Milton

Margaret Rudd

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675138-5

Of the three prophetic books proper—The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem—Milton is the least successful. Although the poem does indeed contain lovely passages, mostly about Felpham, it is on the whole eccentric, shrill, and defiant of its audience. Its comparatively superficial tone and level of attack seem almost to disown the profound psychological insight arrived at so painfully in The Four Zoas. Milton is full of uneasily maintained, rather than inevitable, tensions. It contains to an annoying degree long lists of unexplained characters and place names, and mischievous nonsense names. Its wilful obscurity seems to me much more indicative of a disturbed state of mind in its author than does the painful but sincere struggle for clear vision of the first prophetic book. The Four Zoas is an ordering of hurtful experience directed towards re-integration. Its difficulty and obscurity arise from what Blake was trying to say, and to say for the first time without any of the short-cuts of terminology or of accepted knowledge that we have today. The vision itself, no matter how awkwardly expressed, is coherent and positive, and it strives towards healing and truth. There is something grand about the conception of The Four Zoas. Milton, in contrast, seems in many ways petty and idiosyncratic, a kind of bitter and agitated reaction or aftermath to the perception of a truth too far from present reality to endure. Milton is concerned largely with Blake’s private quarrel with Hayley, which widens out to embrace his quarrel with all of the forces that hinder true art.

Blake had two sets of terms for his prophetic vision, and although they are supposed to merge, they more often give the effect of alternation. The first is the symbolism connected with places and with politico-historical events seen in cosmic distortion. This is the terminology of America and The French Revolution, and it carries over into Milton. Milton follows on logically to these two early prophecies, just as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem connect in sequence with The Book of Thel, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and, of course, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The second, and more successful way in which Blake presents his vision is in terms of human relationships and spiritual states of being, the story, in short, of Albion and Jerusalem as everyman and everywoman, and as man and the church. This is, of course, what we saw in The Four Zoas. The implications of the names as place names are left to take care of themselves, and the reader does not fail to notice and draw the appropriate conclusions. Little or no attention is paid to elaborating the significance of England and the holy city becoming one. Blake’s interest is concentrated wholly on the spiritual and psychological condition of the lovers in The Four Zoas. The geographical theme is almost non-existent except in the names themselves.

Milton is largely an attempt to merge the two sets of terms for the first time. Blake tones down the psychological drama until it takes second place to another story that plays up the historical, social, and geographical aspects of the Albion-Jerusalem alliance and gives rise to interminable lists of English counties and towns meticulously corresponding to various points of Albion’s anatomy, and to the compass points where stand the Four Zoas, constituting Albion’s soul-anatomy. It is as if Blake suddenly recalled that he had intended Albion to stand for England as well as for the Universal Man, and that Jerusalem was not only the eternal feminine but the holy city. It is not surprising that this sudden reversal of interest in Milton strikes a slightly hollow note.

The one or two passages that carry forward the theme of the married lovers seem almost out of context in Milton which presents us with an altogether new surface story, and one that is much less universal as it is based, not on any experience that Blake found in his marriage situation, but on the much more idiosyncratic role he found himself playing at Felpham as mis-understood poet. This tragi-comic, or rather, pathetic-comic situation he found himself in with Hayley, Blake tries unsuccessfully to elevate into a cosmic lining up of the forces of good and evil behind himself, who, as an improved reincarnation of Milton, represents true English poetry, and Hayley who, as Satan, represents all that is false and misguided in English verse. The love story of Albion and Jerusalem does not coincide with this new story at all, but is introduced from time to time all the same, largely, one suspects, to act as a springboard for the schoolboy game Blake plays of equating the points of Albion’s trance-bound body with towns and cities of England. Blake goes so far as to make Hayley–Satan and Milton’s God responsible not only for bad poetry, but for the pernicious class system in England, and for the industrial revolution and its concomitant ills. Blake himself, as the new Milton, appears querulously in the midst of all this wondrous confusion to complain that no one recognizes him as the poet-prophet who is to set right all of these ills.

Needless to say, this new story does not touch on any of the real problems that Blake’s deep concern with Albion and Jerusalem always probes whenever he turns to their story, leaving his game of equation and spiteful identification. The two passages in Milton that do pertain to Albion and Jerusalem directly are very fine indeed and cannot be left out of consideration as they throw much light on the relationship between the lovers. But one is none the less almost tempted to abstract these passages and attach them to The Four Zoas or Jerusalem where they would be much more in context.

The thin connection between the story of Albion and Jerusalem and the story Blake tells in Milton, is simply that in Milton Blake gives a picture of an England sick and dying, a victim of the industrial revolution and class system, and up-holding a satanic art and religion because it is under the tyranny of Milton’s God who is Urizen.

Blake’s whole procedure is negative. His purpose is to prove not only Hayley, but Milton himself wrong, and to present himself as the new bard of England who will put right the errors of belief that weaken Albion. Blake appears in this poem. First as Palamabron, and then as himself, with the spirits of Los and Milton entering into him, he upholds imagination and true vision against the satanic forces. He guards in himself that which was good in Milton, and corrects that part of Milton’s thinking that was false. It is quite certain that poor Hayley, the successful man of letters and patron of the arts, sat, all unwittingly, for Blake’s portrait of Satan.

Such a personal, arbitrary and quixotic plan for a poem that claims to be a prophecy obscures the very vision that Blake purports to offer, and brings Milton down to something much closer to an attack on those who do not understand William Blake, no matter how this fact is obscured by cosmic machinery. In a sense, Milton is easier to understand than The Four Zoas, simply because it is less profound. Its surface difficulties once mastered, and its bitter tone detected, there is little else to trouble the understanding. I cannot agree with those critics who, finding Milton comparatively easy to decipher, conclude that it is a more valuable poem than The Four Zoas.

Milton is a tirade against many things, but none of these things strike the reader as being the real cause of the author’s unease. It is as if Blake, frightened and disturbed by the lack of an audience, took time out to attack all of the things that stand in the way of true art. The precipitating event may well have been Hayley’s reading and condemnation of the MS. of The Four Zoas. It is perhaps significant that The Four Zoas never got beyond the manuscript stage, although Blake engraved both of the later prophetic books. Hayley’s lack of sympathy for the poem into which Blake had put his deepest psychological insight may well have brought home to Blake his loneliness as a poet, alarming him into writing the defiant and egocentric poem, Milton. The poem Milton is Blake’s almost hysterical over-insistence that he possesses vision, coming between two poems that actually embody the vision he claims. None the less, there are lovely passages of poetry hidden within the vast incoherent bulk of the poem, lyrical outbursts that seem to break out of the airless room of Blake’s preoccupied defiance. One must remember that Blake was determined to find renewed inspiration at Felpham, and Milton was written in the disillusionment following Blake’s realization that Hayley’s patronage was not going to end all of his troubles as he had dared to hope.

Blake was, of course, as familiar with Milton’s writings as he was with the Bible. He admired Milton tremendously, although he never hesitated to point out what he considered Milton’s grave errors. A very interesting study might be made of Milton’s stylistic influence on Blake’s prophetic books, and also of the similarity in the plans of the prophetic books to Paradise Lost. Even the themes are similar, for Blake starts in The Four Zoas with the fall of man, within himself, and Jerusalem tells of a paradise regained in the reunion of Albion and Jerusalem. These are aspects of the relation between Milton and Blake not covered by Denis Saurat. It is, however, too large a subject to attempt in the present study, as is the question of Blake’s unique usage of biblical language and imagery.

At the beginning of Milton is the famous lyric known as ‘Jerusalem’. This lyric stands as one of Blake’s most successful fusions of Jerusalem and Albion as significant places, with the idea of Jerusalem and Albion as people. However, the lyric is generally taken simply as a plea to rebuild the holy city in England.

Little of Milton lives up to the promise of this lyric. The body of the poem is more concerned with crediting the ‘dark Satanic mills’ to Milton’s God, than with bringing Jerusalem and Albion together in either sense. There is no glorious fourfold vision at the end of Milton as there is at the end of The Four Zoas and of Jerusalem, but only a wistful hint that such glory may be possible after many errors are abolished.

Blake, like Milton, writes his poem ‘to Justify the Ways of God to Men’. Paralleling Milton’s introduction, Blake has a prose preface to his poem, and in it he cries out against the influence of those classical writers who ‘infected’ both Milton and Shakespeare. Blake concludes that ‘we do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.’ After this preface comes the lyric, ‘Jerusalem’.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant Land.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire.

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic mills?

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

The question in the lyric refers, of course, to the Glastonbury legends, which Blake knew and which allege that Christ was brought to England as a young boy by his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a tin merchant. For some years before his ministry began, Christ is reputed to have been living quietly at Glastonbury in a wattle hut. Glastonbury was the centre of the Druid religion which Christ overcame.

The much-discussed ‘dark Satanic mills’ refer, I think, to anything that has to do with natural religion and the rational laws of Urizen rather than with Christ’s rule of love. This would include both the religion of the Druids, which is said to have been both magical and highly intellectual, and the abuses of the industrial age beginning in Blake’s own time, including mill slavery.

The image of the mill which Blake uses fairly frequently has always to do with the naturalistic ‘laws’ which seem to be imposed by reason, whether these laws occur in religion, in art, or in practical life. We remember that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the false ‘Angel’ had to go through a mill before he could impose his magical delusion on the honest ‘Devil’. The so-called ‘laws’ of Urizen are akin to magical delusion, whether they are found in the druid religion or in the modern slavery of the mills that we are told is for ‘the common good’. For such abstract laws pay no attention to particularity and fact, but simply put into motion all the supposedly infallible and mill-like machinery of ‘Your Reason’, arriving at something that is far from the truth, but almost magically persuades us that it must be true. Such was the masterful illusion, or series of illusions, by which Urizen replaced Orc’s real father and created the mystery religion in The Four Zoas. Mystery and magic and the false imposition of ideas and will and slavery, can always be traced back to a satanic misuse of reason, which, proud of being the most ‘god-like’ faculty, tries to be God, and falls far short.

The illustration that accompanies the first page of the text proper of Milton is one of lovely colours—rose, blue and yellow, a yellow star streaming with red light in which a man and woman swim as if under water, surrounded by weeds and water-tendrils. On the title-page Blake drew a naked man, his back to us, and his hand outstretched into the thundery distance.

The body of the poem opens clearly enough. The curiously ‘neural’ imagery that characterizes the final prophetic books is apparent in the first section:

Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet’s Song,

Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your Realms

Of terror & mild moony lustre in soft sexual delusions

Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer & repose

His burning thirst & freezing hunger! Come into my hand,

By your mild power descending down the Nerves of my right arm

From out the portals of my Brain, where by your ministry

The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise …

Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated

Beneath your land of shadows, of its sacrifices and

Its offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God,

Became its prey, a curse, an offering & an atonement

For Death Eternal in the heavens of Albion & before the Gates

Of Jerusalem, his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah.

Say first! what mov’d Milton, who walk’d about in Eternity

One hundred years, pond’ring the intricate mazes of Providence,

Unhappy tho’ in heav’n—he obey’d, he murmur’d not, he was silent

Viewing his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep

In torment—To go into the deep her to redeem & himself perish?

That cause at length mov’d Milton to this unexampled deed.

A Bard’s prophetic Song! for sitting at eternal tables,

Terrific among the Sons of Albion, in chorus solemn & loud

A Bard broke forth: all sat attentive to the awful man.

All this is to say that Milton wandered around heaven for one hundred years, unable to settle down happily because he knows that a part of his poetry was inspired by the ‘False Tongue’. Chief among his errors were his mistaken ideas about God and about Christ, and the resulting mistaken idea about women’s place in creation. His sixfold emanation, that is, his three wives and three daughters, wanders below, unredeemed. To redeem her he is moved to an unprecedented action. After his hundred years of restlessness, at last there appears on earth a poet worthy for him to enter into, leaving heaven in order to redeem his poetry and his emanation. The earthly poet is, of course, none other than Blake! Crabb Robinson records what Blake told him in conversation: ‘I saw Milton in imagination, and he told me to beware of being misled by his Paradise Lost.’

Blake is, of course, following closely Milton’s opening in Paradise Lost, almost parodying Milton’s ‘Say first what Moved our Grand Parents’, with his ‘Say first! what mov’d Milton’. What actually does move Milton to return to earth is the ‘Bard’s prophetic Song’. And the song sung by this bard who is Blake is a kind of parable all about true and false poetry. The Bard himself seems to merge with the figure of Palamabron who stands for true poetry.

The Bard tells of the terrible situation on earth in England. ‘Albion was slain’, and Urizen lies ‘in darkness & solitude, in chains of the mind lock’d up’. This passage parallels Milton’s description of the fallen Satan. Ages of woe pass over Urizen, and Los watches in terror as in The Four Zoas. In fact, we get a hasty summary of what has already happened in The Four Zoas. In the sick Albion ‘First Orc was born, then the shadowy Female’. Now Blake tells us that another son was born to Los and Enitharmon, distorted imagination, and this son’s name is Satan. He is ‘the Miller of Eternity’, Urizen’s henchman. In The Four Zoas Orc and Satan were one and the same, and Blake splits them up and effects this second birth for the purposes of the parable. Los in his distorted state speaks to Satan, his youngest born, and reminds him that ‘Thy work is Eternal Death with Mills & Ovens & Cauldrons’, and orders him to ‘Get to thy Labours at the Mills & leave me to my wrath’. The symbolism of places makes itself felt here, for at this command of Los’s, in Albion’s capitol,

Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place, Calvary’s foot,

Where the Victims were preparing for Sacrifice their Cherubim.

There is a beautiful illustration of a druidic arch through which tiny figures move in a deep blue starry night with a crescent moon and white racing clouds.

The new character of Palamabron, who stands for true art and imagination over against Satan’s false rational art, now appears in the parable. Palamabron cultivates the living earth in contrast to Satan’s mills:

Palambron with the fiery Harrow in morning returning

From breathing fields, Satan fainted beneath the artillery.

In Milton Blake is concerned with the three classes of men. On the one hand these classes correspond to Blake’s own mythological scheme, but on the other, they refer quite directly to lower, middle and upper classes. Poor Blake at Felpham, perhaps for the first time, had much cause to ponder this phenomenon of society. Blake is particularly incensed by the plight of the working classes who have been forced to turn from cultivation of the breathing earth, which is, after all, a kind of art, to slavery in dark ugly mills or mines, to be shut away from air and light, and for ever warped in their response to nature’s beauty, and unable to live life as it is meant to be lived. The following remarkable passage speaks of this situation in no uncertain terms, and comes in the poem as a parallel to Milton’s ‘farewell happy Fields where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours …’:

Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shut in narrow doleful form,

Creeping in reptile flesh upon the narrow bosom of the ground!

The Eye of Man a little narrow orb, clos’d up & dark,

Scarcely beholding the great light, conversing with the Void;

The Ear a little shell, in small volutions shutting out

All melodies & comprehending only Discord & Harmony;

The Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys,

A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard,

Then brings forth Moral Virtue the cruel Virgin Babylon.

Can such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro’ its tubes

Measure the sunny rays that point their spears on Udan-adan?

Can such an Ear, fill’d with the vapours of the yawning pit,

Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a hand divine?

Can such closed Nostrils feel a joy? or tell of autumn fruits

When grapes & figs burst their covering to the joyful air?

Can such a Tongue boast of the living waters? or take in

Ought but the Vegetable Ratio & loathe the faint delight?

Can such gross Lips perceive? alas, folded within themselves

They touch not ought, but pallid turn & tremble at every wind.¹

¹ There is only one copy of this plate which begins with the line ‘Palamabron with the fiery narrow in morning returning.’

This could be real poetry of the Thel variety save for certain carelessnesses and the irritating intrusion of Udanadan. ‘Thus they sing,’ Blake goes on, ‘Creating the Three Classes among Druid Rocks,’ once more allying the modern results of Urizen’s rule with all such errors in England, back to the Druids. They are all part of the same mainstream of delusion.

Blake gives us a catalogue of the extent of destruction in England because of such delusive assumptions:

Thro’ Albion’s four Forests which overspread all the Earth

From London Stone to Blackheath east: to Hounslow west:

To Finchley north: to Norwood south …

The Surrey hills glow like the clinkers of the furnace; Lambeth’s Vale

Where Jerusalem’s foundations began, where they were laid in ruins,

Where they were laid in ruins from every Nation …

When shall Jerusalem return & overspread all the Nations?

Return, return to Lambeth’s Vale, O building of human souls!

Thence stony Druid Temples overspread the Island white,

And thence from Jerusalem’s ruins, from her walls of salvation

And praise, thro’ the whole Earth were rear’d from Ireland

To Mexico & Peru west, & east to China & Japan, till Babel

The Spectre of Albion frown’d over the Nations in glory & war.

All things begin & end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore:

But now the Starry Heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion.

Blake has more to say about the three classes of men in relation to the most recent cultural errors perpetrated by Urizen. Here he undoubtedly means upper, middle and lower, class England. Satan, with his arrogance hidden under a mild persuasive charm, belongs to the ‘first class’, and this is almost surely a portrait of Hayley. Blake, of course, is Palamabron, the true artist who works in living fields. Satan tries to take Palamabron’s place without having the talent to do so, and Palamabron is afraid of being accused of ingratitude if he does not yield it:

Loud sounds the Hammer of Los, loud turn the Wheels of Enitharmon:

Her looms vibrate with soft affections, weaving the Web of Life,

Out from the ashes of the Dead; Los lifts his iron Ladles

With molten ore: he heaves the iron cliffs in his rattling chains

From Hyde Park to the Alms-houses of Mile-end & old Bow.

Here the Three Classes of Mortal Men take their fix’d destinations,

And hence they overspread the Nations of the Whole Earth, & hence

The Web of Life is woven & the tender sinews of life created

And the Three Classes of Men …

The first, the Elect from before the foundation of the World:

The second, The Redeem’d: The Third, The Reprobate & form’d

To destruction from the mother’s womb …

Of the first class was Satan: with incomparable mildness,

His primitive tyrannical attempts on Los, with most endearing love

He soft entreated Los to give him Palamabron’s station,

For Palamabron return’d with labour wearied every evening.

Palamabron oft refus’d, & as often Satan offer’d

His service, till by repeated offers & repeated intreaties

Los gave to him the Harrow of the Almighty; alas, blamable,

Palamabron fear’d to be angry lest Satan should accuse him of

Ingratitude & Los believe the accusation thro’ Satan’s extreme

Mildness.

It must have been galling to Blake who knew himself an intellectual prince to hear continually, perhaps for the first time at Felpham, the intimation that somehow the lower classes were doomed from before birth, and that the middle class just achieved redemption barely recognized by the upper class fortunates who had never had a moment’s insecurity.

No matter how genuinely grateful Blake often felt to Hayley, it must still have been maddening to be in the position of being patronized by this upper class man of letters with his easy charm who was also the acclaimed literary figure of the day. It is perhaps significant that Hayley wrote a biography of Milton. Most annoying of all must have been to see Hayley’s effusions passing for true poetry while Blake’s own went neglected. We can hardly blame Blake altogether for transmuting such feelings of annoyance and anger, of which he was undoubtedly ashamed, into a cosmic myth concerning the warfare between true and false art. And yet, the myth in which he does this has no comparison with the infinitely more moving picture he gives in The Four Zoas of his much more profound inner struggle to keep his own vision intact. In Milton Blake tries to build a myth out of external events and projected emotions, whereas in The Four Zoas he relates events that take place within the psyche which is the true stage for mythological happenings.

Blake suggests in Milton that the tyranny of false art over true art occurs when Urizen’s rules are the only accepted measures for art and life. This was, of course, the main tenor of the eighteenth century which was called the Age of Reason, although it was a century that contained more variety in its experiments in art and life than perhaps any other comparable period, and even though this variety tends to be lost in the overall picture of a time of reason and sensibility.

Blake feels that the class system is all a part of Urizen’s tyranny, as it forces the true artist to be beholden to the dilettante class who would not recognize true art if they saw it. Thus the man of genius is forced to do tasks unworthy of him for his living. Blake, deploring class snobbery, possessed that type of artistic or intellectual snobbery that felt that the world owed him a living. For such an attitude, patronage is the only solution, and it is a time-honoured one, but Blake wanted complete freedom as well.

Satan-Hayley is unable to control and drive the horses of Palamabron’s Harrow, which is to say that he has no capacity to control and shape imagination. His attempt angers Palamabron who at last speaks his mind, risking the appearance of ingratitude:

Next morning Palamabron rose; the horses of the Harrow

Were madden’d with tormenting fury …

Then Palamabron, reddening like the Moon in an Eclipse,

Spoke, saying: ‘You know Satan’s mildness & his self-imposition,

Seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother

While he is murdering the just: prophetic I behold

His future course thro’ darkness & despair to eternal death.

But we must not be tyrants also: he hath assum’d my place

For one whole day under pretense of pity & love to me.

My horses has he madden’d & my fellow servants injur’d.

How should he, he, know the duties of another? O foolish forbearance!

Would I had told Los all my heart! but patience, O my friends,

All may be well: silent remain while I call Los & Satan.

The ‘How should he, he, know the duties of another?’ has close relation to Blake’s letters of this time, relating how Hayley sets him to do work that keeps him from his true duties which are to lay up treasures in heaven. In Milton Blake has an excuse to let off steam against Hayley on a grand scale, an excuse he seemed badly to need. And he lets off steam about many other matters as well. He cries out, no more with the impersonal concern of ‘I wandered through each chartered street’, but in a hurt defiant tone, as if now mortally wounded by the many social abuses he could once see so clearly when untouched by direct pain. Now he laments in different terms the wrongs that society inflicts in the class system, the system of labour, mistaken ideas about art and God, and above all about life. Most of all he cries out against an audience so deluded by all of these devices of Urizen to obscure the truth, that they cannot even recognize true art when they have it before them. Milton is in many ways a negative poem, frightened and didactic out of defiance and self-doubt, the poem of a man fighting as he backs away from life rather than struggling to go forward with love as in The Four Zoas. It is clear that the more Blake felt the lack of an audience, the more hortatory became his tone, and the less convincing even to himself.

I have tried to indicate in an earlier chapter how difficult is the question of Blake’s relation to his patron, Hayley, even though Hayley never meant to be anything but helpful. It is interesting to note that Blake always insists that Satan meant well, and it is certain that it was the close proximity to a patron who had what Blake felt was his rightful place in the world of art, that set off the sparks. For when the Blakes returned to London we find an affectionate correspondence going on which is surprising considering Blake’s epigrams and accusations, and the picture of Hayley as Satan. It is almost certain that this cheerful and insensitive versifier never recognized himself in Satan, for he was, after all, the popular poet of his day, and he took this position very seriously.

From a distance the suppressed rage that Blake built up as regards Hayley looks more like a mild persecution phobia than fact. For Blake, given trivial tasks that made him feel all the more inferior, in doubting his worth as an artist, also had doubts concerning his ability to hold his wife, and suspected Hayley of trying to seduce Catherine. This is a natural and psychologically ‘logical’ train of thought. For if Blake had failed as an artist it meant that he had failed in his very being, and what woman would stand by a failure if such a charming paragon as Hayley were interested in her? This is undoubtedly what went on in a part of Blake’s mind, while the other part knew perfectly well that Hayley only meant to be kind.

To return to Milton: with his soft-spoken blandishments Satan almost succeeds in persuading Los, imagination itself, that it would be the best for all concerned if he were to take over Palamabron’s horses and Harrow. Even when Palamabron proves that all Satan can do is to madden the horses without hope of controlling them, Satan still uses his persuasive powers to win over Los despite the evidence:

Palamabron call’d, & Los & Satan came before him,

And Palamabron shew’d the horses & the servants. Satan wept

And mildly cursing Palamabron, him accus’d of crimes

Himself had wrought. Los trembled: Satan’s blandishments almost

Perswaded the Prophet of Eternity that Palamabron

Was Satan’s enemy …

What could Los do? how could he judge, when Satan’s self believ’d

That he had not oppres’d the horses of the Harrow nor the servants.

So Los said: ‘Henceforth, Palamabron, let each his own station

Keep: nor in pity false, nor in officious brotherhood, where

None needs, be active.’ Meantime Palamabron’s horses

Rag’d.

There is something rather poignant in Los’s rebuke to Palamabron: ‘Henceforth, Palamabron, let each his own station keep.’ That Blake was made to feel tremendously class-conscious at Felpham for the first time is all too apparent. Palamabron is rebuked, too, kindly but firmly, for the misdeeds of Satan:

Meanwhile wept Satan before Los accusing Palamabron

Himself exculpating with mildest speech, for himself believ’d

That he had not oppress’d nor injur’d the refractory servants.

But Satan returning to his Mills (for Palamabron had serv’d

The Mills of Satan as the easier task) found all confusion,

And back return’d to Los, not fill’d with vengeance but with tears,

Himself convinc’d of Palamabron’s turpitude. Los beheld

The servants of the Mills drunken with wine & dancing wild

With shouts & Palamabron’s songs, rending the forests green

With echoing confusion.

Palamabron is the true Bard, Orpheus himself, who disrupts the tidy orderliness of the Mills and instead causes joyful dancing and singing that echo through the forests, freeing life instead of binding it to the Mills. His crime is to shirk the business of making a living that has replaced life itself. Again, this hits close to Blake’s own situation at Felpham. Los, imagination, who is himself confused and distorted under Urizen’s rule, is not sure whether Palamabron is right or whether he should uphold Satan’s neat reasonable way of life. But he is convinced by Satan that this disorderly scene at the Mills is a very bad sign indeed, and so—

Los took off his left sandal, placing it on his head,

Signal of solemn mourning …

Los decides to view the whole event as a disgraceful exhibition on Palamabron’s part. What is even worse, he takes part of the blame upon himself, making Palamabron feel doubly guilty:

And Los said: ‘Ye Genii of the Mills! the Sun is on high,

Your labours call you: Palamabron is also in sad dilemma:

His horses are mad, his Harrow confounded, his companions enrag’d.

Mine is the fault! I should have remember’d that pity divides the soul

And man unmans: follow me with my Plow: this mournful day

Must be a blank in Nature.’

Los believes that this shameful event has disgraced even nature, totally confusing Urizen’s laws of slavery with the laws of nature that teach survival, but also allow for the disturbing and spontaneous miracle of art and the joy of life itself that comes irrespective of routine and earning power. Palamabron is in deep disgrace.

Satan wept over Palamabron.

Theotormon & Bromion contended on the side of Satan

Pitying his youth & beauty, trembling at eternal death.

Even the characters of Blake’s earlier prophecies are against Palamabron in this case. But he has on his side the archangel Michael who ‘contended against Satan in the rolling thunder’. That is to say, although Palamabron the true artist has against him the whole world of sweet reasonableness, he has the world of supernature on his side, and he invokes its aid:

But Palamabron call’d down a Great Solemn Assembly,

That he who will not defend Truth, may be compell’d to

Defend a lie, that he may be snared & caught & taken.

And at Palamabron’s summoning, Eternity descends to sick England:

And all Eden descended into Palamabron’s tent

Among Albion’s Druids & Bards in the caves beneath Albion’s

Death Couch, in the caverns of death, in the corner of the Atlantic.

And in the midst of the Great Assembly Palamabron pray’d:

O God, protect me from my friends.

This again has similarities to some of Blake’s epigrams, especially the one to Hayley:

Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake:

Do by my Enemy for Friendship’s sake.

Los is so angry at this unauthorized action of Palamabron’s that he causes the realm of imagination within Albion to lose touch entirely with fact. He is, however, afraid to let his wife know that he is doing this!

Los in his wrath curs’d heaven & earth; he rent up Nations,

Standing on Albion’s rocks among high-rear’d Druid temples

Which reach the stars of heaven & stretch from pole to pole.

He displac’d continents, the oceans fled before his face:

He alter’d the poles of the world, east, west & north & south,

But he clos’d up Enitharmon from the sight of all these things.

Satan, to counteract Palamabron’s action, asserts himself as deputy-god for Urizen, ‘drawing out his infernal scroll of Moral laws & cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah’. And ‘Thus Satan rag’d amidst the assembly, and his bosom grew opake against the Divine Wisdom.’ The vast abyss opening into this state of Satan is what Blake calls Ulro. It becomes even more clear to Los and Enitharmon that Satan is none other than the spectrous puritan conscience of Urizen, continually reborn within the sick Albion who is Orc.

There is next a passage which really follows on to the story of The Four Zoas and tells of how Enitharmon, when she deserted her husband in spirit to become the goddess in the mystery religion, is seen in nightmare as a raging old woman and not a goddess at all:

Then Los & Enitharmon knew that Satan is Urizen,

Drawn by Orc & the Shadowy Female into Generation.

Oft Enitharmon enter’d weeping into the Space, there appearing

An aged Woman raging along the Streets (the Space is nam’d

Canaan): then she return’d to Los, weary, frightened as from dreams.

Los weeps incoherently over Satan ‘who triumphant divided the Nations’. Yet perversely Los himself ‘set his face against Jerusalem to divide the eon of Albion’. He is determined, in his distorted state, to destroy Jerusalem. It is significant that Blake here uses the gnostic term ‘eon’ for emanation, since it designates a lesser order of creation. Los is, in setting his face against Jerusalem, setting his face against his own wife, and so he does not let her know what he is doing.

Once again health and the possibility of reunion with Jerusalem is denied to Albion. And this is so because the same sort of error that existed in England in the time of the Druids still exists in different terms. This error is fundamentally the gnostic heresy which Urizen inculcates:

And the Mills of Satan were separated into a moony Space

Among the rocks of Albion’s Temples, & Satan’s Druid Sons

Offer the Human Victims throughout all the Earth, & Albion’s

Dread Tomb, immortal on his Rock, overshadow’d the whole Earth,

Where Satan, making to himself Laws from his own identity,

Compell’d others to serve him in moral gratitude & submission,

Being call’d God, setting himself above all that is called God;

And all the Spectres of the Dead, calling themselves Sons of God,

In his synagogues worship Satan under the Unutterable Name.

The real tragedy of Satan’s moral law falls not so much upon Blake–Palamabron who has inner spiritual resources, but upon the working class labourers shut up in the Mills. This is the problem debated in the great assembly in eternity:

And it was enquired Why in a Great Solemn Assembly

The Innocent should be condemn’d for the Guilty.

One cannot be sure that Blake is not poking fun at governmental procedure with his solemn great assembly. An Eternal rises to his feet and offers a theory:

Saying: ‘If the Guilty should be condemn’d he must be an Eternal Death,

And one must die for another throughout all Eternity.

Satan is fall’n from his station & never can be redeemed,

And must be new Created continually moment by moment.

And therefore the Class of Satan shall be call’d the Elect, & those

Of Rintrah the Reprobate, & those of Palamabron, the Redeem’d:

For he is redeem’d from Satan’s Law, the wrath falling on Rintrah.’

All of this discussion in the Assembly may be Blake’s attempt to parallel the council of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost. The next part of the parable is very obscure indeed. An unexplained character named Leutha, the only other occurrence of this name being in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion when Oothoon says ‘I plucked Leutha’s flower’, wants to take upon herself the burden of Satan’s sin and so redeem him. Actually, she only brings about in Satan the ‘feminine’ delusion of pride. ‘Offering herself a Ransom for Satan, taking on her his Sin’ is a satanic parody of the Cross. Leutha tells how,

entering the doors of Satan’s brain night after night

Like sweet perfumes, I stupefied the masculine perceptions

And kept only the feminine awake: hence rose his soft

Delusory love to Palamabron, admiration join’d with envy.

This seems to be also a satanic interpretation of the necessary interior marriage, the union with the feminine side of oneself. For Satan, instead of joining with Leutha who seems to be his emanation, is taken over by her, and is ridden by the feminine principle which should have, once accepted, freed his masculinity. It is difficult to say exactly what Blake is accusing Satan-Hayley of here. The implication that Hayley was somehow dominated by the feminine principle comes out again in a jingle written in Blake’s notebook:

Of H(ayley)’s birth this was the happy lot,

His Mother on his Father him begot.

If Blake is accusing Hayley of effeminacy, further complications ensue when we remember that Blake also thought Hayley a seducer of women. However, the plight of Orc reminds us that being a frustrated and potentially homosexual ascetic is only one side of the penny. The other side is Orc’s libertine imagination. Be this as it may, it is interesting that Blake at one time or another accused poor Hayley of every crime in the book, and seemed not in the least perturbed by apparent inconsistencies.

Satan has his Leutha, and Palamabron has a wife too, named Elynittra, whom we have not met until now. This is, of course, quite separate from the Albion-Jerusalem story. Elynittra knows how to control her husband’s horses and the Harrow. Leutha tries to usurp her place just as Satan tries to take Palamabron’s. But Leutha at least has the grace to confess that it did not work:

I sprang out of the breast of Satan, over the Harrow beaming

In all my beauty, that I might unloose the flaming steeds

As Elynittra used to do; but too well those living creatures

Knew that I was not Elynittra & they brake the traces.

Leutha with her ‘moth-like elegance’ sees that she and Satan are at fault and will get into trouble in the world of art if they persist in such folly. She speaks of,

A Hell of our own making; see! its flames still gird me round.

Jehovah thunder’d above; Satan in pride of heart

Drove the fierce Harrow among the constellations of Jehovah,

Drawing a third part in the fires as stubble north & south

To devour Albion & Jerusalem, the Emanation of Albion.

If Leutha is meant to be Eliza Hayley, the following lines make sense, for Leutha speaks of her exile from Satan just as unstable Eliza was exiled from Hayley. Hayley’s marriage failed and was childless and he had a son by a servant. According to Blake the failure was Satan–Hayley’s fault. And, according to these lines, too, Satan–Hayley was intoxicated by the vitality of Elynittra, Palamabron’s wife: Leutha speaks:

For Elynittra met Satan with all her singing women,

Terrific in their joy & pouring wine of wildest power.

They gave Satan their wine; indignant at the burning wrath,

Wild with prophetic fury, his former life became like a dream.

Cloth’d in the Serpent’s folds, in selfish holiness demanding purity,

Being most impure, self-condemn’d to eternal tears, he drove

Me from his inmost Brain & the doors clos’d with thunder’s sound.

Leutha realizes that this separation is similar to the separation going on within Albion and Jerusalem, keeping them apart and producing in their place Orc and Vala. This is the division begun in the Garden of Eden and will not be healed until Albion and Jerusalem are united and ‘two Eternities meet together’.

All is my fault! We are the Spectre of Luvah, the murderer

Of Albion. O Vala! O Luvah! O Albion! O lovely Jerusalem!

The Sin was begun in Eternity & will not rest to Eternity

Till two Eternities meet together. Ah! lost, lost, lost forever.

The fullest implications of this passage are made clear when we place beside it the short poem in Blake’s notebook called ‘Merlin’s Prophecy’. It is perhaps significant that Satan, with all his arts of mild persuasion and illusion, is like an enchanter.

The King & the Priest must be tied in a tether

Before two virgins shall meet together.

The harvest shall flourish in wintry weather

When two virginities meet together:

Everything that has happened up until now in Milton has been part of the parable sung by the Bard about the woes taking place on earth. Milton listens carefully, about to leave Eternity and travel to earth to redeem his emanation. Now the Bard comes to the end of his tale:

The Bard ceas’d. All consider’d & a loud resounding murmur

Continu’d round the Halls; & much they question’d the immortal

Loud voic’d Bard …

Then there was great murmuring in the Heavens of Albion

Concerning Generation & the Vegetative power & concerning

The Lamb the Saviour. Albion trembled to Italy, Greece & Egypt

To Tartary & Hindostan & China & to Great America,

Shaking the roots & fast foundations of the Earth in doubtfulness.

The loud voic’d Bard terrify’d took refuge in Milton’s bosom.

And at the instigation of the Bard, Milton arises and prepares to go to Earth again to try to set right the mistaken ideas that he more than anyone else has fixed in the English imagination. He confesses that he himself in his puritanical moral righteousness has been the Satan of the Bard’s parable. He cries out in anguish:

When will the Resurrection come to deliver the sleeping body

From corruptibility? O when, Lord Jesus, wilt thou come?

Tarry no longer, for my soul lies at the gates of death.

I will arise & look forth for the morning of the grave:

I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks:

I will go down to self-annihilation & eternal death,

Lest the Last Judgement come & find me unannihilate …

What do I here before the Judgement? without my Emanation?

With the daughters of memory & not with the daughters of inspiration?

I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One!

He is my Spectre.

Milton, because he lacks his emanation, must enter into his horrible hermaphroditic Shadow for his journey back to Earth. And ‘to himself he seem’d a wanderer lost in dreary night’, but Blake reassures the reader by saying that ‘His real & immortal Self appeared to those in Eternity ‘as one sleeping on a couch of gold’.¹ Journeying through space in the shadow of his once mortal body, Milton leaves his immortal body in eternity, and it is as if this journey is a dream of the sleeping body in eternity. Into the shadow body there enter ‘the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence’, and the shadow becomes a kind of ‘polypus that vegetates beneath the deep’ and finally attaches itself beneath the death couch of Albion. Milton’s journey back to Earth is a perilous one, but he goes ‘guarded within’, ‘A mournful form double hermaphroditic, male and female in one wonderful body.’

³ Plate 13, British Museum copy, shows Milton rising over the rim of the world, the sun behind him. He is naked and haloed, dripping from the sea, a garment in one hand, and a look of dedication on his face. The colours are sombre.

The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its

Own Vortex, & when once a traveller thro’ Eternity

Has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

His path, into a globe itself infolding like a sun,

Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,

While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth

Or like a human form, a friend with whom he liv’d benevolent.

As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing

Its vortex, & the north & south with all their starry host,

Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding

His corn-fields & his valleys of five hundred acres square,

Thus is the earth one infinite plane, & not as apparent

To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade.

Thus is the heaven a vortex pass’d already, & the earth

A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity.

‘First Milton saw Albion upon the Rock of Ages, deadly pale outstretch’d … in solemn death’, and, coming near, ‘Milton’s shadow fell precipitant, loud thund’ring into the Sea of Time & Space.’

Blake admits that this is the first he actually saw with his own eyes of Milton’s descent, for he was standing in his garden at Felpham and saw Milton’s fall into time and space. Milton spots Blake in his garden and loses no time in entering into this poet as his earthly vehicle:

Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star

Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift:

And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter’d there:

But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe.¹

⁴ Plate 15 pictures the sons of God playing in a lovely yellow spring light. Below them is an area of darkness and here sits the blind God of laws and tablets, a naked figure stepping up to choke him. Written below in green are the words: ‘To Annihilate the Selfhood of Deceit, and false Forgiveness.’

Milton must now redeem himself in relation to ‘those three females whom his wives, & those three whom his Daughters had represented & contain’d, that they might be resum’d by giving up Selfhood.’ These six women seen in the aggregate constitute what Blake calls the ‘Six-fold Miltonic female’ who has been very much in the unredeemed state of Vala. The Sixfold Miltonic female is called Ololon, and, since Blake and Milton are now one, we can assume that Ololon is also related to Blake’s wife.

The view of women as unredeemed and naturally sinful is due, of course, to Milton’s false concept of God as a vengeful perfectionist deity who is none other than Urizen. That Milton was really against this God and staunchly on the side of Adam and Eve, Blake realizes, and tells us that Milton was really ‘of the Devil’s party’ without knowing it. Milton’s God has also created the illusion that the earth is a Mundane Shell. On this illusory earth the Covering Cherub masks as the true Church:

The Mundane Shell is a vast Concave Earth, an immense

Harden’d shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth,

Enlarg’d into dimension & deform’d into indefinite space,

In Twenty-seven Heavens & all their Hells, with Chaos

And Ancient Night & Purgatory. It is a cavernous Earth

Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven-folds of opakeness,

And finishes where the lark mounts.

And, Blake adds,

travellers from Eternity pass outward to Satan’s seat,

But travellers to Eternity pass inward to Golgonooza.¹

⁵ Above in this plate are three grey women seated and looking into darkness while three, clothed in pastels, make gestures of dismay. Below, a man halts in fear, as a tree with man’s body reaches out to grasp him in its branches. A hoary head watches from the mossy ground.

Vala, the shadowy female, sees Milton’s descent, and thinks he has come to spread the same doctrines as before in the churches, and that as before she will be condemned. It is clear that in the lament Blake gives her he is speaking of actual social conditions such as mill slavery as much as of symbolic events:

And thus the Shadowy Female howls in articulate howlings:

‘I will lament over Milton in the lamentations of the afflicted:

My Garments shall be woven of sighs & heart broken lamentations:

The misery of unhappy Families shall be drawn out into its border,

Wrought with the needle with dire sufferings, poverty, pain & woe

Along the rocky Island & thence throughout the whole Earth;

There shall be the sick Father & his starving Family, there

The Prisoner in the stone dungeon & the Slave at the Mill.

I will have writings written all over it in Human Words

That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read

And get by rote as a hard task of a life of sixty years.

I will have kings inwoven upon it & Councellors & Mighty Men:

The Famine shall clasp it together with buckles & Clasps,

And the Pestilence shall be its fringe & the War its girdle,

To divide into Rahab & Tirzah that Milton may come to our tents.

For I will put on the Human Form & take the Image of God,

Even Pity & Humanity, but my Clothing shall be Cruelty:

And I will put on Holiness as a breastplate & as a helmet,

And all my ornaments shall be of the gold of broken hearts,

And the precious stones of anxiety & care & desperation & death

And repentance for sin & sorrow & punishment & fear,

To defend me from thy terrors, O Orc, my only beloved.’

With this final line of Vala’s lament we move back into the situation of The Four Zoas as into another room or dimension. There is another passage later on which takes us back to the earlier poem in exactly the same way, and which follows on to this passage in meaning. I will therefore take the liberty of commenting on both together.

Blake tells us specifically that Orc is here Luvah or Christ despite his appearance of the sick monk. But Vala can only see him as the ascetic who condemns love because she herself is in a delusory state. And therefore she must hide from the terror of this strange beloved who was once her Luvah. She who should be a vital part of Jerusalem, Albion’s bride, has become the Whore of Babylon instead. Just as Orc is the sick Christian, she is the sick Mother Church, and their relation is one of separation and warfare rather than of love and unity.

But ‘Orc who is Luvah’ although he is sick unto death can still speak when necessary with the voice of Christ although his disguise as the pious ascetic has almost silenced this voice of the true Christ within him. Thus he now speaks to Vala who is the false mother church, warning her against her own destructive tendency to be the Shadowy Female instead of Jerusalem. He begs her to stand firm as Jerusalem, if only for self-protection so that she may not be destroyed no matter how hurtful his sick actions are, and no matter how much he seems to want her to be the mother image, lusted after jealously and destructively and cruelly unattainable. For if, in her hurt and confusion, she were to become as sick as he is, then indeed all is lost. He speaks to her with tenderness from the depths of his own illness, and his sure touch, his seeing what she must do against almost insuperable difficulties, is indeed the voice of Christ coming as if from far off:

Orc answer’d: Take not the Human Form, O loveliest, Take not

Terror upon thee! Behold how I am & tremble lest thou also

Consume in my Consummation; but thou maist take a Form

Female & lovely, that cannot consume in Man’s consummation.

Wherefore dost thou Create & weave this Satan for a Covering?

When thou attemptest to put on the Human Form, my wrath

Burns to the top of heaven against thee in Jealousy & Fear;

Then I rend thee asunder, then I howl over thy clay & ashes.

When wilt thou put on the Female Form as in times of old,

With a Garment of Pity & Compassion like the Garment of God?

His Garments are long sufferings for the children of Men;

Jerusalem is his Garment, & not thy Covering Cherub, O lovely

Shadow of my delight who wanderest seeking for the prey.’

‘Human’ in this passage, oddly for Blake, applies to the mother-image of natural religion, Vala in all of her too human jealousy and hurt behaviour. ‘Female’ is here used to describe Jerusalem’s state of fourfold detached caring and not caring, when she is capable of detecting those hurts which are caused by illness and those which are intentional and perverse, and of acting accordingly. Hers must be a calm detached sureness of touch in love that is never thrown off balance by personal hurts. Her anger must be just and wise.

In Blake’s unique vision of Christianity the emphasis lies on the Christian marriage. He insists that the love between man and woman must be redeemed from the sense of sin that is still attached to it, and freed from the feeling that marriage is a state somehow inferior to celibacy. The whole teaching of the Church on marriage is unsatisfactory and causes much confusion and misery, more by what it omits to say than by what it actually says. Blake sets out to tell us those things that the Church has never articulated about the sanctity of the marriage relationship, and how it can and indeed must achieve full union in God as much as any mystic’s consummation. The Church still manages to imply that asceticism is a higher calling than marriage, that the higher states of spiritual life are open only to the ascetic, and that sex in any form is somehow polluting: if, it implies, one is weak enough to have to give into natural desires, then one must marry simply for the utilitarian purpose of bringing up a family, without reference to the possibilities of a love relationship that can go as high and deep in union with God as the experience of any mystic. Blake sets out to show the infinite possibilities of a marriage ever expanding in Christ, but he also shows with complete honesty the difficulties that stand in the way, difficulties largely created by the false sense of guilt fostered, however unwittingly, by the Church itself.

The feeling of guilt is, of course, projected on to Woman who is seen as the Temptress by the male. This is a necessary illusion, as a stage, and goes back to the Fall. But our faulty interpretation of Christianity, Blake cannot insist often enough, instead of curing the illness we have fallen into, is in fact pushing us ever nearer to spiritual death. Before the sick rose can begin to be healed, and before we can begin to recover we must learn to regard the love of woman for man in an altogether different light. Otherwise she will behave just as she is expected to behave, becoming Vala the temptress, or, if she is sensitive, fleeing in horror from the whole idea like Thel who is falsely nun-like, Orc’s feminine equivalent. Most often she vacillates pathetically and confusingly between the two extremes, thrown by horror of the one to the other, not standing firm as she ought to as a whole person, Jerusalem. Love seen simply as sex can be highly destructive, for sexual attraction is only one aspect, at once the most and the least important part of a Christian marriage which must be the love between whole Christ-centred people. The perfect mystical union of man and woman together in God is possible, but only after an inner marriage or integration has first taken place within the man and within the woman, each until then self-divided.

This is what Christ hidden in Orc’s disguise is trying to say to Jerusalem. There is something very poignant in his effort to help her from out of the depths of his own illness. Out of the love that Albion bears for his bride and which has not been altogether destroyed, Orc can speak to Jerusalem with momentary insight, seeing what is right for her and wanting her to stop being the destructive mother-goddess that he seems, when he is ill, to be clamouring for her to be. For although he is fascinated by Vala and craves her, at those moments when he can stand clear of his illness he realizes that Vala will destroy himself and Jerusalem just as surely as Jerusalem’s standing firm as herself will cure him. She must realize that she must neither become Vala in response to the needs of the sick Orc, or, on the other hand, try to escape the whole problem by fleeing as Thel. Only to remain Jerusalem can help, to be fully herself at all times.

This is very difficult to achieve, for it means that she must be impervious to all the hurts caused by Albion’s attitude when he is sick. It is doubly difficult because not only is she deprived of her Luvah, but she is paradoxically seen as the harlot, and the more she tries to get her lover back the more she seems the temptress. To make matters worse she tries to gain a semblance of purity by becoming the unattainable mother in Urizen’s religion. As Vala she is as one-sided as Albion when he is Orc. As Vala she is the sick rose: as Jerusalem she is the rose of peace. A few months before his death Blake wrote the following curious lines which would seem to indicate that he thought that Orc and Vala had the final word: ‘Flaxman is Gone, and we must All soon follow, every one to his Own Eternal House, Leaving the delusive Goddess mother and her Laws, to get into Freedom from all Laws of the Members, into The Mind, in which every one is king and Priest in his own House. God send it so on Earth, as it is in Heaven.’

Jerusalem’s refusal to be Vala would steady Albion and almost force him to see things more clearly. Her temptation is always to give in to his sick fantasy and play her appointed role in it because he seems to want this. And in this way she so confuses herself as well as him that neither knows dream from reality. In terms of the Church, Blake is saying that if only the mother Church would be Jerusalem instead of Babylon, then the true Christ would emerge from behind the mask of Orc, the sick ascetic. For ‘Jerusalem is his Garment, & not thy Covering Cherub O lovely Shadow’.

Orc explains all this to Jerusalem who stands hesitating in the guise of Vala–Babylon, not knowing whether to heed him for this is not Christ speaking in a dazzling form she could be sure of, but only her sick husband who too often deludes her, being sometimes a monk, sometimes a demon, sometimes a child, and all too seldom her lover. Christ can speak no more plainly if he chooses to speak from within Albion, for he must be bound to the extent that Albion is bound. Thus Jerusalem is very mistrustful, not knowing whether she should remain Vala and try to force her lover to return, or take his advice and become herself again. As she listens to this strangely hidden Christ, the thought of all her wrongs makes her go off the deep end again in the most Vala-ish way, and the tender wooing of Christ from within Orc is in vain: she chooses to be Vala:

So spoke Orc … in the darkness

Opening interiorly into Jerusalem & Babylon, shining glorious

In the Shadowy Female’s bosom. Jealous her darkness grew:

Howlings fill’d all the desolate places in accusations of Sin,

In Female beauty shining in the unform’d void; & Orc in vain

Stretch’d out his hands of fire & wooed …

Thus darken’d the Shadowy Female tenfold, & Orc tenfold

Glow’d on his rocky Couch against the darkness: loud thunder

Told of the enormous conflict.

This is a very fine passage conveying with great beauty a psychological situation difficult to describe. We are shown the conflict between the two possibilities within Jerusalem, and Orc’s ability to see them. We get the momentary gleam of Jerusalem’s wavering on the brink of choosing to be herself, and then the sudden darkening as she thinks of her past jealousies and desolations and her present fears and doubts, and of how she has unjustly been accused of Sin. She dwells on these wrongs done to her by the person she loves most and trusts least, and his tender wooing of her is in vain, and we are shown, instead of their reunion, the battle of their gigantic wills as she becomes Vala again, and he becomes more Orc than ever.

The reason that Jerusalem cannot stand firm as herself while Albion is sick, is that she has never consciously worked out where she stood, and what constituted being herself. She herself is afraid that her own feminine nature is sinful, and believes that either she must flee it as Thel, or give in to it wholesale as Vala. She is afraid of life, of men and her attractiveness to them, and above all, of herself. She is afraid that she is Eve-ill. She cannot be Jerusalem until she fully accepts her own femininity and responsibility for it, knowing it controllable by the values of Christ and not fearing it as a force of nature that must either sweep one away with it, or be suppressed altogether. As Jerusalem she would understand that Vala is an essential part of her nature, and a very delightful one when it does not try to be the whole, just as the withdrawals of the nun-like Thel within her also serve their purpose within the total personality. What is confusing, both to herself and to her husband, is the attempt of first one and then the other side of her immature self to stand for the whole that is Jerusalem. What has to be achieved, within her as within Albion, is the inner union of the earth-mother of the passions with the controlling values of the father, the Logos. Only then is stability and reality achieved, and an external marriage possible.

The picture that Blake gives us of Jerusalem as Thel and as Vala, is almost as interesting as the one he gives of Orc, but he is not nearly so clear about its origins as he is about the genesis of Orc’s predicament. He sees Jerusalem only in her relation to her sick husband, and not in relation to her own archetypal situation. It is only in the poem called Jerusalem that Blake sees that she has been in as complex a relation to archetypal parents as Orc has been, and that she, too, is struggling to achieve an inner marriage of the two sides of herself, and this is why she loses grip of herself whenever things go wrong. In Thel Blake seemed to be feeling his way towards such an understanding, but in the horror of seeing what is happening to Albion because he has lost touch with his emanation, he loses for a time sympathy with her struggle, and can only picture her as fallen from what she should be. If Thel is taken as the first evidence in Blake’s writings of the sex-revulsion, it may indeed be that Albion’s illness was provoked by Jerusalem’s insecurity instead of the other way around. This would be most difficult to deduce in any case.

In the state that we now find Albion and Jerusalem, he mistakes the sickly asceticism of Orc for love of God, just as she mistakes her stormy emotions as Vala for true love. Each seems to offer to the other a kind of death. This, too, is the state of Christianity. Orc, impotently ascetic, ravaged by incestuous desires and life-hatred, is the true picture of what we imagine is the holy man. Jerusalem, as the unattainable mother in this false religion is ‘pure’, but if she descends from the pedestal, is condemned as a harlot. Just as Orc is the serpent at the heart of Christianity, so Vala is Babylon, the ‘Covering Cherub’ that hides the true Church and the true Virgin Mary. To see Christianity in this light is to escape its meaning altogether and to build it on the same kind of parental authority that is the basis of natural religion, with its taboos and guilts, and the desire for punishment that prevents men and women from growing up and being filled with the love and authority of the Christ within them.

Albion has reason to be disappointed with Jerusalem. When Albion first married her she gave every appearance of being fully herself, stable, serene and enduring. And so she was in appearance and potentially at every level. But her strength and quality had not yet been tested and confirmed. The same is true of Albion: he, too, appeared to be in every respect a man and sure of himself, but like her, he fell apart at the first test. She cries to him_

Once thou wast to Me the loveliest son of heaven—But now

Why art thou Terrible?

and he laments to her:

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 & unlovely in my sight, because thou hast cruelly

Cut off my loves in fury till I have no love left for thee.

Thy loves depend on him thou lovest, & on his dear loves

Depend thy pleasures, which thou hast cut off by jealousy.

Therefore I shew my Jealousy & set before you Death.¹

⁶ An illustration shows Blake’s brother, Robert, with Milton entering into his foot as a star. In the text Albion says to Jerusalem_

Behold Milton descended to redeem the Female Shade

From Death Eternal; such your lot, to be continually Redeem’d

By death and misery of those you love and by Annihilation.

His pride is intellectual as hers is sexual. Any doubt concerning her sexual attractiveness, even when she is making herself thoroughly unattractive, prevents her from loving spiritually, and she is full of such doubts because she has not come to terms with her own femininity. Any hurt to his intellectual pride and suggestion that he cannot be a god in reason, comes out in physical impotence, and there are many such hurts for he has not yet learned the bounds to the ‘masculine’ intellect. Each gives full attention to proving him or herself unequalled in what should have only half energy and half interest. Consequently, the other side of human nature is neglected, and she is spiritually impotent, just as he is physically.

And all this is because neither has accepted the main fact of the human condition which is its essential duality in that no man can be all ‘masculine’ force and intellect, nor can any woman be pure earthy attraction without thereby destroying humanity. And this is for the simple reason that no man or woman is all male or female, just as no one is all spirit or all flesh or all mother or all father, but compounded of both in an infinitely delightful variation. Gods like Urizen are boring as are goddesses like Vala, but people are not. This is what Albion and Jerusalem do not realize when she puts all of her energies into being a rampaging earth-goddess as he puts all of his into serving Urizen. The irony of the situation is that she is not very attractive or feminine when she behaves like Vala, and he is certainly not masculine or brilliant as Orc. There is much waste.

But the divine voice speaking for a moment from within Orc tells Jerusalem in no uncertain terms that as Vala she is not lovable, and that he does not love her in this state although as Jerusalem he did love her. Painful as it is to be told this, just when she is rampaging because she feels unloved, this is exactly the jolt that Jerusalem needed. She listens this time. He tells her that she should have remained Jerusalem even when, due to illness, he could not be her lover. The temporary eclipse of passion has nothing to do with their basic love for each other and she should have known this instead of reacting in hurt pride and jealousy. By so acting she has made matters much worse than they would have been otherwise, whereas, had she remained herself she could have helped, seeing what was Albion’s illness and what was not. This would be to care and not to care at the same time which is the only true way of loving, and, although it seems to sacrifice something in being much less intense than Vala’s stormy love, it gains more than it loses in the diamond-like hardness that can endure, and the delicate sureness of response that can note the false notes both in herself and in Albion. Most of all, it keeps the touchstone of humorous serenity that can good-naturedly see through weakness and childishness and not allow it to rule, almost laughing it out of countenance. Had Jerusalem loved Albion maturely in this way she would never have allowed herself to be made into the mother-goddess in Urizen’s religion, and would have detected in herself the hurt pride that made her welcome the glamour and power of this role. Nor would she have been unduly disturbed by any of Albion’s aberrations because of an inner freedom which can place the cause and real meaning of such behaviour, and a love of humanity in all its weakness and lovability which makes it easier to forgive than to condemn. The keynote of such love is ‘organiz’d innocence’ which is both hard and soft, both charged with energy and peaceful, both strong and pliant, both luminous and solid, rather than the fearful uncertain withdrawal of Thel or the over-active intensity of Vala. This kind of love could have cured Albion and also redeemed woman from the ‘accusation of sin’.

But in order to achieve such love Jerusalem must accept Vala in herself instead of simply giving into her and then being horrified. Instead of fearing her, she must become one with her and redeem the mother, her own earthy passionate nature, just as Albion must become at one with the father, his own intellect, in order to control and put in their proper place these faculties which loom large all out of proportion. To become one with the faculty that ‘proves’ one’s masculinity or femininity is to become sure of oneself as a man or woman for the first time, and until this is somehow accomplished a woman will have an ‘earth-wish’ just as a man has a ‘death-wish’ in needing to become one with the father-logos.

As things are, however, neither Albion nor Jerusalem has achieved such a state of ‘reorganiz’d innocence’ and so neither can distinguish fact from fantasy. Neither is at all sure that Albion’s ridiculous accusations are not true and that Jerusalem is not his wife but a sinful harlot, or potentially one. This is where, had Jerusalem herself not been afraid of her own passionate nature, she would have firmly and humorously declared herself Albion’s wife and not a harlot, instead of herself feeling guilty and overwhelmed by Vala’s lugubrious rampages. Because she has not come to terms with the Vala in herself, understanding that Vala is a necessary part of her personality that can be lived with only when controlled properly and not allowed to rampage, she thinks that she must behave like unredeemed Eve in order to get the love Albion denies her, and she loathes herself the whole time she is behaving this way, even though her power excites her. She sees, too, that Albion is in part a perverse and frightened child, and, as Vala, she sees nothing wrong in ‘mothering’ him when this is the case. She perceives that as the monk, Orc, he puts her on a pedestal, and so she plays the goddess as well, rather flattered. And thus it is impossible for Albion in his sick state to know whether Jerusalem is in fact his wife, or whether she is not really a harlot, a goddess or his mother. As Vala she is trying to provoke Albion into that very intensity and violence of love that, as Thel and Enion, she fled from because it seemed sinful. Now, seeing Albion as Orc repressing all of this violence and trying to be intellect alone, she realizes that in a lover there must be a core of crudity, vulgarity even, and humour. It is this, too late, that she tries to revive in Albion-Orc, by the wrong tactics, knowing that it was such energy above all that she loved and was ashamed of loving.

Neither knows himself or the other, unable as each is to distinguish fact from fantasy. The question ‘Who am I?’, so laughable in itself, becomes the essence of breakdown, or perhaps ‘What am I?’ What might in a healthy marriage have been imaginative make-believe—a momentary assumption by Jerusalem of the role of goddess, mother, or provocative temptress, or by Albion of the role of frowning god, father, or child to her mother—has become no longer a game but a terrifying nightmare in which the role played swallows up the whole identity. Vala, the earth mother, has swallowed up Jerusalem, just as Orc hides Albion and Christ. This is no magical play between grown-ups, but a frightening regression to a prolonged parent-child relationship. It is both terrifying and grotesque. The delicate gauge of what is reality is altogether out of gear, although, had Jerusalem remained herself, what now seems nightmare would have seemed too ridiculous to accept.

When Orc tells Jerusalem that he does not love her when she is Vala, and she still remains suspicious and jealous of him, he assures her that it is only because she has become Vala that he ‘leaves her … intirely abstracting himself from Female loves’. He tells her that in order to save her own womanhood, if not his sanity, she must relent and stop being Vala:

(when) intirely abstracting himself from Female loves,

She shall relent in fear of death; she shall begin to give

Her maidens to her husband, delighting in his delight.

And then & then alone begins the happy Female joy

As it is done in Beulah, & thou, O Virgin Babylon, Mother of Whoredoms,

Shalt bring Jerusalem in thine arms in the night watches, and

No longer turning her a wandering Harlot in the streets

Shalt give her into the arms of God your Lord & Husband.

It is the mother and harlot-virgin, Vala herself, who will relent and bring Jerusalem to her husband instead of making her a harlot wandering the streets. That is, Vala will do this when Jerusalem is reconciled with her and assimilates her as a part of her personality instead of being dominated by her, and swallowed.

So ends that part of Milton which continues the story of Albion and Jerusalem begun in The Four Zoas. Albion’s reunion with his bride is not yet to be realized, for ‘Urizen emerged from his Rocky Form & from his snows’. As I have said, this section about Albion and Jerusalem seems out of context in Milton which presents us with an altogether different story.

We return once more to Milton’s journey through infinity to earth. He comes to an England which is ruled by Urizen and which is therefore unable to become one with the holy city of Jerusalem. This was the jumping-off point for Blake’s interpolation of the psychological situation between Albion, the man, and his bride. Milton is determined to fight against the false God, the same deity that had so deluded him in his previous existence on earth. ‘Silent they met & silent strove … The Man & Demon strove many periods.’

The four faculties or Zoas are now made to coincide with the four points of the compass in England. They are in chaos because Albion is still in chaos:

Four Universes round the Mundane Egg remain Chaotic,

One to the North, named Urthona: One to the South, named Urizen:

One to the East, named Luvah: One to the West, named Tharmas;

They are the Four Zoas that stood around the Throne Divine.

But when Luvah assum’d the World of Urizen to the South

And Albion was slain upon his mountains & in his tent,

All fell towards the Center in dire ruin sinking down.

And in the South remains a burning fire: in the East, a void;

In the West, a world of raging waters: in the North, a solid,

Unfathomable, without end. But in the midst of these

Is built eternally the Universe of Los & Enitharmon,

Towards which Milton went, but Urizen oppos’d his path.

Milton is tempted by various delusions of Urizen who tries to win him back to the false religion:

The Twofold form Hermaphroditic & the Double-sexed,

The Female–male & the Male–Female, self-dividing stood

Before him in their beauty & in cruelties of holiness,

Shining in darkness, glorious upon the deeps of Entuthon,

Saying: ‘Come thou to Ephraim! behold the kings of Canaan!

The beautiful Amalekites behold the fires of youth

Bound with the Chain of Jealousy by Los & Enitharmon.

The banks of Cam, cold learning’s stream, London’s dark frowning towers

Lament upon the winds of Europe in Rephaim’s Vale,

Because Ahania, rent apart into a desolate night,

Laments, & Enion wanders like a weeping inarticulate voice,

And Vala labours for her bread & water among the Furnaces …

Come, bring with thee Jerusalem with songs on the Grecian Lyre!

In Natural Religion, in experiments on Men

Let her be offer’d up to Holiness! …

Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming? …

His Images are born for War, for Sacrifice to Tirzah,

To Natural Religion, to Tirzah, the Daughter of Rahab the Holy …

Within her bosom Albion lies enbalm’d, never to awake.’

These temptations offered to Milton are of that bisexual nature which, Blake feels, is the outcome of such a religion as Urizen’s. Jerusalem is sacrificed to this religion. Blake was before his time in being aware of and articulating the fact that man is both male and female. No one so much as he realized that both components are necessary to the whole man or woman. It is only when Urizen in the man, or Vala in the woman, divides off from the whole that trouble is the result. Urizen can cause such a separation to seem natural and an end in itself, instead of a necessary breaking up before the validity of the whole is accepted. Paradoxically, the moment that a man accepts and unites with the female principle in himself, the more masculine he immediately becomes. ‘O how can I with my gross tongue that cleaveth to the dust Tell of the Four-fold Man in starry numbers fitly order’d,’ cries Blake. It is only when the presence of factors of the opposite sex in one are not accepted that they are likely to begin to lead a life of their own. Then the bisexual nature of man becomes all too apparent. This is obvious in the devotees of Urizen’s religion, whether monk or scholar.

It has often been noted that there is a startling likeness between Blake’s fourfold schema of the psyche and Jung’s division. Blake differs, however, in saying that no one faculty should dominate the others, that the core of personality is something different and more to do with Christ’s being at its centre than with anything else, for Christ is imagination. Jung says that the dominance of one or two of the faculties in combination cause all type differences, although he does not, of course, claim that such a theory solves completely the mystery of personality.

Milton strives valiantly with all the temptations of Urizen. To strengthen himself he has entered into Blake,¹ and Blake prays: ‘O Lord, do with me as thou wilt! for I am nothing, & vanity. If thou chuse to elect a worm, it shall remove the mountains.’ And this faith begins to work:

⁷ Plate 29 shows Milton entering ‘William’ as a star.

Now Albion’s sleeping Humanity began to turn upon his Couch,

Feeling the electric flame of Milton’s awful precipitate descent.

Seest thou this little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?

It has a heart like thee, a brain open to heaven & hell,

Withinside wondrous & expansive: its gates are not clos’d:

I hope thine are not: hence it clothes itself in rich array:

Hence thou art cloth’d with human beauty, O thou mortal man …

Thus Milton fell thro’ Albion’s heart, travelling outside of Humanity

Beyond the Stars in Chaos, in Caverns of the Mundane Shell.

Los, imagination, who has been distorted by Urizen’s rule like the rest of Albion’s faculties, has not seen the point of Milton’s descent into Blake at Felpham. Suddenly it dawns upon him. He understands that Blake is going to set Orc, the sick core of Albion, free from the father-god:

At last when desperation almost tore his heart in twain

He recollected an old Prophecy in Eden recorded

And often sung to the loud harp at the immortal feasts:

That Milton of the land of Albion should up ascend

Forward from Ulro from the Vale of Felpham, & set free

Orc from his Chain of Jealousy: he started at the thought.

Milton is falling through the various faculties of Albion as he falls through Blake. This would lead one to believe that Blake’s identification of himself with Albion is fairly straightforward even though he also appears in this poem in his own person. This backs up the biographical evidence I have already cited for this equation. Up until now I have leaned over backwards in my exegesis of the prophetic books not to indicate any identification between Blake and Albion where it was tempting to do so. However, since Blake himself makes the connection, it seems fairly safe to do so. Catherine Blake also appears in Milton, and she is referred to by Blake as ‘my sweet Shadow of Delight’, the same phrase that he often uses to describe Vala-Jerusalem.

But Milton entering my Foot, I saw in the nether

Regions of the Imagination—also all men on Earth

And all in Heaven saw in the nether regions of the Imagination

In Ulro beneath Beulah—the vast breach of Milton’s descent.

But I knew not that it was Milton, for man cannot know

What passes in his members till periods of Space & Time

Reveal the secrets of Eternity: far more extensive

Than any other earthly things are Man’s lineaments.

And all this Vegetable World appear’d on my left Foot

As a bright sandal form’d immortal of precious stones & gold.

I stoop’d down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity.

This is, of course, the same sandal that Los had placed on his head as a symbol of solemn mourning after Palamabron’s disgrace in Satan’s Mills. Palamabron as well as Milton is now to be redeemed in Blake. And Los, even though his realm of imagination is still in a highly distorted state, now sides with Blake and enters into him as the spirit of prophecy. But Blake is not really sure that Los means to be friendly after what happened to Palamabron:

While Los heard indistinct in fear, what time I bound my sandals

On to walk forward thro’ Eternity, Los descended to me:

And Los behind me stood, a terrible flaming Sun, just close

Behind my back. I turned round in terror, & behold!

Los stood in that fierce glowing fire, & he also stoop’d down

And bound my sandals on in Udan-Adan; trembling I stood

Exceedingly with fear & terror, standing in the Vale

Of Lambeth; but he kiss’d me & wish’d me health,

And I became One Man with him arising in my strength.

’Twas too late now to recede. Los had enter’d into my Soul …

I am that Shadowy Prophet …

Palamabron and Rintrah do not trust this return of Milton. They fear that his followers will ‘weave a new Religion from new Jealousy of Theotormon. Milton’s religion is the cause: there is no end to destruction.’ They are afraid that Milton comes,

To destroy Jerusalem as a Harlot, & her Sons as Reprobates,

To raise up Mystery the Virgin Harlot, Mother of War,

Babylon the Great, the Abomination of Desolation.¹

⁸ Plate 21 shows a male figure in a flaming sun, a female crouched before him, looking back.

Los speaks to them_

O noble Sons, be patient yet a little!

I have embrac’d the falling Death, he is become One with me.

O Sons, we live not by wrath, by mercy alone we live!

I recollect an old prophecy in Eden recorded in gold & oft

Sung to the harp, That Milton of the land of Albion

Should up ascend forward from Felpham’s Vale & break the Chain

Of Jealousy from all its roots …

But how this is as yet we know not, & we cannot know

Till Albion is arisen: then patient wait a little while.

Los pleads for understanding as well as for patience. Los equates Albion with Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead. Such a miracle was possible only in the days before the Covering Cherub hid the true Church, and Christ’s true power was hidden behind sickly piety such as Orc’s:

Pity then your Father’s tears.

When Jesus rais’d Lazarus from the Grave I stood & saw

Lazarus, who is the Vehicular Body of Albion the Redeem’d,

Arise into the Covering Cherub, who is the Spectre of Albion,…

Upon his Rock beneath his Tomb, I saw the Covering Cherub

Divide Four-fold into Four Churches, when Lazarus arose,

Paul, Constantine, Charlemaine, Luther; behold, they stand before us

Stretch’d over Europe & Asia! …

So Los spoke. Furious they descended to Bowlahoola & Allamanda,

Indignant, unconvinc’d by Los’s arguments …

Part of Blake’s eccentricity in Milton lies in the fact that in this poem he is playing games to hoodwink the same audience he is pleading with to give him a hearing. This is annoyingly evident in the over-frequent use of nonsense-names which have no vital connection with anything important, but simply appear once or twice to send the reader hunting all over for a profound meaning, and then disappear as casually. As well as demanding that we keep in mind the symbolic usages of real place names, Blake asks us to remember that Ulro is the space named Satan; that ‘Bowlahoola is name’d Law by mortals’; and Golgonoora is the ‘spiritual fourfold London in the loins of Albion’. We are expected to know at any momentary reference to them what Luban and the Lake of Udan-Adan and the Forests of Entuthon Benython stand for, as well as to recognize each of the minor characters who wander in from earlier prophetic books. The reader is not even convinced that all of these names are really important to Blake himself. The names strike falsely on the mind’s ear as if Blake were deliberately and defiantly going too far into meaningless eccentricity to annoy the audience which pays no attention to him and which ignored the things he was profoundly concerned with. The theme and story of Milton are thin, childish, and unimportant compared to anything else Blake ever wrote, and Blake drifts passively in the idle current of his narrative, pulling in any straws of nonsense that float by, seeing what he can get away with. Blake as the author of Milton seems much like a bored child telling more and more fantastic tales in the hope that someone will pay attention if only to contradict. Only in the passages which carry on the story of Albion and Jerusalem begun in The Four Zoas do we get any feeling of a deep and necessary psychological drama playing itself out.

In vain Los announces that Milton has come to redeem his errors through Blake. No one listens to his extravagant claims:

The Awakener is come outstretch’d over Europe: the Vision of God is fulfill’d:

The Ancient Man upon the Rock of Albion Awakes,

He listens to the sounds of War astonish’d & asham’d,

He sees his Children mock at Faith & deny Providence …

But the time of your refreshing cometh: only a little moment

Still abstain from pleasure & rest in the labours of eternity …

Wait till the Judgement is past, till the Creation is consumed,

And then rush forward with me into the glorious spiritual

Vegetation, the Supper of the Lamb & his Bride, & the

Awaking of Albion our friend & ancient companion.

So Los spoke. But lightnings of discontent broke on all sides round …

Yet, despite all opposition Blake–Milton together with Los and his sons labour to create the fourfold man and the fourfold city of Jerusalem, even though Nature is recalcitrant. For,

every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, & Not

A Natural; for a Natural Cause only seems: it is a Delusion

Of Ulro & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory.

The sons of Los who are the true artists set themselves all sorts of tasks in the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the bride of Christ, the holy city, the house of eternity:

Some Sons of Los surround the Passions with porches of iron and silver,

Creating form & beauty around the dark regions of sorrow,

Giving to airy nothing a name & habitation

Delightful, with bounds to the Infinite putting off the Indefinite

Into most holy forms of Thought; such is the power of inspiration.

They labour incessant with many tears & afflictions,

Creating the beautiful House for the piteous sufferer.

Others Cabinets richly fabricate of gold & ivory

For Doubts & fears unform’d & wretched & melancholy.

The little weeping Spectre stands on the threshold of Death

Eternal …

Again the emphasis is on the bounding line that must limit all true and ‘holy forms of thought’. Even if these bounds stretch to Eternity, they are never indefinite. It is a delusion of Urizen to make Albion think he can push his thought beyond all bounds. It only makes Albion’s sickness worse, and he suffers from vague and indefinite fears. It is to house such fears that the sons of Los labour to build rich cabinets: to embody airy nothing imagination builds forms and dwellings. The only way to grasp infinity is through Minute Particulars and the wirey bounding line. In a letter written a few months before his death, Blake comments: ‘I know too well that the great majority of Englishmen are fond of the indefinite, which they measure by Newton’s doctrine of the fluxions of an atom, a thing that does not exist. These are politicians and think that republican art is inimical to their atom, for a line or lineament is not formed by chance. A line is a line in its minutest subdivisions, strait or crooked. It is itself and not intermeasurable with or by anything else.’

When Albion tries to be god-like and encompass infinity with the mind alone, what he actually becomes is Orc, the weeping spectrous child full of fear and on the threshold of spiritual death and madness because reason is strained so far that it has no contact with his emotional nature. And mind stretched in this way, far from being God-like, reaches only the vague, the opaque and indefinite. This is not to say that reason in its right place cannot help Albion to know infinity. When reason is applied to a particular situation it reveals the eternal truth or form behind the minute particular, so that one may see the world in a grain of sand.

It is ironic that while Albion is convinced that by reason alone he can possess all knowledge, he is living in the constant vague but agonizing fear of utter extinction, because he is trying to equal the angry father-god. He cannot even enter the house of life, let alone eternity. He suffers piteously and is defeated by the too high standards of perfection set by his own reason. He is forbidden to live, but is none the less completely terrified by death. And all this started when Albion first doubted the goodness of sensory experience.

Blake, far from being the airy visionary and anti-rationalist that he is thought to be, is always struggling to control in himself a too rational bias. It is not the same thing as being anti-rational to recognize and try to put into its rightful place an overweening pride of reason in oneself, keeping it from getting the upper hand. Hence we have Blake’s insistence on the validity of empirical fact and the evidence of the passions and emotions. Here, too, we have Blake’s plea for minute particularity and the wirey bounding line in life as in art. And all too often his own analysing intellect keeps him from following his own advice. The measure of his rationality is indicated by the failure of the prophetic books to achieve this particularity and proportion. Pushed to such an extreme as Albion has pushed it, Blake sees that rationality becomes almost the same as complete irrationality, that is, madness. Without bounds the reason is nothing, and its possessor is at the mercy of Ideas become raging archetypes as much as any animal is at the mercy of instinct. He becomes Nebuchadnezzar in fact.

And so imagination, in the form of the sons of Los, is continually busy building forms for these empty ideas to find a home in. This is the house of eternity that is Jerusalem. They build windows into eternity, the timeless moments and creative periods:

But others of the Sons of Los build Moments & Minutes & Hours

And Days & Months & Years & Ages & Periods, wondrous buildings;

And every Moment has a Couch of gold for soft repose,

(A Moment equals a pulsation of the artery)

And between every two Moments stands a Daughter of Beulah

To feed the Sleepers on their Couches with maternal care.

And every Minute has an azure Tent with silken Veils:

And every Hour has a bright golden Gate carved with skill:

And every Day & Night has Walls of brass & Gates of adamant,

Shining like precious Stones & ornamented with appropriate signs:

And every Month a silver paved Terrace builded high:

And every Year invulnerable Barriers with high Towers:

And every Age is Moated deep with Bridges of silver & gold:

And every Seven Ages is Incircled with a Flaming Fire …

Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years,

For in this Period the Poet’s Work is done, & all the Great

Events of Time start forth & are conceiv’d in such a period,

Within a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery.

Book the First of Milton ends with these and other activities of the Sons of Los to rebuild Jerusalem.

The Second Book¹ opens with the description of the realm of Beulah which I have quoted in an earlier chapter. The realm of Beulah is that of threefold vision, the realm of the poet and of marital peace and love. It is a place of repose from the dazzling visions of eternity which cannot be sustained for too long. From Beulah one can make brief excursions into eternity. In Beulah there is no warfare or sexual strife. It is where Albion and Jerusalem watch over each other in love and yet love in freedom. Beulah should be the daily climate of marriage existing around the full union with God that is Eternity. I suggested when I quoted this passage that the single word ‘unbounded’ is the giveaway that Blake does not really want to leave the happiness of Beulah even for what he thinks is a higher realm of truth where he can ‘talk man to man’ with God. This is not to say that it is not good to at least postulate a higher realm of what seem more eternal truths. The idea of such a realm can well become, as it did for Keats and Yeats, an avenue of escape when the ‘fury and mire’ of human life seems too impure. But as Mr. Daiches has pointed out, both Keats and Yeats knew that such a realm of platonic perfection is too cold and artificial to hold the artist for long, even though he may speak of it longingly. He must return to the warm living imperfection out of which art springs, in itself a kind of transcendent and perfect flower.

⁹ There is a lovely illustration of three joyous floating and handspringing male figures; two female figures rush towards them in wonder. Mirror writing proclaims: ‘How wide the Gulf impassable between Simplicity and Insipidity’ and ‘Contraries are Positives—A Negation is not a Contrary.’

Blake had less excuse than most poets to postulate such a realm of escape. Blake professed to know Christ, the perfect Humanity. Keats and Yeats do not claim such knowledge, but seek in the pure forms of imagination and thought something that is eternal. But Yeats knew that his tower was ‘dead at the top’ and Keats knew that something warm and spontaneous was lost in the beautiful figures on the urn.¹ Blake, on the other hand, found in the realm of Beulah, not only art and marital bliss, but Christ himself to raise his art and love to something beyond the fury and the mire. And yet he tries to have his cake and eat it in longing both for this incarnate truth of Christ, and for a realm beyond it, the impersonal and inhuman truth of the platonist. This is perhaps why we begrudge Blake his lifeless ‘Eternity’ and why it rings false in its insistence on pure disembodied gnosis after we have been shown the soft radiance of Beulah.

¹⁰ Daiches.

I have suggested that it is in the richness and tenderness of the poetry describing Beulah and in the thinness of that concerning Eternity that Blake reveals his true sympathies. It is interesting that he uses the giveaway word ‘unbounded’ to describe the vision of Eternity without realizing that he has just finished telling us that unbounded thought is madness. But the most convincing indication that something is wrong with Blake’s thinking when he insists that the vision of Eternity is higher than that of Beulah, is that the female must be excluded from the higher vision. This from Blake whose whole doctrine is based on the belief that man cannot be spiritually whole without his emanation! He is, in effect, saying now that although woman can be weaned away from a Thel-like fear of life, and although she can be persuaded to control her Vala-like behaviour, it seems as if she cannot in the final analysis stand the vision of Eternity. She must wither away like a flower while her husband enters Eternity alone. This is to say that she cannot become Jerusalem, but must remain spiritually virgin, like Ololon a bride of ‘twelve years’. It seems to Blake as if he had patiently followed this woman in her spiritual progress from Thel to Vala, and now when she ought to become Jerusalem, he must conclude that she is too weak to do so. She is a perfect wife in sympathy and love, but she is not a companion of the intellect, meaning, we note, that she doesn’t agree with him intellectually!

If Blake keeps his view of Eternity and the need to ‘prove’ vision, it means that he must admit defeat in the whole doctrine of Albion and Jerusalem’s male and female completeness in Christ, for it is clear that woman will not follow him in this venture of ‘proving’. I cannot help feeling that the emanation is right this time, that the true fourfold vision, which is, after all, the vision of the whole man whose faculties are in harmony and in touch with those of his wife—is to be found in Beulah which is the realm of art and love and Christ, and not in the thin abstraction of Eternity, a redundancy incurred by Urizen.

The quarrel with Hayley goes deeper, then, than appears on the agitated surface of Milton. Because of the need to prove to rational Hayley and those like him his own artistic vision, Blake has lost touch not only with this vision but with his wife as well, since unity with her is an essential part of the vision. All that they stood for together has to be put to the test of reason, and she will not have this, claiming that it needs no proof, only expression. Had woman been able to follow him into Eternity while he did his ‘duty’ of intellectual proof, the lack of any other audience would not have seemed so terrible a thing. But she will not follow, and in fact heartily disapproves of the venture, and leaves him to go alone. And although he lets her off from the heights of abstraction, that are too difficult for her, with a very great tenderness, he is still greatly disappointed and disillusioned, or so he says. In actual fact he enters with more poetic sympathy into the vision he professes to despise as inferior than into the allurements of Eternity to which he returns with almost audible sighs and lagging footsteps. The need to prove himself fourfold seems an almost subtler temptation of pride in reason than the out and out crude desire to be equal to Urizen. It is the temptation that ruins the prophetic books, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Milton. In the Songs Blake had no need to prove himself and his vision—they just were, for all to see, but the trouble was that no one saw what a small miracle Blake’s Songs were. This, the human vision of the Songs and of Beulah, is Blake’s real achievement, and all of his rather tired efforts to prove that he conversed with God and Ezekiel and Milton, are, in short, a temptation of Urizen to make himself appear in the rather crude but sensational light of clairvoyant and visionary that the popular mind can accept as marvellous. What he saw in the Songs was much more marvellous, although few understood this.

I think that in one sense Blake did indeed achieve the mystic’s oneness with Christ, but when he did it had little to do with seeing ghosts and spirits and talking man to man with God. ‘Thy own Humanity learn to adore’ and ‘Everything that lives is holy’, such statements sum up Blake’s deepest insight when he did not doubt himself or his vision, and did not have to subject either to rational proof.

Shortly after this passage about Beulah there is a lovely burst of spring poetry. It is as if Beulah, no matter how inferior to Eternity, at least had the effect of taking Blake’s mind off the airless preoccupation with the Hayley-Satan conspiracy and sent it out of doors into the bright sea air at Felpham_

Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring.

The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn

Appears, listens silent; then springing from the waving Cornfield, loud

He leads the Choir of Day: trill, trill, trill, trill,

Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse,

Reechoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell,

His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather

On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine.

All Nature listens silent to him, & the awful Sun

Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird

With eyes of soft humility & wonder, love & awe,

Then loud from their green covert all the Birds begin their Song.

This Nature is no vague and terrifying Mundane Shell, but an earth made out of lovely Minute Particulars such as this small vibrating skylark, through any one of which eternity may be glimpsed. And this is Beulah, nothing else. Another passage almost as lovely follows, reminding us that Blake was capable of seeing ‘heaven in a wildflower’. Notice particularly the curiously different effect given by the crimson rose on her bed from that in ‘The Sick Rose’.

Thou perceivest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours,

And none can tell how from so small a Center comes such sweets,

Forgetting that within that Center Eternity expands Its ever during doors …

First the Wild Thyme

And Meadow-sweet, downy & soft waving among the reeds,

Light springing on the air, lead the sweet Dance: they wake

The Honeysuckle sleeping on the Oak; the flaunting beauty

Revels along upon the wind; the White-thorn, lovely May,

Opens her many lovely eyes listening; the Rose still sleeps,

None dare to wake her; soon she bursts her crimson curtain’d bed

And comes forth in the majesty of beauty …

But while all nature bursts forth in joy,

Milton oft sat upon the Couch of Death & oft conversed

In vision & dream beatific with the Seven Angels of the Presence,

‘I have turned my back upon these Heavens builded on cruelty;

My Spectre still wandering thro’ them follows my Emanation,

He hunts her footsteps thro’ the snow & wintry hail & rain.

The Idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination,

And from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluing calumny.

The last two lines show the kind of ‘murder’ Blake attributed to Hayley. Such, probably, was the attempt ‘to bereave my life’ he mentions in his epigram about Hayley. The lines about the Spectre of Blake–Milton are almost identical with lines in the lyric, ‘My Spectre around me night & day’.

Milton, by entering into Blake, has tried to overcome the errors formerly perpetrated by his own puritanical Urizen-bound conscience. But he has not succeeded so far, and cannot redeem or be united with his wife as yet. Presumably Blake is bound to the same extent as Milton is bound and it is clear that Blake thinks of Ololon as his wife as well as Milton’s, and Jerusalem, too, is in the state of Ololon. There is some reason for this all-round identification in that Milton and Blake are deluded by the same dictates of Urizen that delude Albion.

A short statement by the Angels of the Divine Presence sums up what has happened to Albion as man and country since Milton’s God has had him in thrall. Blake’s views about individuals versus states once more make their appearance:

We are not Individuals but States …

We were Angels of the Divine Presence, & were Druids in Annandale,

Compell’d to combine into Form by Satan, the Spectre of Albion,

Who made himself a God & destroyed the Human Form Divine …

Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States.

States Change, but Individual Identities never change nor cease.

You cannot go to Eternal Death in what can never Die …

The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.

Affection or love becomes a State when divided from Imagination.

The discussion between Milton and the Angels takes place around what seems to be the death couch of Albion. Blake insists in a very moving passage that the death of Albion is somehow identical with the death of Christ, and that, like Christ, Albion will rise again. Christ is always with Albion even though Albion in his sickness has banished Christ from his soul:

Thus they converse with the Dead, watching round the Couch of Death;

For God himself enters Death’s Door always with those that enter

And lays down in the Grave with them, in Visions of Eternity,

Till they awake & see Jesus & the Linen Clothes lying

That the Females had woven for them, & the Gates of their Father’s House.

And this is the very moment, when Albion is at death’s door, that the Christ within him spoke to Jerusalem, telling her not to be Vala, in the passage I quoted earlier: ‘When I first married you’, etc.

And as Albion lies dying, the Daughters of Beulah ask Jerusalem. ‘Is terror chang’d to pity? O wonder of Eternity.’ But it is still too early for Albion’s resurrection and for Jerusalem to become herself all at once. Blake tells us that there is yet another dire state of the soul to be traversed first. Once again Blake’s over-usage of nonsense names mars what he is saying:

And the Four States of Humanity in its Repose

Were shewed them. First of all Beulah, a most pleasant Sleep

On Couches soft with mild music, tended by flowers of Beulah,

Sweet Female forms, winged or floating in the air spontaneous,

The Second State is Alla, & the third State Al-Ulro:

But the Fourth State is dreadful, it is named Or-Ulro.

The First State is in the Head, the Second is in the Heart,

The Third in the Loins & Seminal Vessels, & the Fourth

In the Stomach & Intestines, terrible, deadly, unutterable.

And he whose Gates are open’d in those Regions of his Body

Can from those Gates view all these wondrous Imaginations.

This last terrible state of Or–Ulro is still to be traversed by Milton and Ololon, and presumably by Blake and his wife and by Albion and Jerusalem. For Ololon, although not yet become Jerusalem, is nevertheless wholly in sympathy with her husband, and she tries through understanding to help him through his living death. She chooses to go with him in his illness, giving up altogether Vala’s position of hurt pride. She has looked his suffering full in the face and is familiar with all its fearful stages of unreality and will-to-hurt, yet never wavers from her own position. Thus in many ways she is indistinguishable from Jerusalem with whom at times she seems to merge, although she still belittles her own capacity for spiritual truth, and this is what offends Blake–Milton. For not to doubt her own value is a very important part of Jerusalem’s wholeness. But at any rate Ololon dares to look suffering full in the face where Thel or Vala, each for a different reason, would have fled,

Where lie in evil death the Four Immortals pale & cold

And the Eternal Man, even Albion, upon the Rock of Ages.

Ololon is afraid, but none the less in an effort to understand and so help, she will look at the most terrifying aspects of the living death that Albion is enduring:

And Ololon looked down into the Heavens of Ulro in fear.

They said: ‘How are the Wars of man, which in Great Eternity

Appear around in the External Spheres of Visionary Life,

Here render’d Deadly within the Life & Interior Vision?

How are the Beasts & Birds & Fishes & Plants & Minerals

Here fix’d into a frozen bulk subject to decay & death?

In other words, Ololon is still doubtful whether these are true visions granted by Christ, since they seem to kill rather than to inspire Albion to further effort. Nevertheless, she looks with pity and forgiveness at the terrible nightmare, which is her own, too, for as Vala she was forced to play her part. She is now in the state of Beulah where no strife can come. ‘Into this pleasant Shadow, Beulah, all Ololon descended.’

Those Visions of Human Life & Shadows of Wisdom & Knowledge

Are here frozen to unexpansive deadly destroying terrors

And War & Hunting, the Two Fountains of the River of Life,

Are become Fountains of bitter Death & of corroding Hell, …

O dreadful Loom of Death! O piteous Female forms compell’d

To weave the Woof of Death! …

Where once the Cherubs of Jerusalem spread to Lambeth’s Vale …

So spake Ololon in reminiscence astonish’d …

Even of Los & Enitharmon & all the Sons of Albion

And his Four Zoas terrified & on the verge of Death.’

And now Ololon, seen as the personification of all the Daughters of Beulah within Jerusalem, confesses her crime of not having stood firm and fourfold, of not having remained the wife that Albion had married just when he needed her most,

falling down

Prostrate before the starry Eight asking with tears forgiveness,

Confessing their crime with humiliation & sorrow.

The starry eight are the Four Zoas and their emanations. In a flash of insight Ololon within Jerusalem participates in Albion’s mental hell. She sees not only the part she has played in creating it, but also the way out. It is in the realm of imagination, that of Los and Enitharmon, that this healing vision comes to her, and it is on this level that she can make successful contact with Albion:

O how the Starry Eight rejoic’d to see Ololon descended,

And now that a wide road was open to Eternity

By Ololon’s descent thro’ Beulah to Los & Enitharmon! …

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find,

Nor can his Watch Fiends find it; but the Industrious find

This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found

It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.

In this Moment Ololon descended to Los & Enitharmon.

Ololon then descends to Blake’s garden at Felpham with the Lark who is ‘Los‘s Messenger’¹:

¹¹ On this plate is the famous drawing of Blake’s cottage at Felpham with Ololon descending.

When on the highest lift of his light pinions he arrives

At that bright Gate, another Lark meets him, & back to back

They touch their pinions, tip tip, & each descend

To their respective Earths & there all night consult with Angels

Of Providence & with the eyes of God all night in slumbers

Inspired, & at the dawn of day send out another Lark …

Lark met the Female Ololon descending into my Garden …

For Ololon step’d into the Polypus within the Mundane Shell.

They could not step into the Vegetable Worlds without becoming

The enemies of Humanity, except in a Female Form,

As One Female Ololon & all its mighty Hosts

Appear’d, a virgin of twelve years: nor time nor space was

To the perception of the Virgin Ololon, but as the

Flash of lightning, but more quick the Virgin in my Garden

Before my Cottage stood …

Walking in my Cottage Garden, suddenly I beheld

The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah.

Ololon in the plural represents all the Daughters of Beulah together. As a single female form she represents Jerusalem in the state of Beulah. As the ‘virgin of twelve years’ she bears some resemblance to the Virgin Mary when she visited the temple. But so many of Blake’s ideas are completely new interpretations of lines and images that begin in the Scriptures, that it is not advisable here to follow up such interesting and complicated sea-changes. The phrase, ‘and all its mighty hosts’ applied to Ololon as the Daughters of Beulah who are sometimes Guardian Angels, makes the reader wonder just how much Blake intended his doctrine of emanations or eons to coincide with the gnostic beliefs concerning eons and the hierarchy of angels flowing down to created matter. As usual, whatever Blake took from his reading, he made completely his own.

Ololon asks to see Milton. Milton appears in Blake s garden as all that is satanic and Urizen-bound in his own beliefs. All of Milton’s errors, summed up in the Covering Cherub of the Church, confront Ololon:

So Ololon utter’d in words distinct the anxious thought:

Mild was the voice but more distinct than any earthly.

That Milton’s Shadow heard, & condensing all his Fibres

Into a strength impregnable of majesty & beauty infinite,

I saw he was the Covering Cherub & within him Satan

And Rahab in an outside which is fallacious within,

Beyond the outline of Identity, in the Selfhood deadly;

And he appear’d the Wicker Man of Scandinavia, in whom

Jerusalem’s children consume in flames among the Stars.

Descending down into my Garden, a Human Wonder of God

Reaching from heaven to earth, a Cloud, & Human Form,

I beheld Milton with astonishment & in him beheld

The Monstrous Churches of Beulah, the Gods of Ulro dark,

Twelve monstrous dishumaniz’d terrors, Synagogues of Satan …

The divisions of this Covering Cherub include:

Osiris, Isis, Orus in Egypt, dark their Tabernacles on Nile

Floating with solemn songs & on the Lakes of Egypt nightly

With pomp even till morning break & Osiris appear in the sky …

All these are seen in Milton’s Shadow, Who is the Covering Cherub,

The Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits.

‘The Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits’: this is to say that Christ is hidden somewhere in all this spectrous covering just as he is hidden in Orc.¹

¹² See frontispiece. Plate 38 of the British Museum copy has one of the loveliest drawings Blake ever made: Albion and Jerusalem lie asleep with peaceful grave expressions, and each lies with an arm thrown across the other. It is night and they are in the mossy curve of a rock, a calm blue sea lapping around them. A great sea-bird hovers motionless, its wings outstretched over them, gazing intently at the sleeping lovers.

Blake stands and views the ruined Albion, a spectacle as poignant as any waste land. Place names fuse with the characters in this passage, which is very fine. Albion, once a fourfold man and country united to his bride, the holy city of Jerusalem, is now a ruin, mated to Babylon.

I stood … & beheld its desolations:

A ruin’d Man, a ruin’d building of God, not made with hands:

Its plains of burning sand, its mountains of marble terrible:

Its pits & declivities flowing with molten ore & fountains

Of pitch & nitre: its ruin’d palaces & cities & mighty works:

Its furnaces of affliction, in which his Angels & Emanations

Labour with blacken’d visages among its stupendous ruins,

Arches & pyramids & porches, colonades & domes,

In which dwells Mystery, Babylon; here is her secret place

From hence she comes forth on the Churches in delight;

Here is her Cup fill’d with its poisons in these horrid vales,

And here her scarlet Veil woven in pestilence & war;

Here is Jerusalem bound in chains in the Dens of Babylon.

Milton finally takes a stand against his own Spectre who wants to continue this ruination. He announces his intention of casting off his Spectre altogether along with the false doctrines of the Covering Cherub which he has hitherto believed.

Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate …

Thy purposes & the purposes of thy Priests & of thy Churches

Is to impress on men the fear of Death, to teach

Trembling & fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness.

Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on

In fearless majesty, annihilating Self, laughing to scorn

Thy Laws & terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues as webs.

But Satan means to oppose the idea of Christ as sole God,

Till All Things become One Great Satan, in Holiness

Oppos’d to Mercy, & the Divine Delusion, Jesus, be no more.

But at the very moment of this manifesto of Satan’s there is an indication of God’s power:

Suddenly around Milton on my Path the Starry Seven

Burn’d terrible; my Path became a solid fire, as bright

As the clear Sun, & Milton silent came down on my Path.

And there went forth from the starry limbs of the Seven, Forms

Human, with Trumpets, innumerable, sounding articulate

As the Seven spake; & they stood in a mighty Column of Fire

Surrounding Felpham’s Vale, reaching to the Mundane Shell, Saying:

‘Awake, Albion awake! reclaim thy Reasoning Spectre, Subdue

Him to the Divine Mercy. Cast him down into the Lake

Of Los that ever burneth with fire ever & ever, Amen!

Let the Four Zoas awake from Slumbers of Six Thousand Years.’

Satan hears the command to Albion to awake and put his tyrannical reason in its proper place, forgiving and respecting his own Humanity. Satan trembles as Albion tries to raise himself from the death couch:

Then Albion rose up in the Night of Beulah on his Couch

Of dread repose; seen by the visionary eye, his face is toward

The east, toward Jerusalem’s Gates:

That is, although Albion still appears to be desperately ill and rejecting Jerusalem, unseen to the eye he is looking towards her hopefully. Although he falls back upon his couch in groans of pain, the perceptive eye can see that a change for the good has taken place, and he is hoping to be reunited with his emanation. He wants to ‘bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human’, all those attempts to be something other than human which are the delusions caused by Urizen.

groaning he sat above

His rocks, London & Bath & Legions & Edinburgh

Are the four pillars of his Throne: his left foot near London

Covers the shades of Tyburn: his instep from Windsor

To Primrose Hill stretching to Highgate & Holloway.

London is between his knees, its basements fourfold;

His right foot stretches to the sea on Dover’s cliffs, his heel

On Canterbury’s ruins; his bosom girt with gold involves

York, Edinburgh, Durham & Carlisle, & on the front

Bath, Oxford, Cambridge, Norwich; his right elbow

Leans on the Rocks of Erin’s Land, Ireland, ancient nation;

His head bends over London; he sees his embodied Spectre

Trembling before him with exceeding great trembling & fear.

He views Jerusalem & Babylon, his tears flow down.

He mov’d his right foot to Cornwall, his left foot to the rocks of Bognor.

He strove to rise to walk into the Deep, but strength failing

For bad, & down with dreadful groans he sunk upon his Couch.

For some time now Jerusalem has been herself, but Albion still fears that she is Vala, just as he still fears his own emotional nature as evil. As these changes take place within Albion, we find that Urizen has weakened in his struggle with Milton in Blake’s garden. Ololon cheers Milton-Blake on, and fears for him. But she needn’t have worried, Blake tells us. Milton is now seeing clearly:

But turning toward Ololon in terrible majesty Milton

Replied: ‘Obey thou the Words of the Inspired Man.

All that can be annihilated must be annihilated

That the Children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery …

To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human,

I come in Self-annihilation & in the grandeur of Inspiration,

To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour ….

To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination,

To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration …

To cast off the Idiot Questioner who is always questioning

But never capable of answering, who sits with a sly grin

Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave,

Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge, whose Science is Despair …

These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers

Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life.’

Then Ololon speaks, remembering the Vala-like role she was forced to play under Milton’s religion which was that of Urizen. She wants to know what her role will be in this new dispensation, fearing that it will be no better:

Then trembled the Virgin Ololon & reply’d in clouds of despair:

‘Is this our Feminine Portion, the Six-fold Miltonic Female?

Terribly this Portion trembles before thee, O awful Man.

Altho’ our Human Power can sustain the severe contentions

Of Friendship, our Sexual cannot, but flies into the Ulro.

Hence arose all our terrors in Eternity; & now remembrance

Returns upon us; are we Contraries, O Milton, Thou & I?

O Immortal, how were we led to War the Wars of Death?

Is this the Void outside of Existence which if enter’d into

Becomes a Womb? & is this the Death Couch of Albion?

Thou goest to Eternal Death & all must go with thee.’

There is poignance and beauty in Ololon’s recognition that her sexual nature needs more than the platonic love of friendship, and no matter how much she tries to play the role of friend alone, her sexual nature makes her behave like Vala when it is unfulfilled. With tenderness she wonders how their love for each other could have ended in sexual warfare, and with a daring that Thel would never achieve asks whether this death they are in now is not the slow womb of rebirth. And yet, she wonders whether she will not once more be forced to play Vala–Eve.

But Christ himself answers her, telling her that she is redeemed. He shows her a vision of what is to come when Albion is once more fourfold and reunited with Jerusalem. Blake in his garden sees this vision, too. It is a curiously negative and wistful vision to end this prophetic book compared with the vision that ended The Four Zoas and that to come in Jerusalem. It is a vision very much in the future tense and one that is seen from the couch of sickness, rather than an affirmation of fourfold being already accomplished. But none the less it has a strange loveliness:

Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham’s Vale,

And the wild Thyme from Wimbledon’s green & impurpled hills.

Terror struck in the Vale I stood at that immortal sound.

My bones trembled, I fell outstretch’d upon the path

A moment, & my Soul return’d into its mortal state

To Resurrection & Judgement in the Vegetable Body,

And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side.

And I beheld the Twenty-four Cities of Albion

Arise upon their Thrones to Judge the Nations of the Earth;

And the Immortal Four in whom the Twenty-four appear Four-fold

Arose around Albion’s body. Jesus wept & walked forth

From Felpham’s Vale clothed in Clouds of blood, to enter into

Albion’s bosom, the bosom of death, & the Four surrounded him

In the Column of Fire in Felpham’s Vale; then to their mouths the Four

Applied their Four Trumpets & them sounded to the Four winds.

Then as a moony Ark Ololon descended to Felpham’s Vale

In Clouds of blood … with one accord the Starry Night became

One Man, Jesus the Saviour, wonderful! round his limbs

The Clouds of Ololon folded as a garment dipped in blood …

1. ² Plato 8, in the British Museum copy, has an illustration of two figures, a man's and a woman's, probably Los and Enitharmon, standing, she in back of him so that they seem one. Sadly they watch a figure ir flames, probably Ore.