The Four Zoas
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. Five years before publishing the
Songs of Experience Blake printed a series of two tractates
arguing that There is No Natural Religion (E 1-2). In the first
tractate Blake argued that man's insistence on a "notion of moral
fitness" is derived from his "Poetic or Prophetic character",
which seeks to place bounds on nature's entropic repetitions of
"the same dull round".
Blake's tractates provide an interesting footnote on the
nature of satire, a favorite genre of eighteenth century writers,
and which claimed as its central purpose, to correct human
excesses and to restore man to a reasonable mode of behaviour.
Satire based upon reason as moral norm inverts the nature of
existence by creating a "starry floor" of reason over the 2
heavens of man's aspiration. The "starry floor" is based upon
typical enlightenment values such as man's basic benevolence, 5
his formation of a social contract, his belief that the natural
order is divinely right, that man's social position reflects his moral capabilities, and other generalities that tend to glorify
the status quo. A heaven based upon reason denies the possibility
of any higher existence than its own.3 The God of Reason is a
"Father of Jealousy"^. Thus the human desire, whether in attempting
to fulfil its destiny or in rebelling aginst reason, becomes the
inevitable object of the reason5s satire. The form of satire
based on reason is thus a description of entropy. Satire's tone
of moral superiority is all that distinguishes the vision of
satire based on reason from the amoral vision of experience.
Further, in that satire always depends upon corporeal appearances
rather than spiritual realities for its judgments, it seems to
be a clear expression of what Blake calls "doubt". It seems
appropriate, therefore, to describe the aspect of will that
operates within reason's bounds, the will to interpret reality
according to the laws of natural morality, "satiric vision."
The other aspect of will, the innocent vision which in the tractates
Blake equates with apocalyptic.desire, will be referred to through•
out this thesis as "apocalyptic vision." These two aspects of
the will, satiric vision and apocalyptic vision, are intended
to serve as general terms rather than as specific definitions.
They characterize the central features of a number of related
metaphors for the active and passive will.
The first chapter of this thesis attempts through analysis
of specific examples in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience 6
and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to demonstrate that engaging the reader's will is an important aspect of Blake's poetic art.
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience depict the contrary states separately within separate individuals. Only rarely do the Songs hint at the possibility of merging these opposing states as processes within a single individual in order to depict a state of organized or higher innocence. Nevertheless, although there are few opportunities in the Songs to portray individuals who can embody a state of higher innocence, the Songs successfully point toward such a state. This is because Blake encourages his reader to take on this role himself in his reading of the poems.
"The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence can be read apocalyptically or satirically, according to the reader's will.
Far from guiding the reader's will, these two poems reflect back his will to him.
A passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell suggests a different formal technique from that of the Songs in giving the reader knowledge of his own will. In this short commentary on Paradise Lost, Blake's satiric vision is quite evident, but its contrary, apocalyptic vision of Milton's epic, is concealed.
The form of the passage requires"the reader to go through a process of temptation and fall in order to place Paradise Lost in an apocalyptic perspective. The passage leaves no doubt that
Blake consciously endeavoured to engage his reader's will in processes which, to the enlightened reader, could be-seen as 7
supportive metaphors for the larger purpose of his poetry.
The question of how far Blake pursued his intentions with the manuscript of The Four Zoas before abandoning it, has puzzled critics of Blake's writings for many years. Blake's comment that "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care" (Letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler, EL676), gives a reader confidence that at least some of the problems the manuscript presents are intentional. A number of interpretative tools are provided by an analysis of Blake's regard for the role of the reader in The Songs and The Marriage. These tools should help in establishing a clearer idea of what burdens Blake might have placed on his reader's will to wrest spiritual or corporeal meaning from its pages. FOOTNOTES
David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. CGarden City, N. Y,: Doubleday, 1970), p. 553. All subsequent references to the works of William Blake will be cited thus: CE 553).
Jean H. Hagstrum, "William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment," in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye CEnglewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 142-155.
Satire based on reason might be described as the secular arm of state religion, which Blake equates with "Self will" in'Annotations to An Apology for the Bible," E 604.
4 "To Nobodaddy," E 462.
-8- APOCALYPTIC AND SATIRIC VIEWPOINTS ON TWO OF BLAKE'S EARLY PIECES
Because The Four Zoas is not a finished work, it provides rather less assurance than William Blake's other poems of representing his intentions. Out of its seeming formlessness the reader can conjecture endless possible interpretations, some of which may confirm his intuitions about Blake's poetic intentions, and yet be denied vigorously by other students of the subject who have organized Blake's "minute particulars" from another perspective. For that reason it seems proper to introduce a discussion of the will in reference to Blake's The Four Zoas by citing supportive evidence from The Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If it can be shown that the reader's will to criticize or approve the poet's work is an important part of Blake's subject matter, then this same principle of awareness can then be applied to a reading of The Four Zoas with confidence that such a concern might have occupied Blake's mind.
For several reasons "The Chimney Sweeper" of Songs of
Innocence contains the most significant discussion of will of all the Songs. First, although a number of the Songs are written in the first person, "The Chimney Sweeper" is one of the few lyrics which address the reader directly. Blake's use of direct address hints at his intention to engage the reader in direct dialogue. The potential for the reader's involvement is considerably
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heightened by another unique aspect of this poem: of all the
Songs of Innocence, it "most directly confronts the misery of life".l The element of human misery "The Chimney Sweeper" introduces to The Songs of Innocence automatically demands that this poem be considered, not simply as an expression of innocence, but in relation to the contrary state of experience. This imperative is reinforced by yet another characteristic: "The Chimney Sweeper's"
"affirmation of visionary joy is more triumphant than in any other poem of this series".^
The poem opens with an account of the chimney sweeper's experience which escapes being horrifying only because it is so compressed:
When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue, Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep. So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
The chimney sweeper's childhood has been sacrificed to us: it is our chimneys that he sweeps. Our collective conscience is touched, at least remotely. Our perceptions are directed toward discovering what effect the young sweep's experience has had on him. Blake's distancing of the sweeper's story through its extreme compression, is deliberate. If the reader desires to see the sweeper more clearly, he does partly because the sweeper is not close enough to be a threat.
Blake induces the reader to view the chimney sweeper in two different ways—both as he appears, and as he might actually be. In other words, the two contraries of the reader's perception, 11
the senses (or reason) and the imagination, are both focused on the sweeper. The first stanza creates a tension between these two perceptions, a reason to believe that the sweeper might not be just a sweep, but more than that—a boy. This tension is embodied in the sweeper's recollection of his earliest attempts to call out his trade cry: "'weep 'weep 'weep 'weep". The sweep thus reminds the reader of a time when the metamorphosis from child to sweep was not complete. The child could not cry "sweep" at all. He was so young that he could scarcely cry the ironic imitation, "weep".
In the second stanza, the tension between the reader's percep• tion of the actual and the potential is heightened. The young chimney sweeper chooses to initiate a younger and less experienced lad into the reality of his own experience. The reader's focus has thus been sharpened from an encounter with a chimney sweep as he has become, to witnessing a young waif in the process of becoming. The dualities of the child's reality, being and essence, are equally visible. The reader is as aware of the alternatives to the child's initiation as he is of the actuality.
Theres little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd, so I said. Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
This poem represents an initiation for the reader and for the chimney sweep-narrator as well as for Tom Dacre, in dealing with their reactions. Two reactions are possible: a mental response that transforms the significance of the initiation and a physical 12
response that yields to that significance. Blake would call the chimney sweeper's response "active", and Tom Dacre's "passive" or "passionate." The proportion of action to passion in Tom
Dacre's and the chimney sweeper's responses to the shaving of
Tom's head, is determined by how close each is to the event.
Thus, Tom Dacre's response to having his head shaved is purely one of passion. The chimney sweeper is more distant from the situation: his responsibility to act, and to reorganize his understanding of that experience is increased in proportion to his distance from it. Accordingly, he comforts Tom, and he suggests a way for Tom to understand his experience. The reader is even farther removed. He is capable of seeing Tom Dacre as a sacrificial Lamb. Hence, his responsibility to act and to organize his perceptions of Tom's, and the chimney sweeper's, and his own initiation, is even more crucial. This is as it should be: it was the reaction of the British public as much as the passion of chimney sweepers, that ultimately led to the drafting of legislation to outlaw this abhorrent practise.
A comparison of the responses of Tom Dacre and the chimney sweep narrator in stanza two of "The Chimney Sweeper" demonstrates that the ability of the poem to play upon the reader's emotions, is not as important as its ability to elicit his thought. The chimney sweeper-narrator is both the reader's lens for observing the initiation and his model for acting in response to it. The fact that the narrator describes his response only in terms of action, and makes no reference at all to his passions, gives some idea of what Blake expects 13
of the reader. In fact, the reader's actions should, in keeping with this argument, be an exact counterpart to Tom Dacre's passion, His actions, like the chimney sweeper's, should actualize
Tom Dacre's vision.
And so he was quiet, & that very night, As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight, That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe Ned & Jack Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black
And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he open'd the coffins & set them all free. Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run And wash in a river and shine in.the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father & never want joy.
The reader's responsibility to act begins with the necessity to clarify his own will. Towards this end, the poem acts as a mirror to reflect the reader's own vision. If one's will is to remain in experience, he can find much in this poem to reflect a satiric vision. Its very subject matter involves moral implications one would rather not think about. How much more true that must have been in Blake's own day. Furthermore, because the chimney sweeper's motives for comforting Tom Dacre are not made explicit, their purity is not above question for the satiric reader. From a satiric perspective, it seems clear that the effect of the
chimney sweeper's help is to coopt Tom Dacre's natural and righteous reaction against inhuman treatment, by soothing him with thoughts of a heaven he will never see in this world. Surely the reader's suspicions of the narrator's motives will not be laid to rest by 14
the mere appearance of this poem In-Songs of Innocence rather than in Songs of Experience. Without being overly harsh, one might quite reasonably conclude that the sweeper's desire to ease
Tom Dacre's sorrow is at least matched if not exceeded by his desire to have Tom Dacre bear his own share of the burden that life has placed on them both. Then too, the Angel's words of assurance, "if he vd3 a good boy, / He'd have God for his father
& never want joy" would certainly sound hollow measured against any realistic assessment of a chimney sweeper's future. As a song about the proletariat, this poem would certainly not be rated very highly if submitted as an example of children's literature at a Marxist writer's conference. A party member might well wonder whose side William Blake was on.
The poem itself provides no bulwark against satiric vision.
It was not Blake's intention that it should. The question is,
could this poem be more effective than a ringing denunciation of
child exploitation? This question has no answer, so long as the
reader's attention is turned outward to the actual social issues
that the poem provokes. But the satiric view of the poem does nothing to explain or encourage the effort of will necessary
for the two children of "The Chimney Sweeper" to sustain an apoca•
lyptic vision against such overwhelming reality. Rather, it is
that very attitude of defeat that they must combat. The pervasive will of the satiric viewpoint is simply hinted at in the poem,
by the obvious truth that the chimney sweepers' apocalypse is
premature. The sun has not yet arisen when they must arise and 15
go to work,
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm, So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
The sweepers are illuminated within, but all about them is still in darkness. Their innocence is not apocalyptic: it is a pathetic anticipation of apocalypse.
Blake does not insist upon an apocalyptic viewpoint from his reader. It is for the reader to make the connection between his will and those of the sweepers. Like any other prophet,
Blake merely presents his vision. He leaves his reader to choose between light and darkness.
In order to understand the power as well as the subtlety of Blake's poem, the reader must remember that the initiation in the poem is a threefold initiation, of Tom Dacre, of the chimney sweeper, and of the reader. Just as in real life the welfare of the sweepers is dependent upon their keepers, so in this poem, it is dependent upon the reader. Tom Dacre may appear to pass his initiation quite independent of the reader's will.
But if that initiation is to be shorn of its meaning for him, he might well be robbed of the strength he needs in order to stay alive. The last stanza of the poem begins with "And s,o Tom awoke", indicating that his awakening might be dependent upon his dream.
In a world as harsh as his, physical strength alone would give little assurance of survival. The reader's attitude towards the chimney sweep narrator influences his initiation also, by the same logic. 16
The third initiation, that of the reader, is perhaps the most delicate of all. There is no outward necessity for him to change.
Whether he regards an imaginative experience as an initiation at all, depends entirely upon his own will.
Despite the fragility of the innocence it portrays, "The
Chimney Sweeper" shows how an active transformation of men's vision through the interpenetration of human wills could lead to apocalypse. But because the poem focuses on an active, mental response to evil rather than a passionate physical response, it must be regarded as nonideological. A satiric vision of
reality might provide the basis for revolution, but it remains
the enemy of personal apocalypse.
That the contrasting visions of satire and apocalypse are
important to the form of "The Chimney Sweeper" has already been
demonstrated. An analysis of this poem has also shown that the visions•of satire and apocalypse originate as much in the reader
as they do in the poem. Blake must have.recognized that the
reader's will operates with the poet's to create the interpretation
of the poem in which poet and reader meet. "The Chimney Sweeper"
contains suggestions that anticipating and reflecting his reader's will was a vital element of Blake's poetic craft. Satire and
apocalypse become formal principles of Blake's methodology in
The Marriage of Eeaven and Eell. In that work the dialogue between Blakean Devil and Blakean Angel serves as a paradigm
for the relationship between poet and reader.
The Marriage begins with an "Argument" showing how the 17
man's original apocalyptic vision of the just man was usurped by satiric vision. The "Argument" is framed by a poetic statement of the opposition between clouds of satiric vision and fires of apocalyptic vision.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep (E. 33)
After the "Argument", the rest of The Marriage is ironical. The orthodox or satiric vision must be burned away by the fires of apocalyptic vision functioning as satire. In accordance with the ironic structure of The Marriage, apocalyptic vision is depicted as the viewpoint of the Devil, and satiric vision the viewpoint of Angels. A "Memorable Fancy" ends The Marriage by depicting
"a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud" (pi 22).^ A heated debate ensues, at the end of which the Angel's cloud has disappeared.
When he had so spoken: I beheld the Angel who stretched out his arms embracing the flame of fire & he was consumed and arose as Elijah. Note: This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well (PI. 24)
A short passage within The Marriage, on plates 5 and 6, suggests the outlines of an infernal reading of the Bible. It also implicitly requires the reader to "behave well" in the infernal sense, in order to distinguish its satiric mode from its apocalyptic message.
Blake's outline for an apocalyptic understanding of the
Bible appears, superficially, to be a satire against Paradise 18
Lost, But it is much. more. Against a framework largely provided by Paradise Lost, Blake identifies four Christian myths: a myth of expulsion, a myth of descent, a myth of the Fall, and a myth of self-purgation. These four myths correspond to the four zones of the orthodox Christian cosmos: heaven, paradise, fallen nature, and hell. In each of these four myths and their respective zones, Blake identifies the same conflict between the opposing principles or reason and desire. Thus, the conflict in heaven, described from an infernal point of view, reads like this:
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrainddit by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the "command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death (PI. 5)
The result of this conflict is a myth of expulsion: "it indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out."
The myth of paradise is not so definite, for it relies upon a concept of a restored paradise through the intercession of
Jesus Christ with God the Father, "where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on." The descent of the Holy Spirit or The Promise, as the comforter is otherwise named in the Bible, brings a vision of a more perfect existence to replace what man has lost through experience in a fallen world. But the descent of the Spirit makes the ideal world seem attainable.
The third myth, more proper to a fallen world and a fallen
vision of existence, is neither of descent nor expulsion, but of
a Fall: "the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed
a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss." Taken away from their
contexts, none of these myths might seem incompatible with orthodox
beliefs. But the fourth myth—the myth which to Blake was
appropriate to the state of hell--is radically different from
anything the orthodox mind would associate with this state.
It is not a myth of torment or of defiance., but of wilful self-
purgation. Its hero is Christ, crucified, then resurrected as
Jehovah, the true Christian God: "the Jehovah of the Bible being
no other than he, who dwells in flaming .fire. Know that after
Christs death, he became Jehovah" (PI. 6). Inaaddition to the
four myths already outlined, Blake's commentary on Paradise Lost
in The Marriage contains also a reference to the Book of Job, which might be called a myth of forbearance. The myth of Job,
contains elements of all four myths, as can clearly be seen
in Blake's interpretive work, Illustrations of the Book of Job.
In The Marriage Blake writes of the Job myth, "this history has been adopted by both parties."
All four myths concern themselves with a conflict between
reason and desire. The myth of expulsion concerns itself with desire being governed, then expelled by reason. That of descent, is the descent of desire to assist reason in re-building paradise.
The myth of self-purgation is a myth of reason being continually 20
consumed in flames of desire. The myth of the fall seems clearly to be an infernal account of man's cast-out desire reconstituting itself in order to regain independence from reason. But the fires of self-purgation are willed by one's desire for unending revelation of truth and an eternal consummation of error, which render impossible any static separation of one process from the other.
Blake's account of the four myths of reason and desire is charged with ambiguity. When considered as barriers against reasonable meanings, these ambiguities are.puzzling and annoying.
But when considered as part of the form of the passage in Plates
5-6 of The Marriage, they can be seen to have a definite purpose.
Taken together, they lead the reader to the necessity of making definite choices in order to interpret Blake's rapid schematization of the Biblical cosmos.
The mythss of heaven and hell—of expulsion and self-purgation— are quite free of ambiguity. They offer definite infernal contraries to the orthodox myths. In Paradise Lost, the orthodox account of the expulsion myth, not even Milton's Satan provides so rebellious an account of his expulsion as does Blake's "infernal" version. In the Blakean version, Desire had been "the original
Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host", and those now ruling in heaven had restrained and then cast out their desire for the contemptible reason that "theirs is weak enough to be restrained". Similarly, Blake's myth of self-purgation is a clear and unambiguous challenge to the orthodox interpretation 21
of hell. Hell has associations of torment and irredeemable defiance.
To the Blakean Devil, Hell is a vision of the unending frustration
of his own efforts to create a static image of truth.
Blake clearly redefines and morally reverses the poles of
the Christian cosmos, in accordance with his infernal viewpoint.5
The new poles are a myth of expulsion and a myth of self-purgation.
The orthodox Christian is thus presented with a crystallized vision
of the alternatives of Christian life, whose clarity cannot but
challenge conventional assessments of the meaning of heaven and
hell.
Between the myths of expulsion and of self-purgation, the myths
of fallen and unfalien paradise, of fall and of descent, are full
of ambiguity. The source of ambiguity throughout B-lake's commentary
on Paradise Lost in The Marriage, is due to the impossibility
of identifying the Messiah according to the orthodox understanding
of "reason" and "desire".
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss (PI. 5-6)
The first possibility is that the Messiah of this reference to the
myth of the fall is the Messiah of Paradise Lost, to whom
Blake has already made reference: "Theshistory ... is written
in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah . . .
But in the Book of Job Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan." In
Paradise Lost, "Messiah," is almost an allegory for the faculty
of reason. But since the myth of a Messiah has been "adopted 22
by both parties", "Messiah" could refer to the person of either
Christ or Satan. This ambiguity is preserved in Blake's reference to the Messiah's fall.. At first sight, the line, "Messiah fell.
& formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss" appears to be an unambiguous reference to the Satan of Paradise Lost (who embodies energy and not reason). But this certainty is reduced to a point of relativity by Blake's unusual verification of the myth: "This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter . . . ." Armed with an unambiguous Biblical reference to Jesus as Messiah, the reader seems compelled to return to "Messiah fell . . . ."if for no other reason than to seek a referent for the pronoun "he". It.could be that "Messiah fell" is an infernal reference to the Incarnation. And it could also be that "& formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss" is an infernal account of Christ's kingdom, whose first members were sought among sinners and not among the righteous (see
Luke 2:17). Blake is capable of such mischief. But speculation—
reason—will not resolve the dilemmas. The reader's efforts to seek a reconciliation of meaning are in vain. There is no indication,
either, whether the "Devils Account" (or Blake's) of the Gospel
sees in Jesus the personification of reason or of energy. In
short, the identity of Messiah can legitimately be expanded to
include a number of possibilities, but can in no way be delimited.
Because Blake's reference to the Messiah and, therefore, his reference to the myth of the fall, seem so open-ended, the
reader might well be tempted to abandon his efforts to find
\ 23
final meaning in Blake's doctrine of reason and energy. Blake's description of the Messiah offers the same sort of conundrum that
Christ offered to his disciples. When his disciples speculated as to his identity, his reply was, "But whom say yetthat I am?"
(Matt: 16:15).
Like Christ, Blake is not merely teasing his reader, the
Messiah's identity cannot be received passively as an already formulated truth, which would then be open to doubts and reservations.
It must be sought actively.
Appropriately, Blake has tied the mystery of the Messiah's identity to the myth of the Fall, The reader must fall away from the deadened, orthodox meanings he had associated with
"reason" and "desire". In the language of the orthodox, these two words are negations of one another. But no Messiah, of either the
Angels' or the Devils' party, could embody words whose meanings are mutually exclusive. The reader is forced ("tempted" might be a better word, particularly since Blake refers to the Messiah as "Tempter" in PI. 17 of The Marriage) to expand his understanding of "reason" and "desire" in order to even guess at Blake's meaning in his ambiguous description of the Messiah. The "apparent surface" of Blake's commentary on Paradise Lost is an infernal satire against both Milton and his epic. But the apparent surface is melted away by the necessity for the reader to go beyond a reductive allegorical interpretation of Paradise Lost, in order to make sense of Blake's language. Lurking behind Blake's ambiguities 24
is the possibility that the destinies of Messiah, Satan, and the
Tempter in Paradise Lost are more inextricably intwined than the narrative structure of that work indicates. Milton in attempting
to "justify the ways of God to men" had descended to an allegorical
structure that too readily yielded meaning to the corporeal
understanding.6 Blake, in seeming to attack Milton, separates
his corporeal from his spiritual meaning, while creating sufficient
ambiguity that the corporeal understanding can see that it has
not uncovered the full extent of Blake's meaning.
In order to understand Blake's apparent satire against
Milton, the reader is tempted to mingle reason and desire, and
thus to violate the order of Milton's cosmos. The reader's
belief in avoiding this sin, imprisons him within a corporeal
understanding of the Miltonic cosmos. But once having fallen,
he can reconstruct that cosmos. Thus he enters the fires of
self-purgation, which he had understood as a punishment, where
the old cosmos, a reflection of his selfish desire to attain
self-righteousness, can be consumed. And he enters a cosmos whose states are a description of mental process. Expulsion,
descent, fall, self-purgation, are myths of that process, described
on different levels of imagery.
Once the reader has entered the cosmos of apocalyptic desire,
it becomes quite evident to him why the Messiah's identity has
been clouded in so many ambiguities. The new Messiah cannot be understood as an allegorical representation of reason or desire.
To the orthodox, these terms are mere negations of one another. 25
But the new Messiah is an archetype of man's apocalyptic will.
He falls consciously, not blindly, of his own will and not through temptation or sin, and he regenerates himself because his will
controls his vision. But his identity cannot be known until the
reader exercises his own will to "fall" away from his dependence upon an orthodox vision.
In the end, Blake's radical reinterpretation of the Christian myth is a fulfillment rather than a satanic inversion of orthodox vision. But Blake deliberately introduces his vision as a satanic
inversion in order to force the reader to act out his own understanding
of the Christian myth—to be tempted to achieve a new understanding,
to wilfully fall into a welter of ambiguities, and through will
and not through reason, to open himself.to new understanding.
Blake's annotations to Emanuel Swedenborg's Widdom of the Angels
Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, which he was probably
reading at the time of writing The Marriage, make it clear that he understood the unrestricted activity of the will as the necessary means of acquiring understanding.
If God is any thing he is Understanding He is the Influx from that into the Will . . . . Understanding or Thought is not natural to Man it is acquired by means of Suffering Si Distress i.e. Experience. Will, Desire, Love, Rage, Envy, & all other Affections are Natural, but Understanding is Acquired But Observe, without these is to be less than Man. Man could ?never [have received] ?light from heaven ?without [aid of the]' affections ....
(E. 591-2. Italics mine)
In creating The Four Zoas, Blake follows in Milton's foot•
steps. A brief examination of Blake's interpretation of Paradise 26
Lost will show that Blake believed Milton's desire for "fit audience . . . though few", is realized through the structure of his epic. Blake believed that the whole of Paradise Lost, organized as it is, beginning with Satan rising from the very depths of hell, expresses the process by which man is redeemed from satiric vision and is restored, as Adam, to an apocalyptic vision of his own experience, through the crucifixion., of Jesus,
Blake believed, though, that the truth of Milton's epic had been misunderstood by his own culture, and perhaps by Milton himself:
"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels &
God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, isFbecause he was a true Poet and of the Devils Party without knowing it" (MHH, pi, 6),
The irony of Blake's Devil is biting, He is not criticizing
Milton for his very seductive portrait of Satan so much as for making his myth more explicit to the corporeal than to the spiritual
understanding. With Paradise Lost the reader's will is not forced
to persevere through obscurity or paradox to obtain truth as its
reward, as, for instance, with Blake's comments on Paradise Lost
in The Marriage, Thus, Milton sorely tempts his reader to interpret
Paradise Lost at its lowest allegorical level. If The Four Zoas
is read as a corrective to Paradise Lost, the difficulties the
reader encounters in attempting to piece together a corporeal
understanding of its narrative may seem at least partially
understandable.
Blake saw Paradise Lost through a different time perspective
and a different moral consciousness than most commentators,
Man is not just Adam in Paradise Lost, but he is all the characters. 27
of the epic, who, all together, make up the cycle of. human existence through its various myths of expulsion, descent, fall, and self- purgation. Paradise Lost is not a linear narrative: its events are eternally present in man's consciousness, and so Blake sees them as coexisting simultaneously in Paradise Lost as one grand event, which is human life itself. Thus he correlates the agents of Paradise Lost, God, Messiah, Satan, and Adam, with one another.
They are not separate actors in a drama of cosmic justification, but aspects of man himself. Paradise Lost for Blake contains within itself its sequel, Paradise Regained. Hence, in his
Illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost?, containing twelve illustrations, each epitomizing the spirit of one of Milton's twelve books, the climactic twelfth illustration depicts Adam and Eve being led out of paradise by Michael, looking back with expressions depicting awe, confidence, courage, and even gratitude— their reactions to the cosmic spectacle they have witnessed— but not fear, or sorrow, or guilt. They have been redeemed from
Satan's satiric perspective to an apocalyptic vision of his fall.
Blake chooses not to illustrate the "Natural tears they dropped"
(PL XII. 645) on leaving paradise, but their spiritual confidence on learning how, through Providence, further good is destined to arise out of evil. In Blake's view Milton has given good reason for the attainment of a paradise within, "happier Farr" than the one from which Adam and Eve were expelled. According to Blake's depletion, the progression of Paradise Lost justifies God's ways to man, not by giving Adam free will and then holding him 28
accountable for his inevitable fall, but by successively stripping away the moral ambiguity of each event as it unfolds. This process begins in the fires of hell and culminates in the eleventh book, for which Blake's illustration shows Christ dying on the cross.
On one side Michael reveals the awful truth of God's love for man. On the other, Adam stares adoringly into the savior's face.
At the foot of the cross lie the serpent form of Satan and Sin and Death vanquished. Eve sleeps in the foreground. Clearly
Blake has not merely illustrated Paradise Lost, but has reinterpreted it to make Christ its central figure.
For Blake even the Adversarial state epitomized by Satan himself is not wholly evil. Satan epitomizes the quality of amoral, unrestrained energy which, in burning, is consumed. In opposition to Satan, Christ epitomizes the quality of moral,- unrestrained energy, which like the burning bush, burns without being consumed. Blake therefore represents Satan as man imprisoned in the hell of his corporeal desires, and being consumed in his efforts to contain and channel the power of Christ within him for his own selfish will. Another way of seeing Satan is that he is the figure of Christ, covered in a cloak of false intention, which, by Book X, becomes visible as the body of a serpent.
Blake's first illustration forhMs Paradise Lost Series explores this image of Christ within Satan. Entitled "Satan Calling his
Legions", it depicts a dynamic strikingly similar to that of a separate unrelated painting of Blake's, "A Vision of the Last
Judgment", whose central figure is Jesus rather than Satan. 29
Furthermore, Satan in the first Paradise Lost illustration, standing nobly erect, his arms outstretched to push back clouds on either side, is remarkably similar to the "traffic-stopping"
Jesus on pages 16, 58," 114, and 116 of The Four Zoas manuscript, g according to G. E. Bentley. The reason for Satan's persuasiveness in Paradise Lost, according to Blake, is that he is a prefiguration of Jesus. The reason for Satan's progressive fall through the epic, however, is that Satan neverppurges himself of error.
Instead, he becomes error, to be sloughed off at the foot of the
Cross in Blake's illustration to Book XI of Paradise Lost.
Much more work would have to be done on Blake's Illustrations for Paradise Lost, in order to show how Blake has interpreted
Milton's epic as a moment of time. But his treatment of Satan shows clearly that Satan's fall is continuous with the redemption of Adam and Eve from a satiric to an apocalyptic vision of their own fall through the ultimate sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
In his analysis of Paradise Lost Blake thus sees an enormous tension between the narrative structure which separates one event from another, and the typological structure of the epic which visualizes all events together in a single apocalyptic vision whose center is Christ.
For Blake the hero of Paradise Lost is not Satan, or Adam, or even Jesus, but the reader. The reader must fight against the temptation to be drawn into the epic's moral dialectic, so convincingly argued by Satan. If he falls into this temptation,
then he will see the poem's events as discrete and separate. He 30
will be tempted to compare God and Satan by the same standard of measurement, And he will fail to.see that the events occuring in the heaven, the earth, and the hell of Milton's cosmos are all aspects of one mighty event, Blake was one of the few readers of Paradise Lost who could see what a heavy burden Milton placed upon his reader's will in requiring him to sustain his upward
journey alone through the epic. Blake's The Four Zoas makes similar demands. Everything that Milton has recorded in his epic applies
to the reader as he undertakes his own moral journey upward out
of a hell of satiric vision. If He does not apply the lessons
of the journey well, he will "come out with a Moral like a sting
in the tail" ("On Homer's wEoet'fy",EE267) . But if he understands
the nature of his free will, as Milton has conceived it, and guards
his journey well, the reward is an apocalyptic vision and a moral
conversion.
The Four Zoas can be seen as Blake's attempt to follow
in Milton's footsteps, Both poets understood similarly the
importance of concealing spiritual meaning from the corporeal
understanding. Both establish a tension between the narrative
structure of their poems and the accumulative effect of its
imagery, in order to conceal spiritual doctrine from the corporeal
understanding. Where the two poets show differences is in their
judgments on how best to tutor the will. FOOTNOTES
E. D. Hirst, Jr,, Innocence and Experience: An Intro• duction to Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 184.
2 Ibid. 3 See Martin K. Nurmi, "Fact and Symbol in 'The Chimney Sweeper' of Blake's Songs of Innocence" In Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, N. J, Prentice Hall, 1966), pp. 15-22. 4 "A Song of Liberty," which Blake found at the end of all extant copies of The Marriage, provides a fitting climax to Blake's images of cloud and fire. The "Song" endswwithaa condemnation of the orthodoxy that binds man's will: "Nor [let] pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not!" (E. 44).
5 Cf. Northrop Frye. "The Romantic Myth," in A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 21-35.
Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., "Opening the Seals: Blake's Epics and the Milton Tradition," in Blake's Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four ZoaSj Milton, Jerusalem, ed, Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 38-41,
7 C, H. Collins Baker, Catalogue of William Blake's Drawings and Paintings in the Huntington Library (San Marino [Calif.]: Huntington Library, 1938) • 8 William Blake, il/al'a or The Four Zoas: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, A Transcript of the Poem, and a Study of its Growth and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 182.
-31- THE FOUR ZOAS:
LIMITATIONS OF ANALYSIS
The relationship between poet, critic, and reader has developed more closely around the writings of William Blake than around the works of any other English writer. This is partly because Blake encourages the roles of poet, critic, and reader, to merge in his poetry.
He interests a critic because he removes the barriers between poetry and criticism. He defines the greatest poetry as "allegory addressed to the intellectual powers," and defends the practice of not being too explicit on the ground that it "rouzes the faculties to act." His language in his later prophecies is almost deliberately colloquial and "unpoetic," as though he expected the critic's response to be also a creative one. He understood, in his own way, the principle later stated by Arnold that poetry is a criticism of life, and it was an uncompromising way. For him, the artist demonstrates a certain way of life: his aim is not to be appreciated or admired, but to transfer to others the imaginative habit and energy of his mind. The main work of criticism is teaching, and teaching for Blake cannot be separated from creation.1
The unity of the roles of artist, critic, and reader, may be found in tracing this "imaginative habit and energy" of Blake's mind. Blake knew this, and he constructed poetic forms that would require the reader and the critic to duplicate those habits in order to unlock his poems' meanings. The poet, the critic, and the reader, are all involved in the same process in Blake's poetry.
Blake wrote that "Every Poem must necessarily be a perfect
Unity" ("On Homers Poetry," E. 267). By that he meant that the
-32- 33
poem is a statement of the unity of a poet's perception. When the reader examines his own perceptions, he too can see that they are unified, whether or not their elements are harmonious or proportionate to some aesthetic standard. To discover the unity of a poem, therefore, the reader or critic has to merge his vision with that of the poet. It is his ability or inability to do that, that leads the reader to claim that a poem is either unified or disunified.
The Four Zoas is an incomplete manifestation of a poetic work. This has given critics cause to doubt its unity. However, inasmuch as its structure emanates from the same poetic process as a completed poem, there should be no more reason for such doubt than there is to doubt any poem's structure. This is not to say that critics should be faulted for their statements about the disunity of the structure of The Four Zoas. They have a responsibility to speculate as to whether they believe it is likely that Blake's intentions can be accurately reconstructed from what exists of the poem. But a critical response claiming, for instance, that The Four Zoas manuscript contains material for two distinct poems or more needs interpretation. The reader should realize that such a statement describes the quality of the critic's own response, and not necessarily either
Blake's intention or his execution.
Because it is through the reader's own act of will that he comes to perceive what Blake calls the necessarily perfect unity of a poem, it seems desireable for criticism of The Four Zoas 34
to shift the onus for creating the poem's unity from the poet
onto the reader. The effect of the poem's incompleteness is
to require that the willingness of the reader's suspension of
disbelief be stretched beyond its normal bounds. This thesis
takes the position that when the criticism of The Four Zoas
can express fairly clearly the extent of these demands upon the
reader's will, only then can an assessment of the poem's
unity be meaningful.
The act of criticism requires that the will be directed
in two opposing thought patterns—synthetic and analytic. The
first intentionally destroys the reader's objectivity; the
second restores it. Analysis necessarily works from an unyielding
set of formal criteria. The analytical mind does not necessarily
take pleasure in its processes, nor is the_ object of its analysis necessarily discomforted. But inasmuch as the analyzer necessarily
remains unmoved and unchanged by the process of analysis, his process may be compared with that of the Pebble in Blake's poem,
"The Clod & the Pebble". The process of synthesis, on the other hand, involves creating the very attitudes which then are tested by analysis. This process requires an empathetic ability of attempting to grasp the forms behind their manifestations.
Most individuals fall into the habit of making no distinction between forms and manifestations. But Blake is ever mindful of the distinction, and makes the ability to form this distinction essential for his reader. Because the process of synthesis entails reshaping one's mental concepts, it can be likened to 35
the process of the Clod in "The Clod & the Pebble". Analysis
and synthesis are each essential to the other in a creative
individual for obvious reasons. Synthesis when separated from
analysis leads to unproductive and absurd generalities. Analysis
separated from synthesis leads to reductive and equally absurd
categories of judgment.
The critical process of the reader is not very different
from the creative process of the poet. The main difference
between them is that the poet's process is .usually more direct,
because his understanding actually becomes his poem, not a
theory about it. Like the reader, the poet often discovers
form through his medium, the metaphor. Metaphors have their own
will and may often reveal that will to the poet in opposition to
his own. (Cf. Blake's statement, "I have written this Poem
from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty
lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will"
[Let. to Butts, E. 697]). Blake believed that form is to be
found in the minute particulars of expression, and in the manner by which the poet organizes those minute particulars into a
larger entity of meaning. Poetic structure is created through
the microcosm of metaphor and into the macrocosm of myth, from
the particular to the general.
Both critical and creative processes share a need to keep their processes open-ended and expansive by subordinating analysis to synthesis. A speech by Los to his analytical spectre in Jerusalem describes in human terms the process by which the central divinity 36
of any form is made known:
He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children One first, in friendship & love; then a Divine Family, & in the midst Jesus will appear; so he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized & not as thou 0 Fiend of Righteousness pretendest; thine is a Disorganized And snowy cloud: brooder of tempests & destructive War. You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue! 1 act with benevolence & Virtue & get murderd time after time: You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you May take the aggregate; & you call the aggregate Moral Law: And you call that Swelld & bloated Form; a Minute Particular. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars: & every Particular is a Man; a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus. (J. 91. 18-30)
The implications of this passage seem unending. As a theory of criticism, the passage applies beautifully to The Four Zoas, and opens many perspectives on that work in particular. "He who would see the Divinity" is the reader who desires an apocalyptic perspective on The Four Zoas. In order to find divinity he must look through Vala, who is the manifestation of a seemingly evasive illusion, and whose name formed the original title for the poem. And he must look through Albion, who is Vala's human creator and counterpart, to the very source to whom Albion must look to receive his vitality and form. Even when Albion himself turns his back upon the divine vision (10.23, 23.2, 19.14), the reader should not: his task, like Blake's, remains unchanged by a temporary failure of vision. When Albion, and after him his members, turn away from the Divine Vision, the radiance 37
is not decreased but diffused, for each, of his children radiates
o
a reflected image of that radiance, either "true or Parabolic".
When the Divinity is not seen at once then he must be sought
among his children, who are none other than the Divine Vision
appearing in Luvah's robes of blood. (32.14). The artist too, when he cannot see the divine radiance, creates figures or images
of it, whose translucence vary according to the creator's
enlightenment. He must then suffer the perils of mortal man, to regain the kingdom of divine unity. Only when the children are viewed through a catharsis of "friendship & love" can the
Divinity be seen through them. The more members there are in a family, the more expressions there are.of individuality in opposition to unity. The more members there are, the more opportunities there are for chaos and for alienation from the whole. But the more members in a family, the more profound are its expressions of unity. Thus, "he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized
. . . ." To organize the particulars is not to see them apart from the whole but in their specific, organic, relationships to the whole. The more minute the particulars and the more specifically organized, the greater the whole, and the greater the opportunity of understanding the nature of Vala the illusion and of Albion the form. Suddenly it becomes clear that turning away from the divine vision is seeking his children, is returning to the minute particulars in order to re-member him. Thus, in the first four lines of the passage quoted from Jerusalem, one 38
finds, in the concept of searching for Divinity through the
Minute particulars, a concentrated description of the entire cycle of fall and regeneration, and all in human imagery. It is also a description of a mode of criticism in which analytical processes are subordinated to processes of organization and synthesis.
An interpretation of The Four Zoas based upon Jerusalem
91.18-30 clearly makes analysis the instrument of synthesis.
But the synthetic view of The Four Zoas given above cannot be taken as a serious interpretation, at least until the poem's minute particulars are better known. But from this starting point, of viewing the synthesis of vision that would have motivated
Blake to weave a layer of Christian imagery into his poem, it seems desirable to contrast a more analytical vision of The
Four Zoas.
Blake often finds ingenious ways to demonstrate how the reader and the artist witness the creative process. That process is a mutual creation between the informing energy of the subject, and the creative energy of the artist, each magnifying the other in the created forms through which that energy is expressed.
The opening lines of The Four Zoas describe this superbly, the ambiguities of the grammatical structure corresponding to the ambiguities of the process:
The Song of the Aged Mother which shook the heavens with wrath Hearing the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle (3. 1-3) 39
Great poetry permits the reader to experience this creative
reverberation of energies between the poet and his subject,
taking place within his own being. If the reader experiences
it, he can assume that he is, at least for that moment, in touch
with the artist's intentions. The critic who can help others
understand that experience can be a trustworthy interpreter of
the artist's intentions.
A direct encounter with the fruits of an artist's creative
power provides a vision of apocalypse because it reorders and
extends one's experience. The archetype of apocalyptic vision
is Jerusalem, an ideal symbol of this state since, as Northrop
Frye frequently writes, she is both a woman and a city, a lover
and a created object. "Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon
we know not": (Textual note for 42.17), this line, which has
no clear context in The Four Zoas, indicates the ambiguous quality
of the vision that exists through much of The Four Zoas. Babylon,
or Babel, is an archetype for satiric vision, which indicates
an entropic dispersal of meaning into disconnected fragments,
and an incapacity of those fragments to sustain organic relation•
ships. The poem quickly falls away from the creative and sustaining
vision of the opening lines, and becomes fragmented. The causes
of division are set out in a dialogue between the two parents of
the fallen state, Tharmas and Enion.
Trembling & pale sat Tharmas weeping in his clouds Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax \ to dry The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy 40
Horrible Ghast & Deadly nought shalt thou find in it But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy
(4.28-33)
Clearly, the fallen state has some relationship to the process
of critical analysis.
The reader is plunged from heroic verse describing the prepara•
tions for creative, mental warfare, into the midst of a lovers'
quarrel. From there the fall continues almost unabated, into a
culminating vision of corporeal warfare between France and
England, from which he is saved and returned to eternal vision by the inexplicable beginning of a Last Judgment. The poem begins with a psychological quaternity, but by the end of Night
VIII, two of these four Zoas have become political allegories, a
third has disappeared, and the fourth seems undecided whether
to be a human artist or a gigantic sun god. No wonder, it seems,
that the poem's events lack coherence.
An analysis of layers of palimpsest in the manuscript of
The Four Zoas appears to provide a reason for the poem's develop• ment. It appears that the poem's conception changed drastically
as it developed. Three distinct poetic conceptions can be
identified, though they are too strongly interwoven to be separable from one another. At first the poem revolved around a central deity, named Vala, who represented the manifested forms of man's mental life. Indications of Vala's character in early layers of the poem seem to point to a rather chaste and well mannered conception underlying both Vala's and the poem's identity, combining general Biblical and pastoral imagery, 41
and borrowing a structure of nine evenly measured Nights from
Edward Young's Night Thoughts,
Later, Vala was replaced as the central organizing figure by the more obviously psychological metaphor of the four Zoas.
Another change, recorded on the title page and through part of
the manuscript, was to delete "The Eternal Man" in favour of
"Albion the Ancient Man", perhaps to maintain consistency with
Blake's expansion into a theme of a fall from pastoral innocence which characterized the changes brought about by the impact of
the industrial revolution in eighteenth.century England.
Blake's poem continued expanding, outgrowing each of its
forms in turn. The last three Nights had so much material added
to them that they grew larger than all the other six Nights
combined. Two versions of Night the Seventh were composed, and both allowed to stand. A layer of Christian symbolism, evidently begun during the composition of Nights Vila-and VIII, was introduced in the other Nights, apparently in a last endeavour to organize the poem's structure.
In this way Blake tried to gather the new and old threads of his Prophecy, and to strengthen the whole with new patches. Unfortunately it was too late for such mending. The 'fabric was so torn and frazzled that the only hope lay in a reweaving of the whole. The remaining tatters are gorgeous, but they will not bear the strain of the giant frame.3
This summary of Gerald Bentley's textual study, "The Composition
and Growth of Vala" (Vala} pp. 157-166), epitomizes the satiric vision of Blake's poem, reinforced with "patience and a magnifying glass" (Vala, p. xii). Bentley's analysis of Blake's prophecy,
/ 7 42
which is represented in the above description of the manuscript, holds firm control over his synthesis of Blake's poetic intentions
and execution. In dividing the poem's composition into three periods, he bases his judgments on characteristics such as handwriting, type of paper used, and stitch-marks. The three
divisions fortuitously coincide with imagery layers of Vala, the
Zoas, and Jesus. Bentley apparently finds little to connect
these layers with one another, once they have been discovered.
Bentley's attempt to establish a firm analytical! basis \
for a critical understanding of The Four Zoas is a valiant one, but it was doomed from the start. Subsequent, more exhaustive
studies have revealed that finally, although certain dates can be attached to the manuscript as a whole (imagery appears to be
a more accurate guide here than watermarks, stitch marks, and other
ingenious evidence), the dating of individual pages of the manuscript relative to one another is impossible. Thus most attempts to focus layers of composition in such a way as to imply that "late" additions are not implicit in "early" layers and therefore indicate changes of purpose, must now be regarded as speculative. Bentley's investigations reveal a lesson that is, as Blake would say, parabolic to his intention: his work shows that the poem is better regarded as an imaginative whole than as a manuscript of piecemeal revisions.
Other forms of critical analysis which have been tried on
The Four Zoas have been similarly inconclusive in establishing a unifying purpose for the poem. The most daring single critical 43
endeavour has been David V. Erdman's contention that, far from
turning away from current history as other Romantics did during
these years following the French Revolution, Blake turned toward
current history, and, having identified his myth with forces in the political world around him, he actually composed The Four
Zoas in accordance with the unfolding of history.
Blake's theme was, as always, a creative ascent from present strife to millennial peace, and in broad terms the climax was fairly calculable since peace and the downfall of Pitt and Napoleon must come sooner or later. But what Blake greatly miscalculated in his republican zeal was the degree to which a mere treaty of peace or the mere fall of Pitt or Napoleon would constitute any real change for the English people. In short, never was a poem so bewilderingly attached to the shifting fortunes of principalities and powers. Each stage in the transformation of Bonaparte from artilleryman of the Republic to lawgiving Emperor seems to have delivered a direct shock to the symbolic consistency and frail narrative frame of Blake's epic. And the strange Peace of Amiens would not only catch him off guard but upset the entire seventh act of his celestial drama. In The French Revolution and America and Europe he had dealt with recent events. In The Four Zoas he seems to have allowed his tune to be called by events unfolding as he wrote. The result is as mad as the effort to play croquet in Wonderland with living mallets and balls.4
The result of Erdman's research, as this statement of its theme promises, makes a magnificent chronicle. Unfortunately, subsequent analysis of the manuscript has shown the impossibility of supporting as conclusive an analysis as Erdman first proposed. In Erdman's later assessment, "certain salient historical allusions or sources remain" (E 738), however. Those that have become accepted will be more difficult to overthrow in the future because, all question of accuracy aside, Erdman's analysis is imaginatively convincing.
He has, in fact, fabricated a series of historical identifications 44
to account for seeming inconsistencies in Blake's myth. As the
structure of Blake criticism expands, it will be hoped that
Erdman's dating will be regarded "as a hypothetical structure"5
rather than an authoritative one. It is still not clear to what
extent Blake's symbolism accords with his historical allegory.
Although Blake seems clearly to have derived much of his symbolism
from history, Erdman fails to confirm that his symbolism was tied to history. Here Erdman imposes upon the apocalyptic vision of
The Four Zoas the satiric vision of America, lines of which echo through the larger poem without dominating its structure. In attempting to find in The Four Zoas a satiric structure like that of America, Erdman "takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole" (MHH, P. 16). One is very grateful for Erdman's satiric readings tooret;member the Divine Vision in its. minute particulars.
But Blake does not allow the satire to become the organizing principle of his vision. A critical structure that does so, ultimately falls out of harmony with Blake's poem, and imposes •I its form on his.
Although Erdman's tone is inspired when organizing the minute particulars of the satiric aspects of The Four Zoas, he becomes an untrustworthy interpreter of the apocalyptic aspects of Blake's vision:
Nevertheless the revisions of The Four Zoas made in this spirit seem vltually to remove the central theme of struggle from the plan of the epic. They suggest that no kind of social or psychological revolution is necessary but submission, albeit submission must be to "the Divine Vision."6 45
Erdman suggests a valid reason for what he sees as a failure of vision at the beginning of Night IX of The Four Zoas: the people have sunk down asleep, desiring only escape from oppression, and not victory over it. "With the people inactive," Erdman recognizes,
"the poet has either everything to do or nothing." (p. 381)
Thus, Erdman recognizes why Blake the poet would lose his nerve,
and direct his vision away from revolution. Nevertheless,
Erdman seems to feel, by this stage of his criticism, that
the principles of his allegory are so well established that
they provide a firm basis from which he may criticize Blake's
transition from Night VIII to Night IX as inconsistent. Thus
Erdman follows a tradition of Four Zoas criticism that has
grown steadily since Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947), which began a major questioning of the integrity of Blake's vision
in The Four Zoas, Only since James C. Evan's observation that
in Blake's vision, when man attaches his imagination to the
fallen world, he becomes what he beholds, has the criticism of
The Four Zoas been relieved of the necessity of accounting for historical allegory of The Four Zoas as an essential determinant of its plot structure. But, to quote Evans, "The apocalypse, then, must involve the destruction of all such constructed worlds if one is to emerge into pure vision that allows him to see each object in its totality".7
One could go on and on citing instances where critics impose their unrefined visions upon Blake's more perfect one. Such rebellions still leave Blake quietly beckoning to the reader to follow him. It is time to follow and see from experience what that task requires of the reader. FOOTNOTES
Northrop Frye, "The Road to Excess," in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism:, ed. Harold Bloom (W. W. Norton: New York, 19 70), p. 120.
"Annotations" to An Apology for the Bible, E 607.
3 Gerald E. Bentley, William Blake: Vala or The Four Zoas: A Facsimile of the Mmuscript, A Transcript of the Poem, and a Study of Its Growth and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 166.
4 David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Time, Revised ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969, p. 294.
5 Prophet Against Empire, p. 295.
6 Prophet Against Empire, p. 380.
7 James C. Evans, "The Apocalypse as Contrary Vision: Prolegemena to an Analogical Reading of The Four Zoas," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (Summer, 19 72), 316.
-47- FINDING APOCALYPSE IN THE FOUR ZOAS: METAPHORS OF POETIC PROCESS
In his annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Blake writes, "Genius has no Error it is Ignorance that is error"
CE 641). This statement provides the reader with the correct
mental attitude to lead him to an apocalyptic vision of The
Four Zoas. First, it reminds the reader of the correct rationale
for studying an unfinished manuscript work by a poet of Blake's
genius. Secondly, it provides a vision whereby genius is seen
to emerge out of unending series of contexts, through unending
stages of self-purification. Those contexts are valuable in their
own right, since they provide the necessary means for the recognition
of genius. For genius is not to be found in form but in process.
A static conception is always the enemy of genius. What makes
The Four Zoas an exciting poem to read is its revelation of poetic
process.
The entire structure of The Four Zoas balances between two worlds. The first manifests life as a struggle toward realization
of perfected form. The other manifests life as a continuous
struggle of throwing off forms to reveal the true expression
of life as energy rather than form. These conflicting worlds
are actually the same, ever-changing world, seen from opposing
perspectives. The first perspective, that of idealization of
form, dooms man to a vision of entropy:
0 how the horrors of Eternal Death take hold on Man His faint groans shake the caves & issue thro the desolate rocks -48- 49
And the Strong Eagle now with num[m]ing cold blighted of feathers Once like the pride of the sun now flagging in cold night Hovers with blasted wings aloft watching with Eager Eye Till Man shall leave a corruptible body he famishd hears him groan And now he fixes his strong talons in the pointed rock And now he beats the heavy air with his enormous wings Beside him lies the Lion dead & in his belly worms Feast on his death till universal death devours all And the pale horse seeks for the pool to lie him down & die But finds the pools are filled with serpents devouring one another He droops his head & trembling stands & his bright eyes decay
(F.Z. 108.35-109.11)
This vision of death compares in the tone of its despair and
universality of its scope with the famoussclosing lines of Book IV
of The Dunaiad.^- Appropriately, these lines are uttered by
Ahania, the emanation of Urizen, the goddess of Urizen's golden world, the most perfect realization in created form of the powers
of eternity. Ahania has been cast out by Urizen because she could
not bear the human cost of maintaining this structure of order.
When Ahania falls into the void, she becomes the embodiment of
satiric vision, as this speech from near the end of Night
VIII .indicates/: .
The perspective which opposes that of Ahania is uttered by
Enion. She is the emanation of Tharmas, whom Blake describes as
the "Parent power (4.7), whose eternal power had been eclipsed by
Urizen's ascendency, and who is manifested in the fallen world as
a raging power of uncontrolled destruction that overwhelms
Urizen's g-olden world. Enion sees life through the perspective
of its beginning point, as manifestation of energy, rather than its 50
end point, the decay of form:
The furrowd field replies to the grave I hear her reply to me Behold the time approaches fast that thou shalt be as a thing Forgotten when one speaks of thee he will not be believd When the man gently fades away in his immortality When the mortal disappears in improved knowledge cast away The former things so shall the mortal gently fade away And so become invisible to those who still remain Listen I will tell thee .what is done in the caverns of the grave The Lamb of God has rent the Veil of Mystery soon to return In Clouds & Fires around the rock & the Mysterious tree As the seed waits Eagerly watching for its flower & fruit Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible army So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body Into the Elemental forms of every thing that grows (109.28-110.8)
These alternatives of vision, as expressed here by Ahania and Enion, are present throughout The Four Zoas. Of Blake's final resolution between them there can be no doubt. The consolidation and casting off of error is the basic metaphor of his poetic process, and it defines his relationship to the cultural and literary tradition of his time. Only when The Four Zoas is seen throughout as an apocalyptic process of conscious and willing descent into the minute particulars of vision in order to reorganize a totality of the divine humanity, can its satiric vision be placed in its correct perspective. The form of The Four Zoas is the clearest possible statement of the process by which Blake's poetic consciousness evolved out of the strictures of the eighteenth century satiric tradition.
The Four Zoas is clearly a poem about creation, fall, and regeneration. Attempts have been made to correlate its structure 51
with the oppositions of war and peace in Blake's own time, and even with the cycle of history as seen from the New Testament, looking backwards to the original creation and forwards to apocalypse.
Although the poem may echo with these larger themes, much of its content seems not to be concerned with them, however. But if the poem is indeed unified, Blake's grand themes of fall, and regeneration, announced at its outset should at least apply consistently to the poem's own structure. In other words, it should be possible to demonstrate that Blake's poem is about its own creation. Strangely enough, rather little has been written on this subject, perhaps because of the sheer volume of external material which the poem has pointed toward. None of the research into sources and analogues has so far explained what critics have identified as the two greatest obstacles to a unified understanding of the work: the poem's apparent lack of transition between Night VIII and Night IX, and the seeming redundancy of the
Council of Eternals. This chapter provides an examination of some of the more important passages of the poem's narrative, showing that they may be interpreted as commentaries on the creative process of the poem itself. It also provides a context to account for the transition between Night VIII and Night IX, and for the Council of Eternals.
An interpretation of a poem as being about itself may appear rather precious at first sight. But the writing of a poem about itself is a fair description of the echoing effect of the opening lines of The Four Zoas : 52
The Song of the Aged Mother which shook the heavens with wrath Hearing the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual Battle
Furthermore, the poet's own mental process became a highly popular
Romantic theme, as the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth in particular show. The Advertisement for Wordsworth's The Prelude,
for instance, reveals the ambition of the poet to write a long poem about the growth of his own mind:
Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such an employment. As subsidiary to this preparation, he undertook to record, in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them?
Interestingly enough, The Prelude and The Pour Zoas overlap
one another in the dates of their composition. The Pour Zoas, bearing the title date 1797, was probably begun a year or two earlier, and was still being reworked as late as 1804. The
Prelude, according to Wordsworth's Advertisement, was composed between 1799 and 1805. Just as The Prelude was designed as a preliminary to The Recluse, so The Four Zoas preceded Milton and
Jerusalem. Of The Prelude, Wordsworth wrote in the Advertisement:
The preparatory poem is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labor which he had proposed to himself;3
Blake, who inscribed "Rest before Labour" on the back of the title page of The Four Zoas, composed his two major prophecies when he awoke from that rest. 53
Further confirmation of the possibility that The Four Zoas
describes the process of its own creation rests with Milton and
Jerusalem, Blake's later epics, both of which contain a number
of lines from the text of The Four Zoas. Milton can be seen as
a poem about a moment of inspiration, and Jerusalem as a poem
about poetry.^
In creating a new poetic form based on the process of its
own creation, Paradise Lost served as Blake's closest model.
Milton the poet descended into darkness in order to see celestial
light. The process by which he discovered his grand subject and
gave it its form exactly paralleled both the fall and regeneration
of Adam, and the spiritual descent and ascent of the reader into
hell's darkness, and thence upward towards heaven's light.
Despite Blake's admiration for Paradise Lost as a unified
statement of poetic process, and for Milton as a revolutionary
poet, Blake creates much of his subject matter in The Four Zoas
in radical opposition to the theology of Paradise Lost. Following
in Milton's footsteps in The Four Zoas was to mean a radical
opposition to much of the theology and the formal art of Paradise
Lost. Paradise Lost had shown more concern for God's justification
than for man's regeneration, which was to be Blake's main concern.
Milton's perspective had been static: his art lay in depicting,
not in creating, the well-known Christian cosmos. Blake's
perspective was to be dynamic: Blake was to create his own
myth and his own cosmos, and his art lay in the energy through which he was to create one image after another rather than to adorn 54
a single concept to perfection. Milton had used a linear narrative sequence, and an Olympian point of view. Blake was to avoid space-time continuity as much as possible, whereas Paradise
Lost had been God-centered, The Four Zoas was to be Christ-centered.
Where the tone of Paradise Lost had been stoic, that of The Four
Zoas would be compassionate.
An example of how the theology of Milton^contradicts Blake's own beliefs is to be found in comparing the two poets on the subject of creation. Milton had believed that God created the universe from chaos. Blake vehemently opposed this idea.
"Many suppose that before [Adam] In Paradise Lost the concept that creation had been created from nothing caused an unfortunate dissociation between Satan's fall and the creation of Paradise. Thus Milton's personal discovery of light through entering darkness, while it finds a correlative in the fortunate fall of Adam and Eve, appears unparalleled in the overall structure of Milton's myth. Regardless of Satan's eventual demise, he provides the motive force by which God's magnification is accomplished, a fact which Milton recognized intuitively by giving the Adversary so important a role in his epic. In The Four Zoas creation is not separate from the fall: the two events are one. This Blake accomplishes partly by 55 distinguishing fallen states from the individuals within those states. Individuals, though fallen, remain redeemable. But principally, the creation and fall are linked through Blake's treatment of Tharmas. Tharmas is the parent power: he is both a creative power and also a protective power. He is the united will, whose eternal state is innocence but whose fallen state is experience. The reader's first encounter with the fallen world in The Four Zoas is in a quarrel between Tharmas and his feminine emanation, Enion, Tharmas is depicted as darkening and sinking into the ocean, and hiding behind clouds. An image of the setting sun, he is consonant with a number of other images: closing the western gate, closing the gates of the Tongue, and turning round the Circle of Destiny. All these images describe Tharmas as having eternal powers that are being circumscribed for the first time, Tharmas, in short, is the power of innocence, radiating energy outwards unthinkingly and unhesitatingly. Tharmas is also the power of experience, frightened at losing his emanations, and trying to protect and shelter them. The result of Tharmas changing from a state of innocence to a state of experience is a dispute between Tharmas and Enion. The manner in which this dispute is resolved provides Blake with a key metaphor for what poetry attempts and does: I am almost Extinct & soon shall be a Shadow in Oblivion Unless some way can be found that I may look upon thee & live Hide me some Shadowy semblance, secret whispring in my Ear In secret of soft wings, in mazes of delusive beauty I have lookd into the secret soul of him I lovd And in the Dark recesses found Sin & cannot return (4.22-27) 56 Here is an anthropomorphic description of the response of poetry to the reader who attempts to wrest meaning without understanding, from its words. Its symbolic meaning eludes discovery by retreating into the enigma of individual metaphors—into literal meanings. By opening The Four Zoas with a description of the quarrel between Tharmas and Enion, Blake describes the necessity of poetry to hide its meanings in symbol. Only when the reader's intentions are purified does meaning emerge from symbol. In deriving a creation myth from the relationship between Tharmas and Enion, and in making their dispute the cause for the creation of the Circle of Destiny, for the creation of the accusing Spectre of Tharmas, and finally, for the birth of Los and Enitharmon, Blake unites a number of important and complex purposes. He instructs his reader's attitude, making him one with Tharmas in pursuit of Enion. He hints at a poetic necessity for turning away from pastoral poetry as it had been attempted throughout the eighteenth century. And he prepares the reader for a new poetic form, appropriate to the reader's understanding and his need to exercise his visionary will. The reader who cannot penetrate Blake's symbolism will find it a weltering chaos of inexplicable meanings. The reader who understands Blake's symbolism will discover that Enion has not left him. Through the characters of Tharmas and Enion Blake finds a way to administer a severe chastening to his eighteenth century reader. At the same time, he explains his own point of view as a poet, since he is also the "parent power". His symbolism shows how narrow 57 and how deep the gulf between the poet's "allegory addressed to the intellectual powers" and the invective of the satirist. The following deleted passage, addressed to Enion, seems to depict her as a reader trapped within the symbolism of the poem as in a maze, and pursued by a vindictive Spectre of Tharmas. The passage indicates the bounds to which Blake could pursue his hidden meanings: The Spectre thus spoke. ^J/^o art thou Diminutive husk & shells- Broke from my bonds I scorn my prison I scorn & yet I lov^> Art thou not my slave & shalt thou dare To smite me with thy tongue beware lest I sting also thee, The discrepancy in viewpoint between this passage, which makes Enion an unknowing victim, and the earlier passage quoted from page four of the manuscript where she deliberately chooses to hide from Tharmas, seems to indicate a range of possible modes Blake had explored in order to find the appropriate tenor in which to address his reader through allegory. It also indicates how easily and perfectly he can shift viewpoints. At the outset of The Four Zoas, Tharmas and Enion enact a quarrel that precipitates the fallen world. In providinguthis introduction to his myth, Blake defines the paradoxical nature of poetry. Blake had criticized Milton for his creating a poetical 58 vehicle that was equally explicit to the spiritual and to the corporeal understanding. Milton's art is essentially that of parable, which yields one meaning to the initiated and another to the uninitiated. Blake's art of paradox is quite different. It provides meaning to the initiated, but to the uninitiated its symbols are as unrelated and meaningless as the discrete objects of material nature. Through paradox Blake made his art a fit representation of "this Vegetable Glass of Nature" (VL'J, E 545), which, far from being man's teacher, reflects only the reality that one is prepared to find in it. Through the art of paradox, Blake made his poetry everywhere show to the reader the necessity of exercising his own will. The quarrel between Tharmas and Enion in Night the First of The Four Zoas prepares the reader to experience similar oppositions throughout the poem. But as the reader moves into the poem, their quarrel and, therefore, the issues it raises, become peripheral to an organized conflict between Urizen and Luvah over possession of the chariot of poetic genius. The imagery of the central portion of Night the First is taken from Book V of Paradise Lost, where God's proclamation of the anointing of his Son as the Most High is followed by a banquet feast and by a plot of rebellion by Satan. In The Four Zoas an analogous feast becomes a sparagmos—a ritual of communion where the body of the universal God is given to man in its elemental forms (12.36-7,44). Presiding at the feast are the newly born children, Los and Enitharmon, born into the fallen world through the quarrel of Tharmas and Enion. 59 Los has already been identified with the imagination. Out of the fragments of Enion's world he will create new imaginative forms to regenerate the fallen Man. Presiding over the feast gives Los his initiation into this role. The background for this feast in The Four Zoas is organized mental warfare between the two most easily allegorized gods of Blake's myth, Urizen and Luvah. Urizen, whose actions in Night the First are clearly modelled after Satan in Book V of Paradise Lost, could be the faculty of reason, and Luvah, a god of vegetative life like Dionysis, could be the faculty of desire. Usually when their conflict, which rages throughout The Four Zoas, is referred to, its origin seems to be over the possession of the divine chariot. This chariot is referred to through a number of metaphors, but for purposes of this discussion, it can best be thought of as the chariot of poetic genius. As Urizen and then Luvah descend from Eternity into time and space, their mental warfare follows with them, and provokes the description of corporeal warfare in Nights VIlb and VIII of The Four Zoas. The conflict between Urizen and Luvah, between reason and desire, characterizes a cultural conflict that can be traced through• out the literature, the politics, and the social history of England in the Restoration and the eighteenth century. It could not be ignored by any poet of the period, though expressions of its political implications was harshly censored after the middle of the century. The symbolism of Tharmas and Enion indicates that the poetic impulse embodied in Los and Enitharmon was indeed born 60 from the need to give metaphoric expression to the cultural conflict But political censorship was not the only cause for a retreat into symbolism to express the growing contradictions of English thought and culture. The censorship within men's mind was just as real. Despite a universal awareness, at least among poets, of the need for new forms of expression, poetic experimentation throughout the century continued to be inhibited by countless neoclassical conventions. This excruciating paralysis of form led to a crisis in the lives of a number of eighteenth century poets, in particular, William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, William Collins, and perhaps Christopher Smart as well. At first the wars between Urizen and Luvah are purely visionary and are seen by some and not by others (28.11-21). As The Four Zoas progresses, however, their impact on the poem changes. At first they are merely "in the air". Later, they provide the dominating subject matter of the poem. Finally, they epitomize forces of oppression and tyranny. This progression seems to follow a change in mental consciousness through the eighteenth century as the early expressions of vague and general enlightened optimism became polarized into attitudes of revolution and political entrenchment, a movement coinciding with the growth of empiricism. This "downwards and outwards" movement of what Blake calls corporeal warfare, or the "wars of Eternal Death", provides the primary source for the satiric vision of The Four Zoas. Its very antithesis to its mental counterpart, "the wars of Eternal Life" makes it an essential ingredient of Blake's poem. The 61 essential opposition between the mental and physical realms is indicated by the closing lines of Night I: Terrific ragd the Eternal Wheels of intellect terrific ragd The living creatures of the wheels in the Wars of Eternal life But perverse rolld the wheels of Urizen & Luvah back reversd Downwards & outwards consuming in the wars of Eternal Death (20.12-15) As the conflict enters the realm of manifestations, it becomes progressively degraded. But the energy of the warring Zoas is not entirely dissipated, for that energy gives rise to another opposition, that of the prophetic imagination, Los. The poem thus gives rise to two opposing movements: the entropic waste of the Urizen-Luvah conflict, and the spiritual ascent of Los. The central position of the Urizen-Luvah conflict in The Four Zoas provides an important comment on the nature of the poetic process. Blake's analogy between Urizen and Milton's Satan is particularly apt here. Milton's use of Satan in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained satirizes the role of the tragic hero in classical literature. And yet, as has already been noted, Satan is the great instrument of God's and Milton's plan of spiritual regeneration. The essentially comic purpose of tragedy was a favourite theme of Blake's. The death of the hero in tragedy purges his society of a tragic flaw which the hero embodies, and allows the audience to share in that purgation. In his Descriptive Catalogue, Blake makes much of the fact that "Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who studied poetical art .... The Monk's definition of tragedy in the poem to his tale is worth repeating: 62 'Tragedy is to tell a certain story, As old books us maken memory: Of him that stood in great prosperity. And be fallen out of high degree, Into miserie and ended wretchedly.'" (E 525) Further, in its depiction of destruction and moral decay, Blake believed that: "the grandest Poetry is Immoral the Grandest characters Wicked. Very Satan. Capanius Othello a murderer. Prometheus. Jupiter. Jehovah. Jesus a wine bibber" (E 623). In stating his case against "moral" poetry in his annotations to Boyd's Historical Notes, Blake contradicts a firm principle of the literature and criticism of his time, that all literature should exemplify moral laws. But Blake believed that everything comes from its own opposite, and that "the grandest poetry" creates its structure from opposition. The opposition between Luvah and Ore generates Los as ±ts opposite. It is for Los to create a vision that incorporates both opposites into one whole, much as Milton had done in Paradise Lost. Earlier it was established that the conflict between Enion and Tharmas indicates Blake's use of paradox—a deliberate retreat into the mazes of metaphoric thought to elude rational inquiry. Blake's (or Enion's) choice of paradox clearly shows his alliance with Luvah against Urizen in the wars of eternal life. However, Blake's choice of the symbol of the chariot as a focus for the conflict between Urizen and Luvah shows that he also makes use of the allegorical method that Milton's Raphael had used: I shall delineate so, By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms As may express them best (P.L. V, 572-4) 63 Flashback accounts of the origin of the conflict leading to the Fall (15.10-11; 21.25-27; 39.3; 64.11-12; 80.40-41; 82.30-35; 119.26-27), indicate that the most consistent expression of the conflict was based on a variation of the Phaethon myth. In this myth, Apollo permitted his son Phaethon to guide the chariot of the sun, with disastrous consequences. Yet the variety of conflicting accounts of the fall, even beyond those cited here, make it quite obvious that the chariot is merely the corporeal likeness of some spiritual form that cannot be adequately understood even through metaphor. For the purposes of this essay a modern language expression for it might be "the center of life energy in the human psyche", or in Blakean language, the Poetic genius. This "chariot of fire" as it is also called in The Four Zoas, exists beyond the capacity of Urizen or Luvah to possess it, or usurp it. The Phaethon myth, when inverted from a passive to an active conception, indicates that the chariot of poetic genius imparts its will through whomever it chooses, and is not the passive receptacle for the desire of either Urizen or Luvah. The inevitable conclusion is that the Chariot of poetic genius designates the unifying vision of Christ. In Paradise Lost the fourfold chariot had symbolized Christ's omnipotence. In The Four Zoas the same fourfold chariot becomes a symbol for the unity of the Zoas. Although parts of this fourfold chariot are visible in early Nights of The Four Zoas, the unified vision, with Christ enthroned at its pinnacle, is not depicted until after the Last Judgment, in Night IX (123.27-29, 33-39). Nevertheless, although 64 the chariot is not seen in its entirety throughout The Four Zoas, it is present as part of the machinery of the Eternals, guiding Blake's vision away from Milton's myth of reason, and towards a myth of desire as the fittest expression of divinity. The necessity for a Council of Eternals in The Four Zoas is clearly illustrated by the distortions that the Zoas and their emanations make when attempting to recall the nature of the divine chariot. Each of the characters has been seduced into seeing self-reflected images of reality, which is the principle characteristic of the fallen man. If Albion as One falls into a dream of a narcisistic reality, then so indeed do all his members. The concept of eternals, unchanged though human, always capable of mingling identities and thus renewing one's reality through the creative opposition of a contrasting point of view, is vital to the conception of Blake's poem. The Council of Eternals are in fact not a separate pantheon of immortals, but a unified vision of the eternal man perceived as his individual members. The Council of Eternals are man's minute particulars conceived as a unified vision. The difference between the two could be exemplified through Dante's image of observing reality reverse itself as he ascends upwards through Purgatory. This reversed relationship of fallen to unfalien perceptions accounts for the frequent appearance of analogies between the fallen and the eternal worlds throughout The Four Zoas. There are four central images of the poetic process in Night I of The Four Zoas. The first, the quarrel between Tharmas and 65 Enion, theorizes that the poetic impulse lies in a desire to create paradox. The second, the golden feast, indicates the source of poetic perception. The third, the war between Urizen and Luvah, expresses its meaning in two ways. First, it expresses the essential nature of mental conflict created by a shifting of allegiance in eighteenth century thought, from reason to desire. Because the eighteenth century poetic mind, which worshipped static form, could conceive of conflict only as an image of hell, the century's poetic tongue, which had lost its gift of prophetic utterance, could not express or contain the conflict until it fulfilled that conception. The second meaning of the conflict between Urizen and Luvah is that, having manifested itself :in-wars and revolution, the conflict showed the antithesis that creates the necessity for poetic thought, and for a redeeming vision of human history. The fourth image, the Council of Eternals, is an organized vision of human existence which the emerging poetic identity, Los, assimilates in its elemental forms at the golden feast. With these four images, Blake identifies the basic elements of his poem. All have a function in describing the nature of poetic thought and the manner of its creation. The succeeding Nights of The Four Zoas are also organized from images of poetic process. Night II describes the creation of Urizen's golden world, a fitting monument to eighteenth century empirical thought, on which the fragile optimism of the age was based. Fittingly, Blake based its conception partly on the Mundane Egg theory of Thomas Bumet, 66 a speculative philosopher who at the beginning of the century had deduced from certain geological evidence that the world as man knew it was the ruins of a perfectly ordered and symmetrical Mundane Egg which had collapsed with man's fall into the rubble of ocean and mountains which we now know.6 Later theories insisted that the world was not fallen, but held in perfect balance by the forces of natural order. Blake, by depicting the creation of a "Mundane Shell" in Night II and its collapse in Night III, is not simply harking'back to "Burnet1.-v. He its. showing-tfte'rcreation' and collapse of eighteenth century speculative thought and poetic form. Lest the inadequacies of this idealization of form be missed, Blake chooses as another analogue, the structure of the Mosaic tabernacle in the wilderness (with some reference to the temple of Solomon). His description of the tabernacle (page 30) reveals a structure that preserves order by dominating the other Zoas of human thought. Tharmas is entirely excluded from this world by an overarching firmament. Luvah and his emanation Vala are both the enslaved workers who construct Urizen's edifice, as the Israelites had been enslaved to build the pyramids of Egypt, and the sacrificial victims for its brazen altar of burnt offerings. Los and his emanation Enitharmon caper within the structure of the golden world as god-like and irresponsible children, drawing in its pleasures and sowing seeds of discontent. The folly of Urizen's Mundane Shell is summed up in a single line of verse: "Where Memory wishes to repose among the flocks of Tharmas" (34.40). 67 Despite the inadequacies of the golden world, and, by analogy, of golden age poetry, the collapse of the entire structure is not directly occasioned by Tharmas, or Luvah, or Los, but by Urizen's emanation, Ahania, confronting her lord with the moral inadequacies of the whole. Her account of the fall as man worshipping his own self-image shows clearly the inability of the reason alone to create an adequate image of poetic process because of its reliance upon static form. The golden world, like the wars of Urizen and Luvah, shows the antithesis of the poetic process. Its collapse, appropriately enough, prophesies the rending of the entire fabric of material existence in the Last Judgment (Cf. 44.10 with 117.9). The collapse of the golden world prophesies also the necessity for poetry to draw its subject matter from beyond the bulwark of reason and of previously created forms. The image of Tharmas compelling Los to rebuild the collapsed world of Urizen, dominates Night IV of The Four Zoas. Tharmas had fallen in Night I because he could no longer sustain a unified vision of his own creation, and his doubts were echoed and magnified by his emanation. With his innocence betrayed by uncertainty, Tharmas changed form from a god of the sun to a god of the waters. He became a chaos of disorganized particulars and conflicting points of view. When the structure of Urizen's golden world of reason lost its moral cohesion in Night III and Urizen also fell victim to self doubts, the sea of Tharmas over• whelmed the whole, burying Urizen in its ruins. More clearly than 68 ever before, the imagination, in both its unfalien and fallen aspects, Urthona and Los, is now shown to create its order out of the formlessness of Tharmas rather than with the structure of the reason. "Urthona is my Son," says Tharmas (51.14). The chaos of Tharmas compels Los to recreate that order. Amazingly, the chariot of poetic genius is now in Tharmas' control, as he draws back his waves to allow Los and the Spectre to rebuild the fallen world. I will compell thee to rebuild by these my furious waves Death choose or life thou strugglest in my waters, now choose life And all the Elements shall serve thee to their soothing flutes Their sweet inspiring lyres thy labours shall administer And they to thee only remit not faint not thou my son Now thou dost know what tis to strive against the God of waters So saying Tharmas on his furious chariots of the Deep Departed far into the Unknown & left a wondrous void Round Los. afar his waters bore on all sides round, with noise Of wheels & horses hoofs & Trumpets Horns & Clarions (52.1-10) Los, assisted by the spectre, recreates the fallen world by binding Urizen into an imitation of the fallen Man's five senses, the most critical limitation that the fallen imagination can impose on reality. The most frightening aspect of Los's attempt to recreate Urizen is the effect of his efforts upon himself: terrified at the shapes Enslaved humanity put on he became what he beheld He became what he was doing he was himself transformed (55.21-3) The entire body of Night IV breaks into two sections through Los's imaginative failure. The first, described above, is Blake's comment on the futility of recreating a culture on a foundation of empirical thought, as if a common belief in nothing more than the evidence of the senses could fulfill man's imaginative need for a total structure of unity. The second section of Night IV is 69 caused by the reappearance of the Council of Eternals. Its theme, "If ye will Believe your Brother shall rise again" (56.18), is based directly on the providential setting of limits. It restores to man (and to the poet particularly, in this reading of the poem) the faith that the fall will proceed no further. Empirical knowledge alone can give no assurance of its own meaning or signifi• cance. Los cannot create poetry with no assurance of its human significance. Nor can he discover significance in nature, which, to the empiricist simply obeys laws of endless recurrence. There• fore, the limits of poetic significance are ordained by divine providence—or, as modern language might.have it, by man's fundamental capacity for symbolic thought. The limits are the basic contraries of human existence—the human and the non-human, Adam and Satan. The events of Night V follow directly from Los's imaginative failure in Night IV. Blake has not abandoned his earliest ideas about the nature of imaginative desire, which he expressed first in There is No Natural Religion: IV The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels. V If the many become the same as the few when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy lan. VI If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot. VII The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ration only sees himself only. (E 2) Once the reason is bounded (as, for instance by the criteria of 70 sensory reality), not even the replacement of the compact golden world of classical and Renaissance learning by the larger realm of eighteenth century scientific exploration can save the imagination from despair. But even the despair of Los at the end of Night IV, at his failure to create a new poetic form out of the materials of the fallen world, cannot contain his poetic desire, which is born forth as Ore. Ore may be seen as an emerging popular consciousness in Blake's own culture, deriving its energy from the philosophy of the enlightenment. But when appropriate artistic and political forms did not simultaneously evolve for its expression, it turned into the energy of revolution, and had to be bound, as Urizen had been. In poetic terms, Ore is yet another incarnation of the savior, an appearance of Jesus in Luvah's robes of blood, who is then bound upon the stems of vegetation. Ore, the revolutionary consciousness, creates out of the random juxtapositions of time and space a new order of existence that Los the poet, inhibited by the dictates of Newtonian causality as well as all the other encumbrances of neoclassical thinking, cannot hope to duplicate poetically. Unable to contain the expanding form of Ore, he chains him down on the top of a mountain, where the true nature of Ore's ability to rise out of the restrictions of his father's rational thought forms is made clear. Concenterd into Love of Parent Storgous Appetite Craving His limbs bound down mock at his chains for over them a flame 71 Of circling fire unceasing plays to feed them with life & bring The virtues of the Eternal worlds ten thousand thousand spirits Of life lament around the Demon going forth & returning At his enormous call they flee into the heavens of heavens And back return with wine & food. Or dive into the deeps To bring the thrilling joys of sense to quell his ceaseless rage His eyes the lights of his large soul contract or else expand Contracted they behold the secrets of the infinite mountains The veins of gold & silver & the hidden things of Vala whatever grows from its pure bud or breathes a fragrant soul Expanded they behold the terrors of the Sun & Moon His nostrils breathe a fiery flame, his locks are like the forests And there the Eagle hides her young in cliffs & precipices His bosom is like starry heaven expanded all the stars Sing round, there waves the harvest & the vintage rejoices, the Spring Flow into rivers of delight, there the spontaneous flowers Drink laugh & sing, the grasshopper the Emmet & the Fly The golden Moth builds there a house & spreads her silken bed His loins inwove with silken fires are like a furnace fierce As the strong Bull in summer time when bees sing round the heath Where the herds low after the shadow & after the water spring The numrous flocks cover the mountain & shine along the valley His knees are rocks of adamant & rubie & emerald Spirits of strength in Palaces rejoice in golden armour Armed with spear & shield they drink & rejoice over the slain Such is the Demon such his terror in the nether deep (61.10-62.8) By the time Ore's parents have expanded their own perceptions to the point of trying to unchain Ore, his energy has taken on the character of rebellion, and cannot be restored to innocence. Thus too, a myth based on desire cannot be given form in eighteenth century thought against the taboos created by the earlier myth of reason. An inhibited poetic consciousness must follow behind the manifestations of the reality it seeks to articulate, a reality which it has already "condemned to crucifixion and hell-fire. A second major image of poetic process which is to be found in Night V is that of the building of Golgonooza. It was seen in Night IV that Los failed to rebuild Urizen's world into a 72 sustaining cultural myth, and therefore had to suffer the separation and crucifixion •. of the desire that he had been attempting to give form to through structures of the reason. If the events of Night IV had left Los in despair, the same should be doubly true of the events to Night V. However, Blake introduces another element into the events of Night V which is to have important consequences for the development of Los in his role as the poet and prophet to a culture. That event is the building of Golgonooza, an act which is essential to the survival of his identity. The building of Golgonooza begins with a concept of Los's emanation as separate from the chaos around him, and as a microcosm of the reality that he desires to re-create in order to preserve from destruction: Los around her builded pillars or iron And brass & silver & gold fourfold in dark prophetic fear For now he feard Eternal Death & uttermost Extinction He builded Golgonooza on the Lake of Udan Adan Upon the Limit of Translucence then he builded Luban Tharmas laid the Foundation & Los finishd it in howling woe (60.1-5) Golgonooza is mentioned only twice again (62.9; 6 3.10) before Night VII. Nevertheless, its description here suggests several clear parallels with the discussion of poetic process which Nights I to IV have already provided. Like The Four Zoas itself, Golgonooza is built upon the foundation of Tharmas, the sea of minute particulars, in defiance of eighteenth century poetic tradition, which considered that only universal generalities were worthy of poetic treatment. Golgonooza parallels the structure 73 of The Four Zoas in several particulars. Golgonooza is created in opposition to Los's fear of Eternal Death. The Four Zoas is created in opposition to the destructive conflict between Urizen and Luvah. Golgonooza is to be known as the City of Art in Milton and Jerusalem, and already it can be identified as a walled fortress. Presumably, if Golgonooza is a fortress for the preservation of art, built against external chaos, then its art is the art of the particular, which assumes an effect of unity only as it accumulates and orders itself. Blake may have composed at least one of his epics in this way, if his descrip• tion of the process of composition can be regarded as accurate: But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years Slumber on the banks of the Ocean unless he has seen them in the Spirit or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme Similar to Homers Iliad or Miltons Paradise Lost the Persons & Machinery intirely new to the Inhabitants of Earth (some of the Persons Excepted) I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at ai/time without Premeditation & even against my Will, the Time it has taken in writing was thus renderd Non Existent. & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all producd without Labour or Study. I mention this to shew you what I think the Grand Reason of my being brought down here (Let. to Butts, E. 697) The multiplicity of viewpoints expressed by the various short sections of The Four Zoas, and the manner in which palimpsest layers in the manuscript have been added one on top of another, would certainly suggest a piecemeal method of composition of The Four Zoas, in keeping with the image of building Golgonooza. The process of creating a new poetic form, 74 in opposition to poetry dominated by reason, must, as has already been observed, begin with the reorganizing of minute particulars, and allowing them to create their own organic unity. This Blake has done in The Four Zoas, both by example and by precept. The last two pages of Night V and all of Night VI are devoted to Urizen's reawakening from his fall in Night III and his exploration of his dens. The somber mood of this Night is without parallel elsewhere in the poem. A general tone of Gothicism makes this Night unique in The Four Zoas. The Spectre of Urthona, for example, appears like an apparition from Macbeth, or perhaps from one of Blake's early Gothic experiments in his Poetical Sketches. And by his globe of fire he went down the Vale of Urthona Between the enormous iron walls built by the Spectre dark Dark grew his globe reddning with mists & full before his path Striding across the narrow vale the Shadow of Urthona A spectre Vast appeard whose feet & legs with iron scaled Stampd the hard rocks expectant of the unknown wanderer (75.3-8) Echoes of the Gothic revival are quite appropriate to this section of The Four Zoas. "An Island in the Moon" indicates that Blake had taken a lively interest in the Gothic imitations of Chatterton and Macpherson, and there is much evidence of Blake's interest in early Celtic traditions. In fact, there is good reason to believe that The Four Zoas may have had its origin in a conception of the last battle of King Arthur, a painting of which Blake interpreted in his 1809 Descriptive Catalogue (E 553-556). But taken as a whole, eighteenth century experiments in Gothic 75 subject matter were essentially re-creations of Urizen. They bore much the same inhibitions as their golden age counterparts. Therefore, it is appropriate that Blake identify echoes of this experiment in poetic treatment with the fallen Urizen exploring his dens. The structure of The Four Zoas up to the end of Night VI shows a clear opposition between the forces recreating the human form, and those causing its further disintegration. Until his despair in Night IV at failing to create form, Los had contributed mainly to the forces of disintegration. But with the providential setting of the limits of Satan and Adam at the end of Night IV, a clear choice begins to emerge for him in Night V, even though he cannot yet see it. The building of Golgonooza, however minute its importance, is adding to the limit of contraction, rebuilding the human form. To contribute directly to the now emerging conflict between Urizen and Ore, is adding to the limit of opacity, enlarging the form of Satan. Neither Urizen nor Ore recalls the human form because of their pursuit of abstractions each associates with the golden age. Their struggle has no significance other than for the attainment of power. They have become mere ciphers in a moral struggle in which Los is at the centre, for he has not lost his desire to recreate the fallen man. Evidence of Los's human concern is strong through Night IV and V. He despairs at the binding of Urizen and is overcome with grief at the binding of Ore, even though he is the agent of both these disasters. 76 Two versions of Night VII remain extant, with Los building Golgonooza in one (Vila) and taking part in the wars of eternal death in the other (Vllb). It is not certain whether Blake intended to combine them or to include one or both in his poem. Inasmuch as Blake printed The Book, of Urizen with two versions of Chapter IV, it would seem feasible to consider that the two versions of Night VII contain a deliberate symmetry and are both integral to the manuscript. Night Vllb, with its revolutionary imagery from America, presents images of the desolation and destruction of pastoral England in an all-out commitment to the processes of war. In its depiction of Los, Night Vllb fails to depict any redemptive possibility and portrays him contributing directly to the imagery of destructive warfare in Night VIII and to the final image of despair in which Night VIII ends. However, Night Vllb does end in a vision of possibility by focusing directly on the division between Ore and the shadowy female. Ore's vision of existence is an entirely negative portrayal of endless warfare. But the shadowy female, even after yielding herself to the power of Ore,retains the vision of a world of innocence beyond the scene of battle leading back to Beulah and to a redemptive possibility even beyond death. But the eternal Promise They wrote on all their tombs & pillars & on every Urn These words If ye will believe your B[rJother shall rise again In golden letters ornamental with sweet labours of Love Waiting with Patience for the fulfilment of the Promise Divine 77 And all the Songs of Beulah sounded comfortable notes Not suffring doubt to rise up from the Clouds of the Shadowy Female Then myriads of the Dead b urst thro the bottoms of their tombs Descending on the shadowy females clouds in Spectrous terror Beyond the Limit of Translucence on the Lake of Udan Adan These they namd Satans & in the Aggregate they namd Them Satan (9.5.4-14) Night VTIb gives no assurance that the wars of eternal death will not engulf all existence, but rather echoes back to the setting of limits in Night IV and to the necessity of a redemptive vision based on belief, that will transform even the symbolism of death into the symbolism of life. The agent for creating such a vision, however, must be Los. Night Vllb is incomplete without Night Vila, just as The Songs of Experience are incomplete without the Songs of Innocence. Night Vila of The Four Zoas depicts Los continuing to create art in disregard for the conflict between Urizen and Ore which surrounds him in an unmistakeable allegory of social attitudes towards the poor in Blake's England. But Los cannot control his vision of his emanation, who changes from a vision of delight to one of horror as he attempts to approach her and to transform her into art. Thus Night Vila shows a continuity from Los's building of Golgonooza in Night V, and proceeds to reveal the difficulties the artist experiences in isolating his own vision from the circumstances about him which give rise to it. A transformation occurs when Enitharmon's Shadow—Los's art—is united with the Spectre of Urthona beneath the Tree of Mystery. The scene is a parody of Eve's temptation in the 78 Garden of Eden. The Spectre of Urthona saw the Shadow of Enitharmon Beneath the Tree of Mystery among the leaves & fruit Reddning the Demon strong prepard the poison of sweet Love He turnd from side to side in tears he wept & he embracd The fleeting image & in whispers mild wood the faint shade (82.23-27) The Spectre of Urthona is best characterized, in the creation of poetry, as "linear time". A guardian over Ore under the Tree of Mystery, he guards also, in the absence of Los, against the possibility of symbolic, accumulated meaning escaping from the linear structure of poetry. The union of the Spectre with the Shadow, of linear structure with art, follows. For till these terrors planted round the Gates of Eternal life Are driven away & annihilated we never can repass the Gates Astonishd filld with tears the spirit of Enitharmon beheld And heard the Spectre bitterly she wept Embracing fervent Her once lovd Lord now but a Shade herself also a shade Conferring times of times among the branches of that Tree (84.41-85.4) At one level, the union of the Spectre with the Shadow appears to be an abandonment of the poetic art to the mere working out of a poem's most obvious implications. In The Four Zoas, it would be the completion of a climax in the poem's satiric vision, and effecting a transition from there to apocalypse, an automatic effort of will which The Four Zoas has been criticized for exhibiting. There is, however, good reason for such abandonment, for it leads to a final, spectacular separation between art and life, thereby freeing art to the logic of its own metaphors, and 79 freeing life to reveal its own causality apart from man's desires and illusions. With this event, the stage is set for a reunion of the Spectre with Los. If we unite in one, another better world will be Opend within your heart & loins & wondrous brain Threefold as it was in Eternity & this the fourth Universe Will be Renewd by the three & consummated in Mental fires (85.43-46) From this extraordinary abandonment of his prophetic role, Los learns from his spectre that life imitates- art. He is thus freed to create forms for the spectres of the Dead, man's disembodied hopes and desires, which the last lines depicted as being lured into the fallen world by the "Eternal Promise" that 'If ye will believe your Brother shall rise again' (95.6). The Spectre reminds Los that he had begun the separation of spiritual from corporeal reality, which leads to a true understand• ing of the necessity for art. Urthonas Spectre terrified behe Both Los and Enitharmon are given a vision of the Lamb of God, "clothed in Luvah's robes of blood descending to redeem" (87,45). With this vision they recommence building Golgonooza for redemption rather than self preservation, and receive for the first time a clear concept of the artist's function. 80 Lovely delight of Men Enitharmon shady refuge from furious war Thy bosom translucent is a soft repose for the weeping souls Of those piteous victims of battle there they sleep in happy obscurity They feed upon our life we are their victims. Stern desire I feel to fabricate embodied semblances in which the dead May live before us in our palaces & in our gardens of labour Which now opend within the Center we behold spread abroad To form a world of Sacrifice of brothers & sons & daughters To comfort Ore in his dire sufferings look my fires enlume afresh Before my face ascending with delight as in ancient times (90.5-14) A centre has been opened: the redemptive work begins in earnest. Innocence at last prevails over experience, and energy over reason. However, if the power of art has been transformed by its separation from life, it has yet failed to provide a transforming vision of life. It is not enough to believe that life imitates art. Art must provide a vision greater than life, containing life within it. In the absence of such a vision, Night VIII is structured to show art and life in opposition to one another, Los activated by Holy Spirit, and Urizen by the power of Satan. The sacrifice of all men, in all historical cycles, to the forces of tyranny is epitomized in the imagery of Jesus being sacrificed by Rahab, who is both the whore who betrayed Jericho to the Israelites, and Mystery, Whore of Babylon, in Revelation;. But when Rahab had cut off the Mantle of Luvah from The Lamb of God it rolld apart, revealing to all in heaven And all on Earth the Temple & the Synagogue of Satan & Mystery (113.38-40) When the historical Jesus was sacrificed, the veil of the temple is rent, and error separated from truth. But this last historical cycle appears as a perversion rather than a fulfillment of the 81 promise of Christ's sacrifice. Rahab appears as the whore of Jericho, hiding Ore in bundles of flax to disguise the significance of his sacrifice in a vegetative cycle. It appears at the end of Night VIII as if Ore's death has no meaning, and at his death is simply to be replaced by another cycle of tyranny. She commund with Ore in secret She hid him with the flax That Enitharmon had numberd away from the Heavens She gatherd it together to consume her Harlot Robes In bitterest Contrition sometimes Self condemning repentant Sometimes returning to the Synagogue of Satan in Pride And Sometimes weeping before Ore in humility & trembling They Synagogue of Satan therefore uniting against Mystery Satan divided against Satan resolvd in open Sanhedrim To burn Mystery with fire & form another from her ashes For God put it into their heart to fulfill all his will The Ashes of Mystery began to animate they calld it Deism And Natural Religion as of old so now anew began Babylon*;' again in Infancy Calld Natural Relgion (111.10-24) Once again, it seems as if the fulfillment of prophecy has been averted, reduced to a recording of a mere naturalistic sacrifice, as had been foreshadowed by the union of the Spectre of Urthona with the Shadow of Enitharmon. Ahania's lament for the death of all form and Enion's prophecy of the eternal man's rebirth, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, appear once more to be merely opposing visions of the endless vegetative cycle. Los, it appears, must resign himself to preparing the tomb: And Los & Enitharmon took, the Body of the Lamb Down from the Cross & placd it in a Sepulcher which Los had hewn For himself in the Rock of Eternity trembling & in despair Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand Years (110.29-32) Thus, Night VIII ends in despair over the triumph of deism, of 82 natural religion, and of tyranny, and the failure of poetry to achieve apocalypse. Night IX opens with Los and Enitharmon weeping over the tomb. And Los & Enitharmon builded Jerusalem weeping Over the Sepulcher & over the Crucified body Which to their Phantom Eyes appear'd still in the Sepulcher But Jesus stood beside them in the Spirit Separating Their Spirit from their body. (117.1-5) This is not ritualistic enactment, however, but genuine despair. The tomb represents the death of all man's hopes for all eternity. It is the consolidation of all the errors of vision which the poem has recorded throughout eight nights. It is a monument to the death of Milton's cultural myth of Paradise Lost, and an expression of despair at the impossibility of ever creating again such a unified expression of belief. The separation of Los's spirit from his body had been begun by the Spectre of Urthona in Night VII. There it was a creative strategy. But here, at the beginning of Night IX, the grim truth that the spirit cannot be reconciled to the body, nor art to life destroys all Los's hope. Terrified at Non Existence For such they deemd the death of the body, Los his vegetable hands Outstretchd his right hand branching out in fibrous Strength Siezd the Sun. His left hand like dark roots coverd the Moon And tore them down cracking the heavens across from immense to immense Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud & shrill Sound of Loud Trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven (117.5-11) But Los unwittingly repeats the same act of tearing the veil of illusion that Christ performed on Calvary. He has been carried 83 into a human apocalypse by his own misunderstandings every step of the way. His acts of will suddenly have been given understanding. He had indeed been the agent of apocalypse, but in the opposite way to what he had anticipated. His function has been to give form to error, to create a recognizable image of his own horror so frightening that he could repudiate it in an act so sudden and so irrevocable that it would be worthy of being called a Last Judgment. The transition to the Last Judgment fulfills the necessities of Blake's metaphors for poetic process throughout.. Its structure is that of paradox, deflecting the reader who follows merely the narrative created by the Spectre of Urthona. Thus, Night the Ninth is made a fit refuge for Enion's reappearance, and the reunion with Tharmas. The symbolism of the transition—the creating of the tomb—is not understood even by Los in advance, so that the Last Judgment cannot be anticipated by the reason, and controlled. Thus, the Last Judgment brings about a world Urizen has not created, and where he can be controlled. Finally, Ore too is redeemed in the Last Judgment. In the Last Judgment, form is cast away as error but energy is never dissipated without effect. Thus in the Last Judgment a vision of the fourfold chariot, now realized, is interrupted by the eternal awareness that all things cast their influence on one another, that even the judge is not spared the judgment of his prisoner (123.27-124.5). The Last Judgment marks the beginning of eternity. The world of eternity is not a different world from the world of time 84 but a different perception of it. It is a world where all creation has a human form, and where all interactions involve the rending of veils in a continuous process of discovery and expansion. The fallen and unfallen worlds are shown to be continuous by a series of analogies that run through the poem.^ The Four Zoas does present many difficulties to the reader, only some of which can be explained by the manuscript's unfinished condition. Whether intentional or not, these difficulties do rouse the reader to engage his will in discovering a vision of the poem that most closely accords with Blake's intent. That vision appears to be a continuous process of discovering paradox, of opening centers to eternity through symbols created in the fallen world. If Blake never ended this process in The Four Zoas3 the reader need not either. But in the symbol of the death and resurrection of Jesus, Blake does find a single symbol that expresses the complexity of the whole. FOOTNOTES ± Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all. These last lines of Book IV of The Dunciad axe quoted from a personal copy of Pope's works missing its cover and introductory pages. 2 Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt, Wordsworth: Poetical Works with Introductions and Botes, 2nd ed. (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 494. 3 Ibid. 4 Edward J. Rose, "The Spirit of the Bounding Line: Blake's Los," Criticism, 13 (1971), 'p. 57. 5 David V. Erdman, Prophet Against Empire, A Poet's Interpreta• tion of the History of His Own Times, rev. ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 297-305. ^ Martin K. Nurmi, "Negative Sources in Blake," William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown University Press, 1969), pp. 312-318; Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London: Chatto and Windus", 1940), pp. 27-34. 7 James C. Evans, "The Apocalypse as Contrary Vision: Prolegomena to an Analogical Reading of The Four Zoas," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (Summer 1972) , passim. -85- CONCLUSION The form of The Four Zoas appears to be based on paradox, which, reveals its meaning only to him who seeks after it, while deflecting the attention of the curious. To the reader who applies his will to his reading of the poem, however, The Four Zoas reveals much about the creative process. The reader learns that Blake expresses the creative process in metaphors drawn from a great many sources. Some are used so frequently and so consistently as to carry their own narrative continuity. Nevertheless, these metaphors should be treated as part of a larger human process which is essentially the process of the poem itself. The poem's process of creation and "fall into the Generation of Decay and Death" (4.5) is given meaning against the archetype of Jesus' death and resurrection. It traces the descent through which thought is created in metaphor, and then the ascent by which thought frees itself from metaphor as a human form which can descend into matter or leave it at will, which can in fact control man's perceptions of the material world. Each part of the poem contributes to this vision of poetic process. It seems doubtful whether Blake intended his poem at any stage of its composition to provide the basis for systematic criticism or commentary on anything outside of its own structure. Neither the Bible, nor Milton, nor eighteenth century poetry, nor 87 contemporary history, nor faculty psychology nor any of a number of important influences on The Four Zoas provide a firm basis for systematic criticism of its structure. One may delight in Blake's depiction of more incidental issues—the Oedipal complex, or his theories of ontogeny, his satire on Burnet's Mundane Egg, or his reinterpretation of the myth of the Garden of Eden. However, these references serve for adornment and diversity within The Four Zoas, rather than for the interpretation of matters external to it. The poem itself is both an ark and the veil through which man's identity is to be redeemed. Its beauty is in Blake's ability to assimilate and transform images from the chaos around him. Taken separately, the images are a bewildering assortment of references and imaginative insights. Considered together, apart from The Four Zoas, they speak well of the breadth of Blake's knowledge, even living as he did in an age of eclecticism. Taken as the fundamentals of a systematic structure of knowledge, however, they are hopelessly confused. And when considered as layers of meaning, political prophecy, Biblical eschatology, or scientific explanation, these scattered insights in Blake's poem are subject to error and distortion. When portions of the poem's imaginative unity are set up as criteria of other matters, external to the poem, their errors or their incompleteness then reflect back upon the unity of the poem. "Attempting to be more than Man We become less said Luvah" (135.21). It seems clear that the individual metaphors or allegories which inform Blake's 88 poem provide much material for later mental warfare, but that, in keeping with the inscription on the reverse side of the title page, "Rest before Labour," The Four Zoas depicts the basic truth of man's identity quite apart from the external linkages that its metaphors and allegories provide. The following passage, spoken by one of the Eternals in Night IX, confirms this conclusion: Man is a Worm wearied with joy he seeks the caves of sleep Among the Flowers of Beulah in his Selfish cold repose Forsaking Brotherhood & Universal love :in selfish clay Folding the pure wings of his mind seeking the places dark Abstracted from the roots of Science then inclosd around In walls of Gold we cast him like a Seed into the Earth Till times & spaces have passd over him duly every morn We visit him covering with a Veil the immortal seed With windows from the inclement sky we cover him & with walls And hearths protect the Selfish terror till divided all In families we see our shadows born. & thence we know That Man subsists by Brotherhood & Universal Love We fall on one anothers necks more closely we embrace Not for ourselves but for the Eternal family we live Man liveth not by Self alone but in his brothers face Each shall behold the Eternal Father & love & joy abound (133.11-26) What makes The Four Zoas an amazing achievement is the fact that, out of materials Blake collects from various forces of change and disintegration, he is able to create a self-contained structure of human renewal, an ark, rendered impervious by the pitch of a few well-chosen Biblical symbols. This study has attempted to present a way in which a unified vision of The Four Zoas may be attained. A unified and complete reading of the poem would be quite impossible within the scope of this paper. But it would be appropriate at the conclusion of this paper to mention some of the work that is needed to help bring that end about. Much of this work would be editorial in nature. 89 It would involve recasting existing critical insights, particularly David Erdman's historical allegory, within the larger framework of the poem. Part of the work would require finding more exact parallels between the structure of The Four Zoas and the structure of English literature between Milton's time and Blake's. This thesis has asserted that Blake placed a high value on the will of the reader to respond creatively to a poetic structure, and to regard it as a vehicle for his own regeneration. To this end Blake's structures are paradoxical, so that they render it impossible for the reader to find consistency without a considerable effort of will. For that reason, the reader's encounter with the poem will always remain largely subjective. A final corrective is needed, however. It was the intent of this paper to open up the possibility for the reader to encounter The Four Zoas imaginatively. While this effort has many scholarly deficiencies, merely plugging the gaps, so to speak, might not increase its value. Much of the pleasure that a reading of The Four Zoas can provide is speculative in nature, and cannot be forced by documentation. One of the benefits of working with an unfinished manuscript, after all, is that it brings the roles of reader and poet into unity. A LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED Editions of Blake's Writings Bentley, Gerald E. Jr. William Blake, Vala or The Four Zoas: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, a Transcript of the Poem, and a Study of Its Growth and Significance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Ellis, Edwin John and William Butler Yeats, ed. The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical with Litho• graphs of the Illustrated "Prophetic Books." 3 vols. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893. Erdman, David V., ed. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, With revisions. Garden City, N. Y,: Doubleday, 1970. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Letters of William Blake. London: Rupert Harte-Davis, 1968. Margoliouth, H. M., ed. William Blake's Vala: Blake's Numbered Text. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Articles Adams, Hazard. "The Blakean Aesthetic." JAAC, 13; (1954), pp. 233-248. Ames,' Winslow. William Blake as Artist, Magazine of Art, 32 (1939), pp. 69-73. Bentley, Gerald E., Jr. "The Date of Blake's Vala or The Four Zoas."' Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958), pp. 102-113. Duncan-Johnstone, L, A. A Psychological Study of W. B. London, December, 1945. The Guild of Pastoral Psychology, Guild Lecture No, 40, -90- Erdman, David V. "The Binding (et cetera) of Vala." The Library (1964), pp. 112-29. . "William Blake's Exactness in Dates." PQ, 28 (1949), pp. 465-470. . "Blake's Attacks on the Classical Tradition." P.Q., 40 (1961), pp. 1-18. Essick, Robert N. "Blake and His Traditions of Reproductive Engraving". BZake Studies, 5 (Fall 1972), pp. 59-103. Evans, James C. "The Apocalypse as Contrary Vision: Prolegomena to an Analogical Reading of The Four Zoas." Texas Studies in Literature and Language,lib (Summer 1972), pp. 313-328. Harper, George Mills. "The Neo-Platonic Concept of Time in Blake's Prophetic Works." PMLA, 69 (1954), pp. 142-155. Miner, Paul. "The Polyp as a Symbol in the Poetry of William Blake." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2 (1960), pp. 198-205. Paley, Morton D. "The Female Babe and 'The Mental Traveller'." Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1963), pp. 97-104. Plowman, Max. "Blake's Bible of Hell." TLS, November 7, 1924, p. 710. Rose, Edward J. "The Spirit of the Bounding Line: Blake's Los." Criticism, 13 (1971), pp. 54-76. . "Visionary Forms Dramatic: Grammatical and Icono- graphical Movement in Blake's Verse and Designs." Criticism 8 (1966), pp. 111-125. Simmons, Robert and Warner, Janet. "Blake's ArZington Court Picture: The Moment of Truth." SIR, 10 (1971), pp. 3-20. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr. "Blake's Philosophy of Contraries A New Source," ELN, 4 (December, 1966), pp. 105-110. Longer Works and Commentaries Abrams, M. H., ed. EngZish Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. 92 Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963. Altizer, Thomas J. J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1967. Beer, John B. Blake's Humanism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. New York: Barries & Noble, 1968. Bentley, Gerald. Bibake Records. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Bloom, Harold. Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1963. Bloom, Harold, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. Bredvold, Louis I., Alan D. Mckillop, and Lois Whitney, ed. Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed. 1939; reprint, New York: Ronald Press, 1956. Bronowski, Jacob. William Blake and the Age of Evolution. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972. Curran, Stuart, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, ed. Blake's Sublime Allegory: Essays on~Ther~~Tbui> -Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973. Damon, S. Foster, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence,RRhode Island: Brown University Press, 1965. / Blake 's Job : William Blake 's Illustrations of the Book of Job, with an Introduction and Commentary. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969. . William Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols. 1924; • reprint, Gloucester, Massachusetts:•' Peter Smith, 1958. Digby, George Wingfield. Symbol and Image in William Blake. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire; A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Revised ed. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969. Erdman, David V., and John E. Grant, ed. Blake's Visionary Ibrms Dramatic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. 93 Fisher, Peter F. The Wiley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Ed. Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Frye, Northrop, ed. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays Englewood Cliffs, New York: Prentice Hall, 1966. •- . Fearful Symmetry : A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Beacon Press, 1947. . A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. Gardner, Earle Stanley, Infinity on the Anvil : A Critical Study of Blake's Poetry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. Ed., with an Introduction by W. Graham Robertson. New York: John Lane, 1907. Gleckner, Robert F., and Gerald E. Enscoe, Romanticism: Points of View. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Grant, John E., ed. Discussions of William Blake. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1961. Harper, George Mills. The Neoplatonism of William Blake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1961. Hughes, Merritt Y., ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose.. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957. Hungerford, Edward B, "Blake's Albion." Shores of Darkness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941, pp. 35-61. James, Laura DeWitt. William Blake:' The Finger on the Furnace. New York: Vantage Press, 1956. Keynes, Geoffrey. Blake Studies: Notes on His Life and Works in Seventeen Chapters. London:. Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949. Margoliouth, H. M. William Blake. London, New York, Toronto: Home University Library, 1951. Murry, John Middleton. William Blake. 1933; reprint, New York Toronto, London: McGraw Hill, 1964. Nurmi, Martin Karl. "Blake',s Doctrine of Contraries: A Study in Visionary Metaphysics." Doctoral Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1954. 94 Nurmi, Martin Karl, "Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell.'" Research Series III. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1957. O'Neill, Judith, ed. Critics on Blake: Readings in Literary Criticism. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1970. Paley, Morton D. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake's Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Percival, Milton. 0. William Blake's Circle of Destiny, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Pinto, Vivian de Sola. The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1957. Rosenfeld, Alvin H., ed. William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Providence: Brown University Press, 1969. Roston, Murray, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism. London: Faber & Faber., 1965. Saurat, Denis. Blake and Milton, London:' Stanley Nott, 1935. . Blake & Modern Thought. London: Constable & Co., 1929. Schorer, Mark. William Blake: The Politics of Vision, New York: Vintage Books, 1959. Sherburn, George. "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century." A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948. Stevenson, Warren. Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creation Motif in Blake and Cqleridge, Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1972. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. William Blake: A Critical Essay, Second Ed. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868. Wicksteed, Joseph H. Blake's Vision of The Book of Job: with Reproductions of the Illustrations. 1910; reprint, 1971, New York: Haskell House, 1971. Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period. London: Chatto and Windus, 1940. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, Jr., ed. Nineteenth Century Accounts of William Blake by Benjamin Heath Malkin, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Thomas Smith, Allen Cunningham, Frederick Tatham, William Butler Yeats: Facsimile Reproductions. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970.