FROM SATIRE TO APOCALYPSE IN WILLIAM BLAKE'S THE FOUR ZOAS by PETER LLOYD GIBB B.A., University of British Columbia, 1965 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA May, 1974 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Depa rtment The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT In this thesis, the will characterizes the power of the imaginative man to break out of closed systems of thought, and the power of the unimaginative man to become controlled by them. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience dramatize the will in opposing forms, each form giving rise to the other. In a state of innocence will radiates primal energy, organizing and sanctifying. In the state of experience, having clouded his imagination, man turns this radiating power inward to conserve it and to protect himself. The contrary states of innocence and experience thus dramatize active and passive states of the will, which in turn project visions of apocalypse and satire. "The Chimney Sweeper" of Songs of Innocence, for instance, can be read apocalyptically or satirically, depending upon the reader's will. The contrasting visions of satire and apocalypse become formal principles of Blake's methodology, the means by which Blake "rouzes the faculties to act." In order to understand Blake's remarks on Paradise Lost in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for instance, the reader must, through an act of will, re-enact Milton's myth of'the fall. Furthermore, in his illustrations to Paradise Lost, Blake demonstrates that the hero of that work is the reader/poet who purges himself of that aspect of his will that is modelled after Satan, and adopts the image of the will epitomized by the Messiah. -i- ii If one can believe that Blake had as much control of the structure of The Four Zoos as he did over these other works, one can assume that its structure is intentionally designed so that the satiric will can see the poem only in its parts, but the apocalyptic will can create a unified vision of the poem's structure, in which all its members display the organic unity of the whole. One means of achieving this unity is to assume that the poem's structure is not derived from its narration of some external reality such as creation, history, or faculty psychology, but by imagining its members as depicting images of the poem's creation. The Four Zoas, thus conceived, is a commentary on the process of discovering and creating a new poetic form in opposition to the debilitating conventions that had controlled eighteenth century poetic thought and expression. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One: Apocalyptic and Satiric Viewpoints on Two of Blake's Early Pieces 9" Chapter Two: The Four Zoas: Limitations of Analysis . 32 Chapter Three: Finding Apocalypse in The Four Zoas: Metaphors of Poetic Process 48 Conclusion 86 Bibliography 90 -iii- ABBREVIATIONS OF BLAKE'S WORKS CITED F.Z. The Four Zoas J. Jerusalem MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Eell VLJ "A Vision of the Last Judgment" -iv- -v- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work could not have been completed without the generous help of many spiritual friends. Among many debts of gratitude I acknowledge the following in particular: Professor Martin Nurmi, who introduced me to the study of Blake; Dr, Peter Taylor, for his patience and encouragement in reflecting back what I was wanting to say; Pete Broomhall, for the best kind of help any friend could give; Jonathan Katz and Gary Handler, for the example of their own commitment to learning. Most of all I am grateful to my parents, who have given more than can be told to this work, and my wife Drelene, for being my helpmate. -vi- INTRODUCTION Throughout his writings Blake distinguishes between corporeal and spiritual understanding. The two realms of understanding he saw as being in eternal enmity with one another. Those who believe only the evidence of the senses he regarded as victims of Satan, the God of this World, who teaches man to doubt the existence of the spiritual realm. "We do not find any where that Satan is Accused of Sin he is only accused of Unbelief & thereby drawing Man into Sin that he may accuse him" (VLJ, E 553).! But to Blake, the empiricists—Bacon, Newton, and Locke—were Satan's unholy trinity, and he regarded the eighteenth century enlightenment as a period of almost unprecedented darkness ?•' "His opinion, who does not see spiritual agency, is not worth any man's reading" (D.C., E?534), Blake wrote of historian Edward Gibbon's methods of reasoning. Blake's personal experiences taught him early in life that spiritual truths needed to be concealed from the corporeal understanding. He particularly admired the parable as a literary form, because it spoke both corporeal and spiritual meanings, depending upon men's willingness to receive one or the other. Blake's savior had spoken in parables to the blind; Blake's "allegory addressed to the intellectual powers" was similarly designed to conceal its truth from the reason and to reveal it only to a spiritual discernment. -1- 2 Blake was not content that his writings should appear opaque to the uninitiated. He took pleasure in casting himself in an infernal role, sometimes entering Satan's kingdom with a flaming harrow, sometimes as a wily tempter, and yet other times disclosing plain truths about the self-contradictions of Satanic beliefs. He took on the roles of both artist and prophet, luring and goading men to rouse their own faculties to act, arid to choose for themselves a perspective that would restore to them a vision of the spiritual world. If man can choose to find meaning in either the spiritual or the corporeal realm, then his will must in itself contain opposing aspects. Opposing aspects of the will must seek fulfillment in opposing realms of existence and through opposing modes of perception. The opposing aspects of the will find expression in a number of metaphors in Blake's writing. It is worthwhile here to consider several different metaphors, because their accumulated significance gives a more accurate impression of the meanings Blake attaches to them. Innocence and experience, belief and doubt, desire and reason, all describe active and passive aspects of the will. The first pair of metaphors, innocence and experience, draw their meaning from the metaphor of the early child's development. Every child is born into an organized world of innocence created by parental love, in which he is the centre, and every child learns of the existence of a larger world of experience where he is not at the centre, and where he seems to have no place at all. Neither world is real; both are imaginative 3 constructs of the growing child. The world of innocence is a world created from an attitude of trust. The trusting child radiates his trust outwards, and it reflects back to him an organized, harmonious existence. A number of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience contain sun imagery to symbolize the radiant energy of the innocent will: "The Echoing Green", "The Little Black Boy", "Night", and "Nurse's Song" in Songs of Innocence, and "Nurse's Song", "Ah! Sunflower", "A Poison Tree", and "A Little Girl Lost" of Songs of Experience, mention the sun directly, and many other Songs refer to it indirectly. In contrast to the state of innocence, the state of experience describes the child's response to a breach of faith between himself and his world of innocence. The cause for this varies: the amoral quality of the child's innocent energy may be the source of disruption, or the immoral nature of a hostile, exterior world may burst upon the child's awareness, whatever the cause, the result is withdrawal, distrust, a sense of betrayal. The child's spirit is divided, his energy is scattered, and his nature begins to reflect his perceptions of a hostile world. Goodness is not as important to the child of experience as survival. The entire economy of his energy is turned inward, he becomes self-centered, and his own gain becomes of paramount importance to him. The attitude of experience so easily finds reinforcement in the external world, that once this mental habit pattern is established, it becomes very difficult for a child to re-establish an attitude 4 of trust. An ethic based upon survival is a return from a human existence to a state of nature, where life feeds upon life, and all individual energy systems are entropic. When Renaissance man moved from a human-centered cosmos towards an empirical description of a universe based upon moral law, a moral upheaval resulted equivalent to that of the child growing out of innocence and into experience. The conflict between the worlds of innocence and experience is the same as that between a religion based on the "Human form divine" and natural religion, based, in Blake's time, on notions of a mechanistic universe.