************************************************** Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experience
The Book of Thel
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
America, a Prophecy
The Everlasting Gospel
Milton
Jerusalem **************************************************
The first lesson in a Blake primer might well be Songs of Innocence. Looking at that we soon come to The Lamb:
Some might consider that too simplistic to be meaningful, but many people have found great meaning in it. Look for example at a discussion by Ralph Dumain.
The next one is a favorite of many social liberals:
This is a double whammy! Very profound spiritual and mystical truth, plus a strong plug for social justice. Both of these facets informed Blake's personality for his entire life.
The The Chimney Sweeper gives a vivid picture of the terrible oppression of children in Blake's England.
Finally look at The Divine Image:
Now look at a work that shows the other side of all these 'innocent' poems, the Songs of Experience, and begin with a statement that all the lovers of sexual liberation most dearly love. It's called Earth's Answer. Of course if that's your primary (and perhaps only) response, you've missed the point entirely. It's really not about sex per se but about the dead hand of conventions of all sorts that condemns people to a life of mediocrity. It you pursue 'men' in the third verse, the note indicates that that interpreter perceived "selfish father of men" to mean Adam, lamenting at the curse which followd the Fall.
Probably the most often read and and for some the most significant of these poems in Tyger,Tyger. With this poem in mind Northrup Frye wrote his fantastic book called Fearful Symmetry.
Focus on this question: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Food for considerable thought! At the very least it must call into question many of the most conventional ideas about God. This could be the fundamental spiritual issue for Blake throughout his life, and indeed of the lives of a great many of us: What about it, God; are you a killer as well as a lover? Many, many pages of Blake's poetry seem to address this fundamental question.
If you're a person of sensitivity, some of these Songs of Experience will break your heart. Look at London.The last line of verse 2 contains that famous phrase that appears so often in my blog. The more you think about that term, the more connotations it will come to have. But consider that the nature of our lives is that our minds are chained to numberless conventions of philsophy, religion, economics, government, etc. etc. Blake's primary endeavour is to set us free from these shackles that confine our daily lives to mediocrity-- using perhaps 2% of our God given brains. (It's not about giving up the ego; it's about giving up the thousands of prejudices, fears, etc that we carry around as baggage like poor Christian in Pilgrims Progress.)
The Garden of Love will appeal to the "free lovers", but it's more significant to me with the prophetic awareness of what has happened to the God of Love at the hands of the established church.
Thel is the story of a young girl going from Innocence to Experience. She didn't like what she saw, so she fled back to the place she came from.
In the vales of Har the youngest of the seraphim wanders down to the river of Adona where she converses with the Lily of the Valley, the Cloud, the worm, and the clod of clay.
The clod of clay has a special significance in Blake's cast of characters. Little enough in itself it yet affirms the existence of glory in the humblest place. Speaking to Thel:
The clod of clay invites Thel to take flesh and experience what she has missed in her innocence. After her conversations we read in section 4 (plate 6):
"The eternal gates' terrific Porter lifted the northern bar:" Thel enters the life of the flesh, "A land of sorrows and of tears where never smile was seen." At this point Blake proceeds to denounce a sense based life, after which Thel "with a shriek fled back unhinder'd till she came into the vales of Har."
With Thel Blake asks an important question:
Is life worthwhile?-- a question asked
emphatically in the negative by Eastern Religion, but
more often in the positive by life affirming
Christians.
In Thel Blake asks the question, but doesn't answer it. According to Raine (page 27) he answered it with a statement to Vala of her lover which Blake recorded near the end of Night 9 of The Four Zoas:
(If you feel like working with Thel Ed Friedlander's study provides much information:
This early work deals with America's war for independence. (Incidentally a fairly large number of liberal minded Englishmen supported the American Revolution, as did Blake here.) He used American figures as well as French ones in this paean to revolution. The most notable part is Plate 6 where he celebrates the end of the age:
The first two lines strongly evoke the Resurrection, a measure of the jubilation Blake felt at both the American and French Revolutions. Blake went immediately to an earlier resurrection recorded in Ezekiel.
The 'slave' is both a reference to the actual slaves who graced the British economy, and to English workers in conditions of slavery, such as the 8 year old children working 14 hours a day for six pence a week.
The bonds, the bars, the chains are those same 'mind forg'd manacles' we saw in London, the chains of the mind, which afflict us today just as they did in Blake's day.
"The sun has left his blackness, etc": this line occurs again near the end of the Four Zoas (Night 9 138:20).
The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine, Mine has a snub nose like to mine. Thine is the Friend of all Mankind; Mine speaks in parables to the blind. Thine loves the same world that mine hates; Thy heaven doors are my hell gates. Socrates taught what Meletus Loath'd as a nation's bitterest curse, And Caiaphas was in his own mind A benefactor to mankind. Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white.
In the second half of his career Blake had largely dropped his
preoccupation with "Old Nobodaddy" in favor
of the New Testament God. His first
large prophetic poem, Milton, begins with a famous poem called
Jerusalem that latter
became the theme song of the British Labor party; they used to sing it as a hymn. (Blake was not the first person to see the
presence of Jesus is ancient England. Tradition
tells us that he was there in the first century.)
Here is more on Milton.
We see Blake, the new man, again in
in these passages from Jerusalem:
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Milton
Jerusalem
Both passages
quoted in
The Gospel of Christian Atheism (altizer))