A critical edition of William Blake's America, a prophecy

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Authors Stockton, Dolores Francesca Colson, 1939-

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317868 A CRITICAL EDITION OF WILLIAM BLAKE"S

AMERICA; A PROPHECY

by

Dolores Stockton

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

1 9 6 5 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED : P o l e n g f , , -Stockto'yT-

APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR

This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:

Cd/JLbL,\i£tfJruisrYKr.______k 5 CARL H. KETCHAM 7 Date Associate Professor of English CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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APPENDIX A

Tesct of the Cancelled Plates of America ...... 66

APPENDIX B

Text of the sfThiralathaie Fragment ...... 70

A SE EJECTED B IBZaX OCRA PH^ oao©oooo©oo©ooooooooo 71

iii LIST OF TABLES

Table Page A 1. Occurrence of 4 Line Rhythmic Patterns „ . „ ...... 35

2. Lines Illustrating the Nature of the Patterns ...... 35

iv ABSTRACT

A brief explanation of Blake8s myth insofar as it pertains to

America. including a summary of salient points of his philosophy, is followed by an extended exegesis of the poem with expository and criti­ cal commentary. Blake’s rhythm is studied by reducing each line of

America to musical notation and examining it for pattern and emotive effect. The quality of the poem and Blake’s poetic method are then evaluated. Following a discussion of the texts of America, the can­ celled plates of America % and the "Thiralatha” fragment (including an attempt to explain why the cancelled plates were abandoned), the text of America. collated from two facsimile copies, and the texts of the cancelled plates and fragment, from Keynes’ Nonesuch Edition, are given, with cross-references to lines recurring elsewhere in Blake.

v INTRODUCTION

1 o The Myth

My naked simple life was X„ That act so strongly shined Upon the earth, the sea, the sky. It was the substance of my mind. The sense itself was I. I felt no dross nor matter in my soul. No brims nor borders, such as in a bowl We see, my essence was capacity. That felt a 1,1 things. The thought that springs Therefrom*s itself. It hath no other wings To spread abroad, nor eyes to see. Nor hands distinct to feel. Nor knees to kneel: Butt being simple like the Deity In its own centre is a sphere Not shut up here, but everywhere.

Thomas Traherne

Who will justify him that sinneth against his own soul? and who will glorify him that dishonoureth his own life?

Ecclesiasticus

Men have struggled to achieve unity within themselves and with­

in society since societies began. The conception of inner unity has

taken different forms in different cultures ? it has been called oneness with God or with the universe, rebirth, englightenment, nirvana. But whatever its conscious form, without identity all men are miserable;

they are monsters, less than wholly themselves, and as they are dis­

torted so will their societies be distortions, waiting to deform the

children as they come.

1 Blake, perhaps most of all English poets, was aware of the in­ dividual’s mortal need to know himself, be himself, and to grow in that way peculiar to himself and to no one else and yet of his essential sameness with all men:

. . . every particular Form gives forth or Emanates Its own peculiar Light ...... This is Jerusalem in every Man, A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness.

This light, peculiar to every man and yet possessed by every man is the faculty to love, where love is synonymous with create. Blake sometimes calls this faculty the Poetic Genius and sometimes imagination, the di­ vine, active awareness that sees the spiritual realities of the physi­ cal world. As one uses and develops this faculty so is he alive and human} as one represses or denies it so is he dead and less than human, that is to say less than divine, since Blake believed that God’s exist­ ence lay in the expression of the humanity of man: "All deities reside in the human breast."2

All around him Blake saw and suffered from men denying the di­ vinity in themselves and in their fellows. His society, from the time of his puberty, was one of war, famine, and slavery under the oppres­ sion of a mad king frantically trying to forestall a revolution by a crippling censorship of speech and the press. As Blake said:

Over the doors "Thou shalt not," & over the chimneys "Fear" is written: With bands of iron round their necks fasten’d into the walls

1. William Blake, "Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion," The Complete Writings of William Blake with All the Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 684. All subsequent page references to Blake’s works will be from this edition.

2. Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," p. 153. The citizens, in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs Walk heavy| soft and bent are the bones of villagers.3

Self-realization as opposed to self-mutilation is Blake’s theme, re­ peated with power and care from the Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem.

The songs are masterpieces of delicate irony, statements of man’s in­ herent beauty that painfully expose his ability to destroy it; the prophecies are wild pleas to know the God in oneself and honor it in others.

Trembling 1 sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me. Yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.^

Blake teaches that there were four major, unified principles in original man, Albion, who is at once each man and all men, the history of the whole creation being repeated in the history of each individual.

These four principles roughly correspond to man’s ability to love, rea­ son, create and act, and are characterized in the four eternals, Luvah,

Urizen, Urthona and Tharmas. Albion fell when he ceased to recognise the integrity of these principles. To be divided within oneself, to be less than an integrated, "organiz’d" man is at once the sin and the punishment, so that each of the four eternals divided as did their di­ visions until there was chaos. The finite world was then created as an act of mercy to provide a limit tothis chaos of disunity.

Attempts to unify society have usually been divided between im­ posing a unity of act and instilling a unity of feeling. Whether a

3. Blake, "Europe: A Prophecy," p. 243.

4. Blake, "Jerusalem," p. 623. uniformity of action is imposed by lawgivers utilizing fear or by an­ archistic rationalists through the idea that all men must necessarily reason inflexibly alike if they will only reason^ it is a psuedo-unity bought at the price of the individual„ of his emotional integrity, and of his creativity. Jesus tried to show that if only men forgave each other their sins, that is, if love prevailed, there would be unique harmony among human beings. The curiosity is that while an imposed unity of action necessarily represses emotion and individual crea­ tivity, unity of emotion--and love is the only unifying emotion— encourages immense diversity of action. As Schorer says, Blake9s meth­ od of achieving universal order is not to deny any of the elements in human nature but to assert their totality and its integrity.^ Through love then, specifically through the forgiveness of sins, and by the progressive defining and casting out of error through the dialectical struggle of contraries (love and hate, energy and reason, etc.) men will eventually know themselves, be themselves, and Albion will once more arise.

Only two of the original eternals appear in America: Urthona and Urizen. The name "Urthona" is, I conjecture, from the Greek opQwvw

"I raise, I erect." He represents that part of the psyche which cre­ ates, unites, coalesces into form. "Urizen" is probably from opiZV "1 define, limit, order," and opfZwv "horizon" or "boundary.Urizen can

5. Mark Schorer, William Blaket The Politics of Vision (Hew York, 1946), p. 91.

6. First noted by F. E. Pierce in 1931 according to David ?« Erdman in Blake; Prophet Against Empires A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (Princeton, N. J . , 1954), p. 164 (foot­ note). be thought of as reason. Reason at its best approaches wisdom; at its worst it is one of the great self®limitations of man. Reason depends

on facts and logic and denies the validity of paradox; in order for

true wisdom8 true knowing to be obtained9 one must eventually transcend

logic, and comprehend paradox. This ability to go beyond the bounds of

logic is what the Zen master tries to awake in his students by asking

questions like "what is the sound of one hand clapping." "To give is better than to receive" lends itself to logic; "to give is to receive"

is a paradox that all Christians must comprehend through experience.

Three of the divisions of the eternals also appear in America;

Ore» Enitharmon, and the daughter of Urthona. Ore is the form in time

(the fallen form) of the eternal Luvah, love. He symbolizes that pas­ sionate energy of desire which in times of oppression furnished man the courage for rebellion; Christ in his role of revolutionary iconoclast is a paradigm manifestation of Ore. His name has several possible sources, the principal ones being the Greek opxeis "genitalsand the classical 0rcus8 Hell's reaper of kings.? There is a yin yang relationship between Ore and Urizen; as the power of human desire gradually declines into passivity, as a successful revolution gradually and inevitably declines into another tyranny; so Ore inevitably fades into Urizen who just as inevitably will provoke the birth of a new Ore when curbed anguish and fury burst forth in another revolution, a res­ urrection in miniature. This is what Blake means (lines 90 and 95) when he speaks of Ore as being both self-renewed and the devourer of his parent. Blake, in the prophecies following America, develops what

7. See Erdman, p. 24 (footnote). is only embryonic there, that it is not through the endless cycle of

waxing and waning passion that man can achieve final awareness, but

only through Luvah, love; and that it is not through the perfecting of

society that universal love is to be achieved, but that one must first

love— and the perfecting of society will follow.

Urthona1s daughter and Enitharmon are the only feminine charac­

ters in America. Blake usually uses female figures (as sexual mates)

to symbolize what he called "emanations»" "the total form of all the

things a man loves and creates,the expression of his divinity. The worst tragedy a man can experience is to be divided from his emanation;

ironically this can happen only if he comes to believe his emanation is

something outside himself rather than his vital extension. The deists, who conceived of God as one who created and then lost all interest in his creations» were to Blake horrible examples of men separated from

their emanations, and ignoring Christ’s paradox that "the kingdom of heaven is within you."

When Ore copulates with the shadowy daughter it is in recogni­

tion of her as his emanations it was Luvah in the form of Christ who

created the finite world as a compassionate limit to chaos; creation is

emanation, but as a fallen creation it must be the emanation of Luvah8s

fallen form, Ore. The shadowy daughter characterizes the physical world; as long as she remains outside of and apart from our inner world

she is an illusion. She may be thought of, in one unsatisfactory word, as nature.

8 . Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry; A Study of William Blake (Boston, 1962), p. 73. 7

Enitharaon too is an emanation divided from her source (Los, the form in time of Urthona) and therefore a fallen form. She is that quality of mind which sees in nature and God only mysterious, external powers; while this view exists it makes union with God, the world, one­ self, impossible for the viewer. Northrop Frye says:

This mental attitude recognizes at the beginning of knowledge a split between a perceiving subject and a perceived object, but has not the nerve to try to leap across the gulf . . . as the inside of a natural man is a very limited place, and as the outside of the natural world is of indefinite extent, all such reflections |pn the external world]carry with them a sense of the helplessness of the subject and the mysteriousness of the object. The mental fear in which abstract thought is born and bred is too pervasive to be felt as fear, but the wars and superstitions produced by it in human life are eloquently il­ lustrative of it.9

Blake calls war enslaved e n e r g y , 10 a perversion of the sexual impulse in its desire to progress from perceiving the object of desire to loving it, and from loving it to becoming one with it so that an exter­ nal object no longer exists. Enitharaon in her belief in an eternally external world “frustrates this rise in the sexual impulse, and so perverts it from creation to destruction."H When enslaved energy,

Ore, breaks his chains, he carries all who are oppressors and also all who have allowed themselves to be oppressed before him in a devouring flame. In one's self, when unity with the objective world is achieved, fear of the world will cease to exist because the illusion of an oppressive external power will have ceased to exist.

9. Frye, pp. 264-265.

10. Blake, “The Four Zoas: Night the Ninth," p. 361.

11. Frye, p. 262. 2, An Exegesis

America is the first poem Blake titled "A Prophecy,'’* and his

"first complete attempt to state, by means of an explicit myth, the si­

multaneity of cosmic, historical, and psychological events."2 He fin­

ished the poem in 1793 some seventeen years after the Declaration of

Independence and while there was still hope for the French Revolution.

To him the successful revolt of an unselfish Washington against the

mighty oppression of Britain was the beginning of the millenimn, a

spark that would eventually inflame all of Europe. As Such the revolu­

tion was of cosmological significance and the poem8s primary concern is

not with the historical revolution butwith the imminent rebirth of man

in Europe as the result of his awakening in America. "Here as else­

where in Blake, the psychological level is the core of meaning, the

real ’content.9 The historical level is the objective externalization

of the first| and the cosmic is the metaphorical enlargement of both."3

America opens with a preludium, an initial statement of the

theme. Historically, it describes the uprising, fourteen years after

the initial stirring caused by Rousseau's Social Contract (published in

1762), of slaves against their masters, in Canada, Mexico, Peru, and the

1. Blake wrote, in the Watson marginalia, p. 392: "Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, 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 opinion both of private & public matters."

2. Schorer, p. 82.

3. Schorer, p. 82.

8 Carribeans and especially in the American colonies where the rebels made and most successfully enforced a declaration of independence. In terms of Blake’s cosmic myth it describes the most recent puberty of

Ore, who, chained by Urthona, and fed by the daughter of Urthona, breaks his chains, rapes the daughter, and bursts like a ripe boil, destined to infect the rest of the world with the passionate desire to live in the full expression of its divinity. In terms of the soul, particularly of Blake’s, it is the description of creative man who has repressed the energetic expression of his desire and need to create be­ cause of fear, for many of us the fear,engendered by economic depres­ sion and war, for Blake the fear engendered by George Ill’s oppressive regime. Through the nourishment of his senses, the desire for expres­ sion ripens once more, frees itself with the energy of love, and be­ comes one with the outside world.

Blake’s stanzaic division does not depend on a planned number of lines but on dramatic logic and visual unity, each stanza a complete little picture, the whole much like a series of photographic Slides except, in its intimate relation to the soul, more resembling a dream.

The first stanza is expository, the second Ore’s speech, the third the rape scene and the fourth the daughter of Urthona1s speech, in many ways parallel to Ore’s. There is no real dialogue^ although the daugh­ ter and Ore address each other, each is speaking primarily of himself.

The first stanza has even the eerily vivid languor of a dream sequence. There is no sound and no living motion, just the glowing

Ore, chained in mute chiaroscuro to the floor of a lightless cave.

The dark-haired giantess he silhouettes is silent, nameless, and 10

enshrouded because she has no real existence apart from man; both her

gifts and her tongue are bound in iron, waiting Ore's release. She is

armed with plagues, weapons so dreadful she needs no others, a view of

the world common to those who fear it, Blake's simile of night as the

pestilential bow of heaven, in which he sees in an object of nature a

tool of man, is one of the strange, wonderful images common to him, in

themselves examples of what he is trying to communicate about nature—

that it is to be improved upon rather than revered, that without man it

cannot exist as a spiritual reality.

In the last line of the stanza, where Ore's embrace is foreseen

(the word "dread” here is in the sense "awesome"), there is at last a

promise of motion, a threat that the terrible panorama might come to

life. It does in an explosion of movement and sound: there is riv­

eting, soaring, screaming, stalking, lashing, rending, howling; clouds

and red eyes roll to and fro and there are swift transitions from cave

to sky, to mountain, to sea, to wilds and back to cave. Even Ore's

speech appears alternately to pulse and fade. From calm he rises

quickly to screaming, lashing, and raging, fades as his spirit feebly

folds, and rises again to a howl as he works his body into a rage

against his chains. Four moving creatures have been introduced, the

(historically authentic) symbols, as we discover in the daughter's

speech, of Mexico, Peru, the Carribean, and Canada. Ore foresees his

embrace not only of the earth, sea, and sky but particularly of civili­

zation as symbolized by the pillars of Urthona, the creative sense in man. His tenfold chains suggest the ten commandments, the ultimate in

ecclesiastical oppression, each one of which, as Blake several times 11 points out,4 Jesus broke by acting on virtuous impulse rather than by rule.5

The bright images are then extinguished by rolling clouds and one is brought sharply back to the immediacy of the cave, from dreams of freedom to the reality of slavery. Ore’s chains may for a time lim­ it his acts, but they cannot limit his spirit, which, fed for fourteen years, finally becomes as strong as the jealousy which imprisons him

(lines 2Ip and 22p). In America Blake does not emphasize jealousy’s being one of the reasons for Ore's imprisonment, mentioning jealousy only once in the Preludium (line 21p) and once in the Prophecy (line

209), However A Song of Liberty is full of references to jealousy, and in a later prophecy, Europe, Blake says:

They chain'd his (Ore's]young limbs to the rock With the chain of Jealousy.6

As has been mentioned earlier, the hindering of another1s acts was, to

Blake, one of the greatest of evils, and done usually through fear

(jealousy) of the hindered one's capabilities, just as the divided personality hinders its parts, sometimes trying to eradicate whole areas of the psyche.

The rape scene is once more silent, but it is a mobile silence relieved by panting and the sound of breaking chains. The action is very fast, building up to a logical and rhythmical climax on "it

4. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The Everlasting Gospel.

5. St. Augustine phrased this same opinion, "Love God, and do as thou wilt."

6. Blake, "Europe," p. 233. 12

joy'd," "it" very deliberately emphasizing "womb," at once a means and

an obstacle to the realization of the self, a net and a trap out of which man must struggle in order to be master, and which must be mas­

tered before its function can be fulfilled— hence "it joy'd." The

effect of the rape is emphasized rather than the rape itself; of five

lines Blake gives two rather slow ones to the daughter's smile, the

first fruit of her union with Ore, a destruction of the enmity sepa­

rated man feels in nature, the slowness of the smile giving a peculiar

tension to the image of lightnings over a silent sea.

Following an introductory line (26p), the daughter's first

speech bursts from her in an exalted, anticipatory rush; by becoming

one with Ore she has been given life.^ Looking back in the Preludium

it can be seen that this is what she has been patiently waiting for,

nourishing the life upon which hers depends, ritually expressing the

desire for unification through the giving of food. Her first words

indicate that she has been searching for Ore— "I have found thee."

Mute, she could not advise Ore, he must of his own initiative remove

the mysterious clouds, which she willingly puts aside after a token

struggle. She welcomes him as the image of God, fallen to give life (a

reminiscence of Ore's Christ manifestation), a God dwelling in Africa, which, as a veritable cupboard of slaves, is a central symbol of the

oppression of fallen man.®

7. The mystic experience of unification is often expressed as the loss of individuality, a drop falling into the ocean of the All. Blake would be the first to insist that it is rather the true realiza­ tion of individuality through being at last completely and immediately alive; the ocean flowing into the drop*

8 . Frye, p. 212e 13

Canada, Mexico, and Peru are courting union, American roots copulatively writhe their mandrake arms into the daughter’s nether deep, and the whale in the Carribean, scene of bloody slave riots, is no longer courting, but drinking her soul, that is, the Carribean Ore is not merely seeking union but has achieved it through his commitment to act (lines 3Op-34p). The daughter cannot only see, speak, and smile, but can feel, and she exults in the orgastic pain that tears her apart in order to mingle her with Ore in the death of the self and birth of the whole. Through the dialectic of fire and frost all that is dead and unloving in the self is destroyed and the consequent re­ unification and rebirth of eternal man made possible.

The Prophecy begins quietly, replacing howling and lightnings with a sullen burning. The first stanza, like that of the Preludium, is again expository; in five concise lines it introduces the protago­ nists and their settings, and delineates their quarrel. The American patriots, alarmed by the ambition of England’s Prince, rise, silently reflecting that Prince's bloody intentions in another highly visual, dreamlike scene, a background of sea cliffs in flame and dark, peopled with silent wraiths. The Guardian Prince is, of course, George III, and in earlier, cancelled plates of America (see Appendix A) Blake names him, Bronowski takes pains to show that Blake was at this time a frightened man taking refuge in ambiguity.^ It is true, perhaps, that his bones, like the bones of the villagers in Europe, were bent a little, but only a sensible little; although he suppressed the

9. Jacob Bronowski, William Blake, 1757-1827: A Man Without a Mask (London, 1944). 14

George III plates, his euphemism is immediately identifiable, Blake was taking a considerable chance; he was later brought to trial (and acquitted) for having allegedly, in the privacy of his own garden, damned the king.

It should be understood that George represents historically not only himself but the many elements in Britain who, from greed and fear, would enslave men— whether by chains, censorship, or intolerable working conditions, Washington, Franklin, Paine,*® and Warren, Gates,

Hancock and Green (Allen and Lee are substituted for Hancock and

Green in a later line) represent those determined not to submit to these elements,

Washington implicitly compares the imminent danger of the pa­ triots to that of the Jews, as Egyptian slaves, of forgetting their heritage and passively accepting themselves as slaves (lines 11-12) :

Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the whip Descend to generations that in future times forget.

In the preceding stanza there was a reference (line 1) to the Prince’s tent of night; here (line 7) we have his bow lifted in heaven, and soon

(line 62) there will be a reference to a "starry host," Blake used the heavens to suggest the remoteness, mystery, and oppression inherent in the worship of external powers; "all such idolatry is fundamentally star-worship, which is why the stars bear the names of gods, and vice versa."** He uses the term "star" in somewhat the same way Hollywood

10, There is some evidence that Tom Paine was a personal ac­ quaintance of Blake’s. A story that Blake saved Paine’s life by warn­ ing him to leave England has been discredited by Erdman, pp. 140-141.

11. Frye, p. 262. 15

does but applies it to the eighteenth-century equivalent of the star—

that is, to those situated highly in government„ society, and occasion­

ally commerce, glittering, distant, and powerful, each of whom was in a

position to exercise tyranny. Schorer points out that stars are also

symbols of dominant reason in their association with "the mechanistic

philosophy of science and eighteenth-century rationalism.

When the Prince declares war, fulfilling the threat of the

bended bow, he reveals his true dragon self. Erdman points out that

George's dragon form suggests the dragons on the banners of several

British regiments from which the name Dragoon Guards is derived.

More simply, this desire of the selfhood, from greed and fear, to make war, to assert rather than to create, is a hideous monster. Even in

the midst of its hideousness it appears slightly ridiculous, perhaps

overbalanced 5 there is something dangerously funny about fat, young

George clashing his scales and fourteen lines later trembling bur-

lesquely at the vision of Ore. His resemblance to Ore in locks and

glowing eyes might well be what he appears to the flag-wavers at home

to whom are touted the glories of war. Note how visually Blake is

thinking: in line 18 even the Prince's voice "appear(s)."

There is then on one shore a dragon burning against a cloudy

sky, on the other the Americans reflecting his bloody tint, much like a

night blitz with its deadly, beautiful fireworks. Between them heaves

the Atlantic which finally, climactically spews, in a hellish boil of

flame and smoke, Ore, terrifying the King (lines 19-29). The imagery

12. Schorer, p. 251.

13. Erdman, p. 23. 16 is overpoweringly of sickness: belching, fainting, bleeding; even the heaving of the ocean contributes to the terrible sense of nausea stimu­ lated by the appearance of the war dragon, Albion and America are, in their illness, personified for the first time in the Prophecy, reveal­ ing themselves to be at once countries and giant figures, much as is

James Joyce's Finnegan, while relating ultimately to the soul, so that the topography of the soul is seen in its relations both to the physi­ cal world, and the physical world as perceived by the imagination, that is, in the figure of a man.

As Blake elaborates in lines 107-109, Albion had dwelt before the fall in Atlantis, "on those infinite mountains of light, now barred out by the atlantic sea."^ At his fall, the physical world took its place, inundating it in chaos, as Plato's and Bacon's Atlantis was overwhelmed by the sea. Atlantis remains the symbol of unity, of the paradise that was. Thus the Atlantic is at once the source of Ore and a symbol of destruction.

The Zenith (line 21) is another symbol of remoteness and oppression connected with the heaven and star symbols. In the New

Testament the total form of spiritual power in the world is manifested in Jesus and his twelve disciples. To the fallen mind this power rests in the Zodiac surrounding a fallen sun, gods invented through super­ stition and fear.15 Dragon George and the Zenith share the same rage at the prospect of seeing their power overcome, the one's temporal power supported by just as much mystery, superstition, and oppression

14. Blake, "A Song of Liberty," p. 159.

15. Frye, p. 262. 17

as the others' spiritual power: the king in his palace, and the jeal­

ous gods housed in their heavens.

There are two interesting images in this stanza: the titanic

one of red clouds rising in an orbed heaven, suggesting a great, veined

eye, and the almost emblematic one of Ore's fiery limbs surrounded by

dark banners and towers. In America Blake's use of iron, wheel, dragon

and furnace are the embryos of what is later to become a very involved

symbology, but the nouns are principally suggestive here. As in

Milton's Hell, the atmosphere is one of heat without light: anger without love, emotion without understanding, energy without reason,

desire without vision, the plight of divided, fallen man.

The fourth stanza (lines 30-36) is an almost extraneous inter­

ruption, serving, apparently, to set a cosmic scene for Ore's forth­

coming speech. The tutelary daemon of Britain is seen standing with

the Mosaic tablets in a disembodied temple, the three forming a trinity

of oppression, while Blake directly addresses Mars, comparing the

planet to Ore. A curious cosmography follows which Blake never

repeated, perhaps because it confounds his assumption that earth was

created after the fall; Damon says of it:

Mars is evidently a symbol of the passionate heart of man, which once was all-inclusive; but from which the Poetic Instinct (the Sun) was divided in the course of Creation. The three planets originally revolving about Mars would have been Mercury, Venus, and the Earth.16

This is the only instance in the poem where Blake interrupts the narra­

tive to speak as the poet, one of the stanza's decidedly weak points.

16. S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Gloucester, Mass., 1958), p. 335. 18

Of somewhat greater significance is Blake’s introduction in

line 30 of the Angel, a symbol of those, who through moral hypocrisy, deceive and enslave themselves and the world.1? The Angel is still the

Prince, but in his more general spiritual aspect, the power behind the throne, so to speak, the spirit of English Toryism; note that the

Prince engages only in historical postures (as in lines 14-18) while the Angel does all the talking. "Spectre” has a very special meaning in Blake; it is everything that is unloving and dead, the selfhood, the opposite of one’s emanation. In line 35, however, applied to Ore, it is used in the ordinary sense of "apparition.11

The following (fifth) stanza is the first version of Ore’s speech, which he repeats in the seventh stanza after an interruption from Albion’s Angel. In the first version's serenity there is seen not so much the fallen Ore, as the eternal Luvah; Blake takes pains to somewhat remove Ore from the speech, saying a voice came forth. The voice prophecies the resurrection of man, of life after a long death;

17. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell deals extensively with Angels; the following poem (p. 261) also clearly expresses Blake’s feelings about them:

I asked a thief to steal me a peach: He turned up his eyes. I ask’d a lithe lady to lie her downs Holy & meek she cries—

As soon as I went An angel came. He wink’d at the thief And smil’d at the dame.

And without one word said Had a peach from the tree And still as a maid Enjoy'd the lady. 19 there Is at last light in the bright air, awakening one for a few, short moments from nightmare, and giving the whole stanza the freshness of morning after a smoke-begrimed night„ In a variety of swiftly changing, but connected images, Blake gives a ubiquitous view of the world on its Easter, its Last Judgment» He seems to suggest that a good share of the grime removed is industrial grime, the imagery of the

Industrial Revolution gradually pervading Blake's poetry as the Revolu- 18 tion itself pervaded Britain. Empire with all its economic, preying- on-colonies connotations is no more, there will be no more watchmen over property, the possessive sense of which, as the basis of Georgian morals, has caused so much pain; women and children will be freed from the deadly exploitation of their labor; Samson will no more grind at the mill with slaves. Blake was about thirty-six years old in 1793 and the thirty weary years may be his.

The Angel fails to be moved other than to a certain nervous annoyance, principally, one feels, because of the remark about Empire, the key epithet in his catalogue being "hater of dignities." Eni-\ tharmon1s children are, of course, the tyrant-angels themselves; Erdman suggests Revelation 12:4 as a possible source for this image.^

Since the effects of liberation do not particularly impress the

Angel (who perhaps can't really believe society could undergo such drastic changes), Ore describes the action he will take to gain those

18. Schorer says (p. 386) : "In Blake . . . the image of tyranny changes gradually from crowns and sceptors to machines . . . money is opposed to art, commerce and empire to poetry and painting, and wheels to wings."

19. Erdman, p. 336. 20 effects, showing in lines 59 and 63 by a reiterated "I," that while the awakening itself is not particularly connected with Ore, the steps taken toward awakening are.

Ore speaks of himself as being wreath’d around the accursed tree9 a strange and puzzling image that lends itself to many interpre­ tations , combining, as it does, Jesus, the serpent, and Ore; the cross, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Ore appears as a ser­ pent several times in America: as a symbol of phallic energy, as the reactionaries8 view of an iconoclast, and perhaps around the accursed tree. It seems to me that Ore’s serpent form reveals his relation to

Urizen, that within the serpent lies the incipient dragon, a form which the dying Ore must more and more assume. Frye sees in the image of Ore and the tree the central symbol of a fallen world— divine visionary 20 power bound to a natural, vegetable world, and Damon interprets the line: ’’Revolt, bound, is forced by Reason (Urizen) to assume a hypo­ critical form (the serpent) in established religion (the Tree of

M y s t e r y ) . "^l it also seems reasonable to suggest that the wreath is one of fire (wreaths of fire appear in lines 140 and 198) which will eventually consume the loathsome tree, that the Ore belief that every­ thing that lives is holy will overcome the Angel knowledge of good and evil. In the dialectic sense they will destroy each other, the need to rebel gone with the bonds, their fates entwisted.

This stanza is the focal point of the poem and, in many ways, of Blake’s thought. Jehovah-Urizen, that desire to reduce all to law,

20. Frye, pp. 136-137.

21. Damon, p. 336. 21 has bound the fierce joy which delights in life. When that joy strug­ gles free it must, simply by being* destroy organized religion which operates through fear and hypocrisy rather than love. In the first version of the speech„ Ore dealt with general bondage; here he deals particularly with sexual bondage 9 as the supreme example of ecclesias­ tical and governmental perversion of human divinity. The soul of sweet delight--the ability to love--can never be defiled although it may be perverted by Urizenic forces; everything that lives is holy,22 and through the energy of life, the dross of selfhood is consumed, apparent surfaces melted away„ "displaying the infinite which was hid."23

Blake uses few abstractions even here in the statement of his thesis, still depending predominantly on visual images. When he does use abstractions he tends to immediately clarify them with visual images, as line 72,

. . . the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd, is repeated in lines 73-75:

Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consum'd: Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass, His knees and thighs like silver; & his breast and head like gold.

And line 67,

. . . renew the fiery joy, becomes in the same line:

. . . burst the stony roof;

22. "To sum up, good in humanistic ethics is the affirmation of life, the unfolding of man's powers . . . . Evil constitutes the crippling of man's powers." Eric Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York, 1960), p. 20.

23. Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," p. 154. 22 where the stony roof is, like the stony law, dead— the tomb of one's own skull.

The imagery of the stanza is often biblical, particularly lines

73-75 for which Nebuchadnezzar's dream and his subsequent treatment of

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego (Daniel, chapters two and three) must be partly responsible. These three lines also contain another of Blake's frequent catalogues of the human body.

The Angel, now thoroughly alarmed, calls up the daemons of the thirteen American colonies in an increasingly hysterical stanza. Be­ cause of the resistance of the patriots the daemons are powerless as empty skins flapping in the wind; in America they cannot, as they so successfully did in England, make politically caused famines (as

Jehovah was so wont to do), fortresses of cities, and druid estates

(Blake often equates oak with druid) of the hills. In graphic terms the Angel describes the birth of rebellion as it takes place before his horrified eyes, as he knows it has taken place many times before. In later poems Blake shows that Ore's mother is Enitharmon; here I believe the reference to Ore's mother (line 100) is probably just an image of the rebelling forces.

The long stanza is very rapid, the first line,

Sound! sound! my loud war trumpets & alarm my Thirteen Angels! repeated four times, a recurring blast nervously sounding to battle; this and the second line also close the stanza, Erdman sees in the eternal Lion the biblical protector of sheep, in the Wolf their tradi­ tional enemy, the two making an apt symbol of s t r i f e , 24

24, Erdman, p, 330, 23

The colonies refuse the first challenge to battle a and Blake jerks the reader out of hysteria with a slow line forcing calm;

On those vast shady hills between America & Albion's shore„

The bright summits of those hills are now shady„ the Olympian seats of the Angelso Of the little tapestry of Ariston Frye says, "The story[as told in Herodotus]of Ariston, the Spartan king who stole another man's

'emanation,' is a reversed form of the story of Menelaus, and expresses 9 S Blake's belief in the derivative nature of Greek culture," It can only be added that the symbols surrounding Ariston are mostly pejor­ ative : he is a king, he stole to possess; besides being connected with empire his palace is immortal rather than eternal, suggesting an in­ ability to be reborn through Eternal Death, and lies in a forest, which often symbolizes error. In this palace the Angels sit on magic (sug­ gesting a mysterious power) seats, a passage ironically reminiscent of

Milton's description of the palaces in Heaven;

Where sceptered Angels held their residence, And sat as Princes 9 whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule. Each in his hierarchy, the Orders bright,26

The Angels finally rise in perturbation, the Angel of Boston (the first city to act against Britain) indignantly rejecting the hypocrisy and oppression of the existing society by declaring his independence of the monarchy, and the other angels following. The Angel's speech is very immediate, speaking directly of Blake's and Dickens' society (and

25, Frye, p. 440

26. John Milton, "Paradise Lost," Milton, ed. Maynard Mack (2nd ed.; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1961), p. 124 (Book I, lines 732-737). 24 ours)a where pity and generosity have become trades that men get rich by. The meaning of the speech is quite clear even though it is ex­ pressed in abstract terms, the only difficult lines being perhaps lines 122-123;

To keep the gen'rous from experience till the ungenerous Are unrestrain'd performers of the energies of nature.

This is to say that the giving, loving person is bound by laws, by fam­ ines , by fears, by the ungenerous who, free from fear of dissent, per­ form unrestrainedly the energies of nature— that is, they devour like beasts.

Erdman shows that the Demon red is very likely the British navy

(although it could also be Ore) cannonading in smoky wreaths from the s e a , 27 kindling the land into rebellious fires which route the British occupation, their mental chains clanking, to the sea. Bernard is

Francis Bernard, the governor of Massachusetts Bay from 1760 to 1771, who had to be recalled because of hi‘s "fatal deficiency in political tact and i n s i g h t , "28 an appropriate symbol of the British occupation.

Albion's Angel then determines to send, hopefully, more trust­ worthy plagues (historically the effort to cause disunity among the colonies through their e c o n o m y 2 9 ) , again revealing in himself the dragon, his Miltonic hosts rolling beneath. These last stanzas are visually somewhat amorphous, because the action is unusually conse­ quent. It is perhaps difficult to encompass this wealth of motion at

27. Erdman, p. 25.

28. T. F. Henderson in DNB s.v. "Bernard, Sir Francis."

29. Erdman, p. 54. 25 once $ but with a little effort it becomes a cyclorama, a Sistine

Chapels a magnificent design writhing around, above, below, full of plague winds, blights, floods, earthquakes, and rushing figures, all inundated in fire. But for the patriots' acting in union, America had been lost, both "acting" and "in union" being of equal importance, New

York merchants lock their chests, Boston mariners unlade their famous tea, and the scribe and builder (Erdman suggests Paine and Jefferson as particular examples30) throw down pen and hammer in rage and fear,

Fife fights fire, the divisive plagues recoil on the Angels, and all the action turns to Britain as Blake lists the evils she does herself in Apocalyptic detail,

Erdman interprets the recoiling of the plagues as a judgment on

England for the aggressive wars of George III, just as the Black Death was considered a judgment on England for the aggressive wars of

Edward XII.'** Blake may have, as Erdman suggests, derived his plague imagery from Joshua Barnes * History of Edward XII (1688), but eight­ eenth-century England’s plague is by no means a "judgment" in the sense of a punishment from some external force, but is an inevitable result of her actions:

He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted . . . . If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being .... His being shrinks . . . he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absoluted e a t h . 32

30. Erdman, p. 54*

31. Erdman, p. 56.

32. Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1838 address at Divinity College quoted from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York, 1929), pp. 32-33. 26

Blake now resembles Hieronymous Bosch rather than Michaelangelo

as ecclesiastical and secular authority writhe against the eastern sky,

and Albion's Guardian in an extraordinary fit (a possible reference to

George Ill's madness) shows the quivering whites of his eyes as he

Urizen-like turns them toward the brain, the seat of reason, thus

making himself quite blind. The Bard of Albion (at that time William

Whitehead, a typical laureate) is very suitably blinded by a cowl of

flesh as he had been blinded to his prophetic duties to "hollow and

stamp, & frighten all the People . . . & show them what truth is.

His dragon form is revealed as are the Angels' and the Priests' who

scuttle off leaving the doors of marriage open, their franchise lost.

Love is man's expression of divinity, not a commodity to be bought from

the government and blessed only by a duly ordained ecclesiastic.

Although Blake definitely means the love between man and woman, he also means that between man and his emanation, "the female spirit(s) of the

dead," the awakening of whom he likens to the budding of the vine; "the

dead" refers to all those bound and hindered, less than divine.

Erdman explains several of Blake's explicitly historical

images. He suggests that the millions' having done with war is a re­

flection of the mass desertions which took place at the end of the war.

Following the "instant and simultaneous flight of almost every man who was intitled to his discharge," says Fortescue[Sir John, army historian]it was impossible for the next ten years to recruit troops enough . . . . As for Ireland and Scotland, in these nations with long-standing grievances . . . serious mutinies occurred as early as 1778. By 1782 rebellion in Ireland reached the proportions of a revolution, and in Scotland

33. Blake, "An Island in the Moon," p. 63. 27

a "contagion" of debate over Reform "reached the north" „ « » „ The particular mention of Bristol and London is appropri­ ate » not only for the riots [open demonstrations against the war) but because these two merchant cities were most deeply involved in the American t r a d e . 34

Ore's flames finally melt the mysteries of the heavens, ex­ posing as the real cause of tyranny„ a whimpering Urizen (reminding one strongly of Lewis Carroll's Walrus) whose cold tears effectively quench

Ore for twelve years until the beginning of the French Revolution, It must be understood that what was quenched was not the American revolu­ tion but the British revolution and hence the world revolution, or mil™ lenium. Urizen in terror of the loss of the status quo kills the revolution because he himself is so dead to the needs of life in his blind dependence on order.

America ends with an epilogue. From a point of omniscience the world governments are seen in their mildewed heavens, slowly attempting to robotize man completely by shutting the gates of the senses and thereby denying to him his perception of the infinite.

But the five gates were consum'd, & their bolts and hinges melted; And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of men.

Blake's prophecy, in the modern sense like Jonah's, was wrong.

The flames of the French Revolution did not enlighten the world or even

France. De Tocqueville could say of that country several generations after the revolution;

Methods of stifling the least whisper of resistance had not (before the revolution]been brought to their present-day perfec­ tion. France had not yet become the land of dumb conformity it is now; though political freedom was far to seek, a man

34. Erdman, pp. 56-57. could still raise his voice and count on its being widely heard.35

And Blake:

But since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Inter- measurable One by Another, Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree.36

But his prophecy in the ancient sense, the sense in which the psalmists were prophets, remains a vivid picture of the soul.

35. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revo­ lution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N. Y . , 1955), p. 115.

36. Blake, a letter to George Cumberland, April 12, 1827, p. 878. 3. The Rhythm

Rhythm is the movement of sound in time. It is a physical sen­

sation of beat and pulse, beat being the regular measure of time and

pulse the continuing activity between beats. For many years the rhythm

of English poetry has been deceptively analyzed by forcing it into the

classical foot, thereby artificially limiting the movement of the pulse

and negating the intrinsic relationship of the rhythm with the meaning

of the line. Poems are often studied as if they were written in "meas­

ured thuds by rule5" they are not. The interrelationships of rhythm,

stress and pitch as they contribute to the musical and the intellectual

idea of a poem are so complex that no set of rules, particularly the very limited ones of classical scansion, can encompass them; the poet must depend on his inner ear to coalesce these factors into the unity he desires. When and if he uses the classical foot it is only one

factor among several, its principal function being to limit the syl­

labic length of the line.

Musical notation has long been available as a simple means for

studying the true rhythm patterns of poetry.1 It permits, for further analysis, a recording of the rhythm as it is actually heard and felt, allowing for the necessary individual interpretation within recognised aesthetic and logical bounds. The concern here is not with defending

1. Sydney Lanier is generally credited with being the first to propose the use of musical symbols in the study of poetry in The Science of English Verse (Hew York, 1880); however, more than a century earlier Joshua Steele had published An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Certain Symbols (London. 1775).

29 30 this method of analysis,2 but rather with using it, which is, perhaps, the most valid defense.

Each line of America has been read as a normally perceptive reader might do (there can be only small differences between readings if the poem is read according to its sense and if the readers have any sense of rhythm) , the rhythm then recorded as accurately as possible-- giving each syllable a value in musical symbols--and the resulting pat­ terns studied. For example, line 2p,

When fourteen suns had faintly journey'd o'er his dark abode, was recorded as follows : I r\n n n fi.ui ji j < i

Musical symbology is developed enough to record the interrela­ tionships of rhythm, pitch and stress, but a detailed analysis of these interrelationships here appeared to be too large an undertaking. For instance, the placement and degree of stress in a poetic line depend on at least four components, each of which influences the others: the etymological, grammatical, rhetorical and rhythmical.^ Pitch also has its interdependencies with rhythm, stress, and logic, and Katharine M.

Wilson has done an interesting study of them.^ Here, the principal

2. One of the more lucid defenses is D. S. MacColl's "Rhythm in English Verse, Prose, and Speech," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, comp. Oliver Elton (Oxford, 1914), V, 7-50.

3. Considering the nature of these components, one can see why stress is the principal link between rhythm and logic.

4. Katherine M. Wilson, Sound and Meaning in English Poetry (London, 1930). 31

concern will be with recording rhythm for the purpose of studying the

larger patterns and their emotive effects; the study of how pitch and

stress determine the placement of rhythmic beat, as well as their other

functions in the poem, must be neglected.

That Blake felt the limitations of the classical foot is veri­

fied by his statement in the introduction to Jerusalem, written some years (between 1804 and 1820) after America;

When this Verse was first dictated to m e , 5 j consider'd a Monotonous Cadence, like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for the inferior parts; all are necessary to each other.6

When Blake wrote America he was still under the ancient bond­ age , and the poem can be passably scanned as iambic heptameter. How­ ever, even at this date he was experimenting with terrific and mild rhythms at appropriate parts within the constriction of classical meter. It will be shown how he constantly utilizes varieties of beat, pulse, and pause, with a syllabic range of twelve to twenty to break

5. "It was Blake * s belief . . . that long passages, or even whole poems, were merely transcribed by him from the dictation of spirits . . . . (However,3 Blake's meticulous care in composition is everywhere apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft," William Blake, The Poetical Works of William Blake„ ed. John Sampson (London, 1960), p. xix. "Usually the term I ^spirit' in Blake, when not used in an ironic sense, means the imagination functioning as inspira­ tion, and the fact that inspiration often takes on a purpose of its own which appears to be independent of the will is familiar to every creative artist," Frye, p. 38.

6. Blake, "Jerusalem," p. 621. 32 the otherwise inevitable monotony of a seven-foot line; also how, less often, but more importantly, these sensitised tools become emotive devices.

Because America was written in iambic heptameter, the syllabic mode (number of syllables occurring most often in a line) is fourteen.

The number of syllables varies sharply from line to line, however, in what appears to be a random manner, in one pair of lines (120-121) almost spanning the extremes of the syllabic range, with no more than five lines of the same length ever appearing in sequence. Even the mode varies within the poem, rising at the end (lines 151-226) to fif­ teen, indicating that on the average, Blake’s lines are longer at the end of America than at the beginning.

In contrast to its syllabic eccentricity, America has consider­ able rhythmic order. Of 263 lines, 203, or 77%, consist of two meas- 4 ures of 4 time; that is two measures in each of which are four beats, eight beats altogether. This eight-beat line may be difficult to reconcile with a heptameter line, but Blake often has the beat come on a pause, a beat not possible to indicate with classical scansion. The 2 3 3 4 other sixty lines are in 4, 4, and 8 time, some in combination with 4 time.

In this governing of syllabic variety by a stable beat can be seen the diversity-within-order that is so integral a part of Blake's thought. The particular structure of the syllabic action was dis- 4 covered by an examination of the rhythmic patterns within the 4 lines 4 (there are not enough lines of each non-4 time signature to permit a valid search for rhythmic pattern). 33 4 The first and second measures of the 4 lines were examined both

separately and together. Three basic patterns were found in the begin­

ning measures and labeled with Arabic numerals:

1. Four beats with no rests on the beat except in odd instances of

syncopation (remember that within the structure of the beats there can

be any variety of pulse) : I I J J J J!

When fourteen suns had faintly journey'd Co*er his dark abodej

2. Three beats with a rest on the fourth beat:

4 I J J J & |

His food she brought in iron baskets , [his drink in cups of iron.]

More often than not a pulse— syllabic activity— occurs after the fourth

beat rest to serve as an anacrusis to the second half of the line:

li j j

Brothers & sons of America , till our [faces pale and yellowJ

3. Four beats with a rest on the second beat:

11J * J JI

Swelling , belching from its deeps [red clouds & raging fires.] 4 This unusual pattern occurs only once (line 20) in the 4 lines. The 34 effect of most rests is to emphasize what came just before.? The rest in Pattern 2 usually sets off the whole beginning phrase from the re­ mainder of the line; in Pattern 3 the rest very strongly emphasizes the first word of the line.

Two basic patterns were found in the end measures, correspond­ ing with Patterns 1 and 2, respectively, in the beginning measures, and were labeled with capital letters :

A. Four beats with no rests except for an occasional incomplete pulse at the end in order to allow for the anacrusis of the next line:

ll J J J Jl or ! | J J J JTI

[heads deprest, voices weakJ eyes downcast, hands work-bruis*d.

This pattern makes for a very positive ending and is used in six instances to close stanzas;® the Preludium is triply divided from the

Prophecy by three of these lines at the close.

B. Three beats with a full rest on the fourth beat: tl JJJ*l

[his food she brought in iron baskets, his!drink in cups of iron .

Tables 1 and 2 show the rates of occurrence of the various patterns of whole lines and give examples of these patterns. From a

7. Interestingly, in syncopation, the rest not only imparts greater emphasis to what has preceded it but prevents too much emphasis falling on an insignificant word like "to," not allowing that word to come on the beat, but shoving it over into the following pulse.

8. In lines 35p, 36p, 37p; 69; 102; 187; 203; and 218. 35

TABLE 1 4 OCCURRENCE OF 4 LINE RHYTHMIC PATTERNS

Pattern Number Lines Per Cent Pattern Symbol of Occurrence Occurrence

IB 1 J J J Jl J J J * l 117 58

2B 1 JJJtlJJJtl 62 31

2A 16 8

1A 1 J J J J1J J J Jl 7 3

3A U N Jl J J J Jl 1 - i

TABLE 2

LINES ILLUSTRATING THE NATURE OF THE PATTERNS

Pattern Symbol Sample Line

IB When fourteen suns had faintly Journey'd / o'er his dark abode .

2B His food she brought in iron baskets . his / drink in cups of jLron .

2A Mingle in howling pains , in / furrows by thy lightnings rent.

1A 0 what limb rending pains I feel, / thy fire and my frost.

3A Swelling , belching from its deeps / red clouds & raging fires. 36 study of the occurrence of the patterns it was found that the beginning measures are much more likely to have four spoken beats and the end measures more likely to have three, the seven beats corresponding to those of a heptameter line, with an eighth unspoken beat, or pause, at the end of the line. It was also found that on the average there are more syllables in the beginning measures, a greater syllabic range, and about twice as many varieties of pulse than are found in the end meas­ ures, and that the beginning measures are often even further emphasized by a caesura on the fourth beat, an emphasis not possible for the end measures. In addition. Patterns 1 and 2 occur at about a 3:2 ratio while in the end measures Pattern A occurs so rarely that there is, in effect, just one pattern in the end measures. In short, the beginning measures have immensely greater variety and activity than do the end measures in spite of the fact that the principal varieties of pulse in both halves of the line are very simple, trochaic, almost marching cadences. The narrative quality of the poem is aided both by the continuous legato movement provided by the simple marching pulses, and by the greater variety and action in the beginning of the line which give a sense of rhythmic anticipation, a little push, driving the musi­ cal momentum from the start. The total effect is one of chant sub­ merged in surge and flow, a theme particularly appropriate to this oceanic poem. 4 For the most part the non-4 lines occur singly or in groups of two and three, in a fairly even distribution within the poem, often enough to give interest to what would otherwise be an unrelieved series 4 4 of 4 lines. However, there are two long spans of unbroken 4 lines, and 37 4 one of non«4 lines. The text of America was examined to see if there were emotive reasons for these interruptions in Blake’s pattern, or if the exceptions were random. 4 The first long 4 interval (lines 57-83) includes, with a few lines before and after, the eighth stanza of the "Prophecy," Ore’s last speech in the poem. Albion’s Angel has asked Ore why he, a ravening demon, comes in that form, and instead of replying in the expected terms of defiant malediction. Ore states man’s re-attainment of divin­ ity in a tone beautifully certain and unafraid. This speech is the 4 essence of the poem, and the continuing use of unbroken 4 time helps to impart a serenity, a sureness, most of all an inevitability to the extended statement that (line 71) "everything that lives is holy, life delights in life." i The second 4 interval (lines 94-115) appears to be random with no discernible emotive effect. 4 The non-4 interval (lines 143-152) is especially interesting.

Up to this point in the poem the reader has been lulled into pausing at the end of a majority of the lines. Suddenly, from line 146 to line

152 there are no pauses and the time signature is either speeded up to 2 3 3 4 and 8 or the last measure of the line is 4 with only three beats instead of the anticipated four. In opposition, these lines fall with­ in a section that has the shortest syllabic length of line in the poem, so that the rapid beat is made to pull against what would otherwise be a very slow line because of the absence of syllabic action. The effect is a little like jumping hurdles in fog. The reader starts to pause at the end of the line, realizes he can't, and is pushed forward headlong 38 into a line so slow that he may not sustain the forced Impetus, but must resume it at broken intervals« Additional tension is undoubtedly contributed to the passage, a description of the English running fran­ tically in agony from Ore's covering flame. 4. A Synthesis

A Japanese poet, seeing a flower, wrote

When I look carefully I see the nazuna blooming By the hedge!

Blake, seeing a flower» wrote

. . . before my way A frowning Thistle implores my stay. What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles or tears; For double the vision my Eyes do see. And a double vision is always with me. With my inward eye 'tis an old Man grey; With my outward, a Thistle across my way.

The major characteristics of Blake’s prophetic poetry lie in its didacticism and its anthropomorphism, both great strengths and great weaknesses. Basho (1644-94) was able directly to express his experience of the flower; he perceived in the flower's physical being, . through his affinity for it, its identity, its truth, without having to change it (or, as Tennyson did, pluck it). Blake is as vibrantly aware of the flower as is Basho, but for Blake a visual transmutation human­ izing it is necessary; Blake needed to see through the flower's phys­ ical reality to its spiritual reality. Ideally, poetry is as immediate an experience as the nazuna haiku; but in order for it to be so the reader as well as the poet must be able to bring his whole self to it.

Blake's unique poetry is at once attempting to transmit the poetic

1. D. T. Suzuki, "Lectures on Zen Buddhism," Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis (New York, 1963), pp. 1-6.

2. In a letter to Thomas Butts dated 22 November 1802, p. 817. 39 40 experience and teach how to receive it, how to be one's whole self; so that he is, through poetry, teaching how to read poetry, a lesson equally difficult for teacher and student. It might be said that

Blake's poetry points to the moon while Basho's is the moon; yet Blake is not pointing from the earth but stands on the moon pointing down.

The basis of Blake's poetry-teaching is his symbolism, which shares the weakness all symbols must; truth ultimately is not a symbol, but is, and symbols can be at best analogies of truth. This leaves a direct sensation of truth necessarily incommunicable except by inspi­ ration and innuendo; poetry attempts by these means to jar the reader awake so that he may himself experience the truth. Because double vision is his means of perceiving truth, Blake's particular method of inspiration and innuendo is to force the reader to view everything in terms of human figures, thus leading to the awareness that truth can be perceived only through the power of the human imagination, and that we must therefore give our unique selves to an experience, whether of a poem, a flower, a person, or life.

Ultimately, considering the content of his poetry, Blake could have had little choice of symbol. Almost certainly he could best show the complex interrelationships of the soul in the conflict and resolu­ tion of human figures. These human figures are much more than emblems, yet do not possess the dramatic idiosyncracies of, for instance,

Dickens' characters; representing personality itself, they must of necessity have a universal rather than a particular character. Each is a little piece of truth which expands as Blake's thought expands and as the reader's expands, much as the nuances behind your own name expand 41 as you come to know yourself. One can rarely read just one prophetic poem, or even one lyric, and fully understand it. America is one of a series of four (Europe„ The Song of Los, The Book of Urizen) prophetic poems outlining Blake’s myth, and although written first, it is the third of the series in narrative order; there is no slightest clue within America who Urthona and Enitharmon are, and in order to fully understand Ore, The Four Zoas must be read. Peer Gynt says

I read religion— intermittently. That way it's easier to digest. One shouldn't read to gulp down everything, / One must select what one will be able to use.

Blake cannot be "used"; he must be gulped down and allowed to lie in the dark, dissolving. The point of Blake's poetry-teaching is that the realization of his poetry must be simultaneous with the realization of oneself.

America reflects in its form its content; as Ore and Urizen struggle in dialectic conflict, energy and form strive to achieve a solution in Blake's technique. In painting, Blake was a great admirer of both firm outline and energetic inspiration. However, just as the individual must be allowed to find his own way, so must artistic energy be allowed to take its own form and not be forced by convention into another. The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is a paradigm of the union of form and energy. I do not believe America achieves this union; here Blake is wavering between conforming to convention and breaking with it, with the result that the reader feels a vague dis­ satisfaction, a sense of not-quite-rightness, that is not present in

3. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Michael Meyer (Garden City, N. Y . , 1963), p. 70. 42

reading some of the earlier lyrics and later prophecies. This fal­

tering is probably most evident in Blake’s metrics where he is appar­ ently concerned with iambic heptameter9 but is more fundamentally conforming to a tightly rhythmical prose cadence, so that he sometimes goes to lengths to make iambs, sounding normally silent "-ed's,1* and eliding vowels, and he sometimes doesn’t bother. His diction is for the most part almost conversational but he occasionally reverses word order or resorts to poetical " o ' e r ' s " o f t ' s , " "e’er’s," and even

" 'gins," although " 'gins" is used not merely to make an iamb but for pictorial and rhythmical emphasis, slowing down the whole phrase.

Blake usually avoids classical allusions; when he does make them (to

Ariston and perhaps to Mars) they have an extraneous quality. Perhaps that is the most concise criticism that can be applied to Blake's irresolution; his conventionalities per se are extraneous and the poem could do perfectly well without them.

America is, for the most part, as simple, visual, and immediate as the naked figures that illustrate it. Except for an occasional stunning metaphor or simile, Blake's imagery depends principally on nouns, about a third of which are unqualified, and secondarily on adjectives and gerunds. Much of the action is in the present tense; sometimes past and present are intermittently used from sentence to sentence with almost the effect of an on-the-spot newscast. Except for the two extraneous passages mentioned earlier, and the speeches, the action is quite concentrated; however, the poem is about equally divided between speech and narrative, with the speeches primarily ex­ pository and not really furthering the action. The poem is unusually 43 concrete, almost always immediately clarifying an abstraction with a positive image, Schorer says of Blake’s poetry that "the abstract dis­ cussion [expands more and more]within the concrete symbolism, until it breaks its boundaries, flows over them and drowns them o u t . "4 This is at least not true in America.

Blake uses a great deal of alliteration in America * some near­ rhyme, and occasionally a sort of rhythm-rhyme:

His stored snows he poured forth . . . .

. . * furrows of the whip , , , future times forget.

To thefour winds as a torn book , . . .

There is one identifiable idiosyncrasy in Blake's diction: he often pairs, with verb forms or adjectives, adverbs without the final

"-ly," as dark descended, wrathful burnt» fierce glowing« indignant burning, thus avoiding an obvious effiminacy, as well as sometimes making his iambs.

The casual reader of America is likely to be left with the un­ happy impression that, compared to Blake's crystalline lyrics, America is all clouds and bombast, writhing, howling, and rhetoric, Blake owes a good deal of his diction and speech rhythm to Milton, the Bible, and

Ossian, a mixture common to the hortative writers and speakers of his day. Blake was choosing the most familiar, higher form of emotive address available to him and it could not have seemed very strange in itself to his audience. The strangeness of Blake's poetry lies in what he says, rather than in how he says it; he does not depend on

4. Schorer, p. 428, 44 complicated tropes and cleverness for his effects, but primarily on symbolic nouns„ the juxtaposition of visual ideas, and rhythm. 5e The Text

America is the seventh book Blake produced by means of his

Illuminated Printing;

In this process the text and surrounding pictorial embellish­ ments were executed in reverse in some species of varnish upon copper plates, which were afterwards etched in a bath of acid until the whole design stood in relief as on a stereotype. From these plates impressions were printed in various schemes of monochrome9 and afterwards delicately tinted by the artist in washes of watercolour, each copy thus possessing an individ­ uality of its own . . . . no subsequent alterations were possible, except such deletions as could be made by chipping out part of the lettering, or by re-engraving and substituting an entirely new plate. Naturally under these circumstances few copies were issued, ntir was there an actual edition in the ordinary sense of the term of any of the engraved works; im­ pressions . . . being struck off as required.1

Seventeen copies of America are known to exist» each consisting of eighteen (including title page and frontispiece) folio-sized plates, only four of the copies colored. Of these Erdman says:

Of all the Prophetic Books, America is the most splendid .... The exultation of the text is reflected in the pure strength of the colouring which Gilchrist described as "sometimes like an increase of daylight on the retina, so fair and open is the effect of particular pages." Never again did Blake quite attain the same brilliancy, the same sensitiveness . . . .2

The following text of Americawas prepared from a collation of two facsimile copies: that published by the Falcon Press in 1948, and that published by the Trianon Press in 1963 from the original lent by

Paul Milion. Since all the copies of America were printed from the same plates there are no variations except in the clearness of the

1. Sampson, pp. xvii-xvili.

2. Erdman, p. 339. 45 46 impression; it is very difficult to differentiate Blake's commas and periods, his semicolons and colons; and sometimes the end punctuation„ coming just at the edge of the plate, is entirely left off. By compar­ ing the Falcon Press facsimile, which is printed with green ink on yellow paper and uncolored, with that of the Trianon Press, which is printed with blue ink on white paper and colored, it was often possible to make decisions about the punctuation that could not have been made from only one copy of the poem.

Every Blake scholar is indebted to Geoffrey Keynes for his excellent editions of Blake's work, and to offer an edition that dif­ fers from his might be thought to border on error. However, Keynes, in his edition of America, has changed the punctuation (sometimes con­ siderably, substituting question marks for exclamation marks and deleting or adding exclamation marks as well as other, minor marks), added capitalization, and once indicates a stanza division where Blake unmistakably has not (between lines 47 and 48). From respect for

Blake, and an interest in what he was doing rather than what convention would have him do, this edition adheres as cfosely as can be determined to his punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and stanza division. As it is impossible to differentiate with any certainty between Blake's colons and semicolons I have interchanged these at my own discretion, as well as questionable end commas and periods; added punctuation is enclosed in brackets, with the exception of quotation marks, all of which are mine.

As can be seen, Blake's practices were somewhat erratic; he seems to have engraved what he felt as he wrote, rather than to have 47 adhered to consistent rules. His use of stops depends to a certain extent on the rhythm and speed of the line; for example at the begin­ ning of the Prophecy, in a calm stanza, he prosaically punctuates:

Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green.

Later, in a somewhat more excited stanza, he repeats almost the same line (159) omitting every comma. It is difficult to tell whether Blake does this sort of thing purposely or carelessly; in America, at least, the question does not seem to be of great importance. He does seem to begin the poem with more attention to convention than he ends it. For instance he at first capitalizes only the first words of lines, nouns, and titles; later he capitalizes nouns and titles he wishes to make proper, such as “Priests," "Eternal Lion," etc. (although not con­ sistently-- sometimes it is "Eternal Lion and sometimes "eternal Lion"), and is finally capitalizing modifying nouns such as "Angel voice," but is almost certainly always concerned with emphasis, whether consciously or unconsciously. He also, very amusingly, uses capitals to indicate pomposity in the Angel’s speech with words like "Dignities," and "Gods

Law," capitals one can hear the Angel enunciating; at one point Ore mockingly capitalizes "Virginity," just as the Angel would have done.

Blake very sensibly spelled out "«ed" when he wanted it sounded and abbreviated it 8d" when he did not, a system which Sampson gilded by adding an accent: "-ed;"3 here there are also inconsistencies,

Blake sometimes neglecting to elide the vowel and sometimes eliding it where it would have suited an iambic meter better not to have. For the sake of saving space (and labor--a consideration important to an

3, Sampson, p. xvi. 48 engraver) Blake always abbreviates "tho1 usually abbreviates "thro' and usually uses an ampersand, all of which were retained. He does not use apostrophes with possessive nouns and they were not used in this edition; where he has omitted them from abbreviations his omissions were preserved. Neither does he use quotation marks, preferring, ap­ parently, to clearly indicate speech in the text; here, quotation marks were added without troubling to put them in brackets as they are con­ sistently additions.

The four lines at the end of the Preludium appear in only three copies of America and were admitted in this edition only for the sake of thoroughness; they were not, as the cancelled plates (Appendix A) and fragment (Appendix B) were not, included in any of the studies of the poem, rhythmical or exegetical. Blake apparently preferred to omit the quatrain in making a print of the poem by, as Erdman says, simply covering "the bitter lines with a slip of paper when he chose.The text is a reproduction of Keynes1.

Keynes6 text was also used for the cancelled plates of America„

Appendix A, and the fragment given in Appendix B. Of the cancelled plates Keynes says:

In the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection. Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. are proofs of three plates which probably represent the first version of America. One of these|plate aj was re-etched with alterations as plate 3 [lines 1-17]; the other two were not used, though the third has a number of cor­ rections made in pencil, here indicated as deletions, and the last twenty-one lines are scored through with a vertical pencil line. The two abandoned plates contain references to

4. Erdman, pp. 267-268; for further commentary see p. 264. 49

King George by name9 which it was no doubt more discreet to eliminate,5

Damon also points out "Blake discovered that his first version of

America might well sound to the casual reader like a justification of

England; Blake’s irony in "King Edward the Third" remains so subtle that it is still mistaken for jingoism? and Damon is probably quite right to suppose Blake was correcting this in America. However, I be­ lieve that the principal reason Blake abandoned these plates is that he discovered Ore.® It is evident in his deletions that he was groping for the fire-frost contraries; he many times altered fire epithets to frost ones where they applied to Urizenic forces; in the three plates he has no real opposing force (and thus no action— these plates are intolerably slow compared to the final America) but he is groping for onea and it seems reasonable to suggest that his alteration (in the last line of plate c) of "the red Demon" to "America" was made because he no longer saw in America itself the opposing force, but was shaping an Ore for which he wished to save the epithet "red Demon," It is sig­ nificant that immediately following plate a in the final version. Ore appears, an appearance that would have been far too delayed had Blake retained plates b and c, Erdman gives an exegesis of these plates.^

* 5. Keynes, p. 893.

6. Damon, p. 111.

7. Frye, p. 179.

8 . W. H. Stevenson offers a similar theory, not seen until after this essay was composed, in his "The Shaping of Blake's 'Ameri­ ca "MLR, LV (1960), 497-503.

9. Erdman, pp. 25, 51-52. 50

Of the fragment given in Appendix B, Keynes says ;

These lines, probably intended for America, were etched on a plate only part, of which remains. The plate carried also a design of which two coloured examples are known .... The lines could well follow on after the text of the third can­ celled plate.10

They could also have been meant for a prelude to the cancelled plates, an embryo of the later Preludiums. Erdman also offers a commentary on these lines.

10. Keynes, p. 893.

11. Erdman, pp. 60, 219. AMERICA

<£

PROPHECY

LAMBETH Printed by William Blake in the year 1793

PreIndium

Ip The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Ore,

When fourteen suns had faintly journey’d o ’er his dark abode;

His food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in cups of iron

Crown’d with a helmet & dark hair the nameless female stood;

5p A quiver with its burning stores, a bow like that of night.

When pestilence is shot from heaven: no other arms she need;

Invulnerable tho* naked, save where clouds roll round her loins.

Their awful folds in the dark air; silent she stood as night:

For never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise; lOp But dumb till that dread day when Ore assay’d his fierce embrace[.^

'Dark virgin;" said the hairy youth, "thy father stern abhorr’d

"Rivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars:

"Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion,

"Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash

1.Repeated with alterations as line 81 of "The Four Zoas: Night the Eighth," p. 343. "The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding

"Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,

"On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds.

"For chaind beneath I rend these caverns: when thou bringest food

"1 howl my joy, and my red eyes seek to behold thy face

"In vain! these clouds roll to & fro, & hide thee from my sight."

Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,^

The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire

Round the terrific loins he siez’d the panting struggling womb;

It joy’d: she put aside her clouds & smiled her first-born smile;

As when a black cloud shews its light'nings to the silent deep.

Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry.

"I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go;

"Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa;

"And thou art fall8n to give me life in regions of dark death.

"On ray American plains I feel the struggling afflictions

"Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:

"I see a serpent in Canada, who c ourts me to his love;

2. Repeated as line 136 of "The Four Zoas: Night the Seventh (b)p. 336.

3. Repeated as line 140 of "The Four Zoas : Night the Seventh (b)," p. 336. "In Mexico an Eagle „ and a Lion in Peru;

"I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away,

"0 what limb rending pains I feel, thy fire & my frost

"Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent;

"This is eternal death; and this the "torment long foretold "

The stern Bard ceas'd, asham'd of his own song; enrag'd he swung

His harp aloft sounding, then dash'd its shining frame against

A ruin'd pillar in glitt'ring fragments; silent he turn'd away,

And wander'd down the vales of Kent in sick & drear lamentings.^

4. These four lines do not appear in most copies of Americao PROPHECY

The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent,"*

Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America8s shore;

Piercing the souls of warlike men who rise in silent night,

Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green;

Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albions fiery Prince.

Washington spoke; "Friends of America look over the Atlantic sea;

"A bended bow is lifted in heaven, & a heavy iron chain

"Descends link by link from Albions cliffs across the sea to bind

"Brothers & sons of America, till our faces pale and yellow;

"Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands work-bruis,d,

"Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the whip

"Descend to generations that in future times forget."

The strong voice ceas’d; for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea.

The eastern cloud rent; on his cliffs stood Albions wrathful Prince[,]

A dragon form clashing his scales [; ] at midnight he arose,

And flam’d red meteors round the land of Albion beneath.

His voice, his locks, his awful shoulders, and his glowing eyes.

Appear to the Americans upon the cloudy night.

5. Repeated as line 52 of "The Song of Los," p. 246. Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between the gloomy nations e

Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging fires.

Albion is sick, America faints! enrag'd the Zenith grew.

As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven

Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood

And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o'er the Atlantic sea;

Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge

Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire

With myriads of cloudy terrors[,] banners dark & towers

Surrounded; heat but not light went thro* the murky atmosphere[«|

The King of England looking westward trembles at the visionj\]

Albions Angel stood beside the Stone of night, and saw^

The terror like a comet, or more like the planet red

That once inclos'd the terrible wandering comets in its sphere.

Then Mars thou wast our center, & the planets three flew round

Thy crimson disk; so e'er the Sun was rent from thy red sphere;

The Spectre glowd his horrid length staining the temple long

With beams of blood; & thus a voice came forth, and shook the temple Cs 3

"The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;

"The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;

6. Repeated with alterations as line 149 of "Europe," p. 242. "The bones of death * the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd,

"Reviving shake, inspiring move[,] breathing! awakening!

"Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

"Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field;?

"Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;

"Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,

"Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;

"Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.

"And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;

"They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream,

"Singing, ’The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning^

" ’And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;

" ’For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.’"9

In thunder ends the voice. Then Albions Angel wrathful burnt

Beside the Stone of Night; and like the Eternal Lions howl

In famine & war, replyd, "Art thou not Ore, who serpent form'd

"Stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children;

"Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities;

7. This and the following six lines are repeated as lines 670-676 of "The Four Zoas: Might the Ninth," p. 375.

8. This line and the following are repeated as lines 825-826 in "The Four Zoas : Night the Ninth," p. 379; "fair Moon" is there altered to "mild Moon."

9. Repeated in "A Song of Liberty," p. 160. 57

"Lover of wild rebellion, and transgresser of Gods Law:

"Why dost thou come to Angels eyes in this terrific form?"

The terror answered; "I am Ore, wreath'd round the accursed tree:

60 "The times are ended; shadows pass [, ] the morning gins to break;

"The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,

"What night he led the starry hosts thro' the wide wilderness5

"That stony law 1 stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroadlO

"To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves,

65 "But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps,

"To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,

"And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof,

"That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,*-*

"May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty

70 "The undefil’d tho1 ravish'd in her cradle night and morn;

"For every thing that lives is holy,*2 life delights in life;

"Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.

10. Repeated with alterations in "A Song of Liberty," p. 160.

11. Repeated with alterations in "A Song of Liberty," p. 160.

12. Repeated in "A Song of Liberty," p. 160, and as line 215 of "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," p. 195.

13. Repeated as the fifty-third Proverb of Hell in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," p. 152, and with alterations as parts of lines 9 and 10 in "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," p. 189. "Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd:

"Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass,

"His knees and thighs like silver; & his breast and head like gold [„ ]"

"Sound' sound! my loud war trumpets & alarm my Thirteen Angels!

"Loud howls the eternal Wolf! the eternal Lion lashes his tail!

"America is darkned; and my punishing Demons terrified

"Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dry"d in the wind.

"They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth.

"They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plow and spade.

"They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the castle of princes.

"They cannot bring the stubbed oak to overgrow the hills.

"For terrible men stand on the shores, & in their robes 1 see

"Children take shelter from the lightnings, there stands Washington

"And Paine and Warren with their foreheads reard toward the east [--J

"But clouds obscure my aged sight. A vision from afar!

"Sound! sound! my loud war trumpets & alarm my thirteen Angels:

"Ah vision from afar! Ah rebel form that rent the ancient

"Heavens, Eternal Viper self-renew’d , rolling in clouds [„ ]

"I see thee in thick clouds and darkness on America's shore,

"Writhing in pangs of abhorred birth; red flames the crest rebellious

"And eyes of death; the harlot womb oft opened in vain 59

"Heaves in enormous circles, now the times are return’d upon thee,

95 "Devourer of thy parent, now thy unutterable torment renews.

"Sound! sound! my loud war trumpets & alarm my thirteen Angels,

"Ah terrible birth! a young one bursting! where is the weeping mouth ?

"And where the mothers milk? instead those ever-hissing jaws

"And parched lips drop with fresh gore; now roll thou in the clouds [;]

100 "Thy mother lays her length outstretch’d upon the shore beneath,

"Sound! sound! my loud war-trumpets & alarm my thirteen Angels!

"loud howls the eternal Wolf! the eternal Lion lashes his tail!"

Thus wept the Angel voice & as he wept the terrible blasts

Of trumpets, blew a loud alarm across the Atlantic deep,

105 No trumpets answer; no reply of clarions or of fifes*

Silent the Colonies remain and refuse the loud alarm.

On those vast shady hills between America & Albions shore;

Now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea;^ call’d Atlantean hills;

Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world [»]

110 An ancient palace* archetype of mighty Bmperies*

Rears its immortal pinnacles* built in the forest of God

By Ariston the king of beauty for his stolen bride.

14, Repeated in "A Song of Liberty," p. 159, 60

Here on their magic seats the thirteen Angels sat perturb’d

For clouds from the Atlantic hover o ’er the solemn roof.

115 Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores; indignant burning with the fires of Ore ]

And Bostons Angel cried aloud as they flew thro’ the dark night.

He cried: "Why trembles honesty and like a murderer,

"Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station {[?]

120 "Must the generous tremble & leave his joya to the idle; to the pestilence!

"That mock him? who commanded this? what God! what AngelI

"To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous

"Are unrestrain*d per formers of the energies of nature;

"Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science

125 "That men get rich by, & the sandy desart is giv'n to the strong [?J

"What God is he writes laws of peace, & clothes him in a tempestf?]

"What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs[?]

"What crawling villain preaches abstinence & wraps himself

"In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay."

130 So cried he, rending off his robe & throwing down his scepter.

In sight of Albions Guardian, and all the thirteen Angels

Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, & threw their golden sceptres

Down on the land of America; indignant they descended Headlong from out their heavn'ly heights, descending swift as fires

Over the land: naked & flaming are their lineaments seen

In the deep gloom9 by Washington & Paine & Warren they stood

And the flame folded roaring fierce within the pitchy night

Before the Demon red, who burnt towards America„

In black smoke[,] thunders and loud winds rejoicing in its terror[9]

Breaking in smoky wreaths from the wild deep & gath'ring thick

In flames as of a furnace on the land from North to South

What time the thirteen Governors that England sent convene

In Bernards house 5 the flames coverd the land, they rouse[, ] they cry [, ]

Shaking their mental chains they rush in fury to the sea

To quench their anguish; at the feet of Washington down fall'n

They grovel on the sand and writhing lie, while all

The British soldiers thro' the thirteen states sent up a howl

Of anguish; threw their swords & muskets to the earth & ran

From their encampments and dark castles seeking where to hide

From the grim flames; and from the visions of Ore; in sight

Of Albions Angel; who enrag'd his secret clouds open'd

From north to south and burnt outstretchd on wings of wrath cov'ring

The eastern sky, spreading his awful wings across the heavens;

Beneath him rolld his num'rous hosts, all Albions Angels camp'd

Darkend the Atlantic mountains & their trumpets shook the valleys[, ]

Armd with diseases of the earth to cast upon the Abyss,

Their numbers forty millions, must'ring in the eastern sky. 62

In the flames stood & view9d the armies drawn out in the sky

Washington [, ] Franklin [, ] Paine & Warren [, ] Allen [„ ] Gates & Lee :

160 And heard the voice of Albions Angel give the thunderous command:

His plagues obedient to his voice flew forth out of their clouds

Falling upon America, as a storm to cut them off[, ]

As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear,

Dark is the heaven above & cold & hard the earth beneath;

165 And as a plague wind fill'd with insects cuts off man & beast;

And as a sea o'erwhelms a land in the day of an earthquake;

Fury! rage! madness! in a wind swept through America

And the red flames of Ore that folded roaring fierce around

The angry shores, and the fierce rushing of th° inhabitants together:

170 The citizens of Hew-York close their books & lock their chests;

The mariners of Boston drop their anchors and unlade;

The scribe of Pensylvania casts his pen upon the earth;

The builder of Virginia throws his hammer down in fear.

Then had America been lost, o'erwhelm'd by the Atlantic,

175 And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,

But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire [, ]

The red fires rag1dI the plagues recoil'd! then rolld they back with fury

On Albions Angels: then the Pestilence began in streaks of red

Across the limbs of Albions Guardian, the spotted plague smote Bristols

180 And the Leprosy Londons Spirit, sickening all their bands: 63

The millions sent up a howl of anguish and threw off their hammerd mail8

And cast their swords & spears to earth, & stood a naked multitude.

Albions Guardian writhed in torment on the eastern sky[,}

Pale[93 quivring toward the brain his glimmering eyes, teeth chattering [,3

185 Howling & shuddering]his legs quivering; convuls’d each muscle & sinew[:J

Sick'ning lay Londons Guardian, and the ancient miter'd York[,3

Their heads on snowy hills, their ensigns sick’ning in the sky[, 3

The plagues creep on the burning winds driven by flames of Ore,

And by the fierce Americans rushing together in the night[,3

190 Driven o ’er the Guardians of Ireland and Scotland and Wales [, ]

They spotted with plagues forsook the frontiers & their banners sear[’d]

With fires of hell, deform their ancient heavens with shame & woe.

Hid in his caves the Bard ^of Albion felt the enormous plagues,

And a cowl of flesh grew o'er his head & scales on his back & ribs:

195 And rough with black scales all his Angels fright their ancient heavens[,3

The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in rustling scales

Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of Ore,

That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce desire,

Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts of youth . 200 For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion;

Run from their fetters reddening» & in long drawn arches sitting;

They feel the nerves of youth renews and desires of ancient times»

Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape appears[. ]

Over the hills, the vales, the cities, rage the red flames fierce;

205 The Heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen who sat

Above all heavens in thunders wrap'd, emerg’d his leprous head

From out his holy shrine„ his tears in deluge piteous

Falling into the deep sublime; flag'd with grey-brow'd s n o w s *5

And thunderous visages, his jealous wings wav’d over the deep;

210 Weeping in dismal howling woe he dark descended howling

Around the smitten bands, clothed in tears & trembling shudd’ring cold.

His stored snows he poured forth, and his icy magazines

He open'd on the deep, and on the Atlantic sea white shiv'ring.

Leprous his limbs, all over white, and hoary was his visage[,j

215 Weeping in dismal bowlings before the stern Americans[,]

Hiding the Demon red with clouds & cold mists from the earth

Till Angels & weak men twelve years should govern o'er the strong;

And then their end should come, when France receiv'd the Demons light[. ]

15. The second half of this line and the whole of the next are repeated in "A Song of Liberty," p. 159, with "his jealous wings" changed to "the jealous wings." 65

Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France[$ ] Spain & Italy,

220 In terror view’d the bands of Albion, and the ancient Guardian

Fainting upon the elements, smitten with their own plagues[.]

They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven

Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair [, ]

With fierce disease and lust, unable to stem the fires of Ores

225 But the five gates were consum’d, & their bolts and hinges melted

And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of tnen[e J

Finis APPENDIX A

AMERICA

Cancelled plates etched about 1793

Plate a

A Prophecy

The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent:

Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore,

Piercing the souls of warlike men who rise in silent night.

Washington, Hancock, Paine & Warren, Gates, Franklin & Green

Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albion’s fiery Prince.

Washington spoke: "Friends of America! look, over the Atlantic sea;

"A bended bow in heaven is lifted, & a heavy iron chain

"Descends, link by link, from Albion’s cliffs across the sea, to bind

"Brothers & sons of America till our faces pale and yellow,

"Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands work-bruised,

"Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, & the furrows of the whip

"Descend to generations that in future times forget."

The strong voice ceas’d, for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea:

The eastern cloud rents on his cliffs stood Albions fiery Prince,

A dragon form, clashing his scales : at midnight he arose.

And flam’d fierce meteors round the band of Albion beneath;

r 66 67

His voice» his locks„ his awful shoulders, & his glowing eyes

Plate b

Reveal the dragon thro6 the human; coursing swift as fire

To the close hall of counsel, where his Angel form renews.

In a sweet vale shelter6d with cedars, that eternal stretch

Their unmov*d branches, stood the hall, built when the moon shot forth,

In that dread night when Urizen call'd the stars round his feet;

Then burst the center from its orb, and found a place beneath;

And Earth conglob'd, in narrow room, roll'd round its sulphur Sun.

To this deep valley situated by the flowing Thames,

Where George the third holds council & his Lords & Commons meet.

Shut out from mortal sight the Angel came; the vale was dark

With clouds of smoke from the Atlantic, that in volumes roll'd

Between the mountains; dismal visions mope around the house

On chairs of iron, canopied with mystic ornaments

Of life by magic power condens'd; infernal forms art-bound

The council sat; all rose before the aged apparition.

His snowy beard that streams like lambent flames down his wide breast

Wetting with tears, & his white garments cast a wintry light.

Then, as arm'd clouds arise terrific round the northern drum.

The world is silent at the flapping of the folding banners.

So still terrors rent the house, as when the solemn globe

Launch'd to the unknown shore, while Sotha held the northern helm.

Till to that void it came & fell; so the dark house was rent.

The valley mov'd beneath; its shining pillars split in twain. 68

And its roofs crack across down falling on th* Angelic seats.

Plate c

[Then Albion's Angel del.] rose resolv’d to the cove of armoury:

His shield that bound twelve demons & their cities in its orb

He took down from its trembling pillar; from its cavern deep,

His helm was brought by London’s Guardian, & his thirsty spear

By the wise spirit of London’s river; silent stood the King breathing [with flames del.] (hoar frosts del.] damp mists9

And on his [shining del.] aged limbs they clasp’d the armour of terrible gold.

Infinite London’s awful spires cast a dreadful [gleam del.] cold

Even [to del.] on rational things beneath and from the palace walls

Around Saint James’s [glow the fires del.] , chill & heavy, even to the city gate.

On the vast stone whose name is Truth he stood, his cloudy shield

Smote with his scepter, the scale bound orb loud howl’d; th’ [eternal del.] pillar

Trembling sunk, an earthquake roll'd along the mossy pile.

In glitt’ring armour, swift as winds, intelligent as [flames del.] clouds

Four winged heralds mount the furious blasts & blow their trumps;*

Gold, silver, brass & iron [ardors del.] clangors clamoring rend the shores.

Like white clouds rising from the deeps his fifty-two armies

From the four cliffs of Albion rise, [glowing del.] mustering around their Prince;

1. This line and the following three are repeated with altera­ tions as lines 310-313 of "The Four Zoas: Night the Sixth," p. 319, 69

Angels of cities and of parishes and villages and families.

In armour as the nerves of wisdom, each his station [fires del,] holds.

In opposition dire, a warlike cloud, the myriads stood

In the red air before the Demon [seen even by mortal men.

Who call it Fancy, (& del.) or shut the gates of sense, (& del.) or in their chambers

Sleep like the dead, del.] But like a constellation ris'n and biasing

[Over the del.] rugged ocean, so the Angels of Albion hung

Over the frowning shadow like [a altered to] an aged King in arms of gold,

Who wept over a den, in which his only son outstretch’d

By rebels’ hands was slain; his white beard wav’d in the wild wind.

On mountains & cliffs of snow the awful apparition hover’d.

And like the voices of religious dead heard in the mountains

When holy zeal scents the sweet valleys of ripe virgin bliss.

Such was the hollow voice that o ’er [the red Demon del.] America lamented. APPENDIX B

FRAGMENT

probably intended for America

Etched about 1793

As when a dream of Thiralatha flies the midnight hour:

In vain the dreamer grasps the joyful images, they fly

Seen in obscured traces in the Vale of Leutha, So

The British Colonies beneath the woful Princes fade.

And so the Princes fade from earth, scarce Seen by souls of men.

But tho* obscur'd, this is the form of the Angelic land.

70 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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_____ . America; A Prophecy. A facsimile commissioned by the William Blake Trust. London, 1963.

_____ . The Complete Writings of William Blake; With All the Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. The Nonesuch Edition. London, 1957.

. The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson. London, 1960.

Bentley, G. I. Jr., and Martin K. Nurmi. A Blake Bibliography; Annotated Lists of Works. Studies„ and Blakeana. Minneapolis, 1964.

Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake, 1757*1827: A Man Without a Mask. London, 1945.

Damon, S. Foster. William Blake; His Philosophy and Symbols. Gloucester, Mass., 1958.

Erdman, David V. Blake : Prophet Against Empire; A Poet8s Interpreta­ tion of the History of His Own Times. Princeton, N. J., 1954.

______„ "William Blake's Debt to Joel Barlow," American Literature. XXVI (1954), 94-98.

Fromm, Erich. Man for Himself; An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. New York, 1960.

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Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, "Pictor Xgnotus." 2 vols. London, 1907.

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Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. trans. Michael Meyer. Garden City, N. Y . , 1963.

71 72

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience; A Study in Human Nature, New York* 1929»

Lanier * Sydney. The Science of English Verse. New York* 1880.

MacColl* D. S. "Rhythm in English Verse, Prose * and Speech," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, comp. Oliver Elton, V (1914), 7-50.

Milton, John. Milton, ed. Maynard Mack, 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1961.

Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. New York, 1946.

Steele, Joshua, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Certain Symbols. London, 1775.

______. Prosodia Rationalis; or. an Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech, to Be Expressed and Perpetuated by Peculiar Symbols. 2d. ed., enlarged. London, 1779.

Stevenson, W. H. "The Shaping of Blake8s 8America,8" M L R . LV (1960), 497-503.

Suzuki, D. T , , Erich Fromm* and Richard De Martino. Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis. New York, 1960.

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Wilson, Katharine M. Sound and Meaning in English Poetry. London, 1930.

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