The poems and art of William Blake are forever in need of explanation, and forever inexplicable. Their power surges from the tension between the simplicity and vividness of Blake’s words and images, and the mysterious apocalyptic vision that shines through that simplicity.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears …
The language is entirely clear, and the imagery is gripping. But what does it mean? When did the stars thrown down their spears? What were they weeping about? And what does any of it have to do with “tygers”?
The language is entirely clear, and the imagery is gripping. But what does it mean?
And yet Blake’s rhyming lyrics are, for the most part, relatively accessible. He is at his most impenetrable in his “prophecies”, his great, rambling cosmogonies, with their cast of made-up entities (Los, Enitharmon, Urizen …), historic figures given new universal significance (Milton, Newton, Locke …), and personal enemies recast as eternal destructive forces—all enacting a terrible drama set inside a real geography and history, which have been transmuted in the alembic of Blake’s revelations.
Awake
Highgate’s heights and Hampstead’s, to Poplar, Hackney and Bow,
To Islington and Paddington & the Brook of Albion’s River.
We build Jerusalem as a City & a Temple; from Lambeth
We began our Foundation, lovely Lambeth.
Of course, there are Blake scholars and devotees who can explain many of these puzzles in terms of Blake’s “system”. It is indeed impossible to make any headway through the prophecies without some use of that explanatory work, and the lyrics too must then be integrated with the prophecies. Yet the exegetes themselves are often baffled, and they tend to insist that Blake cannot be reduced to the expounder of a system, however bizarre. Rather he was driven to attempt again and again to put into words and pictures a vision in which he profoundly believed, but which could never be fully rendered in verse or image, still less in an systematic treatise.
Nevertheless, it is helpful both for understanding Blake, and for understanding why he is more than a curiosity or a madman, to view him as a Christian heretic (the term was already used by Algernon Swinburne, one of his first popularizers), and more specifically as a gnostic, that is to say a deliberate adopter and adapter of the gnostic beliefs that arose within and without the Christian Church in the early centuries after Christ. Gnostics devised complex cosmogonies, with scores of strangely named entities, arranged in layers of descent. Typically, at the top layer were pure, utterly immaterial beings. Some sort of fall from this purity had taken place, leading eventually to the emergence of a “demiurge”, a wicked or at least compromised being who created the material world, and demanded worship from his creations. Adepts of gnosticism were taught these elaborate myths of fall as a path to transcending the material world entirely, and rejoining the primal, immaterial realm of purity and light.
It is clear that Blake took inspiration from such accounts. He too writes of a drama of strangely named entities, whose clashes and collapses somehow explain our own tormented condition. In particular, his entity “Urizen” (perhaps meant to rhyme with “reason”) is fairly close to the gnostic “demiurge”. Gnostics frequently identified their demiurge with the Old Testament God, and Urizen too is God as Creator—not exactly the God of Christian and Jews, but an aspect thereof, restricted to reason, power and rules—whom Blake believed the institutional churches had inflicted upon the faithful as a perverse vision of divinity.
It is clear that Blake took inspiration from gnostic cosmogonies.
However Blake’s vision resembled the ancient gnostics’ more in its structure than in its essence. The core of ancient gnosticism was the promise of a liberation from the flesh and from matter, whose very existence was the manifestation of disorder and the essence of evil. Blake too believed that life in the flesh was a sort of confinement:
They pour cold water on his brain in front, to cause
Lids to grow over his eyes in veils of tears, and caverns
To freeze over his nostrils, while they feed his tongue from cups
And dishes of painted clay. Glowing with beauty and cruelty
They obscure the sun & the moon: no eye can look upon them.
But for Blake liberation from this prison did not at all mean escape from the body and the annihilation of matter. Rather, freedom was to come from some sort of new marriage between the senses and the spirit, reason and imagination, innocent virginity and “gratified desire”—this is indeed his “marriage of heaven and hell”.
Blake’s is thus a Romantic gnosticism. His elect are not the bloodless philosophers, but lovers and artists. Lambeth, where he lived and worked with his wife and constant collaborator Catherine, was not be escaped for some realm of pure light, but was itself—the workshop and the bedroom—to be the corner-stone of the new Jerusalem. It is not even clear that Blake “believed in God”, in any conventional sense: what he sought was “Humanity, Divine, Incomprehensible”.
Blake is not be reduced to a free-love hippy or a boosterish apologist for the “triumph of the human spirit”. There is a piercing note of terror and agony in all his work. But it is less the terror and agony of Jacob wrestling with the angel than that of a man whose own inner forces are at war with each other. That is why—for all that he is so inexplicable—Blake has seemed so timely a prophet to a godless age.
