the system; and its place in the history of esotericism.¹⁶

Imagination, the Poetic Genius and the Divine Body#

The two tractates of about 1788 already contain the doctrine in its bones. All Religions are One opens with an “Argument” in the language of the empiricists — “As the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. This faculty I treat of” — and then turns Locke inside out: “That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius. which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon.” All men share this faculty “with the same infinite variety”; all religions “are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy”; the Jewish and Christian scriptures are “An original derivation from the Poetic Genius”; and “The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius.” There is No Natural Religion argues, in two series of numbered propositions, that if man perceived only through the bodily organs he could never desire what he had not perceived, and that in fact “Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover”; “The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite”; and it ends with the sentence on which the rest of the work is a commentary: “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.”¹⁷

The annotations to Swedenborg’s Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (c. 1788–89) show the same doctrine being tested against a system that came close to it. Where Swedenborg wrote that God is very Man, Blake agreed and pushed further: “Man can have no idea of any thing greater than Man as a cup cannot contain more than its capaciousness But God is a man not because he is so percievd by man but because he is the creator of man”; where Swedenborg spoke of love descending as influx, Blake wrote that “if he has wisdom” a man “may percieve it is from the Poetic Genius which is the Lord”; and against the whole apparatus of an infinite God beyond the human he objected, “That there is but one Omnipotent Uncreate & God I agree but that there is but one Infinite I do not … Heaven would upon this plan be but a Clock.” Thirty years later, annotating Berkeley’s Siris (c. 1820), he wrote the doctrine in its final form: “Imagination or the Human Eternal Body in Every Man”; “Imagination or the Divine Body in Every Man”; “Jesus considerd Imagination to be the Real Man”; “Man is All Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in him”; and, against Berkeley’s God as pure mind, “Forms must be apprehended by Sense or the Eye of Imagination”. The Laocoön plate of about 1826–27 puts it in capitals around the sculpture group: “The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION. that is God himself The Divine Body … JESUS We are his Members It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)”.¹⁸

Three things follow that a reader from the Neoplatonic or the Christian mystical traditions will find unexpected. First, imagination is not a faculty among others, or a lower rung on the ladder to intellect; it is “the Human Existence itself”, and “is not a State”, as the Seven Angels tell Milton: “Affection or Love becomes a State, when divided from Imagination / The Memory is a State always, & the Reason is a State / Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created”. Second, the divine is not beyond the human but is its true form: “Thou art a Man God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to adore”, Jesus says in The Everlasting Gospel; and to Crabb Robinson, who asked about the divinity of Christ, Blake answered, “He is the only God … And so am I and so are you.” Third, because God is “the Human Form Divine”, the way to God is through other men: “He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children / One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst / Jesus will appear”; “Go, tell them that the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts / In other men: & loving the greatest men best, each according / To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other / God, than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity”. Blake’s word for the collective divine humanity is “the Divine Family”, “the Universal Brotherhood of Eden”, or simply “One Man”: “all the Family Divine collected as Four Suns / In the Four Points of heaven … And when they touch’d closed together Southward in One Sun … as One Man even Jesus”.¹⁹

Vision and the four levels of perception#

The system stands or falls on the claim that the imagination sees. Blake’s account of what he saw is consistent from the Trusler letter of 1799 to the last conversations with Robinson, and it is not the account of a man who mistook mental images for objects. “I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way … As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers.” The famous passage of A Vision of the Last Judgment makes the same point about the sun: “I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.” The organ of vision is not the eye but the imagination; the eye is a window, and what is seen depends on the seer. In the Descriptive Catalogue he answered the objection to his “mode of representing spirits with real bodies” by the same rule: “A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see does not imagine at all … Spirits are organized men.”²⁰

Perception has degrees, and the degrees are worlds. The verse letter to Butts of 22 November 1802 describes the experience on the road at Felpham in which a thistle became “an old Man grey” and the sun became Los, and ends: “Now I a fourfold vision see / And a fourfold vision is given to me / Tis fourfold in my supreme delight / And three fold in soft Beulahs night / And twofold Always. May God us keep / From Single vision & Newtons sleep.” Single vision is the seeing of the corporeal eye alone — the guinea-sun, the “Green thing”, the “Globe rolling thro Voidness” which “is a delusion of Ulro”; twofold vision, which Blake says he has “Always”, sees the thing and its human significance at once, the thistle and the old man; threefold is the dreaming, married, moony rest of Beulah; fourfold is the “supreme delight” of Eden, in which the perceiver is a member of the one Man and sees “the Innumerable company of the Heavenly host”. Milton names the four worlds — “the Four States of Humanity in its Repose … First of Beulah … The Second State is Alla & the third State Al-Ulro; / But the Fourth State is dreadful; it is named Or-Ulro” — and assigns them to the head, heart, loins and “Stomach & Intestines” of the human body, “And he whose Gates are opend in those Regions of his Body / Can from those Gates view all these wondrous Imaginations”. Golgonooza in Jerusalem has a gate “toward Eden, and that toward the World of Generation, / And that toward Beulah, and that toward Ulro”. The scheme is not a ladder to be climbed away from the body; Ulro is not matter but a way of seeing, and the same body, “at will Contracting into Worms, or Expanding into Gods”, is in Ulro or in Eden according to “the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or / Opakeness of Nervous fibres”.²¹

Beulah deserves a word of its own, since it is the most original of the four and the one most often misread. It is taken from Isaiah’s name for the redeemed land (“thy land shall be called Beulah … married”), and from Bunyan’s country of rest before the river; in Blake it is “a place where Contrarieties are equally True … a pleasant lovely Shadow / Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep”, created “around Eternity” by the “Eternal Great Humanity” because the Emanations “trembled exceedingly, nor could they / Live, because the life of Man was too exceeding unbounded”. It is the realm of sexual love, sleep, dream, poetry as consolation and the “Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song”; from it the soul descends into Generation and to it the weary return; and its danger is that its rest, prolonged, becomes the sleep of Albion, “moony Beulah” turning into the “Female Space” that “shrinks the Organs / Of Life till they become Finite & Itself seems Infinite”. Eternity, by contrast, is not rest but “the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration”, in which the Eternals “converse … in Visionary forms dramatic” and each “Emanates / Its own peculiar Light”.²²

The fall: Albion, the Zoas and the Emanations#

Blake’s myth of the fall was worked out in the manuscript of Vala and given its final shape in Jerusalem. Its subject is “the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through / Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life”. Albion, “the Ancient Man”, “the Universal Man”, is at once the eternal Humanity and the Britain of the antiquaries, “Patriarch of the Atlantic”, “the Atlas of the Greeks”; his sleep on “the Rock of Ages” is the human condition, and the poem is the story of the attempts to wake him. The cause of the fall is stated several ways, which Blake did not think incompatible: Albion “turns down the valleys dark” from the Divine Vision, saying “We are not One: we are Many”; he hides his Emanation Jerusalem in jealousy and builds “my Laws of Moral Virtue”; Luvah, the passions, “assum’d the World of Urizen to the South”, so that reason and passion exchanged places; and, in the Four Zoas, the “Parent power” Tharmas and his Emanation Enion begin the disintegration by examining each other’s secret sins — “Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul / Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry”. In every version the fall is not a sin against a law but a division: “His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity”; “Man divided from his Emanation is a dark Spectre”.²³

The four Zoas are introduced in the first lines of the Four Zoas as a mystery: “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity / Cannot Exist. but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden / The Universal Man … What are the Natures of those Living Creatures the Heavenly Father only / Knoweth no Individual Knoweth nor Can know in all Eternity”. They are, in the Jerusalem summary, “the Four Eternal Senses of Man”, who in the fall “Became Four Elements separating from the Limbs of Albion”; in the map that Blake drew at the end of Milton’s first book they occupy the four points of the “Mundane Egg” — Urthona north, Urizen south, Luvah east, Tharmas west — with Adam and Satan inside the egg and “Miltons Track” arcing into it. Their names and functions are best given as Blake’s poems give them. Urizen (“your reason”, or the Greek horizein, to bound; both derivations have been argued and neither is Blake’s) is “Prince of light”, the “Schoolmaster of souls great opposer of change”, who in eternity is the intellect and the plowman and in the fall becomes the lawgiver with his “Book of Brass”, the “Ancient of Days” with the compasses, the God of this world. Luvah (“love”) is the passion, the vintner and “prince of Love”, who in the fall becomes the raging Orc and is crucified, “the Spectre of Luvah” being the war-god of the nations; when Blake identifies Luvah with the suffering Christ — “As the Sons of Albion have done to Luvah: so they have in him / Done to the Divine Lord & Saviour” — the identification is one of the hinges of the myth. Tharmas is the body and the senses, “Parent power”, the shepherd and the sea, whose fall is the first, and whose rage is the chaos of the deep. Urthona (“earth-owner”) is the imagination in its eternal form, the smith of the north, who never appears in time except as Los.²⁴

Los (the name is Sol reversed, or the Greek for “stone”, or a loss; again Blake does not say) is the hero of the late poems: “Los is by mortals nam’d Time Enitharmon is nam’d Space / But they depict him bald & aged who is in eternal youth … He is the Spirit of Prophecy the ever apparent Elias”. He is the artist in the fallen world, the “Vehicular Form of strong Urthona”, who “kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble”, who builds Golgonooza, the city of art, and who alone can say “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”. His labour at the furnaces is the labour of giving form to error so that it can be cast off — “Giving a body to Falshood that it may be cast off for ever” — and his most terrible act, in the Book of Urizen, is the binding of the fallen Urizen in a body of flesh through “seven ages”, an act of mercy that he “became what he beheld” in performing. The Emanations are the counterparts: Enitharmon, Los’s Emanation, who is Space and the mother of Orc, and whose “Female Will” is the fallen form of the creative outflow; Vala, Luvah’s, who is Nature, the veil, the goddess “whose Female Will” governs the natural religion of sacrifice; Ahania, Urizen’s, who is wisdom and pleasure, cast out by him as sin; Enion, Tharmas’s, whose lament from the “dark deep” — “What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song / Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price / Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children” — is one of the great passages of the Four Zoas. Jerusalem, “the Emanation of the Giant Albion”, is Liberty, the Bride, the collective Emanation of all mankind, and her separation from Albion, her wanderings as a “Harlot” among the nations and her descent at the end as the New Jerusalem are the frame of the last epic.²⁵

The doctrine of the Emanation is the point at which Blake’s myth touches, and departs from, the Kabbalistic and Behmenist traditions of the divine androgyne. In eternity “every particular Form gives forth or Emanates / Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision / And the Light is his Garment”; the Emanation is not a wife but the outflowing of a being’s love and works, and “Man is adjoind to Man by his Emanative portion”. In the fall the Emanation separates and becomes “an ever-weeping melancholy Shadow” and then a will of her own, “the Female Will”, which is the natural world as an object of worship, chastity as a weapon, and religion as “a Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War … Namd Moral Virtue”. Blake told Robinson that Milton’s ghost had asked him to correct the doctrine “that the pleasures of sex arose from the fall”, and spoke of “a Union of sexes in Man as in God, an Androgynous state”; in the poems the sexes are “Sexual Garments” that hide “the Human lineaments”, “the Sexual is Threefold: the Human is Fourfold”, and at the end of Jerusalem “Sexes must vanish & cease / To be, when Albion arises from his dread repose”. This is not a doctrine against the body or against sexual love, which the Marriage, the Visions and the Songs defend against “the Elders & Priests” with a violence that shocked the Victorians; it is a doctrine that the division of humanity into two sexes, and the war of possession and jealousy between them, is a feature of the fallen state, to be redeemed by the “Wars of Love” in which “the Hand of Man grasps firm between the Male & Female Loves”.²⁶

Time, space and the mercy of creation#

If the fall is division, the creation is its floor. Blake’s most difficult and most consistent doctrine is that the world we perceive was made not by God the Father but by the Elohim during Albion’s sleep — “Albion was the Parent of the Druids; & in his Chaotic State of Sleep Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim” — and that it was nevertheless “an act of Mercy”. The two halves of the doctrine are stated in one sentence of A Vision of the Last Judgment: “Many suppose that before the Creation All was Solitude & Chaos This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind as it takes away all sublimity from the Bible & Limits All Existence to Creation & to Chaos … Eternity Exists and All things in Eternity Independent of Creation which was an act of Mercy.” The Four Zoas explains the mercy: when the fall threatened to be infinite, the Saviour “found the Limit of Opacity & namd it Satan … the Limit of Contraction & namd it Adam”; there is a point beyond which matter cannot grow more opaque to the spirit nor the human form shrink further, and “in every human bosom these limits stand”. Milton adds the third term: “The Divine hand found the Two Limits: first of Opacity, then of Contraction / Opacity was named Satan, Contraction was named Adam”, and the successive Eyes of God are elected to guard the fallen world in turn — “they elected Molech … Triple Elohim came: Elohim wearied fainted: they elected Shaddai. / Shaddai angry, Pahad descended: Pahad terrified, they sent Jehovah / And Jehovah was leprous”, until the eighth, who “came not”, is Jesus. The Seven Eyes are the seven conceptions of God that mankind has held, each a state, none the truth, in ascending order of mercy; the Jehovah of the Old Testament is one of them, and not the highest, which is why Blake could tell Robinson that the God of Genesis “was not Jehovah, but the Elohim”.²⁷

Time and space, in this account, are not the enemy but the instrument. “Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Times swiftness / Which is the swiftest of all things: all were eternal torment”. The most concentrated statement is in Milton: the Sons of Los “build Moments & Minutes & Hours / And Days & Months & Years & Ages & Periods; wondrous buildings”, and “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery / Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years. / For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great / Events of Time start forth & are concievd in such a Period / Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery”. Space likewise: “every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place: / Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount / Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe; / And on its verge the Sun rises & sets … And if he move his dwelling-place, his heavens also move … As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner, / As of a Globe rolling thro Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro”; “every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood. / Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los / And every Space smaller than a Globule of Mans blood. opens / Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow”. The lyric form of the same doctrine is the opening of “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”. And it has a practical corollary that runs through all the late work: “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find / This Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found / It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed”. The Moment is the instant of inspiration, of the act of creation or forgiveness, in which eternity enters time; Ololon descends “In this Moment”.²⁸

The furniture of the created world in the late poems is elaborate, and a reader needs at least its names. The Mundane Shell is “a vast Concave Earth: an immense / Hardend shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth / Enlarg’d into dimension & deform’d into indefinite space, / In Twenty-seven Heavens and all their Hells”, the starry sky as the fallen mind projects it, which “finishes where the lark mounts”. Golgonooza is Los’s city, “the spiritual Four-fold London eternal”, built of “pity” and “well wrought affections”, “Art & Manufacture by mortal men”, with its gates towards the four worlds and its suburbs Bowlahoola (the body’s organs, “namd Law. by mortals”), Allamanda (“calld on Earth Commerce”, the nervous system), Cathedron (Enitharmon’s looms, which weave bodies for the spectres of the dead), Entuthon Benython (the forests of error) and the Lake of Udan-Adan (the indefinite). The Polypus is the mass of vegetated humanity, “One mighty Polypus”, “a self-devouring monstrous human Death”. The Twenty-seven Churches are the religions of history, from the “Hermaphroditic” giants Adam to Lamech, through the “Female-Males” Noah to Terah, to the “Male-Females … the Dragon Forms” Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Paul, Constantine, Charlemaine and Luther, after whom “Adam begins again in Eternal Circle” — the cycle of Orc, in which each revolution against the old law becomes a new law, which Blake had already diagnosed in the Lambeth books and which only the annihilation of Selfhood can end. The Covering Cherub is the sum of these, the last “Selfhood” of the race, “the Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits”, who guards the way to the Tree of Life and must be passed through, not around: “But Jesus breaking thro’ the Central Zones of Death & Hell / Opens Eternity in Time & Space; triumphant in Mercy”.²⁹

States, the Selfhood and forgiveness#

The most important single doctrine of the late Blake, and the one that most clearly separates him from the dualisms he is sometimes assimilated to, is the distinction between States and Individuals. It is announced in Milton by the Seven Angels: “We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals … Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. / States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease: / You cannot go to Eternal Death in that which can never Die. / Satan & Adam are States Created into Twenty-seven Churches / And thou O Milton art a State about to be Created / Called Eternal Annihilation”. Jerusalem applies it to sin: “Satan is the State of Death, & not a Human existence: / But Luvah is named Satan, because he has enterd that State. / A World where Man is by Nature the enemy of Man / Because the Evil is Created into a State. that Men / May be deliverd time after time evermore … Learn therefore O Sisters to distinguish the Eternal Human / That walks about among the stones of fire in bliss & woe / Alternate! from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels: / This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies”. On the plate addressed to the Deists the doctrine is set out like a motto: “Rahab is an Eternal State / The Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal / Distinguish between the Man, & his present State”. The voice from the furnaces declares, “I go forth to Create / States: to deliver Individuals evermore! Amen”, and the Divine Lamb is asked to “take away the imputation of Sin / By the Creation of States & the deliverance of Individuals Evermore”. States are eternal in the sense that error has eternal forms — the miser, the accuser, the tyrant — through which any spirit may pass; but no spirit is a state, and to impute a state to a man as his identity is the sin of the accuser. A Vision of the Last Judgment draws the pictorial consequence: the figures in the picture “are not here meant … as any Particular Persons” but as “States Signified by those Names”.³⁰

The Selfhood is the state that must be left. Blake’s word for it in the poems of 1804–20 is the Spectre — “The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; & when separated / From Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio / Of the Things of Memory. It thence frames Laws & Moralities / To destroy Imagination! the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars” — and its psychology is drawn in the Four Zoas, where Los’s Spectre, “the Spectre of Urthona”, is at once his enemy, “the Slave of Every passion”, and “thy real Self”, whom Los must embrace “first as a brother / Then as another Self”. The Selfhood is not the self, and its annihilation is not suicide or the Buddhist extinction of the ego; it is the putting-off of the false body of self-righteousness so that the “Immortal Spirit” may act. Milton’s speech to Ololon is the definitive statement: “There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary / The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries / The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man / This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal / Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & 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 & the grandeur of Inspiration / To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour / To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration / To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering / To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination”. Its law is stated to Satan: “Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually / Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee … Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on / In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn / Thy Laws & terrors”. Blake’s own prayer at the opening of Jerusalem asks the same: “O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love: / Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!”³¹

The positive name of this act is forgiveness, and forgiveness is the whole of Blake’s Christianity. “The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin: he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the Saviours kingdom, the Divine Body; will never enter there. I am perhaps the most sinful of men! I pretend not to holiness!” So the address “To the Public” of Jerusalem, whose last chapter is addressed to the Christians and whose climax is the dialogue of Albion and Jesus: “Jesus said. Wouldest thou love one who never died / For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee / And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself / Eternally for Man Man could not exist. for Man is Love: / As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death / In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood”. Forgiveness in this sense is not the remission of a debt on condition of repentance; the plate on Joseph and Mary makes that distinction with a violence that is the key to Blake’s whole quarrel with the churches. Joseph hears the angel ask, “Doth Jehovah Forgive a Debt only on condition that it shall / Be Payed? Doth he Forgive Pollution only on conditions of Purity / That Debt is not Forgiven! That Pollution is not Forgiven / Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues of the / Heathen, whose tender Mercies are Cruelty. But Jehovahs Salvation / Is without Money & without Price, in the Continual Forgiveness of Sins / In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity! for behold! / There is none that liveth & Sinneth not! And this is the Covenant / Of Jehovah: If you Forgive one-another, so shall Jehovah Forgive You”. Mary’s own words are the more radical: “if I were pure, never could I taste the sweets / Of the Forgiveness of Sins! if I were holy! I never could behold the tears / Of love!” The Atonement, understood as a payment or substitution, Blake called “a horrible doctrine”; the crucifixion he understood as the pattern of self-giving — “Thus do Men in Eternity / One for another to put off by forgiveness, every sin” — and the Last Judgment as the moment when the Accuser is cast out: “Forgiveness of Sin is only at the Judgment Seat of Jesus the Saviour where the Accuser is cast out. not because he Sins but because he torments the Just & makes them do what he condemns as Sin & what he knows is opposite to their own Identity”. Hell, in the same manuscript, is the state in which “all is Self Righteousness there is no such thing there as Forgiveness of Sin he who does Forgive Sin is Crucified as an Abettor of Criminals”.³²

Contraries, energy and the Moral Law#

The doctrine of forgiveness grew out of the earlier and more famous doctrine of contraries, which The Marriage of Heaven and Hell announced in 1790: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” The “voice of the Devil” corrects the errors of “All Bibles or sacred codes”: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.” The Proverbs of Hell give the doctrine its edge — “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” — and the “Song of Liberty” ends “For every thing that lives is Holy”. Read alone, this is the Blake of Swinburne and the 1960s, the celebrant of energy against restraint. Read with the later poems it is the first stage of a doctrine that Blake did not abandon but completed. In Milton and Jerusalem he introduces a third term: “There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary / The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries”. Contraries — reason and energy, male and female, Palamabron and Rintrah, “the Two Contraries” of Milton’s Bard’s Song — are eternal and necessary, and their war in Eden is “Mental” and creative; the Negation is the Spectre that abstracts from the contraries a “Good” and an “Evil” and sets itself up as judge of both: “They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which / Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil / From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation / Not only of the Substance from which it is derived / A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer / Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power / An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing / This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning Power / And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation”. “Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary”, Blake engraved on the plate that opens Milton’s second book.³³

What is negated is energy, and what negates it is the Moral Law. Blake’s antinomianism — the word is the historians’, and it is accurate — is the constant of his thought from the Marriage to the Laocoön: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”; “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules”; “All Penal Laws court Transgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder” (against Bishop Watson, 1798); “No individual can keep these Laws, for they are death / To every energy of man, and forbid the springs of life”; “The Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin”; “If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour”; and, to Crabb Robinson, that “he had committed many murders”, that “reason is the only evil or sin” (June 1826), and — in Robinson’s summary of December 1825 — that “What are called the Vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world”. The God of the Moral Law is the enemy: Urizen writing his “Book of Brass” — “One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law”; the “Angel of the Presence Divine / That didst create this Body of Mine”, whom Jesus in The Everlasting Gospel strikes with leprosy; “The Accuser Who is The God of This World” of the Gates of Paradise epilogue, “Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine / Of Jesus & Jehovah”; the “Angry God of this World” whom Blake drew, with one cloven foot, over the Dante illustrations. The plate “To the Deists” gives the argument in prose: “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan, & will erect the Synagogue of Satan. calling the Prince of this World, God … Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sins the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger; and not the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, Named by the Divine Name”. Deism, “Natural Religion”, “Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart”, “was the Religion of the Pharisees who murderd Jesus. Deism is the same & ends in the same”; Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon and Hume are its prophets; Bacon, Newton and Locke, “who teach Humility to Man! / Who teach Doubt & Experiment”, its philosophers; Rahab, “Mystery Babylon the Great … Religion hid in War”, its goddess; and the Druids, with their oak groves, serpent temples and “golden Knife”, its ancestors. But the deists are Blake’s contraries as well as his enemies, and the last plates of Jerusalem put “Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer” together in “the innumerable Chariots of the Almighty” — the philosophers of single vision redeemed as states through which the mind has passed.³⁴

Two features of this ethic need stating because they are easily mistaken. The first is that Blake’s attack on the Moral Law is not an attack on morality but on accusation: the works of mercy are the whole content of his religion — “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer” — and the Divine Family in Jerusalem are heard saying “It is better to prevent misery, than to release from misery / It is better to prevent error, than to forgive the criminal: / Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones”. What he denies is that virtue is the price of heaven: “Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governd their Passions or have No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy.” The second is that his politics is continuous with this. The Blake of the 1790s wrote the “Song of Liberty”, America, Europe and “London” with its “mind-forg’d manacles” as a partisan of the Revolution; the Blake of 1804–20 kept the analysis of empire, war, “the Prisoner in the stone Dungeon & the Slave at the Mill”, the “Harlots cry from Street to Street” that “Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet”, and relocated the remedy from Orc’s revolt, which only “renews” the cycle, to the annihilation of Selfhood, which ends it. The late poems are not a retreat from politics but a diagnosis of why the revolution had failed: “The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head / And became a Tyrant in his stead”.³⁵

Art as Christianity; the Last Judgment as a mental event#

That Blake regarded art as a religious act is well known; the strength of the claim is less often grasped. The Laocoön aphorisms of his last years say that “Christianity is Art & not Money”; that “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists”; that “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art”; that “Prayer is the Study of Art / Praise is the Practise of Art / Fasting &c. all relate to Art / The outward Ceremony is Antichrist”; that “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man / Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian”; that “You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of ART”; that “Israel deliverd from Egypt is Art deliverd from Nature & Imitation”; and that “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed”. The address “To the Christians” in Jerusalem had already said it: “I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more … What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? … That to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders.” The ground of the identification is the doctrine of imagination: if the divine body is the imagination, then every act of imaginative making is a participation in it, and “Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations”. In Milton the four arts are the four faces of the eternal Man — “in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music, / And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man” — and in time they survive, through mercy, as “the Three Professions / Poetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physic & Surgery”.³⁶

The aesthetic that follows is one of line, definiteness and “Minute Particulars”, and it is the same doctrine as the ethic. “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling … What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions. Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.” Against Reynolds’s doctrine of the general idea he wrote “To Generalize is to be an Idiot To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit”, “Minute Discrimination is Not Accidental All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination”, and, of the Discourses themselves, “This Man was Hired to Depress Art”. “The Infinite alone resides in Definite & Determinate Identity”; “Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune: but Imagination has! Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves: Imagination is Eternity”; “Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence / Grecian is Mathematic Form / Gothic is Living Form”. The enemies are the “blotting and blurring demons” of Venice and Flanders, chiaroscuro, oil, the “Indefinite” that Englishmen “Measure by Newtons Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom”, and, in the last analysis, “the Goddess Nature” as an object of imitation: “Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me”, he wrote against Wordsworth in 1826. Imitation of nature is memory; art is vision; and “Vision or Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists. Really & Unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is Formd by the Daughters of Memory”, while “Imagination is Surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration who in the aggregate are calld Jerusalem”. The Greek Muses, “daughters of Mnemosyne, or Memory”, are therefore “not authors of such sublime conceptions” as the Hebrew prophets’, and the classical statues are copies of lost “Cherubim” of Asia that Blake claimed to have seen “in vision”.³⁷

The Last Judgment is the frame in which all this is set, and Blake’s understanding of it is the most concise expression of his relation to the Christian apocalyptic he inherited. He painted the subject at least seven times between 1806 and 1827, and described it twice, in the letter to Ozias Humphry of 1808 and in the Notebook essay of 1810 that Keynes titled A Vision of the Last Judgment. The essay begins by defining the event as a mental one: “The Last Judgment when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with Questions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of those Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God turning all into a Consuming fire When Imaginative Art & Science & all Intellectual Gifts all the Gifts of the Holy Ghost are lookd upon as of no use & only Contention remains to Man then the Last Judgment begins & its Vision is seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the situation he holds”. It is “not Fable or Allegory but Vision”; it “is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science”; “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual”; and “Error is Created Truth is Eternal Error or Creation will be Burned Up & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it”. The Marriage had put the same doctrine in the mouth of Hell: “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true. as I have heard from Hell … the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” The ninth Night of the Four Zoas is that consummation as narrative — the vintage and harvest of the nations, the repentance of Urizen, the subordination of Luvah and Vala, the renewed sun — and the last plates of Jerusalem are it as vision: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all / Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied / Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing / And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.” The apocalypse is not the end of the world but the end of the world’s opacity: “The Sun has left his blackness & has found a fresher morning … The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns”.³⁸

Sources and synthesis#

Blake’s account of his sources was that he had none but inspiration; his critics’ accounts have ranged from Ellis and Yeats’s “symbolic system” drawn from Swedenborg, Boehme and the Kabbalah to Frye’s poet who needed nothing but the Bible and Milton, and from Raine’s learned heir of the Perennial Philosophy to Thompson’s plebeian antinomian. The documents allow a more exact statement, and it is worth making, because the question of what Blake read is the question of where he belongs.

The Bible and Milton. These are the only sources Blake acknowledged without irony, and they saturate everything he wrote. “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art”; “all he knew was in the Bible, but then he understands by the Bible the spiritual sense” (Robinson, 1826); “The Hebrew Bible & the Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory but Eternal Vision or Imagination of All that Exists”. He learned Hebrew at Felpham, imperfectly, and used it on the Laocoön and Job plates; he read the Bible, as the annotations to Watson show, as a book of “Sentiments & Examples” whose “historical evidence … may be all false”, and its laws as “the basest & most oppressive of human codes”; and he read it in what he called “its infernal or diabolical sense”, of which “the Bible of Hell” — the Lambeth books — was his own version. Genesis gave him the Elohim who create and the Jehovah who forgives; Ezekiel the Zoas and the wheels; Job the Satan who is God’s own accusing face; Revelation Rahab, Babylon, the Beast, the Bride and the New Jerusalem; the Gospels the Jesus who “acted from impulse: not from rules”. Milton, who “lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face”, gave him the epic form, the cosmos of Chaos and Ancient Night, the Satan who is “the Governor or Reason”, and the problem that Milton exists to solve: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.”³⁹

Swedenborg. The documented relation is the closest Blake had to any esoteric author, and it is one of discipleship followed by repudiation followed by qualified respect. He annotated three of the Swedenborgian volumes published by Hindmarsh’s society between 1784 and 1790, attended the conference of April 1789 with his wife, and wrote the Marriage as a satire on the “Angel sitting at the tomb” whose “writings are the linen clothes folded up”: “Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods … he conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions. Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further. Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s.” What he took is nevertheless the frame of his theology: God as the Divine Human (“the Grand Man” of Heaven and Hell, which Blake’s Albion and his “One Man” restate), heaven and hell as states of the mind rather than places, the doctrine of correspondences between spiritual and natural things, the “spiritual sun”, the marriage of love and wisdom, and the conviction that a Last Judgment had already occurred in the spiritual world (in 1757, Blake’s birth-year, which the Marriage dates its own advent from). What he rejected was Swedenborg’s Church, his “spiritual Predestinarian” Providence, his “sexual religion” of conjugial love (which Blake called “dangerous” in 1825), and above all the moral “religion” of his angels. Milton pronounces the balance: “O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches! / Shewing the Transgresors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven: / Heaven as a Punisher & Hell as One under Punishment”; and the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 calls him “this visionary” whose works “are well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things”.⁴⁰

Boehme and Paracelsus. Blake names them together twice — as the masters beside whom Swedenborg “only holds a candle in sunshine”, and in the verse letter of 1800, “Paracelsus & Behmen appeard to me. terrors appeard in the Heavens above / And in Hell beneath & a mighty & awful change threatend the Earth / The American War began” — placing his reading of them, if the letter is chronological, in his late teens. He told Robinson in 1825 that Boehme was “a divinely inspired Man” and praised the figures in “Law’s translation” (the four-volume Works of Jacob Behmen of 1764–81, with Dionysius Andreas Freher’s engraved diagrams) as beyond Michelangelo. No annotated Boehme survives and Blake never quotes him, so the debt has to be argued from parallels, and the parallels are strong: the Ungrund and the two principles of wrath and love behind the doctrine of contraries (“the wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God”); the fall as a division of the primal Man from his Virgin Sophia behind the doctrine of the Emanation; the “signature” of all things behind “the forms of all things are derived from their Genius”; the Einbildung of the Behmenist theosophers behind Imagination as the divine faculty; the seven fountain-spirits behind the seven ages of Urizen’s binding and the Seven Eyes of God; the alchemical furnaces and the tincture behind Los’s forge and the “corrosives” of the Marriage. From Paracelsus, whom he never quotes either, the scholars have derived the elementals (“Fairies, Nymphs, Gnomes & Genii of the Four Elements”), the microcosm, the imagination as a magical power, and possibly Tharmas. Bryan Aubrey’s Watchmen of Eternity (1986) and Kevin Fischer’s Converse in the Spirit (2004) are the monographs; the judgement of the best-informed reviewers is that Blake “was working within” the Behmenist tradition while transforming it — the Marriage, one may say, is Boehme with the sign of hell reversed, wrath affirmed as energy rather than overcome as the dark principle.⁴¹

Neoplatonism and Thomas Taylor. George Mills Harper’s The Neoplatonism of William Blake (1961) and Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968) argued that Blake was personally acquainted with Thomas Taylor “the Platonist”, the translator of Plotinus, Proclus and Porphyry, through Flaxman and the Mathew circle of the 1780s, and that Taylor was the channel through which the myth of the soul’s descent into generation — the “cave of the nymphs”, the Eleusinian Kore, the sea of matter — reached Thel, The Book of Los, “The Mental Traveller” and the Arlington Court picture. The acquaintance is probable but undocumented: Blake never names Taylor, Plotinus, Proclus or Porphyry; “Sipsop the Pythagorean” in An Island in the Moon may be Taylor; and the one anecdote, of Taylor teaching Blake Euclid until Blake said he saw the proposition and needed no proof, is a late tradition. What is certain is that Blake used the Neoplatonic myth as material and opposed its doctrine. Plato “the visionary” he admitted — “Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believd that God did Visit Man Really & Truly”; “Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers … is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry. it is also somewhat in the same manner defind by Plato” — but Plato the moralist and the geometer was the enemy: “The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn”; “The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical Diagrams See Plato’s Works”; “What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy which blinds the Eye of Imagination The Real Man”; “your Greek Philosophy (which is a remnant of Druidism)”. The descent of the soul, in Blake, is not an exile from a bodiless One but the sleep of a Man whose body is the imagination; the return is not an ascent out of matter but the consumption of matter’s opacity; and “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”.⁴²

Kabbalah. Blake never uses the words Kabbalah, Cabala or Adam Kadmon. The nearest he comes is the address “To the Jews” in Jerusalem: “You have a tradition, that Man anciently containd in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth: this you recieved from the Druids … If your tradition that Man contained in his Limbs, all Animals, is True & they were separated from him by cruel Sacrifices … the Lamb of God, the Saviour became apparent on Earth as the Prophets had foretold”. The cosmic Man of the Christian Cabalists — Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, van Helmont, Fludd — was available to him in many forms, the nearest being Swedenborg’s Grand Man, and the resemblances are real: Albion as Adam Kadmon, the fall as contraction, Jerusalem as the exiled Shekhinah, the Seven Eyes as divine names, the Emanations as the feminine within the Godhead. Denis Saurat (Blake and Modern Thought, 1929) first pressed the case; Sheila Spector’s two volumes of 2001, “Wonders Divine” and “Glorious incomprehensible”, are its fullest statement, arguing that Blake “gradually appropriated kabbalistic mythemes” and moved, through the Lambeth books’ contraries, to a Lurianic structure of contraction, breaking and restoration in the major prophecies; and it was Spector who wrote the entry “Blake, William” in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005). The objections, pressed by her reviewers, are that everything Kabbalistic in Blake is also Behmenist, Swedenborgian or Pauline; that his numbers are four, seven, twelve and twenty-seven, not ten; and that the context he “actually encountered” was that of dissenting Christian London rather than Jewish mysticism.⁴³

Gnosticism. The “Gnostic Blake” begins with Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences: when Robinson quoted “In the beginning God created the Heaven & the Earth”, “I was triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim, & the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient consistency to silence one so unlearned as myself.” Robinson also recorded “Nature is the work of the Devil. The Devil is in us, as far as we are Nature”, and Blake’s own hand wrote, in A Vision of the Last Judgment, “Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being & being a Worshipper of Christ I cannot help saying the Son O how unlike the Father First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.” The structural resemblances to the ancient systems are undeniable and have been catalogued — the ignorant or malign creator (Urizen: “I have sought for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation”; “One King, one God, one Law”), the creation as fall, the divine spark imprisoned, the saviour who is the true God against the God of the law, the serpent as truth-teller, the sexual origin of the fall — and Milton Percival (1938), Peter Sorensen (1995) and A. D. Nuttall (1998) have read the prophecies through them. But Blake could have known Gnosticism only through its enemies and the Enlightenment historians (Mosheim, Lardner, Priestley, Gibbon), and on four points of substance he is not a Gnostic at all. The fall is within the human, not the work of an alien god: “Four Mighty Ones are in every Man”; Urizen is a faculty of Albion. The creator is redeemable: Urizen repents in the ninth Night, the Elohim are one of the Seven Eyes on the way to Jesus. The creation is a mercy, not a prison: the Limits are set “that Men / May be deliverd time after time”. And the body is holy: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul”; “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed”; the end is not escape from the world but its consumption “by an improvement of sensual enjoyment”. Peter Otto’s formula (2018) is exact: Blake’s “modern Gnosticism repeats the structure of ancient Gnosticism while turning it inside out: viz. the journey to the source of life takes us back to this world rather than up to Heaven.” The careful description is Nuttall’s — an “alternative Trinity” in which “the Father and the Son do not get on”, a Marcionite pattern typologically, not genealogically, related to the ancient one.⁴⁴

The Moravians, the antinomians and the enthusiast London of the 1780s. The documents of Blake’s religious milieu are three: his mother’s Moravian membership of 1750–51; the Swedenborgian conference of 1789; and the annotations. Around them the historians have reconstructed a culture. Zinzendorf’s “Blood and Wounds” devotion, the Moravian love-feast and the marriage mysticism of the choirs are the nearest ancestors of the Songs of Innocence and of the erotic theology of the later poems; the antinomian tradition of the seventeenth-century sects — Ranters, Muggletonians, Behmenists, Philadelphians — which A. L. Morton (1958) and E. P. Thompson (1993) traced into the London Dissent of Blake’s day, is the nearest ancestor of his “Everlasting Gospel” (the phrase itself is the Ranters’ and Joachim’s); the Swedenborgian “Theosophical Society” of 1783–84, in which Flaxman and the engraver William Sharp were members, the animal magnetisers, the millenarians Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott (whom Blake mocked in an epigram), and the Masonic and “Egyptian” circles of Cagliostro’s London visits, are the milieu that Marsha Keith Schuchard and Robert Rix have argued gave Blake his vocabulary of influx, spheres, “electrical” fire and visionary sexuality. Nothing in Blake’s writings mentions a lodge, a magnetiser, Brothers, Cagliostro or the Avignon Society, and no membership, initiation or letter attaches him to any of them; the judicious view is that his language was formed in this enthusiast London, which he satirised as readily as he used it, and that the doctrines he built from it are his own.⁴⁵

The Druids, the mythographers and the forgers. The last layer is the British antiquarianism of Stukeley’s Stonehenge (1740) and Abury (1743), Jacob Bryant’s New System (1774–76), whose plates Basire’s shop engraved during Blake’s apprenticeship, Edward Davies’s Celtic Researches (1804) and Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (1809), Macpherson’s Ossian and Chatterton’s Rowley — all of which Blake believed. “The antiquities of every Nation Under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing as Jacob Bryant, and all antiquaries have proved … All had originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus”; “Adam was a Druid, and Noah; also Abraham was called to succeed the Druidical age, which began to turn allegoric and mental signification into corporeal command, whereby human sacrifice would have depopulated the earth”; “I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient, Is so”. From these he took the thesis that Britain was “the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion”, the unity of all mythologies, and the images of the serpent temple and the trilithon; but where the antiquaries admired the Druids he made them the type of the religion of sacrifice, “Natural Religion & its Altars Natural Morality / A building of eternal death”, and the patriarchal religion is, in his myth, what fell. Behind all of these stands the empiricist philosophy he spent his life refuting — Locke, whose “Loom” weaves “the Woof of Death”, Bacon, whose “Philosophy has Ruind England”, and Newton, whose “Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore” — and Berkeley, whose immaterialism he accepted in his own sense, and Lavater, whose Aphorisms on Man (1788) he annotated with his name enclosed in a heart beside the author’s: “It is the God in all that is our companion & friend … every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God”.⁴⁶

Blake and the history of esotericism#

Where, then, does he belong? The question has been answered three ways, and the answers correspond to the three great readings of his work. For the esoteric reading — Ellis and Yeats (1893), who read the prophecies through Swedenborg, Boehme and Mathers’s Kabbalah as “The Symbolic System”; S. Foster Damon (1924), for whom Blake was a mystic in the strict sense whose symbols decode into the Perennial tradition; Milton Percival (1938); Désirée Hirst (1964), who traced one “traditional symbolism” from Ficino and the Christian Cabala through Boehme and Law to Blake; Kathleen Raine (1968), for whom “Without the aids of Plotinus and Porphyry, the Pymander of Hermes, and, above all, Taylor, Blake’s Christianity itself would have been a more limited and lesser matter”; and in their several ways Aubrey, Sorensen, Spector, Fischer and Schuchard — Blake is a learned, or at least a well-read, heir of the Western esoteric currents, and his myth restates them. For the formalist and political readings — Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), for which the sources are vocabulary and the meaning is the poem; Erdman’s Prophet Against Empire (1954), for which the myth is a coded commentary on the politics of 1775–1827; Bloom, Mitchell, Essick and Viscomi — the esoteric materials are real but secondary, and Blake is a Bible-centred Protestant poet and printmaker. For the historicist reading — Thompson, Mee, Makdisi, Rix, Davies — the esoteric doctrines were not a hidden tradition but the common property of London’s dissenting artisans, and Blake’s “system” is the work of a bricoleur in a culture of enthusiasm. The theological reading of Rowland, Sklar and Billingsley adds a fourth: a biblical exegete whose “visionary” hermeneutic is neither occult nor merely political.

An entry in a dictionary of esotericism has to hold all four in view, and the facts allow a verdict. Blake was not an initiate, a magician or a member of any order, and he never described himself as a mystic; the word was Coleridge’s, in 1818 (“a Swedenborgian—certainly, a mystic emphatically”). He did not practise correspondences, astrology, alchemy, theurgy or the art of memory, and he attacked the “Mathematical Diagrams” of the Hermetists and Platonists, the “Smaragdine Table of Hermes” that the Spectre repeats, and every form of the doctrine that nature is a book to be read. Nor is his “gnosis” salvation by knowledge: it is salvation by forgiveness, and its organ is imagination, not intellect. What he does share with the esoteric currents, and shares more completely than any English writer of his century, is their central claim — that the divine is human, that the cosmos is the body of a Man, that the fall is a division within that body, and that its repair is a restoration of vision — and their characteristic materials: the Divine Human of Swedenborg, the contraries and the Sophia of Boehme, the elementals and the signature of Paracelsus, the descent of the soul of the Neoplatonists, the cosmic Adam of the Christian Cabalists, the demiurge of the Gnostics as the Enlightenment reported them, the patriarchal Britain of the Druid revival. He took them as a poet takes materials, and what he made from them he insisted was not learned but seen. The right description is therefore not “a Gnostic”, nor “a Kabbalist”, nor “a Neoplatonist”, nor “an occultist”, but a visionary Christian antinomian who rebuilt the Behmenist–Swedenborgian theosophy of his London into an original mythology, with a Gnostic strand in its account of the creator and a Neoplatonic strand in its account of the soul’s descent, and who has been, since Yeats, the single most important channel by which those currents reached English poetry, painting and the counterculture of the twentieth century.⁴⁷

Works#

Blake’s writings are treated here in the order of their composition or publication, the poems and illuminated books first and the visual art, which runs parallel to them, as a group of its own afterwards. For the illuminated books the “publication” of a title was the etching of its plates; copies were printed in small batches over the following decades, hand-coloured or colour-printed, and no two are alike. Copy counts follow the census of the William Blake Archive.

Poetical Sketches (1783)#

At a glance. “POETICAL SKETCHES. By W. B. London: Printed in the Year MDCCLXXXIII.” A seventy-two-page octavo pamphlet in letterpress, printed at the expense of Flaxman and the Revd A. S. Mathew, who probably wrote the “Advertisement” that calls the contents “the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year”, and apologises for “the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page”. Perhaps fifty copies were printed and given to the author, who never published them and gave them away over forty years, correcting some by hand; twenty-four are known. The contents are nineteen “Miscellaneous Poems” — the four seasons, “To the Evening Star”, “To Morning”, “Fair Elenor”, six “Song”s, “Mad Song”, “To the Muses”, “Gwin, King of Norway”, “An Imitation of Spen[s]er”, “Blind-man’s Buff” — the dramatic fragment “King Edward the Third”, two prologues, “A War Song to Englishmen”, and three prose pieces, “The Couch of Death”, “Contemplation” and “Samson”.⁴⁸

The poems. The four invocations to the seasons that open the book are in an unrhymed lyric blank verse without precedent in the eighteenth century, and already people the year with the giants of the later myth: Summer “pitched’st here thy golden tent”; Autumn, “laden with fruit, and stained / With the blood of the grape”, sings “the lusty song of fruits and flowers” and flees over the hills “but left his golden load”; Winter is a tyrant of the north — “O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors: / The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark / Deep-founded habitation” — “the direful monster, whose skin clings / To his strong bones”, who “withers all in silence” until “driv’n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla”. “To the Evening Star” asks the “fair-hair’d angel of the evening” to “speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, / And wash the dusk with silver”. “How sweet I roam’d from field to field”, which Malkin was told Blake wrote before he was fourteen, is the first of his poems about the cage: the “prince of love” leads the winged speaker “through his gardens far, / Where all his golden pleasures grow”, then “He caught me in his silken net, / And shut me in his golden cage … Then stretches out my golden wing, / And mocks my loss of liberty.” “Mad Song” — “The wild winds weep, / And the night is a-cold” — ends with a speaker who turns “my back to the east, / From whence comforts have increas’d; / For light doth seize my brain / With frantic pain”, and gave “Infant Sorrow” its “fiend hid in a cloud”. “To the Muses” indicts the poetry of the age in its own Gray-like music — “How have you left the antient love / That bards of old enjoy’d in you! / The languid strings do scarcely move! / The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!” — and is built on the four elements. “Gwin, King of Norway”, a ballad in Percy’s manner about a tyrant overthrown by the giant Gordred and a people who “tear the poor man’s lamb”, asks “O what have Kings to answer for, / Before that awful throne! / When thousand deaths for vengeance cry, / And ghosts accusing groan!”, and is the first of the political prophecies. “King Edward the Third”, an unfinished blank-verse play before Crécy, has a King who invokes Liberty, “the charter’d right of Englishmen”, and a Minstrel whose song of Trojan Brutus’s landing prophesies that “Liberty shall stand upon the cliffs of Albion, / Casting her blue eyes over the green ocean”; whether its patriotism is meant or ironic has divided the critics since Erdman, and the “Prologue, intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth” leaves no doubt of the author’s view of war — “O who can stand? O who hath caused this? / O who can answer at the throne of God? / The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it! / Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!” The prose “Contemplation” has the speaker answer the daughter of the grey Morning, “I am wrapped in mortality, my flesh is a prison, my bones the bars of death”; “Samson” retells Judges in a Miltonic prose that Andrew Lincoln has called an early experiment in prophetic narrative.

Major themes and takeaway. The seasons and the elements as living persons; the golden cage of possessive love; the king who must answer for war; the flesh as prison; and, in the Minstrel’s song, the first appearance of the word Albion. The volume is pre-mythological — Frye called its language “symbolic … in an emergent and transitional form” — but the fiery Summer, the adamantine northern Winter, the accusing ghosts and the cage are the materials of Orc, Urizen, the Accuser and the Net of Religion, and the metrical freedom of the seasons and of the prologue in prose is where the long line of the prophecies was learned.

An Island in the Moon (c. 1784–85)#

At a glance. An untitled and unfinished prose satire with songs, in Blake’s hand on eight leaves (Fitzwilliam Museum), with two or more leaves lost between the eighth and the last; first printed by E. J. Ellis in 1907, and given its title by the editors. The island “seems to have some affinity to England”, and its inhabitants — “three Philosophers Suction, the Epicurean, Quid the Cynic, & Sipsop, the Pythagorean”, “Etruscan Column the Antiquarian”, “Inflammable Gass the Wind finder”, “Obtuse Angle” the mathematician, “Steelyard the lawgiver”, Mrs Gimblet, Mrs Nannicantipot, Miss Gittipin, Tilly Lally and the rest — talk, quarrel, sing and get drunk through eleven short chapters. Quid, “the Elder” of two philosophers who seem to be brothers, is generally taken to be Blake and Suction his brother Robert; Inflammable Gass has been identified with Priestley, Sipsop with Thomas Taylor, Steelyard with Flaxman and Mrs Nannicantipot with Anna Laetitia Barbauld, with varying plausibility.⁴⁹

Argument and significance. The satire is on the talk of the Mathew circle and the lecture-rooms of the 1780s: Quid, “the Cynic”, declares that “Homer is bombast & Shakespeare is too wild & Milton has no feelings they might be easily outdone Chatterton never writ those poems” — the reverse of Blake’s opinions; Steelyard reads “Herveys Meditations among the tombs & Youngs Night thoughts”, Scopprell “An Easy of Huming Understanding by John Lookye Gent”; Inflammable Gass’s air-pump bursts and “let out the Pestilence”; Obtuse Angle sings that he would rather be Sutton, founder of the Charterhouse, than “Sir Isaac Newton / Or Locke or Doctor South”; and “Hail Matrimony made of Love” ends in “Matrimony’s Golden cage”. Chapter 11 contains the earliest versions of three Songs of Innocence — “Upon a holy thursday their innocent faces clean”, sung by Obtuse Angle, “When the tongues of children are heard on the green”, sung by Mrs Nannicantipot, and “O father father where are you going”, sung by Quid — after which “nobody could sing any longer”. Then the manuscript breaks, and the fragment on the last leaf is the first description of the method of the illuminated books: “them Illuminating the Manuscript—Ay said she that would be excellent. Then said he I would have all the writing Engraved instead of Printed & at every other leaf a high finishd print all in three Volumes folio, & sell them a hundred pounds a piece. they would Print off two thousand”. The passage was written before the death of Robert and before the vision that Blake said gave him the method; whatever the vision added, the idea of a book in which text and picture were engraved together was already his.

All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion (c. 1788)#

At a glance. Blake’s first works in relief etching, on plates about two inches by two and a half, each aphorism on its own plate; dated 1788 by his own later note on The Ghost of Abel, “W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788”. All Religions are One survives in a single copy printed in 1795 (Huntington; its title-page in the Fitzwilliam), There is No Natural Religion in about a dozen incomplete sets from two printings of c. 1794 and 1795, no set containing all twenty plates and none the plate of proposition III of the second series. The title of the second is lettered in reverse and stands on a Gothic door.⁵⁰

Argument. All Religions are One, headed “The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness”, is seven “Principles” after an “Argument” that borrows the empiricists’ first premise — “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences” — and then names that faculty the Poetic Genius, “the true Man”, from which “the body or outward form of Man” and “the forms of all things” are derived, which “by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon”, which all men share “with the same infinite variety”, which “is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy” and from whose “different reception” by each nation all religions come; the Jewish and Christian Testaments are “An original derivation” from it, and “The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius.” There is No Natural Religion is two series of numbered propositions. The first states Locke’s philosophy until it is a prison — “Man cannot naturally Percieve, but through his natural or bodily organs”; “Mans desires are limited by his perceptions. none can desire what he has not perciev’d” — and the second refutes it: “Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover”; “Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. is not the same that it shall be when we know more”; “The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels”; “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man”; “The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.” The “Conclusion” is that without “the Poetic or Prophetic character” philosophy “would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still”, and the “Application” is the sentence that the rest of Blake’s work expounds: “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.”

Takeaway. The two tractates are the foundation-stones of the system: imagination as the true man and the source of the body; all religions as dialects of one revelation; perception unbounded by the senses; reason as a “ratio” of what is already known, which the “mill with complicated wheels” — the Newtonian universe, and later Satan’s “dark Satanic Mills” — makes into a prison; and the divine humanity in the form of an incarnation universalised. Damon called the last sentence “one of the greatest voicings of the greatest truth”.

Tiriel (c. 1789)#

At a glance. A narrative poem of about four hundred lines in the fourteen-syllable line Blake would use for most of the later books, in fair copy with a heavily revised ending, on eight leaves (British Library, Egerton MS 2876), in wrappers that may be inscribed by Joseph Johnson; first printed by W. M. Rossetti in 1874. Twelve monochrome wash drawings (Butlin 198; three untraced since 1863) were made to accompany it, and the Blake Archive’s editors think they were preliminaries for a book of engraved text and plates that was never made.⁵¹

Plot. “And Aged Tiriel. stood before the Gates of his beautiful palace / With Myratana. once the Queen of all the western plains / But now his eyes were darkned. & his wife fading in death.” The blind old king summons his sons to see their mother die and curses them when the eldest, Heuxos, answers that “Were we not slaves till we rebeld. Who cares for Tiriels curse / His blessing was a cruel curse. His curse may be a blessing”; Myratana dies, and he goes out “darkling oer the mountains”. He is led to the vales of Har, where his parents Har and Heva, “like two children”, play with flowers and run after birds under the care of the aged Mnetha, and fail to know him though they say “thou art so like Tiriel”; he dissembles, refuses to stay and hear “Har sing in the great cage”, and goes on — “I must not sleep nor rest because of madness & dismay”. In the forest his brother Ijim, a giant who takes every creature he meets for a fiend in disguise, seizes him as “the Hypocrite that sometimes roars a dreadful lion” and carries him back to the palace to expose the impostor; when the sons confirm that this is their father, Ijim refuses to believe it and goes back to the forest. Tiriel then calls down “Thunder & fire & pestilence” on his children: a hundred sons die, the four eldest daughters lie “stretchd on the marble pavement”, and thirty sons remain “to wither in the palace / Desolate. Loathed. Dumb Astonishd waiting for black death”. He forces his youngest daughter Hela to lead him back to Har, and when she calls him “O cruel O destroyer O consumer. O avenger” curses her hair into snakes. They pass the caves of his enslaved brother Zazel — “Bald tyrant. wrinkled cunning listen to Zazels chains / Twas thou that chaind thy brother Zazel where are now thine eyes” — and reach the vales of Har, where Tiriel, touching Har’s ankles, makes the speech that is the poem’s meaning and dies: “O weak mistaken father of a lawless race / Thy laws O Har & Tiriels wisdom end together in a curse / Why is one law given to the lion & the patient Ox / And why men bound beneath the heavens in a reptile form / A worm of sixty winters creeping on the dusky ground”. He describes the upbringing that made him — “The father forms a whip to rouze the sluggish senses to act / And scourges off all youthful fancies from the newborn man” — until he was “Compelld to pray repugnant & to humble the immortal spirit / Till I am subtil as a serpent in a paradise”, and ends “outstretchd at Har & Hevas feet in awful death”. A deleted passage of this last section contained the lines “Can wisdom be put in a silver rod or love in a golden bowl”, which became the motto of Thel.

Characters and symbolism. The names are the first sign of Blake’s raids on the magical literature: Tiriel is the Intelligence of Mercury and Zazel the spirit of Saturn in the planetary tables of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (II.xxii), which were also reprinted in the Conjuror’s Magazine of 1792, and Zazel is besides the scapegoat Azazel of Leviticus and Enoch; Ijim is from the “satyrs” (iyyim) of Isaiah 13; Hela from the Hel of Gray’s Norse odes; Heva is Latin Eve, so that Har and Heva are a senile Adam and Eve. Damon’s readings, which have held, make Tiriel the aged religion of law “that rules by power of the Curse”, his blindness lost vision, his kingdom of “the west” the body; Har and Heva degenerate poetry and painting fallen into second childhood, in a vale that is Innocence gone sterile; Mnetha (Athena with Mnemosyne) the neoclassical memory that preserves the arts without understanding them; Ijim the superstitious religion of the common people, “wrestling with a devil who is not there”; Zazel the outcast genius chained by the official religion; the sons the arts and sciences and the five daughters the senses, of whom only Hela, touch, survives to lead the blind faith back to its parents. Frye read the poem as “a tragedy of reason”, Bloom as a satire on “the Jehovah of deistic orthodoxy”, Erdman as the madness of George III in 1788–89. Takeaway. Tiriel is the first draft of The Book of Urizen: the blind tyrant-father, the curse that petrifies, the children bound “in a reptile form”, the “one law” for lion and ox, and the recognition that error, once seen, expires of itself.

Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)#

At a glance. Songs of Innocence, “The Author & Printer W Blake”, 1789: thirty-one relief-etched plates, the first printing of about sixteen copies in 1789, later printings to c. 1811, twenty-one copies in all, no two with the plates in the same order. Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, with a general title-page dated 1794 and a separate Experience title also dated 1794: fifty-four plates, of which five (“The Little Girl Lost” and “Found”, “The School Boy”, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard”) were moved from Innocence to Experience between 1794 and 1818; twenty-eight copies printed by Blake, the last from 1818 to 1827 in a fixed order, and posthumous copies printed by Tatham c. 1832. The 1793 prospectus offered each part “Octavo, with 25 designs, price 5s.”; in 1818 the pair cost £5 5s. and in 1827 £10 10s. Every copy was coloured by hand, by Blake or Catherine, and the Experience plates were at first colour-printed. The Notebook holds drafts of eighteen Experience poems, written between 1790 and 1792, and of a satiric “Motto” never used. It is the one book of Blake’s that had readers in his lifetime — Malkin printed four of the Songs, with two poems from the Sketches, in 1806, Wordsworth copied poems from Malkin, Coleridge ranked them one by one in 1818, Lamb sent “The Chimney Sweeper” to a chimney-sweepers’ anthology in 1824 — and it remains the one by which he is known.⁵²

The two Introductions. Innocence opens with the piper on the valleys wild who sees “On a cloud … a child” and is told to pipe, sing and write “In a book that all may read”: “And I made a rural pen, / And I stain’d the water clear, / And I wrote my happy songs / Every child may joy to hear.” Experience opens with the Bard “Who Present, Past, & Future sees / Whose ears have heard, / The Holy Word, / That walk’d among the ancient trees”, calling “the lapsed Soul” and “fallen fallen light” to return — “O Earth O Earth return! / Arise from out the dewy grass” — and “Earth’s Answer” replies that she cannot: “Prison’d on watry shore / Starry jealousy does keep my tent / Cold and hoar / Weeping o’er / I hear the Father of the ancient men // Selfish father of men / Cruel jealous selfish fear / Can delight / Chain’d in night / The virgins of youth and morning bear … Break this heavy chain, / That does freeze my bones around / Selfish! vain! / Eternal bane! / That free Love with bondage bound.” The “Holy Word” walking in the garden of Genesis 3 is the Word who is the poet’s own inspiration; “Starry jealousy”, the Father of the ancient men, is the first portrait of Urizen; and the two poems state the argument of the book, that Earth cannot answer the call of vision while “free Love” is bound.

The contraries in detail. The two states are set against each other poem by poem, and Blake’s later doctrine can be read off the pairs. “The Lamb” — “Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee” — answers itself with the incarnation: “He is called by thy name, / For he calls himself a Lamb: / He is meek & he is mild, / He became a little child: / I a child & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name.” “The Tyger”, drafted in the Notebook with a discarded stanza about “the horrid ribs” and “the well of sanguine woe”, asks the question the other poem cannot: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? … What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp, / Dare its deadly terrors clasp! // When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears: / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The forge is Los’s; the stars who threw down their spears are, in The Four Zoas, Urizen’s armies at the fall; and the tiger is the “wrath” that the Proverbs of Hell call wiser than instruction. The two “Chimney Sweeper”s set Tom Dacre’s dream of the “Angel who had a bright key” and its moral, “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”, against “A little black thing among the snow: / Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!” whose parents “are gone to praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery”. The two “Holy Thursday”s set the charity children flowing “into the high dome of Pauls” “like Thames waters” — “Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor / Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door” — against “Is this a holy thing to see, / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery, / Fed with cold and usurous hand?” The two “Nurse’s Song”s share a first line and diverge: “My heart is at rest within my breast / And every thing else is still” against “My face turns green and pale … Your spring & your day, are wasted in play / And your winter and night in disguise”. “Infant Joy” — “I have no name / I am but two days old” — is answered by “Infant Sorrow”: “My mother groand! my father wept. / Into the dangerous world I leapt: / Helpless, naked, piping loud; / Like a fiend hid in a cloud. // Struggling in my fathers bands: / Striving against my swadling bands: / Bound and weary I thought best / To sulk upon my mothers breast.”

The theology is in “The Divine Image” and its contraries. Innocence: “For Mercy Pity Peace and Love, / Is God our father dear: / And Mercy Pity Peace and Love, / Is Man his child and care. // For Mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face: / And Love, the human form divine, / And Peace, the human dress … And all must love the human form, / In heathen, turk or jew. / Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, / There God is dwelling too.” Experience’s “The Human Abstract” unmakes it: “Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor: / And Mercy no more could be, / If all were as happy as we; // And mutual fear brings peace; / Till the selfish loves increase. / Then Cruelty knits a snare, / And spreads his baits with care”, and the tree that grows from Cruelty’s “holy fears” and bears “the fruit of Deceit” is the Tree of Mystery — “The Gods of the earth and sea, / Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree / But their search was all in vain: / There grows one in the Human Brain.” A third, “A Divine Image”, etched c. 1790–91 but printed by Blake in only one copy, reverses the third stanza outright: “Cruelty has a Human Heart / And Jealousy a Human Face / Terror, the Human Form Divine / And Secrecy, the Human Dress”. The great single poems of Experience are all on the one theme of love bound. “The Sick Rose”: “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm: // Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.” “The Garden of Love”: “A Chapel was built in the midst, / Where I used to play on the green. // And the gates of this Chapel were shut, / And Thou shalt not. writ over the door … And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars, my joys & desires.” “A Poison Tree”, whose Notebook title was “Christian Forbearance”: “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow.” “The Clod & the Pebble”: “Love seeketh not Itself to please … And builds a Heaven in Hells despair” against “Love seeketh only Self to please … And builds a Hell in Heavens despite”. “A Little Boy Lost”, in which the child who reasons that “Nought loves another as itself” is burned by the Priest “in a holy place” — “Are such things done on Albions shore”. “A Little Girl Lost”: “Children of the future Age, / Reading this indignant page; / Know that in a former time. / Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.” And “London”, whose draft had “dirty street” and “german forged links” where the etched text has the phrase that has become a proverb: “I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe. // In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear, / In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear // How the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls, / And the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls // But most thro’ midnight streets I hear / How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born Infants tear / And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”

Two poems stand outside the pairs. “The Little Girl Lost” and “Found”, begun in Innocence, tell of seven-year-old Lyca asleep in “the desart wild”, licked and undressed by the kingly lion and the lioness and carried to their caves, and of her parents, who after seven days meet the lion turned “A spirit arm’d in gold” and dwell thereafter “in a lonely dell / Nor fear the wolvish howl, / Nor the lions growl” — a myth of death as liberation and of the beast of prey as the angel, prefaced by the prophecy “That the earth from sleep, / (Grave the sentence deep) / Shall arise and seek / For her maker meek: / And the desart wild / Become a garden mild.” “To Tirzah”, added after 1803 and lettered like the late books, is the one Song written in the doctrine of the prophecies: “Whate’er is Born of Mortal Birth, / Must be consumed with the Earth / To rise from Generation free; / Then what have I to do with thee? // The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride / Blow’d in the morn: in evening died / But Mercy changd Death into Sleep; / The Sexes rose to work & weep. // Thou Mother of my Mortal part. / With cruelty didst mould my Heart. / And with false self-decieving tears, / Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears. // Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay / And me to Mortal Life betray: / The Death of Jesus set me free, / Then what have I to do with thee?” — with the design inscribed “It is Raised a Spiritual Body”. Tirzah, the mother of the mortal body, is in Milton and Jerusalem the daughter of Rahab, and the poem is Blake’s own gloss on what Experience is.

Major themes. The two contrary states are not childhood and adulthood but conditions of the soul, and Innocence is not naïveté: Damon called it “the Initial Eden”, a state that contains “seeds of error”, and several of its poems — “The Little Black Boy”, whose mother teaches that “we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love, / And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face / Is but a cloud”; “Night”, in which the lion’s “ruddy eyes, / Shall flow with tears of gold” — already state the doctrine that “Creation is an act of Divine Mercy” and that the peaceable kingdom is beyond death. God who “became a little child”, “The Lamb”, “A Cradle Song” (“Sweet babe once like thee, / Thy maker lay and wept for me”) and “On Anothers Sorrow” (“He doth give his joy to all. / He becomes an infant small”) restate the “God becomes as we are” of the tractate. The accusation of the churches: the priest, the beadle, the “Father of the ancient men”, the God of “Priest & King” are the one enemy, and the sweeper, the harlot, the soldier, the charity child are his victims. Love bound — by jealousy, by chastity, by “Thou shalt not”, by “the invisible worm” of secrecy — is the disease of Experience; the harlot’s curse blights the marriage hearse. Esoteric symbolism. The stars are reason and its jealousy; the forge and furnace of “The Tyger” are the workshop of the creator-smith; the Tree of Mystery in the human brain is the tree on which Fuzon is nailed in Ahania; the “spiritual body” of “To Tirzah” is Paul’s. Relation to other works. The Songs are the lyric counterpart of the Lambeth prophecies, written in the same years and printed in the same shop, and Blake bound them, from 1818, as a single book of “Contrary States” whose principle is that of the Marriage. Takeaway. The Songs say in the plainest English of the eighteenth century what the prophecies say in myth: that the divine is the human form, that the fall is the binding of love, and that the accuser is not God.⁵³

The Book of Thel (1789)#

At a glance. “THE BOOK of THEL / The Author & Printer Willm Blake, 1789.” Eight plates in relief etching, the motto and the last plate etched somewhat later than the rest, in the fourteener; some seventeen copies, most from a printing of about 1789, two of c. 1818. The motto: “Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? / Or wilt thou go ask the Mole: / Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?”⁵⁴

Argument. Thel, “the youngest” of “the daughters of Mne Seraphim”, a virgin shepherdess of “the vales of Har”, laments her own transience — “Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud. / Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water” — and wishes to “gentle sleep the sleep of death”. Four beings answer her, each content with its lot because each is part of a cycle of use and self-giving: the Lilly of the valley, “a watry weed”, who is “visited from heaven” and will “flourish in eternal vales”; the Cloud, who teaches that “when I pass away, / It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy”, and that “every thing that lives, / Lives not alone, nor for itself”; the speechless Worm, “an infant wrapped in the Lillys leaf”; and the Clod of Clay, the Worm’s mother, who does not understand the grace that visits her — “how this is sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know, / I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love” — and who offers Thel entry into her house: “’tis given thee to enter, / And to return; fear nothing”. In the last section “The eternal gates terrific porter lifted the northern bar” and Thel enters “the land unknown”, sees “the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots / Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists”, “A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen”, and hears from “her own grave plot” a voice that asks the questions of the fallen senses: “Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? / Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile! / Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn, / Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie? … / Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy! / Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” “The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek. / Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har.”

Characters and symbolism. Thel is the unborn soul on the threshold of generation — that is the reading of Damon, Frye and Keynes, who called the poem “an allegory of the unborn spirit visiting the world of generation” — and the vales of Har are the sterile, protected innocence of Tiriel; the four counsellors are the successive lessons of a nature that gives itself; the “northern bar” is the gate of Urizen’s quarter through which the soul descends into matter; the “little curtain of flesh” is the maidenhead, and what Thel flees is the sexual, bodily, mortal life. Raine read the poem through Porphyry’s cave of the nymphs and Agrippa’s “Bne Seraphim”, the Intelligence of Venus, as the descent of a Venusian soul; the name Mne Seraphim is, on Keynes’s and Erdman’s showing, almost certainly Blake’s corruption of Agrippa’s. The Cloud names Luvah — “where Luvah doth renew his horses” — the first appearance of the Zoa of love, whose horses are the passions. Relation to other works. The motto came out of Tiriel; the Clod of Clay is the Clod of the Songs; the fibrous roots of the heart are the vegetated body of the later prophecies. Takeaway. The Blake Archive’s editors put the crux exactly: the ending shows “either her failure to accept the harsh facts of life or the failure of her interlocutors’ philosophy to satisfy the human desire for transcendental truths” — and the ambiguity is Blake’s. Thel is at once a pastoral elegy on mortality, the first sketch of the myth of the descent into generation, and the first of his poems about a refusal of experience.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93)#

At a glance. Twenty-seven relief-etched plates, without date, imprint or signature — the only illuminated book Blake neither signed nor dated, presumably because it ends with “A Song of Liberty”. Nine complete copies survive (four of c. 1790, two of 1794, one of 1795, one of c. 1818 and one of 1827), with three partial issues of the last plates. The date is internal: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is The Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up.” Swedenborg had dated the Last Judgment and the beginning of the New Church to 1757; thirty-three years later is 1790, and thirty-three is the age of Christ at the resurrection: Blake, born in 1757, is the risen one, and Swedenborg the angel left with the grave-clothes. The “Argument” that precedes this is a short poem on “Rintrah” roaring “& shak[ing] his fires in the burdend air”, the just man driven “into barren climes” while “the villain” walks “in mild humility” — the book’s one use of the name that would become Los’s son.⁵⁵

Argument, section by section. The book is a Menippean satire in prose, aphorism and prophecy, its “Devil” the voice of energy and imagination and its “Angels” the voices of reason, morality and religion. Plate 3 states the doctrine: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” “The voice of the Devil” (pl. 4) lists the three errors of “All Bibles or sacred codes” — that man has “a Body & a Soul”, that energy is of the body and reason of the soul, that “God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies” — and their contraries: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses. the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.” Plates 5–6 read Paradise Lost as the history of desire restrained — “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling” — with the Messiah as “the Governor or Reason” and Satan as the “original Archangel” of energy: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” The first “Memorable Fancy” (the term parodies Swedenborg’s “Memorable Relations”) has the narrator “walking among the fires of hell” collecting the sayings a Devil writes “with corroding fires” on the rock, and the seventy Proverbs of Hell (pll. 7–10) follow: “In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy”; “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”; “The cut worm forgives the plow”; “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”; “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”; “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”; “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”; “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. / The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. / The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. / The nakedness of woman is the work of God”; “The cistern contains: the fountain overflows”; “One thought. fills immensity”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; “As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys”; “Damn. braces: Bless relaxes”; “Exuberance is Beauty”; “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius”; “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”; “Where man is not nature is barren”; “Enough! or Too much”.

Plate 11 gives the theory of religion: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses … Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood … Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” In the second Fancy (pll. 12–13) Isaiah and Ezekiel dine with the narrator: Isaiah “saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing”, and “the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God”; asked whether “a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so”, he answers, “All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains”; Ezekiel says that “we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative”, and that his eating of dung was “the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite”. Plate 14 announces the apocalypse and the method: “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true. as I have heard from Hell … the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” The “infernal method, by corrosives” is at once relief etching, in which acid bites away the copper around the design so that it stands up, and the book’s own procedure. The third Fancy (pl. 15) is the “Printing house in Hell”, six chambers — a Dragon-Man clearing rubbish, a Viper adorning the cave with gold, an Eagle making “the inside of the cave … infinite”, “Lions of flaming fire … melting the metals into living fluids”, “Unnam’d forms” casting them “into the expanse”, and “Men who … took the forms of books & were arranged in libraries” — in which “knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation”. Plate 16 states the contraries as classes of men, “the Prolific” and “the Devouring” — “These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence. Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two” — and denies that Jesus came to unite them: “Jesus Christ did not wish to unite but to seperate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! & he says I came not to send Peace but a Sword.” In the fourth Fancy (pll. 17–20) an Angel shows the narrator his “eternal lot”, an abyss with Leviathan rising; the Angel flees and the vision vanishes, leaving the narrator “on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light hearing a harper”, whose song is “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind”; the narrator shows the Angel his own lot in return, monkeys and baboons chained and devouring one another, which is “Aristotles Analytics”; “Opposition is true Friendship.” Plates 21–22 dispose of Swedenborg — “Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods … Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s … But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine” — and the last Fancy (pll. 22–24) has a Devil convert an Angel by showing that Jesus broke every commandment: “I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules.” The Angel “embrac[es] the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah”; “This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense … I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no. One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.” “A Song of Liberty” (pll. 25–27), twenty numbered verses, is a prophecy of the revolution spreading from America to France — “The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth … France rend down thy dungeon; Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome; Cast thy keys O Rome into the deep” — in which the “new born fire” (Orc) stands before “the starry king” (Urizen), is hurled down, rises in his eastern cloud and “stamps the stony law to dust … crying Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease”; its Chorus tells “the Priests of the Raven of dawn” to curse no more, “Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not! For every thing that lives is Holy”.

Major themes. Contraries, whose war is the condition of progression and whose “marriage” is not their reconciliation but their mutual acknowledgement; energy as the only life, and the body as “a portion of Soul”; the poet as maker of the gods, and priesthood as the theft of the gods from their makers; the perception of the infinite as the true apocalypse; the Bible read in its infernal sense; Jesus the transgressor. Esoteric symbolism. The book is Blake’s settling of accounts with Swedenborg and his first naming of Paracelsus and Boehme; its “corrosives”, furnaces and “living fluids” are the alchemist’s; its “six thousand years” are the millenarian week of the world; its cavern with “narrow chinks” is Plato’s, turned into a doctrine of the senses; and its “voice of the Devil” is the Behmenist doctrine of wrath as the ground of life, spoken from the side of the fire. Relation to other works. The Marriage is the door to the Lambeth books, whose Orc and Urizen it names, and its doctrine of contraries is completed, not reversed, in the later distinction between contraries and negations. Takeaway. Swinburne called it “the greatest of all his books … the high-water mark of his intellect”, and it is the book from which the modern reputation, and the modern misreading of Blake as a mere celebrant of energy, both descend; read whole, it is a theory of perception and a programme for a scripture.⁵⁶

The French Revolution (1791)#

At a glance. “THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. A POEM, IN SEVEN BOOKS. BOOK THE FIRST. LONDON: Printed for J. Johnson, No 72, St Paul’s Church-yard. MDCCXCI. [Price One Shilling.]” Blake’s only poem set in type for the trade, it survives in a single set of uncorrected page-proofs of the first book (Huntington Library), with an advertisement promising that “The remaining Books of this Poem are finished, and will be published in their Order”; none of the other six is known, Johnson never published the first, and the poem was first printed in 1913 in Sampson’s second edition. Why it was withdrawn is unknown — the same caution that made Johnson withdraw Paine’s Rights of Man in the same year, or the course of events in France.⁵⁷

Argument. Book the First compresses May to July 1789 into a single day, “from dawn to dawn”, in three hundred and six long anapaestic lines. “The dead brood over Europe, the cloud and vision descends over chearful France; / O cloud well appointed! Sick, sick: the Prince on his couch, wreath’d in dim / And appalling mist”. The sick King and Necker descend to the council of forty nobles; the Bastille looms over Paris with its seven towers of Horror, Darkness, Bloody, Religion, Order, Destiny and “the tower of God”, each with its emblematic prisoner — a man chained “for a writing prophetic”, a skeleton “who refus’d to sign papers of abhorrence”, a woman in the den named Religion who “refus’d to be whore to the Minister”, a madman in the tower of God. The Commons meet in “the Hall of the Nation”; the Duke of Burgundy would rather see “this marble built heaven become a clay cottage” than yield; the Archbishop of Paris, rising “In the rushing of scales and hissing of flames”, relays a nightmare of the Church’s fall — “God, so long worshipp’d, departs as a lamp / Without oil … The mitre become black, the crown vanish” — and urges the King to “let the Bastile devour / These rebellious”; the Duke of Orleans and the Abbé Sieyès speak for humanity and for the people, Sieyès prophesying that “the Priest in his thund’rous cloud / Shall weep, bending to earth embracing the valleys, and putting his hand to the plow, / Shall say, no more I curse thee; but now I will bless thee”, and that “the saw, and the hammer, the chisel, the pencil, the pen, and the instruments / Of heavenly song sound in the wilds once forbidden”. Mirabeau calls for the General of the Nation, Lafayette springs up “saying, Ready!”, the Assembly votes “the removal of War”, the army withdraws ten miles from Paris, cold newts and snakes crawl on “the kingly foot”, “the bottoms of the world were open’d, and the graves of arch-angels unseal’d”, and the book ends with “Paris without a soldier, silent … and the Senate in peace, sat beneath morning’s beam”. Takeaway. The most topical of the early prophecies, with real names and places, is already a psychomachia; its King, plagues and unsealed graves pass into America and Europe, where the history is wholly absorbed into myth, and its suppression — a radical poem set by a radical publisher and withdrawn — is the emblem of Blake’s public career.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)#

At a glance. “VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion … Printed by Willm Blake: 1793”, with the motto “The Eye sees more than the Heart knows” on the title-page: eleven plates in relief etching, an “Argument” and eight plates of text, some seventeen copies, twelve of them from the first printing of 1793. (For this book and the two Continental prophecies Erdman numbers the text plates from 1 and the frontispiece, title and “Argument” as i–iii; the Blake Archive and Bentley count all plates consecutively, so that their plate numbers are two higher.)⁵⁸

Argument and plot. “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.” Oothoon, “the soft soul of America”, plucks the marigold of Leutha’s vale, which tells her that “the soul of sweet delight / Can never pass away”, and flies over the waves to her lover Theotormon; on the way “Bromion rent her with his thunders” — he rapes her, brands her his property and, in the same breath, the slaves of his plantation: “Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: / Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun … Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the child / Of Bromions rage”. Theotormon, instead of rescuing her, binds “the adulterate pair” “back to back in Bromions caves” and sits “wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears”. Oothoon calls his eagles to “rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect / The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast”; she declares herself pure — “Arise my Theotormon I am pure. / Because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black” — and diagnoses the prison of the senses: “They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up. / And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle, / And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning”. The rest of the poem is her three speeches, broken by the questions of the two men. On perception: “With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? / With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?”; Theotormon can only ask “Tell me what is a thought? & of what substance is it made? / Tell me what is a joy?”, and Bromion, dreading an infinity of “trees beasts and birds unknown”, clings to law — “And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox?” On the god of reason, in the first naming of Urizen in the prophecies: “O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven: / Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image”. On marriage without love: the girl “who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot; is bound / In spells of law to one she loaths”, turning “the wheel of false desire” and bearing “the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form / That live a pestilence & die a meteor”. On “hypocrite modesty”, which teaches the virgin to “catch virgin joy, / And brand it with the name of whore”; on the “Father of jealousy” and “self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton / With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed”. Her positive vision is of free love — “The moment of desire! the moment of desire!”; “I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!”; “Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?” — and, in the passage that has divided her readers since, she offers to spread “silken nets and traps of adamant” and “catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold” and to “lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play … nor e’er with jealous cloud / Come in the heaven of generous love”. Nothing is resolved: “Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits / Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire”, and the poem ends on its refrain, “The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs.”

Characters and symbolism. Oothoon (from Macpherson’s Oithóna) is free desire and imaginative vision, and also America and the enslaved; Bromion (“roaring”) is possession, law and the slave-owner — Blake had just engraved the plates of Stedman’s Narrative of Surinam; Theotormon (“god-tormented”) is the man paralysed by the morality he has internalised, who cannot act, forgive or love; the Daughters of Albion are the women of England, and beyond them all who can echo a protest and not act on it. The motto opposes the eye, which sees the infinite, to the heart, cramped by law. Relation to other works. The poem fixes the names Urizen, Leutha and the Daughters of Albion, states “every thing that lives is holy” in Oothoon’s mouth, and gives the Marriage’s doctrine of energy its first heroine. Takeaway. The Blake Archive summarises it as Blake’s “critique of colonialism, slavery, sexual repression, and attitudes towards women in his day”; it is also the first of his poems in which vision is raped by tyranny and then abandoned by convention, and the refusal of resolution is the point.⁵⁹

America a Prophecy (1793)#

At a glance. “AMERICA a PROPHECY / LAMBETH / Printed by William Blake in the year 1793”: eighteen plates of relief and white-line etching in a large quarto, the first of the Continental prophecies; twenty-three plates were etched, but four, with references to “the King” and “George”, were never published. About fourteen copies, ten of them from 1793, with later printings of 1795, c. 1807 and 1821; the price was 10s. 6d. in 1793 and £5 5s. in 1818.⁶⁰

Plot. The “Preludium”: “The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc. / When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o’er his dark abode”. The nameless female, who brings the chained Orc food “in iron baskets”, is dumb “for never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise”; when “Orc assay’d his fierce embrace” and “The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire”, he takes her and she finds her voice: “I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go; / Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa”. In most copies Blake masked the four lines that follow, in which “The stern Bard ceas’d, asham’d of his own song” and dashed his harp against a pillar. The “Prophecy” opens with “The Guardian Prince of Albion” burning “in his nightly tent” and the American leaders in a visionary council — “Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green” — where Washington sees “a heavy iron chain / Descends link by link from Albions cliffs across the sea to bind / Brothers & sons of America”. Albion’s Angel rises in “A dragon form”; Orc appears over the Atlantic “a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge / Of iron heated in the furnace”, and “The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision”. Orc’s proclamation is the resurrection of the body and the end of empire: “The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; / The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up … Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field: / Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air … For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.” Albion’s Angel calls him “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities”; Orc answers, “I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree … That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad / To the four winds as a torn book … For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life”. The Angel summons “my Thirteen Angels” of the colonies to war; “Silent the Colonies remain and refuse the loud alarm”; the Angel of Boston cries “no more I follow, no more obedience pay”, and “all the thirteen Angels / Rent off their robes … & threw their golden scepters / Down on the land of America”, joining Orc. Albion’s Angel then looses his plagues, which recoil: “The red fires rag’d! the plagues recoil’d! then rolld they back with fury / On Albions Angels; then the Pestilence began in streaks of red / Across the limbs of Albions Guardian, the spotted plague smote Bristols / And the Leprosy Londons Spirit”. The priests “Rush into reptile coverts”, and the fires of Orc leave “the females naked and glowing with the lusts of youth”. At the end Urizen, “who sat / Above all heavens in thunders wrap’d, emerg’d his leprous head” and pours “his stored snows” over the fire, hiding Orc for twelve years, “when France reciev’d the Demons light”; but “the five gates of their law-built heaven … were consum’d, & their bolts and hinges melted / And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of men”. “FINIS.”

Characters and symbolism. Orc, “the hairy youth”, is revolutionary energy and fallen desire, chained at the foot of the “accursed tree” and bursting free; the shadowy daughter of Urthona is the enslaved earth and America itself; Albion’s Angel is the spiritual form of the British crown; Urizen is the sky-god whose snows are reaction and the counter-revolution of 1793. The recoiling plagues are Erdman’s key: Britain’s coercion of America returned on Britain. The five consumed gates are the senses. Relation to other works. The Preludium’s rape and the Angel’s plagues come from Visions and The French Revolution; the “twelve years” between the Peace of 1783 and the Revolution point forward to Europe, which begins where this ends. Takeaway. The American war as a chapter in the cosmic revolt of Orc against Urizen, in which the revolution is real and its victory partial.

Europe a Prophecy (1794)#

At a glance. “EUROPE a PROPHECY / LAMBETH / Printed by Will: Blake: 1794”: eighteen plates of relief and white-line etching, the frontispiece being the design known since the nineteenth century as The Ancient of Days; about eleven copies (six of 1794, two of 1795, one of 1821), only two of which, H and K, contain the prefatory plate with the Fairy. The frontispiece — a bearded figure crouching in a sun, reaching down with golden compasses to measure the abyss — is the compass-bearer of Proverbs 8:27 and Paradise Lost VII, and for Blake the image of creation as limitation; he coloured a copy of it for Tatham in the last days of his life.⁶¹

Plot. In the copies that have it, a Fairy “on a streak’d Tulip” sings that “Five windows light the cavern’d Man; thro’ one he breathes the air; / Thro’ one, hears music of the spheres; thro’ one, the eternal vine / Flourishes … thro’ one, himself pass out what time he please, but he will not; / For stolen joys are sweet, & bread eaten in secret pleasant”; the narrator catches him in his hat, feeds him on “love-thoughts”, and “My Fairy sat upon the table, and dictated EUROPE”. The “Preludium” has “The nameless shadowy female” rise “from out the breast of Orc” to lament her endless fertility and ask, “And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? / To compass it with swaddling bands?” The “Prophecy” opens with the Nativity — “The deep of winter came; / What time the secret child, / Descended thro’ the orient gates of the eternal day: / War ceas’d, & all the troops like shadows fled to their abodes” — read as the beginning of the long night of religion. Enitharmon, queen of the fallen world, summons her children Rintrah and Palamabron and the rest to establish the reign of “Womans love” as sin: “Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin! / That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters / In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come … Forbid all joy”. Then she sleeps, and her sleep is Christendom: “Enitharmon slept, / Eighteen hundred years: Man was a Dream! / The night of Nature and their harps unstrung: / She slept in middle of her nightly song, / Eighteen hundred years, a female dream!” In the dream the history of Albion’s Angel unfolds: the “serpent temple” is raised at “golden Verulam”, “Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth: / To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid / In forests of night … Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d”; Urizen’s “brazen Book, / That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth” is opened; London becomes a prison of prohibition — “Every house a den, every man bound; the shadows are filld / With spectres … Over the doors Thou shalt not; & over the chimneys Fear is written” — and “the Guardian of the secret codes” flees “along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate”. The sleep is broken not by an angel but by reason itself: “A mighty Spirit leap’d from the land of Albion, / Nam’d Newton; he siez’d the Trump, & blow’d the enormous blast! / Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts, / Fell thro’ the wintry skies seeking their graves”. “Then Enitharmon woke, nor knew that she had slept”, and calls her children by name — Ethinthus, Manathu-Vorcyon, Leutha, Antamon, Oothoon and Theotormon, Sotha and Thiralatha, Orc; dawn breaks, Orc’s fire “in the vineyards of red France appear’d”, and the poem ends with Los: “Then Los arose his head he reard in snaky thunders clad: / And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole, / Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” “FINIS.”

Characters and symbolism. Enitharmon is fallen nature and the “female will”, whose eighteen-hundred-year sleep is the Christian era as a dream in which chastity, mystery and a deferred heaven govern; the serpent temple is Stukeley’s Avebury and the fall of perception into the “finite revolutions” of nature-religion; Newton’s trumpet is the Age of Reason blowing the last trump against its own heavens; Los, appearing for the first time as the prophet-consort of Enitharmon, is the imagination summoning its sons to the revolutionary war of 1793–94. The Fairy’s five windows are the senses, and the induction makes the prophecy the dictation of a nature-spirit, a mischievous counterpart to the biblical inspiration Blake elsewhere claims. Relation to other works. Europe continues America and is continued by “Asia” in The Song of Los; its Enitharmon and Los pass into Urizen. Takeaway. Blake’s philosophy of history in one book: revolution rises against tyranny, but within a fallen frame it recurs; redemption will need the labour of Los, which is why the book ends with his call and not with victory.

The Song of Los (1795)#

At a glance. “THE SONG of LOS / LAMBETH / Printed by W Blake 1795”: eight plates, the last and shortest of the Continental prophecies, all six copies colour-printed in one session of 1795, the frontispiece, title and two full-page designs being colour-printed drawings in the manner of the large prints of the same year. Its two parts, “Africa” and “Asia”, bracket America and Europe so that the four continents make one prophetic map.⁶²

Argument. “I will sing you a song of Los. the Eternal Prophet: / He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. / In heart-formed Africa.” “Africa” is the genealogy of the law-religions: “Adam stood in the garden of Eden: / And Noah on the mountains of Ararat; / They saw Urizen give his Laws to the Nations / By the hands of the children of Los”; “Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East”; “To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: / To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato”; “Orc on Mount Atlas howld, chain’d down with the Chain of Jealousy”; Oothoon hovered “over Judah & Jerusalem / And Jesus heard her voice (a man of sorrows) he recievd / A Gospel from wretched Theotormon”; “to Mahomet a loose Bible gave”; “in the North, to Odin, Sotha gave a Code of War”. “These were the Churches: Hospitals: Castles: Palaces: / Like nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity … Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated & erased”; “Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke”; “Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps round Rousseau & Voltaire”; and the section ends with the first line of America, “The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent”. “Asia” begins where Europe left off — “The Kings of Asia heard / The howl rise up from Europe!” — and the kings, dreading Orc’s “thought-creating fires”, call for famine, plague and poverty “To restrain! to dismay! to thin! / The inhabitants of mountain and plain”, “To turn man from his path, / To restrain the child from the womb”; Urizen pours out “his Books of brass iron & gold”; and the cycle closes in the resurrection of the body: “The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes / Her hollow womb … And milk & blood & glandous wine / In rivers rush & shout & dance, / On mountain, dale and plain.” “The SONG of LOS is Ended. / Urizen Wept.”

Takeaway. The negative counterpart of All Religions are One: where the tractate derived every religion from the Poetic Genius, the song derives every law-religion — Brahma’s, Hermes’s, Pythagoras’s, Moses’s, Mohammed’s, Odin’s, and the Gospel itself as received by Theotormon — from Urizen’s law given “by the hands of the children of Los”, the prophetic faculty serving the god of abstraction. The two thousand years of history are a dream of nets; the awakening is bodily, and the tyrant weeps.

The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795) and The Book of Los (1795)#

At a glance. Urizen: “THE FIRST BOOK of URIZEN / LAMBETH. Printed by Will Blake 1794”, the word “FIRST” later removed from the plate; twenty-eight plates in shallow relief, the text in double columns of numbered chapters and verses in imitation of the Bible, richly colour-printed; about eight copies, of which only A and B have all twenty-eight plates, and no two order the full-page designs alike. Ahania and The Book of Los, both “LAMBETH / Printed by W Blake 1795”, are etched in intaglio, six and five plates, and each survives in a single complete copy (Library of Congress; British Museum). Together they are the nearest Blake came to the “Bible of Hell” promised in the Marriage.⁶³

Argument of Urizen, chapter by chapter. The “Preludium” invokes the Eternals to dictate the tale “Of the primeval Priests assum’d power”. I. “Lo, a shadow of horror is risen / In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific! / Self-closd, all-repelling: what Demon / Hath form’d this abominable void … Some said / ‘It is Urizen’”; he “divided, & measur’d / Space by space in his ninefold darkness”. II. Before the fall “Earth was not: nor globes of attraction … Death was not, but eternal life sprung”; Urizen tells how he “sought for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation”, wrote “in books formd of metals” the secrets of wisdom, won “By fightings and conflicts dire, / With terrible monsters Sin-bred: / Which the bosoms of all inhabit; / Seven deadly Sins of the soul”: “Lo! I unfold my darkness: and on / This rock, place with strong hand the Book / Of eternal brass, written in my solitude … One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law”. III. The Eternals roll apart in wrath; Urizen is walled in “a roof, vast petrific … like a womb”, “Like a human heart strugling & beating”; Los, “rent” from his side, keeps watch round “the dark globe of Urizen”, and the Eternals ask, “What is this? Death / Urizen is a clod of clay”. IV. Los, “affrighted / At the formless unmeasurable death”, binds the changes of Urizen’s chaos “With rivets of iron & brass”, and the creation of the human body follows through seven ages, each ending “And a state of dismal woe”: the skeleton and ribs; a “round globe hot burning”, the heart, sinking down the spine; the “nervous brain” and “two little orbs” of eyes; “Two Ears in close volutions”; “Two Nostrils bent down to the deep”; the “craving Hungry Cavern” of the stomach and the tongue “Of thirst & of hunger”; and the arms and feet flung out “in anguish deep”. V. Exhausted, Los “suffer’d his fires to decay”; seeing Urizen chained, “Pity began … for pity divides the soul”, and a “globe of life blood trembling” rolls from Los’s breast. VI. It branches “Fib’rous, writhing” into “a female form”; “All Eternity shudderd at sight / Of the first female now separate”; the Eternals “call’d her Pity, and fled”, weaving round the pair a woof they “called it Science” — the Tent that shuts off Eternity; Enitharmon flees Los and is caught, “Man begetting his likeness, / On his own divided image”, and conceives a Worm that grows to a serpent and a “man Child”, Orc, at whose birth “A shriek ran thro’ Eternity”. VII. Los, jealous of his son, feels “A tight’ning girdle” grow round his bosom by day and burst by night, and the burst girdles become “an iron Chain”: “They chain’d his young limbs to the rock / With the Chain of Jealousy / Beneath Urizens deathful shadow”; Orc’s cries wake the dead, and Urizen, exploring his dens, forges the instruments of measure — “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”. VIII. His creation “teemd vast enormities”; his four sons, the elements — Thiriel, Utha, Grodna and “Fuzon / Flam’d out! first begotten, last born” — appear; he curses his children when “he saw / That no flesh nor spirit could keep / His iron laws one moment”, and from his sorrow spreads “a Web dark & cold, throughout all / The tormented element … twisted like to the human brain / And all calld it, The Net of Religion”. IX. The inhabitants of the thirty cities shrink beneath “the dark net of infection”: “Six days they shrunk up from existence / And on the seventh day they rested / And they bless’d the seventh day, in sick hope: / And forgot their eternal life”; the cities are “now call’d / Africa: its name was then Egypt”; and Fuzon calls “the remaining children of Urizen … They called it Egypt, & left it.”

Argument of Ahania and The Book of Los. Ahania is the Exodus and the Passion of the Bible of Hell. Fuzon, fire and rebellion, revolts against his father — “Shall we worship this Demon of smoke … This cloudy God seated on waters … King of sorrow?” — and hurls a “Globe of wrath” that lengthens into “a hungry beam” and divides “The cold loins of Urizen”; from the wound springs Urizen’s “parted soul”, Ahania, whom “He groand anguishd & called her Sin … Then hid her in darkness”, so that she becomes “The mother of Pestilence”. Fuzon proclaims “I am God … eldest of things!”, but Urizen, from the ribs of a serpent bred in his forests, makes a bow and shoots him with a poisoned rock that “fell upon the Earth, / Mount Sinai, in Arabia” — the stone of the Law — and nails his corpse “On the accursed Tree of MYSTERY”, where “Forty years flew the arrows of pestilence”. The book closes with Ahania’s lament, one of the most tender passages of the Lambeth books, the exiled emanation remembering the paradise before the fall — “Where is my golden palace / Where my ivory bed / Where the joy of my morning hour / Where the sons of eternity, singing” — and Urizen “with thy lap full of seed … To cast / The seed of eternal science”, and ending in “Cruel jealousy! selfish fear! / Self-destroying … Where bones from the birth are buried / Before they see the light”. The Book of Los retells the creation from the side of the imagination. Eno, “aged Mother, / Who the chariot of Leutha guides”, laments the age when “Love & joy were adoration: / And none impure were deem’d”; Los, “bound in a chain / Compell’d to watch Urizens shadow”, rages against the flames until they harden to solid darkness, bursts free and falls — “Falling, falling! Los fell & fell / Sunk precipitant heavy down down / Times on times, night on night, day on day … Truth has bounds. Error none: falling, falling” — while “the falling Mind labour’d / Organizing itself” into lungs and a body; he smites the deep, “Seperating the heavy and thin”, light begins, “The Back bone of Urizen” appears “Like a serpent! like an iron chain”, and Los builds furnaces and, over “Nine ages”, forges “An immense Orb of fire”, the sun, until it “Stood self-balanc’d. And Los smild with joy”, and binds Urizen’s spine to it; but Urizen’s brain in a rock and heart in a slough form four rivers “Obscuring the immense Orb of fire”, until “a Form / Was completed, a Human Illusion / In darkness and deep clouds involvd”. “The End of the Book of LOS.”

Characters and symbolism. Urizen is reason, law, the sky-father and the demiurge — Jehovah as the tyrant of the deists, and the closest thing in Blake to the false creator of the Gnostics; Los is the imagination whose binding of Urizen gives the fall a form and so makes it survivable; Enitharmon is Pity separated, the first female and the “female will”; Orc the son chained by jealousy; Fuzon fire; Ahania Urizen’s pleasure and wisdom, cast out as sin; the Net of Religion the web of the fallen brain. The parody is exact — the “Book of eternal brass” for the tables of the Law, the seven ages for the seven days, the sabbath as the sanctification of shrinkage, the Tent of Science for the tabernacle, Sinai as a poisoned rock, the Tree of Mystery for the cross — and Nuttall’s “alternative Trinity”, in which the Father and the Son do not get on, is here in its first form. Relation to other works. The seven ages and the Chain of Jealousy are repeated almost verbatim in The Four Zoas and the Bard’s Song of Milton; the Ancient of Days with his compasses is the frontispiece of Europe; the Net of Religion is the “Human Abstract”’s tree grown into a cosmos. Takeaway. The Bible of Hell says that creation was a fall, that the material universe, the moral law and organised religion are its wreckage, and that the body was made by pity as a prison and a mercy at once; what it does not yet say, and what the later books add, is how the maker of the prison is to be forgiven.⁶⁴

The Gates of Paradise: For Children (1793) and For the Sexes (c. 1818–26)#

At a glance. “For Children / The GATES of PARADISE / 1793 / Published by W Blake No 13 Hercules Buildings Lambeth and J. Johnson St Pauls’ Church Yard”: eighteen small intaglio plates — a title, a frontispiece and sixteen numbered emblems, each with a motto — in five copies, all of 1793, priced 3s. About 1818–20 Blake reworked the plates, retitled the book For the Sexes, added couplets to the emblems, and etched three new plates: a “Prologue”, “The Keys of the Gates” and the epilogue “To The Accuser Who is The God of This World”; the twenty-one-plate book exists in a few copies of c. 1818 and c. 1825–27 and in posthumous impressions.⁶⁵

The emblems. The frontispiece, “What is Man!”, shows a caterpillar on a leaf above a chrysalis with an infant’s face; the couplet added later reads “The Suns Light when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ that beholds it”. Then: 1, “I found him beneath a Tree”, a woman gathering infants like mandrakes; 2–5, the four elements as the four states of fallen existence — “Water” (“Thou Waterest him with Tears”), “Earth” (“He struggles into Life”), “Air” (“On Cloudy Doubts & Reasoning Cares”), “Fire” (“That end in endless Strife”); 6, a youth breaking from an eggshell, “At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell”; 7, “Alas!”, a boy catching winged spirits; 8, “My Son! my Son!”, a youth about to strike an elder with a spear; 9, “I want! I want!”, a tiny figure setting a ladder to the moon; 10, “Help! Help!”, a drowning man; 11, “Aged Ignorance”, a spectacled old man clipping the wings of a boy at sunrise (“Perceptive Organs closed their Objects close”); 12, Ugolino and his sons, “Does thy God O Priest take such vengeance as this?”; 13, a deathbed, “Fear & Hope are—Vision”; 14, “The traveller hasteth in the Evening”; 15, “Death’s Door”, an old man entering the tomb; 16, “I have said to the Worm, Thou art my mother & my sister”, a veiled woman among the dead. “The Keys of the Gates” is a verse commentary on the sequence — “My Eternal Man set in Repose / The Female from his darkness rose / And She found me beneath a Tree / A Mandrake & in her Veil hid me / Serpent Reasonings us entice / Of Good & Evil: Virtue & Vice”; “Two Hornd Reasoning Cloven Fiction / In Doubt which is Self contradiction”; and, for the last emblem, “The Door of Death I open found / And the Worm Weaving in the Ground / Thou’rt my Mother from the Womb / Wife, Sister, Daughter to the Tomb / Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife / And weeping over the Web of Life”. The Prologue: “Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice / Such are the Gates of Paradise / Against the Accusers chief desire / Who walkd among the Stones of Fire / Jehovahs Finger Wrote the Law / Then Wept! then rose in Zeal & Awe / And the Dead Corpse from Sinais heat / Buried beneath his Mercy Seat / O Christians Christians! tell me Why / You rear it on your Altars high”. The Epilogue, quoted entire: “Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce / And dost not know the Garment from the Man / Every Harlot was a Virgin once / Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan / Tho thou art Worshipd by the Names Divine / Of Jesus & Jehovah thou art still / The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline / The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill.”

Takeaway. The emblem book of 1793 is a psychomachia of the soul’s descent into generation and its passage through “Death’s Door” to the acceptance of the worm; the additions of Blake’s last decade turn it into the most compact statement of his mature religion — the gates of paradise opened by mutual forgiveness and not by law, the “Dead Corpse” of the Law buried under the mercy-seat, the Accuser worshipped under the names of Jesus and Jehovah exposed as a dream, and the “Garment”, the mortal and sexual covering, distinguished from “the Man”. The couplet on the frontispiece is the doctrine of the Trusler letter in eight words.

Vala, or The Four Zoas (c. 1797–1807)#

At a glance. “VALA / OR / The Death and Judgement of the Ancient Man / a DREAM / of Nine Nights / by William Blake 1797”: so the title-page of the manuscript first read; Blake later altered it in pencil to “THE FOUR ZOAS / The torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man”, and added two Greek epigraphs, Ephesians 6:12 (“we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world”) and John 1:14. The manuscript (British Library, Add. MS 39764) is seventy large leaves, forty-seven of them proofs of the Night Thoughts engravings of 1796–97, written on both sides, with drawings on eighty-four pages: begun in a fine copperplate hand as a fair copy for a book that was never printed, then revised, over about a decade, into a working draft whose pages, in Erdman’s words, “move about” in a sequence that “does not correspond exactly to any sequence of the manuscript leaves”. There are two versions of the seventh Night. Blake gave the manuscript to Linnell; Ellis and Yeats printed it, badly, in 1893; Keynes’s text of 1925 and Bentley’s facsimile of 1963 established it; Erdman’s is the standard text. It is the longest of Blake’s poems, some four thousand lines in the fourteener of Thel and Tiriel, and the seed-bed of Milton and Jerusalem, which repeat whole passages of it.⁶⁶

Argument, Night by Night. The poem is the myth of the fall and resurrection of the one Man, told as a dream of nine “Nights” on the model of Young. Night the First opens with the song of “the Aged Mother”, Eno, and the statement of the theme: “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 … His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity”. The fall begins with Tharmas, “Parent power. darkning in the West”, and his Emanation Enion, who examine each other’s secrets — “Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul / Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry / The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy / Horrible Ghast & Deadly nought shalt thou find in it / But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy” — until Tharmas sinks into the sea “a pale white corse” and his Spectre issues from his feet; Enion weaves a body for the Spectre on her loom, and from their union are born Los and Enitharmon, who grow up quarrelling in the fallen world and know, even so, that “Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves. / Tho’ this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain. / Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps”. Enitharmon calls down Urizen — “Descend O Urizen descend with horse & chariots” — and he comes, “Gloomy sounding, Now I am God from Eternity to Eternity … Lo I am God the terrible destroyer & not the Saviour”. Meanwhile the Man, Albion, lies sick; Luvah and Vala have stolen the horses of light; Jerusalem, his Emanation, is hidden and lost; and the Daughters of Beulah, created as a refuge for the weary, receive the fallen. Night the Second begins with Albion’s abdication: “Take thou possession! take this Scepter! go forth in my might / For I am weary, & must sleep in the dark sleep of Death”. Urizen becomes the architect of the fallen universe, building with his sons the “Mundane Shell”, a golden world of “starry wheels”, while Luvah, the passions, is cast into his furnaces and Vala, weeping, tends them; the sons of Urizen labour with compasses and plummet, and the Night ends with Enion’s lament from “the dark deep”, the wisdom of Experience bought at the price “Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children … Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy / And in the witherd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain / It is an easy thing to triumph in the summers sun / And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn / It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted / To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer”. Night the Third turns on Urizen and his Emanation Ahania. She tells him her vision of the origin of the fall: “Then Man ascended mourning into the splendors of his palace / Above him rose a Shadow from his wearied intellect / Of living gold, pure, perfect, holy; in white linen pure he hover’d / A sweet entrancing self delusion, a watry vision of Man / Soft exulting in existence all the Man absorbing / Man fell upon his face prostrate before the watry shadow / Saying O Lord whence is this change thou knowest I am nothing” — the invention of a God outside the human, worshipped by the Man who made him, which is Blake’s account of the birth of religion. Urizen, enraged, casts Ahania out as sin, and in the same act falls himself; the Mundane Shell cracks, and Tharmas rises from the waters as chaos. Night the Fourth is the binding of Urizen by Los, repeated from the Lambeth book through the seven ages, and its consequence — “Los became what he beheld” — until the Council of God intervenes: the Saviour, “the Divine Lamb”, sets the two Limits, “And first he found the Limit of Opacity & namd it Satan / In Albions bosom for in every human bosom these limits stand / And next he found the Limit of Contraction & namd it Adam”, having first bent “over the corse of Death / Saying If ye will Believe your Brother shall rise again”. Night the Fifth is the birth of Orc to Enitharmon, his binding on the mountain with the Chain of Jealousy by his jealous father, and Urizen’s lament at the sound of the fiery child — “Ah how shall Urizen the King submit to this dark mansion” — followed by his resolve to explore his dens. Night the Sixth is Urizen’s journey through his own creation, the “dens” of the fallen universe, where his daughters do not know him and every creature is locked in its own misery, and where he writes, as he goes, the “Book of Iron” and the books of brass and gold — the sciences and the moral law — until he meets the fires of Orc.

Night the Seventh, in the version Erdman prints first, brings Urizen to the Tree of Mystery, where Orc, chained, is tempted into serpent form and made to climb it — the revolt turned into a religion; Urizen reads Orc his books, “Read my books explore my Constellations”; the Shadow of Enitharmon and the Spectre of Urthona meet beneath the tree and, in their converse, the fallen history is retold as a tale of sexual jealousy; and then the turn of the whole poem occurs. The Spectre enters Los’s bosom, and Los, instead of casting him out, “embracd the Spectre first as a brother / Then as another Self; astonishd humanizing & in tears / In Self abasement Giving up his Domineering lust”. The Spectre’s words to him are the doctrine of the Selfhood in its first form: “Thou never canst embrace sweet Enitharmon terrible Demon. Till / Thou art united with thy Spectre … be assurd I am thy real Self / Tho thus divided from thee & the Slave of Every passion / Of thy fierce Soul Unbar the Gates of Memory look upon me / Not as another but as thy real Self I am thy Spectre … If we unite in one, another better world will be / Opend within your heart & loins & wondrous brain / Threefold as it was in Eternity & this the fourth Universe / Will be Renewd by the three & consummated in Mental fires”. Los answers, “Even I already feel a World within / Opening its gates & in it all the real substances / Of which these in the outward World are shadows which pass away … I will quell my fury & teach / Peace to the Soul of dark revenge & repentance to Cruelty”; Los and the Spectre build Golgonooza together, and at the Night’s end “Startled was Los he found his Enemy Urizen now / In his hands. he wonderd that he felt love & not hate / His whole soul loved him he beheld him an infant”. The second version of the seventh Night is a night of war, in which Orc as serpent is worshipped, Vala triumphs and the nations are consumed. Night the Eighth opens with “the Council of God … as one Man Even Jesus” gathered “Upon the Limit of Contraction to create the fallen Man”, and the Man begins to wake “upon the Couch of Death”; Los sees “the Divine Vision thro the broken Gates” of his heart; the Lamb of God descends “thro the twelve portions of Luvah / Bearing his sorrows & recieving all his cruel wounds”; the Synagogue of Satan, presided over by Rahab — Mystery, the harlot-religion of the churches — condemns him, “Thus was the Lamb of God condemnd to Death / They naild him upon the tree of Mystery weeping over him / And then mocking & then worshipping calling him Lord & King”; Los and Enitharmon take the body from the cross and lay it in a sepulchre “which Los had hewn / For himself in the Rock of Eternity”; “Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand Years”; and, in a passage that connects the poem with the polemic of Jerusalem, the Synagogue, “Satan divided against Satan”, resolves “To burn Mystery with fire & form another from her ashes … The Ashes of Mystery began to animate they calld it Deism / And Natural Religion as of old so now anew began / Babylon again in Infancy Calld Natural Religion”.

Night the Ninth, “Being The Last Judgment”, is the apocalypse. “And Los & Enitharmon builded Jerusalem weeping / Over the Sepulcher & over the Crucified body … But Jesus stood beside them in the Spirit Separating / Their Spirit from their body”; Los “Siezd the Sun. His left hand like dark roots coverd the Moon / And tore them down cracking the heavens across from immense to immense”; the trumpet sounds, “Awake ye dead & come / To judgment from the four winds”, “The thrones of Kings are shaken they have lost their robes & crowns / The poor smite their opressors they awake up to the harvest”, the books of Urizen unroll and burn, “the trembling millions” rise “into flames of mental fire”. Albion, the Eternal Man, wakes on his couch and calls Urizen back to his place — “Schoolmaster of souls great opposer of change arise / That the Eternal worlds may see thy face in peace & joy / That thou dread form of Certainty maist sit in town & village / While little children play around thy feet in gentle awe” — and threatens him if he refuses: “Let Luvah rage in the dark deep even to Consummation / For if thou feedest not his rage it will subside in peace”. Urizen repents: “I cast futurity away & turn my back upon that void / Which I have made for lo futurity is in this moment … Rage Orc Rage Tharmas Urizen no longer curbs your rage”; he “shook his snows from off his Shoulders & arose … Then glorious bright Exulting in his joy / He sounding rose into the heavens in naked majesty / In radiant Youth”, and Ahania rises to him with such joy that she dies of it, to be restored in the spring; “Urizen Said. I have Erred & my Error remains with me”. Then the universe explodes and re-forms, “rattling bones / To bones join”, the dead rise from “reptile prisons”, the Man speaks of “Jerusalem in whose bosom the Lamb of God / Is seen tho slain before her Gates he self renewd remains / Eternal”, and Orc, having “quite consumd himself in Mental flames”, is received by “The Regenerate Man” and given, with Vala, to Urizen: “Luvah & Vala henceforth you are Servants obey & live / You shall forget your former state return O Love in peace / Into your place the place of seed not in the brain or heart / If Gods combine against Man Setting their Dominion above / The Human form Divine. Thrown down from their high Station / In the Eternal heavens of Human Imagination … They must renew their brightness & their disorganizd functions / Again reorganize till they resume the image of the human”. Luvah and Vala enter a pastoral of renewed innocence; the harvest and the vintage of the nations are gathered by Urizen’s plough and Luvah’s wine-press, “Attempting to be more than Man We become less said Luvah / As he arose from the bright feast drunk with the wine of ages”; Tharmas and Enion are reunited as children; Urthona grinds the corn “in his rumbling Mills” and makes “the Bread of Ages”. And the poem ends: “The Sun has left his blackness & has found a fresher morning / And the mild moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night / And Man walks forth from midst of the fires the evil is all consumd / His eyes behold the Angelic spheres arising night & day / The stars consumd like a lamp blown out & in their stead behold / The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds … Urthona is arisen in his strength no longer now / Divided from Enitharmon no longer the Spectre Los / Where is the Spectre of Prophecy where the delusive Phantom / Departed & Urthona rises from the ruinous walls / In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science / For intellectual War The war of swords departed now / The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns / End of The Dream”.

Characters. The four Zoas and their Emanations, introduced in the section on Blake’s thought above, receive here their first full portraits: Tharmas, the body, whose fall is the first and whose element is the sea; Urizen, “Prince of Light”, the intellect become tyrant and lawgiver; Luvah, the passion, who as Orc is the revolutionary fire and as the crucified is “the Divine Lamb”; Urthona, the imagination, present in time only as Los, the smith and prophet, with his Spectre and his Emanation Enitharmon; Enion, Ahania, Vala and Enitharmon, the Emanations, whose laments are the poem’s lyric core; Albion, “the Ancient Man”, “the Eternal Man”, “the Fallen Man”, who sleeps through eight Nights and wakes in the ninth; Jerusalem, his Emanation, and Vala, “the lilly of the desart”, nature as goddess; the Daughters of Beulah; the Spectre of Urthona, the first full study of the Selfhood; Rahab and Tirzah, the harlot-religion and the mother of the mortal body, who appear in the eighth Night; and the Council of God, “one Man Even Jesus”. Major themes. The fall as division — of the four powers, of each from its Emanation, of Man from God — and the resurrection as reintegration; the birth of religion from the “watry shadow” that the wearied intellect projects and worships; the creation as mercy, the Limits set to the fall by the Saviour; the Spectre embraced, which is the poem’s turning-point and the origin of the doctrine of forgiveness; the Orc cycle, by which revolt hardens into a new law and religion; the Last Judgment as the consumption of error, in which the tyrant is not destroyed but restored to his place. Esoteric symbolism. The nine Nights are Young’s, and the “dream” form is the apocalyptic vision; the Mundane Shell and the starry wheels are the Ptolemaic and Newtonian heavens as a prison built by reason; the Limits of Opacity and Contraction are Blake’s answer to the Kabbalistic contraction and to the Neoplatonic descent; the loom and the furnace, the woof of the body woven by the female and the metal forged by the male, are the poem’s alchemical apparatus; the Tree of Mystery is the Tree of Knowledge grown into the religion of sacrifice; and the four Zoas at the four quarters of the “Mundane Egg” are the four living creatures of Ezekiel, the four elements, the four faculties and the four cardinal points at once. Relation to other works. The poem incorporates the Lambeth books — the binding of Urizen, the Chain of Jealousy, Enitharmon’s sleep — and is in turn quarried by Milton (the Bard’s Song, Los’s speech “I am that shadowy Prophet”) and Jerusalem (Los and the Spectre, the Council of God, the Limits, the Deism of the eighth Night). Its ninth Night is the fullest narrative of the apocalypse Blake wrote. Takeaway. Unfinished and unprinted, The Four Zoas is the laboratory in which the Lambeth myth of revolt was converted into the myth of forgiveness: the moment at which Los, having embraced his Spectre, finds his enemy Urizen in his hands and feels “love & not hate” is the hinge of Blake’s whole development, and the ninth Night is the one place where he showed the world remade.⁶⁷

Milton a Poem (1804–c. 1811)#

At a glance. “MILTON a Poem in 2 Books / The Author & Printer W Blake 1804 / To justify the Ways of God to Men”: forty-five plates etched in relief, with some full-page designs in white line, between about 1804 and 1810–11, and six more (a–f) added by 1818; no copy contains all fifty-one. Four copies are known: A (British Museum) and B (Huntington), printed c. 1811, which alone contain the prose Preface; C (New York Public Library), printed at the same time and reworked by Blake until about 1821; and D (Library of Congress), printed in 1818, with the fullest text, in which the numbering used here follows Erdman (Keynes’s numbers in square brackets). The title-page inscription suggests that Blake once planned twelve books. The Preface attacks “The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn” and the “Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War”, declares that “We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord”, and ends with the sixteen-line lyric — the “Chariot of fire”, the “dark Satanic Mills”, the vow not to “cease from Mental Fight” until Jerusalem is built in England — that Sir Hubert Parry set in 1916 and that has since been sung as the hymn “Jerusalem”, and with Moses’s wish, “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets”. The price in 1818 was £10 10s.⁶⁸

Argument: Book the First. The poem invokes the “Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song”, and asks “what mov’d Milton, who walkd about in Eternity / One hundred years, pondring the intricate mazes of Providence / Unhappy tho in heav’n”, while “his Sixfold Emanation” — the three wives and three daughters he had tyrannised in life — lay “scatter’d thro’ the deep / In torment”. The answer is “A Bards prophetic Song”, sung at the eternal tables, whose refrain is “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation”. The Bard’s Song retells the binding of Urizen and the building of Golgonooza from the Four Zoas and then tells a new story. Los’s sons Rintrah and Palamabron work the plough and the harrow of the Almighty; Satan, “youngest born”, the “Prince of the Starry Wheels” and “Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke”, whose place is the mills, pleads “with incomparable mildness” to be given Palamabron’s harrow for a day; Los, against his judgement, consents; Satan wrecks the harrow, maddens its horses and enrages the Gnomes who serve it, and then, weeping, accuses Palamabron of the crimes he has himself committed, with a mildness so persuasive that Los cannot judge between them. A Great Solemn Assembly is called; the judgment falls on Rintrah’s wrath rather than on Satan; Satan, “flaming with Rintrahs fury hidden beneath his own mildness”, accuses Palamabron before all Eden, “created Seven deadly Sins drawing out his infernal scroll, / Of Moral laws and cruel punishments”, and declares, “I am God alone / There is no other! let all obey my principles of moral individuality”; his bosom grows “Opake against the Divine Vision”, “a World of deeper Ulro was open’d” in it, and he sinks “a dreadful Death” into the Space that Enitharmon, in pity, creates for him and that “became Canaan”. The Assembly defines the Three Classes of men — “The first, The Elect from before the foundation of the World: / The second, The Redeem’d. The Third, The Reprobate & form’d / To destruction from the mothers womb” — and reverses the Calvinist meaning of the terms: the Elect are Satan’s class, who “cannot be Redeemd, but Created continually / By Offering & Atonement in the cruelties of Moral Law”; the Reprobate are the prophets, like Rintrah, “who never cease to Believe”; the Redeemed are those, like Palamabron, “Who live in doubts & fears perpetually tormented by the Elect”. Leutha, a Daughter of Beulah, offers herself as a ransom for Satan, confessing “I am the Author of this Sin! by my suggestion / My Parent power Satan has committed this transgression”, and explaining how her love for Palamabron, working in Satan’s brain, produced his “soft / Delusory love … admiration join’d with envy”; the Assembly ratifies Enitharmon’s Space and gives it “a Time … Even Six Thousand years”, guarded by the successive Eyes of God until the seventh, Jehovah, “was leprous”; and “the Lamb of God” is seen dying “as a Reprobate … Punish’d as a Transgressor”. The Bard, challenged, answers, “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing / According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius”.

The Song has told Milton that the Puritan God of his own poem — the accuser, the moralist, the “Elect” — is Satan, and that he himself, in heaven, is in Satan’s state. He rises: “I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks!”; “What do I here before the Judgment? without my Emanation? / With the daughters of memory, & not with the daughters of inspiration / I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! / He is my Spectre!” He takes off “the robe of the promise”, leaves Eternity — an act which the Eternals, who count the mortal world as death, receive with horror — enters his own Shadow, “A mournful form double; hermaphroditic: male & female / In one wonderful body”, and descends through the vortexes of the fallen universe, guarded by “the Seven Angels of the Presence”, while his immortal self remains asleep “on a couch / Of gold” in Eden. The doctrine of the vortex is stated as he passes: “every thing has its / Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity. / Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind / His path, into a globe itself infolding … Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent / To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade.” He sees Albion “Deadly pale outstretchd and snowy cold” on the Rock of Ages, and falls “as a falling star, / Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift; / And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enterd there” — the poet’s own foot, at Lambeth, from which “a black cloud redounding spread over Europe”. He journeys through the Mundane Shell, “a vast Concave Earth”, where his six Emanations sit round him “as the rocks of Horeb” and write his dictates in stone; the Shadowy Female (nature) laments and threatens to “put on the Human Form & take the Image of God / Even Pity & Humanity but my Clothing shall be Cruelty”; Orc answers her; and Urizen rises to oppose him, pouring the icy water of Jordan on his brain, while Milton, with the red clay of Succoth, builds “a Human form” on Urizen’s bones — “Silent Milton stood before / The darkend Urizen; as the sculptor silent stands before / His forming image” — the poet remaking the god of reason as a work of art. Rahab and Tirzah, “the Twofold form Hermaphroditic”, tempt him with kingship in Canaan and with “Natural Religion”. Meanwhile Blake, who “knew not that it was Milton”, binds “all this Vegetable World” on his left foot “as a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold” and walks “forward thro’ Eternity”; Los descends to him “a terrible flaming Sun”, “And I became One Man with him arising in my strength”: “I am that Shadowy Prophet who Six Thousand Years ago / Fell from my station in the Eternal bosom. Six Thousand Years / Are finishd. I return! both Time & Space obey my will.” Los’s sons reproach their father for admitting the “Shadow” that will unchain Orc; Los answers that “an old Prophecy in Eden recorded in gold” foretold “That Milton of the land of Albion. / Should up ascend forward from Felphams Vale & break the Chain / Of jealousy from all its roots”, that “by mercy alone we live”, and that the Last Vintage is at hand. The rest of the book is the vision of the labours of Los — Golgonooza, Bowlahoola (“namd Law. by mortals”), Allamanda (“calld on Earth Commerce”), Cathedron’s looms, the wine-press “call’d War on Earth”, which “is the Printing-Press / Of Los”, the Sons of Los building the Moments and Minutes and Hours, “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery / Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years”, the visionary space of every man’s dwelling — ending “Such is the World of Los the labour of six thousand years. / Thus Nature is a Vision of the Science of the Elohim.”⁶⁹

Argument: Book the Second. The second book opens with Beulah — “There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True / This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow / Where no dispute can come” — and with Ololon, the “sweet River, of milk & liquid pearl” in Eden, whose inhabitants had in wrath driven Milton into Ulro and who now, having “not heard the Bard”, lament him and resolve to descend after him: “Let us descend also, and let us give / Ourselves to death in Ulro among the Transgressors. / Is Virtue a Punisher? O no!” The Divine Family, “as One Man even Jesus”, unites with them, and “Jesus the Saviour appeard coming in the Clouds of Ololon”. The lark’s song and the opening of the flowers in the Felpham morning — “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 Corn-field! loud / He leads the Choir of Day” — are “a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon”. On his couch in Eternity, Milton converses with the Seven Angels, who teach him the doctrine of States: “We are not Individuals but States … Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. / States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease … The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself”. The Songs of Beulah reveal the Divine Voice’s marriage-lament and the “Four States of Humanity in its Repose”; Ololon, looking down, sees the fallen world as “a vast Polypus / Of living fibres” and the four Zoas “in evil death”. “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find / This Moment & it multiply. & when it once is found / It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed”: in that moment, at the fountain of the wild thyme by the lark’s nest, Ololon descends “to Los & Enitharmon” and thence, “as One Female”, into Blake’s cottage garden at Felpham, where the poet, whose “Vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeths shades” so that “in three years I might write all these Visions / To display Natures cruel holiness: the deceits of Natural Religion”, greets her as “a Daughter of Beulah” and asks her message. She seeks Milton; and Milton’s Shadow, condensing “all his Fibres / Into a strength impregnable of majesty & beauty infinite”, appears — “I saw he was the Covering Cherub & within him Satan / And Rahab” — the whole apparatus of the Twelve Gods of the heathen and the Twenty-seven Heavens and Churches “from Adam to Luther”, “Religion hid in War, a Dragon red & hidden Harlot”. Milton himself descends “clothed in black, severe & silent” into the garden. Satan, “a Twenty-seven-fold mighty Demon”, stands on the sea “Not daring to touch one fibre”, and Milton addresses him: “Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate / And be a greater in thy place, & be thy Tabernacle … Such are the Laws of thy false Heavns! but Laws of Eternity / Are not such … Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually / Annihilate himself for others good, as I for thee”. He will not defeat Satan and take his throne — that is the Orc cycle, “till one greater comes / And smites me as I smote thee” — but will put off the Selfhood in him: “Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches / Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach / Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness / Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on / In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn / Thy Laws & terrors”. Satan replies as the god of this world — “I am God the judge of all, the living & the dead / Fall therefore down & worship me” — and the Starry Seven surround Milton in a column of fire, crying “Awake Albion awake! reclaim thy Reasoning Spectre”; Albion stirs on his couch, whose four pillars are London, Bath, Legions and Edinburgh, and sinks back. Then Milton and Ololon meet. She asks whether the Natural Religion of “Voltaire & Rousseau: this Hume & Gibbon & Bolingbroke” is her doing, and Milton answers with the speech that is the poem’s creed: “Obey thou the Words of the Inspired Man / All that can be annihilated must be annihilated / That the Children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery / There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary / The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries / The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man / This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal / Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & 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 … To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour / To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration / To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering / To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination / To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration / That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness / Cast on the Inspired … To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning, / But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin / Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave; / Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge; whose Science is Despair … These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers / Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life: / Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination; / By imitation of Natures Images drawn from Remembrance / These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation / Hiding the Human lineaments as with an Ark & Curtains / Which Jesus rent: & now shall wholly purge away with Fire / Till Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration.” Ololon, trembling, recognises herself as “the Six-fold Miltonic Female”, asks “are we Contraries O Milton, Thou & I”, and divides: her sixfold “Feminine Portion” flees “into the depths / Of Miltons Shadow as a Dove upon the stormy Sea”, and Ololon herself, “as a Moony Ark”, descends “In clouds of blood, in streams of gore” into the Starry Eight, who “with one accord … became / One Man Jesus the Saviour”, clothed in “the Clouds of Ololon” as a garment “dipped in blood / Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing / Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression”. “Jesus wept & walked forth / From Felphams Vale clothed in Clouds of blood, to enter into / Albions Bosom”; the Four sound their trumpets; and the poet falls: “Terror struck in the Vale I stood at that immortal sound / My bones trembled. I fell outstretchd upon the path / A moment, & my Soul returnd into its mortal state / To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body / And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side”. The lark mounts, the wild thyme spreads from “Wimbletons green & impurpled Hills”, Los and Enitharmon rise over Surrey, “Los listens to the Cry of the Poor Man”, and the last line is “To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations”.

Characters. Milton, the poet returning from a century in a heaven he has found to be Satan’s, who corrects his own error by putting off the Puritan God in himself; his Sixfold Emanation, the women he had subjected in life, who are Ololon’s fallen portion; Ololon, a river in Eden and the collective of those who drove Milton out, who descends as one female to reunite with him — the most original figure in the poem, at once Milton’s true Emanation, the penitent Church and the muse; Blake himself, the “Vegetated” poet at Lambeth and Felpham into whose foot Milton enters and with whom Los unites — the first poem in which its author is a character; Los, Enitharmon, Rintrah and Palamabron; Satan, who is here Blake’s own patron Hayley in his mildness and the Puritan Jehovah in his accusation, and whose “Mills” are the mechanical universe; Leutha, the guilt-ridden feminine who confesses; the Shadowy Female, Rahab and Tirzah; the Seven Angels of the Presence, the Eyes of God; the Covering Cherub. Major themes. The correction of Milton — of the theology of Paradise Lost, its Father as “Destiny” and its Son as “a Ratio of the five senses”, its subjection of women, its classical models; the Elect, the Redeemed and the Reprobate inverted, so that the moralist is the damned and the prophet the “Reprobate”; the annihilation of the Selfhood as the only escape from the cycle in which every conqueror of Satan becomes Satan; the Moment in which eternity enters time and inspiration is possible; the poet as prophet who is entered by his predecessor and by the spirit of prophecy; the lark and the wild thyme, the smallest things of Felpham as messengers of Eden. Esoteric symbolism. The vortex is Blake’s version of the sphere whose centre is everywhere; the falling star that enters the poet’s foot is the influx of the spirit into the vegetated body (the foot, and the left foot, the lowest and most material point); the “Mundane Egg” with its four surrounding universes is drawn as a diagram on plate 33; the Twenty-seven Churches are the astrological-historical ages of the Behmenist and Swedenborgian schemes reworked; the garment “dipped in blood / Written within & without” is Revelation 19; the descent of Ololon “as a Moony Ark” is the Ark of the Covenant and the moon of Beulah; and the vision is dated to a particular garden on a particular morning, so that the whole apocalypse occurs in one man’s cottage. Relation to other works. Milton draws its Bard’s Song from the Four Zoas and its quarrel from Felpham; the Preface lyric was omitted from the later copies, whose additional plates expand the vision of Los; the poem’s last line is the first line of the apocalypse that Jerusalem does not narrate but envisions. Takeaway. Milton is the poem in which Blake’s doctrine of the annihilation of Selfhood is enacted by its most authoritative English predecessor, on Blake’s behalf and in Blake’s garden: a “brief epic” in Milton’s own genre whose subject is the moment of inspiration, and whose claim is that a man may correct his tradition and his own past not by defeating them but by putting off the accuser in himself.⁷⁰

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–c. 1820)#

At a glance. “JERUSALEM / The Emanation of The Giant Albion / 1804 / Printed by W. Blake Sth Molton St”: one hundred plates etched in relief, with many designs in white line, between about 1804 and 1820 — sixty may have been finished by 1807, and “Detached Specimens” were shown in 1812 — in four chapters of twenty-five plates, each opening with a prose address, “To the Public”, “To the Jews”, “To the Deists” and “To the Christians”. The plates of the second chapter exist in two arrangements. Six copies were printed in Blake’s lifetime: A, C and D in 1820, B (the first chapter only) and E in 1821, and F, left uncollated at his death; only E (Yale Center for British Art) is fully coloured, and Blake said that he never found a buyer for a coloured copy at the price it would have needed; four posthumous copies were printed about 1832. It is the longest illuminated book, some four thousand lines, mostly in a long line that the address “To the Public” explains: “When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse … to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place … Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!” The frontispiece shows Los, lantern in hand, entering a Gothic doorway — “the Door of Death” — and the last plate shows him with hammer and tongs, his Spectre and Enitharmon, before a serpent temple of trilithons.⁷¹

Argument. Jerusalem is not a narrative in the manner of Milton; it is, as Blake told Crabb Robinson of his poems in general, “a Grand Poem … Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers”, a set of visions of one situation — Albion asleep in death, Jerusalem his Emanation cast out, Los labouring at his furnaces to keep the Divine Vision until Albion wakes — arranged in four movements and resolved only on the last plates. Its “theme”, stated at the opening of the first chapter, is “Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through / Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life. / This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn / Awakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over me / Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song.” The Saviour calls Albion: “Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand! / I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine … I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; / Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me: / Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!” Albion refuses him — “We are not One: we are Many, thou most simulative / Phantom of the over heated brain! … Jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: / By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith. / My mountains are my own, and I will keep them to myself! … here will I build my Laws of Moral Virtue! / Humanity shall be no more: but war & princedom & victory!” — and hides Jerusalem; his twelve Sons (Hand, Hyle, Coban, Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton, Slayd, Hutton, Skofield, Kox, Kotope and Bowen — the Hunt brothers, Hayley, the Sussex justices and the soldiers of the trial) and his twelve Daughters become the powers of the fallen world, and the poet, “Trembling I sit day and night”, prays: “O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love: / Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!” The first chapter is Los’s. His Spectre, “the Reasoning Power in Man”, tempts him to despair and accuses his children; Los answers, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”, compels the Spectre to labour at the furnaces, “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems”, and builds Golgonooza, the city of art, of pity, affections, forgiveness and “tears of honesty”, with its gates towards the four worlds. Jerusalem and Vala speak from the fallen earth; the Sons of Albion, having made an “Abstract” from the contraries, a “Negation … the Holy Reasoning Power”, raise Druid temples and the “Wheel without wheel” of Newton and Locke; the Twenty-four Cathedral Cities of England, “the Friends of Albion”, with Bath, “healing City”, at their head, try to carry the dying Albion back “to the Divine Vision”; and the chapter ends with the Daughters of Beulah lamenting over “the Four Regions of Albion” and the Lamb asked “to take away the imputation of Sin / By the Creation of States & the deliverance of Individuals Evermore”. “To the Jews” (pl. 27) opens the second chapter with the claim that Britain was “the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion”, that the Jews’ tradition “that Man anciently containd in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth” came from the Druids, and that “Albion was the Parent of the Druids; & in his Chaotic State of Sleep Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim”, followed by a ballad of Jerusalem’s fall in the fields of Islington and Marylebone and the poet’s reclaiming of his “Selfhood! Satan! armd in gold”, and the exhortation “Take up the Cross O Israel & follow Jesus”. In the chapter Albion, “the punisher & judge”, condenses the hills and valleys into “solid rocks, stedfast! / A foundation and certainty and demonstrative truth”; the Divine Vision appears in the furnaces, saying “No individual can keep these Laws, for they are death / To every energy of man … I go forth to Create / States: to deliver Individuals evermore!”; Reuben, the natural man, is sent across the Jordan and his senses bent by Los; “the Reasoning Spectre / Stands between the Vegetative Man & his Immortal Imagination”; the Eternals pronounce that “What seems to Be: Is: To those to whom / It seems to Be … but the Divine Mercy / Steps beyond and Redeems Man in the Body of Jesus”; the Friends of Albion fail to save him; Los searches “the interiors of Albions / Bosom” and finds “every Minute Particular of Albion degraded & murderd”; Jerusalem, in her own long speech, refuses Vala’s religion of chastity and sacrifice; and Erin, the spirit of Ireland, closes the chapter with the doctrine of States — “Learn therefore O Sisters to distinguish the Eternal Human / That walks about among the stones of fire in bliss & woe / Alternate! from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels: / This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies” — and with “Come then O Lamb of God and take away the remembrance of Sin”.

“To the Deists” (pl. 52), with its marginal mottoes “Rahab is an Eternal State”, “The Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal”, “Distinguish between the Man, & his present State”, is the polemic quoted in the section on Blake’s thought: “Man must & will have Some Religion; if he has not the Religion of Jesus, he will have the Religion of Satan”; “Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sins the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger; and not the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, Named by the Divine Name”; “The Glory of Christianity is, To Conquer by Forgiveness. All the Destruction therefore, Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion”; with the ballad of the Grey Monk, “For a Tear is an Intellectual thing; / And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King / And the bitter groan of a Martyrs woe / Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow!” The third chapter is the reign of Vala, Rahab and Tirzah. Los, “the Vehicular Form of strong Urthona”, weeps over Albion; the Divine Family, “in Great Eternity” where “every particular Form gives forth or Emanates / Its own peculiar Light”, elect the Seven Eyes of God, “Lucifer, Molech, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah, Jesus”, to guard the fallen world; the Spectre rises over Albion “Saying, I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power! / Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man! / Who teach Doubt & Experiment & my two Wings Voltaire: Rousseau”; the voices at the plough cry, “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer”; the plate of Joseph and Mary sets out the forgiveness “without Money & without Price”; the Daughters of Albion, with “the Druid Knife”, divide Albion’s body and build the religion of sacrifice, “Natural Religion & its Altars Natural Morality / A building of eternal death” on Salisbury Plain; Vala reigns as Rahab, “Religion hid in War”; Luvah is crucified, and “the Divine Vision” seen in the furnaces is “Jesus … the Lamb of God”; and the chapter ends with the Twenty-seven Churches named, “where Luther ends Adam begins again in Eternal Circle”, “But Jesus breaking thro’ the Central Zones of Death & Hell / Opens Eternity in Time & Space; triumphant in Mercy”. “To the Christians” (pl. 77) begins with the quatrain “I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball: / It will lead you in at Heavens gate, / Built in Jerusalems wall”, and argues that “I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination”, that “to Labour in Knowledge. is to Build up Jerusalem: and to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders”, and, in a vision of “the Wheel of Religion” whose name is “Caiaphas, the dark Preacher of Death”, that “Jesus is the bright Preacher of Life / Creating Nature from this fiery Law, / By self-denial & forgiveness of Sin”; a second lyric calls “England! awake! awake! awake! / Jerusalem thy Sister calls!” The fourth chapter brings the crisis. Jerusalem, “in the dungeons of Babylon”, laments; Los reads the Stars of Albion while “The Spectre reads the Voids / Between the Stars”; the Daughters of Albion in their beauty and cruelty, Gwendolen with her “Falshood” hidden in her hand, weave the natural body and worship the Wicker Man; Los, in the long dialogue with his Spectre and Enitharmon that recapitulates the Four Zoas, declares, “He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children / One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst / Jesus will appear … General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every / Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus”, and smites the Spectre on his anvil, so that “all his pyramids were grains / Of sand & his pillars: dust on the flys wing”; “Sexes must vanish & cease / To be, when Albion arises from his dread repose”; the Covering Cherub, “the Antichrist accursed”, appears “Coverd with precious stones, a Human Dragon terrible”, within whom Jerusalem lies hidden; Los’s last great speech to his Spectre and Enitharmon summarises the whole religion of the poem, and Enitharmon foresees her own end — “The Poets Song draws to its period & Enitharmon is no more”; and “Time was Finished!” The last plates are the resurrection. “The Breath Divine went forth over the morning hills Albion rose / In anger: the wrath of God breaking bright flaming on all sides around / His awful limbs: into the Heavens he walked clothed in flames”; he compels “Urizen to his Furrow; & Tharmas to his Sheepfold; / And Luvah to his Loom”, and “Urthona he beheld mighty labouring at / His Anvil, in the Great Spectre Los unwearied labouring & weeping / Therefore the Sons of Eden praise Urthonas Spectre in songs / Because he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble.” “Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd / By the lost Sheep that he hath found … & Albion saw his Form / A Man. & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity / And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los.” Albion confesses his Selfhood — “I behold the Visions of my deadly Sleep of Six Thousand Years / Dazling around thy skirts like a Serpent of precious stones & gold / I know it is my Self” — and Jesus answers, “Fear not Albion unless I die thou canst not live / But if I die I shall arise again & thou with me / This is Friendship & Brotherhood without it Man Is Not … Wouldest thou love one who never died / For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee / And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself / Eternally for Man Man could not exist. for Man is Love: / As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death / In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood”. The Covering Cherub overshadows them; Albion, “not for himself but for his Friend / Divine”, forgets himself — “Self was lost in the contemplation of faith” — and “threw himself into the Furnaces of affliction / All was a Vision, all a Dream: the Furnaces became / Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine / And all the Cities of Albion rose from their Slumbers”; the four Zoas “arose into / Albions Bosom”; Albion calls “Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time”, takes his fourfold bow — Urizen’s of gold, Luvah’s of silver, Tharmas’s of brass, Urthona’s of iron, “a Bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness” whose arrows are “Arrows of Love” — and at “the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect” “The Druid Spectre was Annihilate”, and “The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven / And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer”. “And every Man stood Fourfold, each Four Faces had”, the senses become “the Four Rivers of the Water of Life”, the “Husk & Covering” of the body of death is driven out “In Forgiveness of Sins which is Self Annihilation. it is the Covenant of Jehovah”; the Eternals converse “in Visionary forms dramatic … Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine / Of Human Imagination”, and every “Lion, Tyger, Horse, Elephant, Eagle Dove, Fly, Worm, / And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array Humanize / In the Forgiveness of Sins according to the Covenant of Jehovah”; and the poem ends: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all / Human Forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied / Into the Planetary lives of Years Months Days & Hours reposing / And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. / And I heard the Name of their Emanations they are named Jerusalem / The End of The Song of Jerusalem”.⁷²

Characters. Albion, the Giant, the Universal Man, England and mankind, asleep on his rock through the six thousand years of history, whose refusal of the Saviour is the fall and whose self-forgetting is the resurrection; Jerusalem, his Emanation, “named Liberty among the Sons of Albion”, the Bride, at once the city, the soul and the collective Emanation of all human beings, who ends as the name of every creature’s Emanation; Vala, her “shadow”, nature as goddess, jealousy, chastity and war, who as Rahab is “Mystery Babylon” and the religion of sacrifice; Los, the imagination at work in time, “the Vehicular Form of strong Urthona”, who “kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble”, with his Spectre, whom he subdues and uses, and his Emanation Enitharmon; the twelve Sons of Albion, the accusers, named from Blake’s enemies of 1803–09; the twelve Daughters of Albion, from British legend, who weave the mortal body and wield the Druid knife; the Twenty-four Friends of Albion, the cathedral cities, with Bath and Erin; Reuben, the natural man; the Seven Eyes of God; the Covering Cherub, “the Antichrist accursed”, in whom all the Selfhood of history is gathered; and Jesus, who appears “in the likeness & similitude of Los”, the artist. Major themes. The fall as the refusal of brotherhood — Albion’s “We are not One: we are Many” — and the resurrection as its acceptance; forgiveness against accusation, stated in every chapter and enacted at the end; States and Individuals; the Spectre subdued but not destroyed, as the artist’s reason made a servant; Minute Particulars against “General Good”; the Female Will and the religion of chastity and sacrifice, from the Druids to the Deists, which is Vala’s; Britain as the holy land, its counties, cities and rivers taking their places in the body of the Giant; the arts as the Gospel. Esoteric symbolism. The poem’s Albion is the cosmic Adam of the Jews’ “tradition” and of Swedenborg’s Grand Man, his sleep the Kabbalists’ exile and the Neoplatonists’ descent turned into a single figure lying on a rock in the Atlantic; the Twenty-eight Cities and the Twenty-four Friends are the lunar and Apocalyptic numbers; the four Zoas with their four metals, four senses, four rivers and four faces make the fourfold Man of Ezekiel and of the alchemists; Golgonooza is the New Jerusalem under construction, and its stones, bricks and rafters are the works of mercy; the Wicker Man and the trilithons are Stukeley’s Druids as the religion of nature; the “golden string” of plate 77 is Ariadne’s thread turned to a Gospel. Relation to other works. Jerusalem absorbs the Four Zoas (Los and the Spectre, the Limits, the Council of God, the Seven Eyes) and Milton (the Twenty-seven Churches, the Covering Cherub, the doctrine of States), and completes the Songs — its “England! awake!” answers “O Earth O Earth return!” — and the Lambeth books, whose Albion’s Angel and Enitharmon’s sleep are here the Spectre of Albion and the reign of Vala. Takeaway. The poem that Southey called “a perfectly mad poem” is the summa of Blake’s religion: God is a Man who dies for men, and men exist by dying for one another; the accuser is the only enemy; the artist keeps the vision “in time of trouble”; and the end of history is not the destruction of the world but its humanising, “All Human Forms identified”.⁷³

The Pickering Manuscript (c. 1800–04)#

At a glance. Ten poems, seven of them known from no other source, copied in a fair hand on twenty-two pages of paper that had been used for Hayley’s Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802) and trimmed; named after B. M. Pickering, its owner in the 1860s, and now in the Morgan Library. The poems were probably composed between 1800 and 1804, at Felpham and after; the manuscript, without title or designs, may have been prepared for someone, but for whom is unknown. The contents: “The Smile”, “The Golden Net”, “The Mental Traveller”, “The Land of Dreams”, “Mary”, “The Crystal Cabinet”, “The Grey Monk”, “Auguries of Innocence”, “Long John Brown & Little Mary Bell” and “William Bond”.⁷⁴

The poems. “The Mental Traveller” is the most discussed of Blake’s short poems and the most compressed statement of his myth of the cycle. “I traveld thro’ a Land of Men / A Land of Men & Women too / And heard & saw such dreadful things / As cold Earth wanderers never knew”. A Babe “born in joy / That was begotten in dire woe” is given to “a Woman Old / Who nails him down upon a rock”, numbers “every Nerve / Just as a Miser counts his gold”, and “grows young as he grows old”; he becomes “a bleeding youth”, she “a Virgin bright”; he binds her in turn, “plants himself in all her Nerves”, and she becomes “his dwelling place / And Garden fruitful Seventy fold”; he ages into a host in “an Earthly Cot” whose treasures are “the gems of the Human Soul / The rubies & pearls of a lovesick eye / The countless gold of the akeing heart / The martyrs groan & the lovers sigh”, feeding “the Beggar & the Poor”, until from the fire on his hearth “A little Female Babe does spring”, “all of solid fire”, who drives him out “A Begger at anothers door”; he wanders, blind and age-bent, until he wins a maiden, and as he embraces her “The Cottage fades before his Sight … For the Eye altering alters all / The Senses roll themselves in fear / And the flat Earth becomes a Ball / The Stars Sun Moon all shrink away / A desart vast without a bound”; he grows younger as he pursues her, she flees “Like the wild Stag”, “By various arts of Love & Hate / Till the wide desart planted oer / With Labyrinths of wayward Love”, until “he becomes a wayward Babe / And she a weeping Woman Old”, cities are built in the desert, and “when they find the frowning Babe / Terror strikes thro the region wide / They cry the Babe the Babe is Born / And flee away on Every side … And none can touch that frowning form / Except it be a Woman Old / She nails him down upon the Rock / And all is done as I have told.” Its readers have taken the two figures as humanity and nature, Orc and the Shadowy Female, the male spirit and the female will, the artist and his age, the cycle of revolutions or of religions, and Raine as the Neoplatonic cycle of soul and nature; what the poem itself asserts is that the relation of the two is a wheel of alternating tyranny that no revolution breaks, and that “the Eye altering alters all”. “The Crystal Cabinet” is the counterpart in miniature: the Maiden catches the speaker “in the Wild / Where I was dancing merrily”, locks him in a cabinet “formd of Gold / And Pearl & Crystal shining bright” in which “Another England there I saw / Another London with its Tower”, threefold, “each in the other closd”; he strives “to sieze the inmost Form / With ardor fierce & hands of flame / But burst the Crystal Cabinet / And like a Weeping Babe became / A weeping Babe upon the wild” — the threefold world of Beulah, which shatters when grasped as a possession. “The Golden Net” has three virgins, clothed “in flames of fire”, “in iron wire” and “in tears & sighs”, bear a net of golden twine over the young man’s morning, “Underneath the Net I stray / Now intreating Burning Fire / Now intreating Iron Wire / Now intreating Tears & Sighs / O when will the morning rise”. “The Grey Monk”, partly repeated on the Deists’ plate of Jerusalem, sets the monk’s wounded prayer against the sword: “But vain the Sword & vain the Bow / They never can work Wars overthrow / The Hermits Prayer & the Widows tear / Alone can free the World from fear / For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing / And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King … The hand of Vengeance found the Bed / To which the Purple Tyrant fled / The iron hand crushd the Tyrants head / And became a Tyrant in his stead”. “Mary”, whose “O why was I born with a different Face / Why was I not born like this Envious Race” Blake used of himself in a letter of 1803, is a ballad of beauty destroyed by envy. “The Land of Dreams” is a father and child on the country “Above the light of the Morning Star” where the dead mother walks; “William Bond” ends “Seek Love in the Pity of others Woe / In the gentle relief of anothers care / In the darkness of night & the winters snow / In the naked & outcast Seek Love there”. “Auguries of Innocence” is a hundred and thirty-two lines of couplets, in no evident order, on the sanctity of the least things and the cost of harming them: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour / A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage … A dog starvd at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State … Each outcry of the hunted Hare / A fibre from the Brain does tear … Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly / For the Last judgment draweth nigh … The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags / Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags / A truth thats told with bad intent / Beats all the Lies you can invent / It is right it should be so / Man was made for Joy & Woe / And when this we rightly know / Thro the World we safely go / Joy & Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine … Every Tear from Every Eye / Becomes a Babe in Eternity … The Harlots cry from Street to Street / Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet … He who mocks the Infants Faith / Shall be mock’d in Age & Death … The Questioner who sits so sly / Shall never know how to Reply / He who replies to words of Doubt / Doth put the Light of Knowledge out … If the Sun & Moon should Doubt / Theyd immediately Go out … We are led to Believe a Lie / When we see not Thro the Eye / Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night / When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light / God Appears & God is Light / To those poor Souls who dwell in Night / But does a Human Form Display / To those who Dwell in Realms of day”.

Takeaway. The manuscript’s doctrine is that of the prophecies in the form of the ballad and the gnomic couplet: the cycle of male and female, tyrant and rebel, that only vision breaks; the threefold world that shatters when possessed; the intellectual tear against the sword; and the correspondence by which the caged robin, the starved dog and the harlot’s cry are read as portents of heaven’s rage and the nation’s ruin — the “Auguries” being the plainest statement in English of the esoteric axiom that the small contains the whole.⁷⁵

The Notebook and The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1793–c. 1818)#

At a glance. Blake’s Notebook — a quarto of fifty-eight leaves that had been his brother Robert’s sketchbook, used from about 1787 and by Blake from both ends until at least 1818 (British Library, Add. MS 49460, the “Rossetti Manuscript”, bought by D. G. Rossetti in 1847 for ten shillings) — holds the drafts of the Songs of Experience and the emblems of the Gates of Paradise, the lyrics of the 1790s and of c. 1800–06, the epigrams on Hayley, Cromek, Stothard, Reynolds and the Hunts, the Public Address, A Vision of the Last Judgment, and, entered about 1818 in gaps between earlier matter, the fragments of The Everlasting Gospel.⁷⁶

The poems. The Notebook lyrics of 1793 include “I saw a chapel all of gold / That none did dare to enter in / And many weeping stood without / Weeping mourning worshipping”, into which a serpent forces its way and vomits “his poison out / On the bread & on the wine / So I turnd into a sty / And laid me down among the swine”; “Never pain to tell thy love”; “He who binds to himself a joy / Doth the winged life destroy / But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternitys sun rise”; “The Question Answerd” and “Abstinence sows sand all over / The ruddy limbs & flaming hair / But Desire Gratified / Plants fruits of life & beauty there”. Those of c. 1800–06 are the poems of the crisis of Felpham. “My Spectre around me night & day / Like a Wild beast guards my way / My Emanation far within / Weeps incessantly for my Sin” is the drama of the Spectre and the Emanation as a marriage-quarrel, ending in the terms of the Gates epilogue: “Let us agree to give up Love / And root up the infernal grove / Then shall we return & see / The worlds of happy Eternity / & Throughout all Eternity / I forgive you you forgive me / As our dear Redeemer said / This the Wine & this the Bread”. “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau / Mock on Mock on! tis all in vain! / You throw the sand against the wind / And the wind blows it back again / And every sand becomes a Gem / Reflected in the beams divine … The Atoms of Democritus / And Newtons Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore / Where Israels tents do shine so bright” is the one lyric that puts the quarrel with the philosophers into a single image. “Morning”: “To find the western path / Right thro the gates of Wrath / I urge my way / Sweet Mercy leads me on / With soft repentant moan / I see the break of day”. “The Caverns of the Grave Ive seen / And these I shewd to Englands Queen / But now the Caves of Hell I view / Who shall I dare to shew them to”, on the Last Judgment pictures; “I rose up at the dawn of day / Get thee away get thee away / Prayst thou for Riches away away / This is the Throne of Mammon grey”, in which the poet who has “Mental Joy & Mental Health / And Mental Friends & Mental wealth / Ive a Wife I love & that loves me / Ive all But Riches Bodily” tells “Mr Devil” that he will not pray to him; the epigrams “Grown old in Love from Seven till Seven times Seven / I oft have wishd for Hell for Ease from Heaven”, “To God: If you have formd a Circle to go into / Go into it yourself & see how you would do”, and “Since all the Riches of this World / May be gifts from the Devil & Earthly Kings / I should suspect that I worshipd the Devil / If I thankd my God for Worldly things”. The satirical verses on Hayley (“Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake / Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake”), Cromek, Stothard, the Hunts and Reynolds are the private counterpart of the Public Address.

The Everlasting Gospel. Some three hundred and fifty lines of octosyllabic couplets in several sections, each beginning with a question — “Was Jesus Humble or did he / Give any Proofs of Humility”; “Was Jesus Chaste or did he / Give any Lessons of Chastity”; “Was Jesus gentle or did he / Give any marks of Gentility”; and, aborted after two couplets, “Did Jesus teach Doubt or did he / Give any lessons of Philosophy” — with a prologue in which Joseph of Arimathea says, “I was standing by when Jesus died / What I calld Humility they calld Pride”. The poem’s Jesus “acts with honest triumphant Pride / And this is the cause that Jesus died”; “He did not die with Christian Ease / Asking Pardon of his Enemies”; “If he had been Antichrist Creeping Jesus / Hed have done any thing to please us / Gone sneaking into Synagogues / And not usd the Elders & Priests like dogs”; “God wants not Man to Humble himself / This is the trick of the ancient Elf / This is the Race that Jesus ran / Humble to God Haughty to Man”. The doctrine of the divine humanity is put in his mouth: “If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me / Thou also dwellst in Eternity / Thou art a Man God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to adore / For that is my Spirit of Life”. Humility “is only Doubt / And does the Sun & Moon blot out … And leads you to Believe a Lie / When you see with not thro the Eye”. In the section on chastity, Jesus, sitting “in Moses Chair”, lays his hand on the Law when the woman taken in adultery is brought before him — “The Ancient Heavens in Silent Awe / Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole / All away began to roll … Good & Evil are no more / Sinais trumpets cease to roar” — and turns on the creator of the mortal body, “Thou Angel of the Presence Divine / That didst create this Body of Mine / Wherefore hast thou writ these Laws / And Created Hells dark jaws / My Presence I will take from thee / A Cold Leper thou shalt be”; the woman confesses that “this O Lord this was my Sin / When first I let these Devils in / In dark pretence to Chastity / Blaspheming Love blaspheming thee”, and is forgiven. In the section on gentleness Jesus “cursd the Scribe & Pharisee / Trampling down Hipocrisy”, “scourgd the Merchant Canaanite / From out the Temple of his Mind”, and “took on Sin in the Virgins Womb / And put it off on the Cross & Tomb / To be Worshipd by the Church of Rome”. And the fragment that states the whole quarrel: “The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my Visions Greatest Enemy / Thine has a great hook nose like thine / Mine has a snub nose like to mine / Thine is the Friend of All Mankind / Mine speaks in parables to the Blind / Thine loves the same world that mine hates / Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates / Socrates taught what Melitus / Loathd as a Nations bitterest Curse / And Caiphas was in his own Mind / A benefactor of Mankind / Both read the Bible day & night / But thou readst black where I read white”. A marginal note reads, “I am sure This Jesus will not do / Either for Englishman or Jew.”

Takeaway. The Notebook shows the poet’s workshop over thirty years, and The Everlasting Gospel, its last great entry, is the antinomian reading of the Gospels in its purest form: a Jesus who is the enemy of humility, chastity, gentility and doubt as the churches teach them, who forgives sin because he denies its existence, and whose divinity is the humanity of every man. The title is Joachim’s and the Ranters’, the phrase that the seventeenth-century sectaries used for the third age in which the law is abolished; Morton and Thompson made it the key to Blake’s antinomian inheritance.⁷⁷

The late tractates: On Homers Poetry and On Virgil (c. 1822), The Ghost of Abel (1822), The Laocoön (c. 1826–27)#

At a glance. Three small works of Blake’s last years in which the doctrine of the epics is stated as aphorism and as drama. On Homers Poetry and On Virgil occupy one relief-etched plate (six copies, c. 1822). The Ghost of Abel, “A Revelation In the Visions of Jehovah Seen by William Blake”, is two relief-etched plates (five copies, 1822), addressed “To LORD BYRON in the Wilderness” and dated at the foot “1822 W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788”. The Laocoön is a single intaglio plate (two impressions), a careful engraving of the Vatican group, probably from the cast at the Royal Academy, surrounded on every side by aphorisms in several sizes of lettering, made about 1826–27.⁷⁸

Argument. On Homers Poetry denies that unity and morality are the business of poetry: “Aristotle says Characters are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character. an Apple tree a Pear tree a Horse a Lion, are Characters but a Good Apple tree or a Bad, is an Apple tree still … Unity & Morality, are secondary considerations & belong to Philosophy & not to Poetry, to Exception & not to Rule, to Accident & not to Substance. the Ancients calld it eating of the tree of good & evil. The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.” On Virgil: “Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome as Babylon & Egypt: so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend: were destroyers of all Art … a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticise, but not Make. Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form Gothic is Living Form.” The Ghost of Abel answers Byron’s Cain (1821) in a drama of forty lines. Its prologue: “What doest thou here Elijah? Can a Poet doubt the Visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune: but Imagination has! Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves: Imagination is Eternity.” Adam and Eve, over Abel’s body, refuse Jehovah’s voice as “a vain delusion of the all creative Imagination”; the Ghost of Abel enters, “Among the Elohim a Human Victim I wander … I am the Accuser & Avenger / Of Blood O Earth Cover not thou the Blood of Abel”, and demands “Life for Life!”; Eve, seeing with “my Minds Eye” that “Abel” lives, persuades Adam that it is “better to believe Vision / With all our might & strength tho we are fallen & lost”; the Ghost, unable to forgive — “the Accuser hath / Enterd into Me as into his House” — sinks into the grave, from which Satan rises “Armed in glittering scales with a Crown & a Spear”, demanding “Human Blood & not the blood of Bulls or Goats / And no Atonement O Jehovah the Elohim live on Sacrifice / Of Men: hence I am God of Men: Thou Human O Jehovah … Thou shalt Thyself be Sacrificed to Me thy God on Calvary”. Jehovah’s answer, in thunder, is “Such is My Will … that Thou Thyself go to Eternal Death / In Self Annihilation even till Satan Self-subdud Put off Satan / Into the Bottomless Abyss whose torment arises for ever & ever”, and the chorus of angels sings that “The Elohim of the Heathen Swore Vengeance for Sin! Then Thou stoodst / Forth O Elohim Jehovah! in the midst of the darkness of the Oath! All Clothed / In Thy Covenant of the Forgiveness of Sins”. The Laocoön inscriptions identify the group as “יה & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact. or. History of Ilium”, the two serpents as “Good” and “Evil”, and surround it with the creed of art quoted in the section on Blake’s thought — “The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION. that is God himself The Divine Body … It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)”; “All that we See is VISION from Generated Organs gone as soon as come Permanent in The Imagination; considered as Nothing by the NATURAL MAN”; “The whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common”; “Christianity is Art & not Money Money is its Curse”; “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art”; “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists”; “SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH ART is the Tree of LIFE GOD is JESUS”; “The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical Diagrams See Plato’s Works”; “There are States in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad Men such are Greece & Rome Such is Empire or Tax”; “Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations”; “Israel deliverd from Egypt is Art deliverd from Nature & Imitation”; “Prayer is the Study of Art Praise is the Practise of Art”; “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian”; “Money, which is The Great Satan or Reason the Root of Good & Evil In The Accusation of Sin”; “If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour”; “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed”; “No Secresy in Art”.

Takeaway. The three tractates are the last statements of the two doctrines that the Descriptive Catalogue had announced: that classical art is the copy of a lost Hebrew-Asiatic original and the servant of war, and that art is the Christian religion itself. The Ghost of Abel adds, in the shortest of Blake’s dramas, the refutation of the Atonement as sacrifice — Jehovah’s own self-giving, not a victim’s blood, as the answer to the Accuser — and its dating, “W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788”, is Blake’s own record of the year in which illuminated printing began.⁷⁹

The prose: A Descriptive Catalogue (1809), A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810), Public Address (c. 1810), the annotations and the letters#

At a glance. Blake’s prose is either printed apology for his pictures, or manuscript, or marginalia. A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions … by Wm. Blake (London: D. N. Shury, 1809, 2s. 6d.) was the ticket to the exhibition of 1809; it describes sixteen works, with a preface against the Venetian and Flemish colourists and long essays on the Canterbury Pilgrims (No. III) and The Ancient Britons (No. V). A Vision of the Last Judgment and the Public Address are Keynes’s titles for two sets of Notebook drafts of about 1810, the first “For the Year 1810 Additions to Blakes Catalogue of Pictures &c” on a lost painting of the Last Judgment, the second a defence of his engraving against the Cromek-Schiavonetti school. The annotations, in the margins of books he owned, survive for Lavater’s Aphorisms (1788), Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, Divine Love and Divine Wisdom and Divine Providence (c. 1788–90), Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1798), Bacon’s Essays (c. 1798), Boyd’s Dante (c. 1800), Reynolds’s Discourses (c. 1798–1809), Berkeley’s Siris (c. 1820), Wordsworth’s Poems and Excursion (1826), Thornton’s Lord’s Prayer (1827) and Cellini. Some seventy letters survive, from 1791 to July 1827, most of them to Butts, Hayley, Flaxman, Cumberland and Linnell.⁸⁰

Argument. The Descriptive Catalogue sets the theory of the “bounding line” and the attack on chiaroscuro beside an archaeology of art in which the Greek statues are copies of “those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim” that Blake had seen “in vision” in “the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia”; a reading of Chaucer in which the Pilgrims are “the characters which compose all ages and nations … Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters”; a defence of the “spirits” of Pitt and Nelson and of the painting of “spirits with real bodies” — “A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce … Spirits are organized men”; and the essay on The Ancient Britons, in which “The Strong man represents the human sublime. The Beautiful man represents the human pathetic, which was in the wars of Eden divided into male and female. The Ugly man represents the human reason. They were originally one man, who was fourfold; he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God” — the myth of the Zoas announced in print — with “Adam was a Druid, and Noah”, “All had originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus”, and the manifesto against the reasoning historians: “Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.” A Vision of the Last Judgment has been quoted at length above: the Last Judgment as the event that “passes upon” any individual who “Rejects Error & Embraces Truth”; vision against “Fable or Allegory”; “Mental Things are alone Real”; the sun as “an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host”; and, describing the picture figure by figure, the doctrine that “Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governd their Passions or have No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Understandings”, that “Forgiveness of Sin is only at the Judgment Seat of Jesus the Saviour where the Accuser is cast out”, and that “Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being & being a Worshipper of Christ I cannot help saying the Son O how unlike the Father First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it”. The Public Address is the engraver’s apologia — “Engraving is Drawing on Copper & Nothing Else”, “I account it a Public Duty” to expose the “Blotting & Blurring” of the reproductive schools — and contains the sentence “Imagination is My World this world of Dross is beneath my Notice”. The annotations are where Blake’s opinions are least guarded: on Lavater, “Every mans leading propensity ought to be calld his leading Virtue & his good Angel”, “all Act … is Virtue. To hinder another is not an act it is the contrary”, and “the origin of this mistake in Lavater & his cotemporaries, is, They suppose that Womans Love is Sin”; on Swedenborg, the notes traced above; on Watson, “To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life”, “The Beast & the Whore rule without controls”, “every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house”; on Bacon, “Bacons Philosophy has Ruind England” and “Bacon is only Epicurus over again”; on Reynolds, “This Man was Hired to Depress Art”, “To Generalize is to be an Idiot”, “Innate Ideas are in Every Man Born with him”, “The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius? But whether he is Passive & Polite”; on the Dante drawings of his last years, “Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature Memory is his Inspirer & not Imagination the Holy Ghost”; on Berkeley, “Man is All Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in him”; on Wordsworth, “I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration” and “Natural Objects always did & now do Weaken deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me”; on Thornton’s Lord’s Prayer, in the last months, “The Greek & Roman Classics is the Antichrist” and a parody of the prayer as the deists say it. The letters are the biography’s spine — the Trusler letter of 1799 on vision, the Felpham letters of 1800–03 on inspiration and the “Spiritual Enemy”, the 1804 letter on the Truchsessian Gallery, the letters to Linnell and Cumberland of the last years — and contain, beside the verse epistles, the two summaries Blake wrote of his own poetics: “That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act”, and “Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry”.

Takeaway. The prose confirms that the myth was a doctrine and not a private language: the same propositions — imagination the divine body, vision against memory, the “Cherubim” behind the antique, the Zoas behind the Britons, the Accuser behind the churches’ God, forgiveness as the whole of religion — are stated in the catalogue he sold, the notes he kept and the letters he sent, and are stated with a consistency over forty years that the “madness” of the reviewers cannot account for.⁸¹

The visual art#

Blake’s pictures were made in the same years and by the same hand as the poems, and their subjects are the same — the fall of the human form into matter and its resurrection — but they were made for different purposes: to earn a living by reproductive engraving and commercial illustration; to serve two patrons, Butts and Linnell, who wanted the Bible, Milton, Job and Dante; and to state, in the exhibition of 1809 and the great prints, a doctrine of art. They are treated here as a group, by kind and in rough chronological order, with the techniques first, because Blake’s technique was a doctrine too.

Technique: engraving, relief etching, colour printing, tempera#

Blake was a line-engraver by trade, trained in the old “mixed method” of etching and burin work, and he made the burin a creed. “Painting is Drawing on Canvas & Engraving is Drawing on Copper & Nothing Else & he who pretends to be either Painter or Engraver without being a Master of Drawing is an Impostor”; the fashionable stipple and mezzotint of Bartolozzi, Woollett and Strange were, for him, the loss of “English Engraving”; “Mechanical Excellence is the Only Vehicle of Genius”; and in the last letter he wrote about his own work, on the Job plates, “a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivisions Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job”. The Job and Dante plates of 1823–27 are pure line-engraving without preliminary etching, in the manner of Dürer and Mantegna. His own invention, relief etching or “illuminated printing”, he announced in the prospectus of 1793 as “a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense”, and “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet”; he never described it, and its reconstruction is Viscomi’s. Blake wrote his text backwards and drew his designs on the copper with a quill and brush in an acid-resisting varnish, etched the plate in diluted nitric acid so that words and design stood up in relief, inked the raised surface with a dabber, wiped the borders so that the page “looked written and drawn rather than printed”, printed with light pressure on a rolling press, in coloured inks, and finished the impressions in watercolour; the plates were small, cut by hand, often etched on both sides, and the Experience plates are on the backs of the Innocence coppers. From 1794 he colour-printed, painting the plate with thick pigments in the à la poupée manner so that the impressions resembled oil sketches, and in 1795 he extended the method into painting itself: the twelve large colour prints were painted in pen-and-ink outline and glue-based colour on millboard — with three exceptions: God Judging Adam was printed from an etched copper plate, and Elohim Creating Adam and Satan Exulting over Eve probably from unetched copper — and printed onto damp paper on the press, two or three impressions from each painting, each finished by hand — “essentially monotype”, in Viscomi’s phrase. His paintings he called “fresco”, never tempera: a water-based medium with a glue or gum binder applied in many layers on canvas, copper, iron or panel, glazed and outlined in ink, which he defended in the 1809 advertisement “The Invention of a portable Fresco” — “Oil will not drink or absorb Colour enough to stand the test of very little Time and of the Air; it grows yellow, and at length brown … Fresco Painting is properly Miniature, or Enamel Painting … The Art has been lost: I have recovered it” — and which was, unfortunately, unstable: almost all the temperas of 1799–1803 have cracked, darkened and been repaired. Whatever the medium, the aesthetic was the “hard and wirey line” of the Descriptive Catalogue, “Clear colours unmudded by oil, and firm and determinate lineaments unbroken by shadows”, against what a Notebook epigram of the same years calls the “Venetian & Flemish Ooze”.⁸²

The Large Colour Prints of 1795#

The twelve designs — “12 Large Prints … Printed in Colours … unaccompanied by any writing”, as Blake listed them in 1818 at five guineas each — are the summit of his work as a painter of images without text. Thirty impressions survive, from printings of c. 1795 and c. 1804–05, no design in more than three; Butts bought eight of them in 1805, and the Tate’s eleven came by W. Graham Robertson’s gift of nine in 1939, his bequest of Christ Appearing to the Apostles in 1948 and the purchase of Satan Exulting over Eve in 1996. The Blake Archive’s judgement is that they “are not a series with a fixed sequence, but rather a group of designs centered upon images of the fallen world”, with companion pairs, and drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and Blake’s own myth; the attempt to read them as a programme on the model of the Sistine ceiling has been made but not accepted. Elohim Creating Adam (Tate): the winged, bearded Elohim, “with a worried or despairing expression”, hovers over the supine Adam and moulds his head, while “the giant worm coiled around Adam’s legs” marks the creation as a fall into mortality — Genesis 2:7 read as the Book of Urizen reads it. Satan Exulting over Eve (Tate; Getty): Satan, still angelic but bat-winged, armed with shield and spear, hovers over the sleeping Eve, round whom his serpent-self coils. God Judging Adam (Tate; Metropolitan; Philadelphia), the one design printed from an etched plate and long miscalled Elijah in the Fiery Chariot: God on a fiery chariot, the book of laws on his lap, points at an Adam who has his own white beard and face — the creature made in the image of the lawgiver. Lamech and His Two Wives (Tate; Essick), the murderer of Genesis 4 clutching his head. Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah (V&A; Fitzwilliam). Nebuchadnezzar (Tate; Boston; Minneapolis): the king of Daniel 4 on all fours, with claws and “Feather-like fur”, “the descent of a mighty ruler, and perhaps all of humanity, into a state of fallen nature”, the design that had first appeared in the Marriage. Newton (Tate; Philadelphia): “The great scientist is represented as a heroically proportioned youth sitting at the bottom of the ocean”, bent double over the diagram he draws with compasses on a scroll — “the descent of the human form divine into materialism and abstraction”. Pity (Tate; Metropolitan; Yale; and a small trial at the British Museum): Macbeth’s “naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast” as a cherub on a blind flying horse, reaching for a child over a woman lying with hands clasped — an image, the Archive notes, of a compassion that Blake’s own “Human Abstract” calls “the useless product of a fallen condition”. Hecate, or, since Gert Schiff’s proposal of 1990, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (Tate; Edinburgh; Huntington): a woman with a book, two figures hiding their faces behind her, and an owl, an ass, a lizard and a bat — the triple goddess of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the Enitharmon of Europe, whose sleep is the night of religion. The House of Death (Tate; British Museum; Fitzwilliam): Milton’s “Lazar-house”, with “Triumphant Death” — the same white-bearded, closed-eyed patriarch as the Elohim — hovering over the stricken. The Good and Evil Angels (Tate; private): the shackled, blind “Evil” angel rising in flames towards the “Good” angel who holds a struggling child, the contraries of the Marriage as a picture, and the child as humanity caught between them. And Christ Appearing to the Apostles after the Resurrection (Yale; Washington; Tate): Christ striding forward, arms outstretched, showing his wounds to seven kneeling disciples — the one print in which the divine appears human and unfallen, and therefore the one that most orderings put last. The group’s most telling iconographic fact is that the same old man is Elohim, the judging God, Death and, in the Europe frontispiece of the same year, the compass-bearer: the creator of the fallen world, in whatever book he appears, has one face.⁸³

Commercial illustration: Night Thoughts, Gray, The Grave, Hayley, Thornton’s Virgil, Flaxman#

The largest commission of Blake’s life was Richard Edwards’s Night Thoughts. In 1795–97 he made 537 watercolour designs (British Museum) around the pages of Young’s poem, glued into windows cut in large sheets, for twenty guineas, and engraved forty-three of them for the one part that appeared, in 1797, before Edwards gave up publishing; the format — text in a central panel, figures overflowing the margins, Death’s giant hand behind the letterpress, the chained soul springing above it — is the one he reused in relief for the pages of Milton and Jerusalem, and the nine “Nights” of the poem, and the proofs of the plates on whose backs he wrote it, gave The Four Zoas its shape. The 116 watercolours to Gray’s Poems (1797–98; Yale Center for British Art), made for Flaxman as a gift to his wife in the same window-format, illustrate thirteen poems from the Ode on the Spring to the Elegy, with The Bard, The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin, in a manner that runs from caricature to the sublime and dwells on “the imagination at work in the world through inspired acts of reading, writing, and performing music”. Blair’s Grave (1808), for which Cromek engaged him in October 1805 to make forty drawings, twenty of them to be chosen for engraving — Blake told Hayley he had “produced about twenty Designs” — and then gave the engraving to Schiavonetti, was the work by which the nineteenth century knew Blake: twelve plates — The Skeleton Re-Animated, Christ descending into the grave with “The Keys of Hell and Death”, The meeting of a Family in Heaven, The Counseller, King, Warrior, Mother & Child, in the Tomb, Death of the Strong Wicked Man, The Soul hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with Life, The descent of Man into the Vale of Death, The Day of Judgment, The Soul exploring the recesses of the grave, The Death of The Good Old Man, Death’s Door (the Gates of Paradise emblem enlarged: the old man on his crutch entering the tomb, the youth rising in radiance above) and The Reunion of the Soul & the Body — which “emphasize immortality more than death, the latter often presented as a passage to the former”, and fall into pairs, the wicked man and the good, the soul’s parting and its reunion. The nineteen finished watercolours, rediscovered in a Glasgow bookshop in 2001, were offered at Sotheby’s, New York, on 2 May 2006, where Death of the Strong Wicked Man, now in the Louvre, made $1,584,000 and several lots went unsold; The Day of Judgment went to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. For Hayley at Felpham he engraved the Ballads (1802, 1805), the plates of the Life of Cowper (1803–04), which Catherine printed, and painted the eighteen tempera Heads of the Poets for Hayley’s library (Manchester Art Gallery). For Joseph Johnson he had earlier engraved Stedman’s Narrative of Surinam (1796), whose plates of the tortures of the enslaved are behind Visions and America, and the plates of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (1791). For Flaxman he engraved the Iliad (1805) and the thirty-seven plates of the Hesiod (1817) at five guineas each, in stippled lines unlike anything else he made. And for Dr Thornton’s school Virgil (1821) he cut, in a medium he had never used, seventeen small wood-engravings for Ambrose Philips’s imitation of the first eclogue — Thenot and Colinet, the shepherds, the blasted tree, the sower and the ploughman under the moon — which Thornton nearly rejected, printed with an apologetic note (“they display less of art than genius, and are much admired by some eminent painters”), and which Palmer, Calvert and Richmond took as the beginning of a new pastoral art: “visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise”.⁸⁴

The Bible for Thomas Butts (1799–c. 1809)#

Butts’s order of 1799 for “Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea each” produced the biblical temperas, of which fifty-three are recorded and thirty traced: cabinet pictures of about 27 by 38 centimetres on canvas, copper or iron, seven from the Old Testament and the rest from the life of Christ, in a medium that has decayed. The Nativity (Philadelphia) is the most Blakean invention of the group — the infant Christ hovering in the air of the stable, arms outstretched in the attitude of the crucifixion, while Mary faints back into Joseph’s arms and Elizabeth reaches towards the child from across the room; The Last Supper (Washington) was exhibited at the Academy in 1799; Christ Blessing the Little Children, The Agony in the Garden and The Body of Christ Borne to the Tomb are at the Tate; Job and His Daughters (Washington) is the seed of the Job series. The watercolours that followed, about eighty between 1800 and 1806 and a few later, mostly some 40 by 33 centimetres and signed with the “WB inv” monogram, are among his finest works in any medium and were dispersed from the Butts family in 1852–53 and 1903–06 to the collections where they now hang. The Old Testament sheets “emphasize interactions, both revelatory and punishing, between the human and the divine”: The Angel of the Divine Presence Clothing Adam and Eve (1803; Fitzwilliam), in which the old god who clothes the fallen pair in skins has six toes on the foot that shows beneath his gown — the mark of the creator of the fallen body, whom the Laocoön names “The Angel of the Divine Presence” beside the Hebrew “Jehovah”; Ezekiel’s Wheels (Boston), the enthroned God above the four-faced living creatures and the “eyed wheels — a dark, swilling whirlwind”, with the prophet prostrate below; Jacob’s Dream (British Museum), the spiral staircase of angels; God Writing upon the Tables of the Covenant (Edinburgh); Job Confessing His Presumption (Edinburgh); Satan in His Original Glory (Tate). The New Testament sheets centre on the Passion and the visions: Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels (V&A), the dead Christ under two hovering angels whose wing-tips meet, inscribed by Blake with the verse on the cherubim who cover the mercy-seat — his image of Christ’s body as the fulfilment of the Ark, and the source of the cherubim of Jerusalem; Christ Nailed to the Cross, The Crucifixion: “Behold Thy Mother”, The Entombment, The Angel Rolling the Stone Away, The Resurrection, The Ascension; The Conversion of Saul (Huntington), St Paul Preaching in Athens; and the sequence from Revelation, eight or more sheets of what the Archive calls “the apocalyptic sublime”: The Four and Twenty Elders (Tate), Death on a Pale Horse (Fitzwilliam), The River of Life (Tate), and the four Dragon sheets — The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (Brooklyn), the Dragon seen from behind, bat-winged, three-headed, its tail around the legs of the woman who floats below on the night sky; The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun: “The Devil is Come Down” (Washington); The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea (Washington), the Dragon “a muscular nude male standing, facing forward with legs spread”, his wings starred; and The Number of the Beast is 666 (Philadelphia, Rosenbach) — with The Whore of Babylon (1809; British Museum), crowned with the triple tiara on her seven-headed beast, her cup wrapped in serpents. These are the pictorial form of Rahab, “Mystery Babylon the Great”, of the prophecies, and Blake’s Dragon is, characteristically, a man: the Spectre of the human form, not a beast.⁸⁵

The Milton illustrations (1801–c. 1825)#

“Milton lovd me in childhood & shewd me his face”, and Blake illustrated him for twenty-five years, for the Revd Joseph Thomas, for Butts and for Linnell, in small sets of watercolours that follow the text closely and read it in his own sense. Comus (1801, Huntington; c. 1815, Boston), eight designs from the masque, ending not in dance but in the serious faces of the Lady restored to her parents. Paradise Lost, twelve subjects in the small set of 1807 (Huntington) and the large of 1808 (mostly Boston), with three re-made for Linnell in 1822: Satan Calling up His Legions; Satan, Sin, and Death; Christ Offers to Redeem Man; Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve, in which the serpent coiled about Satan’s own body looks at him as Adam and Eve look at each other; Raphael Warns Adam and Eve; The Rout of the Rebel Angels; The Creation of Eve; The Temptation and Fall of Eve, the serpent’s mouth to Eve’s in a parody of the earlier kiss while Adam turns his back; The Judgment of Adam and Eve; Michael Foretells the Crucifixion, the serpent’s head nailed to the cross by the nail that pierces Christ’s feet, Sin and Death dead at its foot; and The Expulsion, under four cherubim on horses and four bolts of lightning — a selection that “places greater emphasis on Christ’s role in Milton’s epic than most series” of the age. The six designs to On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (1809, Whitworth; c. 1815, Huntington) — The Descent of Peace, The Annunciation to the Shepherds, The Old Dragon, The Overthrow of Apollo and the Pagan Gods, The Flight of Moloch, The Night of Peace — answer to Blake’s “increasingly Christocentric” theology and his war on the classics. Paradise Regained (c. 1816–20; Fitzwilliam), twelve designs, sets “the dignified symmetry and calm repose” of Christ against “the anxious and twisting energies of Satan”, “a pictorial analogue to the contests between the Zoas and their Spectres or Selfhoods”. And the twelve to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (c. 1816–20; Morgan Library), each accompanied by Blake’s own manuscript description, are his most complete gloss on another poet: Mirth; Night Startled by the Lark (“The Lark is an Angel on the Wing”); The Sun at His Eastern Gate (“The Great Sun is represented clothed in Flames Surrounded by the Clouds in their Liveries”), the haloed man of fire who is the sun as imagination sees it; A Sunshine Holiday (“Mountains Clouds Rivers Trees appear Humanized”); The Youthful Poet’s Dream (“the more bright Sun of Imagination”); Melancholy; The Wandering Moon; The Spirit of Plato (“The Spirit of Plato unfolds his Worlds to Milton in Contemplation. The Three destinies sit on the Circles of Platos Heavens weaving the Thread of Mortal Life … & The Spirits of Fire. Air. Water & Earth Surround Miltons Chair”); The Sun in His Wrath; Milton’s Mysterious Dream (“Sleep descending with a Strange Mysterious Dream upon his Wings of Scrolls & Nets & Webs”); and Milton in His Old Age.⁸⁶

The Last Judgments, Nelson and Pitt, The Ancient Britons and the Canterbury Pilgrims#

Blake painted the Last Judgment at least seven times: the watercolour of 1806 for Butts (Pollok House, Glasgow), with The Fall of Man (1807; V&A) as its companion; the watercolour of 1808 commissioned for the Countess of Egremont through Ozias Humphry, still at Petworth, described in the letter to Humphry — “Christ seated on the Throne of judgment before his feet & around him the heavens in clouds are rolling like a scroll ready to be consumed in the fires of the Angels who descend with the Four Trumpets sounding to the Four Winds” — with the blessed rising on the left, the damned falling on the right, the Harlot and the Dragon beneath, and “Mystery” burning; the two large pen-and-wash drawings (Austin; Washington), now dated to c. 1813–14 from a watermark; and the lost “fresco” of some seven feet by five with, it was said, more than a thousand figures, on which he worked to the end of his life and for which the Notebook essay of 1810 was written. The design is the frame of everything else he painted: the Judgment as the moment at which “the Accuser is cast out”. The two “spiritual forms” of the 1809 exhibition, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan and The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (both Tate; both badly darkened), show the admiral, nude and haloed, and the minister in a robe, guiding the monsters of Job 40–41 through whose coils the naked nations writhe; the catalogue calls them “compositions of a mythological cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo, and Egyptian Antiquity”, copies of the “Cherubim” Blake had seen “in vision”, and asks for a national commission to paint them on the scale of the nation — whether as apotheosis or as indictment of the war-heroes is still argued, and the answer is probably both. The Ancient Britons, the largest picture Blake ever painted, some fourteen feet by ten, is lost, and survives only in the catalogue’s account of the Strong, the Beautiful and the Ugly Man escaping from Arthur’s last battle, “the three general classes of men” who “were originally one man, who was fourfold”, with “Druid Temples, similar to Stone Hedge” in the mountains behind. The tempera Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims (1808; Pollok House), 137 centimetres wide, and its engraving of 1810, Blake’s largest plate, show the thirty pilgrims leaving the Tabard, and the catalogue’s essay on them is his fullest piece of criticism — the pilgrims as “the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things never alter … As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linneus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men”; the tempera’s pendant, The Characters in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (c. 1825; Petworth), was his last such panorama.⁸⁷

Illustrations of the Book of Job (1805–26)#

Blake had drawn Job in the 1780s and engraved him, with Ezekiel, in 1793–94; the tempera Job and His Daughters was among the first Butts pictures; and about 1805–06 he painted for Butts nineteen watercolours of the story (Morgan Library), which he and Linnell borrowed in 1821 so that Linnell could trace and Blake colour a second set (Fogg and elsewhere), each set then brought to twenty-one. From the Linnell set, by the agreement of 25 March 1823, came the twenty-two plates — a title and twenty-one numbered designs, reduced through a sketchbook of pencil drawings (Fitzwilliam), engraved in pure line with the border designs added last, dated 1825 and published in March 1826 at 3 Fountain Court and Linnell’s house in Cirencester Place, “Prints” and “Proofs” at different prices. They are the most finished statement of Blake’s art and its most legible. “Blake follows the general outline of the story of Job in the Bible, but also incorporates into his designs many motifs representing his personal interpretation. At the beginning, Job and his family attend only to the letter, rather than the spirit, of God’s laws. Job thereby falls under a false conception of God and into the hands of Satan. Job’s sufferings are recorded in the first half of the series, culminating in his horrific vision of a devil-god in the eleventh design. Job’s spiritual education and material restoration are pictured in the second half.” Plate 1, Job and His Family: the family at prayer under a tree with open books on their knees and their instruments hanging silent in the branches, the sun setting, the moon rising, and in the margin “The Letter Killeth / The Spirit giveth Life”. Plate 2, Satan before the Throne of God: God — with Job’s own face — with an open book, pointing at Satan, who leaps in flames; “The Angel of the Divine Presence” in the margin, and “Jehovah is king” in Hebrew. Plates 3–6: the house falls on Job’s children; the messengers; Job’s charity while Satan descends with the vial; Satan Smiting Job with Boils, the scaled Satan standing on Job’s body, the sun setting into the sea, spiders’ webs in the border. Plates 7–10: the comforters, Job’s despair (“Let the Day perish wherein I was Born”), Eliphaz’s vision — the same bearded God standing over the sleeper — and Job Rebuked by His Friends, the three accusing arms and Job’s wife crouched. Plate 11, Job’s Evil Dreams: Job on his bier confronts the god of his own false vision, cloven-hoofed, entwined with a serpent, pointing with one hand to the tables of the Law and with the other to hell, while devils reach up to drag him down, and the margin carries “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light” and “Who opposeth & exalteth himself above all that is called God or is Worshipped” — the God of the letter identified with the Antichrist. Plate 12, the young Elihu pointing to the stars; plates 13–15, The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind, When the Morning Stars Sang Together, the star-angels with linked arms above God between the sun-god’s horses and the moon-goddess’s serpents and the roundels of the days of creation in the borders, and Behemoth and Leviathan shown to Job in a sphere; plate 16, The Fall of Satan, “The Accuser of our Brethren is Cast down”; plate 17, The Vision of Christ, in which the God who blesses Job and his wife now has Christ’s face — “He that hath seen me hath seen my Father also / I & my Father are One” — with the Gospel of John open in the borders; plate 18, Job praying for his friends before the altar with his back to us, cruciform, and in the lower border a palette, brushes, a graver, an open book — the artist’s instruments as the sacrifice; plates 19–20, the gifts, and Job and His Daughters, the only interior, Job pointing to the pictures of his own story on the walls, “telling his story visually”; plate 21, Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity, the family standing and playing the instruments that hung silent in plate 1, the sun rising where it set, “In burnt Offerings for Sin thou hast had no Pleasure”. The series is a single argument, in which the God of the book is replaced by the God who is the Divine Body, and the reversals between the first and last plates — books for instruments, kneeling for standing, sunset for sunrise — carry it; Wicksteed (1910) first read it so, and added the rule, refined by Damon and Lindberg, that Blake’s right and left — hand, foot, side — are spiritual and material. Lindberg’s warning stands beside it: in its use of the tradition of Job illustration “Blake’s Job is entirely traditional”.⁸⁸

The Dante illustrations (1824–27)#

Linnell’s commission of 1824 produced 102 drawings (sheets of about 37 by 52 centimetres) in every state from bare pencil to finished watercolour, on which Blake was working when he died, and seven large engravings, unfinished, from the Inferno. The drawings, sold at the Linnell sale of 1918 and divided among seven public collections by the National Art-Collections Fund — the National Gallery of Victoria has thirty-six, the Fogg twenty-three, the Tate twenty, the British Museum thirteen — are the freest things he made, in a handling of colour “far greater than Blake’s earlier water colors”, and they are illustrations that quarrel with their text. “While faithful to the text, Blake also brings his own perspective to bear on some of Dante’s central themes, including sin, guilt, punishment, revenge, and salvation. In several designs, Blake’s pictorial imagery … indicates a critical attitude towards Dante.” The inscriptions on the sheets say what the pictures show. On Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions: “Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature Memory is his Inspirer & not Imagination the Holy Ghost … Swedenborg does the same in saying that in this World is the Ultimate of Heaven This is the most damnable Falsehood of Satan and his Anti-christ”. On the diagram of the circles of Hell: “It seems as if Dantes supreme Good was something Superior to the Father or Jesus For if he gives his rain to the Evil & the Good & his Sun to the just & the Unjust He could never have Built Dantes Hell nor the Hell of the Bible neither in the way our Parsons explain it It must have been originally Formed by the devil Him self & So I understand it to have been … Whatever Book is for Vengeance for Sin & Whatever Book is Against the Forgiveness of Sins is not of the Father but of Satan the Accuser & Father of Hell”. On The Mission of Virgil, “The Angry God of this World” over a Jehovah with one cloven foot; and on the last sheet, The Queen of Heaven in Glory, Dante’s Virgin labelled with “Sceptre”, “Laws”, “Dominion”, the books “Homer Aristotle Bible” and “Chaind round” — the Queen of the Rose as Vala, the Female Will enthroned. The great designs: The Inscription over Hell-Gate; The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini (Birmingham), the whirlwind of lovers rising in a single loop from the fainting Dante to the sun, also engraved; Capaneus the Blasphemer (Melbourne), the giant defying the rain of fire; The Simoniac Pope (Tate), Nicholas III head-down in the well of fire; Ugolino and His Sons in Prison (British Museum); Lucifer (Melbourne), waist-deep in ice with three heads; The Angel Marking Dante with the Sevenfold P; Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car (Tate), the gryphon’s chariot whose wheel is “a vortex of flames” full of eyes, the four living creatures around it and a rainbow across the sky — Ezekiel’s vision and Blake’s own Zoas laid over Dante’s pageant; Dante Adoring Christ (Melbourne), Christ cruciform on a sun of fire; The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceed the Nine Spheres (Oxford); and Dante in the Empyrean Drinking at the River of Light (Tate). The seven engravings — The Circle of the Lustful, Ciampolo the Barrator, The Baffled Devils Fighting, The Six-Footed Serpent Attacking Agnolo Brunelleschi, The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati, The Pit of Disease, Dante Striking against Bocca degli Abati — were “Proved” and left on the copper: “I am too much attachd to Dante to think much of any thing else”, he wrote to Linnell in April 1827.⁸⁹

Single works, portraits and the late drawings#

Albion rose — “Glad Day”, “The Dance of Albion” — is the invention Blake himself dated to 1780 in the inscription he added about 1820–25: a nude youth on a hilltop at sunrise, arms flung wide, palms forward, with light streaming from his body, first known in two colour-printed impressions of 1795 and then in the engraved second state, which adds a bat-winged moth and a worm beneath his feet and the couplet “Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves / Giving himself for the Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death” — the image of 1780, liberty in a human body, reinscribed thirty years later as the doctrine of self-giving. Its spread-eagled proportion is the Vitruvian man’s; reversed and fallen it is the crucified Albion of Jerusalem plate 76, and cruciform and radiant it is the Christ of the Job title and of Dante Adoring Christ. The Ancient of Days, the Europe frontispiece, is the bearded figure crouched in a sun, hair blown sideways, reaching down with golden compasses to measure the abyss: the compass-bearer of Proverbs and Paradise Lost, “very probably Urizen in the act of creating and/or circumscribing the material universe”, whose brother images are the Newton bent over his diagram and the Job God who reaches down “much like the figure on the frontispiece to Europe”; the separate impression Blake coloured for Tatham in the last days of his life is at the Whitworth. The Sea of Time and Space (the “Arlington Court picture”; 1821; National Trust), found on top of a cupboard in 1947 — a red-robed man on the shore gesturing back at the sea, a woman in blue pointing him upward, weaving nymphs in a cave, a sea-god with his chariot, a fiery charioteer and a sleeper above — was read by Raine as Porphyry’s cave of the nymphs in Thomas Taylor’s translation, the soul of Odysseus turning from the sea of generation; Keynes and Digby dissented, and the Archive keeps to Butlin’s title. The Visionary Heads drawn for John Varley from about 1819 — Wat Tyler, Edward I “as he now exists in the other world”, Socrates, Solomon, “The Man who built the Pyramids”, “The Man who instructed Mr Blake in Painting &c in his Dreams” — fill two sketchbooks and many loose sheets, and Varley’s account of the sitting for The Ghost of a Flea — Blake saying “I see him now before me”, drawing, stopping when the apparition closed its mouth, drawing the open mouth separately — is in Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), for which Linnell engraved the Flea; the small tempera on panel of the Flea (c. 1819–20; Tate), a scaled, muscular, tongue-flicking figure striding between curtains with a cup for blood, is the one Visionary Head Blake turned into a picture. Keynes’s verdict, that Varley took the game more seriously than Blake, is the usual one; Blake’s own gloss on such seeing is the passage of the Vision of the Last Judgment on the sun. The last commissions were the twenty-nine watercolours to The Pilgrim’s Progress (c. 1824–27; one at Washington, twenty-eight in a private collection), many coloured by Catherine; the illustrated manuscript of Genesis for Linnell (Huntington), which reached only chapter 4 and whose chapter-headings — “The Creation of the Natural Man”, “The Natural Man divided into Male & Female”, “Of the Sexual Nature & its Fall into Generation & Death”, “How Generation & Death took Possession of the Natural Man & of the Forgiveness of Sins written upon the Murderers Forehead” — are Blake’s Genesis in four lines; and the pencil drawings to the Book of Enoch (Washington) after Laurence’s translation of 1821, the Watchers descending to the daughters of men. Of Blake himself the likenesses are Phillips’s oil of 1807 (National Portrait Gallery), engraved as the frontispiece of The Grave, for which Phillips is said to have drawn the sitter out by talking of the archangel Gabriel; Linnell’s drawings of 1820–25, including Blake in conversation with John Varley (Fitzwilliam); and Deville’s life-mask of 1823 (National Portrait Gallery), taken because the phrenologist wanted “a cast of Blake’s head ‘as representative of the imaginative faculty’”, whose severe mouth is the plaster’s doing.⁹⁰

Iconography and the major themes of the art#

Blake’s art has almost no landscape for its own sake, no still life and few portraits from the life; its whole vocabulary is the human body, nude or in the clinging gown he thought Gothic, in a small repertoire of postures that carry fixed meanings — what Janet Warner called “formula-figures”, traced to Le Brun’s passions, Lavater’s physiognomy and the gesture-books of the seventeenth century. The figure with arms flung out, palms open, in sunlight, is liberty and self-giving (Albion rose, the risen Christ, the Job title); the same figure inverted or bound is the crucified Albion and the chained Orc; the crouch on all fours is the fall into animal nature (Nebuchadnezzar, Adam before the judging God); the fetal huddle with the head on the knees is despair (Job’s wife, Ugolino’s sons, the Spectre); the hovering, face-down figure with spread arms is Satan or a spectre (the Dragons, Satan over Adam and Eve, Death in the House of Death); the leap with flame-like hair is Orc and the good angel; the old man with white beard and blown hair is Elohim, the judging God, Death, the Angel of the Divine Presence, Urizen with his compasses and Job’s God, until in the seventeenth Job plate his face becomes Christ’s. Because the figures are types, identity is stated by attribute and relation rather than likeness, and the attributes are a small lexicon that the poems gloss. The compass is the instrument of Urizen and Newton; the book is the Law, on God’s lap, on Hecate’s knee, in the hands of Job’s family, “Chaind round” under Dante’s Queen of Heaven, and, opened, the Gospel of John in the Job margins; the serpent is the material selfhood, coiled round Satan, round Eve, round Adam’s legs, nailed to the cross, labelled “Good” and “Evil” alike in the Laocoön; the scaly hide marks the fallen or satanic body; the sun is imagination when a man stands in it (Los, “The Sun at His Eastern Gate”, Christ on the fiery disc) and a “round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea” when merely seen; the whirlwind is theophany; the veil is Vala’s and the net Urizen’s; the Gothic church stands against the Druid trilithon, the living temple of forgiveness against the stone altar of sacrifice; and above all the Divine Body — Christ nailed, entombed under the cherubim’s wings, risen and showing his wounds — is the human form itself perfected, of which every sound figure Blake drew is a member. The sources of this art were prints: Michelangelo through Ghisi’s and Beatrizet’s engravings, Raphael through the Cartoons, Dürer’s plates, the Gothic effigies of the Abbey, the antique through the Academy casts that he then declared to be copies of lost Hebrew “Cherubim”; and its principle was the “bounding line”. “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art … Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.” “Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has”; “Grecian is Mathematic Form / Gothic is Living Form”; “Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed”. The major themes are those of the poems, seen: the creation as the moulding of a body by an anxious god; the fall as the shrinking of the human form into the beast, the geometer and the sleeper; the reign of the accusing God of the book and the compasses; the Female Will as Hecate, Vala and the Queen of Heaven; the Dragon as the human Spectre; the apocalypse as the casting-down of the Accuser and the return of the instruments to the hands that play them; and the resurrection as a man walking forward out of the tomb with his arms open.⁹¹

Reception and significance#

In his lifetime Blake had a handful of readers and almost no press. Robert Hunt’s attack on the Grave designs in The Examiner of 7 August 1808 and his notice of the 1809 exhibition in the same paper — “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement”; “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity” — were the most conspicuous printed judgements of his painting or his poetry between Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), which printed six of his poems — four of the Songs and two from Poetical Sketches — with an account of the artist’s life “largely obtained from conversations with Blake himself”, and the obituaries of 1827. Southey, who visited him in 1811, “admired both his designs & his poetic talents at the same time that he held him for a decided madman” and called Jerusalem “a perfectly mad poem”; Wordsworth, read the Songs by Crabb Robinson in 1812, “considered Blake as having the elements of poetry a thousand times more than either Byron or Scott”, and later, in the remark that Robinson preserved, that “There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott”; Coleridge, lent the Songs by Tulk in 1818, called him “a man of Genius—and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian—certainly, a mystic emphatically … anacalyptic Poet, and Painter”; Lamb in 1824 thought “The Tyger” “glorious” and its author “one of the most extraordinary persons of the age”, “flown, whither I know not—to Hades or a Mad House”. The word “mystic” is Coleridge’s, and “madness” was the century’s; Robinson’s Reminiscences of 1852, which called him “an insane man of genius” whose “theosophic dreams bear a close resemblance to those of Swedenborg”, and the memoirs of J. T. Smith (1828), Allan Cunningham (1830) and Tatham (c. 1832) kept his name alive as that of a visionary whose imagination had overmastered his judgement. The Ancients — Palmer, Calvert, Richmond, Finch, Tatham — kept the other tradition: “a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy”, Palmer wrote to Gilchrist in 1855, and denied that he was in any way “double minded”. The Swedenborgians of Tulk’s circle were the first to reprint him (Wilkinson’s edition of the Songs, 1839).⁹²

Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863), completed by his widow with the Rossettis and Swinburne, made the reputation: Dante Gabriel Rossetti edited the poems (and altered them), William Michael catalogued the pictures, the Job plates were photolithographed, and a second edition was needed in 1880. Swinburne’s William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), begun as a review of Gilchrist, was the first extended criticism of the prophetic books and the first to read Blake as an antinomian and an aesthetic revolutionary — “on his own ground no man was ever more sane or more reverent”; the Marriage “the greatest of all his books”. The esoteric reading proper begins with Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (3 vols, 1893), which printed The Four Zoas for the first time, reproduced the prophecies in lithograph, and, in the long section on “The Symbolic System” that is essentially Yeats’s, read the whole myth as a coherent system of correspondences — the Zoas as elements, faculties and compass-points, the fourfold Man — in the light of Swedenborg, Boehme, the Kabbalah as Yeats knew it through Mathers and the doctrines of the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn in which he was then immersed; the edition was textually unreliable, its memoir invented an Irish grandfather named O’Neil, and it made Blake, for a generation, an occultist. Yeats’s essays “William Blake and the Imagination” and “William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy” were collected in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) beside “Magic” and “The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux” — the company is the statement. Arthur Symons’s William Blake (1907), which reprinted the early records, and John Sampson’s verbatim text of the lyrics (1905) began the modern textual tradition, completed by Geoffrey Keynes’s Bibliography (1921) and three-volume Nonesuch Writings (1925), the first complete edition, and by David Erdman’s Poetry and Prose (1965; revised 1982, 1988), the standard text since.⁹³

Twentieth-century scholarship divided into schools that correspond to the four readings set out in the section on Blake’s thought. S. Foster Damon’s William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), the first work-by-work commentary, made Blake a mystic in the strict sense whose symbols decode into the Bible, Swedenborg, Boehme, Paracelsus, the Neoplatonists and the Kabbalah, and his Blake Dictionary (1965) is still the field’s working reference; Sloss and Wallis’s edition of the prophecies (1926) argued the contrary, that the “system” is a series of shifting schemes; Milton Percival’s William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (1938) assembled the myth of fall and return from the Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Hermetic, alchemical, Kabbalistic, Behmenist and Swedenborgian traditions; and Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), the most influential single book, replied that Blake’s work is a unified imaginative structure, an anagogic reading of the Bible as “the Great Code of Art”, whose difficulty is that of a complete poetic system and not of occult borrowing, and whose “visions” are works of art. David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) founded the political reading, in which the myth is a commentary on the history of 1775–1827, and Harold Bloom’s Blake’s Apocalypse (1963) the reading of the prophecies as Protestant “poetic argument”. The source-hunters answered: George Mills Harper’s The Neoplatonism of William Blake (1961), which placed Thomas Taylor at Blake’s elbow; Désirée Hirst’s Hidden Riches (1964), tracing one “traditional symbolism” from Ficino to Blake; and Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968), the Mellon Lectures of 1962, for which Blake was a learned heir of the Perennial Philosophy — Taylor’s Plotinus and Porphyry, the Pymander, Boehme, Swedenborg, Agrippa, the Kabbala Denudata — whose originality lay in recombination; her reviewers granted the attraction of the readings and doubted the chain of evidence, and Morton Paley’s Energy and the Imagination (1970) set against her timeless Blake a Blake who changed his mind, from the celebration of energy in the Marriage to the primacy of forgiveness in Jerusalem. The art-historical and bibliographical turn — David Bindman’s Blake as an Artist (1977), W. J. T. Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art (1978), Robert Essick’s William Blake, Printmaker (1980), Martin Butlin’s catalogue raisonné (1981), Joseph Viscomi’s Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), G. E. Bentley’s Blake Records (1969; 2004), Blake Books (1977) and biography The Stranger from Paradise (2001) — insisted that whatever Blake believed, what he made were books and pictures, and gave the field its documents. The historicist reading of the 1990s — Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992), E. P. Thompson’s Witness Against the Beast (1993), Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003), Robert Rix’s William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (2007) — relocated the esoteric materials in the plebeian Dissent and enthusiast subcultures of London, where they were common property rather than hidden tradition; and Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard’s discovery of the Moravian mother (1999, 2004) gave that reading its one new document, while Schuchard’s Why Mrs Blake Cried (2006) built on it an inferential structure of visionary sexual practice that few have accepted. The Gnostic and Kabbalistic readings have continued in Peter Sorensen (1995), A. D. Nuttall’s The Alternative Trinity (1998), Sheila Spector’s two volumes on Blake’s “Kabbalistic myth” and “Kabbalistic language” (2001) — Spector wrote the entry “Blake, William” in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005) — and Peter Otto’s chapter in The Gnostic World (2018); the Behmenist in Bryan Aubrey (1986) and Kevin Fischer (2004); and a theological reading, in Christopher Rowland’s Blake and the Bible (2010), Susanne Sklar’s Blake’s “Jerusalem” as Visionary Theatre (2011) and Naomi Billingsley’s The Visionary Art of William Blake (2018), has made him a biblical exegete of the radical Reformation. The Cambridge Companion (2003) and William Blake in Context (2019) summarise the field; the Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism (2016) has no chapter on him — the academic study of esotericism has treated Blake as a reader of its subjects rather than as one of them.⁹⁴

Beyond scholarship, Blake’s afterlife has run through three channels. The first is the esoteric and Perennialist one that Yeats opened: Raine’s Temenos (1981–92) and the Temenos Academy (1991), of which she was a founder and whose Blake is the “prophet of the New Age” of her Golgonooza, City of Imagination (1991); the Jungian reading of June Singer’s The Unholy Bible (1970), for which the prophecies are the individuation of the psyche (Jung himself, in a letter of 1948, found Blake’s fantasies “an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes”); and the appropriation of Blake by Theosophists, Golden Dawn magicians and their successors as a visionary who had seen what they systematised. The second is the counterculture: Allen Ginsberg’s auditory vision of 1948, in which he heard Blake’s voice reading “Ah! Sun-flower” and “The Sick Rose”, and his recorded settings of the Songs (1970); Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), whose title is the sentence from the Marriage, and Jim Morrison’s band (1965); the British poets and musicians who have made him the patron of a native visionary radicalism. The third is national and popular: Parry’s setting of the preface lyric of Milton (1916), which has been sung as the hymn “Jerusalem” by the suffragists, the Women’s Institutes, the Labour Party, the Proms and the partisans of every side of English politics since, and whose history Jason Whittaker has written; the Tate’s Blake gallery of the 1920s and its exhibitions of 1913, 1947, 1978, 2000 and 2019–20, the last “the largest survey of work by William Blake … in the UK for a generation”, which rebuilt the room above the hosiery shop where the 1809 exhibition failed; the Blake Society (1985), based at the church of his baptism, which found the exact place of his common grave in 2006 and unveiled a ledger stone there on 12 August 2018, and which is coordinating “Blake 200” for the bicentenary of his death in 2027; the William Blake Archive (1996), which has put online copies of each of the illuminated books — most, though not all, of the surviving copies — with a large part of the paintings, drawings and prints, the manuscripts and Erdman’s text, and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (1967), the journal of record. The “madness” question with which reception began has not gone away — it returns in Damrosch’s biographical account of 2015, in Worrall’s cognitive study of the visions (2024) and in Higgs’s popular William Blake vs the World (2021) — and it is worth noticing that the esoteric reading, from Yeats to Raine, was historically the defence against that charge: to call the visions a system was to deny that they were symptoms. What all the readings share is the recognition of a single achievement: a mythology, made by one man from the Bible, Milton and the theosophic and radical traditions of his city, and stated in three arts, in which the divine is human, the fall is a division of the human, and the only redemption is the annihilation of the accusing self in forgiveness — the most complete and the most influential religious vision produced in English since Milton, and the one through which the Behmenist, Swedenborgian, Neoplatonic and Gnostic currents of the eighteenth century entered the poetry, painting and popular imagination of the two centuries that followed.⁹⁵

Bibliography#

Primary#

Blake, William. Poetical Sketches. London: privately printed, 1783.

——. All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion. Relief-etched tractates, c. 1788; printed c. 1794–95.

——. Songs of Innocence. Relief etching, 1789.

——. The Book of Thel. Relief etching, 1789.

——. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Relief etching, c. 1790–93.

——. The French Revolution: A Poem in Seven Books. Book the First. London: J. Johnson, 1791 (page-proofs only; first published 1913).

——. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Lambeth: relief etching, 1793.

——. America a Prophecy. Lambeth: relief etching, 1793.

——. For Children: The Gates of Paradise. Lambeth: intaglio etching, 1793; reissued as For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, c. 1818–26.

——. Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Relief etching, 1794.

——. Europe a Prophecy. Lambeth: relief etching, 1794.

——. The [First] Book of Urizen. Lambeth: relief etching, 1794.

——. The Song of Los. Lambeth: relief etching, colour-printed, 1795.

——. The Book of Ahania. Lambeth: intaglio etching, 1795.

——. The Book of Los. Lambeth: intaglio etching, 1795.

——. Vala, or The Four Zoas. Manuscript, c. 1797–1807 (British Library, Add. MS 39764); first printed in Ellis and Yeats, 1893.

——. Milton a Poem in 2 Books. Relief etching, dated 1804; printed c. 1811 and 1818.

——. Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Relief etching, dated 1804; printed 1820–27.

——. A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions. London: D. N. Shury, 1809.

——. Illustrations of the Book of Job. Twenty-two engraved plates. London: the author and J. Linnell, 1826 (plates dated 1825).

——. On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil. Relief etching, c. 1822.

——. The Ghost of Abel: A Revelation in the Visions of Jehovah. Relief etching, 1822.

——. The Laocoön. Engraving with inscriptions, c. 1826–27.

——. The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. Edited by Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats. 3 vols. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893.

——. The Poetical Works of William Blake: A New and Verbatim Text. Edited by John Sampson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.

——. The Letters of William Blake, together with a Life by Frederick Tatham. Edited by Archibald G. B. Russell. London: Methuen, 1906.

——. The Writings of William Blake. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. 3 vols. London: Nonesuch Press, 1925.

——. The Complete Writings of William Blake, with Variant Readings. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: Nonesuch Press, 1957; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

——. Vala or The Four Zoas: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, a Transcript of the Poem, and a Study of Its Growth and Significance. Edited by G. E. Bentley, Jr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

——. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman, with a commentary by Harold Bloom. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.

——. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Edited by David V. Erdman and Donald K. Moore. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; rev. edn, New York: Readex Books, 1977.

——. William Blake’s Writings. Edited by G. E. Bentley, Jr. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

——. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman, with a commentary by Harold Bloom. Newly revised edn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; New York: Anchor Books, 1988.

——. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Edited by David Bindman. 6 vols. London: William Blake Trust / Tate Gallery; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991–95.

——. The Complete Illuminated Books. Edited by David Bindman. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

——. William Blake: Selected Writings. Edited by Peter Otto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The William Blake Archive. Edited by Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 1996–. blakearchive.org (with the electronic Erdman text at erdman.blakearchive.org).

Secondary#

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—— (ed.). William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Billingsley, Naomi. The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018.

Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. Oxford: Phaidon, 1977.

——. The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.

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Blunt, Anthony. The Art of William Blake. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.

Bruder, Helen P. (ed.). Women Reading William Blake. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.

Clark, Steve, and Jason Whittaker (eds). Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Clark, Steve, Tristanne Connolly and Jason Whittaker (eds). Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Damon, S. Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.

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Damrosch, Leo. Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.

Davies, J. G. The Theology of William Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948.

Davies, Keri. “William Blake’s Mother: A New Identification.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 33.2 (1999): 36–50.

Davies, Keri, and Marsha Keith Schuchard. “Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 38.1 (2004): 36–43.

Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

—— (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954; 3rd edn 1977.

——. “Blake’s Early Swedenborgianism: A Twentieth-Century Legend.” Comparative Literature 5 (1953): 247–57.

Erle, Sibylle, and Morton D. Paley (eds). The Reception of William Blake in Europe. 2 vols. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Essick, Robert N. William Blake, Printmaker. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

——. The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

——. William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

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Fisher, Peter F. “Blake and the Druids.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 589–612.

Fox, Susan. Poetic Form in Blake’s “Milton”. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

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Lindberg, Bo. William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job. Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973.

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Morton, A. L. The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1958.

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Nuttall, A. D. The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Otto, Peter. “William Blake, the Ancient Gnostics, and the Birth of Modern Gnosticism.” In The Gnostic World, edited by Garry W. Trompf, Gunner B. Mikkelsen and Jay Johnston, 464–74. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

——. “‘A New Heaven Is Begun’: William Blake and Swedenborgianism.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 13.2 (1979): 64–85.

——. The Continuing City: William Blake’s “Jerusalem”. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

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Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. 2 vols. Bollingen Series XXXV.11. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Abridged as Blake and Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

——. Golgonooza, City of Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake. Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1991.

Rix, Robert W. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

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