Part 16

For everything that lives is Holy."

And so, as with fire and thunder--"thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire"--is this _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ at length happily consummated; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction. Those who are not bidden to the bridegroom's supper may as well keep away, lest worse befall them, not having a wedding garment. For us there remains little to say, now that the torches are out, the nuts scattered, the songs silent, and the saffron faded from the veil. We will wish them a quiet life, and an heir who may combine the merits and capacities of either parent. It were pleasant enough, but too superfluous, to dwell upon the beauty of this nuptial hymn; to bid men remark what eloquence, what subtlety, what ardour of wisdom, what splendour of thought, is here; how far it outruns, not in daring alone but in sufficiency, all sayings of minor mystics who were not also poets; how much of lofty love and of noble faith underlies and animates these rapid and fervent words; what greatness of spirit and of speech there was in the man who, living as Blake lived, could write as Blake has written. Those who cannot see what is implied may remain unable to tolerate what is expressed; and those who can read aright need no index of ours.[51]

The decorations of this great work, though less large and complete than those of the subsequent prophecies, are full of noble and subtle beauty. Over every page faint fibres and flickering threads of colour weave a net of intricate design. Skies cloven with flame and thunder, half-blasted trees round which huddled forms of women or men cower and cling, strange beasts and splendid flowers, alternate with the engraved text; and throughout all the sunbeams of heaven and fires of hell shed fiercer or softer light. In minute splendour and general effect the pages of Blake's next work fall short of these; though in the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ the separate designs are fuller and more composed. This poem, written in a sort of regular though quasi-lyrical blank verse, is more direct and lucid in purpose than most of these books; but the style is already laxer, veers more swiftly from point to point, stands weaker on its feet, and speaks with more of a hurried and hysterical tone. With "formidable moral questions," as the biographer has observed, it does assuredly deal; and in a way somewhat formidable. This, we are told, "the exemplary man had good right to do." Exemplary or not, he in common with all men had undoubtedly such a right; and was not slow to use it. Nowhere else has the prophet so fully and vehemently set forth his doctrine of indulgence; too Albigensian or antinomian this time to be given out again in more decorous form. Of pure mythology there is happily little; of pure allegory even less. "The eye sees more than the heart knows;" these words are given on the title-page by way of motto or key-note. Above this inscription a single design fills the page; in it the title is written with characters of pale fire upon cloud and rainbow; the figure of the typical woman, held fast to earth but by one foot, seems to soar and yearn upwards with straining limbs that flutter like shaken flame: appealing in vain to the mournful and merciless Creator, whose sad fierce face looks out beyond and over her, swathed and cradled in bloodlike fire and drifted rain. In the prologue we get a design expressive of plain and pure pleasure; a woman gathers a child from the heart of a blossom as it breaks, and the sky is full of the golden stains and widening roses of a sundawn. But elsewhere, from the frontispiece to the end, nothing meets us but emblems of restraint and error; figures rent by the beaks of eagles though lying but on mere cloud, chained to no solid rock by the fetters only of their own faiths or fancies; leafless trunks that rot where they fell; cold ripples of barren sea that break among caves of bondage. The perfect woman, Oothoon, is one with the spirit of the great western world; born for rebellion and freedom, but half a slave yet, and half a harlot. "Bromion," the violent Titan, subject himself to ignorance and sorrow, has defiled her;[52] "Theotormon," her lover, emblem of man held in bondage to creed or law, will not become one with her because of her shame; and she, who gathered in time of innocence the natural flower of delight, calls now for his eagles to rend her polluted flesh with cruel talons of remorse and ravenous beaks of shame: enjoys his infliction, accepts her agony, and reflects his severe smile in the mirrors of her purged spirit.[53] But he

"sits wearing the threshold hard With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desert shore The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money."

From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid as _Thel_, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away.

"I cry Arise, O Theotormon; for the village dog Barks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting; The lark does rustle in the green corn, and the eagle returns From nightly prey and lifts his golden beak to the pure east; Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awake The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon, I am pure Because the night is gone that closed me in its deadly black. They told me that the night and day were all that I could see; They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up, And they enclosed my infinite beam into a narrow circle, And sank my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hotburning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.

Instead of morn arises a bright shadow like an eye In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel-house. But Theotormon hears me not: to him the night and morn Are both alike; a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears. And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations.

With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse and frog Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joy. Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camel Why he loves man: is it because of eye, ear, mouth or skin, Or breathing nostrils? no: for these the wolf and tiger have. Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave and why her spires Love to curl around the bones of death: and ask the ravenous snake Where she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun; And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old.

Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent, If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me; How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure? Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, and the soul prey'd on by woe; The new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swan By the red earth of our immortal river; I bathe my wings And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormon's breast.

Then Theotormon broke his silence, and he answered; Tell me what is the night or day to one overflowed with woe? Tell me what is a thought? and of what substance is it made? Tell me what is joy? and in what gardens do joys grow? And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains Wave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretched Drunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair?

Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth? Tell me where dwell the joys of old? and where the ancient loves? And when will they renew again and the night of oblivion be past? That I might traverse times and spaces far remote and bring Comfort into a present sorrow and a night of pain! Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight? If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings and dews and honey and balm Or poison from the desert wilds, from the eyes of the envier?"

After this Bromion, with less musical lamentation, asks whether for all things there be not one law established? "Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; but knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth to gratify senses unknown, in worlds over another kind of seas?" Are there other wars, other sorrows, and other joys than those of external life? But the one law surely does exist "for the lion and the ox," for weak and strong, wise and foolish, gentle and fierce; and for all who rebel against it there are prepared from everlasting the fires and the chains of hell. So speaks the violent slave of heaven; and after a day and a night Oothoon lifts up her voice in sad rebellious answer and appeal.

"O Urizen, Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven! Thy joys are tears: thy labour vain, to form man to thine image; How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a Love.

Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? and the narrow eyelids mock At the labour that is above payment? and wilt thou take the ape For thy counsellor, or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children?

* * * * *

Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog? Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wide Draw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloud As the raven's eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture? Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young? Or does the fly rejoice because the harvest is brought in? Does not the eagle scorn the earth and despise the treasures beneath? But the mole knoweth what is there, and the worm shall tell it thee."

Perhaps there is no loftier note of music and of thought struck anywhere throughout these prophecies. For the rest, we must tread carefully over the treacherous hot ashes strewn about the latter end of this book: which indeed speaks plainly enough for once, and with high equal eloquence; but to no generally acceptable effect. The one matter of marriage laws is still beaten upon, still hammered at with all the might of an insurgent prophet: to whom it is intolerable that for the sake of mere words and mere confusions of thought "she who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot" should be "bound by spells of law to one she loathes," should "drag the chain of life in weary lust," and "bear the wintry rage of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod over her shrinking shoulders all the day, and all the night to turn the wheel of false desire;" intolerable that she should be driven by "longings that wake her womb" to bring forth not men but some monstrous "abhorred birth of cherubs," imperfect, artificial, abortive; counterfeits of holiness and mockeries of purity; things of barren or perverse nature, creatures inhuman or diseased, that live as a pestilence lives and pass away as a meteor passes; "till the child dwell with one he hates, and do the deed he loathes, and the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth ere yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day:" the day whose blinding beams had surely somewhat affected the prophet's own eyesight, and left his eyelids lined with strange colours of fugitive red and green that fades into black. However, all these things shall be made plain by death; for "over the porch is written Take thy bliss, O man! and sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew." On the one hand is innocence, on the other modesty; infancy is "fearless, lustful, happy;" who taught it modesty, "subtle modesty, child of night and sleep?" Once taught to dissemble, to call pure things impure, to "catch virgin joy, and brand it with the name of whore and sell it in the night;" once corrupted and misled, "religious dreams and holy vespers light thy smoky fires: once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn." Not pleasure but hypocrisy is the unclean thing; Oothoon is no harlot, but "a virgin filled with virgin fancies, open to joy and to delight wherever it appears; if in the morning sun I find it, there my eyes are fixed in happy copulation:" and so forth--further than we need follow.

"Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?--

Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth! Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing? Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darkened and cast out, A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity;"

as in a later prophecy Ahania, cast out by the jealous God, being the type or embodiment of this sacred natural love "free as the mountain wind."

"Can that be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water? That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the days?

* * * * *

Such is self-love, that envies all; a creeping skeleton With lamp-like eyes watching around the frozen marriage-bed."

But instead of the dark-grey "web of age" spun around man by self-love, love spreads nets to catch for him all wandering and foreign pleasures, pale as mild silver or ruddy as flaming gold; beholds them without grudging drink deep of various delight, "red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam." No single law for all things alike; the sun will not shine in the miser's secret chamber, nor the brightest cloud drop fruitful rain on his stone threshold; for one thing night is good and for another thing day: nothing is good and nothing evil to all at once.

"'The sea-fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs, And the wild snake the pestilence, to adorn him with gems and gold; And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their eternal joy. Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! Arise and drink your bliss! For everything that lives is holy.'

Thus every morning wails Oothoon, but Theotormon sits Upon the margined ocean, conversing with shadows dire.

The daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs."

It may be feared that Oothoon has yet to wait long before Theotormon will leave off "conversing with shadows dire;" nor is it surprising that this poem won such small favour; for had it not seemed inexplicable it must have seemed unbearable. Blake, as evidently as Shelley, did in all innocence believe that ameliorated humanity would be soon qualified to start afresh on these new terms after the saving advent of French and American revolutions. "All good things are in the West;" thence in the teeth of "Urizen" shall human deliverance come at length. In the same year Blake's prophecy of _America_ came forth to proclaim this message over again. Upon this book we need not dwell so long; it has more of thunder and less of lightning than the former prophecies; more of sonorous cloud and less of explicit fire. The prelude, though windy enough, is among Blake's nobler myths: the divine spirit of rebellious redemption, imprisoned as yet by the gods of night and chaos, is fed and sustained in secret by the "nameless" spirit of the great western continent; nameless and shadowy, a daughter of chaos, till the day of their fierce and fruitful union.

"Silent as despairing love and strong as jealousy, The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire."

At his embrace "she cast aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile, as when a black cloud shows its lightnings to the silent deep."

"Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin's cry; I love thee; I have found thee, and I will not let thee go. Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa, And thou art fallen to give me life in regions of dark death."

Then begins the agony of revolution, her frost and his fire mingling in pain; and the poem opens as with a sound and a light of storm. It is throughout in the main a mere expansion and dilution of the "Song of Liberty" which we have already heard; and in the interludes of the great fight between Urizen and Orc the human names of American or English leaders fall upon the ear with a sudden incongruous clash: not perhaps unfelt by the author's ear also, but unheeded in his desire to make vital and vivid the message he came to deliver. The action is wholly swamped by the allegory; hardly is it related how the serpent-formed "hater of dignities, lover of wild rebellion and transgressor of God's Law," arose in red clouds, "a wonder, a human fire;" "heat but not light went from him;" "his terrible limbs were fire;" his voice shook the ancient Druid temple of tyranny and faith, proclaiming freedom and "the fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands;" the "punishing demons" of the God of jealousy

"Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dried in the wind; They cannot smite the wheat nor quench the fatness of the earth; They cannot smite with sorrows nor subdue the plough and spade; For terrible men stand on the shores, and in their robes I see Children take refuge from the lightnings. * * * * Ah vision from afar! ah rebel form that rent the ancient heavens! * * * * Red flames the crest rebellious And eyes of death; the harlot womb oft opened in vain Heaves in eternal circles, now the times are returned upon thee."

"Thus wept the angel voice" of the guardian-angel of Albion; but the thirteen angels of the American provinces rent off their robes and threw down their sceptres and cast in their lot with the rebel; gathered together where on the hills

"called Atlantean hills, Because from their bright summits you may pass to the golden world, An ancient palace, archetype of mighty emperies, Rears its immortal pinnacles, built in the forest of God By Ariston the king of beauty for his stolen bride."

A myth of which we are to hear no more, significant probably of the rebellion of natural beauty against the intolerable tyranny of God, from which she has to seek shelter in the darkest part of his creation with the angelic or daemonic bridegroom (one of the descended "sons of God") who has wedded her by stealth and built her a secret shelter from the strife of divine things; where at least nature may breathe freely and take pleasure; whither also in their time congregate all other rebellious forces and spirits at war with the Creator and his laws. But the speech of "Boston's angel" we will at least transcribe: not without a wish that he had never since then spoken more incoherently and less musically.

"Must the generous tremble and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence, That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel? To keep the generous from experience, till the ungenerous Are unrestrained performers of the energies of nature, Till pity is become a trade and generosity a science That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is given to the strong? What God is he writes laws of peace and clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay."

This is perhaps the finest and clearest passage in the book; and beyond this point there is not much extractable from the clamorous lyrical chaos. Here again besides the mere outward violence of battle, the visible plague and fire of war, we have sight of a subtler and wider revolution.

"For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion Run from their fetters reddening and in long-drawn arches sitting. They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times."

Light and warmth and colour and life are shed from the flames of revolution not alone on city and valley and hill, but likewise

"Over their pale limbs, as a vine when the tender grape appears;

* * * * *

The heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen who sat Above all heavens in thunders wrapt, emerged his leprous head From out his holy shrine; his tears in deluge piteous Falling into the deep sublime."

Notwithstanding for twelve years it was fated that "angels and weak men should govern o'er the strong, and then their end should come when France received the demon's light:" and the ancient European guardians "slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven, filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair, with fierce disease and lust;" but these gates were consumed in the final fire of revolution that went forth upon the world. So ends the poem; and of the decoration we have barely space to say enough. On one page are the visions of the renewed world, on another the emblems of oppression and war: children sleeping nestled in the fleece of a sleeping ram with heavy horns and quiet mouth pressing the soft ground, while overhead shapely branches droop and gracious birds are perched; or what seems the new-born body of Orc cast under the sea, enmeshed in a web of water whose waves are waves of corn when you come to look; maidens and infants that bridle a strong dragon, and behind them a flight of birds through the clouds of a starry moonlit night, where a wild swan with vast wings and stretching neck is bestridden by a spirit looking eagerly back as he clutches the rein; eagles that devour the dead on a stormy sea-beach, while underneath fierce pikes and sharks make towards a wrecked corpse that has sunk without drifting, and sea-snakes wind about it in soft loathsome coils; women and children embrace in bitter violence of loving passion among ripples of fruitful flame, out of which rise roots and grasses of the field and laden branches of the vine. Of all these we cannot hope to speak duly; nor can we hope to give more than a glimpse of the work they illustrate.