Notes & Quotes for Blake’s “Minor Prophecies”
This small collection of sayings may well be Blake’s earliest experiment with the “infernal method” of printing that his dead brother, Robert, revealed to him. By writing & drawing (in reverse) directly on copper plates before printing, Blake would have been able to print multiple copies of this and later works, tinting them afterwards.
Through aphoristic declarations and accompanying emblem-like designs, Blake argues for the essential unity of all religions as expressions of the “Poetic Genius” within all human beings. As the quoted phrase suggests, All Religions are One implies the unity of the artistic and religious imagination.
Several of the numbered “Principle[s],” the term used as a heading to each text plate, assert a causal connection between inner spirit and outer body. Because of shared graphic styles, themes, and genre, All Religions are One is closely associated with There is No Natural Religion of the same year.
The influence of Lavater’s Aphorisms is obvious. Lavater’s first two sayings read: 1) “Know, in the first place, that mankind agree in the essence, as they do in their limbs and senses; and 2) Mankind differ as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—and only so, and not more.” In the margin of his copy of Lavater, Blake commented: “This is true Christian philosophy far above all abstraction.”
Blake etched the work on ten small plates c. 1788. There is only one known copy (A), now in the Huntington Library. This copy, lacking the title page now in the Keynes Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, was printed (with some touches of rudimentary color printing) as a large-paper copy in 1795.
Blake divided this series of aphorisms and accompanying emblem-like designs into two groups of numbered propositions in the style of Lavater. In the first series Blake states basic principles, derived from John Locke’s philosophy of the five senses, about physical perception, reason, and the limits of knowledge. As Blake presents them, Locke’s principles become self-evidently absurd. Blake concludes this series by saying: “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.”
Once he establishes that without the imagination it would be impossible for philosophy and experimental science to discover or understand new things, the second series redefines and confutes the first set of propositions, concluding: “He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.” This last line echoes St. Paul; but, unlike Paul, Blake puts this proposition in the present tense rather than the past, thus indicating that Christ’s act was eternal and therefore always going on.
Blake etched the work in relief on twenty small plates c. 1788. Impressions of only nineteen plates are now extant; no impression is known from the plate that presumably bore proposition "III" in series b. Only two printings are known.
Songs of Innocence, a work of 32 plates, appeared in 1789, shortly after Blake had invented his new “infernal” method of engraving. Songs of Experience was added to this first collection of poems in 1894, at which point Blake re-titled the work: Songs of Innocence and Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Of Songs Akroyd writes: “he may have hoped to make this fortune out of it, with its pastel shades and its images of children and nurses, it looks as typically Georgian as a Wedgwood tea-set or a Hepplewhite chair” (119). However, as Akroyd goes on to say,
[The Songs] were not quite right for the age—‘wild’ and ‘mystical,’ with an old-fashioned Gothic appearance that was not acceptable to connoisseurs. They seem to us now to express all the energy and confidence of a poet who has at last found his way forward; Songs of Innocence has the obliquity of ‘An Island in the Moon,’ the spirituality of Thel, the dramatic directness of Tiriel, and the melodic control of Poetical Sketches, all working together to form a complete and coherent statement.
And yet Blake’s contemporaries were partly right: there is something ‘wild’ about these highly compressed and concentrated lyrics. At first glance, they might have seemed aspects of amenable pastoralism (he even deliberately copied Stothard’s soft style in a few images) but there is an intensity in the words and designs that sets them apart from the more agreeable work of his contemporaries. The verse is part of the design, the design part of the verse, in an extraordinarily condensed and almost ritualistic way; the visual completeness, the insistent meters, the impersonal skill of the calligraphy, turn these poems into achieved works of art that seem to resist conventional interpretation. The sense of energy and intensity within such taught bounds leads also to an awareness of possible loss of control and disequilibrium; that is why the tight meters and formal concentration of the poems seem actively to exclude the reader and the world.
Blake protects the sources of his inspiration very carefully, and there is always a suggestion of distance and even parody within the most apparently ‘naïve’ lyrics; they resemble the man himself, who could be cryptic or maddeningly oblique when he felt himself to be challenged” (122).
As it turned out, Blake sold very few of his Songs &, in any case, they were all hand-printed, embellished, and colored—a very labor-intensive & time-consuming process that would have made "mass-production" impossible—which would have pleased Blake.
Blake may originally have planned to create the Songs of Experience as the exact negative image of Innocence. Ultimately, that’s not what he chose to do, but there are some obvious parallels: the two “Chimney Sweepers,” “the two “Nurse’s Songs,” the two “Holy Thursdays”; there area also contrasting titles: “Infant Joy: and Infant Sorrow,” “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image.” Other poems contrast by subject: “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”; “The Blossom” with “The Sick Rose”; and probably “The Echoing Green” with “The Garden of Love,” and “The Shepherd” with “London.”
Most likely, Blake had abandoned the idea of creating two exactly contrasting series of poems even before he finished the first edition of Innocence for, even in that volume, some of the rhetoric, irony, and divided consciousness of experience has been insinuated into the landscape of innocence. Indeed, for different printings of the two-part work, Blake placed Experience on the Innocence side and vice versa.
Damon considers Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso to be Blake’s inspiration for the Songs. Milton’s poems form a single, cyclical whole; where either of Milton’s paired poems ends, the other begins. But where Milton contrasts gaiety and thoughtfulness, Blake contrasts ecstasy and despair; and, unlike Milton, Blake anticipates not a cyclical repetition but an eventual progression to a third state. This can be seen in the first poem of the Innocence series. The piper pipes his song of “pleasant cheer” three times. The first time the piper plays, the child laughs, indicating the state of Innocence; the second time the piper plays, the child cries, indicating the state of Experience; and, the third time the piper plays, the child “weeps with joy,” indicating a synthesis between the two contraries.
In addition, Blake analyzes the basic problematic at the center of the Biblical account of the Fall. Adam & Eve taste the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil and are cast out of the Garden of Eden. That is, they lose their innocence and thus become aware of the differences that distinguish them from God and from each other. For Blake, the Biblical story raises the question, “what’s the true moral of the story?” Is ignorance truly bliss or can we become only godly through Experience? Remember that in the Genesis story, Adam & Eve’s “eyes were opened” and the LORD GOD says, “now they have become like one of us.” Was it the divine plan that human beings be unable to distinguish good from evil—to have no greater moral awareness than young children—forever? Blake seems to think not. Indeed, as he develops his myth, it is the “mistaken demon of heaven,” Urizen, who is the one-strike-and-you’re-out disciplinarian of Genesis.
Thus, the Songs are lyrics presented from the perspective of two mental states--innocence and experience--and Blake is exploring the possibilities and limits of each. Innocence is Blake’s term for the state of the Unfallen Man and the state into which we are all born, a state of free imagination and spontaneous joy. The Innocence side of this lyric anthology evokes a predominantly pastoral world prior to the dualisms of adult consciousness. Human, natural, and divine states of being have yet to be separated. The child is the chief representative of this condition; other recurrent figures, such as the shepherd and lamb, point ultimately to the figure of Christ as the incarnation of the unity of prelapsarian innocence.
Experience is the contrary of Innocence—not its opposite. It is man’s state when he falls from the grace of his initial bliss. The fall made Adam and Eve aware of sex (generation) and death; they became fearful of God as well. The title page of the Songs of Experience depicts male & female children weeping over their dead parents; their initial bliss has been destroyed by the death of the parents. To Tirzah, one of the final poems of the Songs of Experience, depicts the death of Jesus freeing the poet from his mother and his mortality. As Damon says, “the lad who has not yet cast off his mother-image is not yet a man.”
A note on Tirzah. Tirzah is the creator of the physical body and, thus, the mother of death in Songs of Experience. Later, in Four Zoas, Tirzah is the “prude” or pure woman; her sister is Rahab, the whore. Thus, Rahab squanders her lust, but Tirzah uses her lust as a weapon against man. Together they tempt, torture, and divide men.
Characters: Thel, The Lilly, The Cloud, The Clod, The Worm
√ Thel represents the state of innocence on the verge of entering experience.
√ The conflict animating the poem is her fear of entering the state of Generation (sexual activity, motherhood, and mortality).
√ The Vales of Har represent the state of self-love.
√ Her encounters with the various characters challenge the state of self-love in which Thel is trapped. The Lilly questions the concrete value of virginity; the cloud speaks from the male perspective whose fertilizing moisture seeks the flower; the clod speaks from the perspective of the mother & the worm from the perspective of the infant.
√ The Northern Gate, which aligns in Blake’s system with the imagination, is lifted, granting Thel a glimpse of the meaning of entering the world of experience.
√ She rejects experience with its burdens of fertility, ensnaring cycles, and death. Thus, she rejects Experience and, thus remains in a state of innocence and self-love—and, presumably, she will remain unhappy and “without purpose.”
An illuminated book composed of 27 plates, the last three being devoted to the terminal lyric: “A Song of Liberty.” Initially completed, 1793. Consists of lyric poems, proverbs, formal arguments, parodies, and short narratives. Concludes by promising the world “The Bible of Hell.”
√ Damon calls Marriage of Heaven & Hell Blake’s Principia, in which he announces a new conceptualization of the universe, thus quietly equating himself with Ptolemy and Copernicus. Mind, not matter, is the basic substance of the universe in Blake’s view. Therefore, the universe in which we live is psychological or, as he would have said, “mental.” For this reason, the universe is egocentric, differing with each individual; yet, despite the fact that the “fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees”, the universe is One.
√ In analyzing this universe of man’s mind, which contains heaven & hell & nature, some would say that Blake anticipated the theories of Freud, for Blake’s energy” is the libido/Id and his “Reason” is the censor/the Superego. As these contraries are essential to each other in the psychic structure, Blake reduced “Good” and “Evil” to mere technical terms, denoting arbitrary and artificial qualities devoid of any real moral significance.
√ His view that the only universe is mind also resonates strongly with Classical Buddhist Psychology, particularly as articulated in Abhidharma. Buddhist psychology posits 6 senses: the ordinary five of the human sensorium and mind. Put another way, we don’t have direct access to the objects of sight, or to sounds, or to sensations along our nerve endings. Rather, the mind receives the electrical impulses produced in the physical body & constructs their meaning. The mind names such impulses, categorizes them, and assigns them a value (good, bad; positive, negative, etc.). We cannot know with certainty that one perceptions of these electrical impulses is the same as another’s.
Thus, the Abhidharma also concludes that since all that we can know & experience occurs in the mind, which by its nature makes myriads of discriminations, that such categories as Good & Evil have no intrinsic existence. They are only labels that differing minds attach to differing sensations, ideas, or experiences.
√ In Marriage of Heaven & Hell, heaven & its angels, people that we ordinarily label as “Good” constrain their energies, view the imagination with suspicion, and follow conventions without thinking. But Hell and its devils, those that the religious might call “Evil,” follow the energies that produce life. They are therefore original thinkers, revolutionaries who always question orthodoxy.
√ The universe is One, but it is experienced from uncountable egocentric perspectives. Reason—the discriminating, organizing, categorizing quality of mind—has long since created divisions among God and man, man and nature, body and soul, good and evil, etc. Because these dualities are arbitrary and imposed by the rational part of the mind, they may all be accounted for and reconciled through mental acts of imagination and will. Blake’s universe is dynamic because there will always be tension between the discriminating faculties of the mind and the universe’s fundamental unity.
√ Marriage of Heaven & Hell’s complex structure mirrors Blake’s eschatology. The first six chapters are each devoted to crucial elements in Blake’s mythological/spiritual system. Blake also believed that the world had, since the fall & creation of the Garden of Eden experience six ages. The seventh age, which he boldly declares began in the year of his birth, would be a time of revolution that would eventually destroy the errors that have dominated human history since the beginning.
Chapt. I: states the principles; Chapt. II applies the principles to the Fall; Chapt. III describes the origin of the gods; Chapt. IV deals with regeneration; Chapt. V defines the two types of man: “The Prolific” (the purposeful, the creative) and “the Devourer” (who seeks only personal pleasure); and Chapt VI which presents Christ as diabolist (i.e. an original thinker & revolutionary working to overthrow the orthodox order). The “Song of Liberty” describes the revolution that was even then commencing, but without naming the characters. The Eternal Female (Enitharmon) groans in childbirth. Her son is the “new born terror (Orc), who stands before “the starry king” (Urizen). Urizen hurls Orc into the western sea, then himself falls in ruins on Urthona’s dens (the subconscious). Like the fallen Satan in Milton, Urizen rouses himself to reorganize his forces: “leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands” (the Decalogue). But Orc appears as the dawn in the east, and “stamps the stony law to dust,” crying “Empire is no more! And now the Lion [protector of the flock] & Wolf [predator of the flock] shall cease. . . . For every thing that lives is holy.”
We see in this mini-drama Blake’s antipathy to both monarch and the State Church which upheld its prerogatives as the “divine right of kings.”
Characters: Oothoon, Bromion, Theotormon, and the Daughters of Albion (England)
Plot: Oothoon wanders alone in the Vales of Leutha, plucks Leutha’s flower and flies toward Theotormon (the object of her desire) across the Atlantic ocean. On the way, Bromion rapes and impregnates Oothoon, then rejects her as defiled. Nevertheless, Bromion and Oothoon are bound back-to-back in Bromion’s cave. He is bound by a heavy chain, but she only by the flame of her desire. Theotormon surrounds the pair with the black waters of his jealousy. The remainder of the poem records the boast of Bromion and the lamentations of Theotormon and Oothoon, which the Daughters of Albion echo.
√ Leutha, the female counterpart or emanation of Bromion, represents sexuality under social and religious law &, therefore, sex’s associations with guilt, sin, and shame. Her attributes are the Valley of Delight (i.e. the female genitalia), the flower (the plucking of symbolizes the sexual act), and the rainbow (anticipation).
√ Oothoon represents female love & sexual desire under the Law. As the “soft soul of America,” she also represents the ideal of physical & sexual freedom. She is caught in this poem between desire, love, law, and duty. Her lamentations are cries against the bondage of marriage, modesty, jealousy, secrecy, selfishness, religious prohibition, and masturbation (as emblem of the unfulfilled desire inherent in world where sex is considered dirty and female sexuality is suppressed as shameful).
√ Bromion represents the inflexible social and religious laws that seek to place sexual desire under tight controls; not coincidentally he is also depicted as a slave owner. Oothoon calls Bromion “Urizen” in this poem, which is the first mention of this name. Clearly Bromion shares the same limiting and controlling qualities with the Zoa who we later find is one and the same as the “thou-shalt-not” God of the Hebrew scriptures.
√ Theotormon represents desire which, when suppressed becomes jealousy. His natural affections become distorted by the laws that Bromion represents and turn cruel and poisonous.
Themes
√ Blake seems to have conceived Thel and Visions of The Daughters of Albion as complementary visions of women’s position in the fallen world of Blake’s time. At least two versions of these poems were bound together in a single volume.
√ Each poem centers on a female character who searches for self-fulfillment and encounters unanticipated terrors that dramatically shift the text’s aesthetic from the pastoral to the horrific sublime.
√ The poems raise similar questions about the various possibilities of (female) sexual desire and its relationship to the various forces that promote or inhibit its expression.
√ However, these similarities make the contrast between the two poems even more obvious. At the end of her poem, Thel flees from the body with its associations with death and decay. In contrast, Oothoon accepts the body with its potential for delights that can erase conventional distinctions between the physical and the spiritual—and even right and wrong. She chooses and advocates sexual experience even in the face of continued sexual and cultural violence.
√ Blake seems to expect us to view Thel as cowardly and self-absorbed and Oothoon as a courageous revolutionary and spiritually inspired to self-transcendence.
Biographical considerations
√ Oothoon’s seems to be modeled, at least loosely, on Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist pioneer.
√ Wollstonecraft had —or wanted to have—a ménage a trois with Henry Fuseli and his wife. At one point, she went to Fuseli’s wife and asked to become “a family intimate” because she couldn’t stand going a day without Fuseli’s companionship and conversation. Mrs. Fuseli sent her packing—literally, as it turned out—for Wollstonecraft sailed for France that same year, carrying (it is supposed) Fuseli’s child.
√ Wollstonecraft’s open and pragmatic proposal to Mrs. Fuseli, with its implication that she and Fuseli reject the possessiveness customary in marriage so that “delight” could be multiplied, is similar to Oothoon’s unashamed plea to Theotormon to get over his jealousy & her promise that she’ll catch for him nymphs to increase his delight.
√ From all accounts, Fuseli didn’t quite know what to do with a highly intelligent and radically revolutionary woman—and this is similar to Theotormon’s own agony. He loves Oothoon but can’t get past his conventional thinking about a love that possesses the beloved.
Blake’s Poetic Innovation
√ The question of what Oothoon’s rape means and what possibilities are open to her is discussed from her perspective, from Bromion’s, and Theotormon’s. Presenting such shifting and radically different perspectives in a poem was unprecedented in Blake’s time.
√ In later poems, Blake will put perspective shifts to even greater use. A technique that effectively frustrates linear reading and that shows that all objects of thought are not absolute and fixed, but exist in a dynamic tension of opposing perspectives.