Read Online The Portable William Blake by William Blake - Free Book Online Page B

“argument” that in at least one copy of Jerusalem he allowed misplaced pages to remain where they were. His concern is not with the coherence of his theme, but with his need to get everything in. Even within the assumed order of the myth the characters lose their symbolic references when they do not transfer them among each other. They came to represent so much of Blake’s private life as well as his public vision that he interrupted himself at regular intervals to preach against jealousy and the domination of man by woman.
    Blake was never jarred by the tumult of all the conflicts he revealed in his Prophetic Books. His loneliness as a man and thinker was so overwhelming that he took his gifts as the measure of human insight. He was a lyric poet of genius and a very bad dramatic poet; but he suffered from the illusion that his poetic gift was also a dramatic and representational one. The gift of creating character is inseparable from an interest in history. Just as the novel owes its principal development to the modem consciousness that society is man-made, so the ability to create character is impossible without an understanding of men in relation to other men; in short, of man as a creature of process and conflict. Blake’s characters are names attached arbitrarily to absolute human faculties and states of being. The name of the character may have a punning or derived relation to the faculty he represents, as Urizen is the god of this world and its sterility who is “your reason,” or Ore, Blake’s first hero, came into his mind from Norse mythology. So Albion is the central figure of man, “the eternal man,” and Enitharmon is the “universal” woman. But when Blake sets them to orating against each other, their nominal identity is only the line which he must desperately hold on to to bring up the deep-sea fish of human passions, errors, lamentations. The figure of Urizen is an oppressor; Oric is the spirit of visionary emancipation; Los, who comes in later, is the spirit of time working to rejoin man to his lost unity, and the “Eternal Prophet.” Through them, and many other characters, Blake is seeking to explain how man lost the gift of vision. Urizen is the false God, the Satan who separated himself from the prime unity and set in motion the divisions in man, the search after the analytical and the inhuman.
    Blake is not interested in character. His figures are the human faculties at war with each other. He is trying to explain, in the form of a new Genesis, how the split in man occurred, and to show the necessary present struggle of man to unify himself back to an integral and imaginative human nature. He is also raging against all those who would hold him in—from the analytical God of Newton to the scepticism of Voltaire, from the successful painters of the day to “the shadowy female,” who torments man by jealousy. But since he has no interest in history, the beginning, the present, and the future dissolve into each other. What was begun in error is suffered through error now. He is fighting his own sorrows even as he is trying to impose the massive structure of his hazardously built myth onto the contemporary world: to bring himself to us, and the England he actually lived in. Hence the bewildering jump from Old Testament names to English streets, cities, and counties, in which Blake’s own cries were never heard:
     
    O dreadful Loom of death! 0 piteous Female forms, compell’ d
    To weave the Woof of Death! On Camberwell Tirzah’s courts,
    Malah’s on Blackheath; Rahab & Noah dwell on Windsor’s heights,
    Where once the Cherubs of Jesusalem spread to Lambeth’s Vale.
    Milcah’s Pillars shine from Harrow to Hampstead, where Hoglah
    On Highgate’s heights magnificent Weaves over trembling Thames
    To Shooter’s Hill and thence to Blackheath, the dark Woof. Loud,
    Loud roll the Weights & Spindles over the whole Earth, let down
    On all sides round to the Four Quarters of the World,