DOI: 10.4324/9781315675138-1
‘And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side.’
Middleton Murry was the first critic to point out that the troubled relationship of Albion and his bride, Jerusalem, in Blake’s prophetic books, may well have been based on the marital difficulties of William and Catherine Blake. This is a brilliant intuition, and, one would feel, a right one thus far. But Mr. Murry, instead of attempting to establish the point with sufficient evidence, rushes off into what seems to me unfounded conjecture about the exact nature of Blake’s conjugal troubles.
Murry’s position is this. Basing his interpretation on two poems from Songs of Experience and a poem from Blake’s notebook—and poems are always a shaky foundation on which to build theories about a poet’s life if not supplemented with more concrete data—Murry writes as follows: ‘There cannot be much doubt about the story these three poems tell, or conceal. Blake had loved someone not his wife, and had straightway told his wife of his love, and the result had been disaster.’1 This is, of course, pure guesswork on Mr. Murry’s part.
There is no evidence at all that Blake after his marriage fell in love with someone other than his wife, giving Catherine cause for jealousy, and Catherine knew all about his unfortunate experience with ‘Polly’ before he met his wife. Indeed, if we can credit the legend about the Blakes’ courtship, it was the telling of this unhappy experience which led directly to their marriage. And in spite of Blake’s theories about free love, or rather, his theories about loving in freedom, and despite the threatened, and altogether theoretical, concubine, to outside eyes Blake and his wife were an ideal couple. The existence of another woman and her identity would not easily have gone unobserved, especially with Blake’s own outspokenness. Had he believed in taking such a step, he would have been the first to tell us of its accomplishment, in the same spirit in which he walked the streets of London flaunting the red cap of freedom, although he was the only person with sense enough to see that Tom Paine left the country.
Secondly, assuming at the outset that the three poems Murry cites are dealing with Blake’s relation to his wife and not with an imaginary situation, it is still obvious from the wording of the key poem that there is something wrong with Murry’s guess:
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears—
Ah, she doth depart.
As soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently, invisibly—
O was no deny.1
Murry assumes that this is Blake speaking to his wife about his love for another woman, and that her withdrawal is out of jealousy. There is nothing at all in the poem to indicate this. In fact such an assumption makes the poem much more complicated than it really is, and much less coherent, assuming three or even four people and two ‘loves’ which Blake does not differentiate at all! The only possible paraphrase of this poem is to repeat what is quite clear: the poet is saying simply that it is a mistake for a lover to try to tell his beloved of the extent of his love for her, that he had done so, and his beloved had retreated in fear of his declared passion. If this is about Catherine, the most we can assume is that at some point Blake frightened his wife pretty thoroughly by focussing on her some of the almost diabolically impersonal energy we feel, for example, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and that he called this ‘love’. The poem says nothing at all about her jealousy, or about any woman except the beloved herself, although it does seem to indicate that she turned to the ‘traveller’.
This severs immediately the arbitrary connection that Murry makes, based on this faulty interpretation, between the poem above and the one called ‘My Pretty Rose-Tree’, a poem that is about feminine jealousy, but not at all in the same context. This poem tells of another situation, one that might well have arisen after Catherine’s (or the abstract beloved’s) initial withdrawal from the poet, because she was then afraid that he might turn to someone more responsive. But it does not at all suggest that he did, as Mr. Murry contends, at any point turn to another woman. Quite the contrary—he could have turned to an exotic creature, someone who was in love with him and offered herself to him, but instead he turns away from her in loyalty to his true love, the pretty rose-tree, even though she is now jealous and puts out her thorns to hurt him.
A flower was offered to me,
Such a flower as May never bore;
But I said ‘I’ve a Pretty Rose-tree’
And I passed the sweet flower o’er.
Then I went to my Pretty Rose-tree,
To tend her by day and by night;
But my Rose turned away with jealousy,
And her thorns were my only delight.
The third poem on which Mr. Murry bases his erroneous hypothesis is ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, too universal a statement of love become its opposite to bear such a particular interpretation without further evidence.
It is interesting to note in passing that, from the wording of ‘Never seek to tell thy love’, it would appear that it was the woman and not the poet who actually turned towards someone else in her distress, thereby giving her lover cause for complaint. The figure of the ‘traveller’ in this poem, which Mr. Murry disregards entirely, is probably the same as that of the ‘angel’ in the ironic little poem written about the same time. The poet speaks of his love, but the ‘angel’ and ‘traveller’ simply take what they want, silently:
I asked a thief to steal me a peach:
He turned up his eyes.
I asked a lithe lady to lie her down:
Holy and meek she cries.
As soon as I went an angel came:
He winked at the thief
And smiled at the dame,
And without one word said (spoke)
Had a peach from the tree,
And still as a maid (And twixt earnest and joke)
Enjoy’d the lady.
The facts may be nothing more than that Catherine took refuge in the idea of a husband who loved with less articulate energy and violence, and that this ideal husband in her imagination seemed to Blake like a treacherous angel who enjoyed her without physical passion. Or, it could be that she, a simple woman of a naïvely religious and puritan cast, took her trouble to some sympathetic cleric who sided with her attitude that her lover’s excessive demands spelled lust rather than love. This would have seemed to Blake a betrayal, the basest treachery, spiritual fornication in fact.
It still remains for us to determine, if we can, the validity of Murry’s initial assumption that there were some difficulties that William and Catherine Blake had to overcome in their marriage and that the story of Jerusalem and Albion is, by and large, the story of how this was accomplished. Is there any evidence outside of the prophetic books themselves to suggest this, for Middleton Murry never bothers to give us any?
I think there is, although from the outset I would like to suggest that the trouble was of a psychological nature and took place only on the stage of Blake’s imagination rather than, as Middleton Murry would have us believe, in actual fact and with the protagonists of Blake, Catherine, and a concrete ‘other woman’. ‘I have indeed fought thro’ a Hell of terrors and horrors (which none could know but myself) in a divided existence,’ writes Blake on December 4, 1804; ‘now no longer divided nor at war with myself, I shall travel on in the strength of the Lord God, as Poor Pilgrim says.’
On October 23 of the same year Blake wrote a letter to Hayley. It is remarkable not only for its content which does indicate the reality of a long-endured domestic crisis (since, in fact, immediately after their marriage), but also for its language which is that of the prophetic books, making this letter almost the single exception in Blake’s correspondence which otherwise deals almost wholly with ordinary practical matters of the artistic life in a style that is always clear, spare, and objective even when he speaks of depression and of his visions. But this letter tells of an experience, actual and personal, which, by the time Blake wrote to Hayley, was already clothed in the language and symbolism of mythology. This is, of course, not the only experience of Blake’s which passed into the prophetic writings. Events such as his encounter with the abusive soldier, Scofield, and his stay in the cottage at Felpham, were woven into the tapestry of the prophetic books. Yet none of these comparatively minor happenings as they are related in Blake’s letters are so clearly in the process of being translated into myth as is the following major experience. The letter opens with the practical matters more usual to Blake’s correspondence—the receipt of cash, the progress of engravings, his wife’s rheumatism, the health of friends—but suddenly breaks into something quite different:
‘O Glory! and O Delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant,1 the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him; I have had twenty. Thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils. These beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters.’
It is abundantly clear from this that there were difficulties that William and Catherine had to overcome in their marriage, and that these difficulties were precisely the same as those of Albion and Jerusalem whose whole struggle was to rid themselves of the fetters of the rational Spectre in order to overcome their ‘divided existence’ and achieve togetherness and wholeness in Christ.
However, to outside eyes these fetters were not visible. I quote from a letter of Hayley’s which I will discuss at greater length shortly, which tells of Blake’s great happiness in his ‘Wife, for Heaven has bestowed on this extraordinary mortal perhaps the only female on Earth who could have suited Him exactly—[She] … is so truly the Half of her good man that they seem animated by one soul, and that a soul of indefatigable Industry and Benevolence.’ The ‘divided existence’ was indeed far from visible.
Thus far my evidence for the theory that Albion and Jerusalem grew out of the experiences of William and Catherine Blake is contained in the letters quoted above. Half-way between these letters and the prophetic books lies an obscure and apparently personal poem from Blake’s private notebook that seems to me to constitute further evidence. It was written some time between 1800 and 1803, the same time that Hayley was writing of the Blakes’ ideal marriage, and at least a year before, according to Blake himself, he had freed his marriage from fetters! Blake ought to be the one who knew best, but it seems to me at least conceivable that they were both right—that to all practical purposes it was an extremely good partnership, even though in Blake’s analytical soul a dire battle was going on to make perfect what was yet imperfect and appeared to him to threaten the whole structure. In the poem that I speak of, it is clear that Blake has not yet ‘reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’, and that his and his wife’s feet are still in ‘fetters’. On the one hand, this poem bears out the description of the letter—notice particularly Blake’s emphasis on the bestial nature of the Spectre—and on the other hand, it points to the situation in Blake’s first prophetic book, Vala, or, The Four Zoas, and is similar even down to the wording of one or two lines. This poem, linking the wholly personal letters to the situation of the prophetic books, seems to me to establish without a doubt the close connection between Mr. and Mrs. Blake and Albion and Jerusalem, but not at all in the way Middleton Murry suspects
& Throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
‘This the Wine & this the Bread.’
Let us agree to give up Love,
And root up the infernal grove;
Then shall we return & see
The worlds of happy Eternity.
And, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my Fate.
Till I turn from Female Love,
And root up the Infernal Grove,
I shall never worthy be
To Step into Eternity.
‘Thro’ the Heaven & Earth & Hell
Thou shalt never never quell:
I will fly & thou pursue,
Night & Morn the flight renew.’
‘Never, Never, I return:
Still for Victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I’ll have
And when dead I’ll be thy Grave.
When wilt thou return & view
My loves, & them to life renew?
When wilt thou return & live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?
And seven more Loves in my bed
Crown with wine my mournful head,
Pitying & forgiving all
Thy transgressions, great & small.
Seven more loves weep night & day
Round the tombs where my loves lay,
And seven more loves attend each night
Around my couch with torches bright.
Seven of my sweet loves thy knife
Has bereaved of their life.
Their marble tombs I built with tears
And with cold & shuddering fears.
Dost thou not in Pride & scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies & fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?
He scents thy footsteps in the snow,
Wheresoever thou dost go
Thro’ the wintry hail & rain.
When wilt thou return again?
A Fathomless & boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.
My Spectre around me night & day
Like a Wild beast guards my way.
My Emanation, far within,
Weeps incessantly for my Sin.
And the additional stanzas:
Poor pale pitiable form
That I follow in a Storm,
Iron tears & groans of lead
Bind around my aking head.
What Transgressions I commit
Are for thy Transgressions fit.
They thy Harlots, thou their slave,
And my Bed becomes their Grave.
O’er my Sins thou sit & moan:
Hast thou no sins of thy own?
O’er my Sins thou sit & weep,
And lull thy own Sins fast asleep.
This is a long poem and an incoherent one, and yet we cannot say it is really a bad poem, although Blake was right not to publish it. It is intermediate between a private document and a public poem; and it is moving because of this. It has passages that affect us in precisely the way great poetry affects us. It is as irrational in its mixture of the sublime and petty, the disappointing and the transcendent, as are the moods of ordinary life.
It points, as can readily be seen, not only to the letters I have quoted about the bestial Spectre who ruins love and about the ‘divided existence’, but also to The Four Zoas. Not only is the situation similar, but lines as ‘When wilt thou return’ and ‘There we wander’ are caught up into the prophetic books as ‘O when will you return, Vala the wanderer?’
The poem tells the story which I have tried to indicate is the story of the three lyrics Murry cites. That is, the poet is being accused by his beloved of the sin of loving too passionately. The Spectre of puritan guilt keeps them apart like a wild beast, yet pathetically dogs her footsteps in the snow as she wanders through the wintry night of love. The beloved is full of conflicting pride, scorn, tears, and unreasonable jealousy, and she murders his loves with these moods. For surely Blake uses ‘seven loves’, in opposition to Magdalene’s seven devils, to indicate his moments of love for her which she rejects each time they arise. They are not, as Mr. Murry might guess, a harem of other women!
The poet asks her to return and live again, pitying him as he forgives her. But still she flees crying that she will never return, still burning for the victory of making him give up his lustful way of loving. And he, suddenly, childishly almost, gives in, saying wearily and patiently—yes, let us then give up this difficult thing called human love and try to return to the mood of happy innocence which was our first glimpse of paradise before passion made its ugly presence felt. And without irony we reach the climax:
And Throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me …
It is a healthy anger we glimpse when the poet suddenly leaves this exalted mood, and, turning to her, asks her if she has no sins of her own that she must always be bewailing his, and adds, quite reasonably, that his own merely complement hers. It is all the more wonderful to find as if inevitable, the cosmic pity and love returning in the last stanza in which the poet sees and forgives and loves, albeit wearily.
It is interesting to see that here, as so often in Blake, the mood of love is suggested by the weather. Just as in ‘Never seek to tell thy love’ the passage of love was indicated by the shift from a ‘gentle wind’ that moved ‘silently, invisibly’ to a cold wind that made the beloved tremble, so in this poem the ‘hungry craving wind’ sets the note of love’s despair. In the previous poems the beloved turned away from the poet towards the ‘traveller’ or the ‘angel’. In this poem she turns simply towards an ideal of love that is sinless and pure. There is an irony as well as submission in the poet’s agreement ‘to root up the infernal grove’ of love, for it postulates an asceticism that is anathema to Blake.
This points to what is the most significant paradox of Blake’s work, and there are many. Blake’s highest vision of human life cries out against the cruel and false chastity that is based on guilt and jealousy and fear, and sings praises to its opposite, incarnate love. But none the less it is apparent that when Blake slips from this height of vision, he himself is hopelessly caught in Urizen’s web of guilt. The more so because he has rebelled. What if Urizen is right after all? What if he is God? With the doubt and loss of faith in his own vision comes this suffocating web of rational guilt feelings, and the consequent paradox in his work. This is the work of the Spectre who is the puritan conscience born of the ‘Holy Reasoning Power’. It ruins, as he said in his letter, both his poetry and his marriage relationship. It accounts, too, for the feeling of ambiguity, almost dualism, we so often feel in Blake’s work, often when he is saying most loudly that there is no dualism. This feeling that his message was somehow guilty may have been one reason why Blake neglected his audience and wrote for himself alone in the prophetic books. But it arose partly, too, just because he had no audience and this bred doubts. Whichever way round it was, and it was probably both, a vicious circle, this feeling of doubt, ambivalence, whatever you wish to call it, towards his work and his marriage, is certainly what the prophetic books are about, and they were written in a titanic struggle to overcome it and return to love and faith and imaginative certainty.
The only possible way out of this dilemma is found in this poem, too, at least in terms of marriage. The only way to live at the point of highest vision and to achieve incarnate love without guilt or doubt or ambiguity, is freely to admit one’s guilt and forgive it over and over in oneself as well as in the marriage partner. Perfectionism, guilt, and self-righteousness are distortions of the rational spectre and only forgiveness can overcome their disastrous effects in a relationship. In all of life, but especially in the relationship of love, one must tide over the negative and flat moments which cannot help but come, by faith in the blazing meaningful moments which have been and will return in other forms.
And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
This the Wine and this the Bread.
The very probable connection between the experiences of William and Catherine Blake that are revealed in the letters I have quoted and are echoed in this poem, and the myth of Albion and Jerusalem in the prophetic books, will perhaps emerge more clearly if I end this section with a schematic summary of what happens to Albion and his bride in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.
The drama of the prophetic books takes place within Albion who is universal man. To a lesser extent it takes place within Jerusalem, his bride, and until the end, only inasmuch as she represents the feminine half of himself. In a sense there is only one character. The myth tells the story of Albion’s ‘Fall into Division and his Resurrection to Unity’, that is, of his struggle to be reunited with his true bride, Jerusalem, as with the feminine half of himself. Blake implicitly assumes that every man has to go through a microcosmic version of the Fall—a breaking up and a remaking—in order to achieve spiritual wholeness and the consequent acceptance of life and foursquare entry and participation in it. The relationship of Albion and Jerusalem—like that in The Song of Solomon—is a series of conversions and lapses and reconversions to incarnate love. When at last such love grips the whole man, then male and female incompleteness is overcome in a union that is not only the marriage of a man and a woman, but an inner marriage of the two halves of the soul in a mystical union with Christ.
Albion is separated from his bride when the four faculties within him are jarred out of harmony. This happens because Albion allows Christ to be replaced in the centre of his soul by one of his own faculties, his intellect or Urizen (Your Reason). In pride Urizen sets himself up as superior to the other faculties which are: the passions or Luvah (lover); imagination or Los (loss); and Tharmas, or sensation.
Thus Albion is no longer guided from the centre of a fourfold being by Christ, but is being dominated by a part of his own Selfhood, his overly analytical reason, which treats him like a tyrannical father-god, Nobadaddy. The Spectre is the puritan sense of guilt which rises up to attend this false god, and the Spectre is continually reminding Albion that his non-rational activities are sinful. Christ is no longer being reborn continually within Albion. Instead, on the level of the imagination, of archetypal parents, there is born the bound enfant terrible named Orc. Orc appears to be the ascetic, and is even mistaken for Christ, but he is really the serpent, Satan, anti-Christ. Thus, because Albion is out of harmony within himself and is separated from his emanation, we get not only a false moral law, but a false Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the persons of Urizen, Orc, and the Spectre. The tragedy is that they are so very often mistaken for true Christian values.
This inner confusion of course keeps Albion from loving spontaneously. In fact he must go so far as to deny his love for his wife because sexual love is forbidden by the rational god, and so seems all the more alarming and guilty when it breaks out from time to time with all the force of repression.
Jerusalem withdraws, sensing the fact that their love now is become lust. But she has no way of knowing exactly what has happened to Albion, and so she reacts in the worst possible way. She feels guilty too, and hurt, and so she flees from him, and at the same time tries to draw from him the kind of love that seems lost. To counterbalance Albion’s rational bias she becomes exaggeratedly insistent on the validity of the passions which come to dominate her as Reason dominates Albion. The two sides of human nature which are vital and healthful when operating together, now become destructive when each is trying to be the whole truth. On the one hand we find Albion bowing down to his god, Urizen, while on the other hand Jerusalem sets up Vala, her own passions, as goddess. She becomes the priestess of a kind of nature religion, or so she seems to Albion, fascinated by her possessive and elusive mystery, and he goes to her as he would to Lilith. In her effort to counterbalance Albion’s subjugation to reason, she has fallen into the equally disastrous over-emphasis on the earth-passions, and to Albion she seems full of ‘beautiful Witchcrafts’ of which he is deathly afraid yet which draw him irresistibly. For he is now the high priest of reason and must feel that his non-rational desires are sinful. And yet he has such desires and he feels more and more guilty as she goes all out to provoke them and then flees from the intensity of what she has provoked, verifying his guilty suspicion that love is lust. And yet she beckons him and flees and he follows, feeling unutterable guilt, and as if he were being lured to destruction by the angry father-god he is betraying, his own Reason, which now seems external and vengeful.
Within Jerusalem, who is now dominated by her own passions, the emanations, or female counterparts of the four faculties within Albion, are also out of harmony. None of the faculties within Albion can find its rightful mate within Jerusalem. This accounts for the confusing parade of lamenting figures that part and come together and redivide endlessly throughout the prophetic books. For just as Albion and Jerusalem fight and come together again in brief moments of understanding, so within them their faculties struggle to find one another.
Such moments of peace and resolution are ‘windows into eternity’, and, Blake insists pathetically, ‘there is a moment in every day that Satan cannot find.’ But for the most part, despite such rare moments, within Jerusalem Ahania flees from Urizen within Albion and there is no understanding between them on the intellectual level. On the level of imagination Los and Enitharmon are highly discontented. Luvah and Vala stir up the passions, but with torments of jealousy. And on the basic level of instinct or touch, Tharmas and his emanation, Enion, keep losing each other.
And thus, because Albion has forsaken Christ in the pride of his own intellect, he loses touch with Jerusalem at every level. In neither Albion nor his bride is there left anything resembling fourfold Christ-centred love, but instead only passions that are determined to assert the claims of self.
And it is basically the man’s fault, Blake comes to see in the prophetic books, although he blames Jerusalem for her ‘shadowy female’ tactics. ‘Let the men do their duty’, Blake writes in a marginal comment on Lavater, ‘and the women will be such wonders.’ And every man’s duty is precisely to become a man with all of his faculties functioning in harmony because Christ is at their centre. Although this is very difficult, anything less is impotence. Albion has become less than a man by being persuaded that his own reason is omnipotent and the passions sinful. In trying to become more than man—or, at least, something other than human—he has become less. And it is the refusal of the human reason to be limited, and the allowing of it to impose god-like laws of ‘perfection’ that cause the false body-soul dualism which, in turn, causes discord, impotence, and destructive action or inaction.
Jerusalem, too, is not herself. More correctly, she is beside herself. Albion is only dominated by the Reason within him. Jerusalem becomes her own passions. She becomes Vala, another woman, the ‘other woman’, all that she has feared. From now on we glimpse Jerusalem herself at very brief intervals only. We are dealing instead with Vala, her Shadow, just as what we now see of Albion is his Spectre. Jerusalem’s centre has moved outside herself into Vala who is Luvah’s rightful mate.
From here on in the prophetic books, Albion, dominated by his Reason, remains in a state of death-like trance and nightmare impotence, bound, like Hamlet, to ceaselessly questioning inaction. Jerusalem, on the other hand, ruled by passion, becomes over-intense, larger than life and more ceaselessly active. She keeps changing back and forth from herself into Vala, thus bearing a close resemblance to the witchlike ‘belle dame sans merci’, the glimmering femme fatale who lures the spell-bound romantic lover towards his death.
Both Albion and Jerusalem are now in the position of all ‘romantic’ lovers who flee towards some impossible image but do not in fact want to embrace it for all their agony of desire. And this false image of the beloved, by remaining unattainable, destroys as surely as it would heal were it stripped of illusion and embraced in its more limited and miraculous actuality.
It is death-in-life that Albion pursues in pursuing Vala rather than loving his wife, Jerusalem. And he has by this time almost resigned himself to death as a punishment for desiring when his god Urizen has prohibited desire. Because he has allowed his reason to pronounce sexual love guilty, it looms large all out of proportion, and he can think of his wife only in terms of passion, of Vala. No wonder that she is no longer a human being to him, but Vala, Woman, the primitive female writ large. He has forced her into this position, but all of her hurt reactions only make it worse.
She, seeing his death-like trance, tries to snatch a kind of life-from-death, striving for total possession of the impotent Albion. But Albion treats her as a harlot. He both hates and desires her provocation. Partly to regain the manhood he suspects he has lost and partly to minimize the appearance of his commitment to the passions, he must pretend to himself that she is not his wife, not the sensitive living creature and gentle wise companion he has loved, but a looming impersonal Temptress. And, treated as one, in spirit she becomes undifferentiated Woman with all her wiles who might as well be anyone (Enion) or Ahania or Enitharmon for all Albion apparently cares.
This is why she is jealous even as she flees from him, beckoning, and why the impossible image each flees towards is that of the unattainable, the possession of which must spell death. Everyone is exceedingly unhappy to say the least, and Albion mourns:
When I first Married you, I gave you all my whole Soul.
I thought that you would love my loves & joy in my delights,
Seeking for pleasure in my pleasures, O Daughter of Babylon.
Then thou wast lovely, mild & gentle; now thou art terrible
In jealousy, and unlovely in my sight …
Therefore I shew my Jealousy & set before you Death.
I have tried to indicate something of the difficulties that beset Albion and Jerusalem in the prophetic books, and it seems obvious that the fetters that bound them bear more than a passing resemblance to the spectral fetters Blake describes as the ruination of his work and marriage.
The only possible way out of such a predicament is, as Blake says, to ‘reduce that Spectrous fiend to his station’, that is, put in right perspective the perfectionist rules that the human reason proclaims, and so be willing to forgive imperfection in oneself and in the beloved. This is the only climate in which love can exist and break the bond of Selfhood. Then and only then, when patience and forgiveness have placed Christ again in the centre of the soul, and Urizen is no longer a tyrant but mild Rintrah, an important conscience and guide, can Albion and his bride come together in an affirmation of human love that is also mystical union in Christ, because they now see what the Spectre has long denied, that the senses are the gateway to eternity. It is important to remember that Blake never advocates doing away with reason altogether, as many critics think. Rather, Reason must be put in its right place where it becomes commonsense and intelligence applied to particular situations rather than cruel and impossible general laws.
Such an attempt to summarize briefly the main events of Blake’s prophetic book, may well read like a case history or a gnostic nightmare. I have purposely left out any indications of the similarity of Blake’s myth to the myths that the psychologists explore. The material speaks loudly enough for itself. Again, I have avoided drawing any parallels between Blake’s work and the symbols and beliefs of those gnostic sects to which there is often such startling resemblance, from the early gnostics themselves down to Swedenborg whose writings Blake knew intimately and owed much to. Many studies of Blake’s sources have been made and continue to appear, and I leave to their authors the tracking down of influences and similarities. I am more fascinated with the new things Blake is trying to say, using whatever of the past that seemed useful to him, but always in his own unique context.
What seems to me the exciting and unparalleled achievement of the prophetic books is their moving and human portrayal, long before the days of depth psychology, of what goes on in the fluid dream-like world of breakdown, breakdown above all of the vision that had held life together. Not only this, but instead of getting entirely lost in the inner guilts and despairs of Albion alone, we are given a clear picture of the frightening effects of his illness on the person closest to him, her resulting insecurity and the consequent breakdown of their relationship.
And still more important, we are shown the way out of this nightmare world, not through being told to let go completely on the analyst’s couch, but in an example of human courage and valiantly maintained love that seems to triumph like the dawn after seemingly endless night. It is a way out that worked in Blake’s own experience and one, he claims, that is a universal remedy for a necessary and universal illness. For Blake dared to see such breakdown as an almost inevitable consequence of original sin which is intellectual curiosity and pride. Breakdown is simply a stage in every man’s journey from innocence through the necessary anguish caused by experience, to that ‘reorganized innocence’ which is liberty and freedom.