William Blake, the Jonah of London

Through the streets and alleyways of Nineveh the prophet Jonah trudged. At every marketplace and city gate he joyously roared his tidings of evil, “forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!” Two and a half millennia after the great fish vomited Jonah back onto dry land, William Blake faithfully follows that path of bilge and seaweed, bile and gall, into the fraternity of prophets and oracles. Just as Jonah was reluctant to prophesy to the Ninevites for fear that his enemies would hear and repent, Blake has a vested interest in perpetuating the blindness of his readers. In fact, even as he works his metaphysics to impose his “phantasy” as the prophet who proclaims the liberation of the world, he shows a full awareness that true success can only lead to his demise as a poet. Thus, standing upon his apple-crate in the marketplace, he chokes back his voice a little and mumbles in ciphers, desperately praying that he would not be understood.

Amidst angry fires and hungry clouds the poet arises in prophet’s robes, and with a roar to shake the worlds to their very foundations proclaims the revival of “Eternal Hell”! Like Christ upon the commencement of his ministry, he boldly steps forth and seizes the words of Isaiah to legitimize his mission. He points to Isaiah’s vision of Edom becoming “blazing pitch (Isaiah XXXIV, v9)” and cries, “now is the dominion of Edom (plate 3)”; now is the fulfillment of the prophecy, “then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped,” and Blake, the prophet of Hell, shall be the one to fulfill it (Isaiah XXXV, v5).

By positioning his first proclamation in parallel with Isaiah 34 and 35, Blake invites, or rather, forces dialogue between Isaiah and himself, and claims for himself Isaiah’s prophetic authority. Later, he dines with both Isaiah and Ezekiel in a symbolic gesture of equality and solidarity and discusses with them as one prophet to another the challenges that one faces in such a line of work (plate 12). Blake again establishes the bond between prophets and the fires of Hell by telling of an angel who, having been converted by a devil, embraces the fire and, consumed by it, arises as the prophet Elijah (plate 24). Thus allegiance to Hell, Bake claims, makes one a prophet.

Not satisfied with being only a prophet, Blake declares himself the prophet, the one destined to bring about the fulfillment of the final triumph of all prophets’ desire, “the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite” (plate 13). “At the end of six thousand years . . . the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt” (plate 14). That promised end, as he prophesied earlier, has come, and the cherub guarding the Garden of Eden is about to leave so that Adam might return. But first, Man must be liberated and his perceptions made clean so that “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” and this all important task has fallen on one William Blake, prophet, author, & printer (plate 14).

“One thought fills immensity,” so goes one of Hell’s proverbs, and Blake, being a man of many thoughts, is absolutely filled with infinites (plate 8). As the printer of Hell, the raging fires and limitless expanses of its Printing House would be Blake’s rightful domain. “By printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid,” Blake would transfer those immensities, those thoughts, within him and send them out to cleanse the world (plate 14). Like the “mighty Devil” that he saw emblazoning a message of immensity upon the press-plate of the world, the “flat sided steep” that “frowns over the present world,” the abyss of the five senses, Blake the poet prophet shall burn with corroding acids into the copper-plate cliff of the abyss infinities to be “perceived by the minds of men & read by them on earth” (plates 6 & 7).

His messages of infinity “the world shall have whether they will or no”--the bold and overpowering, all-consuming way being the only way of Hell and of the infinite (plate 24). Full of Hell’s fires and energies, the prophet’s message is irresistible. Desire is an all-consuming fire that should not and cannot be quenched. It overwhelms and burns with the force of immensities; “those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained,” but true desire is too strong for bonds—indeed, “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (plates 5 & 10). “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires,” while in the printing house of Hell are dragons, vipers, eagles with “wings and feathers of air”, raging “lions of flaming fire”, and “unnamed forms” presumably too great or overwhelming for words (plates 2 & 15). How else can the beasts of Hell be but awesome and inexorable creatures of action and boldness, fearless predators that consume and hesitate not, when “the wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God” and “the roaring lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man” (plate 8)? So too is Hell’s prophet, William Blake!

But what are raging beasts, mighty as they are, compared to supreme God? Blake rises higher still, for Man is God! “All deities reside in the human breast” and “where man is not nature is barren,” since the creative force of the universe lies within Man (plates 11 & 10). The greatest God, then, is the greatest man, the ones who follow most closely the “first principle” of “Poetic Genius”, for “what is now proved was once only imagined,” and imagination is the rightful domain of poets (plates 12 & 8). Thus, Blake claims, there is nothing greater than these poets, who “animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” according to “whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive” (plate 11).

Blake’s work then would not only be to bring about the universal liberation of senses but by enlarging senses to perceive the infinite, to raise gods. Heaven, however, stands in the way of Hell’s triumph. Heaven is passive, but “the weak in courage is strong in cunning,” and with the cunning application of reason Heaven seeks to restrain the fires of desire (plate 9). “By attempting to realize or abstract” the poets’ infinite visions, the enemies of Hell build “prisons . . . with stones of Law, (and) Brothels with bricks of Religion” to “enslave the vulgar” (plates 11 & 8). Blake must shake his fires up into the burdened air far and wide to free the vulgar throngs from the fetters of cunning analyses and abstractions, for “all wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap” (plate 7).

The prophet had learned his metaphysics well. Hell may indeed be beautiful, desire may consume, energy may liberate, and the infinite may lie beyond the five senses, but it is in the prophet’s best interest not to be too clearly heard. Even as he postures and rages, and appears to boldly throw his prophecies into the wind for all to see, there are multitudes of reasons why he would whisper a few furtive prayers that the wind would abate and not carry his sibylline leaves too far.

Indeed Blake may rail long and bitterly against cunning and reason, but the cause of his complaint does not have to come from a concern for those who are enslaved. Another possible concern suggests itself in Blake’s fantasy of the Angel’s fate—all of Blake’s anxiety may just as well be ascribed to the somewhat more selfish fear that the monkeys and baboons might snatch him up and devour him while kissing him with all fondness. Perhaps Blake fears that with the increased exposure that would come with widespread success, his fantasies would be embraced by those who, with all worshipful admiration, would proceed to pick them apart into bits and pieces of abstractions. Having been loved to death by the hordes of worshippers and priests who would cast their volumes of interpretations at his altar, his own metaphysics would become greatly diluted and diminish in effectiveness. Instead, he would become the vehicle for the imposition of another’s perspective and not the imposition of his own. Blake asked Isaiah and Ezekiel “whether they did not think . . . that they would be misunderstood and so be the cause of imposition” (plate 12). While Isaiah stated that he “cared not for consequences but wrote,” the fact that there are only nine known complete copies of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” suggests that Blake did care. He himself might impose his fantasies upon the audience, but he desperately wants to keep others from doing so.

Having produced just a few copies of his prophecies, Blake certainly did not raise his voice too loudly to the thronging masses, but even had his book flooded the streets and countryside, he could not be accused of trying too hard to gain the trust of his audience. Actually, it appeared more as though he aimed to constantly raise doubts about his prophetic credibility. Again and again, Blake forces the imposition of perspectives to the forefront of the reader’s attention by unceasingly fretting about it. Even as he begins to tell Hell’s story of how “the restrainer, or reason, usurps its place (desire’s) and governs the unwilling,” he mentions that “this history has been adopted by both parties,” causing one to wonder whether his version is necessarily any more “valid” than Heaven’s version (plate 5). Rather than saying, “Heaven’s version is thus, but the true story is thus,” he said, “it indeed appeared to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell” (plates 5 & 6). So indeed it appears to Hell as if the Messiah fell and stole from the abyss to form Heaven, but who is to say that the Messiah’s account is any less trustworthy than the Devil’s, or that either account has any merit at all?

Later, when he takes the Angel to see his fate being eternally picked apart by baboon analytics, he readily admits to being guilty of imposing his fantasy upon the Angel just as much as the Angel had imposed fantasies of Hell upon him. In fact, it is much more of a certainty that Blake imposed upon the angel than the opposite case. The angel never admits to the “metaphysics” that Blake accuses him of; it is always Blake who tells the angel that he had imposed his fear of Hell upon him. After the angel runs away, Hell seems suspiciously too innocent, almost as though it was sharing a joke at the angel’s expense. Note that the harper’s song, “the man who never alters his opinion is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind,” alludes directly to what the angel saw, and that Blake doesn’t tell his Angel friend what the harper sings, only that he heard a harper (plate 19). It seems as though even in this instance, Hell is the guilty party, and that with an almost winking amusement, it had purposely chased an Angel away by scaring it witless.

To complete the conquest of his audience’s trust, Blake tells of how a devil had managed to convert an Angel with arguments that resembled what Blake had been saying. Few pieces of tidings in the world is as effective in making one determined to stubbornly resist conversion as the knowledge that one is the subject of a conversion attempt, especially when such charming news is followed closely by the rather arrogant-seeming statement that the world “shall have” the Bible of Hell “whether they will or no” (plate 24).

The whole of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is spiked full of turn after treacherous hairpin turn. At each turn the reader is thrown face to face with twists that seek to shock and disorient. With seeming relish Blake forces the reader to confront his bold identification with Hell, devils, “repulsion”, “energy”, “Hate”, “evil”, and “Sin & Death” (plates 3 & 5). Again, “delighted with enjoyments of Genius” walking among the fires of Hell, Blake appears to relish tumbling around and around with the often paradoxical Proverbs of Hell built-in cultural navigation points (such as good vs. evil) that offers reference for orientation within the world. Such twists further aggravate the uncertainty of footing between the poet and his audience by never allowing the reader to settle into any degree of comfort. Instead, Blake makes the mental environment turn wave after wave of nauseating summersaults out from right under the reader’s feet.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a dark cube that doesn’t directly repel attempts to probe its contents, but rather subtly misdirects and redirects until without noticing it, anyone who tries to do so finds himself twisted into knots, “improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius” (plate 10). Even as the prophet “roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air,” (plate 2) he does so in riddles that resist unraveling. Blake is smugly cryptic and proclaims without a desire to be fully understood. What does he want? That the world become simple and bold, and by gaining courage to act upon liberated sensual desires, be cleansed of cunning, cleverness, or abstractions? But is being free from cunning and cleverness itself liberation? And if it is indeed liberation, does liberation make one prolific? It seems that even as Blake extends his hand with the gift of deity, he, himself a jealous deity, veils the gift because he doesn’t truly want the world to see.

One does not need to search far to find an explanation for his apparent wish to defeat his own prophecy. “Without Contraries is no progression” (plate 3). In these words the prophet has indeed burned into his slab of copper a significance to fill immensity—contraries “are necessary to Human existence” (plate 3). Here is Blake’s entire given justification, and is, indeed, a more than sufficient one. It is not adequate to have Heaven or Hell, Good or Evil, Reason or Energy, Love or Hate—the eternal conflict between the two sides, the back-and-forth dialogue of Angels and Devils, must never cease, for to come to agreement would be to destroy the foundation of life itself.

To Blake, human life is dynamic and can never rest. Thus a proverb of Hell warns to “expect poison from the standing water,” (plate 9) and the harper by the stream of Hell sings to the theme, “the man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind” (plate 19). This is why Blake’s prophecy is not titled “the triumph of Hell over Heaven” but “the Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, for their fates are irretractably intertwined and each is equally dependent upon the other for existence.

From Hell’s viewpoint, then, while the prophets melt away surfaces to “display the infinite” (plate 14) and the Prolific burn with desire and energy (plate 16), to succeed too well in those tasks would be fatal. There must always remain those men who close themselves up till they “see all things thro’ narrow chinks of (their) cavern(s)” (plate 14) else the need for prophets would cease; there must always be Devourers to “resist energy” with chains born of their “weak and tame minds,” for “the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights” (plate 16).

“These two classes of men are always upon earth & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence,” (plate 16 & 17) Blake proclaims, “If others had not been foolish, we should be so” (plate 9). The key, then is not so much what party one is a part of, but that whether one seems blind to Reason or tame to Desire, the eternal love and hate embrace of Heaven and Hell continues, for “one portion of being is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring,” (plate 16) and Being is not complete except when the two are balanced.

At the end of Song of Liberty, when Empire falls, “the lion and wolf shall cease” (plate 27). Of those same two creatures is said in the Proverbs of Hell, “the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves . . . are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man” (plate 8). For them to cease would be for eternity to cease. Because “truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed,” (plate 10) William Blake cries out “Enough! Or Too much,” (plate 10) and sets about telling the truth in as obfuscated a manner as possible for as a prophet, he is compelled to tell the “truth”. Thus, like Jonah proclaiming God’s judgment on the Ninevites, Blake prophesies reluctantly and wishes not for his audience the very Liberty that he seems to boldly proclaim. One the Prolific and the other the Devouring, they must remain eternal enemies.

What then is innocence and experience? And what of Freedom and Liberty? Does Blake truly desire to unshackle the world from the bondages of oppression when it is the very oppression and evil that gives his prophecy its voice?