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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeob Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 I I 73-26,873

MINNICK, Thomas Ludwig, 19^2- ON BLAKE AND MILTON: AN ESSAY IN LITERARY RELATIONSHIP.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1973 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

© Copyright by

Thomas Ludwig Mirmick

1973

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. ON BLAKE AND MILTONt

AN ESSAY IN LITERARY RELATIONSHIP

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Thomas Ludwig Minnick, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University 1973

Reading Committee: Approved by John B. Gabel Albert J , Kuhn Edwin W, Robbins

Adviser Department of English PREFACE

In 1938 Milton Percival asserted what recent

scholarship has gone a long way toward proving, that

"when the evidence is in, it will be found that in

the use of tradition Blake exceeded Milton and was

second, if to anyone, only to Dante." In the follow­

ing essay I have tried to explore the outlines of one

aspect of Blake's use of prior literatures, his reliance

on the poetry and prose of John Milton.

The influence of Milton on 31ake was persistent

and pervasive, as virtually every critic of 31ake's writings and paintings has had occasion to observe. Yet with one exception, no sustained critical study isolating Blake's lifelong concern with "the British

Homer" has found its way into print. That exception,

Blake and Milton by Denis Saurat (London: George Allen

& Unwin, Ltd., 1935* reissued in New York by Russell &

Russell, Inc., 1 9 6 5 ), though richly suggestive, antedates the major works of Blake scholarship by Milton Percival,

Northrop Frye, David Erdman, and the many other histor­ ians and critics examining Blake in recent decades, A thorough account of the relationship between Blake

and Kilton, the most outstanding example of the creative

use of one poetfs thought by another which English liter­

ature affords, is therefore overdue. Perhaps no study

of this relationship could claim to be exhaustive, so

multiform and sometimes so obscure are the threads of

the cathexis. But I am especially sensible of having

passed over the questions of epic theory (of why Blake

preferred the structure of his prophecies to the arch­

itectonic of Milton's long poems, for example), and of

the wholly personal aspects of the relationship, aspects

which some recent critics imply require the special tools

of psychotherapists in addition to the usual means of

literary history, I have reserved my speculations on

these issues to an afterword on the problem of literary relationship altogether.

» In the main I focus on the argument of Blake's developing mythology as he incorporates or rejects the thinking of Milton. Weaving a coherent pattern from the threads of this relationship has often required me in the text of this essay to omit mention of illuminating comments on Blake and Milton made by other critics.

Moreover, I did not wish merely to repeat observations by others which were not directly relevant to my case.

But I have benefitted greatly from the work of many scholars; my debts, and occasionally my disagreements, are recorded in the notes.

I owe a more personal debt to Professor Albert J.

Kuhn for his patience and guidance throughout my work

on this essay. And I want also to record my thanks to

the members of my examining committee--Professors John

B. Gabel, Virgil Hinshaw, and Edwin W, Robbins— and

to others who read and commented on part or all of the manuscript, and whose good wishes encouraged me to

complete this work— Mr. James R. Carter, Professor

W, J, Thomas Mitchell, Mr. Ruthven Todd, and Professor

Joseph A. Wittreich. VITA

25 September 19^2. . . . .Born - Cleveland, Ohio

1 9 6 ^ ...... B , A, , The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1966 ...... K.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

I96A— 1973...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

"Blake Items in the Library of Isaac Reed," Blake News­ letter. 3 (1 9 7 °)i 8 9 .

"Blake and 'Cowper’s Tame Hares'," Blake Newsletter, k (1 9 7 0 ), 11-12.

Comp., "Summary of Correspondence to the New Study Commission," PKLA. 85 (1970), 5505 6 ,

"A New Rossetti Letter," Blake Newsletter. 19 (1971-72), 181-82.

(with William A, Gibson), "William Blake and Henry Emlyn * s Proposition for a New Order in Architectures A New Plate," Blake Newsletter, 21 (1972Fi 12-17.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Page

PREFACE...... ii

VITA ...... v

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... vii

EXPLANATION OF NOTES ...... viii

Chapter

I. THE BONES OF THE DEAD...... 1

II. IN SEED TIKE LEARN ...... 39

III. AT LIBERTY ...... 83

IV. PROPHETIC DREADS URGE KE TO SPEAK. .... 137

V. IN TERRIBLE MAJESTY MILTON ...... 180

AFTERWORD...... 213

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED...... 220 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure Page

1. "The Dance of Albion"...... 8

2. "The Expulsion from Paradise" by Francis Hayman ...... 18

3. "The Expulsion" (first series) by William Bla&e. , ...... 19

k, "Har and Heva Bathing" (Tiriel, Drawing no. 2) ...... 68

5. "Tiriel Supporting Myratana" (Tiriel. Drawing no. 1) ...... 69

6. Title page, The Marriage of Heaven and Hill. 93

7. Plate 15» The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. , 95

8. Frontispiece, Visions of..the_Daughers o£ Albion ...... 113

9. Frontispiece, Europe. "The Ancient of Days" 12?

10. Plate The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , , 130

11. Milton. Plate 32 of Copy D ...... 197

12. Milton. Plate 16 of Copy D ...... 203 EXPLANATION OF NOTES

Citations to 31ake's writings, exclusive of his

letters, are to the edition by David V. Erdraan, The

Poetry and Prose of William Blake, commentary by Harold

Bloom, 4th printing, rev, (Garden City: Doubleday and

Company, 19?0), For Blake’s annotations and other prose, quotations are followed in the text by page references to this edition, within parentheses (as E 6 3 4 ). The following abbreviations are used 'for Blake's works: A America BU The First Book of Urizen E Europe FR The French Revolution FZ The Four Zoas J Jerusalem M Milton MHH The Harriaye of Heaven and Hill PS Poetical Sketches T Tiriel Thel The Book of Thel VDA Visions of the Daughters of Albion VLJ A Vision of the Last Judgment

Except when noted otherwise, citations to Milton's poetry follow the edition of Merritt Y, Hughes, John

Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York* The

Odyssey Press, 1957)*

viii Matth, 13*52 Every Scri"be instructed to the Kingdome of Keav'n, is like the Kaister of a house which bringeth out of his treasurie things old and new.

— cited by Hilton, title page, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

Imitation is Criticism

— Blake, annotations to Reynolds CHAPTER I

THE BONES OF THE DEAD

To learn the Language of Art Copy for Ever, is My Rule — Annotations to Reynolds

In the summer of 1790 workmen renovating the

church of St. Giles, Cripplogate, uncovered what they

believed to be the coffin of John Milton. On 3 Aug­

ust they reported an old lead casket, "much corroded,

and without any inscription, or plate upon it" to

Mr, Cole, the church warden: and he, having measured and washed it, ordered the grave (where Milton's

father was also thought to rest, in a wood coffin below the one of lead) to be closed, for "with a

just and laudable piety they disdained to disturb the ashes after a requiem of 116 years.' But curiosity (stimulated perhaps by drink) drew Cole, the workers, and the church overseers back to the site. They reopened the grave the next morning, battered tack the casket lid, and regarded the corpse.

1 2

"Upon first view, , . it appeared perfect, and com­

pletely enveloped with the shroud, , , the ribs stand- 2 xng up regularly." They disturbed the shroud, and

the ribs fell. One gentleman pulled at the teeth, which resisted until another hit them v/ith a stone

and they came out. A third took the lower jaw,

intending it as a souvenir, but tossed it back.

Hair was clipped, even torn away--the last remaining

flesh was the little which held hair to skull. Some bones were taken. Then the body became the business, literally, of Elizabeth Grant, gravedigger and assis­ tant to the sexton, who charged six pence per look, and lowered the rate to two pence when the crowds thinned. The carpenters who found the grave kept the doors and required a pot of beer from those whom they let enter; some enterprising folk slipped in through a window.

The casket was reinterred in the late afternoon of 5 August, but the true identity of the deceased raised so much controversy that on 17 August several surgeons were called to be present for another exhuma­ tion, Were these the remains of John Milton? In making their identifications, the experts disagreed— largely because the corpse was entirely mutilated:

"Almost all the ribs, the lower jaw, and one of the hands was gone. A continuing bolster to one party of the debate was the conviction that, while (obvious­ ly I ) many Englishmen might desecrate some unhonorable dead, no true son of Albion would disturb John Milton's il bones.

For the study of William Blake this incident can be instructive. Although the nineteenth-century bulwarks of Milton biography and criticism generally discount the chance that the body was Milton's (indeed,

Masson passes over the event in silence),^ nevertheless the matter was controversial news for a short time in

London, even in the context of reports about the upheaval in France, Articles appeared in St. James's

Chronicle, The English Chronicle and Universal Evening

Post, The Fublic Advertiser, and The European Magazine, among others.^ A careful pamphlet called A narrative of the disinterment of Milton's Coffin. . . by a lawyer of Furnival's Inn, one Mr, Philip Neve, went through two editions in as many months, and was reviewed by at least the Gentleman's Magazine, The Critical Review, and The Monthly Review.^ "A Whig," writing to The Town and Country Magazine, hoped that the remains of Milton might be taken with honor to Westminster Abbey and there graced with a suitable monument, established by O subscription. Hundreds of Milton's teeth were hawked to the curious, and locks of his hair--in grey, black, red, auburn, and light brown (the.correct color)— were also to be had, (The lock of Milton's hair owned by Leigh Hunt and celebrated in a poem by Keats was probably genuine. At least it had a provenance antedating the exhumations, having been the property . q of Dr. Johnson,K In August, William Cowper wrote five stanzas "On the late indecent liberties taken with the remains of the great Milton," William Hayley published these for the first time in his Life of

Cowner (I8 O3 ), for which Blake provided four engrav­ ings.'1'0 As David Erdman has shown, in London in 1790,

William Blake was alive and alert. He may have been planning the critique of Paradise Lost which appears in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He had read

Milton since childhood and seems not to have given up grappling with Miltonic themes even on his deathbed.

Yet nowhere in his extant writings is there any direct allusion to this incident, Was he thinking of it when he wrote "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead"?

Probably not, and yet the disinterments of the alleged Milton raise questions preliminary to any study of the influence of Milton on Blake, Why is there no direct allusion to Milton's bones? The answer that Blake was unaware of the controversy might

have teen congenial to the outmoded sense of Blake as

an apolitical, even atemporal visionary crank, hut

the likelihood of such ignorance on his part is small.

We can not limit our evidence for what Blake knew or

saw or read to his surviving comments or similar direct

links. For first, he never says he read Othello or

Tom Jones or Aristotle. Does this mean that he, unlike

most literate men of the late eighteenth centui'y, did

not know them? Second, what does the positive evidence

mean? Blake did own Bysshe's Art of Foe try, but how

thoroughly did he read it? Bysshe compiled an anthol-

ogy of bits and pieces from long poems: did Blake

read from the fragments to the full works? Is Blake's

single drawing for Koole's translation of Ariosto proof of anything more than a commercial contract?

Does it show an interest in or knowledge of the Orlando

Furioso? Did Blake always mean what he said? And third, since the answer to the last question is no, he did not, how important is the context of a state­ ment by Blake--one from, say, his letters? Margaret

Lowery has suggested that Blake's boast about learning

Greek and Hebrew like an Oxford scholar must be con­ sidered in light of the character of his correspondent, his brother James, who judged the eccentric V/illiam 12 by strictly this— worldly standards of accomplishment.

Was William Blake, perhaps self-doubtful in spite of

himself, trying to measure up in his brother's eyes?

Similarly, when Blake writes to Hayley of rereading

"Clarissa &c," is he trying to smooth a rift by

flattering Hayley's taste in authors?*^ Perhaps one

could formulate answers here rather than questions if

the evidence were more full. Relatively few letters

to or from Blake survive; many are mere receipts or

bills. To the tally of legendary Blake manuscripts alleged to have been mutilated or burned, add the

ephemera chucked out when Mrs. Blake cleaned house,

or lost when the Blakes moved their residence, as

they did often in the years before Felpham. By now

the one or two references Blake might have made to

the desecration of Milton's body are destroyed,

But to rest any kind of argument on the supposi­

tion of lost evidence is to build a blind behind which

any kind of speculation can hide. The primary lesson which the hunter after Blake must learn is that since he does not have the commonplace notebooks of a

Coleridge to rely on, or full reports by contemporaries

(Crabb Robinson tells too little, too late), or the fireside recollections of a memorializing eldest son, he must work almost entirely with the poems and paintings themselves. Tracing the genesis of these is usually

difficult, sometimes impossible, -What Blake did not

find useful to his poetic purposes, he did not use.

And when he did choose to copy a line or pattern from,

say, Milton, he was free to use it in his own v/ay.

As a typical example, consider the well-known

picture usually called "Glad Day," after Alexander

Gilchrist’s characterisation of it (fig. 1), Of this

work both an engraving and a tempera version are known.

According to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, both date from about Ik 179^• David Erdman has pointed out that a better

title for the engraving is the one supplied by Blake

himself, in a caption beneath the nude youth*

Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves

Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the Dance of Eternal Death. (E 660)

Noting that "the symbolism of this inscription derives from Blake's paraphrase of the Declaration of Indepen­ dence in America11 (which means the caption was added long after a first drawing was made, probably about

1780), Erdman argues, "Blake is saying that in 1?80 the people of England rose up in a demonstration of independence, dancing the dance of insurrection

(apocalyptic self-sacrifice) to save the Nations Figure li "The Dance of Albion" (Blake's term in America for the Colonies). Albion's

facial expression must be read as-that of one offering

himself a living sacrifice."1^ It is entirely con­

sonant with Erdman's reading to remark that Blake enlarged the scope of the allegory in this drawing with a phrase from Samson Agonistes. Speaking of himself, Samson cries,

Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with Slaves. . . (SA, 38-41)

The bondage of Albion (the people and spirit of England) was like the yoked and blind slavery of Samson, who suffered capture because of his ignorance in a world of experience. By an act of his own self-willing, which like the agency of Samson's sacrificial freedom is divine, Albion dances down pillars on the Phili­ stines of England. By comparing "The Dance of Albion" with "Albion and the Crucified Christ" (J 9 0 ), Sir

Anthony Blunt has argued that the lines beneath the engraving "signify the sacrifice which man makes of 1 & himself in imitation of the sacrifice of Christ."

But the allusions to Samson the warrior are more direct. Nevertheless, that Samson, like the Albion of Blake's later myth, is a type of Christ gives strength to Blunt's claim. In a kind of iconographical 10

overlay, Albion's arms are extended like Samson's in

the act of bringing down the Temple of Dagon, and like

Christ's on the cross. Like Samson and Christ, Albion

earns a hero's glory by his sacrifice and frees a

nation.

Blake completed "The Dance of Albion" when he was

nearly forty; he felt the influence of Milton much

earlier. "Milton lov'd me in childhood and shew’d me his face," Blake wrote in an intellectual auto­

biography prepared for John Flaxman, as though he

could not remember a time before which Milton was not

important to him.^ But how was Milton important?

Blake implies an answer in his annotations to the works

of Sir Joshua Reynoldsi ". . .no one can ever Design

until he has learn'd the Language of Art by making

many finish'd Copies both of Nature & Art and of what­

ever comes in his way from Earliest Childhood. The

difference between a bad Artist and a Good One is:

the Bad Artist Seems to copy a Great deal. The Good ■I Q one Really does Copy a Great deal" (E 63*0, Seeming

to copy a poem involves echoing the words or forms

only of an original; this was the way of most imitators

of Milton in the eighteenth century, but Blake seldom

does this kind of copying, even as subliminally as with the allusion to Samson under "The Dance of Albion." 11

Really to copyt if we can judge from Blake's usual

practice, requires assimilating the substance and

thought of the original, and this is the sense in which Blake's engraving recalls Milton's Samson, When

Blake really copied Milton, he produced not simply

congruent language but worked from the earliest of

his poems and drawings with an understanding, an inter­

pretation of Milton v/hich increased in insight as he

aged, Marcia Pointon makes this distinction in a

different context when she writes, "no illustrator more closely follows Milton's pattern of idea and

image and few are so precise in following details of the text. The reason for Blake's success, particularly with Paradise Lost, is that his illustrative method is symbolical rather than representational. He is concerned with idea rather than with narrative.

Added to this symbolic method, Blake's character­ istic syncretism of images from different contexts complicates the task of getting to his sources, In

"The Dance of Albion" he alludes in his caption to political, theological and literary antecedents, and in his picture he alludes as well to conventions of iconology in the position of the youth. To trace the literary antecedents of a single line of poetry can be trying, as eighteenth-century editions (and now modern 12

onesi like the Twickenham) have shown. S. Foster Damon

and Morton Paley have offered as a possible source for

"The Sick Rose" from Songs of Experience, a passage

Blake illustrated in watercolors preliminary to his 20 engravings for Young's Night Thoughts. In lines

addressed to Philander in Night One, Young apostro­

phizes,

0 how ambition flush'd Thy glowing cheekl ambition, truly great, Of virtuous praise. Death’s subtle seed within, (Sly, treach'rous minerI) v/orking in the dark, Smil'd at thy well-concerted scheme, and beckon'd The worm to riot on that rose so red, Unfaded ere it fell; one moment's prey! (It 353-59) Young, who closes the first Night hoping "... Milton!

theej ah! could I reach your strain!," might well have

taken his image from Lvcidas. line ^5, "As killing as

the canker to the rose." And, in the words of Thomas

Y/arton, "Shakespeare is fond of this image, who, from

frequent repetition, seems to have suggested it to

Milton." Warton follows this claim with twelve instances from Shakespeare in which canker worms attack roses, including "For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love," "— As in the sweetest buds/ The eating canker dwells, so eating love , . . As Warton ? 1 concludes, "Shakespeare affords other instances," and Blake, familiar with Young, Milton, Shakespeare, 13 and a crowd of others who drew their imagery from them, had almost a commonplace image to, follow.

Noting the uses in traditional literature of the image of a worm attacking a rose reminds us of how original a use Blake made of that image. And recog­ nizing the allusion to Samson Agonistes in the caption of "The Dance of Albion" enlarges our sense of the significance of that drawing. But it can legitimately be asked whether it is relevant for a study of Blake's thought to know that some physicians thought they could identify Milton's skeleton. At least one answer is forthcoming. David Erdman defends in general the historical method of literary criticism in this way:

"The aim of the historical approach is to approximate

Blake's own perspective, to locate, as nearly as we can, the moment and place in which he stood, to dis­ cover what he saw and heard in London's streets--what 22 loomed on the horizon and what sounds filled the air.”

In the following pages I want to focus on one part of that perspective, the places where Blake and Milton struggled, against their common enemies, and sometimes against each other, because of what they saw, heard and thought in London's streets. Such a focus is simultaneously intensive and extensive, looking deeply into Blake's own work and into Milton's, trying to look Ik as Blake looked, and surveying the context of facts and ideas concerning Milton againdt which Blake wrote.

II

Because no one has yet located a copy of Milton's works signed or annotated "by Blake, much of the follow­ ing is speculation based on what was available and con­ genial to the later poet. By the age of eleven or twelve Blake had begun "to write original and irregular verse," suggests Gilchrist, who relied on Benjamin

Heath Malkin for evidence that by the same age Blake was buying cheap prints, but good ones, from Langford's and Christie's auction rooms. These years, part of

Blake's "Earliest Childhood," could also have seen him buying cheap editions of Milton, or even expensive editions at bargain prices.2-^ Surely his father, a dissenter, kept Bunyan at home, at least one Bible, perhaps a copy of Shakespeare, but surely an edition of Paradise Lost, if not a complete Milton as well.

After all, no other English author whom we now regard as classic--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare— enjoyed greater popularity than Milton in the eighteenth cen­ tury, Between 1705 and 1800 Paradise Lost was published more than one hundred times. The Faerie Queene. by comparison, appeared in only seven editions in the same period, and even the works of Shakespeare were

printed only half as often, in about fifty editions

over the century. Raymond Havens has noted that

"Paradise Lost had the unique honor of being the first

poem to be sold by subscription, the first English poem

to appear in a critical edition, the first to have a

variorum edition, and the first to be made the subject oh. of a detailed critical study." All of these "firsts"

antedate Blake's birth. Interest in anything to do

with Milton was high; especially given the events of

August, 1790, Havens's words have an ironic appropriate­

ness; "Beyond question, the attitude of the eighteenth

century was quite unlike our own [Havens was writing

before the current Milton revival], so unlike that it

is hardly possible for us to conceive it. Milton's

shrine, instead of being, as it is now, 'remote and

rarely visited,' was, like that of Thomas Becket, or

of St, James of Compostella in earlier times, closely associated with the life and thought of the day and thronged with persons of all classes, each bearing his gift,"2^

For the middle period of the century, the most important text of Paradise Lost was the variorum edi­ tion Havens mentions above, first published in 17^9.

It was the text in two volumes edited by Thomas Newton, 16

whose Boyle lectures, the Dissertations on the Pro­

phecies which have remarkably been fulfilled, and at

this time are fulfilling in the world (3 vols., 1755”58),

were often reprinted through the nineteenth century.

In 175^ he was Chaplain to the Princess Dowager of

Y/ales; the title page of the seventh edition of his

Paradise Lost (1770) identifies him as "Now Lord Bishop

of Bristol." So careful was this eminent divine that

an audience unused to notes on variants, foul copies,

and archaic senses v/rote the Gentleman's Magazine to

complain about Nev/ton's pedantry. Largely because of

this variorum, more editions of Paradise Lost were

printed in the first twenty years of Blake's life than

in any other comparable period of the eighteenth cen­

tury.2^ In Blake's childhood, English publishers and

booksellers had good reason to love Milton. By 1752

Newton added two more volumes containing Paradise

Regain*d, Samson Agonistes. and Poems upon Several 28 Occasions. Thereafter Newton's edition was usually

sold in the four-volume format, containing Milton's OQ complete poetry. 7

After its third edition, Newton's variorum was

easily available, popular, fairly compact (being in quarto), and inexpensive. The likelihood that Blake knew or owned a copy is therefore high. There is 17

evidence in Blake's drawings to support this conjecture.

His two sets of illustrations to Paradise Lost--the

first done in 1807» the second completed about 1809—

show an important similarity to the series of drawings

done by Francis Hayman and, engraved by various hands,

published with Newton's edition. Merritt Hughes, who

set Blake in the company of other illustrators of the

Expulsion scene (PL XII, 6^6 -69)1 has implied that Blake

was the first to follow Milton literally, with Michael

leading Adam and Eve, all three "handed," from the

garden rather than driving them from Paradise as most

earlier illustrators of the scene had done,^0 But

Hayman (fig. 2) showed a gentle Michael helping the

first parents out of Eden under a forked flame in much the way Blake later did (fig. 3)* Hughes is right to note that Blake interprets the Expulsion "in terms of redemption and possible joy (in, for example, the upraised faces of Adam and Eve), but he neglects to add that he is speaking only of the 1807 drawings, that

Blake follows Hayman and his other predecessors more closely in the second series of Paradise Lost water- color s, where Adam and Eve are penitent, downcast.

Similarities in the modeling of the bodies of the three characters also join Blake's drawings to those of 31 Hayman, and these suggest Blake's acquaintance with rrurt isttA JtJuAu£*fz/&

Figure 2, "The Expulsion from Paradis?." by Francis Hayman XIII. THK EXPULSION Paradise L o st

Figure 3 . "The Expulsion" (first series) by William Blake 20

Newton's four volume edition.

I think that Blake did use Newton's four volumes, and that he studied and followed Hayman's illustrations as well. But Blake also surely knew the elegant edi­ tion of Milton's poetry (3 vols., 197Z0 to which Hay- ley's Life of Milton served as introduction. Perhaps

Blake did not own Warton's edition of the shorter poems, but it was a common volume and he must have known of it in either the first edition of 1785 or the second of 1?91. He may have used other texts of the poems as well. He was Hayley's original choice as illustrator for the posthumous edition of Cowper's translations of Milton's Latin and Italian poetry, published v/ith Flaxinan's illustrations in 1808 but sold by subscription, "briskly" according to Blake, in

July of 1803.^^ Blake expected to complete the engrav­ ings, and we can assume that he and Hayley discussed the project at length. At Felpham Blake had these manuscript translations and the other rich resources of Hayley's Milton library to draw on.

But almost every eighteenth-century edition of Milton was a sort of library in little. Nearly every publication of Paradise Lost included explanatory notes to Milton's language, and there were also usually notes to tie Milton to the literary tradition in which he 21

wrote. The English Homer was illustrated by passages

from the Greek one, and from Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto,

Spenser, and less often, from authors more nearly

contemporary with Milton and Blake. If Blake needed

them, he would have found exhaustive citations to the

Bible, for which Paradise Lost increasingly became, to Blake and his age, the companion poem.^3 About a third of the eighteenth-century editions of Paradise

Lost included Joseph Addison's Critique upon the Para­ dise Lost, which greatly stimulated interest in the poem,-^ This fundamental link joins Milton to the growing examination of aesthetic questions across the century. Following Addison's example, critics drew from Milton their touchstone examples of the leading concepts in the disputes of the time. In the Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, which is as much about Milton as about Pope, Joseph Warton takes Milton as his standard and speaks for the taste of the mid- centuryj "Our English poets may, I think, be disposed in four different classes and degrees. In the first class, I would place, our only three sublime and pathetic poets; Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,But

Shakespeare was still regarded as an unlettered genius, and Spenser was to many tastes unpleasantly ornamental,

Milton was learned and manly, and it was he who most 22

often served as model, as he was for Addison and the

Wartons, and as target, as he was for Dr. Johnson.

If it contained no other apparatus, Blake's copy

of Milton's poems surely contained a life of the poet, more or less elaborate as the printer allowed, and

typically biased by the politics of the compiler.

The lives of Milton present special problems, only some

of which are relevant to Blake. In general it is

sufficient to note that any reader could be easily familiar with the major facts of Milton's life, and that as the century waned, the private character of the poet became increasingly important in the inter­ pretation of his poems.The lives are also valuable as a measure of the extent to which Blake might have come in touch with Milton's prose, for the biographies following those of John Toland (1699) and especially of

J. Richardson (173*0 usually included long extracts from the prose writings, emphasizing the autobiograph­ ical reflections. By means of the prose, throughout the eighteenth century Milton exerted an influence on thought, "appearing at irregular intervals, but always associated with political liberalism or radicalism, from Birch and Benson and James Thomson, to Hollis,

Archdeacon Blackburne, and William Godwin in England, and to Mirabeau in France.'*-^ Blake felt this influence, 23

as did most of the young Romantic poets, and felt it

partly through the knowledge of Milton's prose which

men like Johnathan Richardson, who deplored Milton's politics, and Thomas Birch, who promulgated them,

demonstrated in their early lives of the poet,-^

On Blake's generation the influence of Milton's prose was not great! in 1780, Reverend Francis Black- burne appended Areopagitica and the Tractate of Educa­ tion to his Remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton because he felt they were neglected writings.^9 on piake himself the influence of the prose can hardly be over­ estimated, In Northrop Frye's judgment, "It is in

Areopagitica that Milton is nearest to Blake, and

Areonagitica provides for the student of Blake not only a guide to most of Blake's leading ideas but an illus­ tration of many of his symbols. It was undoubtedly a major influence in forming Blake's doctrine that the Christian Church cannot exist outside the arts because the secondary Word of God which unites us to the primary Word or Person of Christ is a book and not a ceremony. Milton shows that the impulse to destroy art by censorship makes general morality a criterion which the creative imagination must meet."^® zh

Blackburne's Remarks, containing a republican defence of Milton against the vitriol of Doctor John­

son, was published, as I have noted above, with two works by Milton, and also as part of his anonymously compiled Memoirs of Thomas Hollis. An antiquarian ^11 bachelor and "assertor of British liberty'1 who had inherited wealth and a tendency to philanthropy from a number of his forebears, Hollis died in 177^, and as a memorial to the man and his causes, Blackburne gathered material from Hollis's journals, letters and friends, and arranged for the shop which had provided engraved illustrations for Hollis while alive, to per­ form a similar service for his memorial. The shop belonged to James Basire, and at least nine of the large and elaborate plates to Hollis's Memoirs are signed with his name. It was a major job, and as a senior apprentice Blake was surely at work on part of h.o it. At twenty-two his childhood interest in Milton was maturing; there was a war for independence ranging abroad and discussed at home, and Blake was shortly to depict the spirit of England casting off his chains in "The Dance of Albion," And he found agreement among his and Hollis's and Milton's hopes for a "grand, ideal scheme of republicanism.Hollis sent Blake to Milton's prose in the two heavy volumes compiled by Thomas Birch (1738)* or in the version re-edited with

the assistance of Richard Baron (3 vols,, 1753)* From

Birch's text Blake quotes a passage from the Reason of

Church Government in his annotations to Reynolds (E 635).

Blake must have had a copy of the Birch or Birch-Baron edition beside him while he was reading the Discourses« and his familiarity with Milton's tract suggests that he had either the 1738 or 1753 edition in his personal

l i b r a r y .

The Milton materials most tenuously linked to

Blake are the critical studies which appeared in the eighteenth century. Because Addison's Critique was ubiquitous, we can safely assume that Blake knew

Addison (and had therefore at least a nodding acquain­ tance with Aristotle). Both Blackburne's Remarks and

Hayley's Life of Milton are explicitly rejoinders to

Johnson's Life of Milton, and Blake, like anyone else interested in Milton, probably knew the Tory version. By 1804 Blake v/ould probably also have read the manu­ script commentary on Books I to III of Faradise Lost left, among the other literary remains of Y/illiam

Cowper, to the care of William Hayley.^+ But while there is abundance of other Milton scholarship and criticism (including, of course, the pamphlet by

Philip Neve on "Milton's" exhumations), there is no direct indication in Blake’s writings of a connection

to any of them. Did he know Anselm Bayly's The Alli­

ance of Musick, Poetry and Oratory (1769 ) in which the

author "considered the alliance and nature of the epic

and dramatic poemf as it exists in the Iliad, Aeneid,

and Paradise Lost"?^ Or Richard Meadowcourt's A Critical Dissertation, with Notes, on Milton's Paradise

Regain'd (2nd ed., 17^9)? Did he know the very curious

treatments of L'Allegro and II Penseroso in Robert

Deverell’s Discoveries in Hieroglyphics and. Other

Antiauities (I8I3 ), published not long before Blake

did his own interpretation of those poems in the illus­

trations of 1816 or 1817?

Of the criticism of Paradise Lost Blake might have

found a congenial volume in Explanatory Notes and Remarks

on Milton's Paradise Lost by "J. Richardson, Father and

Son"--to quote the title page, which intentionally hft unites them into a single reader, one in spirit.

"Whatever Our Several and United Abilities are, We have Exacted them to the Utmost? nor have Spar'd our

Pains after a Constant Love, and Continu'd Application to the Reading of Paradise Lost Almost ever Since we h o could read Any thing," ' they write, and the parallels with Blake are clear. "Thus we have had but One Single

Point in View, That Important One, to give Our Author's Sense, as We Conceiv'd He would have Explain'd Him­

self, had he risen from his Urn and Dictated to Us.

We have Always Consulted Him in his Own Words, Pointed

as Himself gave them to us . . . . " The book is less

ornately learned than other contemporary works about

Paradise Lost; as Ants Oras has characterised it, "the

main impression produced . . . is that it records the

personal experiences of the authors in reading the

poem.It is often chatty, homely in the most

agreeable sense; "He [Milton]] was rather a Middle

Siz'd than a Little Man, and Well Proportion'd;

Latterly he was No; Not Short and Thick, but he

would have been So, had he been Something Shorter and

Thicker than he Was."-^ Like Blake, the Richardsons

are full of honest common sense, and perhaps most

intriguing, like Blake the elder Richardson (whose

voice sounds more clearly than his son's throughout

the book) was a practicing painter, living by his art:

"I have from my Infancy Lov'd and Practic'd Painting

and Poetry; One I Possess'd as a Wife, the Other I

Kept Privately, and Shall Continue to do So whilst

I Live."^ Milton's pictorial imagination therefore

receives considerable attention: "in our Exposition

We have done what perhaps has not been attempted by any Expositor before, but which is Necessary to the 28

Understanding of an Author when he speaks to the Imagina­

tion, and would convey the Image Himself Sees, Milton

was as Great a Master in This Kind of Painting as Ever

was; but Few have Pencils to copy his Images in their

Own Minds; we have Endeavour'd to Assist Such , , . ,

Blake would also have enjoyed the pious forthrightness

of the Richardsons’ st5'‘le, and even their punctuation.

Ill

While it is important to establish what we can

concerning the ways in which Blake came to know Milton,

the process is a continuous one and one which can reach

only probable and incomplete conclusions. For in every

place, if not at every -time, that Blake turned, he

could come into contact with more objects and ideas which showed the influence of the earlier poet-prophet.

Milton was a topic of dispute in the weekly news- papers. Comus provided the theme for the statuary at the Vauxhall Gardens, as well as the model for

William Godwin's novel, now exceedingly rare, Imogent

A R o m a n c e . ^5 At the trial of Thomas Paine (which Blake, according to an apocryphal story, deprived of a defen­ dant), counsel pleaded using the language of Areo- pagitica. I f , as Blake believed, imitation is criticism (E 6 3 2 ), then there were Milton critics everywhere. During every Easter season from 1765 to

1780, Handel's oratorio "alter’d from Samson Agonistes of Milton" was performed at Covent Garden or Drury

Lane. Milton's poetry, especially Paradise Lost, provided subjects for every leading painter of the day;

Blake certainly attended Fuseli's Milton Gallery at

Pall Mall, and he railed (at least privately, in his annotations to Reynolds) when the nation ignored that series of worksj "0 Society for Encouragement of Art—

0 King & Nobility of EnglandI Where have you hid

Fuseli's Milton Is Satan troubled at his Exposure"

(E 6 2 6 ) . Miltonic authority weighted the disputes over "Ossian;" there were footnotes to Milton in the critical editions of Young's Niaht Thoughts (like the elaborate one for which Stothard provided illustrations in the year after Blake's venture with Young was unsuccessful);^ dramas at the Haymarket used Milton's 60 language; Blair's Grave was influenced by Paradise

Lost. And these are merely a few examples with some demonstrable relevance to Blake. In Raymond Havens's words, "if a writer grew tired of the couplet or desired a freer measure, there was . . . but one thing for him to do--follow Paradise Lost. How well did Blake know Milton's writings? A kind of measure is provided in his illustrations to L'Allegro and II Penseroso. The tv/elve designs are watercolor drawings, undated but done on paper watermarked 1816,

They are therefore among the last of the serial illus­ trations to Milton that Blake executed. They represent a lifetime of acquaintance with the poems and provide complex difficulties of interpretation. But a simple if tedious problem that they also offer is on the leaves which Blake wrote to correspond to each drawing, giving the specific texts he intended to criticize and a brief description of his imitation. I have collated those texts with the major editions of Milton available Z n to Blake. The printed texts agree substantially with each other (Milton's text received painstaking scrutiny throughout the century), differing only in pointing when they differ at all. But Blake's "edition" is regularly and significantly unlike any of them. Blake drops a couplet, changes archaic forms to modern ones— but not consistently, remakes the end of a line but retains the rhyme, seems to lose a line but really All loses several, and so on. He updates Milton's spelling and adds his own eccentric punctuation through­ out. In short, Blake rev/rites Milton in a number of particulars— minute ones, perhaps, but important ones 31

for a poet who jjrefaced his own major work (still in process o.t the time he made these drawings) with the

claim that "Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place . . ." (J 3). These are not the kind of errors an engraver makes while copying. Taken together, they show that Blake knew L 'Allegro and II

Penseroso nearly verbatim, that he had got Milton, in a happy phrase, by heart,

I wish to stress that what can be claimed for Blake in his fifties can not be said equally of the poet as a young man. And this is true of both his memory and his understanding. In the work which includes his most important early statements about Milton, Blake dis­ cussed the dialectic of progression. Perhaps he meant to remind us that at the same time that we are dealing with a changing age, we are studying a protean man,

Milton and the Milton drawings of the period from 1806 to about 1816 present Blake's final developed statements of his sense of the earlier poet, but it is a virtue of

Blake's continually syncretiz.ing imagination that these statements are not wholly consistent with each other.

It is to be expected that they contradict his early judgments of Milton. Blake's canon is sometimes regarded as a unity. I do not regard it so, except in the sense that Blake remained true to his growing and struggling self, and honest about his underlying vision about the

capacities and aspirations of men* That Blake was often struggling with the remains of John Milton, I take as certain. From these bones, what did he harvest? Footnotes for Chapter I

The major source for any account of the exhumations is Philip Neve, A narrative of the Disinterment of Hilton's Coffin . . . , 2nd ed. (London, 1796). l” quote Neve's judgment from p. 14-.

Neve, p. 1?.

Neve, p , 4-4,

See Allen Walker Read, "The Disinterment of Milton's Remains," FMLA. 45 (1930), 1050-68.

Read, p. 106 6 ,

St. James's Chroniel.e, 2-4- Sept., p. 1 and 7-9 Sept., pp. 1, 4-j The English Chronicle. 24— 26 Aug., p. 3 , 24- Sept., p. 4- and 4— 7 Sept., pp. 2, 3* The Public Advertiser. 10 Sept., p. 3> The European Magazine. 18 (1790), 205-07.

Gentleman's Magazine. 60, pt, 2 (1790), 837; Critical Review. 70 (1790), 343? The Monthly Review, 2nd ser., 3 (1790), 350.

22 (179 0 ), 4-67-68.

See Edmund Blunder, Leigh Hunt (London* Cobden- Sanderson, 1930), pp. 369-7 2 .

Hayley's Life of Cowper (Chichester, I8 0 3 ), II, 296- 97» see also Gerald E. Bentley, Jr., and Martin K. Nurmi, eds., A Blake Bibliography (Minneapolis* University of Minnesota Press, 1964), p. 123,

See Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, ed. Ruthven Todd (London* Dutton and Company, 1942), p. 351* Gilchrist tells the now apochryphal story that on his deathbed Blake completed a version of the frontispiece to Europe ("The Ancient of Days") which illustrates PL VIII, 225-3 1 . 34

See Geoffrey Keynes, ed, , The Letters of William Blake (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 65 and Margaret Lowery, Windows of the Morning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), P. 17.

Letters, p, 103.

14 Geoffrey Keynes, comp,, Engravings by Wiliam Blake, The Separate Plates (Dublin: Emery Walker Ltd,, 1956), p. 8 .

15 David V. Erdman, Blake; Prophet Against Empire, rev. ed. (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1969), p. 1 1 .

16 The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1959), p. 82.

^ Letters, for 12 Sept. 1800, p. 3 8 .

In this annotation Blake is responding to a weak but common sense of "copy" which Reynolds used and which Fuseli much later reiterated: "Our language, or rather those who.use it, generally confound, when speaking of the art, cony with imitation, though essentially different in meaning. Precision of eye and obedience of hand are the requisite of the former, without the least pretence to choice, what to select, what to reject; whilst choice directed by judgment or taste constitutes the essence of imitation, and alone can raise the most dexterous copyist to the noble rank of an artist. The imitation of the ancients was, essential. character!stic. ideal." See John Knowles, ed,, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli. . . (London, 1831), II , 22-23, Blake have agreed to Fuseli ' s last three words, but I think that primarily he intends a distinction between fruit and chaff, between spirit and letter.

^ Marcia R. Pointon, Milton & English Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. ” 1 3 8 , 35

Norton D. Paley, "Blake's Night Thoughts: An Exploration of the Fallen Worl'd" in Alvin H, Rosen- feld, ed,, William Blake; Essays for S. Foster Damon (Providences Brovm University Press, 1969), p, 1^; see also S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965 ), p, 11.

23 Poems Unon Several Occasions . . . by John l.iilton (London, 1785") 7” p. 11^

22 "Blake: The Historical Approach" in Alan S. Downer, ed., English Institute Essays: 19 50 (Mew York: Columbia University Press, 1951) , p. 199*

Gilchrist, p. 8, and E 627.

p i t Raymond D. Havens, The Influence of Kilton on English Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1922), pp, ^-5 . For more such details, the best single source is the first chap­ ter of this classic study.

Havens, p. 6. 26 These letters appeared intermittently from 17^9 on for several years, Newton's index, which is'really a concordance of important words, seems to have given the greatest offence. In quarto, it ran 151 pages.

27 John Walter Good, Studies in the Milton Tradition. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature. I, nos. 3, k (I9I3 ), ^9 , ? R Ants Oras, Milton's Editors and Annotators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd (169 6-1801)

29 7 Newton's edition was the "standard" Milton--if one can speak that way— for the period. V/hen William Cowper was approached by J. Johnson (publisher of many of Blake's commercial engravings) to prepare an edition of Milton as well as the translations which were the only part of the project ever to appear, he wrote Johnson asking for books to help 36

with the project: "Newton's edition I have, but have nothing more," he explained. See William Cowper, Latin and Italian Poems of Milton. trans­ lated into English Verse, and a fragment of a Commentary on Paradise Lost, ed, William Hayley (London, 1808), p. x; the letter is dated 6 Sept. 1791.

"Some Illustrators of Milton: The Expulsion from Paradise," JEGP, 60 (I96I), 6?0-79. Marcia Pointon does not correct Hughes (Pointon, pp. 159-6 0 ), but see Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., "William Blake: Illustrator-Interpreter of Paradise Regained" in Joseph A, Wittreich, Jr., ed., Calm of Mind; Tercentenary Essavs on Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff (Cleveland: Case 'Western Reserve University Press, 1971), pp. 102-0 3 .

3^ I am grateful to Mr. Ruthven Todd for noting this point to me in private correspondence.

Letters, 6 July I8O3 , p. 6 9 .

33 The aim of the edition of the Reverend John Gillies was "to show this only, that Paradise Lost owes its chief excellence to the Holy Scriptures" (see Oras, p. 297). Gillies's edition, Paradise Lost Illustrated with Texts of Scripture. was published in London in 1788,

3^ Good, pp. 256-59.

3 J 2nd ed., corr, (London, 1762), I, xi.

3^ See Jerome Alan Kramer, Milton Biograrhv in the Romantic Era (unpub'd diss: The Ohio State Univer­ sity, 196 6 ).

37 Edward Dowden, Milton in the Eighteenth Century (1701-1750) (London: Oxford University Press, I908 ), p. 1 . 37

38 Richardson's Lif e prefaced his Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (London, 1734). Birch's was the introduction to his edi­ tion of Hilton's prose, A Complete Collection of the Kistoricai. Political and Hiscellaneous Works . . .. 2 vols (London, 1738),

39 Good, p. 3 6 .

4 0 Fearful Symmetry (Princetont Princeton University Press, 1949). p. 159. 41 Hollis, Memoirs. I, 112,

42 Erdman, Prophet. p, 3 4 .

43 Gilchrist, p. 327.

44 This commentary was first printed in Cov/per's Milton, pp. 187-237.

45 I quote Bayly's title page.

46 See Oras, p. 101.

47 Richardson, p. clxix.

48 Richardson, p. clxxii.

49 Oras, p. 101.

50 Richardson, p, ii.

51 Richardson, p. clxxviii.

52 Richardson, p. clxxv.

53 See Frank V/. Plunkett, The Mi] ton Tradition in One of its Phasesi The Criticism of Hilton as Found in Leading British Magazines of the Pre-Romantic and Romantic Period 1??Q-1812 (unpublished dissertation: Indiana University, 1931). 38

54 Pointon, pp. 40-4l,

55 (London, 1783). Imogen is a Bardic Comus written under the influence of MacPherson. For Blake and Godwin, see Gerald E, Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969)1 p. 41.

^ The Trial of Thomas Paine (London, 1792). How well the "eminent advocate" who transcribed the trial knew Milton is open to some question. He writes, "In the glorious Milton's Treatise, called Areopagitien . . (p. 5 8 ).

5? Lowery, p. 220,

58 Pointon, pp. 62-173* provides a thorough account and some useful plates.

59 (London, 1798), Four of Stothard's drawings resemble work by Blake— but antedate Blake's drawings, in those cases.

60 See Martha V7, England, "Apprenticeship at the Hay- market?" in David V. Erdman and John Grant, eds., Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 1 9 .

61 Havens, p. 77. 62 Havens, p. 7 8 .

63 I have checked fourteen editions from the eighteenth century, notably Newton's, V/arton's, and Todd's (1801).

64 For these examples I have drawn only from L'Allegro. and I give collations against Nev/ton's text: Blake drops 11, 29-3 0 , E 6 6 3 * uses "does" for "doth" in 1. 44; substitutes "Treat" for "feat" in 1. 101; and compacts 11. 108-114, E 664, CHAPTER II

IN SEED TIKE LEARN

Miltoni Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Rafael, the finest specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting, and Architec­ ture, Gothic, Grecian, Hindoo and Egyptian, are the extent of the Human mind. — A Descriptive Catalogue

The full flower of Blake's humanism is the sub­ stance of Jerusalem. The earlier writings, regarded with respect to their systematic presentation of a coherent and complete world view, are roots and stem of that later work. This must, I think, be made clear at the outset of a study of the developing influence of Milton on Blake, for Milton's influence had vir­ tually done its work by the final pages of Milton.

What remained for synthesis in Blake's major poem was more truly his own than the raw materials of any of his earlier works; we are to take literally the fear of enslavement expressed in the commonly quoted line,

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans"

01 10), In a sense, then, to watch the various and increasing influence of Milton’s Christian humanism

39 work on Blake's art is also to see the growth of a kind of mental slavery. How Blake understood that threat, which was greater because less obvious than the opposi­ tion of Bacon, Newton, or Locke, and how he came to terms with it, is clear, and perhaps became clear to

Blake himself, only in the forging of Milton--and that is a matter for the final chapter of this study. The task at present is to show how from the Poetical Sketches through Tiriel and Thel, Blake drew on Milton, usually sympathetically, to learn his argument and craft.

The juvenile work of most good poets is derivative.

Their early poems provide, to paraphrase Blake, a chance to imitate and therefore to learn the language of art.

So it is not surprising that the first works of both

Blake and Kilton--the Poetical Sketches (1783) and Poems

. . . both English and Latin (164-5)--show conscious copying of traditional and contemporary models. We expect to find traces of Jonson or Donne in Milton's occasional pieces, and recent critics have 'found it fitting that even in these early poems Milton fixes himself in the school of Spenser, specifically as it was revived by the Cambridge poets, Giles and Phineas

Fletcher,'1’ Blake too writes in imitation of Spenser, as well as of Shakespeare (notably in "King Edward the

Third"), Collins, Thomson, Akenside and MacPherson. 41

What is surprising about the Poetical Sketches is that although they show Blake's considerable knov/ledge of

Milton and a willingness to borrow images and ideas from

Milton, nevertheless they include no patent imitation of Milton.

Echoes of Milton in the Poetical Sketches are numerous but random and brief, as a few examples show.

The opening line of the "Song, When early morn walks forth in sober grey," recalls "While the still morn went out with Sandals gray" (Lvcldas. 1. 18?) and "till morning fair / Came forth with Pilgrim steps, in amice gray" (PR IV, 426-2?),2 The description of Mercury's fall in "An Imitation of Spenser"s

Then, laden with eternal fate, dost go Down, like a falling star, from autumn sky, And o'er the surface of the silent deep dost fly (11. 24-26), reminds the reader of the flight of Uriel in Book IV of

Paradise Lost:

Thither came Uriel, gliding through the Eeven On a Sun beam, swift as a shooting Starr In Autumn thwarts the night . . . (11. 555-57) The concluding lines of "To Autumn" fulfill a conven­ tion of the pastoral, the shepherd's moving on to dif­ ferent fields:

Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he Sat, Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak Hills fled from sight . . . (11. 16-18) But they have specific likenesses to T/ycidas. which ends with lines doubtless as memorable to Blake as they are now i

Thus sang the uncouth Swain to the Okes and rills,. At last he rose, and twitched his Mantle blew To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (11. 186, 192-93)

Here Blake copied both directly and indirectly, using

Milton's words ("Thus sang," "Then rose") and also his method: in the respective endings, "twitched" and "fled" break the pastoral tone, adding a note of sudden dis­ cord as though, his task finished, the singer were anxious to get av/ay. These and other local echoes of

Milton show that as a young man Blake knew Milton well.

But even taken together they do not suggest any general attitude toward the earlier poet.

The last two pieces in the Poetical Sketches, "Con­ templation" and "Samson," provide fuller treatments of

Miltonic themes and also give a sense of what in Milton

Blake found agreeable, "Contemplation" is heavily dependent upon L'Allegro and 11 Penseroso but revalues them in a characteristic Blakean way. In the dialogue between the figure Contemplation, a woman humbly garbed, and the mortal "I" of the poem, Contemplation pleads a pastoral case. The "I" who speaks from a life of sorrow in experience, repeats the conventional, affected language of the eighteenth-century graveside meditation, including, as one critic has remarked, all "the faults of that kind of verse.By contrast, Contemplation offers an attractive happiness. Her description of country pleasures rises in excitement to celebrate "the youthful sun" who "joys like a hunter rouzed to the chacet he rushes up the sky and lays hold on the immortal coursers of day; the sky glitters with the jingling trappingsl" (E ^33)* The image recalls a part of L 1Allearo which Blake illustrated in about 1816:

. . . the great sun begins his state, Rob'd in flames, and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight .... (11. 61-63)5

But of course, Milton kept the "great sun" in L'Allegro as more fitted to the purposes of that poem. Blake's

Contemplation owes her garb and demeanor to Melancholy in II Penseroso. to whom she also ov/es her philosophy of simple life and wisdom. Nevertheless Blake has her describe a more energetic joy than Milton's pensive nun.

Blake was less concerned with observing the fetters of decorum, and in this he is unlike the legion of other eighteenth-century imitators of Milton's companion poems.

By every measure, "Samson" is the most Miltonic of the Poetical Sketches. Indeed, although Blake never designed a set of illustrations for Samson Agonistes

(like the ones for Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and many of Milton's other poems), Milton's Samson appears to have been a source for Blake consistently from his earliest through his late writiiigs, from

"Samson" through at least the conception of the Strong

Man in A Descriptive Catalogue (1809), influencing the titanic Albion (as is clear in "The Dance of Albion") and Blake's other giants. But almost never is this

Samson unalloyed; instead, a blend of Milton and the

Bible is characteristic. After detailing the biblical echoes of Blake's "Samson" • (most, of course, from

Judges 13 to 16), Margaret Lowery concludes, "The influence of [the Bible^ upon Blake's Samson is sig­ nificant; but in certain details Blake remembered Mil­ ton's version in Samson Agonistes rather than the bibli­ cal one. On the one hand, Blake had the simple, con­ densed, and direct biblical narrative, whence Milton had taken the episode that formed the main plot of Samson

Agonistes. On the other hand, he had Milton's poem with its Greek plan, its subtle character portrayal— especially of Samson— , its Aristotelian tragic theme; its forceful dramatic irony. But he forged his own poem anew, and if at one time it is the Bible and at another Milton's poem that is visible, it only shows the metals out of which he wrought. They were not yet 7 of one amalgam." Of that incomplete amalgam, some Miltonic elements

are conspicuous by their absence, .Blake did not follow

a Greek plan, nor develop any character in much detail—

except perhaps Dalila, who is not subtle. He did not

show the irony of Samson's tragic death, nor deal with

the death scene at all. In the place of the elements

from Miss Lowery's catalogue is an antitemporal struc­

ture, neither biblical nor Miltonic, opening with

Dalila's account of Samson's temptations, following

with Samson's memory of his Nazarite dedication, and

concluding with Manoa's prayer for a Deliverer to save

Israel from the Philistines, a plea which antedates

Samson's conception. The whole is Ossianic in its

abandonment, and clearly for style, MacPherson is

Blake's literary model.

But Miltonic metal holds the structure up. From

Milton Blake borrowed motifs which he repeats throughout

the poem, notably Dalila's tears. She does not cry in

Judges, But if a single line can describe the arsenal

Blake gave Dalila for assaulting Samson, it appears in

Milton's hero's own explanation for his ruin, "O'recome with importunity and tears" (SA, 1. 51)- Blake's Dalila weeps "in many a treacherous tear," Samson responds,

scorning her "honest-seeming brow, the holy kiss of love, and the transparent tear," Dalila rejoins (in a fallen 46

parody of "Hee for God only, Shee for God in him*' fPL.

IV, 2991), "Alas, my Lord . . . Thou art my Godl To

thee I pour my tears for sacrifice morning and evening

, . . I drink my tears like water; I live upon sorrowl"

The judgment of Blake's narrator is clear; "Thus, in

false tears, she bath'd his feet, and thus she day by

day oppressed his soul . , . The repetition of "tears"

must have been conscious on Blake's part, and the germ

of the pattern is obviously Miltonic. In drawing his main characters— Dalila, Manoa, and

Samson— Blake depended on Milton rather than the Bible.

Milton's Eve is deceitful and even, at one point, willing

for Adam's death, attributes which apply as well to

Dalila in "Samson," But Milton's Samson, both more

sensual and less uxorious than his Adam, required an

intenser assault than Eve's before he submitted to reveal

his secret, and his bitterness after the fact of Dalila's

treachery is accordingly greater. Seen through the eyes

of Milton's Samson, Dalila is perniciously two-faced, without the excuse of recent innocence to lighten her

guilt. This self-conscious treachery is the chief quality of Blake's Dalila, not the less exaggerated for

Blake's shifting of the point of view from Samson to

Dalila herself; this is Blake's most original move in

"Samson," I think, for it allows him to detail her deceitfulness directly, emphasizing the contrast between

her two faces. Blake also took Milton as his authority

for tho characterization of Manoa, The account in Judge

is vague about the age and character of Manoa, but Blake

like Milton, shows him to be an old rnan of humility, grateful for a son who will be also a savior, and pious

in his acceptance of the role of father to a "Deliverer,

Little can be said of the character of Samson, for he remains undeveloped except in broad outline, Blake does not describe him* Milton dwelt on Samson's blind­ ness, his state of bondage, his physical weariness and the effort of will required for him to call up a final exertion of his strength, Milton even emphasizes the renewed length of his hair. But Blake's Samson remains an epic hero in potential, as indicated by the formal classical openings "Samson, the strongest of the children of men, I sing . . , . '* More specifically, he was to be a Christian hero, in the sense that Blake seems to have planned to emphasize the typological role of Samson as a forerunner of Jesus. The events which

"Truth," whom Blake addresses as his muse, is to relate, form the "good nev/s [i.e., 'gospel'] of Sin and Death destroyed." Milton also uses a personified "Truth," meaning Scripture, as the authority for prophecy (PR,

III, 181-83)i and Blake's invocation also recalls the 48

non-biblical figures of Sin and Death from Paradise

Lost, But there is a stronger allusion to Paradise

Re^ajned, in which their destruction through the agency

of Christ is foretold (and then symbolically dramatized),

God explains Christ's mission in the wilderness:

There he shall first lay down the rudiments Of his great warfare, ere I send him forth To conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes, By humiliation and strong sufferance .... (PR, I. 157-60) Here Hilton is setting out the archetypal pattern of the

path of a Deliverer of Israel, a pattern which Samson

(in the Bible, in Samson Agonistes, and by strong impli­

cation of the evidence in "Samson") follows, through his

foolish trusting in a woman who twice has shown her

faithlessness, and through his suffering in blindness

and slavery. Blake reinforces this typological simi­

larity by modeling the annunciation to Manoa's v/ife--

"Hail, highly favoured! . . , for lo, thou shalt con­

ceive, and bear a son, . , . and he shall be called

Israel's Deliverer"— on the prophecy of a Messiah in

Isaiah 9*6. Blake alludes to that same passage in stating the promise concerning Samson, "Israel's strength shall be upon his shoulders," and in the Angel's clos­ ing answer to Manoa, "My name is wonderful . . .

Since "Samson" is usually regarded as a fragment, albeit one which Blake may have intended to leave incomplete, E 9

these allusions and what they imply about Blake's under­

standing of the role of Samson are'all the more sig­ nificant.

Regarded in general, the nature of Milton's

influence on the Poetical Sketches is unusual, given the way most poets of the time used Milton. In compar­ ison with the typical eighteenth-century imitations of

Milton, Blake's Poetical Sketches are free of the super­ ficial elements of Milton's style which were almost formulaic for other poets. Richard Cumberland and

J, B, Burges, authors of the Exodiad (1807), provide page after page of the latter kind of Imitation. The parallels between their invocation, in Book I, and the opening of Paradise Lost are embarrassingly clear:

Of Israel, by Jehovah's mighty power From long captivity redeem'd, with loss And total overthrow of Egypt's host, What time the chosen servant of the Lord From Goshen to the land of promise led Through the divided sea the ransom's tribe, Sing, heavenly Muse, and prop those mortal powers, Which but for thy sustaining aid must sink Under the weight of argument so vast, Scenes so majestic, subject so sublime.®

Except that in his diary Cumberland (whose Calvary. 1792, was as clearly if less painfully "Miltonic") seems really to have loved Paradise Lost, one might suspect an inten­ tion to parody in some of the dialogue: Moses, having destroyed the tablets of the Law and taught the 50

Israelites to repent, is made to say,

Tis well, the prophet cried, this fit reply Beseemeth you to make and me to bear To that almighty Pow'r, whose promis'd love Q Your strict and prompt obedience will ensure,

The careful avoidance here of the simple, if sublime,

style of the King James translation of Exodus suggests

how far Milton had gone toward complementing the Bible,

Cumberland and Burges are characteristic imitators

first in that the Milton they followed was solely the

Milton of Paradise Lost. L'AlIegro and II Penseroso,

which even Dr. Johnson found hard to criticize, enjoyed

some popularity as models, but there are virtually no

poetic copies of Cornus (Godwin's Imogen is an Ossianic

prose romance), or of such shorter pieces as the Nativity

Ode or Lycidas. The audience of Paradise Regained,

which was few, found it unfit, Blake Is therefore

uncharacteristic, for given his allusions in the 1783

volume, he seems to have known virtually all of Milton's

poetry,

Cumberland and Burges might have used Professor

Haven's catalogue of the outstanding characteristics of the style in Paradise Lost as their vade-mecum, so amply do they illustrate his points. For Blake, on the other hand, Havens' list reads almost like a catalogue of omissions, so seldom— with one major exception— do those characteristics appear, especially in the poems written before Jerusalem, Havens describes nine main

classes of characteristics, as well as three minor ones.

In sustaining a sense of dignity, reserve, and state­

liness, Paradise Lost "is as far removed from conversa­

tional familiarity in style or language as any poem could

b e . " ^ One comjiares "How sweet I roam'd from field to

field" and "I love the jocund dance." Havens notes

(indeed, imitates) the "organ tone," the "sonorous

orotund that is always associated" with Milton. In a tone that is consciously childlike, Blake could write

"I love our neighbors all, / But, Kitty, I better love thee." Milton's dominating Latinisms include a recur­ rent inversion of the natural order of speech. When

Blake inverts that order, which is seldom, he usually manages a heightened effect of artlessness. The list of example and counter-example could be prolonged, but

I think the point is made by claiming in general for

Blake, first, an aversion to using patent similarities with Milton, and second, a sophisticated understanding of Milton which can not be claimed for most of the eighteenth-century imitators.^

II

By 1789 to 179-1» the years from which the next sub­ stantial products of Blake's pen are customarily dated, methods and themes from Milton have a more important

and pervasive role than was the case in the Poetical

Sketches. This deeper influence appears in two ways--

one involving form and style, the other content— which

can be discussed separately only with increasing diffi­

culty as Blake forges his own style and myth. Of the

works dating from this time, namely The French Revolu­

tion. Tiriel and Thel (the Songs of Innocence represent,

I think, an experimental development along different

lines and have little to do with the argument here), it

is for the first time accurate to say that they show

Blake not merely echoing Milton but imitating him.

Implicitly, they also provide the first extended

criticisms, by way of explanation, development and revision of Milton's thought.

It is hardly coincidental that what has been claimed

of the Romantic poets in general, that "it was . . .

among the poets who came in the wake of the French 12 Revolution that Milton was the most dynamic force,"* applies with special justice to Blake in particular.

Revolutions and heroic thinking are simultaneous pheno­ mena, and for Englishmen in the eighteenth century, the only viable models of heroic grandeur in literature were Miltonic, Blackmore's Prince Arthur is awkward and pompous beside Satan or Samson; Young's narrator is merely a bedfast penseur; Gray's Bard is majestic and sublime, but essentially a character of high imagery and song, not of high action. But Milton, in his art and life, suited the idealistic generation forming in the late 1780's , He was both poet and revolutionary, and, as the fully integrated, profoundly moral man of thought and action which the Romantics were the first to take 13 him to b e , v he served as a paradigm of energy at work— that is, as exactly the force which Blake, the young

Wordsworth and the young Coleridge identified abroad in France, A second general characterization useful here describes the Romantic movement as "from beginning to end, a quest for literary form."^ That judgment is clearly appropriate to explain the variety in the

Poetical Sketches, and it well suits what Blake was experimentally about in the long works he attempted about 178 9 , It is therefore almost predictable that

Blake's models for his long poems of these years were

Miltonic.

The characteristics of Blake's verse in The French

Revolution place that poem clearly in the tradition of

Paradise Lost. That Milton's epic is in blank verse while Blake's fragment uses a mixed meter in longer lines provides no important objection here. In both the defence of the verse prefixed to the fifth issue of the first edition of Paradise Lost and Blake's similar

passage "Of the Measure, in which the following Poem

is written" in the introduction to Jerusalem (which,

though a late work, explains the dominant direction of

Blake's mature writing altogether), each poet is con­

cerned with variety within the line and with freedom

from "the Modern bondage of rhyming." I quote Blake

(J 3) v/ho echoes Milton: "This neglect then of Rime

so little is to be taken for a defect . . . that it

rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in

English., of ancient liberty recover'd to Heroic Poem

from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming"

(PL, "The Verse"). The French Revolution follows this

example, as had The Seasons. The Task. Night Thoughts,

and many lesser poems of the eighteenth century.

More characteristics than the simple absence of

rhyme make clear Blake's intention to imitate Paradise

Lost iii The French Revolxition. Perhaps the most obvious

similarity is the Miltonic inversion of natural English word order, one of Milton's recurrent Latinisms, as in

Blake's "Clouds of wisdom proi^hetic reply, and roll over

the palace roof heavy" (E 2 8 3 ), "with slime / Of ancient

horrors cover'd" (E 28^), "In the tower named 31oody, a

skeleton yellow remained" (E 28^-), and "This to prevent"

(E 28?), This is Blake's commonest Miltonic device in The French Revolution; it pervades the poem, Blake also

uses Miltonic apposition and parenthesis, as in "he

ceas'd, silent pondering" (E 286), reminiscent of the

tag lines in the Council scene of Paradise Lost, Book II.

Occasionally, Blake omits words not necessary to the

sense, "a technique of condensation that marks Milton's stylein the "terrible" towers of the Bastille,

"the Governor stood, in dark fogs list'ning the horror"

(E 283). Blake substitutes one part of speech for

another, sometimes using an adjective for an adverb,

an interchange "that was a favorite with Milton and his

followers"!^ "Sudden seiz'd with bowlings . . . he

stalk'd like a lion" (E 2 8 3). These particulars, along with the recurring use of epic similes and an obvious

attempt for the dignity and stateliness which are hall­ marks of Milton's style in Paradise Lost show Blake con­

sciously patterning his war epic in little on Milton's model. It is useful to remember here that The French

Revolution dates from the same years as The Songs of

Innocence, which provide as strong a contrast to the uncolloquial style of The French Revolution as the language affords.

The French Revolution also has strong thematic parallels to Miltcn's writings, imaged often in Miltonic ways (though the heavily allegorical emblems, as in the 56 naming of the seven tov/ers of the Bastille, show also a 17 major debt to Spenser). Some are particular echoes.

In the tower named Horror, for example, a man is chained

to the impregnable wall, In his soul was the serpent coil'd round in his heart, hid from the light, as in a cleft rock; And the man was confined for a writing prophetic, , . (E 28h )

The passage has obvious relationships to Paradise Lost and Aroopa^itica. Again, when the villainous Archbishop of Paris is finally cowed in debate by the generous

Orleans, Blake's scene is intended to recall the final humiliation of Satan in Book X:

. . .the Archbishop, who changed as pale as lead; Would have risen but could not, his voice issued harsh grating; instead of words harsh hissings Shook the chamber; he ceas'd abash'd. (E 290)

Blake here condenses all the elements of Satan’s ultimate defeat: the metamorphosis (X, 511-17)» expressed in

"changed as pale as lead"; the inability to rise, par­ alleling Satan's entrapment in a serpent's form on the floor of Hell; the hissings, which in both Milton's and

Blake's accounts "shook the chamber" (cf. X, 50^“°9*

517-2 1 , 5^5“^7); and especially the unexpected turn from

"triumph to shame / Cast on themselves from thir own mouths" (X, 5^5-*+?).

The more general similarities between Paradise Lost and The French Revolution can be stated only briefly and tentatively, for they depend on the fact that Blake's poem is a long work, apparently planned in seven hooks, of which only the first is extant. Characters of great ideals, and some of high evil, are introduced, and great tattles, probably at once physical and emblematic, might well have been projected. But only the beginning of the 18 poem survives, if indeed there ever was more. That

Book I is Miltonic in structure, however, provides a clue to what Blake v/as attempting in The French Revolu­ tion. and for the understanding of Milton's influence on

Blake, this is a major question.

In the first book of The French Revolution Blake condensed about six weeks of turbulent French history into a single day. He attempted to recapitulate, at least spiritually, the sentiments of the National.

Assembly in the "pensive streets," walked and defended by the people of Paris, In the debate among the Prince,

Meeker, the Archbishop, Lafayette and the other nobles of France as portrayed in The French Revolution, Blake reports the Council of State that actually took three days. His antecedent for condensing such moral and pragmatic contention into a single council is the

Council of Hell in Pandemonium in Book II of Paradise

Lostt for raising the host of fallen angels, mining

Hell, building Pandemonium, holding a council and urging Satan's journey lip to earth, one day--what morning comes to Hell?— had also been sufficient. By analogy, the lengthy descriptions of the towers of the

Bastille parallel Milton's descriptions of Hell and the raising of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost. Book I, These major structural data suggest that a primary lesson

Blake was learning from Milton involved the architecture of the long poem: how to build it, balancing part against part, how to work in a tradition of craftsman­ ship, how to conceive an orderly poem on a grand scale.

Paradise Lost is a natural model: for Blake, both wars, in Heaven and in France, were fought to free the spirit from dogmatic tyranny, If more of The French Revolution survived, one might be able to point to further parallels, and even perhaps to suggest what Blake chose to modify or discard. But the structural facts of his beginning imply one major aspect of the way in which Milton's art was working on his own. This architectonic influence is evident in The French Revolution because it is the most imitative of Milton among all of Blake's long poems, a fact which justifies David Erdman's assertion that "in this work . , . ^Blake]] came closer than he ever would again to making his interpretation of history compre­ hensible to the English public of his day."^ This is so at leas?t partly because an audience reared on Paradise 59

Lost knew the literary terms in which Blake was talking.

Moreover, Blake's response to'the architecture of

Paradise Lost is symptomatic of a more general sense of

Milton, a rich interpretive understanding of his art

and thought which recent critics of the seventeenth

century have come to call Baroque. The application of this word from art history to literary works has occa- 20 sioned so much comment that I use it here cautiously.

There is little debate that it has verifiable meaning when applied to Caravaggio or the Caravaggisti, as well as to the architects--Borromini, Gislenus, Pietro da

Cortona, Lanfranco, Bernini, and Guarino Guarini--to whom the word was first intended to apply. But many scholars have extended the term, finding common elements of a Baroque style in European art, music, poetry and science. V/olfgang Stechow has encouraged the study of

Baroque as a Zeitgeist concept which might justifiably be applied to Descartes and Leibniz, Monteverdi and 21 Purcell, Vondel and Milton. In its least arguable contexts, which are architectural, the Baroque is a Grand

Style. "The first impression gained from its buildings is one of overwhelming size and strength, often out of all relation to actual weight and measurement. Except where the genre demands compactness— as with the lyric or emblem--3aroque masterpieces tend to be vast in 60

conception and vast in execution. Kinds such as the

heroic poem and the oratorio, which give full scope to

this architectonic expansiveness, are in fashion in P 2 the seventeenth century,"'' To these, the heroic poem

and perhaps even the oratorio (Blake may well have

attended a performance of Handel's Samson, based on

Milton, for example), the poet turned when an heroic

subject like the spiritual uprising which was the French

Revolution became his argument. The parallel may be

noted here only tentatively, but is is significant to

suggest that Milton's architecture--in the structure of

his major poem and the elaborate ornament of its style—

as well as his images and themes worked on Blake as he planned his poem. To one modern critic, "the outstand­

ing quality of all Milton's poetry seems . . , to be its on shapeliness," J which is specifically a Baroque kind.

To open The French Revolution with a description of an elaborate building was to emphasize the importance of architecture in the poem,

III

The word Baroque, in early variants like barochi, was current as early as 1519i hut its meaning stabilized only in the eighteenth century with the general sense of ph extravagant" or "bizarre."" Most dictionaries follow

the definition of the French Encyclopaedists, "une nuance

de bizarre." the sense also of Quatremere de Quincy's

Dictionnaire hlstorioue de 1 'architecture (I795-I825)<^

An affinity with the Gothic is usually remarked. By the

end of his life Blake distinguished between strict

mathematical form, which many eighteenth-century readers

of Milton thought they found in Paradise Lost and the

organic unity of the Gothic style, in which unity is

"as much in a Part as in the Whole. The Torso as much a

Unity as the Laocoon" (On Homers Poetry. E 2 6 7 ). Blake's

example and his language focus on a primary element in

the Baroque, as exemplified in Milton's poems and in the

works from Balke's own important formative years. In

1789 to 1791, in Tirl.el and The Book of Thel, Blake

rejected the outward habiliments of the Baroque style--

elaborate balance, antithesis, arnament— and concentrated

on its essential humanism, the bold display of contrary

stresses which was emphatic in the Baroque facade trans­

lating, as it often had in the nonvisual art of the

seventeenth century, into the agon of physical with

spiritual, of this-worldliness with transcendence, which marks the limit and special glory of Baroque examinations of the state of fallen man. Technically, this impulse was often manifested during the seventeenth century in 62 the conjunction of art forms, exemplified in the emblem, attempting synaesthesia, the satisfaction of more than one sense at once. Blake’s drawings illustrative of

Tiriel and his illuminated printing in Thel express exactly this impulse. And both Tiriel and Thel exemplify

Blake's notion of Gothic unity, the sense and impact of each poem depending primarily on the state of existence of the title character. Blake found a similar method in the characterization of Satan, v/hose develop­ ment, or rather degeneration, is as much a structural basis for Paradise Lost as are the elaborate parallels, the balance of contrary stresses, in that poem.

In Tiriel. the "nuance of the bizarre" is especially pronounced. Kathleen Raine, the most illuminating critic

Tiriel. has called it a "phantasmagoria on the theme of the death of an aged king and tyrant-father" and rightly identifies the poem as Blake's "first essay in 2 6 myth-making." She is among the recent critics who have made us aware of the wide range of sources from which Blake drew the characters and ideas of his poem, giving body to Blake's belief that "Mj.lton, Shakespeare,

Michael Angelo, Rafael, the finest specimens of Ancient

Sculpture and Painting and Architecture, Gothic, Grecian,

Hindoo and Egyptian, are the extent of the human mind"

(E 535)• And she has gone a long way toward explaining 63

the purposes of Blake's synthesis; she is unique in

showing a Miltonic influence in the poem. But Tiriel has,

I think, a greater unity than anyone has previously dis­

cerned, and that unity is partly because of the identi­

fication of Tiriel with Milton's Satan, and of Har with

Adam.

We can recognize those identifications partly through the genealogy of Har and Tiriel which Blake provides, and partly through the setting of the poem. The name

Har, which is the name both of a place (the Vales of Har) and of a character, appears in several of Blake's poems—

Tiriel. Thel, The Song of L o s , and The Four Zoas. In both later poems, Har the character seems to be the father of mankind. In The Song of L o s . Blake joins biblical names with his own characters and implies that all taken together--"all the sons of Har"--represent stages in the development of the human consciousness, the history of the human race spiritually considered:

Adam shuddered! Noah faded! black grew the sunny African When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East: (Night spoke to the Cloud! Lo these Human form'd spirits in Smiling hypocrisy War Against one another; so let them War on; slaves to the eternal Elements) Noah shrunk beneath the Waters; Abram fled in fires from Chaldea; Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion: 6^

To Trismegistus. Palamabron gave an abstract Law: To Pythagoras Socrates & Plato

Times rolled on o'er all the sons of Har, time after time (SL, 3. 10-20)

Controlling the passage is the biblical archetype of the

dissension among the sons of Noah when different lan­

guages— here different theologies, the product of

"Abstract Philosophy" and "Abstract Law"— appeared in the

confusion of Babel; the sons of Har, regarding as the

sons of Adam, reap one harvest of the garden. In the

Four Zoas, Kar is a name in another of Blake's spiritual

genealogies, the first following Satan, and preceding the

identifiable, historically human "Sons of Los": "Har,

Ochim, Ijim, Adam, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Naphtali

. . (8 . 3 6 0 ; E 365 ).

In these later books, therefore, Har is a kind of ur-Adam, a spiritual counterpart of the first man. In the earlier Tiriel. Blake has not yet ordered his genealogies with their implied spiritual sense. Har is less well identified, though strong allusions indicate roughly the same truth about him. His companion Heva, whose name has the simplest derivation in Tiriel, join­ ing Latin Eva with Hebrew H a w a h . is clearly a kind of

Eve, And the Vales of Har, in both Tiriel and Thel. are a kind of Eden, Har and Heva, "the aged father & mother" 65

(1. 6 3 ) » live with their servant Mnetha in "pleasant

gardens" (1, 6 2 ) where they eat "milk & fruits" (1. 110)

and where, until Tiriel dies there, there seems to be no

death. This is not Eden, only like Eden. Har and Heva

have aged, and once Blake calls them "only the shadow

of Har, 5- as the years forgotten" (1. 59)< They strongly

contrast with the only other parents in the poem, Tiriel

and Myratana. Recently, tv/o scholars simultaneously

identified Blake's source for Kyratana in Jacob Bryant's 2 8 account of Myrina, the queen of the Amazons: "Hers was a history 'coeval with the first annals of time , . ,

Her dominions lay in the most western Parts of Africa, at the extremity of Atlas where the mountain terminated in the Ocean, to which it gave name. This country was called Mauritania; and was supposed to have been possessed by the Atlantes and Gorgons.' Myratana is a simple fusion of r.'yrina and Mauritania, Milton closed Faradise Lost with Adam and Eve walk­ ing, cursed, westward out of Eden, Blake, who was surely familiar with the simple geography involved, sets Mar and Tiriel, with their Eve-like consorts, in the regions which Adam might have reached; as Tiriel stresses repeat­ edly, Tiriel is "King of the West." All his children are "sons of the Curse." Along with other evidence in the poem, these allusions point to the conclusion that 66

T.iriel is Blake's sequel to Farad.ise Lost and that Har and Tiriel represent two possible ends to which mankind was reduced by the Fall. This contention is the more likely if we consider that Blake, in the illustrations to Faradf se Rea ainod. seemed implicitly to say that

Paradise Regained is not a sequel to Faradise Lost. In this Blake agreed with sever’al eighteenth-century commen- 30 tators on the poem.

The character of Kar represents Adam's old a.ge as a period of stagnant innocence, requiring for life of any kind the aid of memory (I'netha). With Tiriel, Blake explored the consequences of the Fall more widely, focus­ sing on the final state of the major character, on the ruin to which his former life has brought him. The allusions to his former state as King of the West pro­ vide a measure, for Tiriel himself and for Blake's audience, of the extent of his fall. It has been so great that his parents no longer recognize him. Tiriel, in his assumed nameless character, dissembles in order to preserve their memory of him* "I know Tiriel is king of the 'West & there he lives in joy" (1, 72), and he goes o n ,

Tiriel I never saw but once I sat with him & eat He was as chearful as a prince & gave me entertainment But long I staid not at his palace for I am forcd to wander (11, 119-21) 67

He invents a false ancestry for himself, v/hich is true

to his present condition as an outcast, father of a wicked race of which only he survives (11, IOO-0 9 ). His position is like Satan's, wandering his solitary way

through Chaos, and like that of Adam, joined in solitude with Eve 1 this is emphasised by Neva's near recognition

of him,

Thou art my Tiriels old father. I know thee thro' thy wrinkles Because thou smellest like the figtree, thou smellest like ripe figs (11. 93-9*0 recalling Satan's recognition of Beelzebub, "If thou- beest he; But 0 how fall'nl how chang'd" (PL, I, 8*1).

Tiriel has become what Har describes him to be: "the king of rotten wood & of the bones of death" (1 . 7 5 ).

The illustrations provide, by counterpoint, further evidence of the effect of Tiriel's fall from power.

Throughout those illustrations, Blake drew Har as an aged patriarch, but he portrayed Heva, who is equally old, as a young and lovely woman (fig. *0. In the single drawing of liyratana, even in death she too (though her face is obscured by Tiriel's upraised protective arm) has the dark hair of her youth (fig. 5). Her flesh seems firm and youthful, like Neva's throughout the series,^ 68 Fig, 5: "Tiriel Supporting I<:yratana" (.Tiriel . Drawing no, 1) 70

But the reader of Tiriel has more than Tiriel's

memories of better times as a key to his decline, for

his condition is not static throughout the poemi he

has not simply reached a state of decay which ends in

death. Instead, Blake showed him declining, from his powerful rage at the time of Myratana's death to his

frustration and ultimate impotence at the end of the poem. At key points Blake images this decline by follow­

ing the pattern of Satan's degeneration in Paradise Lost.

Often Tiriel goes unrecognized or is mistaken for some­

one else. V/hen he leaves the Vales of Har, for example, he encounters Ijim, who recognizes Tiriel but believes him to be an apparitions

Thou hast the form of Tiriel but I know thee well enough Stand from my path foul fiend in this the last of thy deceits To be a hypocrite & stand in the shape of a blind beggar (11. 159-61)

To Ijim, Tiriel seems to be a "dark fiend," an "artful fiend," and "impudent fiend," a "tempter," a figure characterized by deceitfulness. Milton's Satan, Father of Lies and archetypal tempter, is similarly the "subtle

Fiend" (X, 20), the "superior Fiend" (I, 2 8 3 ). Ijim is refusing to play Ithuriel to Tiriel's Satan when he challenges: 71

Come thou dark fiend I dare thy cunning know that Ijim scorns To smite thee in the form of helpless age & eyeless policy Rise up for I discern thee & I dare thy eloquent tongue, (11. 169-71)

And yet Ijim seems most wary of Tiriel1s "glib & eloquent tongue," the ablest tool of tempters since Satan made the serpent talk.

These allusions may not be specific enough to connect what Ijim believes he is confronting with I-'il- ton's Satan, but Blake leaves us in no doubt about the identification after Ijim speaks before Heuxos:

What Heuxos call thy father for I mean to sport to night This is the hypocrite that sometimes roars a dreadful lion Then I have rent his limbs & left him rotting in the forest For hir'ds to eat but I have scarce departed from the place But like a tyger he would come & so I rent him too Then like a river he would seek to drown me in his waves But soon I buffetted the torrent anon like to a cloud Fraught with the swords of lightning, but I bravd the vengeance too Then he would creep like a bright serpent till around my neck While I was Sleeping he would twine I squeezd his poisnous soul Then like a toad or like a newt would whisper in my ears Or like a rock stood in my way, or like a poisnous shrub At last I caught him in the form of Tiriel blind & old (11. 201-13) 72

I.'iss Raino has identifier! Ijim's list as a version of

the traditional transformations of Proteus, combining

also forms from Agrippa and the Odyssey. But for the

appropriateness of a protean tempter, one need only

recall Satan's transformations, into a cormorant, a wolf, and a "bright serpent." The toad is especially

significant, for while it does not appear in the

traditional lists of Proteus's changes, it is the form

Satan takes to reach the dreams of Eve, the form in which Ithuriel finds him:

Squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve: Assaying by his Devilish art to reach The Organs of her Fancy, .... (IV, 800-02)

Finally, Ijim believes in Tiriel, but he sees the palace of the former king "as false as Matha & as dark as vacant

Orcus" (1. 2 3 9), a type, of Hell itself.

Now Tiriel calls down his curse and makes his palace even more like Wilton's Hell, He asks the "fiery dogs" of Earth to "rise from the center belching flames and roarings" (11. 2^8-49). He calls up "dark smoke," a

"Pestilence" like the tenth plague of Egypt which cuts off "all the children in their beds . . . in one night"

(1 , 275). It brings "fogs & standing lakes": in this

"noisom place," all the children of Tiriel are "Chained in thick darkness" (1. 270). Except that they will die, they are like Wilton's fallen angels, weltering in 73

"torture without end" on a "fiery Deluge, fed / With everburning Sulphur unconcum'd," "o 1 erwhe3.ni*d / Y/ith

Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire . , (I,

67-6 9 , 76-77). In a moment of tragic self-realization at the end of the poem, Tiriel explains to himself and to Har why such an end came to him and his sons. It is because he is human, a son of Har, who is the "mistaken father of a lawless race" (1. 357). For Har brought laws into the world and with them the fallen condition which taught Tiriel's wisdom,' all ending "together in a curse," the curse of a C-od who damned Adam and Eve out of Para­ dise, humbling "the immortal spirit" of Tiriel and all

Har's other sons, "Consuming all both flowers & fruits, insects and warbling birds" (1. 3 8 9 ) which in Eden would have stayed forever unconsumed. Now Tiriel, "subtil as a serpent in a paradise" (1 . 3 8 8 ), finds his "paradise is fall’n & a drear sandy plain" (1 . 3 9 0 ), like the ashes which Satan, "parched with scalding thirst and hunger fierce," chewed "with hatefullest disrelish" (X, 5 5 6 ,

564-66, 569). Like Satan, and like the Archbishop of

Paris, Tiriel returns his "thirsty hissings" (1. 3 9 1 ) in a curse. The curse, eternal product of the Fall, is being human under the dominion of "One law," a parallel to the one "Command / Sole Daughter of his [[God's] voice" 7^ which Eve -transgressed (IX, 652-53)* "But in Milton: the Father is Destiny" (MHH. 5). And all men are "hound beneath the heavens in a reptile form" (1. 3 6 2 ) because a malignant Destiny has made them so. This is the lesson of Wilton's Paradise Lost. For men under the rule of such a law, Satan's degeneration is the con­ trolling archetype of our lives, except perhaps Adam's, in whom, as Har, a tyrant-God's mercy perserved inno­ cence in senility.

IV

According to such a reading Tiriel is not the expression of Blake's already consistent and well- developed private mythology, a part of the Ore cycle as Northrop Frye has argued,33 N or j_s amalgam of arcane sources, emphasizing the heterodox tradition, that Miss Raine has argued it to be. It is, I think, a kind of practice piece, a tentative attempt to carry on a major poetic tradition, the terms of which it accepts, criticizing the dogmas by revaluing them.

There is no paradise in the fallen world, nor will there come to be one as long as oppression, in the form of one law, rules. Though a tyrant, Tiriel is not the father of this law but a victim of it. He stands 75

for all of us, and like us, he dies. This makes him

unlike Thel, Urisen, Los, Albion, and all the other

"Immortals," For not all the allegory which the poem

can justly be said to imply can set aside the fact of

Tiriel's death. Only in Tiriel did Blake explain how

"the mortal taste brought death into the world." Tiriel

is an interpretive criticism of Paradise Lost. Yet . regarded as myth, Tiriel is therefore a less achieved work than the books in Blake's illuminated canon.

Implicitly denying the fortune which Milton projected from the Fall, Tiriel ends hopelessly. Its argument, though archetypal, is not cyclic.

It is commonplace to remark that Tiriel and Thel are closely related. They share many elements. The

Vales of Har appear significantly in both. The questions which Thel confronts beside her own grave, and which she can not answer, seek reasons for the fact of the human condition, primarily for its physical boundaries? Tiriel, who has endured physical experience, answers Thel's questions, substituting an emphasis on the universal pain of living for the wonder in Thel's speech. His own question, "Why is one lav/ given to the lion & the patient Ox" (1. 3^0), puts the spiritual case which Thel could make only in physical terms, Northrop Frye lias called the poorns obviously complementary, and observes 76

further, "The diction and imagery of the two poems seem

to be a deliberate contrast,"-' Both Tiriel and Thel wander among varying scenes: each poem is structu.red by the slow development, in each case really a degenera­

tion, of the title figure. And although Thel finds at

least some refuge from life in never confronting it, each poem is bleak in its conclusion.

In planning Thel and Tlrie1, Blake followed a

Miltonic model, for they are companion poems in the tradition of L'Allegro and II Penseroso. Their subjects are innocence and experience, which can easily enough be allowed as contributory themes in Milton's poems.

The pastoral vision of L'Allegro has narrowed to a disappointed hope that becomes anti-pastoral in Thel:

Thel wants Eden and can not accept the real world. The

introspective thinker of II Penseroso, syncretized with

Oedipus, Lear, and Satan, tyrants of the world of exper­ ience, becomes blind, self-centered Tiriel, Both Tiriel and Thel reject the states of existence they see in their wandering, but Thel rejects them without experiencing them and Tiriel casts them aside, full to sickness with experience, Une nuance de bizarre in Thel's grave and the phantasmagoria throughout T3 riel further join the poems. 77

Thel and Tiriel follow the example of Milton's poetry in a further way, v/hich Frank Warnke has argued is also typical of the Baroque:

The Baroque conceives of heroism as passive rather than active, and of the will as a faculty to be directed not toward achievement but toward endurance. The idea of heroism as the will to endure is a fully consistent one for Milton .... The Lady in 'Comus' success­ fully holds out against a seducer who cannot touch the freedom of her mind; the speaker in 'Lycidas' finds inner resources to resist the temptations of doubt, despair, and disgust with the world; the two major works of Milton's later years fParadise Regain'd and Samson Afronistes^) deal definitively with the figure of the passive hero whose will manifests itself in resisting temptation and whose triumph ultimately resides in his making himself a sacrifice.35

Tiriel is such a sacrifice, though he is ignorant of that until his final moments, Thel, like the Lady in

Comas, eludes the temptations of her own sexuality, and, like the Lady but more intensely than she, is criticized for her naive fear of experience, her will

to live frustrated by the discrepancy between life as it is and life as she wills it to be, Tiriel's will, the only power left to him with age, permits him to endure: that to do so it must enslave and destroy others, I think Blake took to be a repeated face of life, from which he did not shrink, but which he did not love,

Finally, in symbolically remaking the tradition of

L*Allegro and 11 Penseroso, Blake was following the 78

model of Milton himself, the revolutionary poet who

never took up a traditional form without changing it.

In so doing, the young Blake accomplished what many

Romantics attempted after him. Joseph Vhittreich argues,

"It is sometimes thought that, because the Romantics

bring about the disintegration of conventional forms,

they can contribute little to our understanding of

them. It is true that the Romantics reveal little

interest in concepts of genre that emphasize rule, Yet

they retain a deep interest in genre." Blake dissolved

the boundaries which, for many imitators of Milton,

defined the companion poems as genre, but he did not

ignore the genre: he redefined its boundaries. "Genres,

the Romantics insist, are more than mechanical forms

governed by fixed rules; they are traditions, supple

and flexible, that give free play to the poet's imagina­

tion; they are to be modified and transformed, not

slavishly imitated. Hence they turn finally from the

conservative artist, like Shakespeare, to the revolu­

tionary artist, like Milton, who radically alters the

forms he uses without losing their essential identity.

In Tirie1 and The 1 Blake effected such a transformation

and began to become the lirophetic, ^revolutionary poet who could inherit Milton's mantle. 79

Foot no t es for C ban ter* TI n See, for example, I-". I.], Hahood, Foe try and Humanism (Hew York: '7. V/, Norton A C o m p a n y 195°) » PP. 170“ 71). p S, Footer Damon, William Blake; Pie Philosophy and Symbols (New York: Peter Smith, 1947), p. 2$Q.

^ Lowery, p. O3 . For much of the discussion of Milton's influence on the Poetical Sketches. I am indebted to Miss Lowery's study, V/indows of the Morning. h. , Damon, p. 263.

5 Blake's illustrations to I-1Allegro and II Penseroso are reprinted in Adrian Van Sinderen, Blake; The Mystic Genius (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1949). The ’’Great Sun" is p. 6 7 .

^ For the influence of L* Allegro and II Penseroso. see Havens, pp. 439-7 7 , For the figure of Contemplation, Elake also has Spen­ ser's Heavenly Contemplation (F.Q. , I. x. 46-4-8) as a possible model. But he follows Milton's Melancholy from II Penseroso, the figure of Contemplation as nurse of Wisdom in Cornus (11. 375-80), 9-nd perhaps also Pope's Heavenly Contemplation among the nuns in Elolsa to Abelard, a poem Blake later illustrated in his panel portrait of Pope for Hayley's library— all of whom make Contemplation a woman. In the illus­ tration to II Penseroso showing "Melancholy and Her Companions" (Van Sinderen, p. 91)1 Contemplation is of indeterminate sex but winged, following the descrip­ tion in II Penseroso (1. 5^) an^ Cornus. Warton (p. 64) thought that Milton gave Contemplation wings on the model of Durer's Melancholia. and one recalls that Blake kept a copy of that engraving above his work table, Samuel. Palmer, perhaps recalling Blake's own account of that work, speaks of that print as "Albert Durer's Melancholy the Mother of Invention, memorable as probably having been seen by Milton, and used in his Penseroso" (Records, p. 5&5)• 80

7 Lowery, p. 7 6 .

8 The Kxodlad, a Poem. By the au'thors of Calvary (London, 1807 5~i 1^ o ✓ Cumberland and Purges, p. 167.

10 For the full catalogue, see Havens, pp. 80-8 5 .

11 Haven, p. 8 8 ,

12 James Holly Hanford, A Hilton Handbook. *J-th ed, (Nev/ York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 19^6), p. Jh-2.

13 Joseph A, Wittreich, Jr., The Romantics on Hilton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Clevelands The Press of Case V/estern Reserve University, 1970), pp. 9-xo. l*i- D. G, James, The Romantic Comedy; An Essay on English Romanticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. xi ,

15 Havens, p, 81.

16 Havens, p. 8 2 ,

17 For example, the man in the tower named Destiny sees an "image of despair in his den, / Eternally rushing round, like a man on his hands and knees, day and night without rest" (E 28A), an echo perhaps of Sir Trevisan fleeing from the Cave of Despair (F.Q,. I, ix. 21-2A).

18 Erdman, Prophet, pp. I37 -3 8 ,

19 Erdman, Prophet. p, I3 8 .

20 Rene Wcllek's classic study, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship" (JAAC. 5 19^+6 , 77-10Q) tra.ces the origins and applications of this term to literary contexts. I use the concept less specifically 81

than Wellek, rather following the excellent reading of the term by M, H, iiahood, pp, 131-206. 21 "Definitions of the Baroque in the Visual Arts," JAAG. 5 (19^6 ), 11/+.

22 Uahood, pp. 135-36.

23 iVahood, p. 176.

Zh V/ellek, 77.

25 Y/ellek, 7 7 ; Mahood, p. 1 3 2 ,

26 Blake and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 96 8), ifj yi.

27 For citations to the text of Tiriel. I follow Gerald E, Bentley, Jr., William Blake, Tiriel; Facsimile and Transcript of the Manuscript (Oxford; The Clar­ endon Press, 1967). line references v/ithin paren­ theses are to this edition.

28 Nancy Bogen, "A New Look at Blake's Tiriel." Biff PL. ?H (1970), 153-65» and Ilary S. Hall, "Blake's Tiriel; A Visionary Form Pedantic," BNYFL. 7/+ (I9 7 0 ), 166-7 6 ,

29 Hall, 166, Hiss Hall quotes Jacob Bryant, A New System; or. An Analysis of Ancient T.'ytholory (London, 177^-76), II, 337. 30 See Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., "William Blake; Illus- trator-Interpreter of Paradise Regained" in Wittreich, Calm of Hind, pp-. 108, H O - 1 3 ,

31 Bentley, T.i riel. pp, 20-3 3 ,

32 Raine, I, 6 3 ,

33 Frye, pp, ZM-l-U-S*

3'* Frye, pp. 2/+1-/+2. 82

3 *5 — "ijaroque Once !lore : Notes on a Literary Period,*' NLH, 1 (1970), 157.

3 6 The Romantics on Milton, pp. 20-21. CHAPTER III

AT LIBERTY

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning. — The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The composition of Blake's minor prophecies can be dated only conjecturally and approximately, in spite of the dates on the title pages, for most of them were apparently in process for several years, Blake often working on more than one at a time. But in 31ake's work, both the poetry and the paintings, from about

1790 to 1?95» the influence of Milton remained steady,

Moreover, this work shows Blake's increasing under­ standing of Milton's thought, especially of its rele­ vance to Blake's own time. During this period Blake continued to draw from Milton for key images and the ideas they concretely represent. But in two ways

Blake's minor prophecies show greater debts to Milton

83 84

than his earlier writings had done. First, about this

time Blake seems to have become acquainted with more of

Milton’s writings than he had known before. At least

he uses more of them in his own work. His argument— in

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Visions of the

Daughters of Albion, in his conception of the grand

figures of Albion and Urizen— is clearly consonant with

the attitudes Milton defended in his voluminous prose writings* the influence of Milton on Blake comes for

the first time into Blake's poetry not only through

Paradise Lost. Samson Agonistes. and the other poems, but also through The Reason of Church Government, The

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The History of

Britain, and Milton's other prose, especially Areo- pagitica. (The Treatise on Christian Doctrine must be excepted here. It was not discovered until I823 and was translated only shortly before Blake’s death,) And second, Blake achieves in the minor prophecies, what he attempted but failed at in Tiriel and accomplished in only a brief way in Thel. the creation of a mythic world, for which enterprise his major model was Mil­ tonic .

Blake's uses of images and ideas from Milton can be listed, I think, though perhaps not exhaustively, given the transmuting power of Blake's imagination. These images, especially in patterns (like Blake's version of the archetypal fall of Satan in Tiriel), make up in part the vera narratio, the plot (Aristotle's word was mvthos) of Blake's early poems. But as narrative plot plays less and less a role in Blake's poetry, another element of gains in importance. Jerome Bruner has defined myth as essentially two-fold, "at once an external reality and the resonance of the internal vicissitudes of man."'*' Plot, imagery, style--all vehicles for declaring an objective external reality, and each more or less quantifiable— provide clear touchstones of what Blake took from Milton. Kow he recreated the mythic resonance of Paradise Lost or

The History of Britain is less easily explicable.

Blake borrowed Milton's- imagery, criticized and even rewrote his plots, imitated important aspects of his stylet here the critic can point to significant similarities and differences among the works of the two poets. But such study only would inadequately explain the ways Blake imitated Milton,

In the Descriptive Catalogue (1809) through which

Blake announced to the public his own grand republican scheme for the improvement of the nation by an improve­ ment in its art (his "voluminous, ancient history of

Britain, and the world of Satan and Adam" being then 8 6

completed and ready, "if God please," for publication

[E 533“3*0)f Blake identified his sources for the true mythology of England as Jacob Bryant and John Milton,

specifically the latter's History of Britain, Des­

cribing "The Ancient Britons" (a picture not now extant),

Blake wrotei "In this Picture, believing with Milton

the ancient British history, Mr. 3. has done, as all

the ancients did, and as all the moderns, who are worthy

of fame, given the historical fact in its poetical vigour . . . Miracle, prodigy, improbabilities and

impossibilities ("what we should say was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes" [s 53^1 ) —

these are the words, with "vigour," power, and spirit, which describe the mythic resonance of historical facts.

These are the qualities Blake visualized and recorded in synthesizing the story of England, ancient and con­

temporary, social and spiritual. In justification of

its truth, Blake had asserted* "Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so., make it so? . , , All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm per­ swasion removed mountains] but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of anything" (MHH 13). Blake there­ fore, like Milton, requires a fit audience of however few, and the criterion of fitness involves the reader's capacity for imaginative persuasion of the truth of Blake's poems. Put another way, Blake's poetry, at

least after The Marriage of Heaven'and Hell, is mythic

to the reader who is capable of responding to it. This

would make Blake's work esoteric or cultist if he were

focussing, for example, on himself merely, rather than,

as he was, trying to see the vicissitudes and capacities

of inner man altogether. As this is the attempt of all

poets "in ages of imagination" (Blake believed), it

defines poetry essentially, and it grounds Blake's

judgments of poetic tradition. It conjoins him in a single task with Milton,

Blake was firmly persuaded, with Milton, that

words could work miracles, that language could free

men, and that therefore a purification of language and

art could effect a revolution— indeed, an apocalypse—

in England. For Blake, at the time of the great revolu­

tions in America and France, England stood like Samson,

"Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with Slaves," blind yet

capable of a great deliverance out of error. He implies

in The Marriage of' Heaven and Hell and the later Lambeth books that this deliverance could come about by a

renewal of visionary thinking, manifested in a renewal

of the tradition of poetry as prophecyi 8 8

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. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be con­ sumed, 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 dis­ tinct 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. (MHH 14)

In The Teares of the Muses Spenser also had argued that

a revolution in poetry was required for a national

regeneration, and Milton too, in Areopagitica. foresaw

an age of truth and liberty as the ultimate product of

freedom of thought and press. Blake voiced his own

prophetic goal on the first page of Milton, quoting the

prophet-deliverer Moses: "Would to God that all the

Lords people were prophets" (K Is see Numbers 11:29).

In so aspiring, Blake followed the example of Milton

who saw in England, "a Nation so pliant and so prone to

seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a

towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithfull

labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of

Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies .... For now the

time seems come, wherein Moses the great Prophet may sit 89

in heav'n rejoycing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfill'd, when not.only our sev'nty Elders, but all the Lords people are become Prophets" (Areo.,

Prose, II, 55^, 555-56).2

Implied by this goal, in both Milton and Blake, is a providential view of history. Believing with Milton the ancient British history meant, for Blake, an exten­ sion of the tradition of the exempla, that "human events constituted a record of God's constant intervention in the affairs of the world,This theme recurs through­ out Milton's History of Britain, especially in Book III and "The Digression" or Character of the Long Parliament, in which latter work Milton defended his view that the parliament of 1641 deserved the scorn of the Common­ wealth!

Thus they who of late were extoll'd as our greatest Deliverers, and had the people wholly at their Devotion, by so discharging their trust as we see, did not only weaken and unfit them­ selves to be dispensers of that Liberty they pretended, but unfitted also the People, now grown worse and more disordinate, to receive or digest any Liberty at all. For Stories teach us, that Liberty sought out of season, in a corrupt and degenerate Age, brought Rome itself into a farther Slavery! For Liberty hath a sharp and double edge, fit only to be handled by Just and Vertuous Menj to bad and dissolute, it becomes a mischief unweildy in their own hands .... (Prose, V, 44-8) 90

Nations might enjoy the rewards of a true and complete liberty only when they were first comprised of virtuous men. Otherwise, it is the lesson of England's own his­ tory that divine justice will send Romans or Danes to administer an exact and propaedeutic retribution. In believing this, "Milton stands in the direct line of descent that leads from the Hebrew prophets, through the early Christians and the mediaeval historians, to the Renaissance."2* Blake, too, was this kind of pro­ phet.

The vision of a renewed England which Milton pro­ phesied was, Northrop Frye has argued, to be found in his works in its complete integrity only in Areopagitica. for "in the epics there is still much that is generalized and doctrinal . . . .nJ In his prose tract "For the

Liberty of Unlicens'd Printing," Milton portrayed a unified image of truth at work rousing and perfecting a diseased nationi

For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital, but to rationall faculties, and those in the acutest, and the pertest operations of wit and suttlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cherfulnesse of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has, not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie, and new invention, it betok'ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall decay, but casting off the old and wrincl'd skin of corruption to outlive 91

these pangs and wax young again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and prosperous vertue destin'd to become great and honourable in these latter ages, Kethinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invinci­ ble locksi Rethinks I see her as an Eagle muing [i.e., renewing by moulting^ her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl'd eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav'nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amaz'd at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prog- nosticat a year of sects and~schisms. (Areo,. Prose, II, 557-58)

I have quoted the whole of this long passage because

it provides central images for Blake's writings in the

period from 1790 to 1795. In the Carriage. Blake's own

defense of the liberty of thinking against the "muddy

pool of conformity and tradition" (Milton's phrase;

Areo.. Prose. II, 5^3)* Blake adumbrated the images of

the eagle, the snake (who casts off "the old wrincl'd

skin of corruption"),^ and the flock of confused on-

looking birds,

Milton returned to the image of the phoenix-eagle at the end of Samson Agonistes. The final semichorus of the play describes Samson's destruction of the

Temple of Dagon (a moment parallel to the dance of

Albion in Blake's engraving, "Glad Day") as the product of Samson's inward regeneration of spiritual strength* 92

. . . he though blind of sight Despis'd and thought extinguish'd quite, With inward eyes illumined His fiery virtue rous'd From under ashes into sudden flame, And as an ev'ning Dragon came, Assailant on the perched roosts, And nests in order rang'd Of tame villatic Fowl; but as an Eagle His cloudless thunder bolted on thir heads. So virtue giv'n for lost, Deprest and overthrown, as seem'd, Like that self-begott'n bird In the Arabian woods embost That no second knows, nor third, And lay erewhile a Holocaust From out her ashy womb now teem'd, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem'd, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. (SA, 11. 1687-1707)

Blake, v/ho already had connected the condition of

England under Philistine art and science with Samson in

slavery, like Milton imaged the apocalyptic regeneration possible to a nation by using the complex of dragon

(often glossed as "serpent"), phoenix- sagle and a crowd of "tame villatic Fowl."^

On the title page of The Marriage of Heaven and

Hell (fig. 6), above and to the right of "Marriage,"

Blake drew five small birds surrounding a larger phoenix, representing perhaps the question of the

"mighty Devil" that Blake describes as folded in black smoky clouds which mark the end of one age and the birth of another (MHH 6). "In corroding fires" (like Pig. 6 i Title page, The Carriage of Heaven and Hell 9k

Blake’s infernal method of printing) the Devil writes,

"How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/ Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?" (KHH ?). Throughout the Marriage small birds fly in the margins and between the lines, and the phoenix at the moment of its regeneration is the domi­ nant subject of plate 15 (fig. 7). The text of the

"Memorable Fancy" which the phoenix illustrates brings together the passages from Areooagitica and Samson

Agonistes quoted abovei

I was in a printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation. In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man clearing away the rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of Dragons were hollowing the cave. In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and precious stones. In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle-like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs. (MHH 15)

The passage obviously recalls the Dragon of Revelation who is "that old serpent, called the Devil" (Rev. 12:9) and who, in the allegory of the Marriage. is the first force of deliverance (for the individual soul or the soul of England) from false vision; Blake may have intended as well to acknowledge the irony of Milton’s 95

\

Pig. 7* Plate 15, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 96

Samson imaged as a Dragon, an irony which hinges on Q the Greek meaning of "dragon"* "the seeing one,"

As one commentator on Samson has explained, "So by the

very nature of the word, Milton in calling Samson 'the

seeing one' and connecting the term with Fowl, does not

suggest the image of the snake creeping in the evening

among the sleeping, unaware hens, Milton is evoking

the image of fowls transfixed into attention at the

sight of the great serpent , , , with the uncanny fire

radiating from his eyes. He is showing the terrible,

blind Samson commanding the fascinated attention of the q onlookers,

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake prophesies

that the spirit of England (who is not yet Blake's

Albion) could come "as an ev'ning Dragon" and build

palaces of infinite understanding by tearing down the rubble of England's dead and finite, rocky art. In

Blake's illustration (fig. 7), both eagle and serpent

are symbolic of energy reawakened, shuffling off their

old corrupted bodies and, themselves renewed, renewing all men. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and especially

A Song of Liberty foresee "a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shak­ ing her invincible locks." Reading this passage from

Areonagitica. Blake could have recalled the simile at 9?

the close of The Reason of Church Government, a work he

quotes in his annotations to Reynolds. There Milton

compares "the state and person of a king [Milton implies,

of an English king^J then to that mighty Nazarite Samson t

who . . , grows up to a noble strength and perfection

with those his illustrious and sunny locks the laws

waving and curling about his god like shoulders" (Prose.

I» 859)» only to be enslaved by the Philistines of bad religion, bad government and bad art. In Milton, there­

fore, and largely in Milton's conception of Samson,

Blake found his source for the spirit of revolution and

reawakening vision, the figure he names variously Ore

and Los, the Deliverer who could regenerate Albion.

II

As a manifesto looking forward to a new age in

literature and thought, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

is primarily a critique of the stale and wrong-headed

traditions by which thought in Blake's England was

dominated. Milton too named dogmatic traditions as the

cause of tyranny over men's minds. The manacles of

slavery are mind-forged, he asserts at the beginning of

The Tenure of r'in.gs and Magistrates! "If men within themselves would be governed by reason, and not generally 98 give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of

Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favor and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive to have the public state conformably govern'd to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves" (Prose. Ill, 190). Custom,

"still . . . silently received for the best instructor," causes "that swollen visage of counterfeit knowledge which not only in private mars our education, but also in public is the common climber into every chair of law, education, or religion" (DDD. Prose. II, 222-2*0.

Tradition, taken always to be dogma uninspired by

Christian or humane principle, is consistently attacked throughout Milton’s prose works, often satirically, but always with a sense of the almost irredeemable harm which dogma can cause. The seriousness of the task of reproving dogmatists demands a vehemence of style, as

Milton knew and as, I think, Blake knew from Miltoni

". . . although in the serious uncasing of a grand imposture . . , there be mixt here and there such a grim laughter, as may appeare at the same time in an austere visage, it cannot be taxt of levity or insolence* for even this veine of laughing . . , hath oft-times a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting" 99

(Animad.. Prose, I ( 663-6^-). The Marriage of Heaven and

Hell (which a recent commentator has shown to be quite

specifically anti-prelatical, and so like much of Milton's prose invective),'1'0 urges its attacks in just such a

style, with an apparent belief on Blake's part, whether he had learned of it from Milton or not, that "a Satyr as it was borne out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously”

(Apology, Prose, I, 916).

The decorum of Blake's style in the Marriage is justified by the example of much of Milton's prose, especially the anti-prelatical tracts, Milton's famous image of God vomiting because of the deficiencies of the Bishops (Of Ref., Prose, X, 537) is not far in tone or effectiveness from Blake's entry into the Bible of his Established Angel only to find grinning monkeys and baboons coupling and devouring one anotherj and Blake's

Angel's self-righteous answer, "thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed” (MHH 20), is very like some replies to Milton by the objects of his prose assaults, (Blake might have been familiar with those from Milton's own quotations of them in his obligatory responses to their replies.) But the sub­ stance of Blake's attack is closest to Milton's argu­ ments on repressive dogma in Areopagitica:'1'^ "Truth is 1 0 0

compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n

into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition" (Areo.,

Prose. II, 5^3)i a "Prelaticall tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men" (Prose, II, 55^)* The bindings of tradition make truth speak falsely, Milton argues; in

The Reason of Church Government, reviving a favorite image, he summarizes, "And must tradition then ever thus to the worlds end be the perpetuall cankerworm to eat out Gods Commandements?" (Prose. I, 779) • Throughout the prose tracts this attitude toward tradition is consistent on Milton's parts he unhesitatingly rejected any human tradition which conflicted with his individual reading of Scripture, although he felt free to cite the 12 authority of the Fathers whenever it supported him.

And implicitly in Areonagitica he recognized his own right to the access of publication, even if he might be wrong in his beliefs, by defending the absolute freedoms of thought and press* "Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties" (Prose. II, 5 6 0 ).

In all this Milton took as primary the importance of Scripture, Man and liberty are the key themes through­ out his poetry as well, it can be argued. But he 1 0 1

regarded man, especially in Paradise Lost, as bound

under the terms of his (Milton's own) reading of the

Bible. Adam, it is often noted, is the least heroic of

Milton's three human heroes: Christ as the God-man

of Paradise Regained and Samson each achieve far greater

deeds than Adam. The liberty allowable to man in Para­

dise Lost is similarly bound. This caused the central

disagreement between Blake and Milton at the time Blake

wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and this disagree­

ment is reflected in the mythic subjects Blake chose to

develop from Milton and the rest of precedent tradition.

Paradise Lost recounts the archetypal Judeo-Christian

myth, detailing the creation and fall of innocence,

showing the beginning of regeneration, and promising redemption or apocalypse. In Tiriel Blake writes on

the assumption that Milton's facts were right, but that

the world as it is offers not apocalypse but death. "A

Poison Tree" from the Songs of Experience, almost an epitome of Tiriel. told from the archetypal tyrant's point of view, makes roughly the same comment, also using

Christian, Miltonic symbols. This is negative criticism on Blake's part. The main difference between it and

Blake's work, at least predominantly from the Marriage on, is that in the later work Blake is constructive, literally, in the sense that he finds a strong foundation 1 0 2

on which to build a new mythology— his own vision of the

absolute freedom and infinite capacity of man. In later

works like The Four Zoas and Jerusalem he adapts the

Judeo-Christian myth into this positive framework. In

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he focusses on Milton's

recurrent themes, man and liberty, without adopting the

plot of the Christian view of history. For Blake, man

and liberty were the absolutes, and only when he came to

see Scripture as enhancing, not abrogating them, did he

embrace, and then only with reservations, the Bible, as

he might have said, "of Heaven."

At some point in the composition of The Marriage of

and Hell, Blake conceived for the first time of Albion

as the antediluvian giant, spirit of England. Kis

references to Albion in works earlier than the Marriage

are conventional, "poetic" in the decorative sense that

other poets of his time used the name, even occasionally

formulaici "Liberty shall stand upon the cliffs of

Albion" ("King Edward the Third," E 429), or "Justice

hath heav’d a sword to plunge in Albion's breast"

("King John," E 430). Moreover, in his first works,

Blake apparently thought of Albion as a womani "0 Yet

may Albion smile again, and.stretch her peaceful arms, and raise her golden head, exultinglyl" ("King John,"

E 431) and "Tyranny hath staind fair Albion’s breast 103 with her own children's gore" ("King John," E ^3 0 ),

The sex of Albion is indeterminate■in A Song of Liberty—

"Albions coast is sick silent," MHH 2 5 — but the appear­

ance of the character there fits the evolving figure who

is clearly male in the other prophecies and who, I think,

developed out of Milton's consistently masculine figure,

the giant son of Neptune whose rule over England ante­ dated the legendary Brut (Brit.. Prose, V, pt. i, 6).

(In the History of Britain Milton alludes to a woman,

Albina, "and from thence £some authors^ would have the name Albion derived," but he feels greater warrant for belief in a male figure; Prose. V, pt. i, 7.) Also about the time of the composition of the Marriage. Blake was developing his idea of the spirit of revolution, Ore.

In the Marriage Blake never names Ore, and he names

Albion only once. Instead, he focusses on "the Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains ..." (MHH 16), Blake emphasizes the titanic capacities of men without yet, it seems, having conceived of the specific beings who appear in the later works.

For Blake differed from Milton essentially on the question of the nature of man, and consequently also on the purpose and means of the atonement. As early as

1788 and then consistently onward to the end of his 10^

life, Blake believed man's capabilities to be infinite,

because of the "Poetic or Prophetic character" which

opposes "the Philosophic & Experimental"* "If it were

not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philoso­ phic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all

things, & stand still unable to do other than repeat the

same dull round over again" (E 1). But "the desire of

Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself

Infinite" (E 2). In Paradise Lost both men and angels are limited. This is clearest in the example of Adam, whose one transgression, for Blake, freed him from the tedium of innocence in Eden; for "the same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with com­ plicated wheels" (E 2), But even the knowledge of experience which Milton allowed to Adam would have been insufficient for Blake, so long as there was a "sum of wisdom" beyond v/hich it was Adam's folly to desire: desiring further can lead to a palace of wisdom. "Less than All cannot satisfy Man . . . He who sees the

Infinite in all things sees God" (E 2). "But in Milton,"

Blake wrote, "The Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-Ghost, Vacuuml" (MHH 5).

Here Blake's most important criticism of Paradise Lost concerns the capacities of Milton's Christ, who is like the "tame villatic fowl" of closed senses, not like the 105

"immense world of delight11 of the regenerated phoenix.

This is also a criticism of Milton as a man, for "He who

sees the Ratio only sees himself Only" (E 2).

In these adversions on Paradise Lost. Blake is

criticizing Milton more generally as well, specifically

the use of the doctrine of accommodation, the belief

that "God speakes to us after the manner of men," that

He "illustrateCsU heavenly truths by earthly resemblances,"

that He "condescendeth to our capacities in a more fami­

liar and delightful way, so as to teach us by Comparisons

and Similitudes, the better to imprint in our hearts and memories what so nearely concerns us."^ Because Milton believed that "To attaine/ The highth and depth of Thy

[God 's^J Eternal Wayes/ All human thoughts come short

. , (PL, VII, ^12-1*0, he likened "spiritual to corporeal forms" (PL, V, 573) and measured "things in Heav'n by things on Earth" (PL, VI, 893) throughout

Paradise Lost, especially in recounting the war in

Heaven. Blake did not believe that analogies were either necessary or suitable to express the divine natures to mans man's own nature is divine and expressible in straightforward visionary imagery— that is, metaphor, sublime allegory.

This Blake justified because "... the Poetic

Genius is the true Man, and . . . the body or outward 106

form of Kan is derived from the Poetic Genius. Like­

wise . . . the forms of all things are derived from their

Genius . . . " (E 2). This is put similarly in the

Carriage: "Kan 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" (MHH

To distinguish between body and soul is to separate soul

from body and God from man. By employing and defending

the doctrine of accommodation, Milton promulgates these

separations. For Blake, however, Christ really does

"become as we are that we may be as he is" (E 2). In

so doing, He purifies our vision, or, as Blake also

sometimes expresses it, Christ's example teaches us our

own infinite capacities, and we become like the eagle-

like men around the Eagle in the third chamber of the printing house in Kell. The atonement is an act of vision; Milton, in his own mind-forged fetters, did not allow himself to see.

In calling Milton's God "Destiny," Blake is taking the Devil's part, Beelzebub explains God's victory in

Paradise Lost as "upheld by strength, or Chance, or

Fate" (I, 133)» and Belial assumes that "the sentence of thir Conqueror" is "fate inevitable" (II, 208, 197). Destiny is the burden of Satan's soliloquy after first

seeing Adam and Eve, and Blake is unconvinced by Milton's

judgment on that speech: "So spake the Fiend, and with

necessity,/ The tyrant's plea, excus'd his devilish deeds

(IV, 393-9*0. For Milton's omniscient and omnipotent

God is, for Blake, the surer tyrant, who had earlier in

the poem described His own ways as predestinarian: "Some

I have chosen of peculiar grace/ Elect above the rest;

so is my will" (III, 183-8*0. Of the Reprobate, this

same God adjudges "none but such from mercy I exclude"

(III, 202), and He makes this judgment before the fact,

with full power to make that judgment hold. Only Christ'

charity, not the Father's (Milton has presented them as

separate, and Blake took him at his word) opens the way

to mercy. Since Milton had pictured the Father and Son

under different characters in Paradise Lost. Blake looked

as well for the Holy Spirit, Not finding Him, he

declared that for Milton, the Holy Ghost was "Vacuum!"

In Paradise Lost Milton's God is the only character who speaks of disloyalty (v/hich is presented as a sin

against God's ego), of the expiation of treason, of

"rigid satisfaction, death for death," of justice

according to the lex talionis (III, 203-12), The ways of such a God, Milton implied to Blake, require some kind of rational justification, for He, not Satan, is 108 the father of Sin and Death. By His one law, such a God restrained the energetic desire of Adam and Eve, govern­ ing them unwilling, until that desire, after punishment,

"by degrees," became "passive till it is only the shadow of desire" (MHH 5)» The most passionate moment in

Paradise Lost comes only after what Milton called "the

Fall," when "Carnal desire enflaming, hee Adam on Eve/

Began to cast lascivious Eyes" (IX, 1013-1*0. Adam's act to free himself from restraint inflames his senses to enjoy Eve, thanks to the "delightful Fruit" (IX,

1029-33* 1023). For Blake, Satan's promise was fulfilled and Adam and Eve began to see as Gods, recognizing, like

"the ancient Poets," the Genius of the Tree through

"their enlarged & numerous senses" (MHH 11). But from height of passion, by their sense of guilt and by the punishment which is guilt confirmed, they fell. "The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the

Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah" (MHH 5 ) because the agent of their banishment from an enlarged sensual

Eden is Christ. He by His curse reduces man to mere corporeality 1 "... know thy Birth,/ For dust thou art, and shalt to dust return" (X, 207-08). As Adam acquiesces to the curse, and to the vision of himself that he sees through such a Christ's eyes, he falls:

"It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out ..." (MHH 5 ). 109

III

The true Christ (God become as we are), Blake

implies, will improve man's sensuality to what it was

immediately after Adam's first self-liberating act.

This he will do with "an improvement of sensual enjoyment" by cleansing "the doors of perception" until we see not

"thro' narrow chinks" of the cavern which is the un­ spiritual body, but through heightened physical and spiritual senses at once— that is, with the imagination.1^

Because Milton overcame his blindness by developing an inward Celestial light which illuminated his "mind through all her powers" (PL, III, 51”55)» because

Milton argued especially in his prose for the great capacities of seventeenth-century Englishmen, he was,

31ake recognized in spite of his criticisms of Paradise

Lost, "a true Poet and of the Devil's party . . . ."

The Protestant idea of an "inner light" through v/hich man, unaided by commentaries and priests, can expli­ cate God's words and works was congenial to Milton

(though not in its most radical— Anabaptist--expression) and to 31ake. But, as Northrop Frye has argued, the two poets shared more specific and more pervasive beliefs, beliefs v/hich might have drawn Blake to join Milton to his own partyi . .no one identifies poetry with 1 1 0

prophecy or expresses the responsibility of the creative

artist to God for his genius more clearly than Milton.

Milton's 'liberty' is practically the same thing as

Blake's imagination, and whenever Milton talks about reason he means it in the sense of 'the bound or outward

circumference of Energy* which liberty supplies. Liberty

for Milton is the total release of the whole man, and his main effort in defining it is to break down the parti­ tions in which the timid and cautious attempt to keep its various aspects separate. That is, the 'Christian liberty' of the theologians [imaginatively understood] is not a different thing from political liberty? and the 'liberty to know and utter* inevitably expands into the liberty to love.

Blake's London, like Milton's, was blighted by repressive ideas concerning sexuality, love and marriage— ideas which worked to confine men’s activities into dog­ matic compartments tending only toward imaginative death:

But most thro* midnight streets I hear How the youthful Kariots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse (E 27)

It should not be surprising to find Blake echoing Milton on these themes of intensely human experience. During his lifetime, Milton was notorious most for his "divorce tracts"— an ironic misnomer since they concern the worth Ill

and purpose of a true marriage at least as much as they

argue for liberalized divorce lawsi The longest and

fullest of them, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,

would have attracted Blake with its sustained meta­

phorical richness, its allusions to the Druids, its

insistence on the charity of God (even in His loftiness),

its sense of the contraries of practical living (" for

not to be belov'd & yet retain'd, is the greatest injury

to a gentle spirit": Prose. II, 253) in which one can

not escape the autobiographical resonance, and finally,

its sure sense of the cheerful end for which marriage

was ordained: "... Marriage is a covnant the very

beeing whereof consists, not in a forc't cohabitation,

and counterfeit performance of duties, but in unfained

love and peace” (Prose. II, 25^). From this tract Blake

might have taken the powerful oxymoron of the "Marriage

hearse," v/hich is an effective figure only on the assump­

tion, as Milton allows, that marriage truly so-called

must be a state of life and fruitfulness. To force the

continuance of a bad marriage is to "shut up and immure

together" unsuitable partners against the dictates of

"Christian wisdome and tendernes" (Prose. II, 27^-75)*

"nay, instead of being one flesh, they will be rather

two carkasses chain'd unnaturally together; or as it may happ'n, a living soule bound to a dead corps ..." 112

(Prose, II, 326). Blake illustrates just such a condition of human affairs in the frontispiece to the Visions of the Daughters of Albion (fig. 8 ) which serves as a thematic overture to that poem. "L6

The central situations of the Visions concerns exactly the kind of marriage v/hich Milton argued against.

For Bromion and Oothoon are bound, by Theotormon's jealousy, Oothoon's naivete, and Bromion's ambivalent shame, in a marriage v/hich has only a physical consumma­ tion, dramatically represented as rape: "Bromion rent her with his thunders, on his stormy bed/ Lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appalld his thunders hoarse"

(VDA 1:16-1?). "Marriages of this kind," Thomas Paine had written in his Reflections on Unhappy Marriages.

"are downright prostitution.To Theotormon Oothoon is in fact little better than a whore, and his jealousy over her submission in body to Bromion poisons his love for her. Oothoon also acquiesces in Bromion's judgment:

"behold this harlot here on Bromions bed" (VDA 1:18), and in her "meekness" (VDA 2:5) she howls for punish­ ment from the rending of "Theotormons Eagles" (VDA

2:12-14). In the progress of the poem, these eagles do not merely punish, however; they purify.-*-9 For by means of them Oothoon sees a vision of herself and of

Theotormon that teaches the virtue of her "fall": Fig. 8 t Frontispiece, Visions of the Daughters of Albion 114

I call with holy voice I kings of the sounding air, Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect. The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.

The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey; Theotormon severely smiles, her soul reflects the smile; As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles. (VDA 2 i14-19) As in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the eagle is an

agent of regeneration, helping Oothoon transcend the

muddy visions of Bromion and Theotormon, the corrupt

representatives of fallen passion and dogmatic morality*

. . . the Eagle returns From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east; Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to awake The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon I am pure. (VDA 2*25-28)

By cleansing Oothoon's vision of herself, the eagle

introduces the long remaining section of the poem, v/hich

elaborates Oothoon's no longer meek, though still in part uncertain, ideal of a true conjunction between man and woman— a vision in which each ministers self­ lessly to the needs, including the polygamous sexual needs, of the other.

In this way the Visions of the Daughters of Albion looks forv/ard to the major prophecies, for although

Oothoon's resurrected innocence is not likely to convince either Bromion or Theotormon, and therefore not likely to bring about a social improvement betv/een even two of

Blake's characters, nevertheless Oothoon breaks out of

the partitions of the fallen world of experience and promises a new world in which old dogmas have lost sway.

In this one way, the Visions fulfills the promise of

the Marriage. Moreover, Leutha and Oothoon will re­ appear later in Milton where taken together they function like Vala of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The later poems are statements, hov/ever, while Oothoon leaves us primarily with questions which signify the confusion in her visionary innocence (not the inactive virginity of Thel) facing a muddy world of experience, unable to understand why it does not conform to her insight into 20 how things ought to be. Oothoon has seen the bound­ lessness of the possible, but in the face of the day-to- day and likely, she is still uncertain as to how to bring her vision to reality. Consequently, the Visions of the Daughters of Albion is not, I think, what John

Middleton Murry has called it, a "glorious Magnificat" 21 of sexual liberation.

In two passages the Visions recalls the archetypal garden and parents. Neither passage is so fully developed as to be classed as surely Biblical or Miltonic, but I think this suggests that for some purposes Blake saw little difference between Genesis and Paradise Lost. 116

Oothoon, waiting for Theotormon to relent, asks:

How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure? Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, & the soul prey’d on by woe The new wash'd lamb ting'd with the village smoke & the bright swan By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings. (VDA 3:16-19)

These lines summarize the full range of experience which

Oothoon seeks to share: "the new wash'd lamb" with its connotations of the risen Christ complements "the red earth of our immortal river," an allusion to the literal meaning of Adam, "red clay." And Oothoon's assertion that the ripe fruit worms feed on (with unmistakable undertones of the fruit the serpent offered) is sweetest implies her unashamed acceptance of (at least sexual) maturity. But the key notion in this passage lies in

Oothoon*s belief that she reflects the image of her husband, a belief that implies her need for him and his legitimate superiority over her, not as master to slave but as husband to wife. In Paradise Lost Eve regards her own image in the waters of Eden until the voice of God explains:

. . , What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes; but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy , . , (PL, IV, 467-72) 117

Milton's now unpopular belief concerning marriage,

succinctly expressed in "Hee for God only, she for God

in him," is implied by the fact that Oothoon and Eve

each reflect the images of their husbands, and Blake's

own use of this relationship is furthered by the name

"Theotormon" (emphasis added) as well. That Oothoon, however much she is herself freed from conventional thinking, is still not fully capable of an active life is due in part to the fact that Blake here echoes Milton on the relationship of a man and wife. In part, that

Blake here follows Milton also accounts for Harold 31oom's

judgment, "Visions of the Daughters of Albion hesitates 2? on the threshold of mythopoeic poetry." The character of Oothoon ironically foreshadows Blake's later full conception of the female will in Vala, and the Visions of the Daughters of Albion may be taken as a development of that period between Eve's liberation by a "fall" into sensual enjoyment and the greater "fall"— that is, induction into a just and fulfilling state of exper­ ience, out of which a higher innocence may come— of

Adam. Theotormon is an Adam without love.

The second passage which recalls the garden of

Genesis and Paradise Lost is the opening of Bromion's lamentation, in which he responds to Oothoon's question,

"How can I be defild . . .?"* 118

Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruitj But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth To gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknowni Unknown, not unperceivd .... (VDA ^ 113-1 6 )

Bromion here echoes, ironically, the Devil of the

Carriage who had asked the same question: "How do you know but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way . . .?"

Blake is not suggesting that Bromion is of the Devil's party, in his approbative sense. He has recast the

Devil's question to show how like it is to the tempta­ tion worked by Satan, who promised Eve new sensual gratification were she to know the tree. But Bromion

(who is a contrary to Theotormon, like Satan to Adam in the later prophecies) does not offer imaginative release like the Devil of the Marriage . Instead

(to quote Harold Bloom), he "is cheered by the prospect of an orthodox vision of Hell, an eternal fire in which the harlot Oothoon shall burn . . . In this sense the characterization of Bromion implicitly extends

Blake's criticisms of Paradise Lost, showing the differ­ ence between Blake's Devil and Milton's Satan. Neither

Milton's God nor Milton's Satan is truly merciful; the one punishes man for offending Him, the other teaches man only enough to divorce him from God and subject him 119

to a different masteri as Milton says in the Tenure,

Charles (Milton is, of course, naming only indirectly)

is like Satan, "an old and perfet enemy, who though

he hopes by sowing discord to make them his instru­

ments, yet cannot forbeare a minute the op'n threatning

of his destind revenge upon them, when they have servd

his purposes" (Prose. Ill, 239), Blake's Devil is like

Milton's Satan when Satan exercises his own energy, unlike him when Satan seeks to restrain the energy of others. In this way both Milton's God and Milton's Satan were models for Blake's Urizen.

After Bromion's lamentation (VDA 4 t13-2^) the remainder of the poem is given to one long speech by

Oothoon, also a lamentation, repeated "thus every morning" (VDA 8 ill) to an unrelenting Theotormon, The recurrent purpose of her sighs is to offer him a fruit which his severe jealousy refuses to accepti

I cry, Lovel Love! happy happy Love! free as a mountain wind! Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water? That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weeping all the dayi To spin a web of age around him. grey and hoary 1 dark! Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hanges before his sight. Such is self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed, (VDA ? i16-22) 120

Two questions arise with respect to this speech. The

first concerns the importance of virginity to Blakei

is he, in effect, denouncing that "sage and serious doctrine" through the Visions? Elsewhere, especially in the lyrics "Ah! Sun-flower" and "Abstinence sows

sand all over" and in The Book of Thel. Blake seems to be arguing the absolute importance of sexual exper-

o 1% ience for the growth of the individual. But his con­ cern is primarily with "Desire gratified." The point is that "he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence"

(P7HH 7). And although Blake often talks about virgins, in fact in his mature work he seldom says much about virginity. When he does, his attitude remains constant.

It is clearly expressed in A Song of Liberty where he offers an attack not against virginity but against hypocrisyi

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren whom, tyrant, he calls frees lay the ground or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not! (MHH 25) Theotormon desires Oothoon, but jealousy and his own notion of morality prevent him from acting on his desire.

I suppose he is a virgin; he would be wiser otherwise, and better. Underlying Blake's criticism of him, of the "pale religious letchery" both he and Bromion repre­ sent, and of Thel, to mention only the most obvious 121

examples, is Blake's agreement with Milton that*

I cannot praise a fugitive andcloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall by what is contrary. ( Areo.. Prose. II, 515)

"Without Contraries is no Progression." But as long as

Theotormon restrains his own desire, Oothoon has no real contrary and can not achieve a full consummation of her­ self or of her love for him.

IV

The dialectic of contraries worked more fruitfully in Blake's political writings of the period 1790 to 1795» partly because by that time several successful revolu­ tions had occurred and partly because Blake could repre­ sent both parties— spiritually, Urizen and Ore— to a political revolution as active. At this period on this question it is the. contrasts between Milton's prose writings and Blake's prophetic poems which are important to distinguish the different tasks each poet was about in his political writings. From the evidence of direct borrowing or clear echoes, Blake seems not to have found

Milton's antimonarchical writings to be congenial, except 122

at some general points of agreement. Blake felt, for

example, the goal of government to be the development

of free conditions for a nation of prophets, and he

might have agreed with Milton that "none can love freedom

heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but

license; which never hath more scope or indulgence then

under Tyrants" (TKM, Prose. Ill, 190). He would have

subscribed, equally with Milton, to the assertion that

"No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that

all men were born free, being the image and resemblance

of God himselfe ..." (TKM. Prose. Ill, 198). And, as

Blake believed in "labourpLng^ well the minute particu­

lars," which in one practical way translates into the

dictum to respond to every man, even if he is king, by

judging his particular faults or virtues, he might have

held with Milton, "... who in particular is a Tyrant

cannot be determin'd in a general discours ..." (TKM,

Prose. Ill 197), This last passage from The Tenure of

Kings and Magistrates may have been motivated by the political expediency of not naming names, and in the London where Godwin's Enquiry into Political Justice was licensed for sale only on the supposition that so expensive a pair of volumes would not have a wide enough audience to cause any real political unease, Blake too knew the valor in sometimes keeping his meaning obscure. 123

David Erdman has suggested Blake's "nervous fear of

censorship" and a "Tory hue and cry" as possible causes

for the suppression of The French Revolution, and even

in the important political prophecies of this period,

America and Europe. which were unlikely to have a wide audience, 31ake wrote of "revolution sympathetically, but not plainly,

This is not to say that Blake disagreed with Milton but that he found little in the political writings which he could use, Milton, of course, was addressing an audience at least national in scope and sometimes broader. As a partial consequence, he was obliged to defend his views in treatises dressed out in the rhetoric of serious argument. He propounded theories— could not merely defend the right of a disaffected

England to oppose her kind, most notably in the assassi­ nation of Charles I, without establishing precedents,

"autorities and reasons, not learnt in corners among

Schisms and Heresies, as our doubling Divines are ready to calumniat, but fetch't out of the midst of choicest and most authentic learning, and no prohibited Authors, nor many Heathen, but Mosaical, Christian, Orthodoxal, and which must needs be more convincing to our Adver­ saries, Presbyterial" fTKW. Prose. Ill, I9 8 ), The question of which of Milton's political writings Blake

might have known is not likely to he settled, and perhaps

is not important either to a reading of Blake's poems.

For in the antimonarchical writings is little of the

extended allegory or strong metaphor of Milton's other

proses the nature of the task required a different

decorum, and that one uncongenial perhaps, unuseful as

it seems, unnecessary even, to Blake's work. The reasons

for this range from the determinable fact that Blake could

not have read Milton's major defense of the regicides,

in the Pro Ponulo Analicano Defensio Secunda. because it

was not translated until George Burnett's edition of

Milton's selected prose (2 vols., London) which appeared

in 1809, to the critical judgment that all of the sources

for Blake's achieved myth— the daily London news, Joel

Barlow's Vision of Columbus (1?87), and so on— seldom

passed unchanged through what John Livingston Lowes

might have called the volcanic cauldron of Blake's mind, 2 ^ or the deep well of his imagination.

Nor is this to claim that Blake ignored Milton's

political writings; it is merely to qualify the ways

he learned from and used them. In his Life of Milton.

William Hayley alluded to the passage in the Second

Defense where Milton speaks of his own compositions*

, .he speaks of his treatise on divorce, as forming 125

a part of his progressive labour to vindicate liberty

in various points of view; he considered it in three different shapes, ecclesiastical, domestic, and 27 civil . . . ." In imitation of Milton, Blake may be

said to have made his defences of liberty on the same

fronts, though he less consistently regarded them as separate, especially as time passed and his own vision synthesized them into confrontations with a single enemy. In essence, Blake's hope for a regenerated Albion depended on the belief that "... hostilitie and sub­ jection are two direct and positive contraries" (TKM.

Prose. Ill, 2 3 0 ) which can not reside simultaneously in the same Englishman, and that when republican art had taught the oppressed to understand the mind-forged mechanisms of their oppression, they would overcome them.

But Blake was also increasingly coming to believe, with

Milton's Michael, of the battle between Satan and Christ as of each soul's Armageddon, "Dream not of thir fight/

As of a Duel, or the local wounds/ Of head or heel . ,

(PL, XII, 3 8 6 -8 8 ), lines Blake adumbrated later in Jerusalem.

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 bowl (J 52 t25-28) 1 2 6

The process of Blake's development was an ongoing pro­ cess; and by the time Blake wrote America. Europe. and the other minor prophecies, it had advanced to a pro­ foundly independent stage. The threads of influence become too tangled to unwind, except in a few instances where Blake meant to leave the weaving clear.

The most notable instance of such a conscious willingness on Blake's part is, of course, the frontis- n O piece to Europe, called "The Ancient of Days" (fig. 9).

Keynes dates this etching from 1794, and he goes on to name what are generally agreed to be the sources for the idea of the print, God setting a limit to the uni­ verse at creation. Keynes cites a passage from Proverbs,

"When he prepared the heavens, I was there* when he set a compass upon the face of the depth" (8*27), but adds "it seems probable, however, that the idea was first presented to his mind in the shape in which he saw and drew it by the passage in Paradise Lost." namely*

Then stayed the fervid Wheels, and in his hand He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd In God's Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things* One foot he centred, and the other turn'd Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just Circumference, 0 World. Thus God the Heav'n created, thus the Earth .... (PL, VII, 224-32) 12?

Fig. 9* Frontispiece, Europe, "The Ancient of Days" 128

Both sources v/ere first suggested by John Thomas Smith

in his early biography of Blake. Smith further noted:

"He [Blake] was inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure, by the vision which he declared hovered over his head at the top of his staircase} and he has been frequently heard to say, that it made a more powerful impression upon his mind than all he had ever been visited by. This subject was such a favourite with him, that he always bestowed more time and enjoyed greater pleasure when coloring the print, than any thing o n he ever produced," 7

If we take Smith seriously— and the evidence of the number of elaborately colored single copies of the plate, including the one done in vivid watercolors and gold by Blake on his death bed, suggests that Smith was merely repeating what many understood from Blake himself— then this picture assumes a special importance for the study of Blake,That the subject appeared to him in his strongest vision may be explained by means not impor­ tant here} Lowes described the sources which feed the imagination, invented metaphors ("cauldron," "hooks and eyes," "deep well") to suggest how it worked, but left it otherwise in silence, and took the wiser course.

Still, it is a curious fact that Blake took greater pleasure, often repeated, in coloring a picture of 129

Urizen ("And Urizen .../... formed golden compasses/

And "began to explore the Abyss [BU. 2 0 1JO-kO"] ) than

any other— not Los, nor "The Dance of Albion," the

frontispiece to Jerusalem, nor any other of his works.

This suggests Blake's continuing fascination with the

process of achieving cosmos from chaos, and v/ith the

figure of God— as "Destiny," "Uobodaddy," Urizen, creator,

judge, punisher, or simply the source of all power— as well as his increasing belief, and here I look forward to the concerns of The Four Zoas and Milton, that in

spite of his criticisms of Paradise Lost and the Bible

of Heaven, such a God was justifiable, and had to be

justified, in His ways to men.

If "The Ancient of Days" may be taken as an enig­ matic overture to Blake's work after the period of the minor prophecies, in a sense another plate, page four of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (fig. 10), may be at once prophetic of an important later metaphor in Milton and summative of Blake's sense, in 1790 to 1?95, of

Milton and the tradition Milton represented. The sub­ ject of the lower third of the page, later reused in one of the color-printed drawings, has been variously called "The Good and Evil Angels" and "The Jealousy of

Los," and has been read as depicting the Devil and Angel of the Marriage as contraries, as showing the family of \

Fic;. 10: Plate 4-, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 131

Los (with Enitharmon and the infant Ore), or as picturing Los delivering up a child.to Ore, who is on this last view regarded as the adult figure beside the s u n , ^ Whatever else the picture may be said to show,

I take it that Blake intended as well for this scene to be emblematic of the purpose of the argument which follows in the marriage. Directly after this page Blake began his criticisms of Paradise Lost and Job. Although in some early copies of the Marriage the figure surrounded by flames can see, in the later versions and in the color- printed drawing, Blake regularly drew him blind. In all copies, the chains which bind him are clear, though what he is bound to is usually obscure. His blindness and his fetters make this figure, on one level at least, a spiritual form of Milton himself, who "wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God" (MHK 6).

At this point in the Marriage Blake is criticizing

Milton in order to clear a way for a new dispensation of the Imagination, represented perhaps by the infant in the plate, and Blake may have meant to show the spirit of the new age passing from tradition, in Milton, out of whom it grew, to its new protectors. This plate is like "The

Ancient of Days" in its archetypal simplicity and sub­ limity. But in emphasis and theme it is different.

Blake focussed not on the power of the figures, though 132

there is power in the chained titan on the right, but

on hopefulness in the figures on the left, who are at

liberty. Wherever else they may have disagreed, both

Blake and Milton believed that such liberty was the

essential condition for life. 133

Footnotes for Chanter III

Jerome Bruner, "Myth and Identity" in Henry A. Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking (Bostom Beacon Press, 1 9 6 8 ), p.

2 All citations to Milton*s are to the edition of Douglas Bush, et al., eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven* Yale University Press, 1953” ), cited within the text as Prose. Individual works are indicated with the following abbreviations* Animad., Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence Against Smectvmnuus; Apology, An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d A Modest Confutation . . .j Areo., Areopagitica; Brit., The History of Iritain; DPP, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; Of Ref., Of Reformation; RCG. The Reason of Church Government; and TKLi, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

3 C. A. Patrides, The Phoenix and the Ladder* The Rise and Decline of the Christian View of History, Univer­ sity of California English Studies, no, 29 (Berkeley and Los Angeles* University of California Press, 1964), p. 59.

** Ibid.

^ Frye, p. 160.

8 So most editors gloss this image of the "old wrincl'd skin of corruption"* see Prose. II, 557 and J. Max Patric et al,, eds., The Prose of John Milton (Garden City* Doubleday and Company, 1 9 6 7 ). p. 324. n f There is a considerable critical literature concerning these lines. For summary and recent controversy, see Lee Sheridan Cox, "The 'Ev'ning Dragon' in Samson Agonistes* A Reappraisal," MLN, 76 (1 9 6 1 ), 577-84 and Lynn Veach Sadler, "Typological Imagery in Samson Agonistes* Noon and the Dragon," K L H . 37 (1970), 1 9 5 -2 1 0 .

8 Cox, 582. 134

9 Cox, 583* 10 See John Howard, "An Audience for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Blake Studies. 3 (197°)* 19“52. 11 See Frye, pp. 159- 60 . 12 C. A, Fatrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966) , p ^ 3~,

1 3 Patrides, Tradition, p. 9. Patrides quotes several common statements of this doctrine of accommodation and cites also a large number of authors and works which defend it. 14 A convenient recent explication of Blake's epistemology of inward and outward vision as they join, through a heightening of sensual enjoyment, is to be found in Robert F, Gleckner, "Blake and the Senses," SIR, 5 (1965), 1-15.

1 5 Frye, pp. 158-59. 16 Blake's source for the daughters of Albion may also be found in Milton's prose, where they are actually daughters of Diocletian, "King of Syria": "These Daughters," fifty in number, "by appointment of Danaus on the mariage-night having murder'd all thir Husbands, except Linceus. were by him at the suit of his Wife thir Sister, not put to death, but turn'd out to Sea in a Ship unmann'd; . . . and as the Tale goes, were driv'n on this H a n d . Where the Inhabitants, none but Devils, as som write, or as others, a lawless crew, left heer'by Albion without Head or Governour, both entertain'd them, and had issue by them a second breed of Giants ..." (Frose, V, pt. i, 6- 7 ).

1 7 Quoted by Damon, p. 330. 18 In characterizing Bromion and Oothoon bound back to back as "terror & meekness," Blake establishes two contraries like the clod and the pebble in Songs of Experience: neither has achieved a state of total vision, though by taking the two together, one can infer the outer bounds of one continuum of sensi- 135

bility. John Beer has suggested that the Visions also recall "The Clod and the Pebble" in another line, "As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles" (VDA 2*19), and adds that both poems present a favorite theme of Blake's that "innocence is both self-giving and inviolable"* Blake's Humanism (Manchester* The University Press, 1 9 6 8 ), pp. ^2-^3 . 19 7 For more discussion of Blake's eagles, see Michael J. Tolley, "Some Blake Puzzles— Old and New," Blake Studies, 3 (1971)» 123-2**-. Tolley argues that Blake's usual use of eagles is to represent predatoriness.

20 For an alternate reading of Oothoon's character here, see Harold 31oom, Blake's Apocalypse (Garden City* Doubleday and Company, 1 9 6 3 ), pp. 105-122.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion by William Blake (London and Toronto* J. M, Dent and Sons Limited, 1932), with a note by J, Middleton Murry, p. 19.

22 Bloom, p. 122.

Bloom, p. 118,

oh. Rogder L, Tarr has read Thel and Comus to a different conclusion, but neglects the briefer lyrics I have mentioned as well as Blake's important judgment on virginity and "pale religious letchery" from A Song of Liberty* see "'The Eagle' versus 'the Mole': The Wisdom of Virginity in Comus and The Book of Thel." Blake Studies. 3 (I97I), 187-9**-.

2^ Erdman, Prophet, pp. 1 5 1 -5 2 ,

p /T David Erdman, Prophet. p. 5 6, used Lowes's metaphor in a similar connection and recalled it to me.

^ The Life of Milton . . . bv William Havlev. ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla,* Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), p. 8 5 .

Keynes, Plates, pp. 26-27. See also the chronology in Erdman, Prophet. p. **-97. 136

^ Keynes, Plates., p. 27; and Smith, edited from Kollekens and His Times (1828) in Records, pp. ^7-71.

Keynes, Plates, p. 25» lists a substantial number of handcolored versions of this plate separate from the illuminated book Surope. Of these, the death-bed copy made for Frederick Tatham is now in the Whitworth Institute, Manchester.

Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf 2nd summarize some of these readings in 'William Blake*s Illuminated Books; A Census (New York: The Grolier Club of hew York, 1953)i P. 33- See also Clark Emery, V/ ill jam Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. University of Miami Critical Studies . 1 (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami, 1 9 6 3 ), p. 101. CHAPTER IV

PROPHETIC DREADS URGE ME TO SPEAK

. . . for such a journey none but iron pens Can write and adamantine leaves receive nor can the man who goes The journey obstinate refuse to write time after time --The Four Zoas VI, 71*^1-72*1

When the Lambeth books, his minor prophecies, were

completed in 1795» Blake turned away from poetry for perhaps a year or two and worked instead to express himself in pictures, David Erdman has suggested that

Blake sought to "devote all his energy to an ambitious attempt, in a more silent art, to combine prophetic terror with pursuit of the main chance," that is, the chance of success with a projected Atlas folio of

Edward Young’s Night Thoughts for which Blake prepared more than five hundred v/ater-color drawings.'1' But even though Blake's intent may have been financial success, he pursued the Night Thoughts venture with an eye unusually strict in its single-mindedness. For except­ ing the twenty-two completed engravings which appeared in the publisher Richard Edwards's edition of the first

137 138

part of Young's poem (1796) and Blake's three engravings

for Burger's Leonora (also 1796)# Blake is known to

have virtually no other commercial work from 1795 "to o 1797•" The reasons for this will not be satisfactorily

established. Of course, the size of the job for Edwards

is the major cause for Blake's concentration of effort, but it is unlike Blake’s earlier habits for him not to have sketched or penned any other significant work which can be dated from this time.

There is, however, considerable evidence to suggest an internal ferment in Blake at this time, the working of an intellectual dialectic which did not find form or language until he began the greatest unfinished work of his life, the manuscript poem Vala which he was later to rename The Four Zoas. It is not helpful to suppose that Blake had planned the minor prophecies as works preliminary to his major poems. For Blake we lack the careful commonplace-book outlines of possible epic subjects on which the Miltonist can rely when showing the intensive purpose of the earlier poet's self-instruction. Blake's allusion in The Marriage of

Heaven and Hill to "The Bible of Kelli which the world shall have whether they will or no" (KHH 2^) can be taken to refer solely to the minor prophecies which, as John Beer has shown, retell the events of Genesis 139 and Exodus and are thematically both Law and Prophets.

In early parts of the Vala draft of Blake's poem, the tone is contrary to the audacity of the Carriage; for indeed, there are suggestions in The Four Zoas that

Blake, in the later years of the eighteenth century, was a reluctant poet. In the third night of The Four

Zoas, which was the second part of the earlier Yala and among the first sections of the poem to be composed,

Albion in terror saysi

Why roll the clouds in sick'ning mists, I can no longer hide The dismal vision of mine Eyes, 0 love & life & light! Prophetic dreads urge me to speak. futurity is before me Like a dark lamp. Eternal death haunts all my expectation, (FZ III, ^1*5-9)

Blake's character Albion, though seldom truly predic­ tive of his own destiny, is here made to foretell accur­ ately a period of trial in his days to come. Regarded as historical allegory, the lines foretell the fall of

England into the political turmoil of Blake's generation.

They could equally well apply to Blake himself, who was taking up again "the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse" (TZ_ I, 3*2, a line which may owe its martial optimism to the fact that it was probably written later than Fights II through IV). Beginning Vala. Blake

"still wrote in fear of the shadow of Pitt's Inquisition 1*K> across his page . . . , as David Erdman notesi but I want to suggest that the reasons Blake did not set about

Vala until 179?» the date on the title page, were not merely commercial or political, that he may have kept from writing in part because he believed his poetic task, or at least one unit of it, was finished, the

Bible of the Lambeth books laboriously prepared in full, and in part because he was not yet ready in mind to do another work.

Gerald Bentley's important edition of The Four Zoas is more than a facsimile and transcript of a complex manuscript, one which late in life Blake gave to his friend John Linnell, "no doubt because he knew that he would be the one most likely to appreciate and preserve it . . . . Bentley characterizes it as "more than the fragments of a great poem. It is the workshop of an extraordinary poet, with chips and broken tools left about among the pieces of the partly completed master­ piece."^ But even this implies simply that the artist had difficulty with' his materials, that he left the piece uncompleted because of a peculiarity in his attractive but unusually intractable marble. In fact, the poem is a record of nothing less than the major intellectual shift in Blake's entire creative life.

The period of composition of The Four Boas is the period 14-1

in which Blake came fully to understand and name the visionary way out of the morass of the fallen created world which he recorded in the Lambeth prophecies.

The word "imagination" appears only once in the works 7 Blake published previously to Hilton. While writing

Vala. or revising it elaborately into The Four Zoas,

Blake began to conceive of the imagination as "the

Divine-Humanity" (J 7O 1I9 ), creator of the real world

"of which this world of mortality is but a shadow"

(J 71»19) and therefore the means of spiritual regener­ ation and the agent which brings about apocalypse, and which conceives and justifies apocalyptic poetry, in this world.

The dramatic development of Blake's notion of the imagination may be suggested by the sudden appearance of the word— used eight times— in his letter to Doctor

Trusler, on 23 August 1799» a letter which roughly coincides with the "sudden illumination, which shook him ^Blake] like an earthquake" that H. H. Hargoliouth says occurred in late 1799 or early 18001 "This is the point at which the rebel became the prophet .... The conversion was a double one, of man and wife. The divine vision was a vision of the divine and of them­ selves in it. From the simple Christianity of the Lamb 142

in Songs of Innocence and from the insight of To Tirzah

Blake had for a tine fallen away. ‘He saw his error. He

experienced a 'last judgment.' He had been wrong in

attacking religion as such. Henceforth . . . his attack

is on perverted religion, on Deism masquerading as Q Christianity." The evidence of manuscript changes, mostly additions, in The Four Zoas corroborates Kar- goliouth's judgment in a general way, though it is probable that the "conversion" was a much more gradual process than he suggests, and a rather less extreme one.

A measurable indicator of this shift in attitude involves

Blake's increased use of Biblical names. Bentley writes,

"Of . . . sixty-five Biblically derived words, forty- two appear only in added sections, eighteen are found only in Night VIII or added passages, and two specifically

Christian names (Jesus and Jerusalem) are in Nights VIII and IX. Except for these Christian names, only Beulah,

Eden, Tirzah, and Rahab appear more than once or twice, and Tirzah and Rahab are found only in Night VIII. These last two names and’ Ijim, Adam, Noah, Lebanon, Jerusalem, and Eden are the only Biblical names Blake had used in his prophetic works composed before Vala. Thus the evidence of the Biblical words used in Vala suggests that at some time during the composition or revision of the poem Blake became absorbed with the significance of 1^3

Old Testament names, and rewrote Night VIII partly to

Q express this interest,"'' Bentley finds eleven Old

Testament names were added late to early portions of

the poem, "surely an indication that Blake became

interested in them only at a very late stage in the rewriting ....

This evidence, together with our knowledge that

The Pour Zoas was in process for perhaps ten years,

from 1797 until late in the first decade of the nine­

teenth century, indicates a slow but major reorientation in Blake's thinking. For the changes in the manuscript conform generally to another pattern as well: ", , ,

Blake was only gradually convinced of the applicability of the Christian myth to his own prophecies. At first he began with Christian parallels (as in the crucifix­ ion of Luvah . . and comparisons (as when Vala is called 'Melancholy Magdalen' . . .), but slowly the changes became more central. Finally, he introduced a directing agency external to the four Zoas ('the Council of God'), which effected a profound change upon the meaning and direction of his poem."1'*’ We have already seen how closely Paradise Lost and the orthodox 3ible were related in Blake's mind. It is a special evidence of the conjunction in which he understood both works that a similar pattern, a complementary one, shows in 144

the ways he used Miltonic motives to integrate the Judeo-

Christian myth into his own evolving mythology.

Paradise Lost and the Christian Bible were, for

Blake, inspired poetry, histories of the human conscious­

ness, and therefore prophecy. In 1797 the Bishop of

Landaff's Apology for the Bible appeared, arguing over

the prophetic truths of scripture, and "in this year

1798" Blake read and annotated it. There he wrote "To me who believe the Bible & profess myself a Christian

. . ." (E 6 0 3), and there he subscribed his important

definition of prophecy* "Prophets in the modern sense

of the v/ord have never existed Jonah was no prophet in

the modern sense for his prophecy of Nineveh failed

Every honest man is a prophet he utters his opinions both of private & public, matters Thus If you go on So

the result is So He never says such a thing Shall happen

let you do what you will, a Prophet is a Seer not an

Arbitrary Dictator" (E 606-0 7 ), This definition of prophecy is consonant with the tradition of the exempla. in which Milton wrote his History of Britain, for it implies that a man of insight can predict that if a nation goes on So, the result is So, in terms of which assumption Blake's earlier works were written. Such an insight, during the last years of the eighteenth cen­ tury, gave Blake "prophetic dreads" which urged him to 1*5

take up his pen again.

To write what? The spiritual -history of his own

times, as represented in the internal battles, the 12 psychomachia of Albion. Blake conceived Vala m the

tradition of Spenser: it is also the tradition in which

he understood Moses and Milton. Blake's long polemical

response to 3ishop Watson's Apology is relevant here.

Watson had written, "What if I should admit that SAMUEL,

or EZRA . . . composed these books C"the pentateuchl ,

from public records, many years after the death of Moses?

. , . every fact recorded in them may be true . .

(Blake's emphasis added). Blake lashed back:

Nothing can be more comtemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be True Read them & Judge, if you are not a Pool. Of what consequence is it whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or no . . . PUBLIC RECORDS as If Public Records were True Impossible for the facts are such as none but the actor could tell, if it is True Moses & none but he could write it unless we allow it to be Poetry & that poetry inspired (E 607)

Blake had come to believe that Genesis, Exodus, Paradise

Lost and his own Vala were true because they were poetry, and that poetry inspired.

Writing to Thomas Butts just before returning from

Felpham (25 April I8O3 ), Blake declared: "I have in thede three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme, Similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's 146

Paradise Lost, the Persons & Machinery intirely new to

the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted)."

Geoffrey Keynes indicates that this "no doubt refers

to the long symbolic poem Milton,3ut a likelier

candidate is The Four Zoas which Blake had begun in

London but substantially completed at Felpham, with the

writing of Milton (at least the two book version now

known) intervening in the work on the longer poem,

perhaps after the composition of Night IX, before the

wholesale revision and recopying of Night VIII, "Milton

was probably written in some haste and partly engraved

in 1804 [that is, after the return to London^ » though

it was added to for several years," and while the

revisions of The Four Zoas probably continued until

about 1810, little or none of I.'ilton was done by 2 5 April

I8O3 , and virtually all of The Four Zoas was finished in 14 at least some stage of drafting.

Blake's poem "Similar to . , . Milton's Paradise

Lost" was therefore some stage of Vala or The Four Zoas.

And his belief expressed in the same letter to Butts

that his poem, "which seems to be the Labour of a long

Life, all produc'd without Labour or Study," was less

his work than the design of some power outside himself

implies the directing agency external to the four Zoas*

"I mention this to shew you what I think the Grand llj-7

Reason of my being brought down here,'*

"I have written this poem," Blake wrote to 3utts,

"from immediate Dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty

or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even

against my Will , . . ." Like Urizen in Night VI, Blake

had gone "the journey obstinate" from time to time, but

when the job was nearly done, he could say "I perceive

that the sore travel [perhaps a slip for 'travail,'

but 'the journey obstinate' implies Blake meant what

he wrote} which has been given me these three years

leads to Glory & Honour" (see FZ VI, 72il). And futurity, which had hung before Albion "like a drak lamp," was now a source of joy: "My heart is full of futurity , . .

I rejoice & I tremble . , . . For Blake knew himself to have produced "an immense poem" by inspiration, a poem which belonged beside Genesis and Paradise Lost, which was in fact a correction of them, a revision for his own times. And it was true, not perhaps in the limited sense which Bishop Y/atson admired, but in a spiritual sense: "If historical facts can be written by inspira­ tion Milton's Paradise Lost is as true as Genesis, or

Exodus, But the Evidence [of public records} is nothing

. . (E 607). 1^8

II

When Blake claimed that The Four Zoas was similar to Paradise Lost* he was acknowledging the debt to Hilton which is clear throughout that poem. It is manifest in many local ways, from the occasional borrowing of an image or phrase to the reworking of some of Hilton's major characters, to the revision--literally, the new ways Blake saw again the visionary moments of Paradise

Lost— of events in the earlier poem to suit the terms of Blake's conception of man's real, essential condi­ tion. These elements from Hilton worked into Blake's poem much in the way Blake came gradually to incorporate significant names and incidents from the Bible. Blake’s attitudes toward Hilton's ideas were ambivalent throughout the poetry he wrote before 1797* He found much energy to admire in Hilton's conception of liberty, but Blake saw in men a capacity for freedom which contradicted

Hilton's structured world, yet which Blake took as absolutely important and true, Blake implies that there existed a tension between the spiritual form of Hilton and his own, for Hilton could write in fetters and he himself would not. Nevertheless, by the time he had completed The Four Zoas, Blake was willing to serve as a vessel for the reincarnation of Hilton's poetic and prophetic spirit, even if, as he tells us in Hilton, it 1^9

had first to pass through the purgatory of a hundred

years of wandering. This shift in. Blake's acceptance

of the example of the earlier poet is anticipated by

the ways he found Milton's work usable in the evolution

of his own thought.

It is not possible to trace that evolution exactly,

or with certainty about when specific details might have

become part of the final composite, nor even to be sure

to v/hat degree of near completion the manuscript as we

have it had been brought, But scholars have reached

general agreement about the sequence of priority of

major portions of the poem, although they disagree

about appropriate dates for those portions. The

earliest part of The Pour Zoas to be done included

Mights I, II, III, IV, Night V to Urizen's repentance,

the first version of Might VII (called Vllb in Erdman's

edition), and most of Might IX (from line 90 to the end).

Within this portion, the present Might I is later than

the present Might II, which in the manuscript is twice

called "Might the First," Blake seems to have intended

to begin Vala with the present Might II; later he added part of what is nov; Might I, and in the final stages of

composition, when most of the poem was done, he heavily reworked Might I, in its final form a part of the last work Blake did on The Four Zoas. 1 7 150

In a second phase of composition, Blake "sprinkled the manuscript with emendations, replacing stern pro­ phetic wrath with exuberant Christian forgiveness," revised the end of Night V, and wrote Might VI, a second version of Might VII (that is, Might Vila in Erdman's edition) and the first eighty-nine lines of Night IX.

The final phase of composition included some revisions throughout the poem (heavily in Might I) and the writing, or at least the recopying, presumably with corrections, of Might VIII. From internal evidence, especially the references to "the torments" of the Ancient Kan, Might

VIII appears to have been written against the background of renewed war, suggesting a date of composition coinci­ dent v/ith the Peace of Amiens. The dating of Might VIII from 180E has been accepted by all parties, but Blake may have continued to add -passim to the manuscript for several years thereafter,

V/ithin the framework of these generally recognized phases of composition, there is much room for argument about the priority of details or whole passages, and it is necessary to prefix any reading of the poem with

David Erdman's caveat 1 "The complexities of the ms, in short, continue to defy analysis and all assertions about meaningful physical groupings or chronologically definable layers of composition or inscription must be 151

1 fi understood to rest on partial or ambiguous evidence.'

Even in outline, then, a tracing of the development of the influence of Milton on Blake in the course of

The Four Zoas may verge on the palpable obscure, but there is an occasional guidepost even for the way through

Chaos. In the sections of the manuscript which were first to be composed, Blake depended on Milton's example. At the opening of Might III, for example, Urizen casts off his Emanation Ahania, treating her, as Harold Bloom remarks, "as if she were Sin to his Satan in Paradise 19 Lost . . . ." 7 Similarly, the lament of Urizen in

Night V builds on the contrast between his former state in Eternity and his present fallen condition: the theme appears throughout Book I of Paradise Lost, as when one reads of Satan,

. , , his form had not yet lost All her Original brightness, nor appear'd Less than Arch-Angel ruin'd, and th'excess Of Glory obscur'd .... (PL I, 591-9*0 This tone is clearer in the lament of Ahania in Night II, where she recalls Eternity to Urizen:

. . . these dens thy wisdom framd Golden ft beautiful but 0 how unlike those sweet fields of bliss Where liberty was justice ft eternal science was mercy, (F2 II, 39*9-11) lines which echo Satan's lament in Hell, "If thou beest hee; But 0 how fall'nj how chang'd" (PL I, 84), And in Night II, Blake repeats the image of the compasses which measure the fallen world, an image-he has by now made

his own* "... measured out in ordered spaces the Sons

of Urizen/ With compasses divide the deep ..." (FZ I,

2 8 *31-3 2 ). Immediately after this, after the fall of

Tharmas and the building of the created world, Blake

describes the building of "the Golden Hall of Urizen"

(II, 30*8-22) with clear echoes of the building of

Pandaemoniurn (PL I, 670 ff.), an appropriate correspon­

dence since both are types of Hell,

Most of these parallels are used for a kind of epic

effect in The Four Zoas. With them Blake joins his poem

to the epic tradition in much the way that Spenser joins

a tradition by echoing Virgil in the opening invocation

to The Faerie Queene or that Milton invokes an epic

resonance through the rev/orking of epic conventions.

In the earliest echoes of Milton in Vala Blake adds the

authority of tradition to the verse. Also but less often,

Blake writes as on a palimpsest of literary precedents

so that his revisions of Milton's poetry and thought

imply and echo what they correct or adumbrate. The

description of the separation of Los from his Emanation

Enitharmon is obviously dependent on Milton's account

of the creation of Eve, But the dreamlike easiness in

the birth of Eve and God's mercy then are in obvious 153

contrast to the pain or selfhood forming in the birth

of Enitharmon:

0 hov/ Los hov/ld at the rending asunder all the fibres rent Where Enitharmon joind to his left side in grinding pain He falling on the rocks bellowd his Dolor, till the blood Stanch'd, then in ululation waild his woes upon the wind. (FZ IV, 49:7-10; cf. PL VIII, 452-90)

The same implied overlay of one incident from Blake on

another from Milton appears in the description by the

Spectre of Urthona of the coming to life of Enitharmon,

which also recalls Eve's first awakening (FZ. IV, 49:24-

50:27).

Perhaps the most intricately revised and developed

passages from Paradise Lost to appear in the early draft

of The Four Zoas concern the activities of the angels,

both faithful and fallen. Blake conflates two sections

of Milton's poem into an elaborate parody which is also

a serious indictment of his own century's scientistic

thinking. After the council in Pandaemonium the leader-

less hosts break into groups which try various games or sing or philosophize or wander to measure the confines of their new environment (PL II, 506-6 2 8 ), Milton com­ pares this diversity of activity with the orderliness and unified behavior of angels in prelapsarian Heaven.

Raphael, explaining the war in Heaven to Adam, recounts the heavenly business that followed God's anointing of 15^ the Messiahi

That day, as other solemn days, they spent In song and dance about the sacred Hill, Mystical dance, v/hich yonder starry Sphere Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheels Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem: And iii thir motions harmony Divine So smooths her charming tones, that God's own ear Listens delighted. (PL Y, 618-2?)

As a God is, so He creates, Blake regarded ominously the Deistical regularity of the mechanism Milton calls

Heaven, and reworked it, in light of post-Miltonic physics, to stress the Urizenic directions implicit in

Milton's description.

The legions of Urizen march in a Hell devised by the natural philosophers of Blake's century, a universe where the zodiac of "mathematic motion wondrous" directs their geometric dance:

In sevens & tens & fifties, hundreds, thousands numberd all According to their various powers. Subordinate to Urizen And to his sons in their degrees & to his beauteous daughters

Travelling in silent majesty along their orderd ways In right lined paths outmeasurd by proportions of number weight And measure, mathematic motion wondrous, along the deep In fiery pyramid, or Cube, or unornamented pillar Of fire far shining, travelling along even to its destind end Then falling down, a terrible space recovring in winter dire 155

Its wasted strength, it back returns upon a nether course Till fired with ardour fresh recruited in its humble season It rises up on high all summer till its wearied course Turns into autumn. such the period of many worlds Others triangular right angled course maintain. others obtuse Acute Scalene, in simple paths, but others move In intricate ways biquadrate. Trapeziums Rhombs Rhomboids Parallelograms, triple & quadruple, polygonic In their amazing hard subdued course in the vast deep. (FZ II, 33*19-36) In such places as Milton's Heaven or Urizen's Kell,

where everything is circumscribed by destiny, Blake

saw the dangers of Milton's Hell, that in their dull

round, their "wearied course," they would become "A

Universe of death" (PL II, 622).

' III

But in spite of his criticisms of the Deists and of

Deism in Milton, Blake began to come to terms v/ith the

necessity, the "destin'd end," which this long section

from Night II describes. In a passage which Blake added

to the same page of Night II, perhaps at the same time

that he v/rote this elaborate geometrical section, he explains: 156

For the Divine Lamb Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision Permitted all lest Man should fall into Eternal Death For when Luvah sunk down himself put on the robes of blood Lest the state calld Luvah should cease. & the Divine Vision Walked in robes of blood till he who slept should awake. (FZ II, 33:11-15) The Divine Vision tolerates the complicated dance of

Urizen's legions because without mercy man is hopelessly

lost to eternal death. The mercy of Jesus requires Kis

own self-sacrifice, ultimately on the Tree of Mystery

but here in the renunciation of Eternity to walk "in

robes of blood," a "Divine Lamb" surrendering to the

thicket of the fallen world. The tone of Blake's

description of the dance is less caustic than his earlier

criticisms of the fetters in which Milton occasionally

wrote, gentler, say, than the black curses of Tiriel

which result from the One Lav/ of the God of Milton and

Genesis. Blake is coming to explain in his own terms

the harsh necessity of this world— that is, to justify

the v/ays of God to man.

At this point in the composition of Vala the central

issue became the explanation and perhaps the justifica­

tion of the first fall. Christ's infinite mercy inter­ venes to protect the fallen Luvah and will continue to

intervene even as Luvah falls further and further from 157

his Eternal state. The world of the mundane shell is better than the world of Eternal Death, But Luvah's fall is only a consequence of an earlier fall* why had there to be a first fall, the fall of Tharmus? In his earlier writings Blake had already rejected one of Milton's answers. For Blake, man did not fall because he sought to know too muchi "The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite" (E 2),

Satan was good to offer knowledge to Adam and Eve, and they v/ere right to take it. God's tyrannical possessive­ ness is not an issue in The Four Zoas. and Blake does not use the myth of the Tree of Knowledge to characterize the first fall.

Instead, he wrote about Tharmas and Enion and lodged v/ith them the cause of the "fall into Division . , . into the Generation of Decay & Death" (FZ I, 3*4-5),

Men are in bondage— the lament of Vala as she builds the mundane shell is modelled on the plight of Israel making bricks in Egypt (FZ II, 31*4-16)--because of an internal human fauit, as Night I was written to explain.

Perhaps sin did not have to come into the world, but in the world it is and Blake was obliged to account for it, Blake's poem about fall and generation had to take the form of a psychomachia, and Vala was no longer his title character because in the multiplicity which battle 158 implies, she is subordinate to the "Four Mighty Ones . . , in every Man" (FZ, I, 3*.^). Blake changed his title to show the new direction his poem was to takes "VALA / OR /

The Death and / Judgement / of the / Ancient Man / a

DREAM / of Nine Nights" became "The Four Zoas / The torments of Love & Jealousy . . . ."

In Paradise Lost Milton treats the birth of sin-- one cause of the fall— tv/ice, in the allegorical passage in Book II when Sin tells of her own genesis, identify­ ing herself and Death to Satan, and in the moot character­ ization of changes in Eve before the fall, after the suggestion in the dream she hears from Satan metamor­ phosed to a toad. In each case Milton implies what

Michael later explains of the battles which Christ and

Satan will always fight over the souls of men: whatever external consequences they will ultimately have, essen­ tially they are internal battles, not "a duel, or the local wounds/ Of head or heel" (PL XII, 387-8 8 ), Blake's epigram to The Fcur Zoas makes the same point: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against prin­ cipalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12), Consistent with these battle grounds the goal for1men, for Milton and for

Blake, is a return to Paradise, not that of the Garden 159

but "a paradise within thee, happier far" (PL XII, 58?)•

To achieve it Adam and his seed must, to "knowledge

answerable,"

. , , add Faith, Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call'd Charity, the soul Of all the rest . . . , (PL XII, 581-85)

For Blake it was a lapse from faith and love, not dis­

obedience to a tyrant's law, that brought on Adam and

Eve and on mankind after them "Death Despair & Ever­

lasting brooding Melancholy" (EZ I, ^33). Considering

the outcome, Eve's question to Adam on the morning of

the fall is bitterly ironic: "And what is Faith, Love,

Virtue unassay'd/ Alone, without exterior help sustain’d?"

(PL IX, 335“36). For her "Faith, Love, Virtue" are unequal to the trial. She falls beside the tree because

she is spiritually weak. Blake might have said she lacked imagination, that she could not see as God,

In a fair copy of "Auguries of Innocence" made about

1803, Blake was to write "If the Sun & Moon should doubt /

Theyd immediately Go out" (11, 109-10, E ^8 3 ). And much later he explained the sleep of the soul, his continuing metaphor for spiritual weakness, in The Everlasting Gospel:

V/hen the Soul fell into Sleep And Archangels round it weep Shooting out against the Light Fibres of a deadly night Reasoning upon its own dark Fiction In doubt which is Self Contradiction .... (E 512) 160

For doubt, "reasoning upon [ones] own dark Fiction,"

is both cause and first sign of a fall from the inte­

grating vision of the imagination. This is E v e ’s fault,

not Satan's (who fell from Pride according to Milton,

but for Blake, "Yfhat I calld Humility they calld Pride"

Qe 51°lf and humility, which Milton called a virtue

for Adam, "is only doubt/ And does the Sun & Moon blot

out" [s 5121), Love and liberty are states of the soul

conditional upon full visionary integration. The disin­

tegrated psyche, represented by the division of the four

Zoas, knows only pity, terror, hatred, and "stern demands

of Right & Duty" (F2 I, 4:13-19). A lapse in faith, for

Milton and for 31ake, is at heart a lapse in love, "the

soul of all the rest."

Analysis, prompted by doubt, discovers sin not

because sin was there before the analytical intro­

spection but because analysis born of doubt sees what

doubt by nature has to see. The method makes the message,

and as a man sees, so he finds himself to be. Both

Tharmas and Enion exemplify this truth. The fait accompli with v/hich The Four Zoas opens involves the fear and self-doubt of Tharmas, to which Enion responds,

Once thou wast to Me the loveliest son of Heaven— But now . . . I have lookd into the secret soul of him I lovd And in the Dark recesses found Sin & cannot return, (FZ I, 4:20, 26-27) 161

The allusion to Satan is unmistakable. Like Satan,

Tharmas was once "the loveliest son of Heaven," but by

examining his soul, Enion finds sin, just as Sin was

born from out of the mind of Satan, Now Tharmas,

Urizen-like and imitative of Milton's Urizenic Creator

as Blake drew Him in the "Ancient of Days,"

Weeping, then bending from his Clouds he stoopd his innocent head And stretching out his holy hand [what the religious call good was born at the same moment as sinj in the vast Deep sublime Turnd round the circle of Destiny with tears & bitter sighs. ( m I, 5*9-11) Enion weaves from Tharmas his Spectre (6:1-2) and Sin-

like, couples v/ith it, conceiving Los and Enitharmon.

Again, Blake's image is Miltonic:

. . , Exalted in terrific Pride Opening his rifted- rocks mingling together they join in burning anguish Mingling his horrible darkness with her tender limbs then high she soard Shrieking above the ocean: a bright wonder that nature shudderd at Half ’Woman & half beast .... (PZ I, 6:8-7:4f cf. PL II, 650-60)

In short Blake conflates the images v/ith which Milton

symbolized the birth of Sin and Death from Satan and the nature of the birth of sin in Eve, in order to account for and describe the sin of Tharmas and Enion,

It is a mark of Blake's thoroughgoing humanism that he uses the Miltonic materials in order to focus on man's 162 predominant role in his own fall. The command or sug­

gestion of no external being excuses man from respon­

sibility for the hateful war of contraries which plagues him.

Tharmas is therefore more like Milton's Satan than like Milton's Adam. Like Lucifer in Heaven, Tharmas in

Eternity enjoyed the highest visionary states he was like Christ. And the sin to which Tharmas succumbs is at bottom the sin to which Satan tempts Christ in

Paradise Regained. Satan would have Christ doubt

Himself, v/ould have Him reason upon His own dark fiction until He required for His own self-reassurance the material signs of His spiritual nature by which Satan would have Him identify and destroy Himself. As its argument foretells, Paradise Regained proves Christ

"th'undoubted Son of God" (PR I, 11) because He never lacks visionary strength. Satan wishes to lead Him not to a revolt of will like his own, but to a misstep, a deviation. Such a notion of sin has Biblical author­ ity. The commonest Old Testament words for sin stem from the Hebrew root -ht*, the basic meaning of which is "to miss the mark, to deviate, to fall," and >awon, another common word for sin, also suggests a deviation or distortion. Milton reflects the same notion when he observes in the De Doctrina Christiana that every act 163 is good in itself* "it is only the irregularity, or deviation from the line of right, which, properly 20 speaking, is evil." Blake could not have known the treatise on Christian doctrine, hut we must assume that he was deeply read in Paradise Regained. Still, what­ ever lessons for Tharmas Blake may have drawn from the brief epic, it was to Paradise Lost that he consistently turned for the imagery to build the mythic syntaxes of his own poem.

Blake draws Los and Enitharmon, born from the coupling of Enion and the Spectre of Tharmas, as a revalued Adam and Eve in a paradise manque *

Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time And drew it out to Seven thousand years v/ith much care & affliction And many tears & in Every year made windov/s into Eden , , .

. . . Los & Enitharmon delighted in the Moony spaces of Eno Nine Times they livd among the forests, feeding on sweet fruits And nine bright Spaces wanderd weaving mazes of delight Snaring the wild Goats for their milk they eat the flesh of Lambs A male & female naked & ruddy as the pride of summer Alternate Love & Kate his breast; hers Scorn & Jealousy In embryon passions, they kiss'd not nor embrac'd for shame & fear His head beamd light & in his vigorous voice was prophecy He could controll the times & seasons,.& the days & years She could controll the spaces, regions, desart, flood & forest 164

But had no power to weave a Veil of covering for her Sins. (FZ I', 9*9-11, 19-3 0 )

This Eden (which is not the state of four-fold vision Blake later coneeived of) is our own world of "Seven

thousand years," v/arped from Milton's pastoral paradise.

More specifically, Los identifies Blake's intended locus

later in the poem: ", . . in the Brain of Man we live,

& in his circling Nerves./ . . , this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain" (£Z. I, 11:15-16).

Los and Enitharmon spend their days "among the forests" ("And let us to our fresh imployments rise/ Among the Groves ..."C£L V, 125-26]), but their delight is in "weaving mazes." They dine on fruits

("And Eve within, due at her hour prepar'd/ For dinner savoury fruits , . ." C f L V, 303-041), but the milk they drink is gotten by "Snaring the wild Goats," and "they eat the flesh of Lambs." Man and woman, naked and ruddy, nevertheless "they kiss'd not nor embrac'd for shame & fear" (". . . nor turn’d I ween/ Adam from his fair

Spouse, nor Eve the Rites/ Mysterious of connubial Love refus'd" £ PL IV, ?4l-43]]). Milton's Eden and especially the "wedded Love" of Adam and Eve was intended as a corrective to the paradises envisioned by theological hypocrites (Milton's word in PL IV, 744-45)* Blake's 165

Eden in the "Moony spaces of Eno" is a hypocrite's

delight, except that Enitharmon has "no power to weave

a Veil of covering for her Sins," Blake's comparison is

obvious: in Genesis the Lord God makes coats of skins

for Adam and Eve, and Milton adumbrates,

, , , so now As Father of their Family he £Christ] clad Thir nakedness with Skins of leasts .... For hee thir outward only with the Skins Of 3easts, but inward nakedness, much more Opprobrious, with his Bobe of righteousness Arraying cover'd from his Father's sight, (PL X, 215-17, 220-23) Faithless and without charity, Los and Enitharmon recognize their guilty nakedness but seek a false "Veil" with which to cover it. They reject true love because they cannot conceive it justly: Enitharmon claims

"thorns & bitter roots" are the food of "sweet love"

(F2 I, 10:6). Instead of a gentle Christ come as inter­ cessor to clothe her, Enitharmon sees only her perverted vision of Luvah and brings about the accession to power of the egocentric tyrant Urizen. Blake modelled this section of the poem (FZ I, 9»3^-12:8) on Genesis and on

Milton's account of Christ’s judgment in Book X of

Paradise Lost. Enitharmon recounts it as a dream, for in sleep,

. . . in visions of Vala I walkd with the mighty Fallen One £Luvah] I heard his voice among the branches, & among sweet flowers 166

Why is the light of Enitharmon darken'd in dewy morn [.Luvah asksl Why is the silence of Enitharmon a terror . , , (FZ I, 10:15-19? cf. Genesis 3*8-9 and PL X, Q2-ll*0

Here Luvah's questions especially recall the questioning

of Christ, Luvah (his name implies that in Eternity he

was fully integrated and remorseless physical and

spiritual love) is a sacrifice who, for the sake of Los

and Enitharmon, "refusd to look upon the Universal

Vision" and appears instead "in visions of Vala" (FZ I,

10:23, 15). The greatest perversion of true imagination

is the reduction of Luvah to Vala's fallen companion,

under the command of Urizen whom Blake, recalling

Lucifer, names "Prince of Light" (FZ. I, 12:30). At the

moment when Enitharmon wills the supreme Godhood of

Urizen, as when Eve tasted of the Tree,

A Groan was heard on high. The v/arlike clarions ceast, the Spirits Of Luvah & Vala shudderd in their Orb: an orb of bloodl

Eternity Groand & was troubled at the Image of Eternal Death, (FZ I, 12:2-^)

Blake used two passages from Book IX of Paradise Lost for models here. After Eve tasted, "Earth felt the wound, and Mature from her seat/ Sighing through all her

Works gave signs of woe,/ That all was lost" (PL IX,

782-8^), and when Adam joined her, 167

Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Sky lov/'r'd, and muttering Thunder, some sad drops Wept at completing of the mortal Sin Original .... (PL IX, 1000-04-)

Only at this point in Night I does Blake enthrone a God like Milton's to oversee the chaos of human history: "I am God from Eternity to Eternity . . . the terrible destroyer & not the Saviour" (FZ. I, 12:23, 26). Before him Los and Enitharmon celebrate the communion of sex, and Blake’s allusion to the reenactment of a human sacrifice in the mass is clear* "he threw his arms around her loins .... They eat the fleshly bread, they drank the nervous wine" (FZ. I, 12*4-2-4-4-). Love has become devouring* religion is hid in war.

' IV

Between the composition of Nights II through IV and the early drafts of Night I, Blake found purpose and use for Miltonic materials both more extensively and more significantly than previously, as the fore­ going discussion of Night I suggests. The achievement of Night I is an expression, to borrow a phrase from

T. S. Eliot, of Blake's "historical sense"* "the his­ torical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling 168

that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer

and v/ithin it the whole of the literature of his own

country has a simultaneous existence and composes a

simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a

sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of

the timeless and of the temporal together [Eliot might

almost here be glossing Blake on prophecy^ , is what makes

a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his contem- 21 poraneity." A poet can use traditional materials yet not be traditional, in Eliot's high sense, as Elake himself shows in some of his simple borrowing of details which echo Milton, The poet who drops an allusion merely to show his recent reading or to repeat a favorite image from an admired predecessor is like the man of limited vision who sees with his eyes. In finding a place in his own mythology for the images and ideas of Milton, who almost universally represented the culmination of

"the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own coun­ try," Blake wielded traditional materials in a respectful but innovative way, thinking not merely with them but through them, as the man of enlarged vision will see through his eyes. 169

This was his common way with traditional materials,

once he "began to achieve his own myth, as is clear on a

comparison of the faithful, pleasant representations of

subject and moral in Blake's illustrations to the Fables

of John Gay (1793) with the richly symbolic revisions

of Thomas Gray (1797-98) or the twelve drawings which

counterpoint Robert Blair's The Grave (1808), Blake's

illustrations to Milton are a significant case in point,

and for them as well the movement from literal repeti­

tion to symbolic reinterpretation is the same, Joseph

Wittreich has traced this change and generalizes in

terms that restate Eliot's paradox of the timeless yet

temporal historical sense in a context specific to Blake*

"These illustrations are too laden with symbolism to

allow the designs to be dismissed simply as literal

renderings [[as Geoffrey Keynes has done3 ; yet that

symbolism is so completely entangled with the poems it

illumines that 31ake finally comes closer to the text of

his author than a 'literal* illustrator could ....

Blake's illustrations are 'presentments of the spiritual

essence.' In his designs to Milton's poetry in general

. . ., Blake lifts us to his own level of perception, abstracts the 'spiritual essence' of the poem, and lays 1?0 bare its metaphorical and mythic structures in designs that probe the central issues of Milton's art and resolve 22 those issues in interpretations

A poetical example of Blake's enlarged revision of

Milton is immediately at hand in Night VII of The Four

Zoas, an example of unique importance in Blake's work since it exists in two complete versions, Night Vllb, the earlier, done in the first phase of the composition of the poem, and Night Vila, generally considered a replacement for rather than a continuation of the earlier draft, Blake's method changed significantly from version to version. In the first he worked almost mechanically, fitting in conventional epic elements by modelling passages of his own on important literary precedents. For example, he provides a catalogue of the trees that ’'vegetate" in the "Worlds of Enitharmon"

(FZ Vllb, 98i8-16) on the model of Spenser's catalogue in the Wandering Wood (FQ I ,i .8.5~9«9 )1 a passage based on the long tradition which originates in Ovid's

Metamorphoses. Blake's lists of animals (98*17-22 and

9^ 137-5 5 ) recall Milton's description of the work of the fifth and sixth days of Creation (PL VII, 387-50*0, and both culminate in Man, whose "seven Diseases" are the Seven Deadly Sins of another Christian narrative tradition. The conventional arming of the hero, 171

exemplified in the shield and spear of Satan, is

reworked into the forging, by the Sons of Urizen, of

"the sword the chariot of war the battle ax/ The trumpet

fitted to the battle . . (FZ. Vllb, 9 2 il9-2 0 ). To

these non-3iblical precedents Blake added a number of

allusions to the poetic and prophetic writings of the Old Testament as well as a passage based on the Gospel

accounts of the Crucifixion*

They sound the clarions strong they chain the howling captives they give the oath of Blood They cast the lots into the helmet They vote the Death of Luvah & they naild him to the tree They peircd him with a spear & laid him in a sepulcher To die a death of Six thousand years bound round with desolation. (FZ Vllb, 92*11-15) This collection— for Blake was not successful in welding these husks of conventional details into a new whole— lacks only an elaborate epic simile to satisfy the textbook lists of secondary epic conventions* 31ake provides one, according to the accepted formula, "As when the Earthquake rouzes from his den ..." (FZ. Vllb,

9 1 C second portionl*6-1 0 ).

Night Vila is different from the earlier version in being conceived around a single unifying and organic element, the Tree of Mystery. In Night I Blake had omitted this integral part of Milton's account of the 172 first fall because good and evil are categories alien to his conception of Eternity, The products of fallen experience (of "the Sons of Albion in their strength," as he says in Jerusalem, 10:1), they are traps set by the religious out of envy of other, freer men, Urizen descends to the cave where Ore is already enclosed, and jealous of Ore's power even when confined (". , ,

Urizen , . . saw/ A Cavernd Universe of flaming fire

..." where "the adamantine scales of justice/ Con­ suming in the lamps of mercy pourd in rivers" £FZ Vila,

77:5-11]). Urizen broods:

While his snows fell & his storms beat to cool the flames of Ore Age after Age till underneath his heel a deadly root Struck through the rock the root of Mystery , , ,

Amazd started Urizen when he found himself compassd round And hieh roofed over with trees .... (FZ Vila, 78*3-5. 9-10) In this account of the growth of the Tree of Mystery

Blake is more merciful to Urizen than in the earlier account in The 3ook of Ahania. chapters II and III, for in The Four Zoas Urizen is no longer the self-willed enemy of Luvah-Orc (an equivalent figure to the fiery

Fuzon), The physical battles of the earlier book have modulated into an internal dialectic (reminiscent of another of Blake's accounts of the growth of the Tree, in "A Poison Tree") in which Urizen*s melancholy and 173

envious brooding are the causes of Ore's entanglement

and ultimate death, yet Urizen cannot be strictly called

to blame. Events in Might Vila happen with an inevit­

ability, a necessity, that focusses on subconscious or

unwilled activity rather than on active, calculated

deceit.

So, for example, when Enitharmon is tempted by

the Spectre of Urthona and recounts her "Secrets of

Eternity" (the passage echos Eve's retelling the history

of her birth to Raphael), she admits,

, . , all Beulah fell In dark confusion mean time Los was born & Enitharmon But how I know not then forgetfulness quite wrapd me up A period nor do I remember till I stood Beside Los in the Cavern dark enslavd to vegetative forms, (FZ Vila, 83:26-30)

Blake is excusing Urizen and Enitharmon for their roles

in the destruction of Luvah and Los, not dispassionately as a detached and scientific observer might, leaving his reader to adjudicate the cause and effect he merely traces, but empathically, even compassionately, as though the narrator too had paid the price of experience and gone the journey obstinate. To the reader sensitive to the literary precedents to Night Vila, the necessity at work is clearer because Blake compresses into this

Night Books IX and X of Faradise Lost, Ore, "organizing" 17^

in an Ovidian metamorphosis into "A Worm compelld,"

f'a Serpent body” (80*27-/4-0), shall- writhe on the Tree

of Mystery until the Shadow of Enitharmon descending

upon it brings it

. . . to blossom in fierce pain shooting its writhing buds In throes of birth & now the blossoms falling shining fruit Appeard of many colours & of various poisonous qualities Of plagues hidden in shining globes that grew on the living tree.. . . (FZ Vila, 82*19-22)

Tempted by the Spectre of Urthona (a memory of Los in

Eternity), she will fall, this "Loveliest delight of

Men," this "lovely Vision" (FZ. Vila, 82*28, 84*1),

For he promises that they will be as Gods, will regain

their former joy*

. , . this delightful Tree Is given us for a Shelter from the tempests of Void & Solid Till once again the morn of ages shall renew upon us To reunite to those mild fields of happy Eternity V/here thou & I in undivided Essence walkd about Imbodied, thou my garden of delight & I the spirit in the garden. (FZ Vila, 8^*l-6 )

Blake explains the necessity of experience with the terms of the fortunate fall, for the Spectre of Urthona,

"formd without a counterpart without a concentering vision" (8 7 *31 ) can never regain his vision until

Enitharmon falls. She recognizes, having "gatherd of 175

this ruddy fruit," that her sin requires a ransom

(8?»16-18) which for her is Los. he therefore "plucked

the Fruit & eat," despaired, and would have died but

for the intermediary comfort of Urthona's Spectre

(87*2^-29). 3ut although Los and Enitharmon, like Adam

and Eve, fear the judgment of the Lamb of God, they

make no recriminations ("Thus they in mutual accusation

spent/ The fruitless hours . . ," [ PL IX, 1187-883.).

Blake hurries their repentance and regeneration, though

Milton had drawn it out with curses, pain and labor.

For by the lesson of the Tree (though not by virtue

of the Tree), Enitharmon became merciful, a "shady

refuge from furious war," a "soft repose for the

weeping souls/ Of those piteous victims of battle . , ."

(90*5-6). And Los the artificer, "divine inspired,"

"with the strength of Art,"

, . . drew a line upon the walls of shining heaven And Enitharmon tincturd it with beams of blushing love It remaind permanent a lovely form inspird divinely human, (FZ Vila, 90*35-37)

By their united love they reclaim the spectres of the dead; they bring joy to Ore even bound on his dark

lake; they give to Tharmas hope of Enion's return;

"dividing the powers of Every Warrior," they heal Urizen, their enemy, and 176

Startled v/as 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 Lovely breathd from Enitharmon he trembled within himself, (FZ Vila, 90:63-67)

Such an Expulsion from the Garden is cause indeed for

joy, as Blake showed in the final drawing of his first

Paradise Lost series (see Figure 3 ), For the dialectical war of Urizen and Ore yielded the corpse on the Tree, the body which is Blake's Christ giving "his vegetated

Body/ To be cut off & seperated that the Spiritual body may be Reveald" (FZ. VIII, 104 [second portion3*37~38).

This is 31ake’s most radical revision of Kilton,

By it he denies the fact of a wrathful Father, reducing him to a perversion of the intellect, albeit one active in history. And he asserts as real the typological identity of the first and second Adams: Christ is in man, even as he sins, and can redeem him by the exercise of imagination. Thus Blake worked out, by revising the terms of traditional Christianity especially as they appeared in Paradise Lost, the consequences of his belief, held early and sustained throughout his life, that "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" (E 2). Footnotes for Chanter IV

Erdrnan, Pronhet. p. 287,

Bentley, Records. p, 61/4-, ”

John Jeer, Blake's Visionary Universe (Manchester: The University Press, 1969), pp. 7 6 -IOO,

Brdman, Pronhet. p. 2 9 3 .

Edwin J. Ellis, The Real Blake (London: Chatto and V/indus, 1907), p. 172.

Gerald E, Bentley Jr., ed., Vala or The Four Zoas (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1 96 3), p. xvii,

This observation, along with a discussion of its implications for the study of Blake's developing thought, was first made by Morton D, Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 147.

K, I.’. Margoliouth, V/illiara Blake (London: Oxford University Press, I96I), pp. 121-26 provides a full setting for this "conversion." Margoliouth's case is both weaker and stronger than he suggests. On the one hand, he attributes great suddenness to an event that nay have required a long period of time and a complex process, as changes in the ms suggest. On the other, his reference to "to Tirzah" is well chosen, but it does not support a referent notion from which Blake "fell": "To Tirzah" appears only on a few copies of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, namely those copies Blake printed about 1800 or thereafter. It is therefore likely that "To Tirzah" in fact repre­ sents just the return that "argoliouth wants to claim of other works. Elake's letter to Doctor Trusler is no, 6 in Keynes, Letters. pp. 29-3I,

Bentley, Vala. p. 171. 178

Bentley, Vala. p. 172.

Bentley, Vala. p. 1 6 3 ,

12 This is also Faley's judgment in Energy. pp. 9^-96. For an alternative view, see Helen T. Mci.'eil, "The Formal Art of The Four Zoas" in David V. Brdman and John Grant, Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic (Frince- ton, II.J.j Princeton University Press, 1970)* P. 37**.

**■3 Keynes, Letters. p. 67.

^ Bentley, Vala, pp. 163-6k-,

13 J Keynes, Letters. p. 67 .

The letter g, for example, in "vegetate" in Might I, 8:5> is written in Blake's very late style of hand­ writing (H Erdrnan suggests a date after 1805 for this line of the poem, making it one of the final parts of Vala to "be revised.

17 For the three phases of composition of The Four Zoas. see David V, Erdrnan, Prophet , pp. 295“9o. The vexed question of the order of composition of this manu­ script is profitably discussed in Erdrnan' s textual notes to the poem at S 737-39* in H. K. Kargoliouth's attempt at reconstructing the text of Vala as it might have been before Blake revised it into The Four Zoas in Uilliam Blake's Vala; Blake's Mumcered Text (Oxford: _The Clarendon Fress, 195^)» PP. xi- xxvii; and in sentley, Vala, pp. I55-2OI, The most important reading of The Four Zoas to take account of the evolution of the poem is by Morton Faley, Energy, pp. 1^2-70.

Erdrnan's important warning is in his textual notes to the poem, at E 739.

19 Bloom, Apocalypse. p. 24-1. I rely on the Hebrew scholarship of T'other Mary Christopher recheux, O.S.U., "Sin in Paradise He gained: The }3i’olical Background" in Joseph A, Y/ittreich, ed, , Calm of Mind ; Tercentenary Essays on Paradise Regained and Sanson Anonlstes in Honor of John S. Diekhoff (Cleveland: The Press of Case Y/estern Reserve University, 1971)» pp. 49-66. In the same collection, Stuart Curran has profitably argued the likelihood of an influence from Paradise Regained on Jerusalem in "The Mental Pinnacle: Paradise Regained and the Romantic Four-Book Epic," pp. 146-55.

T, S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Sacred Wood, 7th ed, (London: Methuen £ Co., Ltd., 1950)» P. 49,

Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., "William Blake: Illustra- tor-Interpreter of Paradise Regained" in Y/ittreich, Calm of Mind, p. 9 6 , CHAPTER V

IN TERRIBLE MAJESTY MILTON

For let it "be rememberd that creation is. God descending according to the weakness of man for our Lord is the word of God & every thing on earth is the word of God and in its essence is God. --Annotations to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man (1?89)

According to the view of Christ as pattern of the imaginative visionary, the view Blake was adumbrating as he laboured over The Four Zoas. Christ has a function at once religious and epistemological, To believe in

Him as Blake did requires not merely a particular religious point of view, but especially a particular psychology. One cannot hold, as Milton did, the _

Renaissance view (which Morton Paley rightly remarks was already anachronistic in Milton's time) that Reason is the chief power of the soul,'*" In Paradise Lost Adam is made to explain (he is analyzing Eve's Satanically inspired, prophetic dream):

. , . But know that in the Soule Are many lesser Faculties that serve Reason as chief; among these Fancie next Her office holds; of all external things, Which the five watchful Senses represent,

180 181

She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes, Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames All what we affirm or what deny, and call Our knowledge or opinion; then retires Onto her private Cell when Nature rests. Oft in her absence mimic Fancie wakes To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes, Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams, 111 matching; words and deeds long oast or late. (PL V, 100-113)

As mistaken as Pertelote when she rationalized away the dreams of Chaunticleer, Adam is bound by his philosophy of "five watchful senses" and a merely recreative fancy.

Since a man is as he sees, a fall from the freedom of

Eden was inevitable for him. In Milton Blake asserts the power of the creative imagination to free man from the five limited senses and restore him to a fourfold visionary Eden. This is the burden of the Bard's songs

"Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salva­ tion."

By exercising the power of his own imagination, a man reveals to himself and to the public his own essen­ tial Christliness. Blake's "Preface" to Milton attempts to rouse the "Painters! . . . Sculptors! Architects!," the "Young Men of the New Age," indeed, "all the Lords people" to a general visionary resurrection. "V/e 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." Milton therefore will be propaedeutic to England as a nation which suffered "fashionable.Fools," "ignorant

Hirelings . . . in the Camp, the Court & the Univer­ sity"— men like William Hayley, however well-intentioned, or John Flaxman who thought himself an artist for copy­ ing an Attic line, or Joshua Reynolds, men like John

Schofield, "a Private in Captn Leathes's troop of 1st or Royal Dragoons," his comrade one Private Cock, and

"a Justice of Peace in Chichester," men like the unversity lecturers who propagated a gospel of mechanism from the perverted scriptures of Bacon, Newton, Locke,

Voltaire, Rousseau, Faley and Priestley, even men like

Milton who sometimes recognized the power and validity of their own prophetic voices but who subjugated their visions to received and hardened dogma. In purpose

Milton joins The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Blake's other early exhortatory writings. The tone of inspired admonishment is clearest in the Bard's Song (M 5*25-13*^); the response of the Bard to his disbelieving audience,

. . . I am inspired1 I know it is Truthl for I Sing According to the inspiration of Poetic Genius V/ho is the eternal all-prophetic Divine Humanity To whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore Amen, (M 1301-l^r3) summarizes by example a major theme of the poem, the assertion of the eternal (that is, essential, or Locke might have said substantial) preeminence of the imagina­

tion over the ephemeral accidents .(Blake called them

"states") of individuality by which Reason or Appetite

or Fancy take power of the soul. That this confidence

in the truth of his own inner experience distinguishes

the true poet-prophet, Blake believed consistently from

the time of his earlier prophetic writings: as Isaiah

is made to explain in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical

perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in

every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain

confirm'd; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote . . .

in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains" (MHH 13). As early as the Carriage. Blake was persuaded of the importance of the imagination. With

experience and reflection, he came to understand how it

functioned and what it required of him. Milton reveals what he had learned.

Working from his epistemology of the imagination as savior, 31ake postulated a description of the human condition concerned at once with mankind in the aggregate and with every individual;

Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. States change, but Individual Identities never change nor cease. 184

You cannot go to Eternal Death in that which can never die. (M 32 :22-24) Or again,

Judge then of thy Own Self.* thy Eternal Lineaments explore, V/hat is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihil- able. The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself. Affection or Love becomes a State when divided from Imagination. The Memory is a State alv/ays, & the Reason is a State Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created. Y/hatever can be Created can be Annihilated: Forms cannot 1 The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife, Eut their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever. Amen. Hallelujahl (M 3 2 :30-3 8 )

This view of the imagination— and of memory, inspiration and reason— had influential enemies in the eighteenth century, as 31ake well knew. In his annotations to the works of Joshua Reynolds, Blake wrote: "Reynoldss

Opinion was that Genius Kay be Taught & that all Pre­ tence to Inspiration is a Lie & a Deceit to say the least of it, [If Inspiration is Great why Call it Madness}

This Opinion originates in the Greeks Caling the Muses

Daughters of Memory" (E 6 3 2 ). Blake knew also that among his allies, at least from time to time, he could rank Milton, For together they held that the Daughters of Memory were not the Daughters of Inspiration, muses 185

of the true poet-prophet, "A work of Genius," Blake

wrote, going on to quote The Reason of Church Government,

"is a Work 'Hot to be obtained by the Invocation of

Memory & her Syren Daughters, but by Devout prayer to

that Sternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance

&: knowledge & sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed

fire of his Altar to touch <5.- purify the lips of whom he

pleases.1 Milton" (E 635)* Blake's stand on the role of memory in creation was

not taken merely for the sake of some art or some artists.

Memory and reason are "Eternally" ancillary to the imagi^ nation because "The Imagination is not a State: it is

the Human Existence itself." Milton failed to recognize

this, Blake might have said, because he failed to dis­

tinguish states from individuals. This failure v/as

especially important in Milton's attitude concerning predestination. Milton v/as not, it should be clear,

a strict Calvinist, believing in a preordained fate for us all: the purpose of Paradise Lost is to show other­ wise, that our free will makes a difference in our claim to salvation and thereby justifies God's ways to man.

But it is nevertheless true that Milton's God voices a strict view of justice and retribution and asserts that men classed according to their hope for the future life must face hard facts according to His system: 186

Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Sleet above the rest: so is my will: The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warnd Thir sinful state, and to appease betimes Th'incensed Deitie, while offerd grace Invites, for I will cleer thir senses dark, What may suffice, and soft'n stonie hearts To pray, repent, and bring obedience due .... This my long sufferance and my day of grace They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste; But hard be hard'ned, blind be blinded more, That they may stumble on and deeper fall; And none but such from mercy I exclude. (PL III, 183-190, 198-202)

Christ, the agent of Wilton's God in His "long suffer­

ance," can not redeem all men, only those who elect Him

of their own free will. It was argued that Milton's

view is less harsh than it might have been: Johnathan

Richardson insisted that this notion of fore-ordaining

"is a Different Notion from That of Universal Fate or

Necessity; 'tis limited only to the Future State of Man,

and there are Two Opinions concerning it. Some have

maintain'd what they call Reprobation with the Other;

that is, that not only there are Certain Chosen, Sleet

from Eternity, to Everlasting Happiness, but that the

Rest are Reprobated, and must necessarily be Eternally

Damn'd, the Other Notion of Predestination is, that

some are Elected Peculiarly, the Rest May be Saved

Complying with the Conditions; This is the Doctrine of Milton, and 'tis the Opinion of Moderate Calvinists."-^ 187

In his edition of Paradise Lost 3ishop Mewton

followed Richardson's charitable opinion. But William

Cowper, whose critical notes to Paradise Lost Blake may

have known in manuscript, regarded even "moderate Cal­

vinism" as too favorable a reading of Milton's doctrinej

"It is not very easy to see how this opinion , , .

becomes entitled to the honourable appellation of

moderate Calvinism. It supposes as much partiality

to be shown in the distribution of grace, as is usually

charged on Calvinism of any other description; some to

be saved infallibly, and others to be left to a per-

adventure. But the Scripture, when it speaks of those,

who shall be saved, and of the means, holds out the same

hope to every man, and asserts the same communications

of light and strength to be necessary in all cases equally,For Blake, "the Spirit of Jesus is co'ntinual

forgiveness of sin" (J 3)» forgiveness offered without

exception and without end. Imagination, "the Human

Existence itself," is the means of grace, and even

Satan the individual, distinguished from Satan the state,

can be redeemed. Milton had specifically excluded him

from grace t

The first sort the rebel angels by thir own suggestion fell, Self-tempted, self-deprav'd; Man falls deceiv'd By the other first; Man therefore shall find grace, The other none .... (PL III, 129-32) 188

Here the difference between 31ake and Milton is absolute:

"Love without end" (PL III, 1^2) ip falsely attributed

to Wilton's God, As He can not be infinitely merciful,

He can not be infinite,

II

Even so, as Blake knew only too well, "Wan 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

Y/orld, God; and destroying all who do not worship Satan

under the Name of God" ("To the Deists," J 52). Even

the true prophet may himself fall into error, as witness

the example of Los, the prophetic spirit, made individual

in the person of Milton* "I am that Shadowy Frophet who

Six Thousand Years ago/ Fell from my station in the

Eternal Bosom" (M 22:15-16). Such a perversion of vision

results in a finite god of arbitrary charity and in

churches of sacrifice and destruction, the "Druidism" which in Blake's time v/as called "natural religion" and "Deism." The artist who denies his inspiration— in Blake's metaphor, who separates from his Emanation, as Los separated from Enitharmon, Albion from Jerusalem, and Milton from Ololon, the "Sixfold Emanation" repre­ senting his "female portion" of three wives and three 189

daughters— is responsible for these cruelties:

The Shadowy Female shudders thro' heaven in torment inexpressible I And all the Daughters of Los prophetic wail: yet in deceit, They weave a new Religion from new Jealousy of Theotorrnonl Hiltons Religion is the cause: there is no end to destruction! Seeing the Churches at their Period in terror & despair: Rehab created Voltaire; Tirzah created Rousseau; Asserting the Self-righteousness against the Universal Saviour, Mocking the Confessors & Martyrs, claiming Self- righteousness; Y/ith cruel Virtue: making War upon the Lambs Redeemed; To perpetuate V/ar & Glory, to perpetuate the Laws of sin. (M 22:36-^5)

As it was a prophet who gave these laws, only a prophet

can free men from them. The fallen world requires one

man who will join the lineage of Los by subduing his

reason and memory by means of his imagination and there­

by set the world right. The story of how Los fell into

error and how he might be saved is the matter of "A

Bards prophetic Song!" (M 2:25-13*^). In the opening section of that song the Bard

recounts a spiritual biography, the story of Los, with

details that suggest the life and thought of Milton,-*

Los at his anvil "Among indefinite Druid rocks & snows

of doubt & reasoning" recalls Milton at his own poetic labors in an age of scepticism and the new science. 190

The ages by which Los creates a finite human body

transmute Milton's account of the events of Genesis :

they are Blake's addition to the hexameral tradition

which before his time culminates in Paradise Lost.

These "seven ages" give metaphors for the fall of man

from his full imaginative understanding through infinite

and varied senses into a state of sexual incompleteness

and bounded perception. Milton was content to leave

Adam in this limited state, wandering with Eve but

separate from her in body and spirit. The "Male Form

howling in Jealousy" recalls Milton publishing his dis­

content with his first wife, arguing from the awkwardness

of his own marriage to the theories of marriage and

divorce in his early prose, ultimately countenancing

the divorce, before the Fall, of Eve from Adam in Book

IX of Paradise Losti "from Particulars to Generals /

Subduing his Spectre" (M 3:37-33). "First Ore was born

then the Shadowy Female: then All Los’s Family / At

last Snitharmon brought forth Satan," and from Satan

came the acquiescence on Milton's part to a universe of "Starry Wheels," of "Starry Mills"— the "intricate mazes of Providence" which make up an orderly heaven.

And from Satan came "the Three Classes of Men" with their "Sexual texture"— that is, merely sexual, which is fallen, "The Sexual is Threefold: the Human is

Fourfold" (M 4:5), 191

At first Los recognizes that Satan must not be

allowed to pervert the tools of Art to his own uses.

Satan is severely rebuffed v/hen he seeks to take them

over i

. , . Prince of the Starry Hosts And of the Wheels of Heaven, . . . . . , Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke . . . To Mortals thy Mills seem everything & the Harrow of Shaddai A scheme of Human conduct invisible & incompre­ hensible Get to thy labours at the Mills & leave me to my wrath. (M 4i9-HO The harrow ploughs in order to prepare for new life. It is "of Shaddai"— the God who covenanted with Abraham, and in cabalistic tradition, the "Redeemer," the "bene­ factor after temptation" of the Zohar— because it has a divine, merciful purpose. But those in the state of

Satan regard the universe as mechanical and governed by fixed lav/s, and mercy to them is ineffable, a mystery to be revealed to a special few. But the truth is that

, . , every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not A Natural: for a Natural Cause only Seems, it is a Delusion Of Ulro: & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory, (M 26i^-^6)

This truth can be sustained only by the prophet in whom mercy is an integral and essential quality. 192

Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets,

as in ages of Eternity they are. But in this world most

men are arrogantly self-righteous, or wrathfully indig­

nant at the self-righteousness of others, or simply

well-intentioned but confused. Blake called these kinds

of men, respectively, the Elect, the Reprobate, and the

Redeemed (by which he often meant, the redeemable).

These categories appear for the first time in Blake's

published writings in Milton. his most systematic

description of fallen mentality, although the values

they define are inherent in earlier works.^ In a pre­

liminary draft of "A Poison Tree,” for example, Blake

characterized the duplicity of conventional Christian

morality:

X 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. O Called "Christian Forebearance" in manuscript, this

stanza prefigures Blake's attitude toward the Elect.

His respect for the Reprobate is rooted in his defence

of Energy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There the Elect and the Reprobate are called Prolific and

Devouring. "To the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains"; that is, men of limited powers believe all men suffer under the same limitations as they. 193

"But It is not so, he [the Devourer^ only takes por­ tions of existence and fancies that the whole" (HHH 16).

In Milton Blake recognized a third class of men, the Redeemed, which he incorporated into his earlier doctrine of contraries. "l/ithout Contraries is no progression," he wrote in the Carriage. where he clearly identifies those contraries as self-righteous passivity manifest in reason, in a body distinct from the soul, in

"what the religious call Good," on the one hand, and energy active in "the only life," yet what the religious call "Evil," on the other (MHH 3). Of the three classes of men in Milton, two are contraries and the third is a

"negation": "Contraries are Positives / A Negation is not a Contrary" (M 30; reverse-etched in title). At the moment of is clearest self-knowledge in Milton,

"turning toward Ololon in terrible majesty," Milton explainsi

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 Con­ traries 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. (M ^0:30-36) 19^

The Elect of the state of Satan no longer make up one

of the contraries essential to human progress: they are

recognized as "the Negation," for by rational demonstra­

tion they deny the "grandeur of Inspiration" (Li ^1:3).

By this important correction of his earlier thought,

Blake opens a way to freedom. Milton is a poem of pro­

logue in the most important sense: it makes possible

the correction of a mistaken system of thought by

establishing the groundwork for a genuine vision.

To say, therefore, that Milton is a prologue is to

suggest not only its strengths but also its major limita­

tion. Milton is more concerned with regeneration than

with apocalypse: the harrow is a key image in Milton,

but the climactic image of Jerusalem is dravm from the

harvest. The character of Jesus is developed to sig­

nificantly greater purpose in Jerusalem; in Milton,

though His presence is implied, He does not take a

major role. But Jesus is the zenith of human progress,

the state toward which the dialectic of contraries

aspires. Los, Milton, Blake— all poets imitate His way,

Blake seems always to have believed that all creation

is archetypally one act, and that, an act of charity:

"For let it be rememberd that creation is. God descend­

ing according to the weakness of men for our Lord is the word of God & every thing on earth is the word of God 195

and in its essence is God" (from the annotations to

Lavater's Aphorisms on H a n . 1789; 2 589). Not the

Elect, the Redeemed, not even the Reprobate, no man in

a state of this-worldliness, can achieve Eternity

without the sacrifice of Jesus, Y/ho descends even into

the death of natural vision and a finite body in order

to redeem every individual. Milton is concerned with

the pattern of Jesus, but the poem focusses on this

world, even when the Eard sings in Eternity. Put

another way, both Milton and Jerusalem depend recur­

rently on the metaphor of descent, but in Milton the

descent is made by Milton, and in Jerusalem the descent

is made by Christ.

Ill

Elake's ideas and the imagery by which he expressed

them are separable only in artificial ways. He was not

a philosopher who adorned his theories with pictures;

he was a poet who recorded visions. Yet in speaking of

Milton the critic must determine first the patterns of

argument which underlie the poem (as I have tried to do

in the opening sections of this chapter), for they con­

trol the images by which they are expressed. This

subordination of image to idea is more true of Milton than of any of Blake's previous writings, and the poem 196

gives evidence to suggest Blake thought this was the

case.

Blake's insistence on protecting the integrity of

the individual may "be said to he a predominant character­

istic of his thinking primarily in the late prophetic

works--The Four Zoas. Milton and Jerusalem. In the

earlier annotations to Lavater he had criticized the

philosopher who abstracts from individuals in order to o reach "general knowledge,"*' but only in the later poems

does he justify the labors of Los as "Striving with

Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems" (J

11*5)• The poet must deliver himself before he can

free others* the descent of Milton’s spirit into Blake

records the moment of Blake's own deliverance. It involves both the sacrifice of Milton and Blake's sure awareness of his own identity. There exists no better example of what T. S. Eliot calls the activity of the

"historical sense"--what makes a writer traditional, yet at the same time makes him most acutely aware of his own contemporaneity. For the first time in his books,

Blake speaks in Milton from his own authority in, propria personat he acts under his own name as a character in the text, and he includes, for the only time in his illuminated books, his name above a spiritual self- portrait among the illustrations (M 32* see Fig. 11). Figure 11* Kilton, Throughout Hilton there is subtle confirmation of

the metaphor of Milton's metempsychosis, especially of

the significance of Blake himself as the latest of the prophet-poets which is a corollary of that metaphor.

This confirmation is evidenced in the way Blake uses

images and events from Milton's poetry to make his ov/n poem. In the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel, in even as

late a poem as The Four Zoas. when Blake borrowed from

Milton, the model showed relatively clearly through

Blake's work. But in Milton. 31ake's ideas control his borrowed motifs, So, for example, the journey of Milton through the "Four Universes round the Universe of Los"

(H 3^*3 2 ), although it owes a great deal in conception to Satan's flight through Chaos in Paradise Lost, is wholly transmuted from Milton’s pattern. The most obvious difference is that Satan journeyed up while

Milton is travelling down, toward the Hell of Ulro, not away from it. Yet both characters are going.toward the finite created world, where Milton’s Satan sought

Eden but where Blake's Milton finds "in evil death the

Four Immortals [that is, the Zoa§] pale and cold /

And the Eternal Man, even Albion, upon the Rock of Ages"

(K 3^.*^5-4-6). Chaos, which for Milton was a place where raw nature warred against itself, unstructured by God, is for Blake the abode of men, "Chasms of the Mundane 199

Shell" (M JktbO-kl), "a vast Polypus / Of living fibres"

(M 3^*2^-2 5 )— the men v/ho, living under the rule of the

twenty-seven churches of perverted vision, are disorgan­

ized and spiritually dead (K 3^*26; see J 75)•

Blake imposes his own system upon another man's so

that he can himself be safe from the salvery of Ulro.

Virtually every motif from Milton's v/ritings that appears

in Milton is inverted or revalued. The Elect, who are

the chosen few of Milton's reasoning God, in Blake per­ petrate the cruelties of moral virtue. The Reprobate, who will never reach beatitude in Milton's orderly heaven,

are powerful in their just wrath, according to Blake.

The "Great Solemn Assembly" convoked in the Bard's Song

is clearly modelled after the Council in Pandaemonium.

But the council in Milton's Hell had revenge as its pur­ pose and Satan as its hero. The assembly in Milton is

called by Palamabron, Elake's character for the state of pity, v/ho orders the meeting in the hope that it v/ill reveal the truth that Satan lied (M 81 ^6-48). When

"all Eden descended into Palamabron's tent," they join in prayer, and although the judgment of the assembly goes in favor of Satan (on this point Blake does follow

Milton), it is Los v/ho fumes with the true wrath of

Blake's indignant Reprobates, not Satan, whom Milton characterized as the exemplar of power and energy. In 200

Blake's solemn assembly, the innocent is condemned in

order to save the guilty, for "If -the C-uilty should be

condemn'd, he must be an Sternal Death" (M llil7 ). For

in 31ake's system all strive to avoid Sternal Deaths

in Paradise Lost Hilton brought death into the world,

and rationalized its presence. Blake's Eternals must

sacrifice themselves, for they can not be annihilated,

rather than permit the annihilation of the guilty,

So Blake's Sin, called Leutha in Milton, offers

herself as the sacrifice to save Satan. In "moth-like

elegance," "glowing with varying colours immortal,"

she feels herself metamorphose into a serpentine woman

like Milton's Sin (II ll!28-12i2). She recounts how in

her fallen state she practiced feminine wiles which,

though they kept Satan from death, "stupified the mascu­

line perceptions" and caused "A Hell of our own making,"

complete with a thundering Jehovah (M 12: 5» 20-24).

"I came forth from the head of Satan," Leutha admits, and "back the Gnomes recoil'd. / And call'd me Sin, and for a sign portentous held me" (M 1 2 1 3 8 -3 9 ), By this merciful act, Satan (like Milton's Lucifer a being of power before he fell) turns momentarily wrathful: *rv/ild with prophetic fury his former life became like a dream / Cloth'd in the Serpents folds, in selfish holiness demanding purity" (M 12 i45-46), According to 201

this account, Satan is not the instigator of sin but

its victim from a hind of benevolent maternalism, "The

Sin was begun in Eternity, and will not rest to Eternity"

(M 13:10), For the interim of six thousand years (the

duration of the finite, created, fallen world) Enitharmon

in her kindness made a space "to protect Satan from

punishment" until time could be fulfilled, and a man

who was crucified as a reprobate be recognized as the

savior. Then,

The Elect shall meet the Redeem'd, on Albion's rocks they shall meet Astonish'd at the Transgressor, in him beholding the Saviour. And the Elect shall say to the Redeemed. V/e behold it is of Divine Mercy alone 1 of Free Gift and Election that we live. Our Virtues & Cruel Goodnesses, have deserv'd Eternal Death, (K 13*30-3*0. This is the lesson of the Bard's Song, that divine mercy

is infinite, that all men are brothers v/ho will sacrifice

for each other if they only recognize the need of the

fallen. And I.iilton, listening among the immortals,

learns that in his selfhood he himself is Satan and must

offer his immortal part as a sacrifice in order to redeem

Eternity from Eternal Death.

When the Bard finished his song, "Milton rose up from the heavens of Albion .../... took off the robe of the promise, & ungirded himself from the oath 202

of God" (M 14*10-13i illustrated in I lilton. plate 16 ,

Fig. 12). At this moment ("A Moment equals the pulsa­

tion of an artery" [M 28:473 )* ^he poem is complete.

For in this moment Milton acts for the first time in

Eternity, recreating the sacrifice of Christ by giving

himself for his Emanation Ololon, for the three classes

of men, for Satan, for the entire "World of Los the

labour of six thousand years" (M 29*64), Milton's act

is epiphanic, outside of time. In this moment he

wrestles with Urizen, as Jacob wrestled with the Lord

(M 18*51-19*26; illustrated in Milton, plate 16 £ plate 18

in copy d ]]).^ It is the moment when Milton entered the

foot of William Blake:

But I knew not that it was Milton, for man cannot know What passes in his members till periods of Space & Time Reveal the secrets of Eternity .... (M 21:8-10)

It is the pastoral moment of the Lark's song in "a

Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon" (M 31* 45)i and the moment when Ololon "descended to Los &

Enitharmon [‘the Adamic William Blake and Eve-like

Catherine 3/ Unseen beyond the Mundane Shell Southward

in Miltons track" (M 35*46-47)* when, walking in the

garden of his Felpham cottage, Blake "sudden .... beheld / The Virgin Ololon & address'd her'as a Daughter 203

Figure 12 1 r'ilton. plate 16 of Copy D, 204 of 3eulah" (M 3 6:26-27; illustrated at the bottom of

Milton, plate 3 6 [[plate 40 in copy D[]).

It is the moment when "in terrible majesty" Milton turns to Ololon to declare:

To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self- examination. To bathe in the Waters of Life f 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 & Nev/ton 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, by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots, Indefinite, or paltry Rhymes} or paltry Harmonies. V/ho creeps into State Government like a catter- piller to destroy To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning, But never capable of answering} who sits with a sly grin Silent plotting v/hen to question, like a thief in a cave .... These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life I 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 205

Which Jesus rent: & now wholly shall purge away with Fire Till Generation is swallowd ut> in Regeneration. (M 4bi37-41*14, 21-28)

So it is the moment the limitations which kept Milton

from his Emanation, the fallen boundaries of sexuality,

are dissolved (illustrated in Milton, plate 41 [jplate 4 5

in copy D^). It is the moment v/hen

Terror struck in the Vale I Blake 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

"Every moment less than a pulsation of the artery / Is

equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years"

(M 23:62-63), but imagination, a living force, works

through inspiration in a moment beyond time. The poets'

works are done, and "all the Great / Events of Time"

begin because of a conception which is born fully

matured (though still to be explained to men under

the bondage of time) "Within a moment: a Pulsation of

the Artery" (M 29:1-3).

IV

To articulating the moment which completed the vision of Milton. Blake devoted many of the illustrations

of his poem'**'1' as well as the major portion of his text. 206

In plate 16 (Fig. 12), for example, Blake drew Milton

in the pose or Albion in "Albion Rose" (Fig, 1), at the moment of freedom from recent bondage, setting out to deliver Bngland. The re-use of this attitude is sug­ gestive of the continuity of sources in Blake’s pictorial expression, and a similar continuity obtained for the sources of Blake’s poetry. From Raphael's account of the fifth and sixth days of creation (FL VIII, 387-52*0,

Blake took the general model for his catalogue of animals and insects which "sport round the Wine-pr^sses" of Los

(M 27:l-^-l), incidentally converting Milton's emmet from

"parsimonious" to "wise." Chaos and Old Fight are found a habitation "beyond the skies" (M 2 0 *3 2 -3 3 ).

And Blake repeated almost exactly Milton's catalogue of fallen angels in the list of "the Monstrous Churches of

Beulah, the Gods of Ulro dark" (M 37:16-38:1*0, though in Blake's list Adam, Abraham, Moses, Paul, Luther and others join Baal, Ashtaroth, Chemosh, Molech, Thammuz,

Belial, the classical pantheon, and others from Milton's list,

Nevertheless, as Blake's increased reliance on sources from scripture implies, in his moment of inspir­ ation he recognized not only all the cruelties to which

Milton's argument gave reasonable justification, but also the preeminence of the Bible as the word which 207

gives the poet power, Blake's scattered allusions to

Ovid, Caesar, Shakespeare, Boehme, Gray and even Milton

are insignificant in number v/hen compared to the many

echoes of the Mosaic hooks, Joshua, Kings. Samuel,

Isaiah and Fzekiel, and especially to the gospels, the

letters of Paul, and Revelations, By comparison with

the angels who touch v/ith fire the lips of the prophets,

Milton's Urania, even his "Holy Light" are pallid, stiff and secondhand.

Paradise lost is the central concern of Blake's

minor prophecies. Paradise regained is the business of

the extended later works, including Milton. Jerusalem,

A Vision of the Last Judgment, and the pictorial se­

quences illustrating Bunyan, Dante, L'Allegro and II

Penseroso. and Paradise Regained. Throughout these later works, in a manner consistent with the method of The

Four Zoas, Blake agreed with Milton that the Sden to

come is a "paradise v/ithin thee happier far," more

glorious than the pastoral garden which for Milton v/as

our first home, and which for Blake usually appears as

Beulah, a "moony space" for rest, a protective, sexual threefold state. 3ut at least from the time of his moment of inspiration on the seaside at Felpham, Blake believed that paradise would be achieved not by follow­ ing the pattern of a rhetorical Jesus such as Milton had 208

described in Paradise Regained. The battle between

Christ and Satan, the a^on of experience, will be won

neither through "a Duel, or the local wounds / Of head

or heel" (FL XII, 386-8?), nor through obedience to the

"Lav/ of God exact" (PL XII, ^02), nor through cavilling

indignantly in the v/ilderness. It was not for these that

Jesus joined manhood to godhead. At the Last Judgment,

"all those are Cast away who trouble Religion v/ith Ques­

tions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of

those Knowledges which hinder the Vision of God . . ."

(VL J . 1810; E 51^ ) * "Ken are admitted into Heaven not

because they have , . . governd their Passions or have

No Passions but because they have Cultivated their Under­

standings, The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of

Passion but Realities of Intellect ..." (VL J ; E 55*0.

But every man undergoes a Last Judgment every time he

chooses between Reason and Imagination, between Memory

and Inspiration, If he chooses Jesus v/ho is Vision,

"Error & Creation will be Burned Up & then & not till

then Truth or Eternity will appear It is Burnt up the

Moment Ken cease to behold it . . (VLJ; E 555)*

Blake's last recorded judgments concerning Milton

sustain, in a much muted way, the rejection of Milton's

error which he announced in Milton. Late in life Blake entertained Henry Crabb Robinson, a man whose respect for the transcripts of conversations with the famous suggests that he never chose Imagination over Memory, but whose diary is useful on exactly that account,

Blake turned the talk to "his favourite expression

'my visions.' 'I saw Milton in imagination and he told me to beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost.'"

As the discussion continues, if Robinson's record is correct, one begins to suspect that only in this general warni?ig was Blake sincere with his guest, that the rest of the chat was, on Blake's part, a rather elaborate 12 hoax. One wonders how Robinson came to terms with the suggestion. Years earlier his contemporaries would have responded to such a remark with firej Y/ordsworth had hoped to resurrect Milton's spirit in order to raise up his own age, to "giv.e us manners, virtue, freedom, power," And Coleridge mused, in a note written about the time that Blake was sojourning at Felphami "In the next world the Souls of the Dull Good men serve for

Bodies to the Souls of the Shakesperes & Miltons"— a sort of Beulah, as it were — "& in the course of a few

Centuries, when the Soul can do without its vehicle, the Bodies will be advantage of good company have refined themselves into Souls, fit to be cloathed with like Bodies."1^ 210

But Coleridge's notion of Eternity is too quiet,

and Wordsworth was himself too often "Ho Poet but a

Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry

or Inspiration" (S 65*0. Their redemptive Hiltons were

likely to he tamer than the engraver v/ho spent most of

his last years, and of theirs, at 1? South Holton Street.

By 1825 Blake had been often enough in good company, as lh he noted for another memorialist, to understand the

limits of his audience. "If the Spectator could enter

into these Images in his Imagination approaching them

on the fiery chariot of his Contemplative Thought if he

could Enter into Moahs Rainbov/ or into his bosom or

could make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images

of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal

things as he must know then would he arise from his

Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy" (VL J : E 550). Occasionally, the spec­

tator was not ready for that strenuous happiness: "The

oddest thing he said was that he had been commanded to

do certain things— that is, to write about Hilton—

and that he was applauded for refusing. He struggled with the Angels and was victor. His wife joined in the conversation .... Footnotes for Chapter V

Paley, Energy, p. 213.

See Blake's letter of 16 August 1803 to Thomas Buttsf Keynes, Letters, p. 72.

Richardson, Explanatory Notes, p. 10*f.

Cowper, Latin and Italian Poems of Milton, p. 232.

These pages of Milton, plates 3-5, were added in late copies of the poem (E 7 2 9 ) and have the effect of shifting what biographical emphases the Bard's Song may have away from the identifications of Palamabron with Hayley and Rintrah with Blake; see Damon, Philosophy, pp. 407-13,

See Raine, Tradition. II, 226-27, and Milton 0. Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny (New York* Columbia University Press, 1 9 3 8 ), p. 24-7.

See David V. Erdman, ed., A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake (Ithaca 1 Cornell Univer- sity Press, 1 9 6 7 ), s. v. "Elect," "Redeemed,” "Reprobate” and their cognate forms.

On page 11^ (reversed) of Blake's Notebook; see E 721.

To make such a criticism is Blake's purpose in several of the annotations, but see especially E 58^-8 5 . See also VLJ. E 550* "General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge."

The photographs in this chapter reproduce plates from the Rosenwald copy of Milton now in the Library of Congress. It is Copy D as described by Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf 2nd, in William Blake's Illum­ inated Books» A Census (New Yorki The Grolier Club of New York, 1953), pp. 98-102. 212

Most of the full-plate illustrations and many of the quarter-plate or marginal drawings illustrate this moment. Plates added to the later copies of Milton (some of those new to copy D, for example) suggest Blake's intention to adumbrate and emphasize this epiphany. 12 Edith J, Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (London* J. M, Dent & Sons, 1938), I, 329-330. l * i J Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton* Princeton University Press, 1958- ), I, 1735 16. 121* the entry for 13-18 December I8O3 . lii See Blake's autograph in the album of William Upcottj E 6 7k.

Morley, Robinson. I, 3 3 I. AFT3SV/0RD* Cl! LITERARY RELATIONSHIP

In a letter to Richard Eberhart, late in his life

Y/allace Stevens extended a sympathy which was, as Harold

31oom remarks, "all the stronger for being self-sympathy":

I sympathize with your denial of any influence on my part. This sort of thing always jars me because, in my own case, I am not conscious of having been influenced by anybody and have pur­ posely held off from reading highly mannered people like Eliot and Pound so that I should not absorb anything, even unconsciously. But there is a kind of critic who spends his time dissecting what he reads for echoes, imitations, influences, as if no one was ever simply himself but is always compounded of a lot of other people. As for V/, Blake, I think that this means Wilhelm Blake.1

One has to sympathize with Stevens, His repeated denials of feeling the influence of others became increasingly vehement as his work came more and more under the scru­ tiny of professional critics, and one senses his forgive- able displeasure that the originality of his thought and manner might be understated.

But to take Stevens at his word is an easy luxury which the critic cannot afford. Let us say that the self-assertiveness, the willful misprision evident in

Stevens' allusion to "W, 31ake" seems not unlike a similar tone in many of William Blake's annotations to

213 works by his own contemporaries, but that the coincidence

is unintentionally ironic, Nevertheless, Stevens could

not, and surely would not have wished to deny that others

enlarged or converted his experiences and opinions—

that they influenced him. About a proposed trip to

Madrid, Stevens wrote to his friend Jose Rodriguez Feo,

"X cannot imagine anything more interesting than to

know someone there and through that person to acquire p some sense of the place," To Norman Holmes Pearson

about Marianne Moore, he said "The truth is that I am

much moved by what she is going through. It is easy to

say that Marianne, the human being, does not concern us.

Mads, mon Dieu. it is v/hat concerns us most,"^ And,

perhaps most suggestive in light of Stevens' denials of

influence, to Frederick Morgan he wrote, "There is a

young Korean at Yale, Feter Lee, v/ho sent me some trans­

lations of ancient Korean poetry which made the same

impression on me that translations of ancient Chinese Ll poetry make."

My point is simply that however much critics may try to divorce the poet from the man (and curiously,

Stevens' denials give weight to these attempts), the separation is a false one, as the English Romantics pro­ foundly believed, and as V/ordsworth, in a memorable passage, earnestly declared* "V/hat is a Poet? . . . He is a nan speaking to m e m a nan, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tender­ ness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased v/ith his ov/n passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him , . , . Literary rela­ tionship, it is too often forgotten, is only a species of human relationship altogether. And literary relation­ ships are different from other forms of human interaction by virtue of their objects (they involve men relating to the art and thought of other men, rather than to the look and sound of other men), and not by virtue of a difference in kind. All the varieties of human cathexis possible between persons are possible between poets, except perhaps the direct gratification of sensual awareness (yet Keats held a lock of Milton's hair, and

Blake may have touched Milton’s bones). This exception is unimportant to the general argument, especially in light of the influence which great men v/ho made the past have on men who make the present. An observation by Joseph V/ittreich is exactly to the point: "Commonly represented as the priest of poetry during the Romantic period, Milton is equally compelling as a symbol of the spiritual life and the man v/ho has attained it in full 216

measure. This preoccupation v/ith Kilton's spirituality,

together v/ith a sense of his spiri-tual presence in the

world, helps to explain the visionary company the

Romantics kept v/ith Hilton."^

That the critic can sometimes isolate the moment

and the place of the cathexis "between one poet and another,

by "dissecting v/hat he reads for echoes, imitations,

influences," is not reason to deprecate influence or

source study. V/e have Blake's poems, as we have Stevens'

letters, and must learn from them what v/e can. Harold

Bloom speaks justly when he argues that "the profundities

of poetic influence cannot be reduced to source-study,

to the history of ideas, to the patterning of images."^

I would go further: the study of poetic influence ought

not to be reduced to any single mode or program or thing

at all, neither to echoes nor, as Bloom has done, to Q "the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet.

Poets, especially willful poets like Blake and ISilton,

act according to their ov/n systems, and not to those of

other men.

The patterns of psychoanalytic theory are relevant

here, of course. But one should not build a theory of poetic influence on the exclusive model of a single psychological phenomenon, as Bloom does on the basis of 217

Freud's analysis of the father-son archetype, or as

Jung himself does on the marriage of the mystic king and queen, the alchemical metaphor by which he explicates the psychology of the transference,^ The Burden of the

Past, The Anxiety of Influence— these titles of recent studies of poetic influence suggest an attitude toward precedent tradition which many poets share, including

Stevens, Eberhart, and sometimes Blake.

But "Opposition is true Friendship" (MHH 17) and

"He v/ho has sufferd you to impose on him knows you"

(MHH 9 ), Most of all, "the Worship of God, is honouring his gifts/ In other mens & loving the greatest men best, each according/ to his Genius . . ." (J 91:7-9). It is possible to "accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyz­ ing" but it is nevertheless true, at least for Blake, that "General Forms have their vitality in Particulars"

(J 91:26, 29).

Blake's major metaphor for the influence which he felt from Milton's life and art is metempsychosis. He also used the conventional notion of the passing of the poet's mantle, the response of Milton as audience to the voice of the Bard, and reports of his own directions communication with the dead (in conversations v/ith

Ezekiel, with his brother Robert, and with Jesus, the 218

"Friend of Sinners" see J 3 ) as ways to represent the

variety of relationships by which he came to be, and

knew he was a visionary and a poet. Part of the critic's

business in determining the achievement of a poet must

be to notice the nature and extent of the contribution

of earlier thinking upon that poet's work. To assess

the v/eight of the precedents which contributed in

innumerable particulars to the art of William Blake, one

might in summary use the language of another profoundly

gifted and revolutionary artist, the sculptor Auguste

Rodin: "It is not thinking with the primitive ingenuity

of childhood that is most difficult, but to think with tradition, with its acquired force and with all the accumulated wealth of its thought."'*'0 Footnotes for Afterword

See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence; A Theory of Poetry (Hew York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

See Holly Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens (Kew York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1 9 6 6 ), p. 6 3 0 .

Stevens, Letters. p. 737.

Stevens, Letters, p. 771,

The passage is from Y/ordsworth1s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), quoted here from Hrnest Rhys, ed., The Prelude to Poetry (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1927"), pp. I 7 7-I7 3 .

Y/ittreich, Romantics on Hilton, p. 11,

Bloom, Anxiety, p. 7 .

Bloom, Anxiety, p. 7 .

See Carl G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference. trans. R. P. C, Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 6 9 ).

Les Cathedralss de France (Paris, 19^6), quoted in Albert H. Risen, Rodin (Hew York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1 9 6 3 ), p. 1 9 , BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS .CITED

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Bayly, Anselm. The Alliance of Musick. Poetry and Oratory (London, 1 7 6 9 ).

Beer, John. Blake's Humanism (Manchester 1 The Univer­ sity Press, I9 6 8 ).

. Blake's Visionary Universe (Manchester* The University Press, 1 9 6 9 ).

Bentley, Gerald E., Jr. Blake Records (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1 9 6 9 ),

______. ed,, Vala or The Four Zoas (Oxfords The Clar­ endon Press, 19^3).

______. ed., William Blake. Tiriels Facsimile and Transcript of the Manuscript (Oxfords The Claren- don Press, 1 9 6 7 .

______t and Martin K, Nurmi, eds., A Blake Bibliography (Minneapolis 1 University of Minnesota Press, 1964).

Birch, Thomas, ed, A Complete Collection of the Histori­ cal ,.Political. and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton (London. 17^81.

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______. Remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton (London, 1779). Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence t A Theory of Poetry (Nev/ Yorki Oxford University Press, 1973).

220 221

______, Blake's Aoocalynse (Garden City* Doubleday and Company, 1 9 6 3 ).

______, The Visionary Company* A' Heading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City* Doubleday and Company, I9 6 I).

Blunden, Edmund. Leigh Hunt (London* Cobden-Sanderson, 1930). Blunt, Anthony. The Art of William Blake (New York* Columbia University Fress, 1959).

Bogen, Nancy. "A New Look at Blake's Tiriel," BNYPL. 74 (1970), 153-65. Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake and the Age of Revolu­ tion (New York* Harper & Row, 1 9 6 9 )V

Bush, Douglas, et al., eds., Conrplete Prose Works of John Hilton (New Haven* Yale University Press, 1953- r Coburn, Kathleen, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Tavlor Coleridge (Princeton* Princeton University Press, 1958- ) Cowper, William. Latin and Italian Poems of Milton. translated into English Verse, and a fragment of a Commentary on Paradise Lost, ed, William Hayley (London, 1808).

Cox, Lee Sheridan. "The 'Ev'ning Dragon' in Samson Agonistes1 A Reappraisal," MLN, 76 (1 9 6 1 ), 577-84.

Cumberland, Richard and J. B. Burges. The Exodiad. A Poem (London, 1807).

Curran, Stuart. ".The Mental Pinnacle* Paradise Regained and the Romantic Four-Book Epic," in Wittreich, ed., Calm of Mind (q, v.), pp. 133-162.

Damon, S. Foster, A Blake Dictionary (Providence* Brown University Press, 1 9 6 5 ).

______, William Blake* His Philosophy and Symbols (New York* Peter Smith, 1947).

Deverell, Robert, Discoveries in Hieroglyphics and Other Antiquities (London, 1813)» 6 vols. 222

Dowden, Edward. Milton in the Eighteenth Century (1701- 1750) (London”: Oxford University Fress, 1908).

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Sacred Wood. ?th ed. (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1950).

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