comment-William Blake, the Jonah of London-1 William Blake, the Jonah of London

A prolific devouring of William Blake’s paradoxical satire! However heaven & hell get along in their marriage, your analysis of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell seems a particularly felicitous match between poet & reader. You prove yourself every bit as devoted to energy as Blake, and your analysis seems as capacious & attitudinous as the text it examines.

While the essay could have turned out to be merely a tour of Contrary Land, your focus on Blake’s attitude towards audience gives the paper a real trajectory. We end up with a clearer idea of why Blake might wish to be misunderstood, despite all this burning insistence on being heard. Though I’m not 100% sure that his limited production proves him mistrustful of reception (given his care putting together any one iteration, plus the economy of one though filling immensity), your correlation of WB with another reluctant prophet helps unearth the personal stakes within what might seem like a series of impersonal proclamations.

There seem to be two William Blakes running around your paper: fair enough, given the general emphasis on contraries. One is the self-glorifying hypocrite, subjecting us to bombastic riddles that urge a redeemed vision not to be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Your almost scornful treatment of his sweeping contradictions, matched with your strong reading of the hypocritical tendency of hell to self-satisfy (especially in the harp vision), makes us quite suspicious of WB – or at least willing to conceive of him as falling into his own net. This approach would consider Blake’s address to be self-canceling, however ambitious, and resonates with the Rowland essay.

But towards the end of the paper, you prove ready to redeem William Blake, to consider him as indeed a god who stands outside of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and even satirizes the narrator’s tendency to identify with hell. By positioning William Blake beyond the contraries he unleashes, you picture him as devoted to energy for its own sake. And his obscurities and contradictions – his failure to be understood – would be the fuel of truth.

It’s consistently interesting to follow your argument; there’s real suspense in this paper as to who the real William Blake will turn out to be – fraud or savior? It’s the same question that would attend any prophet. In the end, his energy seems to win the day. Even so, your conclusion twists into irresolution, as truth ducks into scare quotes and the redeemer, to the end, depends on continuous opposition. It may be impossible to honestly banish such doubts when the prophet, unlike Jonah, is self-appointed.