Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human 152757752X, 9781527577527

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Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human By

Nicholas Meihuizen

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human By Nicholas Meihuizen This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Nicholas Meihuizen All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-7752-X ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-7752-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vi Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 The Daemon Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 38 Blake: From Poetical Sketches to Songs of Innocence & Experience Chapter Three ......................................................................................... 128 Blake’s Prophetic Books Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 217 Shelley: The Daemon of the World, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 280 Shelley: “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Mont Blanc”, “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark” Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 327 Keats: From Endymion to The Fall of Hyperion Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 417 Conclusion Bibliography ........................................................................................... 424 Index ....................................................................................................... 443

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been working on the Romantics since I was an undergraduate student, many years ago. My debts to others are therefore many, but I only single out the few individuals who loom large in my memory. First, I acknowledge the debt I owe to the late Kathleen Raine, for so kindly corresponding with me and gifting me with copies of certain of her works. Next, my Romantics lecturers at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, Don Beale and the late François Hugo, provided me with scholarly models I have tried to emulate throughout my career. I thank particularly inspiring colleagues and students from recent years: Cobus Crowther, Michiel de Lange, Noel Dube, Mlamuli Goba, Andrea Goosen, Ashley Hambly, Lilly Labuschagne, Adam Lehmann, Jené Liebenberg, Botiumelo Matshedisho, the late Chris Mann, Thulisile Mngomezulu, David Scott-Mcnab, Charika Swanepoel, Etienne Terblanche, Willem Van den Berg, Jansen Vermeulen and Hein Viljoen. I must also thank an anonymous reader of the present work for pertinent suggestions regarding wider daemonic understanding. It goes without saying (but it shouldn’t) that I thank my wife, Elsa, for support and encouragement, despite the professional demands of her own academic career. Some debts can never be repaid.

CHAPTER ONE THE DAEMON

The late Harold Bloom’s final book, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (2015), prompts, with its close readings of various American authors, my present engagement with British Romanticism from the point of view of its daemonic features.1 For me the figure of the daemon provides the means to introduce a broader exploration of Neoplatonic (and other internally-oriented) doctrines and imagery, not least those evolved by the poets themselves. The daemon intrudes, too, upon sociological matters. Orrin N. C. Wang detects a “force” in the continuing expression of Romantic revolutionary thinking: “Very few more powerful pedagogical moments exist in romantic studies than the act of connecting contemporary invocations of the left and right to a two-hundred-year-old genealogy originating in the Jacobin and anti-Jacobin conflict”. Importantly, the sustained nature of this “force”, which I would call daemonic, ties the study of Romanticism “to future concerns beyond and outside the scholarly world”.2 For Bloom, indeed, the daemon is an extraordinary nexus of energy, which bridges the human and “what lies beyond the human” (The Daemon Knows, 4). “What lies beyond the human” is that which interests me, as it clearly pertains to humankind’s present predicament on earth, and “concerns beyond and outside the scholarly world”. It is a matter, again, which I approach (in part) through the means of a traditional understanding of our relation to the earth, and the imagery, rather loosely termed “Neoplatonic”, with which we express this relation. The revival (or rerevival) of this traditional understanding in the late eighteenth century links, in obverse ratio, with the beginning of the industrial age, the need to return to values underlining the interconnection of life forms and energies on earth, and the respect for the earth associated with a perception of the sacrality of these life forms and energies. This broadening of a perceptual horizon displaces 1

Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 2 Orrin N. C. Wang, “Ghost Theory”, Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2 (2007): 217218.

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the taken-for-granted centrality of humankind and its claim to terrestrial dominance. Regarding recent ways of our situating ourselves in relation to the problems of existence, a general posthumanist outlook comes remarkably close to that of key British Romantics. If the term “posthuman” brings to mind the hybridity of a Frankenstein “monster”, or of a cyborg from science fiction—an extension of the human, in other words— “posthumanism” is, rather, concerned with the blindness of self-centred humanism, itself a correlative of the extreme intensification of the ills of industrialisation, and seeks to shift awareness to the importance of life beyond and outside this narrow range. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini observe: In contrast to images of the cybernetic posthuman as trans- or super-human, posthumanist discourses promote neither the transcendence of the human nor the negation of humanism. Rather, critical posthumanisms engage with the humanist legacy to critique anthropocentric values and worldviews.3

In evoking the images and beliefs of a traditional understanding of our relation with the earth, of which the daemon acts as a pivot for me, I consider my approach to be posthumanist in its sympathies,4 though situated within the longer perspective suggested by Clarke and Rossini: “If the limits of the human have always exercised both our thinking and our esthetic practices, then some aspects of what is now termed ‘posthumanism’ and ‘the posthuman’ go as far back as the beginning of the human itself”. As Cary Wolfe puts the matter, posthumanism is a discourse “that comes both before and after humanism”.5 From my perspective, a traditionalist approach to the posthuman would indeed involve a “transcendence of the human”, though not a “negation of humanism”. I think of Charles Taylor’s rebuttal (as outlined by Christopher Steck) of the notion that the secular self has emerged from conceptual constraints—located in an obeisance to ideological manifestations of transcendence—into a “neutral, self-contained reality”. Rather, according 3

Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, Preface, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, eds. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xiv-xv. 4 I express an allegiance in oblique terms because a specific field of research “implies delineation or control”, which I wish to avoid. See Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities”, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, eds. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 9. 5 See Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxv.

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to Taylor, the self is “formed and reformed through different historical constructions”, where for the modern self “the eclipse of the transcendent is part of that social construction”, “not a newly realized truth about the human condition”. “Tacit assumptions” based on the apparent “emergence” of the secular self “discourage an option for [the] transcendent”, but the contemporary self, acting within an “immanent framework” can still turn to the transcendent through literature.6 Further, according to Clarke and Rossini, and this defines something of a goal for the present book in its engagement with the daemon and the spiritual concerns and energies surrounding it: “a current challenge for posthumanist thinking is to confront the specters of those premodern animals, gods, angels, monsters, and other real and conceptual entities that, in order to keep the human ‘proper’, humanist modernity had to expel”. To consider ecological views in relation to posthumanism, those expressed by Fritjof Capra are exemplary: he writes of “the notion of the embodied mind” currently being “developed in cognitive science”. What is important here is that the sense of unity of body and mind embedded in this notion “transcends not only the separation of mind and body, but the separation of self and world”: This sense of oneness with the natural world is fully borne out by the new scientific conception of life. As we understand how the roots of life reach deep into basic physics and chemistry, how the unfolding of complexity began long before the formation of the first living cells, and how life has evolved for billions of years by using again and again the same basic patterns and processes, we realize how tightly we are connected with the entire fabric of life.7

Mark Lussier quotes Capra on the disturbing human tendency to elevate selfhood, and the consequences of this for the environment: “The origin of our [current] dilemma lies in our tendency to create the abstractions of separate objects, including a separate self”, which is only dispersed when we “overcome our Cartesian anxiety . . . [and] realize that identity, individuality, and autonomy do not imply separateness and independence”.8 As Aldo Leopold would have it, humans are part of a “biotic community”, with no special privileges. And as early as the sixteenth century, at the 6

Christopher Steck, “Re-embedding Moral Agency: Linking Theology and Ethics in Blake”, The Journal of Religious Ethics 41, no. 2 (2013): 337-338. 7 Fritjof Capra, The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living (New York: Anchor, 2002), 68-69. 8 Mark Lussier, “Self-Annihilation / Inner Revolution: Blake’s Milton, Buddhism, and Ecocriticism”, Religion & Literature 40, no. 1 (2008): 41.

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height of the European Humanist enterprise, Giordano Bruno, albeit an eccentric contrarian, could declare that “no natural intrinsic or ontological difference exists between men and beasts”: “In fact, a larger difference exists among [humankind] than exists between idiotic men and horses and elephants”.9 Iain McGilchrist writes of the interdependence of right and left hemispheres of the brain, where the currently dominant left (though McGilchrist is ever wary of the terms of a reductive bifurcation) “underwrites the fragmented vision” of mechanistic reasoning, and “is both literally more limited in what it can see, and less capable of understanding what it does see than the right” (one of whose functions is to assemble into a rich and complex whole the parts perceived by the left); further, the left “is less aware of its own limitations”.10 Bearing this in mind, “we should be appropriately sceptical of the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resources there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines—not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value” (Master and Emissary, xxvi). The Romantics with whom I deal, Blake, Shelley and Keats,11 seemed well aware of the pernicious fictions “of human nature”, based on the elevation of a superficially rational aspect of the mind, and centred in the privileging of a separate self, empowered by its own sense of self-worth to exploit all around it. The antagonist against which they strove was, in Lussier’s words, the “delusion of separation and alienation” (Lussier, “Self-Annihilation”, 45); their goal, a freeing of consciousness from the narrow confines imposed by Enlightenment, left-brain awareness. Their daemonic means of doing so will be explored in this book. In Bloom’s The Daemon Knows the daemon is made manifest in the works of writers coupled by him in a suggestive manner: Whitman and Melville, Emerson and Dickinson, Hawthorne and James, Twain and Frost, Stevens and Eliot, and, finally, Faulkner and Hart Crane. At times the 9

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 204. For Bruno, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Bruno’s Radical Critique of Humanism”, Annali d'Italianistica 26 (2008): 178-179. 10 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), xxi. 11 The apparent privileging of these representatives of what Marc Redfield refers to as “the Big Six canon” is not the result of unconsidered prejudice (though my familiarity with their work undoubtedly plays a role in my choice), but on account of their specific links with the daemonic. See Marc Redfield, “Aesthetics, Theory, and the Profession of Literature: Derrida and Romanticism”, Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2 (2007): 243.

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daemon is spurred into existence by one in the couple working on the other; at other times it simply descends on its chosen author. In the course of the volume, Bloom briefly refers to daemonic lore, citing Walter Pater’s Greek Studies, Plutarch’s work on the cessation of oracles, the Cambridge Platonists, the Neoplatonists, and Plato himself (Bloom, The Daemon Knows, 19, 152). He also, at two points in the book, touches on the Yeatsian “Daimon”, a pertinent reference in a contemporary review of matters daemonic (The Daemon Knows, 195, 495).12 However, he prefers to reveal instances of daemonic enlargement in his chosen authors. What seems to be common in all his instances is the sense that the daemonic voice is supercharged, often expressing what we might call (in a Romantics context) the Burkean Sublime;13 it seems to come from beyond the authors themselves while yet being absorbed in human matters. Bloom quotes from Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (1976): “The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. What, if anything, lies beyond the human—God or the gods, the daemon or Nature—is matter for great disagreement. What, if anything, defines the range of the human is scarcely less sure” (in Bloom, The Daemon Knows, 3-4). The current convergence of humanism and posthuman concerns (which responds in part to Weiskel’s speculations) is suggested by Rosi Braidotti: “Posthumanism is the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and antihumanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives”.14 As Bloom says of his selection of authors: “these writers represent our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism” (The Daemon Knows, 3); this last (as well as referring to a posthuman imperative) stands as his best general account of the agency of the “daemonic”. It is necessary to examine daemonic lore in a bit more detail in the present work, where both knowledge of the daemon (linked to daemonic evocation) and daemonic expression are concerned. The daemon, however, is not a straightforward subject. In Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Mortals and Immortals, the daemon is that small measure of 12 Originally Yeats spelt the word “Daemon”; though I favour this spelling, I occasionally slip between “daemon” and “daimon”, depending on authors’ preferences. 13 Paddy Bullard provides a useful contextualisation of the Burkean Sublime, which, refreshingly, emphasises the (albeit reactionary) statesman’s humanism. See Paddy Bullard, “Burke’s Aesthetic Philosophy”, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53-66. 14 See Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 37.

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divinity within humankind: “The psuché, which in each of us is ‘ourself’, has a ‘daimonic’ character: it is a particle of the divine in human beings”.15 Pictorius Villinganus, the sixteenth century alchemist, notes that daemon “is the name of one that doth administer help or succor unto another, and whom Pliny calleth a God”. For Apuleius daemons are “media between us and the Gods”, being immortal and rational, but having “passion in common with other natures subordinate to themselves”. At one point in North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of Caesar, Caesar’s “great daimon” (“ho mentoi megas daimon”) is rendered in general terms as the tenor of a life: his “great prosperitie and good fortune”. In a related way Jane Chance Nitzsche observes that “the Greek concept of the daemon influenced the Roman genius, so that each man was said to possess a soul (genius or daemon) born with him”. (This conflation of “daemon” and “genius” is a terminological point to be borne in mind later, regarding the Romantics in the present book.) Concerning the difficulties associated with the meaning of the word “daimon”, Hannu Poutiainen notes that “the genealogy of the daimon’s signification—‘fate’ in Heraclitus, ‘mysterious sign’ in Plato, ‘malignant spirit’ in the Septuagint and in Christian discourses like that of St. John Chrysostom—remains a knotted one”. It is knotted in the context of this specific mingling of Christian and pagan sources, but Bloom’s understanding of the office of the daemon, at least, accords with Apuleius, and is essentially that found in Plato’s Symposium, with its sense of an entity which bridges the human and “what lies beyond the human”. In Shelley’s translation of this work, we find Diotima’s account. She says the daemon is one who:

15

See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 191. For references in the remainder of this paragraph, see Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, trans. Robert Turner (London: John Harrison, 1655), 110; Apuleius in Kathleen Raine, “Thomas Taylor, Plato and the English Romantic Movement”, The British Journal of Aesthetics 8, no. 2 (1968): 255; North in William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 331; Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 4-5; Hannu Poutiainen, “Autoapotropaics: ‘Daimon and Psuché’ between Plutarch and Shakespeare”, Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 1 (2012): 520; Iamblichus, Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, trans. Thomas Taylor, London, 1790. Secret Doctrine Reference Series (San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1984), 32. See also Angus Nicholls’s detailed overview of the Platonic daemon in Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2006), 11-12.

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interprets and makes a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers and sacrifices of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands and directions concerning the mode of worship most pleasing to them, from Gods to men. . . . The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love; and he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely happy, and participates in the daemoniacal nature; whilst he who is wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave. These daemons are, indeed, many and various, and one of them is Love.16

This account tallies with Neoplatonic belief. Most subtly, Iamblichus says of the “medium” of daemons, it “unfolds into energy the invisible good of the Gods, being itself assimilated to it. . . . For it renders that which is ineffable in the good of the Gods effable, illuminates that which is formless in forms, and produces into visible reasons that which in divine good is above all reason”. An autonomous supernatural medium, though, is not, of course, what interests Bloom (master of the agon of natural poetic influence). It was different for Yeats. A self-styled “last Romantic”, and, in effect, a latter-day Neoplatonist and Hermeticist, for him daemonic influx also involves a force that lies beyond conscious awareness. It is an elusive agent, sometimes revealed in dream or semi-wakeful states, or glimpsed in aesthetic creation. However, Yeats believed the daemon to be our autonomous opposite, which bore within itself the weight of all that we are not but need to become—a type of Blakean “Contrary” which completes our nature.17 Yeats was well aware, too, that one may be deluded as to the actual presence of the daemon, as in the case of his sceptical “interaction” with the daemonic Leo Africanus.18 In recent terms, indeed, the seemingly autonomous daemon might be viewed as an hallucination, stemming from Julian Jaynes’s rationalisation of the “bicameral mind”. It might also be seen as an expression of the immanence of posthuman awareness, as Ron Broglio applies this term to Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”, with its immersion in nonhuman existence: “Poetry, in this posthuman configuration, is not illuminating 16 Being made by Percy Bysshe Shelley, this translation is of more than passing interest in this present work, as we will see. Shelley’s translations from Plato are to be found in James A. Notopoulos’s The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1949), 375-511. The passage above is from pages 441-442. 17 Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 367, 371. 18 See Nicholas Meihuizen, Yeats, Otherness and the Orient: Aesthetic and Spiritual Bearings (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018), 141-169.

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and expressing one’s experiences. Rather, poetry is opening up to a nonhuman phenomenology of wonder beyond fact, reason, and mimetic description”.19 Though Yeatsian credulity regarding the supernatural is often qualified by scepticism, the poet is always alert to “wonder beyond fact”, to the power of daemonic influx, whatever its source. Thus Bloom and Yeats share the understanding that daemonic force comes, in some sense, from beyond the human individual, even though the Yeatsian viewpoint involves a general philosophy of spirit-mediated existence, while Bloom wishes to reveal moments of the transcendence of limited human perception through the power of the imagination.20 Important here is the difference in kind: the daemon as autonomous impersonal force gives credence to the valency of Blake’s visionary reality, for instance, while the Bloomian notion accommodates the more conventional sense of infusion of exceptional personal imaginative enthusiasm experienced from time to time by all the Romantics. For the Romantics, imaginative commitment to the potency of transcendence (in the face of the restrictions of organised religion or contemporary rationalist complacency) is paramount. Their daemonic understanding goes back, I believe, at least as far as Homer. To contextualise this understanding (the purpose, in part, of the present chapter), is to begin to see how the Romantics integrated previously perceived wellsprings of poetic vision within their aesthetic awareness, and so imbibed a paradigm that seemed to emerge from beneath the accumulated strata of centuries to validate their inherent sense that the sacral glowed within the mundane, thus dissolving the borders of commonplace perception, and instilling, in effect, a posthumanist understanding of the world around them. We might thus say that the Romantics’ daemonic awareness was informed both by learning and inherent enthusiasm, related to a general surging of psychic sensitivity 19 See Judith Weissman’s, “Vision, Madness, and Morality: Poetry and the Theory of the Bicameral Mind”, The Georgia Review 33, no. 1 (1979): 128-140. Weissman, although she offers useful general insights, seems blind to the severe limitations of Jaynes’s theory. See James W. Moore, “‘They Were Noble Automatons Who Knew Not What They Did’: Volition in Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Frontiers in Psychology, no. 12 (2021): 4. McGilchrist, however, feels Jaynes made a “breakthrough”, but arrived at a conclusion opposite to what he uncovered—rather than a “breakdown” occurring, the experience of unified consciousness had been lost (Master and Emissary, 261262). See Ron Broglio, “Romantic”, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 36. 20 I believe Yeats had a deep-seated conviction of the authenticity of posthuman agency, to the understanding and service of which he devoted most of his life.

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during this era. The powerful social and intellectual forces evident in the age itself, which sparked various forms of revolution, from political, to spiritual, to industrial, as has often been stated, contributed to the conditions for this surge.21 Consider, too, McGilchrist’s observation, that Romanticism is “the only term we have to refer to a philosophical, as much as cultural, revolution which heralded the beginnings of a reawareness of the power of metaphorical thought, of the limitations of classical, non-paraconsistent logic, and the adoption of non-mechanistic ways of thinking about the world, which belatedly enabled us to catch up with ideas that have been for centuries, if not millennia, current in Eastern cultures” (Master and Emissary, 200).22 The intensity of the zeitgeist sometimes took its toll on the psychologies of sensitive creative artists, as in the cases of Christopher Smart, William Cowper, and, later, John Clare. Blake, considered mad by some, in fact evinced a penetrating sanity. Securely grounded in his acute understanding of human nature, he was also a highly engaged and discriminating reader of a variety of authors. In response to T. S. Eliot’s perceiving “a certain meanness of culture” in Blake, Kathleen Raine observes, “A culture which embraced Plato and Plotinus, the Bible and the Hermetica, English science and philosophy, the tradition of Alchemy, Gibbon and Herodotus, besides the body of English poetry—not to mention his equally wide knowledge of painting—can scarcely be called mean”.23 The Neoplatonic learning evident in Blake was enabled, to an extent,24 by the contemporary translations of classical works by Thomas Taylor, as Kathleen Raine points out, citing his translations of Plato into English (the first), and his translations, between 1780 and 1800, of Neoplatonic Tractates by Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. He also wrote “a number of remarkable essays on the Orphic mythology”, along with “the Neoplatonic use of those ancient myths as the natural language of metaphysical thought”. 21 See Duncan Wu, ed., Romanticism: An Anthology (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), xxxii-xliv. 22 The term “reawareness” points to previous Western familiarity with these ways of thinking: McGilchrist names Plato and the pre-Socratics, along with Plotinus, though he does not refer to the Neoplatonists as such (Master and Emissary, 195, 259, 293). Elsewhere, he calls Plotinus “one of the greatest of Greek philosophers”. See McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), 10. 23 See Kathleen Raine, “Blake’s Debt to Antiquity”, The Sewanee Review 71, no. 3 (1963): 449-450. 24 See Kathleen Wheeler’s, “Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship”, The Wordsworth Circle 30, no.2 (1999): 91, for an indication of the rich line of Greek literature (as distinct from philosophy) that was also available, and influential, in the eighteenth-century.

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Blake, Coleridge and Shelley all read Taylor; and Ralph Waldo Emerson called him “the best feeder of poets since Milton”.25 I will consider an instance of Taylor’s translation of pertinent material presently, to help clarify what Raine means by “the natural language of metaphysical thought”. But first, Emerson’s evocation of Milton must give us pause, as it was Milton’s example which inspired all the British Romantics. For Thomas Greene, in The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (1963), the epic language of Milton is replete with daemonic energy. Milton shows “that electric dynamism the ancients thought was divine or demonic. . . . Upon it depends, really, the humanistic awe, the maraviglia, for that which quickens the self but surpasses the self” (Greene, Descent from Heaven, 23). If Milton at times “distrusted all rhetoric or ornamentation”, following a current of Puritanism “that sought to quell the demonic elements with a straight jacket of stylistic ‘purity’” (Descent from Heaven, 381), this tendency was at variance with another within him, based on a “truer understanding of Old Testament language, with its dense orchestration of imagery, its poetic abandon, its visionary fire, not more restrained, as some Puritans thought, but less restrained than classical poetry”. Greene notes that the implicit theory of Hebrew prophecy was inspirationalist; it denied study and rational control; it regarded the poet as a man possessed or driven by God to speak things his rational will resisted; it released the demonic powers within the word and made of it a searing, blazing, uncontrollable thing, an antisocial explosive. (Greene, Descent from Heaven, 382)

Blake and Shelley were both alert to this “demonic” capacity in Milton; famously, for Blake, when Milton wrote of Devils and Hell, he was “at liberty”, because he was “of the Devil’s party, without knowing it”; Blake’s deliberately subversive observation (in its own way daemonic) was, of course, later qualified by his depiction of the descent and redemption of Milton, in Blakean-Christian terms, in his eponymous prophetic book (Raine refers to Blake’s “Christian polytheism”, and Bloom his “apocalyptic humanism”).26 For Shelley, Milton’s Satan is “the Hero of Paradise Lost”, 25

Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1985), 93-94. 26 William Blake, Collected Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 150 (from now on referred to as BCW). See Raine, Blake and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:73. See Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday), 372). See Dennis M. Welch, “‘Cloth’d with Human Beauty”: Milton and Blake’s Incarnational Aesthetic”, Religion and Literature 18, no.2 (1986): 1-15. And as

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the “only imaginary being who resembles in any degree” the liberating, Christ-like Prometheus, despite his “engendering in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure”. Shelley perhaps offers a corrective to his father-in-law’s straightforward presentation of Satan in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin ignores Satan’s faults, preeminently his authoritarianism, and focuses on his “spirit of opposition”, which “disdained to be subdued by despotic power”;27 Shelley’s qualified praise acknowledges both daemonic force and the perspectival dangers attending sectarianism. Whatever the explicit statements of these two poets regarding Milton, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Prometheus Unbound are infused with daemonic energy, in the pattern of this great Romantic precursor. In more general terms, they saw in Milton’s treatment of words what Kathleen Wheeler ascribes to the Greeks and Romantics in general: “For them, communication, especially verbal communication, involves treating words not like coins, as Socrates complained in the Symposium, with a fixed value to be handed passively from one person to another: words are living things and powers” (“Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship”, 92). To recall the wider area of understanding which I have associated with the contextualisation of the daemon, Milton himself was well aware of Platonic lore; thus, he refers unabashedly to “thrice great Hermes” in Il Penseroso (line 88). William Hunter believes Milton’s knowledge of Hermes came from Marsilio Ficino’s 1471 Latin translation of the Hermetica, “ascribed to the legendary name of the Thrice Great Hermes”.28 Hunter notes that the various authors of the Hermetica “unified material from Plato and the Platonic Academy, from the Stoics, from other Greeks, from Egyptian theology, and perhaps added a little Hebrew matter” (“Milton and Thrice Great Hermes”, 335). If Milton’s knowledge of this work was not first-hand, general knowledge of it was widespread, and he “may have received its ideas in some recension” (331). Ficino considered the Hermetica Jerome McGann wrote, Milton’s texts for Blake are “works which continue to act in the world . . . either to enslave or to liberate” (Jerome McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 47. The same applies to Blake himself, of course, as far as “liberation” goes. The autonomous force of these works can be seen as daemonic. 27 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 205. See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 1:324n35). 28 Hunter, Wm. B., “Milton and Thrice Great Hermes”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 45, no.3 (1946): 330.

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to be Christian in nature (330); Hunter feels this fact would have been important for Milton, though, again, outright Neoplatonic thought seems clearly acceptable to the speaker of Il Penseroso: Or let my lamp, at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook; (85-92)

Milton’s somewhat oblique syncretism, indeed, is not limited to his youth (as in the case of Il Penseroso), and informs the inspirational mode of Paradise Lost. Consider the beginning of Book 7: Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above the Olympian hill I soar, Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the name, I call: for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwellst; but, heav’nly born, Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed, Thou with eternal wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased With thy celestial song. (7.1-12)

Kathleen Raine, in discussing Shelley’s “To a Skylark”, with its phrase “unpremeditated art” (line 5), links this poem to the “celestial song” of Milton’s syncretic muse, who in Book 9 of Paradise Lost inspires the poet’s “unpremeditated verse” (line 24), and tells of a circle of Hermetic influence involving Milton and various Romantic figures: in Blake’s Milton the lark who “leads the choir of day” (31.31) is equated with the poet himself, whose lark in L’Allegro sings “From his watch-tower in the skies” (line 43). And, says Raine, “Shelley is, whether he knew it or not, Blake’s spiritual successor; and his skylark has its prototype in Blake’s, whose “Nest is at the Gate of Los, spirit of prophecy”.29 She sees Shelley’s skylark as “his tribute

29

In Milton, Blake calls the skylark “a mighty Angel” (36.12). We should not forget that behind Milton’s lark is Chaucer’s “bisy larke, messager of day”, who “Saluëth

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to Milton as the defender and exemplar of the Platonic doctrine of poetic inspiration” (Raine, Defending Ancient Springs, 147). On the following page of the same essay on Shelley, she includes Coleridge: A famous passage in the Hermetica, certainly known to Shelley, as it was to Blake and to Coleridge, describes this power of the soul to travel wherever it will [as evinced in the skylark], to be in those very places of which it thinks; a power which no body, however fine, can possess. “Command it to fly into Heaven, and it will need no Wings, neither shall anything hinder it”. (148)30

As will be argued in the second chapter on Shelley, the skylark is daemonic in nature, a sublime “other” which helps the poet see and feel beyond the bounds of the human, and which bears for Shelley both the informing necessity of natural existence and the richness of Hermetic tradition. What of the other Romantics in relation to Milton? For Coleridge, “Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Paradise Lost. . . . The fallen angels are human passions, invested with dramatic reality”, an observation which points to the daemonic link between the more-thanhuman “sublime” and the all-too-human “passions”.31 An apposite Miltonic connection is made by Gregory Leadbetter, in Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, between Coleridge’s image of himself as a “library-cormorant” and Satan, in Paradise Lost, who “on the Tree of Life . . . Sat like a cormorant”, an indirect acknowledgement of daemonic influence.32 I return to the nature of Coleridgean daemonism as discussed by Leadbetter in subsequent paragraphs of the present chapter. Wordsworth, in the sonnet, “London, 1802”, exclaimed of Milton: “Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart”.33 David Erdman equates Wordsworth’s passionately Republican feelings regarding Milton at this time with Blake’s, in hir song the morwe gray” (“The Knightes Tale”, 1491-1492). The lineage would be important for Blake. 30 For the quotation, see Hermes, The Divine Pymander (San Francisco: Wizard, 1985) 10.122. 31 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lectures on Literature: 1808-1819, vol.5 ed. Reginald A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 427. 32 Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 75-76. In “The Devil’s Thoughts” Coleridge, in light-hearted vein, refers to himself as a “cormorant”, “Sitting”, notably, “on the Tree of Knowledge”, not “Life”. 33 William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 193, line 9.

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who, in his eponymous epic, called on Milton to engage in “Mental War”.34 In his sonnet, Wordsworth brings to mind the Republicans “who called Milton friend”, announcing through them his own allegiance: “The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington, / Young Vane”. Through Milton, says Erdman, Wordsworth thus “called for the living presence of the Commonwealth men of Britain” (“Milton!”, 2). Keats also announced his allegiance to Milton: “I am convinced more and more every day that . . . a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World. Shakespeare and the Paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me”.35 In the minor ode, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair”, Keats almost makes of Milton a Shelleyan skylark, “sounding” “heavenward”: How heavenward thou soundest, Live temple of sweet noise, And discord unconfoundest, Giving delight new joys, And pleasure nobler pinions! (11-15)

The awareness of the sublimity of the Miltonic influence is perhaps best captured at the conclusion of this ode, when the “bright hair” of the poet is “coupled” unexpectedly with his “name”: Sudden it came, And I was startled, when I caught thy name Coupled so unaware, Yet, at the moment, temperate was my blood. Methought I had beheld it from the Flood. (33-42)

Keats’s receptive consciousness, calm and “temperate”, is suddenly enlightened about what it perceives, and seems to encompass an immense span of time in an instant, so enlarged does it feel in the presence of “the simplest vassal of thy power”.36 As Jerome McGann points out, Byron too, despite his distaste for Miltonic blank verse, was heavily influenced by Milton in terms of awareness of the complex mingling of good and evil in characters: “The mixed character of Byron’s Lucifer makes him a fitting inheritor of that line of post-Miltonic criticism which liked to sympathize with the demon’s 34 David Erdman, “Milton! Thou Shoulds’t Be Living”, The Wordsworth Circle 19, no.1 (1988): 2. 2-8. 35 John Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 281. From a letter to J. H. Reynolds, of 24 August 1819. 36 John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1977), 293-294, lines 1-15. (From now on referred to as KCP.)

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grandeur or power of suffering”.37 On a personal level, too, Byron felt aligned with Milton, enemy of hypocrisy and champion of freedom of thought. Like Milton, he too had “fallen on evil days” and “evil tongues”. In Milton the relevant passage occurs a few lines after the already quoted appeal to the expansive otherness of Urania, from Book 7 of Paradise Lost: Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole, More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visitst my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east: still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. (7.23-31)

Byron alludes to this passage in the “Dedication” to Don Juan, excoriating the hypocrisy of his erstwhile revolutionary elders, Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and elevating Milton, by comparison, as moral and authorial exemplar (this last especially regarding sublimity—that quality which transports “beyond the human”): If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues, Milton appealed to the Avenger, Time, If Time, the Avenger, execrates his wrongs, And makes the word “Miltonic” mean “sublime”, He deign’d not to belie his soul in songs, Nor turn his very talent to a crime; He did not loathe the Sire to laud the Son, But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (73-80)

Byron continues with a savage indignation: Think’st thou, could he—the blind Old Man—arise, Like Samuel from the grave, to freeze once more The blood of monarchs with his prophecies, Or be alive again—again all hoar With time and trials, and those helpless eyes, And heartless daughters—worn—and pale—and poor; Would he adore a sultan? he obey The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh? (81-88)

37 Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21.

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Here he exemplifies and thus literally recalls the “searing, blazing” prophetic voice of the Old Testament that Thomas Greene associates with Milton. To move from Milton and extend discussion beyond the strict limits of British Romanticism, I note that Angus Nicholls, in his lucid Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients, examines in careful and extended detail Goethe’s fascination with the daemonic, which the poet links with “key philosophical debates concerning the relationship between human subjectivity, reason and nature”, in a manner far more acceptable in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany than it ever would be in England.38 Nicholls, in a sense, demystifies the daemon, situating it within “part of a long literary-philosophical dialogue that begins, as Goethe himself acknowledged, with the ancients, and that resurfaced in Germany during Goethe’s lifetime” (Goethe’s Daemonic, 3). English daemonic expression was never centralised in a single figure of the stature and influence of Goethe, and was not so rigorously philosophised, as we will see, though, again, inspired in part by Taylor’s translations of Plato and key Neoplatonists. In fact, Goethe’s philosophical speculations, often epistolary, were barely known in England. As René Wellek notes, “We cannot escape the conclusion that personal, epistolary, and literary relations between the two groups [English and German Romantics] were extremely tenuous”. He continues, however: But lack of historical contact does not, of course, preclude similarities and even deep affinities. . . . As partial explanation one can point to common antecedents in history: e.g., the very general similarity between the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge and that of Schelling and thus generally of the German Romantics is marked even before Coleridge had read Schelling. It is due to the common background in the tradition of Neoplatonism, in mysticism such as Boehme’s, and in varieties of pietism. Rousseau and hence Goethe’s Werther supply the common ancestry for the two groups in eighteenth-century sensibility and sentimentality.39

Among the “deep affinities” (which also points to a distinction) is one noted by Geoffrey Hartman. He discusses two ballads, one by Wordsworth (“The Danish Boy”) and one by Goethe (“Des Erlkönig”), in the light of the 38

Nicholls notes that “no previous book in the history of Goethe scholarship has undertaken a detailed analysis and excavation of the classical philosophical heritage that precedes Goethe’s use of this concept [the daemonic]” (Goethe’s Daemonic, 10). 39 René Wellek, “German and English Romanticism: A Confrontation”, Studies in Romanticism 4, no.1 (1964): 41.

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“demonic”—more in its popular sense of menacing force, though not unrelated to the philosophical “daemon”—and makes the interesting observation that the English poet was immersed in a ballad culture, while the German had to reconstruct one, giving him a freer hand in matters daemonic, along with a programmatic view in terms of “rebuilding culture” as reflected in balladry.40 And as far as this confident programmatic approach is concerned, Hartman asks us to “compare the tradition that goes from Wordsworth to Keats. It is deeply uncertain of the ‘character’ or ‘identity’ of the poet. What kind of labor is imaginative labor? The charge that poetry is an ignoble or idle dreaming—‘Thou art a dreaming thing; / A fever of thyself’ [from Keats’s Fall of Hyperion, 1.168-169]—is never far from the English consciousness. But Goethe’s labor is cut out for him. Could anyone be more productive than this demiurge who works at catching culture up; who builds Bildung with devilish energy of purpose? What a supremely confident maker!” (“Wordsworth and Goethe”, 408). It could be that this English “uncertainty” about “identity” marks the difference between “confident” Goethean theorizing on the daemon and a more retiring English proclivity to regard theory as intellectually over-determined in the face of experience. Even Coleridge, the exception in England, perhaps, when it comes to Romantic immersion in philosophical thought (particularly that which inspired Goethe), according to Leadbetter, in “the way he couples the daemonic with the transnatural” is “idiosyncratic and provisional, not part of a consistently applied terminology (as it is, say, for Goethe)”.41 It is also interesting to bear in mind, however, as Lore Metzger notes in her essay, “Modifications of Genre: A Feminist Critique of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Die Braut von Korinth’”,42 that Goethe and Coleridge (like Goethe and Wordsworth—mutatis mutandis) were linked in “claiming the ballad form for serious poetry” and were thus involved “in transgressing boundaries that separated high from low art as well as proper from improper gender roles” (“Modifications”, 85). The “vampires” in the two works, in addition, bear a 40

Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History”, New Literary History 6, no.2 (1975): 407-408). 41 Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic, 2. I discuss the “transnatural” in a bit more detail below. Leadbetter, quoting Seamus Perry, also notes that “the standing of Plato in the eighteenth century [in Britain] was rather low, precisely because of Platonism’s associations with visionary or mystic abstraction” (in Coleridge and the Daemonic, 26), another indication of the ascendancy of conservative British common-sense over the speculations of philosophy. 42 Lore Metzger, “Modifications of Genre: A Feminist Critique of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Die Braut von Korinth’”, in Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, Margaret R. Higennot, Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenk, eds. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1994), 81-99.

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daemonic ambiguity: “they are both attractive and disruptive, both desirable and terrifying, leading the reader both to empathize with their subversive energy and to fear their demonic entrapment” (“Modifications”, 99). Metzger speculates that Geraldine in “Christabel” “probably owes her beautiful looks and seductive demeanor to Goethe’s ‘bride’” (“Modifications”, 94). Of course, this brand of daemonism taps into the current fascination with the dubious figures of Gothic fiction, popularised, for instance, by M. G. Lewis, in The Monk.43 Shelley and Byron were no strangers to the attractions of the Gothic, but were more influenced by the deeper manifestations of daemonic expression in Goethe’s works, such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust II, whose resonances can be felt in Alastor, Manfred and the Prometheus poems, to cite obvious examples. Goethe’s initial interest in the irrational nature of the daemon in the 1770s (introduced by Georg Hamann with his translations of Plato, and Johann Gottfried Herder—part of a “polemic against eighteenth-century German rationalism” (Goethe’s Daemonic, 16-18)), predated that shown by English Romantics in the wake of Thomas Taylor’s translations of the 1780s and 1790s. Goethe’s later, more philosophical approach to the daemon, was largely based on his reaction to Schelling’s “world-soul”, with its implication of an unconscious “remainder” in both self and world, inaccessible to understanding (Goethe’s Daemonic, 111). The connection of the daemon with an unconscious aspect of ourselves gives Plato a modern resonance, appreciated by Goethe (Goethe’s Daemonic, 222). Nicholls provides a very clear overview of the daemon in Plato, where subtle shifts of emphasis are in evidence; he includes a discussion of Socrates’s “daimonion”, or daemonic voice, which apparently guided the philosopher at certain moments in his life. Nicholls’s overview aligns with what has already been pointed out above regarding Platonic and Neoplatonic understanding of the daemon, though he warns that “one of the major themes of the daemonic is the indeterminacy of non-rational or numinous experience”, an indeterminacy which attaches to the term “daemon” itself (Goethe’s Daemonic, 15). Thus, he qualifies the general view expressed by Diotima in The Symposium, that the daemon bridges the natural and the divine on behalf of humanity, with further instances of daemonic discussion in Plato, notably from Phaedrus and The Apology (Goethe’s Daemonic, 33). These bear other, humancentred connotations, and are seen to accommodate Goethe’s subsequent assimilation of ideas from, for instance, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and, again, Schelling, where Platonic longing for the transcendent “forms” (involving 43

See Peter D. Grudin, The Demon-Lover: The Theme of Demoniality in English and Continental Fiction of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Garland, 1987), 101-103.

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daemonic mediation), is displaced, in Goethe’s “Weimar Klassik” period,44 by a longing for the natural world, stemming from within the individual, and mediated by myth, narrative and images (Goethe’s Daemonic, 26). The difference between Platonic daemons and Goethe’s earlier Sturm und Drang conception of the daemon is summarised by Nicholls: While in classical philosophy daemons were seen as intermediaries between gods and human beings, during the Sturm und Drang period the daemonic individual became something like the modern conception of genius. . . . This daemonic genius is the subject who produces original art works through an indwelling Kraft [force] that is seen as being natural and organic, thereby overcoming the split between human subjects and nature. (Goethe’s Daemonic, 219)

Also at issue, then, is the question of the provenance of the daemon—does it emerge from within the self, or does it descend from without? According to Nicholls, the later Goethe’s understanding would, in terms of limitations on human understanding imposed both by self and nature, see the daemon as a force from within and as an obstructing force from without. However, as Nicholls points out, Goethe’s most famous pronouncement on the daemon was made late in life, and in its suggestion of human empowerment reveals a strong connection with the understanding of the daemon expressed in the present book, where that which is “beyond the human” is in clear evidence: Any productivity of the highest kind . . . every invention, every great idea that brings fruit and has consequences is not subject to any individual and is above all earthly power. Man must regard such things as unexpected gifts from above, as pure children of God, which he must receive and venerate with joyful gratitude. It is akin to the daemonic, which overpoweringly does as it pleases and to which he surrenders unconsciously, while he believes that he is acting on his own initiative. In such cases, man is often seen as an instrument of a higher world government, as a vessel deemed worthy of receiving divine influence. (In Goethe’s Daemonic, 127-128. My translation)

The fact that Goethe was known to English authors through his most famous fictional works, such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust

44 Weimar Classicism was “concerned with establishing a progressive, modern program of aesthetics that endeavored to adapt classical notions of form to modern subject matter and in particular, to late-eighteenth-century understanding of subjectivity” (Nicholls, Goethe’s Daemonic, 124). Despite its name, it thus reacted against the strictures of the classical Enlightenment.

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II (the latter of which was translated in part by Shelley45 and possibly Coleridge46), does, again, make him a pertinent source of inspiration for these writers as far as daemonic expression goes. Consider the following passage from Werther: From the inaccessible mountains over the wasteland where none has set foot, to the end of the unknown ocean, the spirit of the eternal creator blows, and rejoices in every particle of dust that hears it and exists. Oh, back then, how often did I long, as with the wings of the crane flying over me, to reach the shore of the unmeasured sea, to drink from the foaming cup of the infinite that swelling bliss of life, and just for a moment, in the limited strength of my bosom, to feel a drop of the bliss of the being that produces everything in and through itself. (In Goethe’s Daemonic, 145-146. My translation)

But to indicate Goethe’s swerve from the original Platonic conceptions of the daemon, Nicholls writes of the above: “The Sehnsucht [longing, desire] presented here cannot be equated with a Platonic longing for the forms of existence. Unlike the winged soul of the philosopher presented in Plato’s Phaedrus, a soul that strives to leave the corporeal world in order to find the realm of the eide [transcendent forms], Werther only wants to grow wings in order to better investigate the earth, not the heavens” (Goethe’s Daemonic, 146). Nevertheless, as are Blake, Shelley and Keats, Goethe is at the same time keenly aware of an informing “infinite” Being “that produces everything in 45

And Shelley’s more extensive knowledge of Goethe is suggested, for instance, by his familiarity with the doctrine of “elective affinity”, taken from Goethe’s eponymous novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) of 1809. See E. B. Murray, “‘Elective Affinity’ in The Revolt of Islam”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67, no.4 (1968): 570. 46 Faustus, Translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the German of Goethe, ed. by Frederick Burwick and James McKusick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), has been objected to by reviewers as being overconfidently ascribed to Coleridge, “links in the chain of evidence remaining circumstantial”. See J. C. C. Mays “Faustus on the Table at Highgate” The Wordsworth Circle 43, no.3 (2012): 125. With the rather bland translation in view, I would tend to agree with Mays. Richard Holmes, in Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Flamingo, 1999), 367n. (before the 2007 controversy), wrote, echoing the prevailing view: “The loss of Coleridge’s version of Faust, which would surely have been spectacular, had a curiously suspending effect on Goethe’s reputation in Victorian England. Shelley (who said that only Coleridge could do it justice) translated fragments of the drama in 1822 in Italy, which were published by Leigh Hunt in The Liberal; and Coleridge in turn said he admired these ‘very much’. But full translation did not appear until the late 1820s, by which time it was heavily bowdlerized”). Whatever the case, Coleridge was obviously very familiar with Faustus.

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and through itself”. And apart from such obvious influences of a perception of what is beyond the human—apart, too, from Shelley’s translations of clearly daemonic scenes from Faust (the “Walpurgis Night” and the “Prologue in Heaven”)—as Frederick Burwick points out, the influence in Shelley of Goethean perception as explored in Faust is also apparent in the poems to Jane Williams and The Triumph of Life.47 However, once more, Goethe’s theoretical speculations on the subject of the daemon (often through his letters) could not have been known to Blake, Shelley or Keats; any influence he exerted was through poetic, dramatic expression. I have already drawn attention to Gregory Leadbetter’s Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination. Although Coleridge is not one of the Romantics to be considered in detail in the present book, it is instructive, in view of the poet’s keen interest in the translations of Taylor,48 along with his fascination in the same philosophers as fascinated Goethe, briefly to look at his relation to the daemon as examined by Leadbetter. Building on an inspired reading of a somewhat opaque and neglected 1812 notebook entry by the poet, Leadbetter convincingly uses the reference to “Daimon” in the entry to indicate Coleridge’s ability to unify the contraries of a Judeo-Christian Fall and a spiritual ascent in a continuum of spiritual becoming (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 11). Like Schelling and Goethe, indeed, Coleridge was aware of the areas of existence (natural and personal) impervious to conscious thought, considered daemonic and “transnatural” by the poet—for Coleridge the latter term implied that which is beyond natural cause and effect, but it “also carries an imputation of moral deviation within the very fabric of its imaginative power”.49 Countenancing such a notion transgressed the values of the pietism of both Unitarians (whom the poet for a time followed) and Anglicans, who considered it to be a form of “superstition” in the face of the divine revelation afforded by Christianity.

47 Frederick Burwick, “Origins of Evil”, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Anthony Howe and Madeleine Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 465-477. 48 Leadbetter quotes from a 1796 letter to Thelwall: “Metaphysics and Poetry, and ‘Facts of mind’—(i.e. Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth, the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan) are my darling Studies” (in Coleridge and the Daemonic, 26). 49 Coleridge and the Daemonic, 154-155. Regarding that which is “beyond nature” (“transnatural” in its broadest sense), Leadbetter quotes from Coleridge’s Marginalia, vol.1, 585: “In all Living there is ever an aliquid suppositum, which can never be lifted up into the intelligible” (in Coleridge and the Daemonic, 29).

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The notebook entry is to be found in volume 3 of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.50 Leadbetter reveals in it the thinly masked names of women with whom Coleridge was involved, and who may have prompted sexual feelings in him. The following weakly-encoded sentence appears in the notebook: “Thus, it was thiw Gift tuum/ and so thiw Yram + ettolrach”. The sentence is decoded by Leadbetter: “Thus, it was with Gift tuum/ [possibly Dorothy Wordsworth, “gift” in Greek being “doron”, and the poet once before, in etymological bent, having referred to Dorothy Wordsworth as “Theou Doron”, “Gift of God”] and so with Mary and Charlotte” (15).51 A first reading of the passage (here presented in part) might suggest the writer’s sense of shame associated with sexual longing: One of the strangest and most painful Peculiarities of my Nature (unless others have the same, and like me, hide it from the same inexplicable feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something transnatural) I will here record. . . . It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden Vice, past, present, or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to form a close intimacy—which never deters me but rather (as all these transnaturals) urge me on, just like the feeling of an Eddy-Torrent to a swimmer. . . . Thus, it was thiw Gift tuum/ and so thiw Yram + ettolrach. These occasional acts of the ǼȖȠ ȞȠȣȝİȞȠȢ [Ǽgo noumenos, or personal spirit] = repetitions or semblances of the original Fall of Man—hence shame and power—to leave the appointed Station and become ǻĮȚȝȦȞ [Daimon].

However, in a careful analysis of it, Leadbetter uncovers the abovementioned link between Fall and ascent—in that consciousness of sin leads to self-awareness and the development of Reason, or, for Coleridge, a higher faculty of consciousness that perceives spiritual truth “beyond the evidence of the senses” (9). One might add, with Nicholls’s analysis of the Platonic daemon in mind, that erotic desire is a forerunner or analogue of the philosophical desire for the “transcendent forms” underlying material nature. Not expressed in so many words by Coleridge (apprehension of

50

The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol.3, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 4166. 51 Mary was the wife of John Morgan, the poet’s friend. Charlotte Brent was Mary’s sister, who lived with the family while Coleridge was “deliciously nursed and cosseted” by them in 1807, and later (after painful indiscretions committed with the ladies had been forgiven, or at least understood) in 1811. See Holmes, Darker Reflections, 111-112 and 259-260.

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“hidden Vice” is more the occasion for a frisson of transgressive pleasure),52 this linkage is yet seen in a poem such as “The Eolian Harp”.53 Leadbetter says of this poem, “Coleridge’s eroticization of its central event—a moment of liberating metaphysical transgression—is rarely discussed”. He thinks of the “desultory breeze” in the poem, “caress[ing]” the harp, which “Like some coy Maid half-yielding to her Lover”, “pours such sweet upbraidings, as must needs / Tempt to repeat the wrong!” (32). Coleridge is attracted by the transgressiveness at the same time as its spiritual aspect is revealed, as in the passage from the notebook. A perhaps unconscious tapping into Platonic allegory is expressed. Coleridge’s sense of shame in the notebook, a sense of shame absent in Plato when it comes to erotic love, is also related to the guilt he feels regarding his fascination with metaphysical thought (including the works of Taylor). As Leadbetter notes, “Throughout his life, Coleridge knew that his ‘Metaphysical reason’ carried Luciferan associations” (20). And yet a type of daemonic liberty is also implied in the notebook entry, in Coleridge’s qualifying his “guilt” and “shame” as being “inexplicable” and “causeless”: “the radical implication is, therefore, that he does not consider his visionary transgressions to be truly shaming, or guilty, notwithstanding the fact that they may breach faith with ‘God’—in the form of religion—and leave him socially isolated” (10). Standing outside society, as the individual of genius always must (11), he is imaginatively free (disburdened of the well-meaning but circumscriptive moralizing of friends such as Lamb and Wordsworth) to express the daemonism apparent in, for instance, the Ancient Mariner, “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel”; it is a complex, ambiguous daemonism, however, which—however indicative of spiritual growth (219-220)—is never free of the sense of danger and thrill associated with transgression, and thus differs for the most part from the daemonism manifested in Blake, Shelley and Keats, as we will see. Important for Coleridge in helping to free his awareness from Establishment constraints, Thomas Taylor, according to Raine, brought back into contemporary British awareness knowledge of the “first principles of mind” found in poetry, embedded in Platonic tradition, and as fundamental in its operations as mathematics, which will always be the basis of “calculations of a certain kind, without which buildings would not stand or 52 Leadbetter refers to the “profound tension” in Coleridge for at once being attracted to the transnatural and at the same time being aware of the antipathy this causes in others. This tension nevertheless “implies” for him a “pleasurable frisson” (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 9). 53 The Complete Poetical Work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 100-102.

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aeroplanes fly”. This tradition thus refers to a wider sphere of influence beyond human control: it is “in the nature of things”.54 The self-educated Taylor, however, has often been subjected to the snobbish aspersions of the “learned”, even in recent decades. For instance, Joseph Childers in a 1998 review of books on nineteenth century literature, considers the republication of Taylor’s 1792 translation of Plotinus’s An Essay on the Beautiful as “not likely to establish Taylor’s reputation as translator or Neoplatonist—which never really existed in any grand way even for the Romantics”. Almost in the same breath, he scolds Jonathan Wordsworth for his “completely uncritical” notion regarding the “ultimate truth” embedded in Platonism, apparently not realising the “completely uncritical” nature of his own statement, which so cavalierly dismisses any possible grounds for such a claim.55 Leo Catana, however, mounts a spirited defence of Taylor.56 Catana unmasks the Lutheran roots of the prejudices levelled against Neoplatonism, and hence against Taylor himself, for promoting such “charlatanism”, as the reviewer James Mill put it (Catana, “Thomas Taylor’s Dissent”, 197). Mill’s view, which led to the side-lining of Taylor amongst the orthodox, so to speak, was influential throughout the nineteenth century. Works related to Taylor’s were also available at the time; Stuart Curran, in Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, refers to Augustus Wilhelm Schlegel’s Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1815), with its understanding of the archetypal nature of Prometheus.57 Curran also lists Baron de SaintCroix’s Recherches Historiques et Critiques sur les Mystères de Paganisme (1784) and Boccaccio’s Genealogie Deorum Gentilium (1360), which had been in circulation over the centuries, and which was read by Wordsworth and Coleridge as something of an Italian primer, of all things!58 A veritable catalogue follows: Francis Bacon’s The Wisedome of the Ancients (1619), Alexander Ross’s Mystagogus Poeticus; or, The Muses Interpreter: Explaining the Historicall Mysteries, and Mysticall Histories of the Ancient Greek and Latine Poets (1653), and John Turner’s An Attempt Towards an Explanation of the Theology and Mythology of the Ancient Pagans (1687). Timothy 54

Kathleen Raine, 1968, “Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement”, in The Sewanee Review 76, no.2 (1968): 230. 55 See Joseph W. Childers, “Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century”, in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no.4 (1998): 763. 56 Leo Catana, “Thomas Taylor’s Dissent from Some 18th-Century Views on Platonic Philosophy: The Ethical and Theological Context”, in The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition, no. 7 (2013): 180-220. 57 Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975), 35. 58 Alan G. Hill, “Wordsworth, Boccaccio, and the Pagan Gods of Antiquity”, Review of English Studies, no. 45 (1994): 32.

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Webb includes works by John Lemprière, John Bell, Richard Payne Knight, and William Godwin, who, under the name of “Edward Baldwin”, published Pantheon; or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome in 1806.59 According to Curran, “the most influential of English syncretists” was Jacob Bryant, with his A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774-1776).60 This work was expanded by George Stanley Faber in 1816, in The Origin of Pagan Idolatry Ascertained from Historical Testimony and Circumstantial Evidence (Curran, Annus Mirabilis, 213214). We have already considered Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the Hermetica (1471), and its subsequent wide circulation. Leadbetter refers to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth, whose True Intellectual System of the Universe was first published in 1678, and was republished in 1743, in an edition read by Coleridge, who probably mined in it some of his knowledge of Hermes Trismegistus, “whom Plato revered as ‘a God or daemon’” (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 27-28). All these works contributed to a familiarisation with what Raine refers to as the “perennial wisdom” of the ancients, “the mode of thought which is, implicitly or explicitly, the foundation of all supreme imaginative art” (Defending Ancient Springs, 110). We also need to be aware, however, of the ambiguities surrounding the relationship with Greek and Roman culture and its languages. The Greek language, in particular, “was a widely recognized badge of exclusivity both among those who possessed it and those who did not” (Webb, “Romantic 59

Timothy Webb, “Romantic Hellenism”, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 165. 60 Bryant’s work was engraved by Basire, possibly aided by his young apprentice, William Blake. See Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:93. Whatever the case, Blake would certainly have been familiar with it, and seems to have drawn on its etymological speculations. Consider, for example, Bryant’s notion that Apollo and Abelion (a sun god of the “East”) are one and the same, which might have added to Blake’s mythographic cherishing of the near anagram, Albion. See Jacob Bryant, A New System; or, An Analysis of Antient Mythology (London, 1807), 17. (“Albion” itself was possibly derived from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 2.10.6, and 4.11.1516. Another possibility is that Blake knew Chaucer’s “Compleint to His Empty Purse”, which refers to “Brutës Albioun”. See Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), 21.) Bryant’s etymologizing would also emphasise significant reversals of names, such as that of “Sol”, which nevertheless maintained continuity of identity—one thinks of Blake’s “Los” (A New System, 28). Also of importance is this passage from Bryant: “Some of the antients thought that the soul of man was a divine emanation; a portion of light from the Sun. Hence, probably, it was called Zoan from that luminary” (38). The words “emanation” and “Zoan” (one thinks of the Zoas) have decidedly Blakean resonances.

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Hellenism”, 169). This led to at once a championing of and animosity towards the language and its ancient culture, with Keats mourning his ignorance of Greek, and Blake learning Greek within three years, but later (in accord with much current popular sentiment) denouncing it on account of its exclusivist public school associations, its perceived imaginative rigidity (which seemed to block his own imaginative freedom), and the bloodthirsty “heroic” militarism generated by its epics over the millennia (“Romantic Hellenism”, 172-173). Even Shelley was at first little attracted to Grecian culture, for similar reasons to those of the later Blake (173); but in time (and with the poet being fully aware of his own ideologically edited version of the case) “Greece became for Shelley, as for many other Romantic Hellenists, a symbol of freedom, whether political, literary or intellectual” (175). This general caveat aside, the sacral traditionalism, the perennial wisdom, of the classical past permeated Romantic thought. Thomas Taylor’s translations were able to provide first-hand evidence, as it were, of the symbolic understanding inherent in this perennial wisdom, kept alive by poets and artists over the centuries, though “lost to churches and philosophers”. But he is representative of an approach to this wisdom that differs from those of the “discourses” mentioned above. Raine feels that in England the poets (as opposed to “churches and philosophers”) kept this wisdom alive, not through invention but through tapping into European Platonism, whose “final authority” is, again, “in the nature of things, verified and reexperienced again and again” (Defending Ancient Springs, 110). Taylor’s translations enabled a conscious reconnection with those authors whose work exhibited an understanding of “the nature of things” through “the learning of the imagination”, based on established symbolic means of presenting age-old existential issues, Raine’s “natural language of metaphysical thought” (94). Raine highlights present-day aesthetic incomprehension regarding the perennial wisdom; it is as if “the poets speak a secret language” whose “meaning is no longer understood”, as the “capacity for thinking in symbols” has been lost (111). Raine shows her own “capacity for thinking in symbols”, applied to Blake, when she convincingly reasons that Blake’s illustration of Porphyry’s De Antro Nympharum (On the Cave of the Nymphs, translated by Thomas Taylor),61 a work which “illustrates the cycle of generation” in detailed terms, combines two incidents from Homer, the cave of the nymphs from Book 13 of The Odyssey and Odysseus’s Phaeacian landing from Book 5, 61

Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey, trans. Thomas Taylor (London, 1823). Copy of the first edition (London: J.M. Watkins, 1917).

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when he casts the borrowed veil back to Leucothea.62 Porphyry highlights a level of comprehension of extra-human forces clothed in symbol which serves as a type of backdrop to my own exploration of the poets in subsequent pages, who demonstrate a similar comprehension, even though their intentions are not (for the most part) allegorical; traditional resonances for them add to poetic depth. What Porphyry’s reading also illustrates, and this is something of prime importance to Blake, Shelley and Keats, is the sacral nature of existence; for this reason, it is instructive to delve into his allegory, clearly mined by Blake in the above-mentioned illustration. Porphyry’s reading stems from Book 13, lines 102-112 of The Odyssey, presented in the Taylor translation as follows: High at the head a branching olive grows And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs. A cavern pleasant, though involved in night, Beneath it lies, the Naiades’ delight: Where bowls and urns of workmanship divine And massy beams in native marble shine; On which the Nymphs amazing webs display, Of purple hue and exquisite array. The busy bees within the urns secure Honey delicious, and like nectar pure. Perpetual waters through the grotto glide, A lofty gate unfolds on either side; That to the north is pervious to mankind: The sacred south t’immortals is consign’d. (Cave of the Nymphs, 5)

Every element of the illustration has a symbolic meaning, productive of the posthuman forces surrounding human existence, and intimately known to Blake through the Taylor translation. Porphyry writes that the cave represents the world, being of earth and stone, or “of that matter of which the world consists”; but as matter “is continually flowing” or changing, “the flowing waters” are an “apt symbol” of what the world contains. Matter per se “is obscure and dark”, “involved in night”, but is made “pleasant” by the “orderly distribution of form”, signified by the “cavern”. The cavern itself is lovely “to him who first enters into it, through its participation of forms”; however, “its interior and profound parts are obscure”. Porphyry links this imagery to Persian sacred initiation, which involves entering a cave, “mystically signifying the descent of the soul into the sublunary regions” 62 “Sea of Time and Space”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20, no. 3 / 4 (1957): 318. See this illustration by Blake, online at https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/news/original-william-blake-painting-to-go-onloan.

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(11). The cave can symbolise both “the sensible world, because caverns are dark, stony, and humid”, and “the intelligible [spiritual] world, because that world is invisible to sensible perception, and possesses a firm and stable essence” (14-15). But Homer’s cave with its “perpetually-flowing streams of water” (not “firm and stable”) is not “a symbol of an intelligible hypostasis, but of a material essence” (15). A new material existence is woven from the threads of life by agents of divinity, nymphs, specifically Naiades, or those “who dwell near fountains” (13), associated with the waters of life. These nymphs are also symbols of “souls descending into generation”, who are “incumbent on water”, as “souls descending into generation fly to moisture” (15-16); the stony bowls and urns are “in the most eminent degree adapted to the nymphs, who preside over the water that flows from rocks”. The marble beams signify bones, about which are woven the purple webs, which are “evidently . . . the flesh which is woven from the blood” (19). “Add, too”, says Porphyry, “that the body is a garment with which the soul is invested, a thing wonderful to the sight” (20). The body bears a type of prosthetic relationship to the soul, a relationship anticipating or pre-modelling aspects of cybernetic culture.63 The point is, the boundaries of the human are seen to be permeable to otherness. Despite the emphasis on water, the urns are filled with honey: “it is a symbol well adapted to aquatic Nymphs, on account of the unputrescent nature of the waters over which they preside, their purifying power, and their co-operation with generation” (23). Also, “the ancients peculiarly called bees, as the efficient causes of sweetness” “the Nymphs that are souls” (23). Just as bees return to their hives at the end of a working day, so do just souls return “to their kindred stars” after leading a good life (24). Of the two “gates” of the cave, northern and southern, Porphyry reasons that since the cave is “symbol of the world”, we can extend this image to include “two extremities in the heavens . . . the winter tropic, than which nothing is more southern, and the summer tropic, than which nothing is more northern”—Capricorn and Cancer in astrological terms (26-27). Cancer, according to Macrobius (in a note translated by Taylor, at the end 63 Cary Wolfe asserts that posthumanism sees the human as “fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (What is Posthumanism? xxv). From the point of view of a spiritual posthumanism, as Kevin LaGrandeur points out, Prospero and Dr Faustus’s various spirits “represent proxies for their makers and so can be seen not just as prostheses but as distributed, networked versions of the maker’s selves” (“Early Modern”, in Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman), 16. LaGrandeur sees Ariel as “a type of daemon” (20).

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of this volume), is the abode of souls about to descend but not yet separated from the milk of the galaxy (“this circle being so called from the milk [‘gala’ (Greek) ‘lac’ (Latin)] with which souls are nourished when they fall into generation” (33)); Cancer itself is not yet separated from the galaxy, and hence tells of the need, as in the case of mortal infants, for “the nutriment of milk” (48). Thus, the northern Cancer is linked with descent into generation. The winter solstice in Capricorn heralds the beginning of the ascent of the sun in the south, hence, Porphyry implies, it is linked with the ascension of the soul, which is immortal, like the gods: “The sacred south [gate] to immortals is consign’d” (27). The “branching olive”, which must in its “branching” “with shady boughs” be flourishing, not merely existing, is the plant of Athene, and Athene “is wisdom” (37). As Athene was produced from the head of Zeus, this olive appropriately “crowns the pointed cliff”. The significance of this is that “the universe is not the effect of a casual event and the work of irrational fortune, but that it is the offspring of an intellectual [that is, spiritual] nature and divine wisdom, which is separated indeed from it (by a difference of essence), but yet is near to it, through being established on the summit of the whole port . . . governing the whole with consummate wisdom” (37). Furthermore, the “ever-flourishing” olive possesses a certain peculiarity in the highest degree adapted to the revolutions of souls in the world. . . . For in summer the white leaves of the olive tend upwards, but in winter the whiter leaves are bent downward. On this account also in prayers and supplications, men extend the branches of an olive, ominating from this that they shall exchange the sorrowful darkness of danger for the fair light of security and peace. (37-38)

Rewarding humanities’ labour with its fruit, sacred to Athene, and supplying victorious athletes with crowns, the olive is beneficent towards humankind: “Thus, too, the world is governed by an intellectual nature, and is conducted by a wisdom eternal and ever-flourishing” (38). Homer’s imagery of the cave of the nymphs implies the following: “all external possessions must be deposited. Here, naked, and assuming a suppliant habit, afflicted in body, casting aside everything superfluous, and being averse to the energies of sense, it is requisite to sit at the foot of the olive and consult with [Athene] by what means we may most effectually destroy that hostile rout of passions which insidiously lurk in the secret recesses of the soul” (38-39). “Numenius and his followers”, with good reason, says Porphyry, saw that the suppliant Odysseus “represented to us a man, who passes in a regular manner over the dark and stormy sea of

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generation, and thus at length arrives at that region where tempests and seas are unknown”, these last being images “of a material nature” (39). A negative daemon figure then enters Porphyry’s account. Odysseus lands in the port of the ancient sea-god Phorcys, whose daughter, Thoösa, gave birth to the same Cyclops who was “deprived of sight” by Odysseus (Homer, The Odyssey, 1.71), unaware that he blinded his “natal daemon”. The consequences of this deed served to remind Odysseus of his errors, “till he was safely landed in his native country”. Thus, “a seat under the olive” is appropriate for Odysseus, “as to one who implores divinity and would appease his natal daemon with a suppliant branch” (Cave of the Nymphs, 39-40). Blinding this agent of materiality, however, would appear to be Odysseus’s first step in attaining spiritual liberation (free of the sense of sight), but he must suffer the subsequent wrath of the gods who govern materiality, a fact which channels the oppositional daemonic energy expressed in the telling of the epic as Odysseus struggles to find his way home. Porphyry concludes by underlining the validity of his symbolic interpretation; he does so based on his experience of Homer’s superior understanding of the facets of quotidian existence, which, Porphyry feels, must extend in depth to the secrets of spiritual existence, and so participate “in the nature of things”, to use Raine’s formulation: It must not, however, be thought that interpretations of this kind are forced, and nothing more than the conjectures of ingenious men; but when we consider the great wisdom of antiquity and how much Homer excelled in intellectual prudence, and in an accurate knowledge of every virtue, it must not be denied that he has obscurely indicated the images of things of a more divine nature in the fiction of a fable. For it would not have been possible to devise the whole of this hypothesis unless the figment had been transferred (to an appropriate meaning) from certain established truths. (Cave of the Nymphs, 40-41)

Of course, Porphyry’s argument is circular, assuming the truth of its own premise; but what he does point to is a primordial human predisposition to probe the surface of life for underlying meaning, as, for example, in the doctrine of correspondences, explored by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: “The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man”.64 The generation of meaning is 64 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge / Tavistock, 1970), 17. Though Foucault was specifically

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given strength through a shared understanding of the significance of its elements, which is what Neoplatonic interpretation provides. Blake’s immersion in Porphyry’s account is clear from the details in his illustration, true to the Neoplatonist’s explanation. In the illustration we see the cave, the nymphs, the weaving, the containers, the stream. Outside sits Odysseus, on the border of the sea of time and space; the thread of his existence is held by the sea-god, Phorcys, or shape-shifting materiality, ever in flux. The Fates are ready to cut the thread binding him to materiality. If Odysseus is the archetypal seeker, travelling over the sea of time and space, looking for home, his homecoming to the spiritual sphere is imminent. Thus, in accord with the cutting of the thread, he casts the material body of his present life (the veil only lent to him for a certain period by the sea-goddess, Leucothea) into the realm of Phorcys, the divinity presiding over the sea of time and space, and kneels before his patron, Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom, who would guide his vision upwards, towards a spiritual existence.65 In this way, knowledge of the language of traditional symbols gives significance to an otherwise obscure illustration. However, a perceived shortcoming of such reasoning is that though an allegorical reading might apply in a convincing way to one passage of Homer, this is not necessarily the case in another— undercutting the assumed significance of this approach. This matter is discussed more fully below. Blake’s response to this little treatise, translating it into a carefully detailed pictorial form, shows its influence on his visual imagination, and, consequently, a release of associated aesthetic and spiritual energy, entirely in accord with his own conception of the self’s relation to existence.66 As in the case of Milton’s classicism, the treatise would have resonated with Blake’s Christian beliefs, unorthodox as they were, and certainly his sense of the living soul and its evocation through appropriate symbol.67 Interestingly, the illustration is dated 1821 by Blake himself, six years considering the Renaissance means of “ordering” the world, this doctrine was archaic in its roots. 65 Odysseus looks directly at us, to include humanity in this circuit; but he is also following Leucothea’s instruction to turn his back on the veil in Book 5 of the Odyssey (Homer, The Odyssey, 98). Blake’s awareness of the passage is hinted at in Plate 26 of Milton, with its “Two Gates thro’ which all Souls descend” (BCW 512, 26.13). 66 See Blake’s verbal attention to every detail of the lost fresco, “A Vision of the Last Judgment”, from “the note-book” of 1810: “not a line is drawn without intention, & that most discriminate & particular” (BCW 611). 67 We must be aware that Taylor himself felt the Christianising of Plato, as carried out by Ficino, to be inappropriate. See Taylor, “General Introduction”, in Plato, The Works of Plato, vol.1, trans. Thomas Taylor (Dorset: Prometheus Trust, 1995), 63.

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before his death, and therefore long after he had apparently renounced his adherence to Grecian influences.68 Robert Simmons and Janet Warner, however, feel Blake appropriates the classical imagery for his own mythical concerns (with opposite results to those uncovered by Porphyry and Raine), and provide a largely credible reading.69 This only tends to demonstrate, though, Blake’s syncretic abilities, spurred by Taylor and Platonic imagery. Also, when Simmons and Warner question Raine’s interpretation by pointing to related passages in the Odyssey, which use the same types of images for different ends (“Arlington Court”, 4-5), it must be noted that these other passages do not contain all the elements in the Blake illustration. In addition, their otherwise admirably thorough approach, based on Blakean myth and symbol (many elements of which Raine herself had already noted, however),70 makes no mention of the shears of the Fates, poised above the thread of mortal existence, in the left-hand corner of the illustration—a clear allusion to classical tradition, and found elsewhere in Blake depicting as much.71 The only occurrences of shears in Blake outside this tradition, as far as I can determine, are in a water colour of Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:90), and in the figure of “Aged Ignorance” in For Children: The Gates of Paradise (BCW 209),72 with his large scissors, who attempts to clip the wings of a youthful cherub. “Aged Ignorance”, Mary Lynn Johnson demonstrates, probably derives from an emblematic motif used by seventeenth century artists, Otho Vaenius and Robert Quarles (a fact of interest when we consider Keats’s Lamia, in Chapter Six).73 Even from this late stage in Blake’s life, then, Taylor’s translation acts as something of an infusion from what is beyond normal human experience, or, in Neoplatonic terms, it is of a daemonic nature, helping to make vivid the sacrality of aesthetic mediations of existence, and, by extension, of existence itself. If Taylor did not work in the same direct way on the other Romantics to be considered in this book, his insights, derived from the classical past, were in the air, and formed something of the ground whereon even the minute particulars of the everyday could be seen to take on a 68

See Kathleen Raine’s “Sea of Time and Space”, 318. Robert Simmons and Janet Warner, “Blake’s Arlington Court Picture: The Moment of Truth”, Studies in Romanticism 10, no.1 (1971): 3-20. 70 Raine, “Sea of Time and Space”, 319-322; 325-330. 71 Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:90, 1:98. 72 Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, ed. N. John McArthur (n.p.: Lexicos Publishing, 2011), Plate 11, Kindle. 73 Mary Lynn Johnson, “Emblem and Symbol in Blake”, Huntington Library Quarterly 31, no.2. (1974): 156-157. 69

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suggestive weight, underwritten by the interpretative approaches of the ancients; these interpretations, because they accumulate authority over the centuries, need not be considered as simply the fruit of “ingenious” minds (to use Porphyry’s term), arbitrarily assigning significance to private imagery.74 At this point, however (and with the last thought in mind), we need to return to the distinction posed by Milton’s example: the distinction between the understanding of a symbolic vocabulary that could add depth to one’s own poetry, and the seemingly spontaneous expression of daemonic force in one’s poetic utterances. Awareness of the distinction is important because, though consciousness of symbol provides a resonant vocabulary, daemonic expression enlivens that vocabulary, makes of it more than just an exercise in imagistic “translation”, so to speak, as will become apparent when we examine individual poets and their works. The distinction becomes evident, though somewhat indirectly, if we look at certain passages from Jon Whitman’s Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique, which presents the Homeric basis of the move to allegorical interpretations, while questioning the assumption of a fixed allegorical correspondence as practised by the Neoplatonists.75 The “earliest systematic tendencies” towards allegorisation were promoted by Homer’s “twofold perspective of gods interacting with men”. What results is a “composite realm of abstract figures, increasingly autonomous in their operation”, which “keep recalling the terms and contexts” of Homer, as if to contextualise its “own abstract formulations” in relation to Homer (Whitman, Allegory, 14). These “abstract figures” would include, as in Porphyry, Athene as Wisdom, a Cave as the World, and the Naiads within the Cave as the weavers of human materiality.76 Whitman turns to the beginning of the Iliad, to Achilles’s anger, which stems from his confrontation 74 Neoplatonic sacrality and transcendence also assuaged another need—to undermine the complacency of orthodox thought in general. The Gothic had done the same, as Joel Faflak argues: “The Gothic challenges our comfortable reality by reminding us never to take for granted a certainty bought at the price of setting aside improbability, ambiguity, doubt”. See his essay, “Gothic Poetry and First Generation Romanticism”, in Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion eds. Angela Wright and Dale Townshend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 96. And, as Angus Nicholls notes, Goethe deployed the irrationality of the daemon as part of a polemic against German rationalism (Goethe and the Concept of the Daemon, 18). 75 Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 76 Interestingly, Angus Fletcher, in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 39, though he is concerned with the eighteenth-century, feels that allegorical protagonists “are always daemonic”.

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with Agamemnon over the appropriation of Briseis; she was taken from the hero by the Greek leader in compensation for the return of Chryseis to her father, Chryses, the priest of Apollo, already impiously abused by Agamemnon. The anger which descends upon Achilles could almost be an allegorical figure, except that Homer never takes the matter that far. And Whitman argues that, as can be seen when Athene herself descends to rebuke Achilles, though she might have represented “wisdom” even in Homer’s day, she certainly does not display wisdom consistently in the remainder of the epic—this fact undermines allegorical consistency (Allegory, 16). Philip Rollinson also discusses the problem of the “predetermination of a definite (albeit broadly conceived) kind of meaning which will constitute the figurative sense of every text no matter what the literal sense”.77 However, the “definite (albeit broadly conceived)” archetypes of the collective unconscious (which could be seen to underlie Homeric myth), can, according to Jung, bear ranges of meaning.78 Thus, Athene as anima archetype might be both redemptive and violent. Jung aside, the problem of authorial intention versus interpreter’s apparent imposition should not take away from those passages in which allegory supports a spiritualising interpretation expressly conveyed by Porphyry (even if Porphyry alone were the originator of such a reading), and when this interpretation is clearly understood by the readership (as it is by Blake). In the case of the anger that descends upon Achilles, says Whitman, the potential for personification of the emotion exists (which would have made Achilles a type of Neoplatonic signifier of such anger), but, whereas in a medieval allegory the potential might have been fulfilled, Achilles himself “takes over the action” (Allegory, 16). Typical of Homer’s epic, however (and here Whitman’s case is not as consistent as he makes out), is the fact “that intervention by ‘daemonic agents’” (my emphasis) such as anger, which “is not really part of Achilles himself”, but “intrudes upon him, from the outside”, occur throughout the epic, just as moral blindness and physical strength do (Allegory, 18). As “daemonic agents”, they verge on being autonomous bearers of their various qualities to the humans on whom they descend. When Whitman argues that though this “intervention” by a force from without might be thought to “facilitate anger’s personification”—but that this is not the case in Homer’s epic—he yet reveals an ancient awareness of the autonomy of daemonic agency, which might thus release it from any interpretative strictures. That is, daemonic agency in works of 77 See Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1981), ix-x. 78 See, for instance, C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 45.

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literature was not necessarily seen to be bound by referentiality to persons or places; an implication that follows from this is that it might manifest itself directly, as in Whitman’s example of “anger”: Whatever else it is, allegory is oblique writing. While it involves a correspondence between what the text says and what it means, it requires a divergence between these two levels, as well. And this is the problem with “anger”. It is not anything “else”. It is not the name we give to something that is really inside Achilles. It is not some fiction obliquely signifying an interior reality. It is too literal for that. Whereas earlier our allegorical interpretation broke down because there was too great a divergence between Athene and wisdom, here our allegorical composition breaks down because there is too strict a correspondence between the text and its actual meaning. Anger cannot act obliquely because it does not signify anything obliquely. It signifies only itself, and hence its only action is to cause anger. (Allegory, 18-19)

However, while anger in general might indeed be “only itself” in Homer (albeit, a bit confusingly, a “daemonic agent”), in the present case it does bear a specific significance, and here the distinction between direct expression and interpretative awareness can be seen. Richmond Lattimore, in the notes to his translation of the Iliad, says that the word for “anger” at the epic’s very beginning (ménis, not akhos, as Whitman believes) is only used for the gods, pointing to Achilles’s divine connection, but also suggesting that this type of “anger” is something more than just “anger itself”. It has a numinous dimension, connected to the anger of Apollo at the impiety committed, which removes it somewhat from the realm of direct meaning to which Whitman would consign it; such divine anger is substantially daemonic, something existing apart from the hero, and involving an extra-human function, not merely a human one, as does ordinary anger (Lattimore, in Homer, The Iliad, 519-520n). Achilles serves the god while also expressing his own anger. Anger involving the presence of the divine requires interpretative awareness; personal anger is evident in the direct words of Achilles, which convey considerable passion—he lashes Agamemnon with his tongue: “O great shamelessness, we followed, to do you favour, / you with the dog’s eyes, to win your honour and Menelaos’s / from the Trojans” (1.158-160). Consider, too, Homer’s evocation at the beginning of the Iliad: Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

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Chapter One of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus’s son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. What god was it then set them together in bitter collision? Zeus’s son and Leto’s, Apollo, who in anger at the king drove the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished. (1.1-10)

The “goddess”, who must “Sing” the story, is one of the Muses, or daughters of Memory, the “ultimate preservers of traditional lore and wisdom” (Lattimore, Iliad, 520n), and therefore a type of personification (or at least signification) of a function separate from the poet, for whom the poet now is medium. And if Apollo’s daemonic buttressing of Achilles’s anger is one instance, another instance of a divine actor in the story acting daemonically is provided by Whitman himself: in the bed-chamber scene of Book Three, the goddess Aphrodite “becomes almost the principle of sexual attraction itself—a daimon, Homer explicitly calls her here—in order to act as gobetween for Paris and Helen” (Allegory, 19). Homer’s invocation of his Muse is a metanarrative; she is an objectively conceived daemonic intercessor appealed to by the author in need of her extended powers. Blake, Shelley and Keats all appeal to higher powers, though they also involve these powers (Jesus the Imagination, Intellectual Beauty, Apollo) in the body of their poetry—both evoking and expressing their energy. Aphrodite as daemonic “principle of sexual attraction” within the narrative (acting on behalf of the characters), and Achilles’s special category of anger as daemonic agency linked to Apollo, come close to the type of signification later to be expounded by the Neoplatonists and understood by the Romantics, even though (as already pointed out) straightforward allegorisation was not their goal; the traditional resonances were enough. The overall point is, however, even if all the elements of allegory as later understood are not in place in Homer, there is a continuity in perception over time in linking certain attributes to certain figures in the collective imaginary, as it were. Further, as examples of daemonic agency are to be found throughout Homer, as Whitman notes, they are thereby closely associated with the wellsprings of Western poetry, not only in terms of content, but (as suggested above) also in terms of authorial function, and, again, this fact was registered in subsequent poetry, stretching millennia ahead—as in the case of Milton’s evocation of “Urania”, in Paradise Lost (an evocation that follows Homer’s lead). Daemonic agency was free to be

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objectified in story, internalised in relation to authorial function, and manifested in authorial expression.79 In the following pages, I will apply this understanding, and a more general understanding of the sacralisation of the world and its consequences, to three Romantic poets, as already mentioned: Blake, Shelley and Keats. I hope to reaffirm the value of observations made decades ago by Kathleen Raine concerning the perennial philosophy, but, more significantly perhaps, I also hope to shed new light on the above-mentioned poets, based on close readings of some of their key texts. Here I take my bearing from what Terence Hoagwood points out regarding Blake and Shelley: “the poets do not merely betray the influence of philosophical texts; they transform the traditions that they inherit, largely by unifying those traditions in the multidimensional forms of poetic . . . art”.80

79

Geoffrey Hartman distinguishes between the “leftover daimons” of “decorative neoclassical and vers de societé usage” and those of, for instance, The Ancient Mariner, which “retrieve something of the deeply human, sensory and imaginative rationale” of the original minor gods. See Geoffrey Hartman, “Gods, Ghosts, and Shelley’s ‘Atheos’”, Literature and Theology 24, no.1 (2010): 5. Such are the daemons and daemonic expressions to be examined in what follows. 80 Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), ix. “Multidimensional forms” involve the temporal and atemporal, history and myth, body and soul, reason and imagination.

CHAPTER TWO BLAKE: FROM POETICAL SKETCHES TO SONGS OF INNOCENCE & EXPERIENCE

The following little poem, “To the Muses” from Blake’s early Poetical Sketches (a compilation of pieces written between 1769 and 1778—from when he was twelve to when he was twenty), is illustrative at once of his immersion in contemporary orthodox neoclassicism, so to speak, and his awareness of the imaginative impoverishment following the retreat of the authentic inspiriting “voices” from a time when, he felt, spirit and materiality were united in a system accepted by all (BCW 10-11): Whether on Ida’s shady brow, Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the sun, that now From antient melody have ceas’d; Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air, Where the melodious winds have birth; Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea Wand’ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry! How have you left the antient love That bards of old enjoy’d in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc’d, the notes are few! (1-16)

The circumscriptions of any variety of the orthodox were something Blake could not abide in later years, but, whatever the case, the void left behind by the retreat of the Muses was obviously keenly felt by the young Blake.

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He was compelled to fill it with the vibrant products of his own imagination and the inspiration obtained from his deeply engaged reading. It seems clear from this poem that these matters are interconnected. He is aware that figures from the classical past bear a relation to the living imagination, and are not simply at an allegorical remove from the sources of imagination as abstractions representing “Poetry”, as in neoclassical convention. They seem to be an inspiriting force, daemonic in nature, associated with the material elements of the world, from mountains to the depths of the sea, and they once generated—in sensuous terms again linked to materiality—a “love” that was “enjoy’d” by the “bards of old”. So Blake’s youthful lament is an invocation, an appeal to the daemonic energy once freely at large on earth. He himself wants to be inspirited by the full presence of what are now but shadows. In the years to come the “Fair Nine” will, indeed, bestow their gifts on him, though not always explicitly in terms of the perennial philosophy, to which he here, perhaps not in a fully conscious way, alludes. Kathleen Raine (as we saw to an extent in Chapter One) has long since pointed out the instances of allusion to this philosophy in Blake, in detailed ways that require no further elucidation. My task will be to perceive how Blake positions himself in relation to the resurgence of daemonic energies all around him, in terms of the age and his own visionary predisposition. The age itself is the most obvious starting point, as Blake himself was so evidently attuned to historical time, a fact discernible in the sense of general contemporary spiritual depletion attending “To the Muses”. Certainly, he sought inspiration in many areas, despite, or perhaps because of the weakening influence of the Muses. Thus the early Poetical Sketches (BCW 1-40) contains elements of the Gothic and Malory in “Fair Elenor”, Norse saga and Ossian in “Gwin, King of Norway”, rapid-action folk narrative in “Blind Man’s Buff”, classically informed nativism in the four apostrophes to the seasons and “An Imitation of Spenser”, and a contemporary expression of fellowship with the patriotic Shakespeare of Henry V in King Edward the Third.1 Evident in this collocation is Blake’s remarkable ability to absorb different influences and reproduce them in a fluent manner, a fact which makes one appreciate all the more the powerfully individual voice that will emerge, as if from beyond the confines of socio-historical and cultural determinants. In most of the poems in Poetical Sketches it is too early to detect the daemonic energy that will infuse his later works, but there are glimpses of 1

And Peter Ackroyd, in his Preface to the Folio Edition of Paradise Lost, points to a strong Miltonic influence in Blake: “the presence of Miltonic cadence and diction is everywhere apparent”. In Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. William Aldis Wright (London: The Folio Society, 2003), ix.

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it. Thus “To Winter” emerges from the cycle of seasons praised in Spenserian neoclassical terms, largely conventional, to body forth an independent force, not entirely smothered by the initial invocatory device of the apostrophe or the not infrequent lapses into second-hand diction and imagery (BCW 2-3): O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors; The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs, Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car. He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathed In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes, For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world. Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings To his strong bones, strides o’er the groaning rocks: He withers all in silence, and in his hand Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life. He takes his seat upon the cliffs; the mariner Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal’st With storms, till heaven smiles, and the monster Is driv’n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla. (1-16)

“The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark / Deep-founded habitation” (2-3), despite its conventional cadence (close to that of the lovely “To the Evening Star” (BCW 3)), conveys the sense of an elemental imperium, owning, not simply governing, a quarter of the globe. The agency of the season is evident in “there hast thou built”. The ice of the “north” conjoins with the darkness of winter and the deep-seated extent of its sovereignty in “thy dark / Deep-founded habitation”, which seems to reach far into the earth in a type of perpetuity, rather than simply extend across the earth as part of the apportionable seasonal cycle. The “yawning deep” (5) is Miltonic, and derivative because of this (though it anticipates future apocalyptic language in Blake), but the “unchain’d” storms “sheathed / In ribbed steel” which follows (6-7), adds particulars that vivify the sense of cold strength. Also powerful in its use of particulars is the image of the “monster” “whose skin clings / To his strong bones” (9-10). Robert Gleckner argues that the poem also exhibits an energizing “emergent” dialectic (in comparison to a “contrast”) in relation to the other seasonal poems; “even if it is reductively procrustean” to see dialectic throughout the work of early Blake, “it is quite clear Blake was already well beyond the

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structural resources afforded by mere logical contrast”.2 Certainly the personal force of oppositional opinion is apparent in “To Winter”. However, I would not go so far as Gleckner in saying that the poem “perversely parodies” the “seemingly sequential development toward fulfilment and unity” of the “three preceding seasonal poems” (Gleckner, “Antithetical Structure”, 146). One has only to consider the final two lines of the poem, which anticipate spring (“till heaven smiles”), to realise that Gleckner claims too much; yet the brute force of the “yelling” winter reinforces the permanence associated with its “Deep-founded habitation” in the earth, and it is more this force which suggests to me the emergence of engaging contrary energies in Blake, energies I associate with the daemon. I detect this energy too, in “To Summer” (BCW 1-2), which concludes with the following stanza, contrasting the northern with the classical world (though in classical mode): Our bards are fam’d who strike the silver wire: Our youths are bolder than the southern swains: Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance: We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy, Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven, Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat. (16-19)

But rather than exist in dialectical relation with “To the Muses”, it submerges any sense of imaginative depletion, and focusses on native potentialities. I find Stuart Peterfreund’s reading rather forced.3 He detects “biblical echoes signalling fall and betrayal” in line 7 of the poem, “Beneath our thickest shades”, which he links to Genesis 3:8, and Adam and Eve hiding from God, who walks “among the trees of the garden”. The speaker of Blake’s poem (despite declaring the superiority of all things native) is “deluded” by classicism, and so is “fallen” like Adam and Eve; this is evident, says Peterfreund, in the final line of the poem, with the “laurel wreaths” that are “worn by Greek and Roman poets, not Hebraic ones”;4 so 2

Robert Gleckner, “Antithetical Structure in Blake’s Poetical Sketches”, Studies in Romanticism 20, no.2 (1981): 145. Johnson and Grant see the personification of winter as a prototype of Urizen. See Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. Mary Lyn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York: Norton, 1979), 143n3 (hereafter cited as BPD). If uncreative, though, winter here is not bound by cold rationality. 3 Stuart Peterfreund, “The Problem of Originality and Blake’s Poetical Sketches”, ELH 52, no.3 (Autumn, 1985): 673-705. 4 The link between Blake’s nativist tradition and the Old Testament is made earlier on in Peterfreund’s essay, when he notes that “To Spring”, in “beginning without a name any more specific than thou suggests the Hebrew God, who first reveals

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the speaker of the poem “takes back what he previously conceded” (Peterfreund, “Problem of Originality”, 693). This same stanza, according to Peterfreund, contains a second biblical allusion, when the speaker urges the summer to “throw thy / Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream” (lines 11-12): “Here the echo is of Ezekiel, who describes how God made Israel his chosen people and how Israel betrayed that trust”. Ezekiel’s God says, “I swathed you in fine linen and covered you with silk. . . . But you trusted in your beauty, and played the harlot because of your renown” (in “Problem of Originality”, 693-694). Peterfreund’s conclusion (governed by his sense of the later Blake) is startling: The implication of the allusion seems clear: by succumbing to the classicizing tendency and worshipping at the “gaily decked shrines” of the classical tradition, England and English poetry have played the harlot on their own, shunning authentic divine presence and favor for false idols, choosing the rotten rags of memory by inspiration over the Robe of the Promise. Given England’s betrayal, it would be more convenient for English poetry if its God went Grecian, stripped off his garments, and joined them in the Heraclitan stream. (“Problem of Originality”, 694)

The problem with Peterfreund’s approach is that he doesn’t just point to possible allusions, he claims them in an absolute way and then uses them in argument to undermine the poet’s syncretic vision and his sincere praise of his native land in the final stanza of the poem. Blake’s current pride in his country is evident in the rather jingoistic elements in the short Shakespearean drama, King Edward the Third (BCW 17-33). Before the Battle of Cressy,5 for instance, the Black Prince declares, “I think / My Englishmen the bravest people on / The face of the earth” (191-193). At the end of the play, the Minstrel sings the prophetic words of the legendary British forefather, Brutus, to the assembled troops (BCW 33): Their mighty wings shall stretch from east to west, Their nest is in the sea; but they shall roam Like eagles for the prey; nor shall the young Crave or be heard; for plenty shall bring forth, Cities shall sing, and vales in rich array Shall laugh, whose fruitful laps bend down with fulness. (43-48)

No doubt wishful thinking informs this idealistic prophecy (Blake will attend to the reality a few years hence), but his present sincerity cannot be himself to Moses bearing the name “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14)” (“Problem of Originality”, 686). This reasoning seems spurious to me. 5 Blake’s spelling of Crécy.

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doubted. It is on the basis of this sincerity that we can affirm the value of his syncretic eclecticism for him, where classical and Hebraic influences, along with nativist legend (as in the case of Trojan Brutus) all bear significant weight.6 In “To Summer” the very sincerity of the note of native bravado in concert with the poem’s obvious classicism creates the dialectical tension and the flow, though not a strong one, of daemonic energy. A contrary energy is also apparent in the prose piece, “Contemplation” (BCW 36-37), from Poetical Sketches. The personified figure of Contemplation celebrates the “humble garb true Joy puts on”, to be found in natural surroundings: “delights blossom around; numberless beauties blow; the green grass springs in joy, and the nimble air kisses the leaves”. The human interlocutor, though, refuses to be comforted by Contemplation and nature: Heavenly goddess! I am wrapped in mortality, my flesh is a prison, my bones the bars of death; Misery builds over our cottage roofs, and Discontent runs like a brook. Even in childhood Sorrow slept with me in my cradle; he followed me up and down in the house when I grew up; he was my schoolfellow: thus he was in my steps and in my play, till he became to me as my brother. I walked through dreary places with him, and in church-yards; and I oft found myself sitting by Sorrow on a tomb-stone! (BCW 37)

And so the piece ends. The pains of the mortal condition cannot be alleviated by the conventional comforts of the Virgilian pastoral. The reference to “flesh” as “a prison” and “bones” as “bars of death”, has Neoplatonic resonances, though certainly other sources might have supplied this imagery;7 whatever the case, it tells of an agon within the natural man, in relation to an awareness of existence “beyond the human” (Bloom, The Daemon Knows, 4). While there is firm evidence that Thomas Taylor gave Blake lessons in Euclidian geometry—a point which indicates a more than passing relationship between the men—and though it is a fact that Blake engraved the title page for John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Mensuration and Practical Geometry in 1782,8 there is no evidence as to the exact time 6

Even as late as 1810, in his notes to “A Vision of the Last Judgment”, he was able to affirm that though Greek vision was “lost & clouded in Fable & Allegory”, “the Greek Fables originated in Spiritual Mystery & Real Visions” (BCW 605). 7 Young’s Night-Thoughts, for instance (1742-1745). Though Blake only began working on the engravings for a new edition in 1795, he may well have read the work before that time. 8 See James King, “The Meredith Family, Thomas Taylor and William Blake”, Studies in Romanticism 11, no.2 (1972): 157. Interestingly, Taylor’s first work was

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when Blake began his friendship with Taylor (could it have been before the publication of Poetical Sketches in 1783, implying a late insertion of “Contemplation” into that book?). There is also no evidence that Blake discussed Neoplatonism with Taylor at this time, though one must bear in mind that he may have read Taylor’s first translations of Plotinus when published in 1787 (Raine, “Thomas Taylor, Plato and the English Romantic Movement”, 233), or even discussed them before then.9 Poetical Sketches contains other instances of the daemonic voice and energy. “Mad Song” (BCW 8) is almost wholly daemonic in sentiment, but I single out: “Like a fiend in a cloud, / With a howling woe, / After night I do croud, / And with night will go” (17-20). With its intimations of “Infant Sorrow” from the Songs of Experience, where the fiendish pains of madness are transferred to infant life on earth itself (BCW 217), it takes its strength from a tradition of mad songs, stretching at least from King Lear and Hamlet to Purcell’s “Mad Bess”, along with the related broadsides springing from this tradition.10 Rebecca Crow Lister, writing of the mad songs of the Restoration, notes that, “In a society dominated by Descartes’ rationalism and self control, mad characters were figures of fascination, spontaneity, disgust, and pity”.11 Also, of course, mad characters “were allowed to give voice to the unspeakable and constantly flew in the face of taboos and social norms” (Lister, “Wild Thro’ the Woods”, 52), a fact which must initially have appealed to Blake, with the potential for extraordinary expression that it offered. This early warrant might have helped inform, even, the liberated

A New Method of Reasoning in Geometry, published in 1780, when he was twentyone (Raine, “Thomas Taylor, Plato and the English Romantic Movement”, 233). Blake was then twenty-two or twenty-three; might he have been instructed by Taylor at this time, in order suitably to prepare himself for the Bonnycastle engraving in 1782? Jane McClellan and George Mills Harper think Blake was early acquainted with Pythagoreanism and Platonism through Taylor’s “Ocellus Lucanus on the Nature of the Universe”, in the European Magazine of 1782 (“Blake’s Demonic Triad”, The Wordsworth Circle 8, no.2 (1977):182). 9 Taylor published both an Essay Concerning the Beautiful; or, a Paraphrase Translation from the Greek of Plotinus, Ennead I, book VI, and The Mystical Initiations or Hymns of Orpheus, with a Preliminary Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus in 1787. See Kathleen Raine, “Blake’s Debt to Antiquity”, 354. 10 Katelin Hansen, “Mad for Madrigalism: Text Painting in the Bedlam Songs of Purcell and Copario” (unpublished manuscript, June 7, 2007), 4, 9. 11 See Rebecca Crow Lister, “‘Wild Thro’ the Woods I’le Fly’: Female Mad Songs in Seventeenth-Century English Drama”, (Mus. D thesis, Florida State University, 1997), 52.

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spirit behind the writing of An Island in the Moon and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The content of the stanza, and Blake’s appeal to “Pallas, Minerva” at the conclusion of “An Imitation of Spenser” (BCW 15), evokes the matter of the illustration of the “Sea of Time and Space”, together with the image of Odysseus, the “weary wanderer”, at the feet of the goddess: And thou, O warrior maid invincible, Arm’d with the terrors of Almighty Jove! Pallas, Minerva, maiden terrible, Lov’st thou to walk the peaceful solemn grove, In solemn gloom of branches interwove? Or bear’st thy Egis o’er the burning field, Where, like the sea, the waves of battle move? Or have thy soft piteous eyes beheld The weary wanderer thro’ the desert rove? Or does th’ afflicted man thy heav’nly bosom move? (44-53)

Peterfreund’s notion that the poem shows “the extent to which Blakean imitation is criticism” (“Problem of Originality”, 688), is, again, wrongheaded, almost perversely reductive in its implicit assignation of cynical irony to any classical reference in Poetical Sketches. Is it not reasonable to assume the validity of Blake’s syncretism, which grants, even at this early stage, that all spiritual expressions (so to speak) “are one”? Or, at least, that widely signifying tenors are not constrained by their present vehicles? The stanza, in any case, though presented at the beginning of Blake’s career (prior to his proven awareness of Neoplatonic thought), just as the deeply-informed “Sea of Time and Space” comes at the end, brings to bear an outside force (much in the manner of Milton’s Urania—which might also inform Blake’s move here) to broaden the span of human vision in terms of an anthropomorphic goddess (to say nothing of Apollo and Mercury in the remainder of the poem). Blake himself, in 1816 or so, illustrated Il Penseroso, and offered an explanation of his imagery, showing, once more, his late Platonic awareness and empathy: The Spirit of Plato unfolds his Worlds to Milton in Contemplation. The Three Destinies sit on the Circles of Plato’s Heavens, weaving the Thread of Mortal Life; these Heavens are Venus, Jupiter & Mars. Hermes flies before as attending on the Heaven of Jupiter; the Great Bear is seen in the Sky beneath Hermes, & Spirits of Fire, Air, Water & Earth Surround Milton’s Chair. (BCW 619)

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This somewhat uncanny coupling of beginning and end contributes (if anachronistically) to the extratextual force found in these lines for the present reader. But though, this fact aside, the classicism voiced here is conventional enough, the human plight of the “weary wanderer” in the “desert” of material existence, sounds back to the type of allegorizing stemming from Neoplatonic readings of Homer; it would be especially arresting if the allegory had been arrived at in an unassisted way by Blake himself. The truth of the matter appears to be, however, that Blake, in a poem titled, after all, “An Imitation of Spenser”, had been tapping into Spenserian allegorical technique, linked to the Neoplatonic tradition, but not directly from the source—a source to be revealed by Taylor within the coming decade, as indicated above. Spenser’s Tears of the Muses, for instance, bewails the incomprehension of the present regarding the wisdom informing each of the facets of “blessed Sapience” which the Muses represent (Spenser, Poetical Works, 480-486). However, Blake’s Muses are not as conformably allegorical: in “To the Muses”, they bewail the departure of humankind’s sense of earthly sacrality linked to imagination; in “An Imitation of Spenser”, “Pallas, Minerva” (appealed to as an independent personality, in the manner of a Muse) might sympathise with the plight of humankind—but Blake leaves open her possible intentions. *** In a review of the then newly published facsimile of the prose piece, An Island in the Moon, Robert Essick states that the work “takes its comedic and social milieu from the London conversazione in which Blake participated”.12 Later in the review he points to possible influences from “the lamentably unfunny Wit’s Magazine”, including discussions of “inflammable air” and “phlogiston” (bottled privy gas in Blake), and an essay, “Expedition to the Moon” (141). On this expedition we find that “most wonderful philosopher Mr. Katterfelto, with his black cat, and her nine kittens” (Blake’s Antiquarian in the Island “seemd to be talking of virtuous cats”).13 The Blakean links are notable. As Essick says, “At the 12

Robert N. Essick, review of An Island in the Moon, by William Blake, Huntington Library Quarterly 52, no.1 (Winter 1989): 139. 13 Martha W. England refers to a likely influence stemming from Samuel Foote’s vaudeville, “Tea in the Haymarket”, wherein the Society of Antiquaries discusses the virtues of Whittington’s cat (BPD 376). For Marsha Keith Schuchard the term “virtuous cats” is a deliberate malapropism for “the virtuoso casts studied by artists”. See Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination (London: Pimlico, 2007), 196.

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very least, these points of contact suggest that Blake and The Wit’s Magazine were working much the same vein of British humor in the mid1780s” (142). Of An Island, Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant note that “Underneath the preoccupation with fashionable literature, philosophy, religion, and mythology, one senses the emptiness of this salon style of life—the constant drifting from house to house in search of diversion, the isolation amid continual chit-chat, the pseudointellectual arguments that go nowhere” (BPD 374-375). Northrop Frye sees elements of Swiftian satire, the humour of Laurence Sterne and “a Hogarthian command of the grotesque” in the work.14 He admires the poem’s “exuberance”: “If Blake’s aphorism is true that ‘Exuberance is Beauty’, the Island in the Moon is an extremely beautiful work of art” (Fearful Symmetry, 193). “Beautiful” is not the first word that comes to mind in reading the piece, though its exuberance is certainly evident, and telling, despite its moments of adolescent humour (“Then Mr Inflammable Gass ran & shov’d his head into the fire & set his hair all in a flame, & ran about the room No—no, he did not; I was only making a fool of you” (BCW 48)). Some of the humour will have future reverberations, as Blake (seeming to relish in the irresponsibility of it) bursts through the barriers erected around literary giants; Quid declares: “‘I think that Homer is bombast, & Shakespeare is too wild, & Milton has no feelings: they might be easily outdone’” (BCW 51). The depiction of Milton in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell is of this same temper, though the machinery surrounding the later depiction is somewhat more subtle. Blake’s daemonic exuberance finds its proper outlet in attacking the small-mindedness of the intelligentsia and, for example, the complacent acceptance of a world that is subject to hellish incursions on the human frame, of a type (though of a more startlingly sadistic nature) with those later to be deplored in the Songs of Experience. The darkness of the subject is especially notable amid the banal vaudeville apparent in most of this work. Blake suggests an extreme depletion of the quality of humaneness in the corporeal present and so creates a space, unwittingly at this stage, perhaps, for the imaginative expansion of his later posthuman expressions of elemental and psychological forces—posthuman in their overthrowing of the constraints of existence pictured in extremis in the present satire. I think of the brutal shockingness of the account of John Hunter’s surgical practice (he was the father of surgery as we know it), which dwells on harrowing details: “He’ll plunge his knife up to the hilt in a single drive, and thrust his fist in, and all in the space of a Quarter of an hour. He does not mind their 14 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1974), 191, 193.

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crying, tho’ they cry ever so. He’ll swear at them & keep them down with his fist, & tell them that he’ll scrape their bones if they don’t lay still & be quiet” (BCW 50). Johnson and Grant, however, think it also contains “the only genuine expression of feeling in the story”, when Sipsop inconsistently “drops his own game” (BPD 375): “When I think of Surgery—I don’t know. I do it because I like it. My father does what he likes & so do I. I think, somehow, I’ll leave it off. There was a woman having her cancer cut, & she shriek’d so that I was quite sick”. (BCW 51)

Sipsop’s scatty reflections are not part of the crazed vaudeville, but seem to tell of a distressed, empathetic mental state, as he recollects (and reexperiences in his mind, perhaps) how “sick” he felt on hearing the woman’s “shrieks”. Another moment of redemptive relief occurs with the unheralded first appearance, as if from another realm of perception, of a version of “Holy Thursday”, one of the “most delicate and fragile of the Songs of Innocence” (Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 192). The last stanza in this version reads: Then like a mighty wind they raise to heav’n their voice of song, Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heav’n among. Beneath them sit the rev’rend men, the guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity lest you drive an angel from your door.

Apart from our astonishment at finding the poem in this unlikely context, we are also caught off guard by the explicit account of the sober, empathetic response to the song of the otherwise far from enlightened, usually boisterous company: “After this they all sat silent for a quarter of an hour” (BCW 59). The strength of the feelings associated with being lifted out of self into the orbit of others, is made to ring in this mutual silence.15 Before moving on to the even greater degree of satirical presence and exuberance to be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, called by Frye “the crowning work of Blake’s early period” (Fearful Symmetry, 193), we need to consider the ideas in a few of Blake’s annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man and Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love, as well as There Is no Natural Religion (series one and two), and All Religions Are One. Immediately notable in the Lavater annotations (Lavater having been translated by Blake’s friend, Fuseli)16 are Blake’s brief 15 Ackroyd is mistaken to see the “satirical context” of Island influencing the celebration of “Innocence” in this particular appearance of the poem. See Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 121. 16 Blake, BPD 430.

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affirmations and disagreements, exuberant to a high degree: “All gold!” (BCW 65); “Admirable” (66); “False! Severity of judgment is a great virtue”; “False! Aphorisms should be universally true”; “Excellent”; “I hate scarce smiles: I love laughing”; “Damn sneerers!”; “I hate crawlers” (these last six all on a single page: 67). Blake’s response to aphorism 309 is particularly interesting, as it broaches the matter of “hell”, so important in Blake’s psychic development.17 I give first the aphorism, and then Blake’s response: He who, at a table of forty covers [that is, forty separate dishes], thirty-nine of which are exquisite, and one indifferent, lays hold of that, and with a “damn your dinner” dashes it in the landlord’s face, should be sent to Bethlem [Bedlam] or Bridewell—and whither he, who blasphemes a book, a work of art, or perhaps a man of nine-and-thirty good and but one bad quality, and calls those fools or flatterers who, engrossed by the superior number of good qualities, would fain forget the bad one.

Blake’s enthusiastic response, while emotionally charged, yet shows a degree of moderation absent from Lavater: To hell till he behaves better! mark that I do not believe there is such a thing litterally, but hell is being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires which shortly weary the man, for ALL LIFE IS HOLY. (BCW 74)18

The response implies something important about Blake’s character. He is swift to condemn, swift to judge, but not absolute in the positions he adopts; there is room for “better” behaviour on the part of one he consigns to hell, following which the verdict will be rescinded. It is notable that Blake is quick to point out the non-literal nature of hell; following Milton’s Satan to an extent (the mind itself “can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” (Paradise Lost 1.255)), Blake feels that “hell is being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires which shortly weary the man”. This notion touches on Neoplatonic understanding of the imprisoning nature of corporeality, but the final Blakean aphorism, “ALL LIFE IS HOLY”, voices a radical belief, anticipating the unity of body and spirit in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell. As Duncan Wu points out, the aphorism as adapted in the 17 See June Singer, The Unholy Bible: Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious (Boston: Sigo, 1986), 68-79. Singer believes Blake to be going through a Jungian individuation process (that is, arriving at a sense of his authentic self, with light and dark aspects in balance) centred in his transvaluation of “hell” in the Marriage. 18As throughout, I do not correct Blake’s original spellings (as in “litterally”), nor do I commonly use “sic”, an ugly interpolation, only used if absolutely necessary.

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Marriage (“For every thing that lives is Holy”) is energised by that work’s dialectical approach, being “a parodic reversal of Revelation 15:4: “For thou [God] only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee”.19 Blake seems to have invested in the justice of his version a few years prior to any thoughts of parodying orthodox or Swedenborgian beliefs in the Marriage (dated by Keynes as being etched sometime between 1790 and 1793 (BCW 148)). Related to this perception of pervasive holiness, is Blake’s emphasising of words in aphorism 408: “Let none turn over books, or roam the stars in quest of God, who sees him not in man” (BCW 77).20 This alignment of God and humankind will later become fundamentally Blakean, as in “The Divine Image”, in Songs of Innocence (BCW 117). But, again, Blake does not limit his vision of divinity to humankind; his vision is calibrated to a posthuman breadth. In response to aphorism 630, which, though it states, “judge with lenity of all [life]”, clearly distinguishes between humankind and other life forms (that, according to Lavater, “are not companions of man”), Blake affirms that God, if aligned with humankind, is also “become a worm that he may nourish the weak”: It is the God in all that is our companion & friend, for our God himself says: “you are my brother, my sister & my mother”. . . . God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes; for he is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remember’d that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man, for our Lord is the word of God & every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God. (BCW 87)

Though in the above Blake draws on Saint John as his authority regarding God’s love (1 John 4:16), aphorism 407, also marked by Blake, is essentially Neoplatonic in its message, where the visible “veils” the invisible dimension: “Whatever is visible is the vessel or veil of the invisible past, present, future—as man penetrates to this more, or perceives it less, he raises or depresses his dignity of being”. Implicit in the aphorism, though Lavater dwells on temporal states, is the distinction between material illusion and spiritual reality. Blake for his part perceives the transcendence inherent in a spiritual perspective: “A vision of the Eternal Now”, is his response (BCW 77). There are resonances here with “the voice of the Bard” from the Songs of Experience (1789-1794), “Who Present, Past, & Future, sees”, though the specifically “Holy” nature of such “seeing” is yet to be asserted by Blake (“Whose ears have heard / The Holy Word” (BCW 210, 1-4)). Considering 19

Duncan Wu, ed. Romanticism: An Anthology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 223n85. 20 The italics indicate Blake’s underlining.

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his responses to Lavater as a whole, Blake’s spirituality, once more, is clearly syncretic in its sources. Blake’s actual moving in the dialectical direction of the Marriage is evident in the following; again, first comes the aphorism (409), then Blake’s response: He alone is good, who, though possessed of energy, prefers virtue, with the appearance of weakness, to the invitation of acting brilliantly ill. Noble! But Mark! Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

Blakean vision here would appear to hold “virtue” and “Active Evil” on the same level, but, of course, the “virtue” is displayed by one “possessed of energy”, displacing to an extent the apparent contradiction (but not diminishing the extraordinary boldness of the observation, daemonic in the sense of coming from beyond anything expressed by Lavater, but also from beyond anything current in contemporary thought).21 The “Annotations to Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom”, “Written about 1789”, according to Keynes, also contains intimations of the Marriage, but expressed by Swedenborg himself on page 7 of his book: That the Divine or God is not in Space . . . cannot be comprehended by any merely natural Idea, but it may by a spiritual Idea: The Reason why it cannot be comprehended by a natural Idea is because in that Idea there is Space.

Blake seems to regard this last “Reason” as a clarification: “What a natural Idea is” (which I take to mean “So this is what a natural Idea is”). It is Swedenborg’s qualification of this statement that makes an impact on Blake, who comments on the following, “Mark this”: Nevertheless, Man may comprehend this by natural Thought, if he will only admit into such Thought somewhat of spiritual Light. (BCW 89)

Swedenborg continues: “A spiritual Idea doth not derive any Thing from Space, but it derives every Thing appertaining to it from State”. He elaborates on the notion of “States” on page 276 of his work (where “first 21 However, as Peter Schock observes, Blake was, around 1790-1793, involved with “the radical circle of Joseph Johnson”, with its revolutionary ideology. Schock characterizes Blake’s work in terms of Raymond Williams’s Gramscian “oppositional formation”, “a specific practice which counters the cultural dominance of institutions and traditions”. See his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Blake’s Myth of Satan and its Cultural Matrix”, ELH 60, no.2 (1993): 442.

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Principles” are the spiritual source, and “Ultimates” are the elements of natural creation): Forasmuch as there is such a Progression of the Fibres and Vessels in a Man from first Principles to Ultimates, therefore there is a similar Progression of their States; their States are the Sensations, Thoughts and Affections; these also from their first Principles where they are in the Light, pervade to their Ultimates, where they are in Obscurity. (BCW 94)

The meaning is that the “States” of “Sensations, Thoughts and Affections” of the “first Principles” “in the Light” can “pervade to their Ultimates” “in Obscurity”; hence “natural Thought” might admit of “spiritual Light”, and it is this fact which Blake “Marks”. Blake appears to have corroborated what he previously expressed in a note on page 9 of Swedenborg: “Man may comprehend [the divine], but not the natural or external man”. He here accepts the dualism of body and spirit, with the alienation of “the natural or external man” from spirit, but has still taken note of the spiritual potential of “natural Thought”. By the time of his annotation of page 220 of Swedenborg, he steadfastly accepts this potential. The Swedenborg passage reads as follows: “The natural Mind of Man consists of spiritual Substances, and at the same Time of natural Substances; from its spiritual Substances Thought is produced, but not from its natural Substances”. Blake responds without hesitation: “Many perversely understand him as if man, while in the body, was only conversant with natural Substances, because themselves are mercenary & worldly & have no idea of any but worldly gain” (BCW 94). These are strong words (“Many perversely understand him”), which constitute a strong defence of Swedenborg’s awareness that “Thought” from the natural world is produced from “spiritual Substances”. However, Blake also appears to agree (“Note this”) when Swedenborg writes on pages 410-411: “Thought indeed exists first, because it is of the natural Mind, but Thought from the Perception of Truth, which is from the Affection of Truth, exists last; this Thought is the Thought of Wisdom, but the other is Thought from the Memory by the Sight of the natural Mind” (BCW 95). Here thought “exists first” because “it is of the natural Mind”—which seems to be in conflict with the previous notion that thought is not produced from the “natural Substances” of “the natural Mind of Man”. The important point for Blake, though (in the midst of these rather confusing formulations, where two types of thought are at issue), is the source in feeling (“from the Affection of Truth”) of “the Perception of Truth”, which is “the Thought of Wisdom”. This actively “perceived”, affection-centred truth, is distinct from the mechanistic, passively accepting and materialistic “Thought from the Memory by the Sight of the natural

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Mind”. Blake, in relation to the previous apparently contradictory quotation, seems to accept that Swedenborg, like Blake himself, favours “Thought” “produced” from the “spiritual Substances” of the “natural Mind of Man”, regardless of which type of thought comes “first”.22 This is a rich Blakean source then, touching on the favouring of the “daughters of Inspiration” over the “daughters of Memory”,23 and the favouring of energy over reason in the Marriage and, of course, all the writings which follow. Blake’s final response is to page 458 of Swedenborg: Moreover it was shown in the Light of Heaven . . . that the interior Compages [structure] of this little Brain was . . . in the Order and Form of Heaven; and that its exterior Compages was in Opposition to that Order and Form.

Blake writes: “Heaven & Hell are born together” (BCW 96). The perception in this instance stems from Swedenborg, but is closely related to the thought of Jacob Boehme (deeply admired by Blake; see BCW 158), as Kathleen Raine reminds us. She quotes from Boehme’s Mysterium Magnum, chapter 8, page 24: For the God of the Holy World, and the God of the dark World, are not two Gods; there is but one only God. He himself is the whole Being; he is Evil and Good, Heaven and Hell; Light and Darkness; Eternity and Time; Beginning and End. Where his Love is hid in any Thing, there his Anger is manifest. In many a Thing Love and Anger are in equal Measure and Weight; as is to be understood in this outward World’s Essence. (In Raine’s Blake and Tradition, 1:363)

Linked explicitly to Swedenborg at present, the observation makes Blake’s parodying of Swedenborg in the Marriage less straightforward in its intentions than might first appear. I will return to this observation below, after briefly considering the two series, There Is No Natural Religion (etched circa 1788). Of the first series, points 4, 6 and the “Conclusion” express the intent of the whole: 22

Swedenborg and Blake anticipate McGilchrist’s notion of the different types of thought (mechanistic and holistic) stemming from the different hemispheres of the brain (Master and Emissary, xxi). 23 “A Vision of the Last Judgment” (BCW 604): “Fable or Allegory is Form’d by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration, who in the aggregate are call’d Jerusalem”. As Raine credibly surmises, the “daughters of Inspiration”, might not draw upon memory of “temporal tradition”, but they do draw upon “memory of the kind Plato called anamnesis, recollection of the eternal forms or ideas” (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:52).

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4. None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions. 6. The desires & perceptions of man, untaught by any thing but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense. Conclusion. 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. (BCW 97)

The very creation of art, it is implied, involves that which is beyond the “organs of sense”, which in Swedenborgian terms, are limited to what is “natural”. The supersensual, the spiritual, is not bound by the natural, hence the impossibility of “natural religion”. The Neoplatonic sense of the daemonic is in evidence here, making the poet or prophet (the two are the same in Blake’s eyes) mediums of the posthuman, post-natural, daemon— the mediator between divinity and humanity. The second series continues in the same vein, but I quote points 1, 2, and the final, 7, as expressing the kernel of Blake’s thought: 1. Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover. 2. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more. 7. The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. (BCW 97)

Also important is Blake’s “Application” of the above: 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. (BCW 98)

These constitute, in effect, Blake’s original aphorisms, the form and content of which take their bearing from Lavater and Swedenborg,24 but whose 24 See David Falon, Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2017). In his review of this work in The Huntington Library Quarterly 81, no.1 (2018), Li-Hui Tsai mentions that Falon also traces its source to “the intellectual inheritances of the European Enlightenment found in Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Nature and Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man” (164).

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expressive power is their own. They amount to a manifesto of Blake’s relation to the world and existence. Its tenets will remain with him throughout his life. All Religions Are One (circa 1788), prefaced by the prophetic words of John the Baptist, quoting Isaiah, “The Voice of one crying in the Wilderness” (BCW 98),25 comprises seven “Principles”, all concerning “Poetic Genius”, which in the first “Principle” is a term synonymous with “Demon” or daemon (and “genius” is the Latin counterpart of “daemon”).26 The prophetic voice is centred in “knowing”, and, “as the true method of knowledge is experiment”, “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences”, claims Blake in “The Argument” to this plate. Blake thus professes to broach matters of spiritual import through what amounts to Swedenborg’s “natural Mind”. He asserts the value of “experience” premised on the scientific-seeming “true method of knowledge”, thereby claiming a materialist basis (anyway commensurate with the spiritual in Blake’s eyes)27 for an appreciation of the “Poetic Genius”. “Principle 1st” reads as follows: That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon. (BCW 98)

Nearly forty years later, on the brink of death, Blake was to write, memorably, of “The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever” (BCW 878), showing a remarkable consistency in his belief in the strength of “Poetic Genius”, or the “Real Man” (with whom Blake, in his thirty-first year, is not averse to equating with the daemon of Neoplatonic understanding, 25

See John 1:23, and Isaiah 40:3; Blake aligns himself with this prophetic tradition. Margoliouth considers All Religions to lie at the “outset” of Blake’s “prophetic life”. See H. M. Margoliouth, “Notes on Blake”, The Review of English Studies 24, no.96 (1948): 313. 26 See Dawson, “‘A Firm Perswasion’: God, Art, and Responsibility in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Jung Journal: Culture and Society 7, no.2 (2013): 67. Dawson points out that “genius” comes from the Latin “to beget” (gignere, gentium); Blake’s “Poetic Genius”, says Dawson, is “something of a tautology”, as “poetic” comes from the Greek poesis, “to make”. Dawson feels that the words “Poetic Genius” together suggest “making something from something within oneself”. The daemon, indeed, is a “maker”, or seemingly autonomous agent, though emerging “from within oneself”, or, at least, dependent on the quality of one’s attention to the forces acting through one. 27 See Cato Marks, “Writings of the Left Hand: William Blake Forges a New Political Aesthetic”, Huntington Library Quarterly 74, no.1 (2011): 58.

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by this time known to him through Taylor). His writing of “Poetic Genius” in terms of a distinction between “outward form” and “Poetic Genius” reveals that “To the Muses” in Poetical Sketches was not merely a nod in the direction of convention, but expressed a sense deeply felt by the poet. Gleckner points to this distinction, noting, however, the “union” of sense and spirit implicit in All Religions. This union does not negate the sense of a larger presence within the self, existing beyond the confines of the senses in their unenlarged state. And in 1799 (eleven years later), Blake was to write to Dr Trusler, “tho’ I call [these designs] Mine, I know that they are not Mine, being of the same opinion with Milton when he says That the Muse visits his Slumbers & awakes & governs his Song when Morn purples the East” (BCW 792).28 “Principle 4th” reveals the expansion offered by “Poetic Genius” in the field of knowledge; without it we would be confined to the same dull round, repeating each other’s thought and understanding ad infinitum: “As none by travelling over known lands can find out the unknown, So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more: therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists” (BCW 98). This is an important idea to bear in mind when it comes to the critique of Swedenborg in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as we will see below. *** The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is filled with what Yeats (sensing its combative yet cathartic daemonism) calls “a paradoxical violence”.29 Long considered to be satirical of Swedenborg himself, it has been convincingly reassessed by Terence Dawson (and Robert Rix) as largely aimed at the conservative group of English Swedenborgians, who quickly triumphed over those “who wished to include any of Swedenborg’s more progressive views into the East Cheap statutes”.30 Dawson is also convincing when he 28

Gleckner, “Blake and the Senses”, Studies in Romanticism 5, no.1 (1965): 5. W.B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908), 147. 30 See Terence Dawson, “‘Here I Stand’: Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as Confessional Writing”, Jung Journal: Culture and Society 6, no.2 (2012): 50-51. See also Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 121. Humberto Garcia, in “Blake, Swedenborg, and Muhammad: The Prophetic Tradition, Revisited”, Religion and Literature 44, no.2 (2012): 60, refers to Morton Paley’s assessment that the split in the New Church was occasioned by resistance to the “immoral and revolutionary implications of concubinage as a sanctified form of Islamic or Israelite polygyny”, approved of, with qualifications, by Swedenborg—wholeheartedly approved of by Blake. The involvement of Swedenborgians in the attack on Priestley’s home in the Loyalist 29

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makes the far bolder claim that Blake’s purpose in plates 21-22 (beginning “I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise”), and possibly the whole of the Marriage, was “to test and ascertain his own views”, in the mode of confessional writing: Plates 21-22 of the Marriage suggest that an outer situation (the New Church debate [among the English Swedenborgians]) has occasioned a struggle to distinguish and take responsibility for what Blake truly thinks and feels. Copy K shows him gradually accepting responsibility for attitudes of which previously he would appear to have been unaware. (Dawson, “Here I Stand”, 58-59)

Dawson’s stance is what he terms “post-Jungian” (not as absolute in its tenets as a strictly Jungian approach),31 but it relies on a fundamental Jungian notion—that of individuation, of which he finds strong evidence in Blake’s approach in the Marriage: The hallmark of Jungian analysis is the Auseinandersetzung: the process of actively thrashing things out with the implications of one’s inner experiences, in other words, gradually coming to terms with those attitudes of which one was previously unaware. This is what moves the analytical process forward; it also promotes what Jung called “the process of individuation”, —the kind of self-understanding that comes from making a concerted effort to comprehend the nature and extent of one’s limitations and intrusive tendencies. (“Here I Stand”, 59)

Blake’s use of Swedenborg as a means of self-definition rather than as the butt of satire in any straightforward sense, helps account for his praise, which appeared much later, in 1809, in “Number 8” of A Descriptive Catalogue, concerning “The spiritual Preceptor, an experiment Picture”: The works of this visionary are well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things; the reason they have not been more attended to is because corporeal demons have gained a predominance; who the leaders of these are, will be shewn below. Unworthy Men who gain fame among Men, continue to govern mankind after death, and in their riots of 1791 would also have strongly influenced Blake (Schock, “Myth of Satan”, 450). 31 Dawson points out, “If Jung’s followers have allowed others to associate Jungian psychology with dogmatic and ‘systematic reasoning’, it must be pointed out that this is not necessarily a charge that can be levelled at Jung. He claimed that he always began a clinical encounter by reminding himself not to have any preconceptions about the nature of his patient’s dilemma and not to assume anything” (“Here I Stand”, 63).

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Apart from expressing a continuing allegiance to Swedenborg long after 1793 (the final etching date of the Marriage), the content of the above seems as fantastic as anything found in Swedenborg. But at issue, as in the Marriage, is the distinction between “Learning” and “Inspiration” and corporeality and “vision”, as well as the closed doors of “mind” and “thought”. And to establish Blake’s very real divergence from Swedenborg, the maxim from “Principle 4th” of All Religions Are One also needs to be borne in mind: “As none by travelling over known lands can find out the unknown, So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more: therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists”. Dawson comments: Because Swedenborg spoke only with Angels and repudiated everything connected with Hell, his writings could do no more than “recapitulate” what had been written before him. Blake has identified a significant difference between himself and Swedenborg. He has come to the conclusion that as long as we remain in our comfort zone, we can never experience anything new. If either artist or individual wants to evolve, he must confront “the unknown”—he must be willing to speak with Devils. (“Here I Stand”, 53)

The exclamation from Milton comes to mind (BCW 506): “O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches, / Shewing the Transgressors in Hell, the proud Warriors in Heaven, / Heaven as a Punisher, & Hell as One under Punishment” (1.22.50-52).32 However, Blake could at once both appreciate and criticise a single figure, which adds to the daemonic otherness of the Marriage, that is so beyond any established constraints. Dawson states, “Blake was somewhat unusual in that he had an unnerving tendency to criticize fiercely an aspect of the work of a writer whom he otherwise admired” (“Here I Stand”, 54). As example, he refers to Crabb Robinson’s surprise at Blake’s “intense” admiration of Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode”:

32

Books, plates and lines in Blake are indicated thus: first the book number, then the plate number, then the line numbers. Where there is no book involved, plate number is followed by line number.

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His delight in Wordsworth’s poetry was intense. Nor did it seem less, notwithstanding the reproaches he continually cast on Wordsworth for his imputed worship of nature; which in the mind of Blake constituted Atheism. The combination of the warmest praise with imputations which from another would assume the most serious character, and the liberty he took to interpret as he pleased, rendered it as difficult to be offended as to reason with him.

In connection with Wordsworth (I think of the “Tintern Abbey” poem), it is interesting to find that Blake takes note of the following quotation from Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning Divine Love: man may come to spiritual wisdom “by laying asleep the Sensations of the Body, and by Influx from above at the Same time into the Spirituals of his Mind” (BCW 93). In “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth tells of being “gently” “led on” by the “affections”, “Until, the breath of this corporeal frame / And even the motion of our human blood / Almost suspended, we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul” (Poetical Works, 164). Had Wordsworth, too, read Swedenborg? Grevel Lindop detects a Swedenborgian influence in Coleridge as early as the writing of “Frost at Midnight”, when his intellectual interchange with Wordsworth was at its height.33 Regarding Blake’s own relation to nature (largely considered negative, but, in truth, as faceted as his relationship with Wordsworth),34 it is worthwhile to remember what he wrote to Dr Trusler in a letter of 23 August 1799: To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself”. (BCW 793)

Bearing in mind Blake’s ability to admire and condemn almost simultaneously, I turn to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell itself (BCW 148160). Blake wrote to Dr Trusler, in the same letter quoted above: “That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of 33 See Grevel Lindop, “The Language of Nature and the Language of Poetry”, The Wordsworth Circle 20, no.1 (1989): 3. 34 See Barbara Lefkowitz for a fuller discussion of this matter: “Blake and the Natural World”, PMLA 89, no.1 (1974): 121-131. She notes (taking into account Blake’s negative and positive responses to nature) that “the only valid generalization one can make about Blake’s overall attitude toward nature is that he almost never treats it apart from a human context” (121).

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the Ancients consider’d what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato” (BCW 793). According to this syncretic understanding of the educational approach of the “wisest” ancients, the Marriage is certainly fit for “Instruction”, as David Morris notes.35 The daemonic presence in the poem derives from what Morris calls “hypothetical sources” (which he terms, metaphorically, “dark matter”),36 evidenced by “puzzling swerves or disturbances in the semantic field” (“Dark Ecology”, 276). He refers to the “disproportion between cause and effect” in such passages from “Auguries of Innocence” (fair copies made circa 1803) as, “A Robin Redbreast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage”, and “A dog starved at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State” (BCW 431). Morris writes, “The darkness of the text almost requires inferring the presence of a source capable of producing such disturbances in meaning and in import”. For me, this “source” is a froward daemonic energy, which Blake uses throughout the Marriage to rouse the “faculties to act”; it is detectable in the disproportionality between cause and effect (for example, “those who envy or calumniate great men hate God” (BCW 158) and the semantic swerves, which steer the reader off any predictable course, as if forcibly being led by an invisible hand (for example, “I beheld the Angel, who stretched out his arms, embracing the flame of fire, & he was consumed and arose as Elijah” (BCW 158). The daemonic energy cannot be localised in any single individual, but certainly “Rintrah” from the opening “Argument” (Plate 2; the same two lines from the beginning are repeated at the end) provides an early focus for it (BCW 148): Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep. (2.1-2)

The name is possibly derived from “Rinda”, in Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (which includes other Blakean names: “Vala”, “Har”, “Hela”, “Onar”).37 Rinda, albeit a female, is a powerful figure, who bore a 35

David Morris, “Dark Ecology: Bio-anthropocentricism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no.2 (2012): 274. As Morris puts it, the work “breaks new ground in its aggressive refusals of directness and clarity”. 36 Morris notes, “Dark matter in astronomy refers to an undetectable and hypothetical substance inferred only from its gravitational effects on visible matter” (“Dark Ecology”, 276). 37 See Theodore Stenberg, “Blake’s Indebtedness to the ‘Eddas’”, The Modern Language Review 18, no.2 (1923): 205. Mallet’s work was translated from the French by Bishop Percy (of Percy’s Reliques fame) and published in 1770. In Milton

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formidable son, Vali, by Odin, and is thus associated with the sharing and bestowing of divine power.38 In symbolic terms she is the crust of the earth, perhaps connected in Blake’s imagination with earthquakes, or the very surface of the earth rebelling against present maltreatment. Etymological speculation aside, Blake’s Rintrah seems linked to fire rather than earth— the “fires” he “shakes” are “his”, which he controls (he “shakes” them). With his “roaring” he expresses rage. From what follows in the Marriage, his rage has to do with the perversion of values and the consequences of this for existence at large (the “air” is “burden’d” by an oppressive weight, that causes “clouds” to “swag” or sway with effort; that they are “Hungry” suggests natural deprivation—perhaps, also, they “swag” because of this). The “deep”, above which Rintrah appears to be positioned (he is “in the burden’d air”), has affinities with Milton’s “abyss” at the beginning of Paradise Lost, brimming with the potential of creation (1.21). But far from being linked to creation, Rintrah seems linked to destruction. Duncan Wu sees Rintrah as embodying “the just wrath of the prophet, presaging revolution”; he refers to Amos 1:2 “The Lord will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem” (Romanticism, 212nn3-4). This revolutionary energy, taking its cue from the French Revolution, is, however, also creative. As Peter Schock observes of Blake’s use of the myth of Satan in this poem, it is “susceptible to an imaginative reshaping along the lines of revolutionary ideology. Blake consequently makes this myth the vehicle of new values, using it to embrace instead of anathematize the demonic portent of revolution, and to imagine a world of liberated energy and desire” (“Myth of Satan”, 451). This point is gestured at in the second and third stanzas of “The Argument”, which tell of the productive value of hardship and striving: Once meek, and in a perilous path, The just man kept his course along The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees. (2.3-8)

The “path” may be “perilous” and adjoining “The vale of death”, but the land’s indigenous harsh “thorns” do not prevent the cultivation of “Roses” (they “are planted”), with their associations of beauty and delicacy, and Rintrah is “the wrathful son of Los” (Johnson and Grant, in BPD 85). A type of anagram is possibly involved in the creation of the name: “Rent heart”. 38 The Eddas, trans. B. Thorpe and I. A. Blackwell (London: Norroena Society, 1903), 342.

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intimations of their own “thorny” coupling—a marriage of contraries in themselves. The scrubland of the “barren heath” has its own heatherflowers, productive of nectar through the wholesome labour of “the honey bees”, purveyors of sweetness implicitly coupled with the contrary “thorns” of their stings. The third stanza extends the interplay of contraries to human life, couched in Adamic terms; like the honey bees, these are also not void of a suggestion of Neoplatonic understanding—in this case, the waters of generation, with their cliffs and caves (“tomb”) of materiality: Then the perilous path was planted, And a river and a spring On every cliff and tomb, And on the bleached bones Red clay brought forth. (2.9-13)

Wu points out that “a valley of dry bones symbolizes the exiled ‘house of Israel’”, according to Ezekiel 37:3-4 (Romanticism, 213n6). Johnson and Grant add that Ezekiel had a “vision of resurrection” in this valley, and further note that “the literal Hebrew meaning” of “Red clay” is Adam (in BPD 85). These references, hardly in need of elaboration in the case of someone with Blake’s proclivities, have their valid resonances, but the image of the bones giving structure to the red clay is, more fundamentally, indicative of the marriage of contraries productive of life. In stanzas four and five the “just man” is driven into a new wilderness, with its own potential for growth (driven by the “villain”—perhaps covetous of the “planted” “perilous path”, or simply bound to the cycle of interchanging contraries?). As in the epigraph to All Religions Are One, the voice in the wilderness evoked by this imagery is latent with spiritual renewal: Till the villain left the paths of ease, To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility. And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. (2.14-20)

This renewal with its “raging” “just man”, taps into the energy of Rintrah, as does the presence of the “lions” (the “strong” from whom “sweetness”

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emerges (Judges 14:14)).39 The unconstrained, honest energy of the raging just man is obviously in sharp contrast with the hypocritical “mild humility” of the “sneaking serpent” of materiality,40 though polite society might be taken in by such “mild humility”, and turn its back on one who “rages in the wilds”. In concluding with a repetition of the first stanza, “The Argument” binds the entire poem within the daemonic energy of Rintrah (which resonates outwards too, as a fiery energy is celebrated in the remainder of the Marriage); the content of “The Argument” anticipates the inversions of perspective to follow. Plate 3 contains one of the most widely known sayings by Blake: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (BCW 149). The saying might bear a relation to Porphyry’s statement, as translated by Taylor: “Harmony consists of and proceeds through contraries” (Cave of the Nymphs, 34).41 The Plate begins, however, with the provocative statement: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives”. The correspondences gathered around “thirtythree years” are well known (Blake’s age, Christ’s age at the time of his crucifixion, the time elapsed since Swedenborg’s Last Judgment and the beginning of his New Church), and cannot be appreciated within the bounds of anything like a “meek” perspective. Schock notes that Plate 3 of the Marriage “delivers a millenarian prophecy which identifies Christ, revolution, and apocalypse, and satanizes all three in a way distinct from all other political appropriations of the myth”, such as those propagated by Paine, 39 Blake was also aware of the zodiacal symbolism associated with the lion, at the entrance of the gates of Pluto, ruler of material nature, and hence alluding to the just man’s beginning of a new cycle of life. See Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 389. 40 Raine notes that the serpent is symbolic of matter. She also relates the serpent to the myth of Psyche, and the “irresistible nature of Eros”: “the god who to the sinless soul is beautiful, appears, in the fallen world, in a form of evil” (Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 380, 425). The present “sneaking serpent” has nothing of the energy of Eros; however, the inversion of values involved in the perception of Eros, is certainly allied to that found in the Marriage. 41 McGilchrist devotes a section of The Matter With Things to “the generative power of opposites” (1243-1250). He makes the particularly Blakean observation: “For opposites to co-exist, they clearly cannot cancel or annul one another, but must rather give rise to something new: a form of harmoniƝ, as in Heraclitus’ lyre [dependent on tightly wound strings, being pulled in opposite directions]. But note that this harmony is not to be taken merely in the ordinary musical sense of concord, but in the sense of tonos, tautness, from which we get our word ‘tone’” (1250). Concord is underwritten by a taut balance of opposites.

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Priestley, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. The impact of the Plate “is to achieve an ontological ‘critical mass’, fully grounding the cluster of revolutionary values” in the Marriage (“Myth of Satan”, 454-456). A “new heaven” (its novelty perhaps epitomising the perpetual flux of Christian sectarianism) is set against “the Eternal Hell”, ever-constant in its propagation of flaming energy, an early transvaluation in the work, contributing to the “grounding . . . of revolutionary values”. If co-existence of the “Contraries” is necessary for “progression”, the final few lines of the plate—in conveying conventional “wisdom” —contain a barbed irony: From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

It is this provocative, tightly-wound irony which exerts an extra-textual energy, meant to enter the psyche, and— as should the words of any prophet worth his salt—transform it. It has often been observed that this transformative power is enacted in Blake’s method of etching, as depicted self-referentially in “A Memorable Fancy” in Plates 6 and 7. So adamant is Blake in obtaining his objective, and so intent is he on actively engaging his subject, that he mounts an assault on three fronts: those of form, content and technique (BCW 150): When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock; with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth: How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?

Wu glosses these sentences, compellingly, thus: “In Blake’s metaphor the abyss is the head, where all five senses are located, and the cliff is the face”. He sees the “mighty Devil” as Blake himself (Romanticism, 215n22). Schock notes that Paine and Priestley, in the Johnson circle frequented by Blake, saw the devil as part of “a universal fable appropriated by institutional Christianity to gain power”. Further, the members of the Johnson circle had been demonised in satanic terms (“Myth of Satan”, 443). Both these facts offered motivation enough for Blake to want to turn the tables, and include himself in this daemonic company. The “corroding fires” appear to refer to Blake’s “process of etching in which corrosive acid is used to burn away the surfaces of a metal plate” (Johnson and Grant, in BPD 88). The word “corroding” is split between Plates 6 and 7, plate 6 marked by the orange

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and red colour thematics of Hell, Plate 7 marked by the blue of Heaven.42 Implicit in this detail is the purgative force of Blake’s art, which frees vision to embrace both Hell and Heaven. Paralleling these technical expressions, the “mighty Devil”, through his etched words, bears intimations of the “immense world of delight” in the otherwise inconsequential “Bird”, and is aware of the imprisoning nature of the “senses five”. Susan Wolfson, in her ground-breaking study, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (1997), writes of Blake’s “sketching verbal form” through his etchings, and points, for instance, to the hyphenation of “medicinal” in Plate 14 of the Marriage, where “me-” is isolated by this hyphenation: “This hyphenation of ‘me-’, orthodox as it is, serves an infernal printing method that displays the ‘me’ hid in the medicinal corrosives of Blake’s practices with words”. She refers to the “salutary Hell, whose fires melt away habitual lexical surfaces to display the artist’s sign for himself in the medicine he prescribes” (Formal Charges, 35). I doubt that one can claim a semantic function for the “cor-” in Plate 6 (the hyphenation seems to have to do with space available on the Plate, and a “ro-” appears under “cor-” on the original plate),43 but it is of interest that the “corroding” fires reveal a core notion— the need to enlarge the “senses five”, enacted (to an extent) by the word’s bridging the two plates with their distinctive red and blue colours. Plate 14, indeed, contains the key expression of this notion in Blake. The image at the top of the plate, with its daemonic orange and red colouring, its grey dead or sleeping figure seemingly consumed by purgative flames, themselves surmounted by another human figure whose expansive gesture (widespread arms extending the length of the grey figure) seems to imply the casting-off of corporeal restraint expressed so powerfully in the text (BCW 154): The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

42 See Kathleen Lundeen, “A Wrinkle in Space: The Romantic Disruption of the English Cosmos”, in Pacific Coast Philology 43 (2008): 14. She refers to “the hint of an atmospheric background” often found in the plates. 43 However, I think again of the notes to A Vision of the Last Judgment, where Blake writes, “not a line is drawn without intention, & that most discriminate & particular. As Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant, so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass Insignificant—much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark” (BCW 611). Certainly, “corrosive” was an important word for Blake, who may have recalled Beelzebub’s use of it in Paradise Lost 2.401, where this devil tells of the “corrosive fires” of God’s wrath. At the least, the split “cor-ro-ding” brings attention to this.

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Wolfson’s insight conveys something of the autonomous, daemonic energy of Blake’s work: “The idiosyncratic hyphenation shows how forms of writing can impress the self in writing in ways that paradoxically elude deconstruction by language, medium, or sheer textuality. The graphic expression of me- becomes a meta-graphic formation of a poet seizing his line to assert new forms against received structures of grammar, syntax, and verbal integrity” (Formal Charges, 35). While the “new forms” “impress the self in writing”, the forms do not account for the whole of the impact of the work. It is the energy of the “assertion” of these forms that is made almost tangible because of the felt counter-current they create in the face of a likewise almost tangibly oppressive orthodoxy. Commenting on the famous aphorism concluding Plate 14 (“If the doors of perception were cleansed”), Kathleen Lundeen also gestures towards the basis of energy in this counter-current, where perception itself is the felt thickening agent: “Blake’s entire project as a poet and graphic artist was to alter perception since he fiercely believed you cannot change the way people think—socially, politically, or theologically—unless you alter the way they see”. By quoting philosopher Arthur I. Miller, she brings cognitive psychology to bear on the matter of perception: “the history of science is ‘the history of theories of perception and imagery’, where a uniquely ‘reflexive relationship’ exists between the perceiver and the perceived” (“Wrinkle in Space”, 16). Intuitively aware of such perceptual reflexivity which might alter the quality of existence, Blake developed a “new mode of representation” (10). She writes of the Blakean text “as a dynamic, generative field instead of a static structure of differences. In his prophetic poetry, words morph into other words, and contexts dissolve as the narrative moves along” (13). Words are so crowded together, that “the plates depict a realm that is virtually vacuumfree”, a visionary “statement” opposed to the regulatory Newtonian universe,

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premised on the necessity of empty space—needed to make room for matter (14).44 A concentrated energy thus circulates in each Plate. Plates 7 to 10 contain the “Proverbs of Hell”. Dawson, following Viscomi, feels that these aphorisms probably comprise “The Bible of Hell”, referred to at the end of Plate 24, which Blake was intending to publish separately at the time. Dawson says, “The Proverbs illustrate the view that the only way to revitalize conventional wisdom is by exploding its bromidic maxims”.45 “Bromidic maxims” apart, Blake admired certain of the conventional enough aphorisms of Lavater and the decidedly unconventional meditations of Swedenborg, as we have seen, and the present set base themselves, to an extent, on patterns and promptings from these earlier works, but only to capitalise on their lack of revolutionary insight and incisiveness. His movement in this direction was observable in his own early “proverbs”, found in the two series of There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One. I single out a few representative “Proverbs of Hell”. On Plate 7 we find, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” (7.10), a reversal and deepening of the expected human quest for immortality as portrayed, for instance, in Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, and, it may be, an instance of David Morris’s “disturbance in the semantic field” of quotidian perception (“Dark Ecology”, 276).46 The deepening lies in the extension afforded by “the productions of time”, which includes the human, but is not limited to the human. The word “productions” suggests creations, as if temporality centred in nature were a type of artist, a posthuman representative of Poetic Genius, which counters the perception that “Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes”, and—as “to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination”—“Nature is Imagination itself” (BCW 793). The “doors of perception” and a posthuman perspective are also involved in “A 44

Locke’s problem lay in attempting to define such space, which brought into question the incommensurability of human perception and boundless immensity. “We can only imagine infinity to be the multiplication of finiteness”—a pervasive mechanistic materialism antithetical to Blake’s view: “If humans can imagine infinity, Blake argues, that proves they are not finite after all” (Lundeen, “Wrinkle in Space”, 3). 45 “‘A Firm Perswasion’: God, Art, and Responsibility in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, Jung Journal: Culture and Society 7, no.2 (2013): 68. Johnson and Grant, however, argue that because they follow the page designs of the orthodox Bible, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los comprise the “Bible of Hell” (in BPD 140). The “Proverbs” might yet take their place in this Bible. 46 See Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 119. Vendler provides the texts of all the sonnets and offers commentary on each.

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fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (7.8), where “wisdom” taps into Swedenborg’s notion of “the Perception of Truth, which is from the Affection of Truth”, and which is “the Thought of Wisdom” produced from the “spiritual Substances” of the “natural Mind of Man” (BCW 95). The “natural Minds” of “fool” and “wise man” see a single “tree”, but the “wise man’s” vision is “cleansed” to see beyond the corporeal bounds to the infinity in the tree. McGilchrist feels “that something actually emanates from our eyes and enters into the object of our attention”, that, “in looking”, “we enter into a reciprocal relationship: the seeing and the seen take part in one another’s being”. He refers to this same Blakean aphorism; the “fool’s” vision would be that of the camera: “the camera model is merely that of the left hemisphere, whose sequential analytic grasp of things does not reach to reverberative, reciprocal movement” (Master and Emissary, 165). For McGilchrist this “reciprocal movement” reveals the living tree, a focus of “attention” quite different from that of the materialist (Master and Emissary, 4-5).47 Another “instructive” aphorism on this same Plate is, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise” (7.18), which, on the one hand, is hardly in the mould of Lavater or Swedenborg, and certainly registers a disturbance in the semantic field because of the puzzling causal chain from “folly” to “wisdom”. If, on the other hand, it simply means that we learn from our mistakes, then the productive interplay of the “fool” and the “wise man” (carefully mounted in “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”) is obscured. In that aphorism the gap between the two seems unbridgeable; in the present aphorism Blake reveals the same humanism he had shown in his response to Lavater’s aphorism 309 (which drew from the poet his notion of “hell”). Lavater consigns one who criticises the whole on the basis of a small part to “Bethlem or Bridewell” (the lunatic asylum or prison). We recall Blake’s response: To hell till he behaves better! mark that I do not believe there is such a thing litterally, but hell is being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires which shortly weary the man, for ALL LIFE IS HOLY. (BCW 74)

From this perspective, the fool will not be locked within the bounds of his folly forever; he has the capacity to extract himself, and, though repeatedly caught up in the “folly” of the “natural Mind”, finally perceive the “Spiritual 47 See also McGilchrist’s Ways of Attending (London: Routledge, 2019), in which he notes that attention “is actually nothing less than the way in which we relate to the world. And it doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with” (13).

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substance” associated with the “Perception of Truth”. Yeats wrote in “An Acre of Grass” of “that William Blake / Who beat upon the wall / Till truth obeyed his call” (Variorum Poems, 1957, 575), evoking in a manner this very proverb. Plate 8 begins with the type of social commentary we find in Songs of Experience, and allies Blake’s “honest indignation” with that of Isaiah’s in “A Memorable Fancy” from Plate 12. The proverb reads: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” (8.1). “Law” and “Religion” are prescriptive vehicles of the state, intimately involved in each other to regulate human behaviour according to rigid, perhaps uncompromising standards. The “stones of Law”, indeed, in their immutability do not distinguish between offences committed out of necessity and wanton offences. Their “stoniness” is void of the Blakean qualities of “Mercy” and “Pity” that contribute to the divine image of humanity (BCW 117). The sanctimonious hypocrisy of “Religion” participates in this perversion, as in “London” (BCW 216), though more obliquely. The “bricks of Religion”, as opposed to the primary, archaic “stones”, suggest a socially crafted structure, concealing from view the dire need of the poor (prostitutes in this case) to make a living. From this same Plate comes the extraordinary declaration of how inconceivable certain aspects of posthuman existence are to ordinary humanity: “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man” (8.7). Even “the destructive sword”, so disturbingly human in its murderous prosthetic nakedness, is involved in a causality beyond the reach of human understanding. The “portions of eternity” here seem to dwarf the Manichaean dualism of “The Tyger”: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (BCW 214). In the latter a demiurge might be involved in the creation of the tyger, as opposed to the Lamb of Christ. Kathleen Raine, for instance, writes of Gnostic belief in relation to “The Tyger”, that the world was not created by the supreme God: “Common to all schools of Gnosticism is the belief that the creator of the temporal world was not the supreme God; and among Jewish Gnostics, the Creator of Genesis is identified with this second creator” (“Blake’s Debt”, 429). This question of a daemonic demiurge will be discussed in more detail when we come to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but for the time being we see Blake circumventing any literal understanding of a biblical Genesis and its consequences as tailored to human understanding, just as he circumvented any literal idea of hell when responding to Lavater. “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, is found on Plate 9 (line 5), and is a compact expression of the unpredictable potency

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of wild emotional energy as opposed to the plodding predictability of linear rationality, tamed by subservience to a unitary authority. Unusual at first is the matter of “wisdom” in relation to “wrath”, but this, once more, appears to be linked to Swedenborg’s “Affection of Truth” joined to “the Thought of Wisdom”: intuitive feeling is the basis of spiritually charged wisdom. “Too great for the eye of man” in that eye’s unexpanded sensual state, this intuitive feeling is the basis of wisdom for the cleansed doors of perception. Cleansed, the doors of perception admit a glorification of the senses, as found in Plate 10 (BCW 152), which is only a “glorification” from the point of view of present limitation, and is, in reality, the “Truth”: “The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion” (10.1). This proverb joins together corporeal, emotional, sexual and aesthetic standards of perfection and (in the case of “Pathos”) empathy, circling back to the powerful expression of the “Contraries” in Plate 4 (BCW 149): 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

What prompted this presentation of the “Contraries” was, of course, established notions regarding dualism of “Body & Soul” and its moralising reverberations—energy from the body deemed evil, reason from the soul deemed good, and eternal “torment” the consequence of “following” one’s “Energies”. Blake’s response collapses the dualism and so overturns the basis of any simplistic and complacent means of dividing human capacities to circumscribe the unlimited potential of life with a code geared to a “safe” but hypocritical progress. In proposing a liberated and liberating “Devil” (Plate 4 is titled “The voice of the Devil”), Blake anticipates Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini’s posthumanist challenge, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman, presented at the beginning of Chapter One: “a current challenge for posthumanist thinking is to confront the specters of those premodern animals, gods, angels, monsters, and other real and conceptual entities that, in order to keep the human ‘proper’, humanist modernity had to expel” (“Preface”, xv). It is true Blake conceives the “premodern” “Devil” in satirical anthropomorphic terms, but, and bearing in mind that “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body”, all Blake’s expressions of spiritual energies are anthropomorphic. What this Devil points to, however, is not an elevation of the human, but an opening up of

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the human to an “Eternal”, posthuman perspective: “Energy is Eternal Delight”.48 If “desire” is the yearning for supreme “Delight”, it is clear why the provocative Plates 5 and 6 should follow this Plate. Blake’s critique of Milton (“sufficiently notorious”, as Donald Dike succinctly puts it)49 seems to stem from the almost juvenile boisterousness of An Island in the Moon, when Quid bursts out: “‘I think that Homer is bombast, & Shakespeare is too wild, & Milton has no feelings: they might be easily outdone’” (BCW 51). But there is no empty boasting in the present Plates; the critique of Milton is carefully structured, and is consistent with the antithetical position taken by Blake in the Marriage. However, the antithetical force of these Plates seems beyond the realm of polite conjecture, vibrates with revolutionary intention to overturn the blindly accepted status quo. The negative keystone of the Plates is “reason” as the “restrainer” of “desire”. As a “restrainer” it must deal with human “unwillingness”, and so takes on the role of an authoritarian “governor”. Subject to continual governance, desire becomes “passive”, a mere “shadow of desire”. This impersonal overview of the forces involved is related by Blake to Milton’s anthropomorphisation of them, or, rather, Blake’s own transumption (and inversion) of Milton to depict the eventual triumph of desire: “The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah”. The logic in the remainder of the Plates follows from this inversion: though Milton’s “Messiah” is “Reason”, while the “original” “commander of the heavenly host” “is call’d the Devil or Satan”, in the “Book of Job” “Reason” is called “Satan”—that is, the “Messiah is call’d Satan”. As a Blakean lesson in perspective, “both parties”, the Angels’ and the Devil’s, have “adopted” “this history”, but Milton’s angelic account of the “original expulsion” has been “distorted”, as Schock puts it (“Myth of Satan”, 460). Thus it appears to Milton’s Messiah, “as if Desire was cast out”, whereas in the Devil’s account, Reason fell, “& formed a heaven of what he stole” from the energy-riven “Abyss”. The “comforter” of the “Gospel” is “Desire”, whom the “Father” sends to “Reason” that he “may have Ideas to build on” stemming from “Eternal Delight”, rather than a repetition of “natural or organic thoughts” bound to “the same dull round 48 As Raine points out, Blake was aware that Swedenborg believed “Delight” to be “the universal constituent of heaven, and the universal constituent of hell”, though the one type was “good and true”, the other “evil and false”; yet, said Swedenborg, “all delight is of Love” (in Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:368). Blake built upon this foundation to confute its distinction. 49 Donald Dike, “The Difficult Innocence: Blake’s Songs and Pastoral”, ELH 28, no.4 (1961): 369.

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over again” (BCW 97). The “Jehovah of the Bible” deals in “Desire” and “Eternal Delight” as he is “no other than [the Devil del.] he who dwells in flaming fire”. After his death, Christ “became Jehovah”, in accord with one who “acted from impulse, not from rules”, as stated in Plates 23-24 of the Marriage. Milton’s trinitarian scientism intrudes on his poetic sensibility, to curtail spiritual freedom: “in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son a Ratio of the five senses, & the Holy-ghost Vacuum!”. Overarching predestination based only on what the “five senses” perceive, is rounded off by the empty “Vacuum” of Newtonian science— where spirit should be. But Milton’s rationalism is undercut by his own daemonic sensibility, a force that comes from beyond himself, whether he will or no, expressed by the exuberant inversion in the “Note” which concludes this section of Plate 6: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

In effect, Milton’s daemonic energy redeems him. Plate 11 of the Marriage expresses Blake’s particular understanding of daemonic lore, in an extension of the discussion related to “Poetic Genius”, in All Religions Are One (BCW 153): The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

All corporeal, “sensible objects”, participate in the “animating” energies of their “Gods or Geniuses”—their own daemons—which reflect the relation of body and spirit not as distinct entities, but as a continuum.50 It is from this perspective that “every thing that lives is Holy” (Plate 27, BCW 160). Blake also anticipates, to an extent, the giant embodiments of his prophetic books, such as Albion and Jerusalem: “And particularly [the ancient Poets] studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity”. The

50 Certain of Blake’s unorthodox views were perhaps prompted or reinforced by Joseph Priestley. As Schock notes, in Disquisitions Relating to Spirit and Matter (1777), Priestley wrote that “what we call mind, or the principle of perception and thought is not a substance distinct from the body”; he also wrote about matter, that “powers of attraction or repulsion are necessary to its very being” (in Schock, “Myth of Satan”, 458; 469n45).

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unfettered vision of the poets, though, is displaced by “a system”, a rational diminution involving “abstraction” and priestcraft: Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

“The vulgar” are the common people, lacking in sophistication, or perhaps so caught up in dealing with the necessities of existence as to be deprived of the opportunity to cultivate or appreciate Poetic Genius. They thus succumb to the streamlined spiritual manipulations of a self-serving authority, a “Priesthood” ensconced in a political frame, who resort to the superstition implicit in “poetic tales”, rather than the true vision stemming from Swedenborg’s “Perception of Truth”. “At length” this privileged state of authority, engirded by its validating myths, is itself declared to be sanctioned by “the Gods”. The Plate concludes, with its emphasis on a plurality of deities, with a corroboration of daemonic lore related to that expressed by Jean-Pierre Vernant in Mortals and Immortals: “The psuché, which in each of us is ‘ourself’, has a ‘daimonic’ character: it is a particle of the divine in human beings” (Mortals and Immortals, 191). Blake writes: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”. Lest this concluding sentence be read as too settled an opinion, we find the shifting spiritual perspectives of Plates 12 and 13, “A Memorable Fancy” (BCW 153-154). The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel are questioned by the speaker as to “how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them”. Isaiah’s response tells of his cleansed doors of perception, attuned to the idea “that All deities reside in the human breast”, but with an added combative expression of social critique: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote”. The biblical Isaiah’s evocation of “the wrath of the Lord of hosts” expressed by the “darkening of the land”, where its “people shall be as the fuel of the fire” (Isaiah 9:19) is exemplative of “the voice of honest indignation” of God. As an expression of infernal energy (an adjective warranted by “the fuel of the fire” image), it also links to the “acting from impulse” of Jesus, in Plate 24. Isaiah’s championing of a “firm perswasion” gives authority too to the prophetic voice shared by Blake. The speaker asks: “does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?”, and Isaiah responds: “All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion

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removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing”. Ezekiel’s response is more problematic. Though “the philosophy of the east”, he asserts, tried to establish “the first principles of human perception” that reveal divinity, “we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle and all the others merely derivative”. This might be an affirmation of Blake’s “Poetic Genius” which “resides” in every “human breast” (“the Poetic Genius is the true Man” (BCW 98)), but Ezekiel’s bigoted suprematism is hardly Blakean: Israel’s monopoly of Poetic Genius “was the cause of our despising the Priests & Philosophers of other countries, and prophecying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours & to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius”. As Dawson points out (“A Firm Perswasion”, 72), there is a flaw in this particular “firm perswasion”, whereby “King David” “conquers enemies & governs kingdoms”, and whereby “we cursed in [God’s] name all the deities of surrounding nations”, and considered these nations to have “rebelled”. The firm stance taken made “the vulgar” think that “all nations would at last be subject to the jews”; “like all firm perswasions”, says Ezekiel, this “is come to pass”. His blatant expression of triumphalism—“and what greater subjection can be?”—makes manifest the irony in the speaker’s response: “I heard this with some wonder, & must confess my own conviction”. However, again as Dawson notes, Ezekiel has more than one side to his nature: Blake was well aware that “most people are a muddle of conflicting qualities” (“A Firm Perswasion”, 73). Ezekiel also asserts the central Blakean desire “of raising other men into perception of the infinite”, which he links with an obscure reference (for that time) to the consciousnessaltering practices of “the North American tribes”, perhaps suggesting the untrammelled perception of the natural man, in the vein of Rousseau.51 He then voices an unwavering commitment to his prophetic vocation: “is he 51

The source of Blake’s knowledge of the spiritual practices of Native Americans remains unknown. But see his indignant response to Bishop Watson’s aspersions about the religious ignorance of “man, in a savage state”: “Read the Edda of Iceland, the Songs of Fingal, the accounts of North American Savages (as they are call’d). Likewise read Homer’s Iliad. He was certainly a Savage in the Bishop’s sense. He knew nothing of God in the Bishop’s sense of the word & yet he was no fool” (BCW 389). Erdman notes that the “Red Indian” in West’s famous painting, The Death of General Wolfe, had its origin in a “Niagara Falls scene” by Blake’s friend, Fuseli. In Blake’s lost fresco, The Ancient Britons, the colour of the British figures was “very like that of Red Indians”, according to Crabb Robinson; Blake considered this a healthy colour, as opposed to the colour of modern Europeans, suggesting influence and admiration. See David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 41-42.

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honest who resists his genius and conscience only for the sake of present ease of gratification?” The energy embedded in a firm persuasion can be both productive and obstructive, a nuance in the Marriage which perhaps tempers somewhat its enthusiastic daemonism, but which reinforces our sense of its practical existential reach, and of the humanism which attends Blake’s daemonic vision. This humanism is the basis of the interchange between Devil and Angel in Plates 17 to 24. The Angel approaches the Devilish speaker and chastises him: “O horrible! O dreadful state! consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career”. The speaker responds, nonchalantly: “perhaps you will be willing to shew me my eternal lot & we will contemplate together upon it and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable”. The Angel shows the speaker a horrifying landscape of hell, fronted, significantly, by a “stable” and “church” (the Christian progress from humble simplicity to system), at the “end” of which is a “mill”, or mechanical industrial factory. The Angel and speaker behold the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining round it were fiery tracks on which revolv’d vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather swum in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption. & the air was full of them, & seemd composed of them; these are Devils. and are called Powers of the air.

There follow visions of more giant black and white spiders, a black tempest, a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and the head of Leviathan; the terrified Angel climbs up to the “mill” just beneath the church. Remaining behind, the speaker now finds himself “sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper”. The harper’s “theme” is not only pertinent to the present moment, but reflects too on the changing perspectives submitted in the Marriage as a whole, and specifically those regarding Swedenborg: “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind”. The Angel, surprised that the speaker “escaped” from the terrors, learns from him a lesson in the imposition of one’s own “metaphysics” on another, by being shown, from the vantage of the “church” a disgusting vision, supposedly the “lot” of the Angel. There strong apes rape and then devour weak ones, and even “here & there” “one savourily picks the flesh off of his own tail”. The Angel realises that “thy phantasy has imposed upon me”, and feels the speaker ought to be “ashamed”. The speaker retaliates, “we impose upon one another”, and points to the reliance of the Angel upon rationalism, represented by

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“Aristotle’s Analytics” (where “analysis” was understood by Blake in its reductive Baconian sense),52 which makes the time spent “conversing” with him “lost”. In Plate 22 we learn that Swedenborg thought himself “wiser” than all the narrowly “religious” whose “net” he has “broken”, not realising he was like a man who “carried a monkey about for a shew, & because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men”. His own “metaphysics” is at fault because “he conversed with Angels who are all religious” and are thus limited by the “Analytics”—rationalism marked by the absence of Poetic Genius. It is because of this absence that “Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number”.53 A Devil, in Plate 22, further underlines the importance of this Poetic Genius: “The worship of God is: Honouring the gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God: for there is no other God”.

The Angel, “smiling” to hypocritically conceal his apoplectic rage, points to the divine unity of “Jesus Christ”, and his “sanctioning” of the ten commandments, a fact which supports the Angel’s charge of “Idolator” (referencing the third commandment) levelled at the Devil. In a fine Blakean flourish, the Devil first implies that Christ as the greatest man can be loved in the greatest degree while not excluding what is due to other great men; he further shows (however obliquely)54 how Christ broke all the commandments. He concludes: “I tell you, no virtue can exist without 52

See Patrick Hugh Byrne, Analysis and Science in Aristotle (New York: SUNY Press 1997), 2: “there is no real reason why the ancient Greek idea of ‘loosening up’ [the original Greek meaning of ‘analysis’] should be the same as the modern notion of ‘reducing’ or ‘breaking up’”, which thereby reduces a living organism to nonliving, mechanically-functioning parts for the sake of a logical model; the notion probably stemmed from Bacon. 53 We recall the significance of Jacob Boehme for Blake, as recorded by Raine in Blake and Tradition, 1:363, where she quotes from Boehme’s Mysterium Magnum, chapter 8, page 24: “God . . . is Evil and Good, Heaven and Hell; Light and Darkness; Eternity and Time; Beginning and End”. 54 Dawson, “A Firm Perswasion”, 66: “The Devil’s list is often strained. . . . In order to illustrate his view, [Blake] is presenting episodes from the Bible where Jesus represents a challenge to the kind of collective thinking that is represented by authority”.

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breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules”. Jesus, then, is a prime exemplar of the energy celebrated in the Marriage. Realising the Truth of the Devil’s argument, the Angel is converted, “embraces the flame of fire”, is “consumed” and rises “as Elijah”. The fiery reference (though suiting the vein of comic satire) is appropriate, as the biblical Elijah brought fire down from heaven, and rose to heaven by fire (2 Kings 2:11). The conversion is complete when the Angel becomes a Devil, the “particular friend” of the speaker, and the sharer in the “infernal or diabolical sense” of the Bible, “which the world shall have if they behave well”. It seems we might already “have whether [we] will or no”, “The Bible of Hell” in “The Proverbs of Hell”, as discussed above. But lest we accept the outcome of the debate too easily, we need to ponder the proverb offered at the end of Plate 24: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”. Though differences in kind are here emphasised, all differences and shifts in perspective must be acknowledged.55 Hence the Devil can say, despite the proverb “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”, “bray a fool in a mortar with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him”; and Swedenborg can at once show “the folly of churches, & expose hypocrites” and go “no further” than “recapitulate” “all superficial opinions” and provide “an analysis of the more sublime”. Yet all these human inconsistencies and contraries share in the grace bestowed (and anticipated in the response to Lavater’s aphorism 309) by the final proverb or aphorism of “A Song of Liberty” (Plates 25 to 27), usually considered to be a part of the Marriage: “For every thing that lives is holy”. *** Visions of the Daughters of Albion (BCW 189) contains, near the conclusion of its final plate, Plate 8, these very words: “for every thing that lives is holy!” Oothoon, the poem’s female protagonist, is yet able to claim as much after a wrenching immersion in the realms of material and mental experience. The poem does not exactly trace her passage from innocence to experience, as, despite what she suffers at the hands of men—Theotormon, thrown into the toils of anguished jealousy because of her rape, and Bromion, her rapist—she always has her liberatory vision. Nancy Moore Goslee, contesting Nelson Hilton’s deconstructive displacement of character by figuration, considers herself as evoking “the perhaps nostalgic belief that we may attempt to locate a specific and individual, if developing 55

Schock emphasises Blake’s awareness of the “infinite forces and energies abstracted and reduced by the religious into the dualisms of soul and body, good and evil” (“Myth of Satan”, 457).

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and changing, consciousness for Oothoon”. Oothoon, for me, is an energised character with a specific voice and “consciousness”, whatever other readings of her we may wish to adopt—feminist, psychosexual, political, metaphysical. An appreciation of so much daemonic energy as is expressed by Oothoon is not a “nostalgic” hankering after a character’s subjectivity. I agree with James Heffernan, that Oothoon resists classification and “refuses to be polarized”.56 Her liberatory vision from within the bonds of male-imposed limitations (daemonic in its enthusiasm) is certainly idealistic. David Aers feels that it stems, unrealistically, from a character not liberated from her situation, yet able to stand outside that situation and analyse it from a perspective of which she has no experience.57 But that Blake does not allow her to escape from her current state at the end of the poem, seems to indicate his awareness of this fact. According to Aers, “this counteracts the over-optimistic tendencies and represents the poet’s unflinching realism, his final rejection of any too easy idealism about human consciousness”. As a daemonic mouthpiece of liberation, however, Oothoon surely does not need to be judged in terms of her immediate or future functioning in the world, of “the failure of her powerful critique to lead to action” (Aers, “Dialectics of Sex”, 506). After all, her liberatory discourses in the poem, in the context of the negations of Theotormon and Bromion (and, surprisingly, the occasional insights of Bromion), are the setting forth of the “visions” of the women of England,58 prophetic and inspirational in their force, stemming from the hard-fought-for American state of political and social independence, a source of strength in the face of seemingly intractable adversity. For instance, as Anne Mellor points out, though as early as 1772 Lord Mansfield ruled in the case of the black slave James Somerset “that slavery was not lawful in England”, he did not question the lawyer defending the slave owner’s point that slavery, “like

56

See Nancy Moore Goslee, “Slavery and Sexual Character: Questioning the Master Trope in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, ELH 57, no.1 (1990): 104. See James Heffernan, “Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality”, Studies in Romanticism 30, no.1 (1991): 6. 57 David Aers, “William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex”, ELH 44, no.3 (1977): 505. 58 Again, see Spenser’s The Faerie Queene 2.10.6 for Blake’s possible source for the name “Albion”, bestowed by mariners of old sailing England’s coasts: “the venturous Mariner that way / Learning his ship from those white rocks to save, / Which all along the Southerne sea-coast lay, / For safeties sake that same his seamarke made, / And namd it Albion”. Albion is later anthropomorphised as “mightie Albion, father of the bold / And warlike people, which the Britaine Islands hold”. Though slain by Hercules in France, his “immortal spright / Lives still” (Faerie Queene, 4.9.15, 16).

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marriage, was a ‘municipal’ rather than a ‘natural’ relationship”, implying a commercial “parallel between wives and slaves”.59 Thus, despite the prophetic and inspirational force, Oothoon needs to contend with the mental chains hinted at in the cryptic epilogue to the poem: “The Eye sees more than the Heart knows” (BCW 189). Superficially, this seems to suggest that surface appearance counts more than deep intuitive awareness. But Robert Gleckner, in “Blake and the Senses”, though at this point he discusses A Vision of the Last Judgment, alerts one to the fact that this is to miss what is implicit in the epigram, that the “one imaginative eye” associated with the “Visions” in the title of the poem, is a cleansed “door of perception”, which (looked through, not with) has the ability to perceive the infinite in the particulars of daily life; this is a mental reality, linked to Blake’s sense of the power of the imagination (“Blake and the Senses”, 13).60 For example, in A Descriptive Catalogue Blake opposes what is “real”, as seen in “Vision”, to what the “perishing, mortal eye can see” (BCW 576). “The Argument” of the poem, which follows, is in Oothoon’s voice. As it tells of her innocent love for Theotormon and her rape by Bromion with his “terrible thunders”, it is strange that Frye should think that she, a “virgin”, “has engaged in an extramarital amour, apparently with Bromion, and has inherited the jealousy of her husband and the thunderous denunciations of her lover” (Fearful Symmetry, 239). Such a reading diminishes the trauma she has experienced, and diminishes the responsibility of both males: Theotormon mourns her physical spoilation, despite her assertions of love (showing a deeper-rooted prejudice than revealed by the anger of a deliberately wronged husband), and Bromion, in the typical move of a seasoned rake (hardly a “lover”), brands her as a “harlot”. In the first person, “The Argument” appeals directly to the reader: I loved Theotormon, And I was not ashamed; 59 Anne Mellor, “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft”, The Huntington Library Quarterly 58, no.3/4 (1995): 346. “Municipal” implies that marriage and slavery were subject to agreed-upon laws generated by human communities. 60 McClellan and Harper note, “when man looks with rather than through his eyes, Ulro’s dark caverns of suffering and alienation spread before him” (“Blake’s Demonic Triad”, 181). “Ulro” is Blake’s natural world of delusion (ibid., 174). McGilchrist writes: “We need to see through the eye, through the image, past the surface: there is a fatal tendency for the eye to replace the depth of reality—a depth which implies the vitality, the corporeality and the empathic resonance of the world—with a planar re-presentation, that is, a picture. In doing so, the sublime becomes merely the picturesque” (Master and Emissary, 373).

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80 I trembled in my virgin fears, And I hid in Leutha’s vale!

I plucked Leutha’s flower, And I rose up from the vale; But the terrible thunders tore My virgin mantle in twain. (1-10)

Though she is “not ashamed” of her love for Theotormon, her sexual inexperience makes her afraid of physical expressions of love: “I trembled in my virgin fears”. “Leutha’s vale”, according to Raine, denotes sexuality, as a “vale” in Blake always depicts “a material or bodily state”, while “Leutha” (an Ossianic word, like Oothoon itself) is linked to the Gaelic “Lutha”, meaning a “swift stream”. Perhaps, for Blake, with his knowledge now of Taylor’s translation of On the Cave of the Nymphs, Leutha is a “fontal naiad of generation” (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:170-171). The name “Oothoon” is clearly related to Macpherson’s “Oithona”, where the Gaelic “oi” means “virgin”, and “thona” means “wave”. Oothoon, then, might plausibly be seen as a virgin of “the wave of materiality”, hence Blake’s representing her in Plate 4 of the poem as “a great green wave, her ankle fettered to the watery envelope of hyle, her generated body” (Blake and Tradition, 1:174). Entering the world of generation, Oothoon “plucked Leutha’s flower” and “rose up from the vale”. Her first experience of sex, though, the brutal rape, has a potentially devastating effect, which might have subdued or perverted her nature for the rest of her life: “the terrible thunders tore / My virgin mantle in twain”. The hard alliterative collocation of “terrible”, “tore” and “twain” gives substance to the physical effect of the violence. That “The Argument” ends at this point leaves the matter of Oothoon’s psychic dissolution in the balance; if this were all the poem had to offer it would have been, merely, a lurid account of the despoilment of innocence, a type of cautionary tale, an abbreviated Camilla or Clarissa.61 But Blake, inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, according to Raine (Blake and Tradition, 1:168), wished to make much more of his heroine.62 The distinction between what is presented in “The Argument” and the remainder 61

As Mellor points out, “Too often, the females of [Wollstonecraft’s] day were seduced by heartless libertines who then abandoned them, dishonored and pregnant, to a life of social ostracism and prostitution” (“Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 364). 62 Goslee feels that Blake “corrects” Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on female reason at the expense of liberated sexuality (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 119). Mellor, in addition, feels that Blake undermines Wollstonecraft consistently in his illustrations to her work (“Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 359-363). Her two-hundred-year retrospective interpretation of these illustrations seems to me particularly severe and partisan.

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of the poem seems intended to confound conventional expectations; it sets up a tension between expected consequences and what the free spirit might express in the midst of psychic and material bondage. In the poem “Mary” (BCW 428), to follow up on Raine’s surmise that this poem is about Wollstonecraft, the eponymous subject is first seen by others as “An Angel” “from the heavenly Climes” (line 5), but opinion soon turns. Her innocent “delight” in herself (she “moves in soft beauty & conscious delight”) and her desire, like Wollstonecraft, to be socially “free” “among Friends”, causes deliberate misrepresentation and envy: Some said she was proud, some call’d her a whore, And some, when she passed by, shut to the door; A damp cold came o’er her, her blushes all fled; Her lillies & roses are blighted & shed. (17-20)

Her freedom, like that of Oothoon, is compromised by the limited sensibilities of those around her; Mary, however, seems far more circumscribed by opinion than Oothoon. The final stanza of the poem reads: And thine is a Face of sweet Love in despair, And thine is a Face of mild sorrow & care, And thine is a Face of wild terror & fear That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier. (45-48)

The unrelenting beat of the anaphora, centred in the solitary individual’s “Face” or outward form responding to the contempt of the world, seems to subdue Mary totally. Its repetitive cadence is terminated by the absoluteness of “never be quiet” in the final line. If she is a proto-Oothoon, so to speak, Mary shares with her only the weight of a supposedly aberrant sexuality (figured in the coupling of “soft beauty” and “delight”) and does not reveal the inwardness of Oothoon. One might argue that the issue of social acceptance is the crux of the present poem, and that Visions of the Daughters of Albion was needed by Blake to extend the critique of contemporary society and its mores. One cannot help but feel that Mary Wollstonecraft was made of sterner stuff than the eponymous persona of “Mary”, and that Visions is a more fitting monument to her. The first word of Plate 1 of Visions is “Enslav’d”. Though applied directly to “the Daughters of Albion”, it has wider reverberations, telling of an identity among women, slaves, and all who are subject to the mental chains imposed by society and themselves.63 The irony in their “trembling 63 Goslee notes: “Both the date engraved on the title page of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion—1793, that tumultuous year for the French Revolution—and

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lamentation”, which “sighs toward America”, that should be a source of comfort considering recent history, is made manifest when the cause of the lamentation is revealed: For the soft soul of America, Oothoon, wander’d in woe, Along the vales of Leutha seeking flowers to comfort her. (1.3-4)

The “soul of America” is not liberated, despite political liberation; this larger issue is contracted by Blake into personal terms, explored in the remainder of the poem.64 But if Oothoon’s present “woe” is caused by her own mental limitations, to do with her budding sexuality, this private state is nevertheless conditioned by public social mores, and hence can be felt by the Daughters of Albion. Her subsequent encounter with the “bright” flower, with its significant encasing of the name “Mary”—the “Marygold”—frees her from this initial stage of entrapment. She experiences a twofold vision, seeing, in alternation, with the eye and through the eye. Kevin Hutchings refers, in this regard, to the “double vision” in Blake’s epistolary poem to Thomas Butts, of 22 November 1802 (BCW 816-819). This double vision is contrasted with the myopic “Single vision and Newtons sleep”; it “causes such things as thistles and flowers to exceed their assigned taxonomic categories, thus challenging prevalent ideas concerning the nature of their earthly being”. Hutchings feels that Oothoon’s vision “unsettles anthropocentric complacency”. Note also the Marygold’s indwelling “soul of sweet delight”; Hutchings states that this “attribution of spirit” “challenges the contemporary belief that only humans were endowed with souls”. The flower introduces Oothoon to the posthuman potential attending a larger awareness of life, where the word “nymph” “carries a rich variety of possible connotations”, according to Hutchings, including beautiful young woman, semi-divine natural spirit, post-larval insect, and even clitoris, making the Marygold-nymph “a radically fluid entity”: 65 “Art thou a flower? art thou a nymph? I see thee now a flower, Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!”

the first word of its narrative two pages later— ‘Enslaved’ urge us to consider political contexts for its mythic narrative” (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 101). 64 David Erdman long since pointed out the public resonances attending the personal in this poem, incorporating humankind at large, and its involvement with possessive materialism (Prophet Against Empire, 227). 65 Kevin Hutchings, “Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9, no.1 (2002): 3-6.

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The Golden nymph replied: “Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild! Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight Can never pass away.” She ceas’d, & clos’d her golden shrine. (1.6-10)

In plucking the flower, Oothoon at once releases her liberated sexual vision, emerges from the vale of material generation (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:169-171), and seeks the object of her love: Then Oothoon pluck’d the flower, saying: “I pluck thee from thy bed, Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts, And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.” (1.11-13)

Her initial flight evinces the bounding enthusiasm of untrammelled innocence, a delight in her own physicality (not unlike the Mary of the eponymous poem): Over the waves she went in wing’d exulting swift delight, And over Theotormon’s reign took her impetuous course. (1.14-15)

The word “impetuous” might sound a note of warning, with its sense of heedlessness regarding possible dangers, but it also encapsulates the sheer force of her energy and enthusiasm. The name “Theotormon”, with its overtones of being tormented by God (Johnson and Grant in BPD 72), evokes the chastising God of the Old Testament along with “Error” number 3 from Plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven & Hell: “That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies” (BCW 140).66 Theotormon is more tormented by himself, subscribing to the “Errors” of a hypocritical morality centred in the needs of the self, though sanctioned by a religious orthodoxy that supposedly observes God’s word (or Urizen’s word). As the dealings between America and England are among the poem’s concerns, “Theotormon’s reign” must be the Atlantic, which is also a reference to the sea of time and space, material existence, which Oothoon has entered.67 The implication is that God’s torments (conditioned by jealousy, as we are presently made aware) set the tenor for this existence—if one succumbs to 66 Dennis Welch argues that John Locke’s linking of accountability to personal identity makes the individual subject to the law, or torah, suggested in the name Theotormon—tormented by God and the law. See Dennis M. Welch, “Essence, Gender, Race: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, Studies in Romanticism 49, no.1 (2010): 113. 67 Blake’s ability to offer simultaneous perspectives is typical of his art. As Goslee notes: “One of the great strengths of Blake’s poetry lies in its complex analogies between the physical, psychological, political, and cosmic levels of mythic narrative” (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 102).

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the hypocritical exhortations of religion. Theotormon himself exemplifies this fact. Immediately after setting out, Oothoon is raped by Bromion. In the original plate there is a gap between the two couplets detailing her setting out and the rape. Thus the transition from joyful expectation to a brutal annulment of innocence is rendered in terribly sudden terms. She seeks love, and encounters lust of the worst kind. Bromion’s name suggests the Greek for “roarer” (Johnson and Grant in BPD 72), hence his connection with “thunders”: Bromion rent her with his thunders; on his stormy bed Lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appall’d his thunders hoarse. (1.16-17)

His total lack of empathy, and his feeling outraged by her crying, as if he were somehow a victim, tell of his extreme self-absorption. Of course, he side-steps any issue of guilt, then, and is quick to denigrate the supposedly fallen woman as a “harlot”, a stereotypical male assignment of blame to the sexual victim. He exults over his conquest, and makes early reference to the “jealous” conditioning of this present world, through Theotormon’s agents, “the jealous dolphins”. He also makes a connection between woman’s position in this world and that of slaves: Bromion spoke: “Behold this harlot here on Bromion’s bed, And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid! Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun; They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge; Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent.” (1.18-23)

It is not clear whom he is addressing at this stage, but in the very next line following the above passage, at the beginning of Plate 2, it is evident that he speaks to Theotormon, who, to an extent, here represents an aspect of English manhood. England had to relinquish her American possessions in the face of the violent revolution suggested by Bromion, who, however, cannot see the elements of injustice underlying American independence. Aers’s reading of the final line, “Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent” is politically and psychologically acute; he feels that Bromion here voices “the possibility that the repressed introject the ideology and values of the oppressor, they ‘worship’ their rulers in the way people have worshipped gods” (“William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex”, 504). I tend, rather, to the simpler view that Blake is thinking here of the prejudiced understanding of African idolatry, seen as savage, where “obeying” the conceptual “violence” associated with the “terrors” of savagery seems an

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unsurprising concomitant. While Aers presents a general phenomenon, with or without the presence of Bromion, the second view amounts to an oblique castigation of Bromion’s untroubled perpetuation of the status quo: people who know no better than to “worship terrors” are happy enough to “obey the scourge” and “obey the violent” (whether concepts or masters). Either view might be seen as valid, but what seems important for Blake is to record the perpetuation of oppression, even under a new, supposedly liberatory dispensation (let alone in the light of the quasi-legal idealisation of the “freeborn Englishman”, in use since the time of the Levellers, in the midseventeenth century).68 Beginning Plate 2, then, Bromion relegates the responsibility of the consequences of the rape of Oothoon to Theotormon, both as a means of ensuring his own freedom from restraints and of provoking the selftormenting Theotormon—who will emerge as his brother in the late prophecies (Johnson and Grant in BPD 72). I think sibling rivalry can be discounted at this stage of Blake’s development of his characters, but Bromion, in addressing Theotormon, clearly knows his man: “Now thou maist marry Bromion’s harlot, and protect the child Of Bromion’s rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.” (2.1-2)

He devalues Oothoon and asserts in triumphant terms the value of his brutal energy: he calls her, with a genitive construction steeped in gender violence, “Bromion’s harlot”; and his own act of begetting “the child” is conditioned by “rage” (also in the proudly possessive case). Unlike the revolutionary rage of Rintrah, at the commencement of the Marriage, this rage seems a perversion of the life energy which should accompany the love act and the child engendered by that act. However, although Bromion’s consciousness presently seems outside all such considerations, later he is more susceptible to change than Theotormon. Perhaps there is an element of positivity in his wrathful energy, hearkening back, to an extent, to the Marriage’s “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” (BCW152). Goslee observes: “His moment of vision, contrasted to Theotormon’s incapacity for change, might again suggest that sexual experience, even in this aggressive mode, leads to vision”. She immediately qualifies this statement by noting Bromion’s sudden shift back to limited vision (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 115). And as James Swearingen notes, Bromion’s understanding

68 See Rachel Foxley, “John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-born Englishmen’”, The Historical Journal 47, no.4 (2004): 851.

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is superficial; he is an “abstractionist and lawgiver”, who “makes no effort to reconsider his categorial posture and initiate thinking”.69 Theotormon, in responding to this taunt, is as self-absorbed as Bromion; he feels no empathy with Oothoon, but rather bewails his own state, the expressions of his energy moiling pointlessly around the objects of his jealousy, rather than finding any vital outlet: Then storms rent Theotormon’s limbs: he roll’d his waves around And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair. Bound back to back in Bromion’s caves, terror & meekness dwell. (2.3-5)

If Bromion, an external agent, “rent” Oothoon, Theotormon’s own “storms” “rend” him, in an inverted parallel, which highlights his selfish assumption of the suffering caused by Bromion. In the original plate he is a black, supine figure, supporting himself on his elbow, with his head facing the earth, as if defeated and overcome with exhaustion.70 On a separate plate we find the figures (presumably Bromion and Oothoon) bound “back to back”, a chain around the leg of the male figure. In Plate 4 Oothoon is also shown fettered, but at the same time she is at one with a flame-shaped, and thus energised wave of materiality (thinking of the imagery of Marriage); though bound to materiality through the chain, she is yet free to express this energy. Sitting on his haunches in the separate plate, Bromion is in the typical position (almost foetal) of Blake’s tyrants, bound to the consequences of their limited vision. The position suggests the abjection of the slaves of which he is master, himself as much enslaved as they are (Frantz Fanon avant la lettre),71 within the Platonic cave of material illusion. Oothoon in this plate has not yet emerged from her state of “meekness”, and, with her head hanging low, seems as defeated as Theotormon in Plate 2. This separate plate also shows Theotormon at the entrance of a cave, as described in Plate 2: At entrance Theotormon sits, wearing the threshold hard With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore 69 See James A. Swearingen, “The Enigma of Identity in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91, no.2 (1992): 210. 70 The blackness of the figure, like Theotormon’s black “jealous waters”, represent, for Goslee, black enslavement (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 108). 71 See, for example, The Wretched of the Earth, pp.50-52. But see, also, Mary Wollstonecraft: “slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent”. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (New York: Norton, 1975), 5.

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The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money, That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth. (2.6-10)

Isolated in solipsistic grief, Theotormon does not notice the suffering of the exploited, the slaves and children, forced into servitude by a collaborative system (figured in the “religious caves”) from which he sits passively apart (as far as possessing a social conscience goes). The implication is that he in his self-absorption is as much an exploiter of the people of the earth as the terrifying and violent Bromion. Ruler of waves, like England (the tenor to his vehicle), he is ironically deaf to the suppliant “waves” (they “sound” as if “on a desart shore”) of people whose suffering he could help to alleviate. The “religious caves” (in concert with the social hierarchy ensconced at “the summits of the earth”) through—it is implied—self-serving legalities, uphold the exploitation of the unwanted fruits of sexual “lust”, the children sold into servitude, and commercial “lust”, the quest for profit derived from the labour of slaves. Oothoon, an enslaved woman (both by sexual force—as in an unloving marriage—and through social position), remains in the midst of her woes; but these woes are not self-centred. She wishes to open Theotormon’s eyes to the purity of her love for him, despite what has happened, and this is imaged in the “rending” of her flesh by eagles to reveal her inner self. Goslee feels that the “partial drawing” of Oothoon attacked by eagles shows “ecstatic masochism”, and that the image “even resembles Bernini’s sculpture of St. Theresa”. Her point is that Oothoon’s “possible liberation risks needing martyrdom” (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 115). Certainly, the intransigence of the males suggests the need for extreme measures, but she does not need their compliance to express her daemonic vision. From an opposite point of view, Heffernan, responding to the word “rent”, previously used for the rape and for Theotormon’s self-inflicted storms of jealousy, feels “if Bromion can turn sexual intercourse into an act of violent aggression, she can turn a brutal punishment into a kind of sexual intercourse”. The sensuous picture of Oothoon lying with arched back, and the eagle, “kissing” her rather than tearing her flesh, supports this view (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 12). For me, however, the rending might be seen as a type of “cleansing” of the “doors of perception”, aided by the eagle, which is depicted in the Marriage as “a portion of Genius” (BCW 152). Theotormon is not moved, seems to consider this as due suffering on his behalf: Oothoon weeps not; she cannot weep! her tears are locked up;

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Chapter Two But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs, And calling Theotormon’s Eagles to prey upon her flesh. “I call with holy voice! Kings of the sounding air, Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.” The Eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey: Theotormon severely smiles; her soul reflects the smile, As the clear spring, mudded with the feet of beasts, grows pure & smiles. The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs. (2.11-20)

His “severe” smile of reproof is likened (through a quasi-Homeric simile, which comprehends an interdependent community of existence on earth, with good and bad consequences) to the muddying feet of beasts which have fouled a “clear spring”; she, “reflecting” the smile, purifies it of its ironic intentions. Hutchings sees significance in the “natural” simile of “a mudded spring” to represent “the ostensibly spiritual process of ascetic self-cleansing”, as purity thus identified with “earthly process” which “emphatically opposes Theotormon’s self-righteous desire to renounce the material world”. The connection of the images of “beasts” and their “feet” disturbing rivers with Ezekiel 32.2 and Psalms 68.30 underlines connections with tyranny’s “harmful social and environmental consequences” (“Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature”, 13, 14). Though her reflection of the smile has no impact on Theotormon, Oothoon is now free to give voice to her unbounded vision. The point of the poem is to express this vision, stemming from the cleansed doors of perception, not, as Mellor feels, specifically to free the mind from Wollstonecraft’s “very rational modesty” (“Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 366), which, however necessary in contemporary England, could be seen as conforming to generally restrictive social and psychological oppression. Blake (even if he himself at times cannot see beyond the perceptual and psychological limitations of his age) does never “equate ultimate freedom with the gratification of the desires of the white European male” (“Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 368; my emphasis). I would also question Welch’s absolute assertion that “the fundamental aim of Visions is to present a strenuous voice of resistance against tyranny even if that voice may not succeed” (“Essence, Gender, Race”, 108; my emphasis). First, the empathetic refrain sounds; though the “sighs” of the Daughters of Albion were heard at the beginning of the poem, there they were, if an expression of women’s lot in England, an appeal to the general idea of a supposedly liberated America; they sighed “toward America”. Swearingen feels that the refrain stresses Oothoon’s role “as a repository of typical rather

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than unique experience” (“Enigma of Identity”, 207). Here, the sighs of the Daughters of Albion express an understanding of continuing oppression (it is implied, taking the whole poem into account), despite superficial political change.72 Oothoon now cares more for Theotormon’s condition than her own, a selflessness that expresses her inwardly liberated state, notwithstanding her material circumstances (and Theotormon, ironically, has all the material freedom of an enfranchised, privileged male). Her daemonic nature (with a focus beyond all constraints of the self) emerges: “Why does my Theotormon sit weeping upon the threshold, And Oothoon hovers by his side, perswading him in vain? 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 ripe 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.” (2.21-28)

She evokes a world of non-human consciousness and dimensions involved in existence (“dog”, “nightingale”, “lark”, “Eagle”, “breaking day”, “ripe corn”, “the pure east”, the “sun that sleeps too long”), as if to shift his awareness beyond his limited self-centredness, and take cognisance of something more than restricted human concerns. She then reveals to him her own changed state of consciousness, what she perceives through her cleansed doors of perception: “Arise, my Theotormon, I am pure, Because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black. They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up, And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle, And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red, round globe, hot burning, Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.” (2.28-34)

The actual rape is far from her mind; she tells of a type of mental rape, committed through the imposition of an unthinking human conformity— conveyed by the repeated “they”—which “incloses” the “senses” and the otherwise “infinite brain”, and isolates the desiring “heart” (“hot burning”) 72 Goslee refers to W. H. Stevenson’s suggestion that Spenser’s refrain, “Sweete Themes runne softly, till I end my Song”, from Prothalamion, offers a “faint echo” for Blake, making the Daughters’ chorus “an anti-prothalamion” (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 109). This might be an oblique means of further tempering the idealism of the Visions.

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in a featureless “Abyss”, suggestive of the means of cordoning off any emotional expression, whether sexual or otherwise. She is soon aware, however, that Theotormon takes no account of the expressions of what amount to her transformative Poetic Genius: “Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel house: That 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.” (2.35-37; 3.1)

The dark perspective attending Theotormon (but also discernible to Oothoon, who is affected by it because of her inability to move Theotormon) suggests the Proverb of Hell, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (BCW 151). The “bright shadow, like an eye” is an inverted version of the cleansed eye of vision, free of shadow, and implies a type of surveillance over human affairs by a limited higher power.73 There are thus intimations in this image of the “Father of Jealousy” (7.12), Urizen, “mistaken Demon of heaven” (5.3). Theotormon remains enclosed within his own bounded vision, yet Bromion is aware of Oothoon’s “lamentations” concerning Theotormon, which also convey, though, her altered consciousness. This is the first indication that Bromion is susceptible to change. The final line of the above passage begins Plate 3 of the Visions, where Oothoon gives evidence of her expanded vision through examples from nature which call into question the limitations imposed by five senses alone (3.2-13). Her cogent questioning and choice of pertinent examples add weight to her list of natural instances which deny explanations based on rational cause and effect. She deals first with “senses” beyond those which 73

David Brion Davis, in his The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 17701823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 457, refers to Bentham’s panopticon in connection with the surveillance of slaves; Blake might have had this “eye” in mind. See also Kevin Hutchings’s reference to Foucault’s notion of “pastoral technology”, the “ever-watchful behaviour” of the supposedly beneficent “good shepherd” actually being representative of “panoptic” governmental order, which “encourages individuals to internalize social surveillance in the form of an obedient, law-abiding conscience” (“Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature”, 1). From this point of view, “Oothoon attempts to refute the socially and ecologically destructive dualisms underpinning pastoral technology, opposing the tendency of her antagonist, the ascetic Theotormon, to align human biology with a hostile natural world that must be transcended in the name of an ostensibly liberatory spirituality” (2). See also “The School Boy” from Songs of Innocence, where the schoolboy sits in class “Under a cruel eye outworn” (BCW 124).

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are materially discernible, exhibited by the intuitions of “chicken”, “pigeon” and “bee”. She then looks at the similarities in capacity of the material organs of sense of “mouse & frog”, but then points to their material and emotional differences, implying that perceptible organs of sense result in very different subjective constructions of the world and manifest themselves within very different forms. There is thus a principle of discernment and creation beyond a shared material basis. The different natures of “wild ass”, “camel”, “wolf” and “tyger” are also not determined by shared material characteristics of “eye, ear, mouth, or skin / Or breathing nostrils”. Neither is the predilection of “the blind worm” “to curl round the bones of death” consciously arrived at, nor is the spontaneous production of “poison” in “the rav’nous snake” the result of its conscious will. Her list (involving the reader, as well as Theotormon, in a series of imponderable questions) concludes with those thoughts of mankind which are inaccessible to conscious will, despite being materially situated, as it were, within the human being: “And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old”. An anticipation of the Freudian unconscious, her example makes the point that if the previous imponderables have been situated outside man’s sphere of personal involvement, man (limited by rational thought and the five faculties of sense) is actually imponderable to himself. Still eliciting no response from Theotormon, Oothoon focusses specifically on the object of his selfish concern—her own state of supposedly fallen womanhood (3.14-20). The reference to “thy image pure”, though reflective of her own purity,74 should unwittingly (on her part) satisfy his own complacent sense of self. That, ironically, it reinforces his sense of being wronged, and that her carefully chosen set of examples from a world beyond that of human self-interest should fall on deaf ears, shows his intractable nature, and so the tenacity of a limited and limiting consciousness engulfing the world. In her examples, supposed corruption masks underlying sweetness—that of the fruit fed on by the worm, the lamb besmudged by smoke, the swan besmudged by river mud (and, in a Neoplatonic aside, the swan as emblematic of the pure soul suffused with the blood of human generation (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:177)). The “soul prey’d on by woe” seems at first curious, but if meant to enlighten Theotormon through empathy, should convey to him the sweetness of his 74 Hutchings: “Because the modifier ‘pure’ follows rather than precedes the clause’s noun, the reader is at liberty to consider Theotormon’s purity not as a pre-given quality . . . passively reflected but as something Oothoon’s act of ‘reflection’ causally bestows upon him” (“Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature”, 14). My point is that if she at first sees him in terms of purity, it is her own pure vision that determines this perception.

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true self beneath the present “woe” he now feels, that this “woe” is transient, an expression, perhaps, of a potentially regenerative felix culpa. If it is, this expression of the felix culpa or “Fortunate Fall” brings Oothoon’s ideas close to those of Coleridge, a central contention of Leadbetter’s Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination being that for Coleridge the Fall (with its biblical resonances) creates the circumstances for human spiritual progress to arise: “the Fall opens the way to the dynamic pursuit of gnosis, and hence the divine source” (78). Theotormon, however, seems to miss the implication entirely (even though he at least breaks his silence), and, in “answering” Oothoon (line 21), embarks on a series of questions mirroring those of Oothoon, but lacking their coherence (3.22-25; 4.1-2). Theotormon’s outpouring first justifies his state of “woe”, in a sense responding to Oothoon’s words at the end of Plate 2: “to him the night and morn / Are both alike; a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears”, and so participate, to an extent, in an engagement beyond the bounds of self (though his concern remains with the self). His next question, imponderable and somewhat inconsequential (“Tell me what is a thought, & of what substance is it made?”), might at least convey an urge to step beyond his immediate immersion in self, but his subsequent dwelling on “joy” returns to his own needs, and the implication that they cannot be met: “in what gardens do joys grow?” He is, in effect, spurning any aid. His following images convey the immensity of his woe, reflected in the elemental dimensions of “rivers” and “mountains”. When he scales down to humanity, presumably to spotlight his own case, he does so with a generalisation which multiplies subjective sorrow by referring to a plurality of “wretched” beings: “in what houses dwell the wretched”. Though the cause of their “woe” is “forgotten”, they yet suffer its consequences, as, it is insinuated, he will do for a long time to come: “Drunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair”. They are inebriates in a state of terminal dejection, long after the cause of their woe has been forgotten. Theotormon thus presents himself in a self-pitying, helpless light, as if he will never recover from the hurt done to him. Not changing his mood, he becomes more coherent in what follows, and seems to respond, if in a wholly self-referencing, self-serving way to Oothoon’s “And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old”: “Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth? Tell me where dwell the joys of old? & where the ancient loves, And when will they renew again, & the night of oblivion past, That I might traverse times & spaces far remote, and bring Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain?” (4.3-7)

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In the illustration to this plate, Oothoon is in the flame-shaped green and black wave bending over Theotormon, who is not naked like her, but in foetal position (linking him with Bromion) and draped all over in blue (suggestive of the Atlantic ocean, with which he is associated, and, it may be, of his mournful condition). Her ankle, as previously discussed, is fettered, yet though a captive she is not bowed, but generates energy from her flame-wave, her eyes steadily fixed on Theotormon, below her.75 His first words are admonitory, in effect blaming her for his condition by building (at a tangent, however) on her example of the “thoughts” “hid of old”. Although his questions are rhetorical expressions of his need to reexperience the past in order to blot out his present suffering rather than actual questions, it is useful to consider his express reference to “thoughts” to show the gap between him and Oothoon. Her lesson on the limits of rationality is circumvented as he selfishly focusses on needing to have free access to the thought she apparently causes to resurface, instead of appreciating the distance of these thoughts from rational ideas of causation and location: “where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?” The following questions show his need to gain “comfort” from past “joys” and “loves”, in their “renewal” through memory, which will enable him to “traverse times & spaces far remote”. That is, he has an imaginative capacity, but it is used, not for enlargement of perception, but (drawing on “the daughters of Memory”) to cater for the sense of a severely encased self. His apostrophe to thought is almost a parody of the poetry of sensibility, underlining the limitations of his consciousness: “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 desart wilds, from the eyes of the envier?” (4.8-11)

His rhetorical concern with the provenance of thought soon gives way to his immersion in “the present moment of affliction”, where he is helpless before an indeterminate future which might offer “comforts” or “poison”, depending on the whim of “thought”. Then Bromion speaks, presumably to the other two, “and [shakes] the cavern with his lamentation”—not to be outdone by Theotormon, we might cynically think, but his thought, at least at first, circles outwards from himself. He speaks of “trees and fruits” which “flourish upon the earth / To 75 Heffernan connects this wave with the “flame-flowers” “used to convey passion and vitality” in the Songs of Innocence. Depicted as being above Theotormon, she is like the triumphant “apocalyptic figure on the cloud depicted at the end of the poem” (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 18).

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gratify senses unknown”, of “beasts and birds unknown” “not unperciev’d, spread in the infinite microscope”, of lands “yet unvisited by the voyager” “Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown” (4.14-18). This is a surprising account of enlarged perception to stem from Bromion, the violent, slave-owning rapist. The shift involved in acknowledging this fact is itself a nudge into conceptual otherness, not open to rational explanation, and enables Bromion momentarily to assume a daemonic mantle. That which is “unknown”, “trees and fruits”, “beasts and birds”, are yet perceived through materially enlarged vision, which draws on an “infinite microscope”. This image from science has the authority of practical demonstration, buttressing Bromion’s imaginative expression in a substantial manner. Infinity, encompassing “every thing” (according to the Marriage (BCW 154)), extends in both directions, the immense and the miniscule, and here the miniscule is involved in an imaginative exercise which is given body by Bromion’s reference to voyages of discovery, laced by adjectives of otherness: “In places yet unvisited by the voyager, and in worlds / Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown”. Welch alerts us to the fact, however, that “although Bromion intuits a difference between perception and knowledge, he does not care about the difference . . . believing that the mind is but an increasing accumulation of new . . . perceptions” (“Essence, Gender, Race”, 117). His being bound to empiricist experience, even in this imaginative exercise, explains the consequent diminishment of his vision (4.19-24). If his imagining “atmospheres unknown” enabled him briefly to step beyond himself, he is now subject to the “oppressive”, circumscribing perspective warned of at the conclusion of Plate 24 of the Marriage: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”. He asks, “are there other wars beside wars of sword and fire?”, and, with an apparently ever-diminishing perspective, “are there other joys beside the joys of riches and ease?” His vision of “existence” is coloured by “eternal” bondage within the “fire” and “chains” of an “imposed” “phantasy”, as the Marriage would have it (BCW 157), though his reference to “phantoms of existence” and “eternal life” has both Christian and Neoplatonic overtones—the understanding that true “existence” is “eternal”, not limited to phantasmic temporality—suggests that he still retains a sense of enlarged life: “is there not eternal fire and eternal chains / To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life?”76 The plate concludes with Oothoon apparently gathering her strength to respond

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Goslee here detects a possible parodying of “the genre of the sublime rhetorical question”. She sees him as prescriptively fusing “a Mosaic code and a Pauline dualism” (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 115).

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to the male views she has just heard: “Then Oothoon waited silent all the day and all the night”. Plate 5 begins with both Oothoon and the Daughters of Albion in one sense combining the force apparent in their “lamentation” and “sighs” (judging from the outwardly directed potency of Oothoon’s words): “But when the morn arose, her lamentation renew’d. / The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs” (5. 1-2). This repeated refrain underlines the continuing presence of the “Daughters”, and the shared plight of the oppressed, whether women or slaves. Oothoon, having witnessed the limited consciousnesses of the males, has gathered her full strength to apostrophise the higher authority of Urizen, as demiurge of this world, and instigator of the type of masculine reductionism voiced by Theotormon and Bromion: “O Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven! Thy joys are tears, thy labour vain to form men to thine image. How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a Love.” (5.3-6)

Calling him a “Demon” (synonymous with Daemon, if we bear in mind Principle 1st from All Religions Are One), and a “mistaken” one at that, Oothoon perceives he is subservient to a supreme Being, and that therefore his material strictures, centred in reason (McGilchrist’s left brain), are partial.77 “Mistaken” is, of course, ambiguous, denoting both his mistaken rationalism and mankind’s mistaken notion that his perspective is the only valid one. Despite his dominance in an age of reason, conformity and consensus among humankind is not possible; hence “thy labour vain to form men to thine image”, and the supposed rewards of labouring under this misconception, the “joys”, ironically become “tears”, because of the frustration and unhappiness stemming from the impossibility of achieving such control. She then responds to Bromion’s Urizenic, materialistic spin on “joy”: “are there other joys beside the joys of riches and ease?”. He only sees the pleasure in “riches and ease”; Oothoon, aware of the range of expressions of pleasure, sees this unitary focus as an absorbing conformism, which negates the variety of obviously “different joys”. Instead of a 77 McGilchrist warns, however: “Despite the right hemisphere’s overwhelmingly important role in emotion, the popular stereotype that the left hemisphere has a monopoly on reason, like the view that it has a monopoly on language, is mistaken. As always it is a question not of ‘what’, but of ‘in what way’” (Master and Emissary, 64). He goes on to point out that “insight”, including the mathematical variety, tends to be associated with the right hemisphere (65). Oothoon’s “insight” is certainly holistic.

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flattening out of a unitary “joy”, she invests “each joy” with the supreme emotion of “Love”, and locates each in unfettered and sanctified time and space, where they are “Holy, eternal, infinite”. She then presents a powerful discourse on diversity (if at times gnomic), incorporating within it biting social critique: “Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift, & the narrow eyelids mock At the labour that is above payment? and wilt thou take the ape For thy councellor, or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children?” (5.7-9)

Diversity expresses itself in numerous ways, from the material distinction between “mouth” and “eyelids”, to the expressive one between hypocritical (or scornful) “great mouth” laughing at a perhaps well-intentioned if humble “gift”, and the mean (or ironic) “narrow eyelids” which cannot appreciate “labour that is above payment”. More bluntly, “ape” and “dog”, different in themselves, are also hardly at the level of “councellor” and “schoolmaster”, and so (perhaps provocatively, with a gesture towards the intelligent animals of Aesop’s moral fables) are obvious pointers to distinction. She continues, and now engages in social critique (5.10-16). Critique to do with money and its misuse (“poverty” which could be overcome by fair-minded state intervention, and “usury”, where money feeds on itself), is also distinct. Free giving of “gifts” must cause a different pleasure to that of selling products; and the working suburban “citizen” with his own concerns cannot experience the “pains” arising from the farmer’s problems. The next two lines possibly have to do with military recruitment, “the fat fed hireling” being a recruit in state service, with his summoning “drum” “hollow”, because linked to empty promises and false bravado; the recruiter “buys whole corn fields into wastes” by luring away the young men who would have worked the farms.78 These are all different types of people, seeing “different” “worlds”; even though they have the “eye and ear” of humans in general, these organs of sense are attuned differently; once more, “The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees”. Oothoon then turns to the exploitative practices of the church, as well as its collusive influence on social hierarchies, and on the laws surrounding marriage: “With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer? What are his nets & gins & traps; & how does he surround him With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,

78 Heffernan does not hesitate in identifying the “fat fed hireling” as a “recruiting officer” (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 15).

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To build him castles and high spires, where kings & priests may dwell?” (5.1720)

The “parson” in his parish lives off “the labour of the farmer”, but his “claim” to do so is inscribed in ancient laws that make no provision to ensure equivalent material benefits for both. The parson is a poacher on another man’s property, using the “nets & gins & traps” of a “sense” hidden from sight, but effective in a colluding social environment that is advantageous to the privileged. The “labour” of the parson is the creating of his sermons, “cold floods of abstraction” which isolate him in “forests of solitude”, where he can “build him castles and high spires” of securely ensconced ideology, not in synchrony with the needs of ordinary life, but serving only “kings & priests”, the church and state and their continuance. An upshot of the attendant moralism which keeps society in check, is the legal prescriptiveness attending marriage. Oothoon highlights the entrapment of young women in marriages of convenience, a type of legally sanctioned (and enforced) prostitution (5.21-32). Must this state of affairs continue “Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound / In spells of law to one she loathes?” The fire and freedom of youth, its daemonic energy shared by Oothoon, is ignored. The “spells of law” suggest the invisible power of the law, which, as if she is in a state of enchantment, bind a young woman to a partner both not of her choice and “loathed” by her. The example clearly shows the elevation of rationalist abstraction over human feeling. Oothoon details the material and psychological consequences of a woman’s having to “drag the chain” of “life” (her own life, but also the continuance of life which marriage implies) in acts of procreation where no love exists and hardly any life force either: “weary lust” conveys the woman’s perspective, where she is preyed upon with no considerations of reciprocity. She must consequently harbour great bitterness, and hence the soul-damaging “chilling, murderous thoughts” which “obscure / The clear heaven of her eternal spring”. Oothoon takes care to say “obscure” rather than “destroy”, acknowledging, in Hermetic fashion, the continuing potency of “her eternal spring”, but this brings scant comfort to a life condemned to “turn the wheel of false desire”. The result of this type of union (recalling the “new-born infant” “blighted” with “plague” in “London”) is a fatally flawed, mysterious birth process (the most gnomic passage in the poem), involving first “the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form”.79 Blake, it may be, thinks of the biblical cherubs, fearsome theriomorphic beings, 79

There are shades here of the “fiend hid in a cloud” from “Infant Sorrow” in the Songs of Experience, which recalls the same image from the earlier “Mad Song” with its accompanying “howling woe” and “frantic pain” (BCW 9).

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their “human form” being that of the laundered, chubby child of Western art.80 Oothoon conveys the disease-ridden nature and brief existence of these “cherubs”, who appear to exist (“dwell”) alongside the child in the womb, himself subjected to ignominious acts (“the deed he loathes” and suffering an “impure scourge”); premature birth follows from this interference. An unjust legal system which stifles human feelings and serves only the letter of the law, has consequences for future generations that impact on the nature and quality of human life, and therefore the experience of existence on earth. Oothoon then returns to the matter of distinct forms of existence on earth, correcting human unitary vision, the basis of self-centred exploitation of the earth (BCW 193); each creature (“whale”, “dog”, “raven”, “vulture”, “spider”, “eagle”, “fly”) has its own being and sphere of influence, and Oothoon points this out in exaggerated terms calculated to reveal the absurdity of not taking distinctions and diversity into account (5.33-38). The passage concludes (5.39-41; 6.1): “Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering church yard And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave?”

The thought to which this final line leads contains a version of “grave humour”, but also an affirmation of the importance of co-existence of life forms on earth, along with the Hermetic notion of renewal of life: “Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss, O Man! / And sweet shall by thy taste, & sweet thy infant joys renew!’” (6.2-3). Materially and emotionally satisfied man shall “taste” “sweet”, giving joy to the lowly worm, who will continue to nourish the earth and recycle dead matter. Less literally, materially fulfilled human beings will be better caretakers of the earth. Her lesson appears to be: give of yourself freely in this life, because the life force in which you participate will in any case be renewed. In the remainder of Plate 6, Oothoon contrasts innocent sensual “pleasure” with “hypocrite modesty”, which she now detects in Theotormon. She does not give up on him, however, but seeks yet to energise him with her daemonic strength: “Who taught” “honest, open” “Innocence” “subtil modesty, child of night & sleep?” (6.4-7). Blake’s meaning is not entirely clear, but it appears that the infant is innocently “open” to all the pleasures of a sensuality closely linked to emerging sexuality. Impinging on this 80 Blake’s “Covering Cherub”, after all, is not a cute child. Milton’s unredeemed Shadow is one version of the Covering Cherub (Milton, 2.37.44).

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experience of pleasures generated by the body, is “subtil modesty”, seen by Oothoon as unnatural, as it needs to be “taught”. It is not “open” and “honest”, because it must mask the experience of “delight” through “dissembling”, returning to the “secret joys” under cover of “night & sleep”. Even if “not awake” when the “mystery” of sex “was disclos’d”,81 because of insidious moral hypocrisy the seemingly “modest virgin” will, when awake, “know” how to “dissemble”. The “nets” of moral hypocrisy linked to the hidden sensuality of “thy night pillow” (suggestive of self-pleasuring) “catch virgin joy”, and distance the natural self through the societal brand of “whore”.82 This early hypocrisy, which compartmentalises sexual experience within the realm of secret pleasures, thus helps to commodify sex, to be “sold” “in the night”, a night enclosed in elements of secrecy: “in silence, ev’n without a whisper, and in seeming sleep” (6.8-13). This hypocrisy is served by religion, opposed to sensual pleasure, yet figuratively linked with the secrecy through its insubstantial “Religious dreams” and dusky “holy vespers” (6.14-20). The “honest morn”, when all was “open” to view, was the natural inspirer of bodily satisfaction. Oothoon, having revealed the indefensibility of sexual hypocrisy, then confronts Theotormon directly, and casts their relationship in shocking terms, in the light of a perversion of honest natural energy. She applies her list of damning adjectives to “modesty”, but their weight must be borne by Theotormon himself: “knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling”. In placing herself in relation to this weight, she attempts to dislodge him from his self-absorption and make him look beyond himself, to one who had been the object of his affections: “Then is Oothoon a whore indeed!” She would be a “whore” for catering to such a debased conception of sexuality. But she also widens the range of consequences to include “all the virgin joys / Of life” which must be “harlots”.83 And her final indirect appeal to

81

This second line of the passage might be provocatively ironical, playing on the notion of assumed innocence hypocritically masking the facts of “secret” subjective experience. In the character Thel (in the eponymous book), though not at the cost of secret experience, “orthodox notions of virginity become analogous to pretensions of virtue”. See Robert P. Waxler, “The Virgin Mantle Displaced: Blake’s Early Attempt”, Modern Language Studies 12, no.1 (1982): 46. 82 As Welch notes, the “Lockean person” presents a “radical form of self-objectification”, “that instrumentalizes and even commodifies both the self and the Other” (“Essence, Gender, Race”, 114). Blake sees this legalistic objectification here. 83 For Robert Waxler, it is the religious orthodoxy “adopted by Milton’s Spectre, that perpetuates the dictum that ‘Love is Sin’. That orthodoxy allows the Eve / Mary figure to become the equivalent of the woman figure as virgin / whore: and it is, of course, ‘the religious’ who would see Thel and Oothoon in that way” (“The Virgin

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Theotormon, where she deliberately maligns herself, is centred in her awareness of his need to value a being other than himself: “Theotormon is a sick man’s dream”—his relation to life is doubly flawed, being “sick” and a “dream”, and she paints herself as “the crafty slave of selfish holiness”. Her adjectives are carefully chosen, underlining the life-denying strictures of a bogus morality. As we see from the conclusion of the poem, she fails to move him: “but Theotormon sits / Upon the margin’d ocean conversing with shadows dire” (8.11-12). Having painted this picture of herself as a type of shock tactic, Oothoon immediately withdraws it, and presents herself in her daemonic sexual splendour, which would shake the foundations of conventional morality, a vision from beyond the circumscriptions of society: “But Oothoon is not so: a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies, Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears; If in the morning sun I find it, there my eyes are fix’d In happy copulation; if in the evening mild, wearied with work, Sit on a bank and draw the pleasure of this free born joy.” (6.21-23; 7.1-2)

In this vision even gazing at the sun rising in the morning is unashamedly sexualised, a “happy copulation”, emphasising a continuity of natural sensuous processes. James Heffernan, drawing on French feminist Luce Irigaray, feels she is open to jouissance, “a distinctively female kind of pleasure”, “almost endlessly diffused”, and visual copulation is one expression of this, a fact which should be borne in mind later, when Oothoon would seemingly act as procuress for Theotormon (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 10). From Blake’s point of view, the “joy” of existence from whatever source is “free born”, and thus should not be constrained by the impositions of a society invested in control. She then contrasts her open “free born joy” with the secret pleasures of sterile, solitary gratification, of the “womb” “awakened” to “enormous joys / In the secret shadows”, of the “shut up” “youth” who “creates an amorous image / In the shadows of his curtains” (7.3-7). This type of gratification is characterised by “secret shadows” and “silent”, internally focussed imaginings of sexual partners, where the ability “to generate” outwardly is forgotten. She then again damns the hypocrisy of religious ideology, which creates the moral atmosphere for this hypocritical secret gratification (7.8-

Mantle Displaced”, 50). The “Spectre” in Blake signifies the limited corporeal being, a shadow of the eternal human (Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 410).

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11): “Are not these the places of religion, the rewards of continence?”84 Her outspokenness, in bringing into the light the “self enjoyings”, thus also defuses the aura of taboo surrounding them—and this exemplifies the active strength attending her “free born” nature. She questions the religious subjection of the body when she asks: “Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude / Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?” She thereby summons up the false dichotomy revealed in the distinction between Error and Contrary in Plate 4 of the Marriage: Error 2 states, “That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason call’d Good, is alone from the Soul”, whereas Contrary 2 insists, “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (BCW 149). Oothoon then uses the blunt adjective “horrible” in association with secretive “darkness” to discompose any pat recourse to sanctimonious moralising about the sins of the flesh associated with open sexuality. She goes on to attribute this perversion of sensuality along with the misery instilled by sexual jealousy to the socio-religious climate created by Urizen, “Father of Jealousy”, already established as the “mistaken Demon”, the demiurge whose jealous nature reflects that attributed to Yahweh in the books of the Old Testament. The perversion of sensuality is an aspect of the socio-religious climate created by Urizen, and not the solitary focus of Oothoon’s concerns, which is the liberation of perception. Even if her vision of free love seems to be “a male fantasy that serves the interests only of the male libertine” (Mellor, “Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 367), it is actually reflective of a state where both female and male consciousnesses are liberated, and beyond the toils of any fantasy. As the final stanza of the poem “London” shows, Blake was all too aware of the consequences of male sexual indulgence in a mentally manacled state (BCW 216). Theotormon’s tormenting jealousy is an extension of his God’s jealous nature, or is conditioned by that nature (7.12-15). Oothoon asks of Theotormon’s God, “Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?” Her quarrel is personal, to do with her blighted relationship with Theotormon, and its impact on her—emptying her of beauty and life, till she becomes a mourning spectre, “wailing on the margin of non-entity”.

84 Marsha Keith Schuchard sees Blake as “seeming to refer to the Moravian effort to visualise the circumcised penis and to transmute, not repress, masturbatory impulses” (Why Mrs Blake Cried, 36). The Moravians may have entertained a liberated perception of such activities, but Oothoon is clearly unmasking social hypocrisy and the sterility of having to “create an amorous image” for purposes of limited gratification.

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The spirit within Oothoon, however, is not to be subdued. Her final declarations involve a spirited interaction of positive and negative views, promoting, as in the Marriage, an almost tangible experience of opposed energies. She first sets “Love” against selfish jealousy (7.16-22). The freedom of the “mountain wind”, elemental, elevated, untrammelled, is set against the spongy material absorption of another’s being, jealousy and misery. Further imagery is startlingly vivid, the spider’s “web of age” (suggesting white hair and a complexion covered with fine web-like wrinkles), the inability of the aged eyes to desire “the fruit that hangs before his sight”. The Gothic image which follows, the “creeping skeleton / With lamplike eyes” is also designed to shock Theotormon out of his numbed state.85 Still ineffective, she then takes another approach, to tempt him with sexual images in order, selflessly, to awaken his desire, and to counter any sense, now, of merely personal need; the transformation of the aspect of masculine consciousness Theotormon represents would have revolutionary social consequences (7.23-29). The “silken nets” to catch “girls of mild silver” and “furious gold”, are very different from the secretive “nets found under thy night pillow” in Plate 6, used to selfishly “catch virgin joy” for solitary pleasure, a step in commodifying it and thus branding it “with the name of whore”. Here the act is done for another, and in the open, and the material sensuality is robust: “silken nets”, “traps of adamant”, “mild silver”, “furious gold”—not mere “reflections of desire” “impressed” on the “horrible darkness”. Similes involve the natural world, implying a posthuman radiance enfolding various life forms: “Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam”. Her selflessness is emphasised, along with her free spirit and lack of hypocritical modesty, as she depicts the scenes of free love Theotormon will engage in while she simply observes. Goslee, as do many critics, detects “masochistic voyeurism” here (“Slavery and Sexual Character”, 122). Oothoon, for Heffernan, however, “defies both jealousy and the possessiveness of fixed referentiality, in which words are bound to single meanings”; hence, in an earlier passage, copulation with the sun denotes loving visual interaction. Though sexual meaning is “undeniably present” in the current passage, “we cannot be sure whether the ‘copulation’ is literally or figuratively sexual”. Thus “Oothoon’s language destabilizes sexual and semantic possession at the same time” (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 11). In general, we must understand, and this is a crucial 85 Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, would later (1818) write of the “dull yellow eye” of the “monster”, sharing in a Gothic sensibility with Blake, though it is unlikely she had read Visions, despite her mother’s prominence in the Johnson circle. See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 1994), 55.

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Blakean point, Oothoon speaks from a higher state of consciousness, which spiritualises matter, and gives matter to spirit.86 In the final line of the present plate, and moving into Plate 8, she concludes with a series of aphorisms, which recall, to an extent, Lavater and Swedenborg, and so provide a rhetorical gravitas to her appeal.87 Though she fails, the appeal redounds with energy, a circulation of freedom within the confines of what Blake knows to be the facts of social existence. As do I, James Swearingen sees Oothoon’s talk “as action of a highly productive kind” (“Enigma of Identity”, 203).88 But without the possibilities inherent in this sense of freedom realised, where do we, as the human race, stand? Oothoon, bound as she is, speaks for earthly justice centred in a realisation of the expanded senses; an inclusive realisation: “Does the sun walk in glorious raiment on the secret floor Where the cold miser spreads his gold; or does the bright cloud drop On his stone threshold? does his eye behold the beam that brings Expansion to the eye of pity? or will he bind himself Beside the ox to thy hard furrow? does not that mild beam blot The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night? The sea fowl takes the wintry blast for a cov’ring to her limbs, And the wild snake the pestilence to adorn him with gems & gold; And trees & birds & beasts & men behold their eternal joy. Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! Arise, and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!” (7.30; 8.1-10)

The passage has to do with perception and an interplay of contraries dependent on perception. The brightness of “sun” and “gold” exist in tension, but the gold is tempered by secrecy and coldness, whereas the sun “walks in glorious raiment”. The cold “stone threshold” of the miser does not benefit from the nourishing rain “dropping” from the “bright cloud”. His “eye” is not open to the “expansion” offered the otherwise “mild” “eye of pity”, because he is bound to his narrow, “hard” existence, figured as the conditioned, enslaved ploughing of the “ox”. 86 Robert Waxler sees Oothoon as “a Mary-figure whose purity goes unrecognized” (“The Virgin Mantle Displaced”, 49). 87 Hutchings, though concerning an earlier passage, refers to her “hopeful auguries” (“Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature”, 10). 88 Swearingen’s intricate account takes note of Oothoon’s continuing mental development in the sequence of ways in which she relates identity to her past: “as an accumulation of past events”, “as pure immediacy unrelated to a past”, and finally as “constituted by a past understood as possibility” subjected to perpetual revision (“Enigma of Identity”, 203-204).

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The next expression is at first puzzling: “does not that mild beam blot / The bat, the owl, the glowing tyger, and the king of night?” Hutchings feels that according to the proposition “every thing that lives is holy”, “this blotting must be seen as an act of sacrilegious violence” (“Pastoral, Ideology, and Nature”, 19). The “mildness” of mere “pity” cannot appreciate the contrary qualities of these predatory creatures, in a way that acknowledges them as fellow-denizens of this earth, and so “blots” them out. What follows seems to corroborate this, when sterling contrary qualities produce an opposite effect: the “wintry blast” can protect the “limbs” of the “sea fowl”; the inherent “pestilence” of the “wild snake” is part of his essential corporeality, and thus a source of his “adornments” of “gems & gold”. From this perspective of the “expanded” “eye of pity”, metonymic of the enlarged senses, stems the idealisation of all the elements of existence, vegetable and animal: “And trees & birds & beasts & men behold their eternal joy”. The qualification at the very conclusion of the poem does not negate this revolutionary vision; it acknowledges the limitations of contemporary reality, while not discounting future potential. Scepticism always accompanied this vision. Swinburne, in 1868, in rather patronising terms, noted that “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”. The potential, though, is still embedded in the lines. As Iris Murdoch notes, although “The Good is distant and apart . . . it is a source of energy, it is an active principle of truthful cognition and moral understanding in the soul”. 89 Heffernan detects a visual expression of this potential in one printing of the poem, where a terrified looking Bromion at the end of the poem, his mouth agape and hair on end, is made to look on the image of the “apocalyptically soaring” Oothoon, and “literally see the power of defiance that Oothoon’s language conveys” (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 7). A living emblem of this potential is seen by Oothoon in the freedom of bird flight and expressive, joyful song: “Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! / Arise, and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!” Perhaps in ironic contrast with her own situation, the bird is nevertheless a living incarnation of existential freedom. And, as Swearingen notes, the “promise of this ‘holy’” is “comprehensive”, beyond “centric humanism” (“Enigma of Identity”, 215). Blake knows there is much to be done before Oothoon as the “soft soul” of America (or, in

89

See Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay (London: John Camden Hotten 1868), 234. See Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1992), 474.

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more general terms, the state of liberated consciousness),90 can receive her due: Thus every morning wails Oothoon; but Theotormon sits Upon the margin’d ocean conversing with shadows dire. The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs. (8.11-13)

Regarding this final mention of Oothoon’s woes, Heffernan feels that “her voice expresses not so much anguish on her own behalf as sorrow for the human condition” (“The Dilemmas of Marginality”, 18). Swearingen sees the Daughters at the end as a “community of suffering” which “inevitably disrupts the old order, for the unison of that ‘eccho’, the song of the repressed other, tells a dangerously liberating story of the oppressed and saves Oothoon from isolation” (“Enigma of Identity”, 214). In my view, both observations ring true. *** The Songs of Innocence collection was etched in 1789, three or four years before the printing of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, but its being combined with the Songs of Experience in 1794 under the subtitle, “The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul” (BCW 210), makes it appropriate to consider certain poems from both books at this point. Discussing the two books in tandem is especially important bearing in mind that “the states are contraries because they cannot be reconciled within the limitations of human existence”, even though “without the simultaneous presence of both states, human existence would cease”. Matt Simpson believes that “what Blake demands is that we experience Songs of Innocence and Experience in, as it were, a three-dimensional way and know them—in the ways they energise and activate one another—as something rich and strange, vigorously alive—in a word, as visionary”. He refers to the often-neglected need of experiencing the poems not only in relation to each other, but also to the coloured engravings accompanying the originals, much easier to do in this ubiquitously digitalised age (as I have done) than in 1992.91 90 Robert Waxler believes that Oothoon, in a process of transformation in Blake’s illuminated works, eventually becomes Jerusalem in the eponymous book, “married to the bridegroom Jesus” (“The Virgin Mantle Displaced”, 48). 91 The first quotation is from Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (New York: Doubleday1961), 29. See Matt Simpson, “Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience”, Critical Survey 4, no.1 (1992): 22.

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Daemonic images and energy suffuse the pages of Innocence, starting with the “Introduction” (BCW 111). Here the piper, already filled with joyous energy, taps into that of the “child” “on a cloud”, a vision-imbued otherness, who evokes the symbolic “Lamb” of divine incarnation, and its association with Jesus as the “True Man” and “Poetic Genius”, implicit in All Religions Are One (BCW 98): Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: “Pipe a song about a Lamb!” So I piped with merry chear. “Piper, pipe that song again;” So I piped: he wept to hear. (1-8)

Following the dialectic of innocence and experience, the spirit child on a cloud (or the mortal child as yet untouched by worldly sorrow) seems the inverse of the mortally bound child likened to a “fiend hid in a cloud” in “Infant Sorrow”, from the Songs of Experience (BCW 217). The preverbal, primal expressions of “pleasant glee” and the “Lamb” tell of perception which bypasses the intellect, an instant communication (and communion) of sense and understanding. So powerful is this nonverbal music that the child weeps in joyous empathy at the evocation of the “Lamb”, as if aware of the depths of significance being plumbed by a simple sound, for the Lamb, as we later see from the eponymous poem, is at once creature, child and saviour, in a circle of identity that bridges subjectivity and objectivity, and material and spiritual (“I a child, & thou a lamb / We are called by his name”) (BCW 115). We then move, however, from this spontaneous type of communication into a spoken verbal form, as if following the trajectory of linguistic development over the ages, with an echo of the biblical linguistic fall of Babel, which complicates our awareness of the free-floating innocence (void of any socio-historical context) and its resonances expressed in the first two stanzas. Donald Dike points out that the “fall” which occurred between Innocence and Experience “is not supposed to occur in measurable time”, as “the states of the soul co-exist” (“Difficult Innocence”, 355). It is important to remember, however, Stanley Gardner’s biographical contextualisation of the Songs of Innocence: Blake was newly married, he lived near his beloved brother, Robert, and witnessed in his own parish the

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“unprecedented undertakings in child care”.92 This was certainly an optimistic phase of the poet’s life. But perhaps what happened in his parish reinforced his awareness of the negative aspects of existence; he would have been all too aware of the reasons why child care was necessary in the first place: “Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy chear:” So I sung the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. (9-12)

The “songs” are linked to the primal music, but now are slightly distanced from spontaneous understanding through the specifics of linguistic understanding, inevitably involving reason. However, at this stage “the same” as given in the pure music is involved in what is communicated, with the same joyfully weeping response from the child. The implication is that intuitive emotional expression (or spiritual expression) can be combined with reason, or that, in Swedenborg’s terms and according to his careful sequencing “marked” by Blake, which privileges intuitive awareness over rational awareness, “It appears as if the Understanding joined itself to Love or the Will, but this is also a fallacy. Love or the Will joins itself to the Understanding and causeth the Understanding to be reciprocally joined to it” (BCW 95). The matter of verbal transference becomes more involved when writing is at issue; though the “pleasant glee” of the piper’s songs might be communicated in this way to more people, it comes at a cost to the state of innocence, involving more than the resonances of biblical myth: “Piper, sit thee down and write In a book that all may read.” So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear. (13-20)

Transferred to script and paper, the songs begin to bear the weight of their production, linked to socio-economic factors. The manifestation of spontaneous, innocent delight, the child, vanishes, no longer needed, 92 See Stanley Gardner, The Tyger, the Lamb, and the Terrible Desart (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 47.

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because of the permanence of writing, but taking with him something of the initial spirit and sense of reciprocity involved in the piping. Also, the “rural” setting is almost simultaneously despoiled, to accommodate the needs of the technology of writing—linked to the industrial despoilment of Blake’s era: the speaker must “pluck a hollow reed” to make his “rural pen”, but, more disturbingly, he “stain’d the water clear”, offering a direct connection to industrial spoilation of environment. And yet “happy songs” can be created in this way, to bring “joy” to “every child”. If innocence and experience are “The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, then the working of these contraries is certainly in evidence even in the earliest stages of innocence. As Bloom notes, “Experience exposes the precarious unreality of Innocence; Innocence censures the duplicity of Experience’s realities” (Visionary Company, 30). The final line of the poem, however, declares “joy” in perpetuity, despite circumstance, exhibiting in this something of the daemonic energy associated with the irrepressible Oothoon, and tempering Bloom’s notion of “the precarious unreality of Innocence”. The active energy in Innocence manifests itself at times with a disturbing irony, however, which involves the reader in a despairing sense of frustration at the naivety of innocence in the face of societal conditioning. This is especially true of “The Chimney Sweeper” (BCW 117), where the speaker reveals, in the first person, his own blighted circumstances, though without a murmur of self-pity; Blake’s verbal play, however, reveals his own compassion: When my mother died I was very young, And my Father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry “’weep! ’weep! ’weep! ’weep!” So your chimneys I sweep, & in soot I sleep. (1-4)

Though a particular case, it is a common one, and represents a form of societal oppression allied to the gender-based oppression of Visions. The speaker is, like Oothoon, not overcome by his situation, and selflessly concerns himself with the plight of the others, while revealing aspects of its nature: There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, That curl’d like a lamb’s back, was shav’d: so I said “Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.” (5-8)

The “lamb” simile is, again, highly resonant in the realm of innocence, but particularly notable in this stanza is the canny ability of the speaker to shift perception in a way that does not simply “make the best of a bad situation”,

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but which, in a way, transforms that situation. This transformation is reflected in the dream vision depicted in the next two stanzas: And so he was quiet, & that very night As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black. And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he open’d the coffins & set them all free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun. (9-16)

The naming of individuals incorporates them in the vision, making them specific children whose present conditions are psychically reinforced by the potency of oppressive symbol, but, also, where the hope inherent in futurity is buttressed by religious and natural symbol. The hope is of an ambiguous nature, being at once a source of strength and a source of delusion, the latter centred in the placatory imagery of the deferral of fulfilment associated with religious doctrine.93 But the bodily energy embedded in the vision is real: “leaping, laughing, they run, / And wash in a river, and shine in the Sun”. However, the strength of indoctrination contaminates vision in the final two stanzas; but the naïve sense of hope attached to this contaminated vision gains strength from its very innocence, as the acceptance of the boys’ state—premised on a bogus moralistic aphorism favouring the exploiters— stirs the energy of indignation in the reader: Then naked & white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father, & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags & and our brushes to work. Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm; So if all do their duty they need not fear harm. (17-24) 93 Dike refers to “the vision’s plausibility, the ease with which it fits into or develops out of the context of experience”; though Tom’s vision “is admittedly a dreamfantasy which, sufficiently explicable, cannot merely be explained away, for the reason that wishing is one necessary means to the apprehension of reality”. He further notes that “in naturalistic writing, of course, as opposed to pastoral [of which this poem’s vision is a type], such fantasy would be just compensatory” (“Difficult Innocence”, 371).

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The exploited Tom, happy to do his “duty”, is nevertheless “happy & warm”, having developed an inner perception, based on vision or even Poetic Genius, that counters his material state. What is troubling is that this countering enables the status quo to be maintained. And so a tension is created between experience in the world and transcendental vision; this same tension is present at the conclusion of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Inherent in such tension is the potential for extreme action, because of the awareness of a state beyond the limitations of present experience. That is, when vision and its promise of a better world is no longer held in check by the injustices of the realm of experience, then it empowers the violence of revolution, as in the case of France. The blatant irony in this poem, its own daemonic energy which attempts to change societal perception, also, therefore, carries a warning. The irony in “Holy Thursday” (BCW 121) is of a different kind. While it opens our eyes to the tribulations of experience, it is centred in compassion. The top and bottom borders of the original plate are crowded with eighteen boys (at the top) and fourteen girls (at the bottom), representative of the “multitudes”, being led by their elders on this one day of the year when they give thanks to their benefactors. It is a special occasion for them because they are washed and dressed in colourful clothing, and are treated to a public outing, where they will be seen and heard. The title of the poem beneath the top border is in large letters, and the word “Holy” has serpentine vegetation twining amongst its shapes (present to a lesser extent in “Thursday”). The “serpent” matter (and its suggestion of material entrapment) might well be present in this twining, considering the content of the poem itself, which questions the nature of this societal, shallow version of what is “Holy” from the start. The innocence of the children, though, is not in question: ’Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, The children walking two & two, in red & blue & green, Grey-headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow, Till into the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow. (1-4)

Here are the colours of energy (“red”), heaven (“blue”), and earthly matter (“green”), if we think of the plates of Marriage and Visions. The “grey” and the “white” of “snow” carry opposite connotations in this context, telling of what is outworn and sterile. And as Raine notes, symbolically, old age stands for the temporal, which alone ages (Blake and Tradition, 1:66). (Of course, “white” has a different connotation in “The Little Boy Found” (BCW 121).) Stanley Gardner, though, feels Blake in 1789 approves of these “wise

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guardians”, because of the previously mentioned, short-lived undertakings in child care in his parish (Tyger, Lamb and Terrible Desart, 38). Again, however, what of the conditions that necessitated the presence of these “wise guardians”, salaried individuals benefitting from them? As David Fairer comments, “Gardner is concerned to hold a wider world of experience at bay”. Dianne Payne, in her revelatory PhD thesis, although she presents evidence of a well-regulated and humane charity school system—evidence gathered from the children and their parents rather than the authorities—acknowledges that “over the course of the eighteenth century, charity school children were subject to the economic and political mood-swings of the day, and what they were permitted to learn and how they were employed changed to accommodate ‘both ideological and vocational elements’ within upper class attitudes, often modifying the original intentions of benefactors”.94 The irony at this point in the poem is that such circumscribing “white” sterility should come “before” the fresh energy of the children. Irony extends into the simile in the fourth line, where the mighty river is seemingly contained within the confines of the emblem of state and religion—St Paul’s. This suggests a finally futile effort: the containment of an unbounded life-force not subject to human-made circumscriptions. The life-force is given further human expression in the following stanza, where Blake probes beyond the condemnatory fact of orphaned, neglected children present on such a scale, to uncover more than the limited senses can perceive, a transvaluation apparent in “flowers”, “radiance” and “lambs”, and the seemingly inevitable cadence of the fourteeners: O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town! Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own. The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands. (5-8) 94 See David Fairer, “Reading Innocence: Contextualizing Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no.4 (2002): 538. See Dianne Payne, “Children of the Poor in London: 1700-1780” (PhD, University of Hertfordshire, 2008), 114. She quotes here Geoffrey Best, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the Church of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 119. Payne also notes that “the average salary of a schoolmaster in a London charity school was £30 a year plus housing and fuel, and was £24 a year for a schoolmistress” (“Children of the Poor”, 117). A present-day equivalent (in terms of buying power) requires a multiplier of between 100 and 150. See R. D. Hume, “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England”, Huntington Library Quarterly 77, no.4 (2015): 380. For a wider-ranging contextualization, see Fairer, “Reading Innocence”, 535-562.

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This uncovering achieves its climax in the final stanza, with its bodying forth of elemental energy, its reversal of the positions of children and elders, and biblical exhortation (Heb. 13:2): Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song, Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among. Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. (9-12)

The human “voice of song” exceeds all human limits to become an elemental “mighty wind” attaining the reaches of “heaven”.95 The “thunderings” in the following line not only recall Rintrah from the Marriage and the revolutionary force associated with him but are seen to transcend any sociopolitical action for which the condition of the children cries out, and to shake the spiritual source of existence itself. The sarcasm in “wise guardians of the poor” is palpable; they are now, in a situation where true spiritual and existential strength is revealed, “Beneath” the children, not “before” them in a superficial procession. What is required, though, is not social revolution but a cleansing of perception, a revolution of consciousness where human consciousness becomes coterminous with God: as “The Divine Image” declares: “Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell / There God is dwelling too” (BCW 117). For the word “angel” in the final line, the original Greek informing the King James version of Hebrews 13:2, had “aggelos”,96 literally “messenger”, but by implication in the context, “messenger of the divine”, which can also be rendered (in terms of pre-Judeo-Christian pieties) “daemon”. Blake would have known the Greek noun from his familiarity with Bryant’s influential work on ancient mythology (which, as already noted in Chapter One, his master, Basire, engraved, perhaps with the help of his young apprentice), and would have been aware of the Neoplatonic connection through his acquaintance with Taylor. But whether Blake was aware of this connotation or not, the daemonic function of the children in the poem is evident, both in terms of their extraordinary energy and their communion with the divine for instructional purposes.97 95

Payne quotes the Dean of Westminster, who heard the St Pauls children in 1784: “The union of 5,000 treble voices raises admiration and astonishment. It is a choir impossible to collect by any other means” (“Children of the Poor”, 128). 96 King James Version of the Bible Online, accessed July 11, 2022, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Blake was conversant with Greek. See Webb, “Romantic Hellenism”, 172-173. 97 This is not to overlook the material plight of the children. As Dike says, “each bright particular recalls, however dimly, its gray counterpart” (“Difficult Innocence”,

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The eponymous speaker of “The Little Black Boy” (BCW 125) also instigates a cleansing of vision to see beyond racial surface difference. Differences are measured in terms of colour superficially associated with psychic purity and impurity—white and black, what Dike calls “stigmatic differences” (“Difficult Innocence”, 367). This type of superficiality was overturned by Blake in “Holy Thursday” in implicit terms, regarding the sterile “white” wands of the beadles, but here he is more explicit, dealing with more fundamental human matters: My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child, But I am black, as if bereav’d of light. (1-4)

The prejudice behind iconic religious imagery is exposed, even as the child subscribes to it, revealing the ironic energy of Blake’s intentions: whiteness of the soul and angels, benighted blackness. My mother taught me underneath a tree, And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east, began to say: “Look on the rising sun; there God does live, And gives his light, and gives his heat away; And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.” (5-12)

The child’s mother has the enlarged spiritual vision ascribed by Swedenborg to Africans.98 She draws on the sun imagery, also used by Blake in “The Chimney Sweep”, to elaborate on the Hermetic notion of divinity, as explained, for instance, by Thomas Vaughan.99 The “light” and “heat” are the illumination and energy afforded by divinity, experienced by all living 374). And Fairer writes, “As if to remind us of the practical realities on which the whole system depended, those two final lines make an uneasy couplet” (“Reading Innocence”, 557). 98 Humberto Garcia, “Blake, Swedenborg, and Muhammad”, 49. And Blake, at the commencement of The Song of Los, whose first plate of script, Plate 3, is titled “Africa”, refers to “heart-formed Africa”, in which Los, “the Eternal Prophet” sings “at the tables of Eternity”, suggesting Africa’s initial spiritual prominence, before “Urizen [gave] his Laws to the Nations” (BCW 245). 99 See, for example, Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:225, where the “alchemical sol” of the spirit and the sun of “the great world” are linked by Vaughan.

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entities, without discrimination, a source of “comfort” and “joy” within temporal existence. But temporal existence is transient, and gives way to a greater life, as the mother teaches the child, who passes this knowledge on to the reader; the reader, subsumed within the “little English boy” of the penultimate stanza, like Coleridge’s wedding guest, is obviously in need of instruction: “And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love; And these black bodies and this sunburnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear, The clouds will vanish; we shall hear his voice, Saying: ‘Come out from the grove, my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.’” (13-20)

As far as a greater spiritual reality is concerned, the teaching is Neoplatonic, where the body is “but a cloud” covering “soul”—though the emphasis on God’s love is more Christian in intention, a fact reinforced by the references to biblical “tent” and the “lambs” of innocence; the syncretism is complementary, in its ability to explain the necessary cleansing of perception. The consequent dispersion of illusory materiality includes a dispersion of prejudice, conjoined with it; in treating prejudice in these terms, Blake reveals the dispersion’s place within a greater spiritual reality, where Swedenborgian correspondence operates, and the earthly presages the heavenly: Thus did my mother say, and kissed me; And thus I say to little English boy, When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy, I’ll shade him from the heat, till he can bear To lean in joy upon our father’s knee; And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him, and he will then love me. (21-28)

Anne Mellor is concerned about the subservient position the black child plays, despite the message of the poem, perceiving in this Blake’s inability to see beyond his own prejudice (“Sex, Violence, and Slavery”, 359). But Blake’s presentation is knowing, in that it reflects an irrefutable contemporary

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state of affairs, where blackness is devalued by whites.100 Mellor, ignoring the poem’s spiritual syncretism, states that “Blake here affirms the ideological construction of the African as one who finally benefits from Christianity”. She also feels that the black child “has learned from his mother . . . a desire both to serve the white child (‘I’ll shade him from the heat’) and to be ‘like’ the white child and his God”. Apart from her detection of an exclusive divinity never advocated by Blake, she ignores the fact that the black child is deliberately reflecting the white child’s limited perspective here. And when, in the original plate, the black boy becomes “entirely white, indistinguishable from the white boy” (actually the whiteness is tinged with gold, and gives the impression of a spiritual glow), she is not appreciative of the fact that for both boys the corporeal “clouds” have been removed, revealing their soul natures, not subject to any colour; the orthodox western iconography of the illustration might also be seen as an instance of Blakean irony. Or, in more straightforward terms, Blake uses traditional means to intimate what cannot be presented. The poem’s final ironic statement reveals Blake’s true position, that white prejudice can only be overcome by superficial assimilation; when the two children look alike, the white child “will then love me”. While Dike is correct in stating that “the consolation of the mother and the cheerful hope of the little boy are not convincingly a cure or solution” (“The Difficult Innocence”, 367), Blake too (from a daemonic perspective beyond the limitations of his material) is aware of this fact. However, we can conclude from the poem’s final irony that such prejudice, being indeed superficial, cannot stand in the way of spiritual growth. Daemonic energy in the Songs of Experience is most obviously expressed in the extreme otherness of “The Tyger”, but a sense of outrage permeates the book, and often expresses itself in explicit terms void of the irony present in Innocence. The “Introduction” highlights the daemonic voice of “the Bard”, who speaks from “beyond” temporality, and foresees redemption; his distance from the ordinary is underlined by the heralding voice which introduces his own (BCW 210): Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past, & Future, sees; Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walk’d among the ancient trees, 100

Dike notes that the Innocence poems “are trying to see through” “the gross moral and perceptual reality . . . that the reader brings with him to the poems and that Blake, too, has to admit” (“The Difficult Innocence”, 358).

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Calling the lapsed Soul, And weeping in the evening dew; That might controll The stary pole, And fallen, fallen light renew! (1-10)

Not only does the Bard transcend temporality, he has communed with primal divinity, whose energised syllables (the macrocosm within which the Bard’s own microcosmic “voice”, his own syllables, participates) have informed the entire creation. That is, the syntax of the stanzas involves both the “voice of the Bard” and the “Holy Word”, in “Calling” to “the lapsed Soul” and “weeping” in appropriate terms of sympathy amidst the moisturefilled environment of generation.101 The “voice” itself then speaks, in direct terms, to an subject to all the shortcomings of a limiting materialism implicit in generation, but extended by Blake from Neoplatonic spiritual understanding into a critique of the present state of his own world: “O Earth, O Earth, return! Arise from out the dewy grass; Night is worn, And the morn Rises from the slumbrous mass. Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry floor, The wat’ry shore, Is giv’n thee till the break of day.” (11-20)

The voice appeals to the Earth to “return”, to “arise” from its immersion in materiality and resume its participation in a much greater reality. The time, in millennial fashion, is ripe for such a restoration, as the “night” of unenlightened existence is all but “worn” out, and the daylight, the “morn” of expanded vision, “Rises from the slumbrous mass” of uncomprehending 101

See, again, Raine, “Sea of Time and Space”, 326. Generated souls depend on moisture: “Heraclitus says ‘that moisture appears delightful and not deadly to souls’, and that the lapse into generation (although this is in reality a death from eternity) is delightful to them”. Interestingly, Heraclitus was known as the “weeping philosopher” (Levin, Ancient Philosophy Reader: An Open Educational Resource). Regarding the presence of “the lapsed Soul” in Blake, in Thomas Taylor’s translation of the Gorgias, for Heraclitus “moisture is the death of the soul” (Plato, The Works of Plato, vol.4, 410).

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consciousness. Earth, however, is yet resistant, “turning away”, not convinced by impending signs of change: the view of the high heavens, albeit inverted as a “starry floor” (that is, reflected in “The wat’ry shore” of the realm of generation, or evident in the “Mundane Shell” below (Milton, 16. 21-27), which veils true Heaven from us)—signs meant to give assurance of the pending “break of day”. In “Earth’s Answer”, she, as “the lapsed Soul”, is given a voice, though heralded in very different terms from those of the Bard, suggestive not of prophetic otherness, but of alienation: Earth rais’d up her head From the darkness dread & drear. Her light fled, Stony dread! And her locks cover’d with grey despair. (1-5)

Through it she expresses the all-consuming sense of entrapment in present experience, where no glimmer of hope can subsist. This world of experience forms the counterweight to that of enlarged vision, helping to give substance to its opposite, but also revealing the limitations of materialist vision. These are the same limitations experienced by Oothoon in Visions, but Earth here, unlike Oothoon, has no means of countering the limitations through recourse to expanded vision, to the perspective offered by “The Holy Word”: “Prison’d on wat’ry shore, Starry Jealousy does keep my den: Cold and hoar, Weeping o’er, I hear the Father of the ancient men.” (6-10)

The potential value of the “wat’ry shore” is undermined, and the promise of the “starry” presence of heavenly influence is conditioned by the Urizenic quality of “Jealousy”, emphasised previously by Oothoon. The environment is similar to that of Theotormon and Bromion in Visions, a “den” or cave of material existence surrounded by the waters of generation, and suffused with jealousy and sorrow; presiding over all is the tyrannous “Father of the ancient men”, the jealous God of the Old Testament: “Selfish father of men! Cruel, jealous, selfish fear! Can delight, Chain’d in night, The virgins of youth and morning bear?” (11-15)

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Like Oothoon, Earth is aware of the extensive damage associated with the repression and perversion of “delight”, that is “Chain’d in night”, so at odds with the existential purity and exuberance which should attend “The virgins of youth and morning”. Earth also draws on natural examples, presented in aphoristic questioning rhetoric, like that of Oothoon: “Does spring hide its joy When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower Sow by night, Or the plowman in darkness plow?” (16-20)

But despite the challenge implicit in this rhetoric, she can only focus on her own “bondage” and call for external aid, having, it seems, no visionary capacity. And her bondage is imaged in very material terms, emphasising that she cannot escape from the perspective set in place by the “Selfish father of men”: “Break this heavy chain That does freeze my bones around. Selfish! vain! Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound.” (21-25)

In the final line the weight of the material imagery, as it were, imposes on supreme spiritual emotion, the driving essence of creation: “free Love”. As “free Love” spreads far beyond the range of merely individual sexual congruence (while including it, and gesturing at its importance in the realm of generation), her “bondage” is exemplative of that of the entire realm of experience, and is thus appropriately positioned at the commencement of this book. An instance of Blake’s Miltonic “electric dynamism the ancients thought was divine or demonic” (Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 23) is to be found in the explicit sense of outrage of “Holy Thursday” from Experience (BCW 211): Is this a holy thing to see In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduc’d to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand? (1-4)

The irony of the first “Holy Thursday” poem, with its supreme elevation of innocence, is displaced by a raw unmasking of the word “holy”, which

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hypocritically conceals the brutal reality of experience. The first stanza emphasises contrasts, not contraries, and these reveal blind societal selfishness and lack of compassion. “Misery” is rife in “a rich and fruitful land” which could remove its causes entirely but for an absence of humane vision, to probe beyond the limitations imposed by a type of collective societal selfishness: the “cold and usurous hand” of complacent charity, a mere sop to conscience, with no basis in the reality of the situation. In the second stanza the “trembling cry” of the chimney sweep comes to mind (“’weep! ’weep!” (BCW 212)), announcing, only to those who would see it thus, fruitful labour for the working class: Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! (5-8)

The “trembling” nature of the cry, however, which to complacent ears betokens merely the shrill voice of a child, tells of one who sees behind the veils erected by the daily experience of sameness. Even if a “song”, its notes do not celebrate a just state of affairs. The stanza would arrest complacent vision, urges reconsideration based on factual evidence: “Can it be a song of joy? / And so many children poor?”. “Poverty!” in the final line of the stanza breaches material circumscription and perspective to shock society into an awareness of psychic and spiritual impoverishment. Blake then resorts to his device of anaphora to beat into awareness through images of natural barrenness this impoverishment: And their sun does never shine, And their fields are bleak & bare, And their ways are fill’d with thorns: It is eternal winter there. (9-12)

He then in the final stanza swiftly conflates (again using repetitive anaphora) images of external natural abundance with inner qualities of love and charity, once more destabilizing reliance on a singular material perspective, and revealing in practical terms the consequences of a degree of enlarged vision for society: For where-e’er the sun does shine, And where-e’er the rain does fall, Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall. (13-16)

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His vision is not utopian; it is centred in the facts of material existence (the nourishment offered by “sun” and “rain”, available to all, only not resorted to because of the limitations of “mind”). As in “London”, the word “appall” redounds with the strength of punning wordplay to encompass both the horrified response to “poverty” and the veil or “pall” which protects the mind from experiencing empathy at the plight of others. The pall, too, is a funeral cloth, betokening in this context the death of human sympathy, as well as suggesting the consequences of this “death” for fellow human beings. To probe this wordplay is to release the energy of intimation, which has the power to unsettle a unitary perspective, content with the status quo. “London” itself (BCW 216) is a masterpiece of explicit social critique, harnessing through its pared-down but resonant imagery and commonplace verse form, a brimming indignation. Michael Ferber tells of one way in which Blake’s minimalism conveys substantial presence: the “repeated pairings of words and clauses . . . themselves subsumed in hierarchies of pairs . . . take us beyond repetition or seriality . . . to a sense of inclusiveness or totalization”. Ferber notes, too, the poem’s “great linguistic and imagistic vitality and strangeness, as if the ideas are so fierce and burning only a fearful symmetry can contain them”. He detects, in effect, barely contained daemonic energy in “the suppressed rage and grief in the speaker [which] finds vent in syntactic distortions, like the victims themselves, who let out sounds which shake the structure governing them”. 102 The city, defined in terms of the “charters” of commercial interest,103 which bind even the great Thames—now a polluted emblem of the waters of generation—binds in turn her own citizens within the consequences of such chartering, inflicting on them “Marks of weakness, marks of woe”: I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. (1-4)

102

See Michael Ferber, “‘London’ and its Politics”, ELH 48, no.2 (1981): 311, 312. As Johnson and Grant note, the ancient “chartered rights” of a small number of privileged Englishmen, exclusionary in themselves, had come to mean “to limit” and “to hire”, favouring commercial enterprise and exploitation (BPD 53n1). Blake himself, in the early King Edward the Third, refers in good faith to “Liberty, the charter’d right of Englishmen” (BCW 18). The distinction between these two uses of “charter” is a measure of the distance he has travelled, from idealistic patriot to hard-bitten realist.

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The cognate verb and object in “marking” the “marks” (a cognate accusative), involve the speaker in the “weakness” and “woe”, signalling his empathy. The “cries” of adults and “Infants”, the spoken “voices”, the polysemic resonances of “ban”,104 all betoken the mental imprisonment brought about not only by the “chartered” surroundings, but, more importantly, by enclosed perception. Blake makes it clear here that the existential issues pertaining to lack of vision are not of mere philosophical or aesthetic interest, but are located at the heart of societal misery—with the great city itself, a potential New Jerusalem, the locus of this misery: In every cry of every Man, I every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear. (5-8)

Human sounds of misery have material manifestations, examples in a quotidian sphere of the Swedenborgian correspondences which conjoin different facets of existence, but now in the grotesque terms of societal abuse, meted out by church and state. The “appalling” exploitation registered in the “cries” of young sweeps resonates in the black funereal “pall” of a pun figuratively covering a church immersed in its continuing “black’ning” ways,105 and (supposed guardian of orphans, as many sweeps were) all too in need of cleansing: How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry Every black’ning Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier’s sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls. (9-12)

The “sigh” of the “hapless Soldier”, helpless in his servitude to the “Palace walls” metonymic of state power, anticipates his death or mutilation on the battlefield, where his spilt blood contaminates the very structure of state power. Arthur Gilbert points out that “there is a great deal of documentary evidence that numbers of prisoners, as well as those viewed by society as 104

The word encompasses “public prohibition”, “proclamation”, and “curse”, enfolding in its ambit church and state, as well as the bitter denunciations of the oppressed (BPD 53n2). 105 E. P. Thompson, in his reading of “London”, in Michael Phillips, ed., Interpreting Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 16-17, draws attention to William Frend’s use of “appal” to denote the pallor of the guilty, adding to the richness of Blake’s wordplay.

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social undesirables were impressed or forced to volunteer during the eighteenth century”. He also observes that “many men went to prison for petty crimes and for debt” and “often ended up in the army”. It is also notable that “during wartime the army did attract men who had identifiable trades, men who had a vocation, but who in the harsh eighteenth century world could not make a go of it”.106 Blake’s adjective, “hapless”, incorporates all the hardships and social types associated with a soldier’s life. But it is the cry of exploited sexuality that cuts to the heart of societal misery. Oothoon’s ideal of free love is inverted, at the bidding of economic survival, a type of survival premised on the wide-spread traffic in sex, itself premised on the hypocritical secrecy surrounding the need for sexual gratification—more attractive because of its illicit, secret nature.107 And this commodification of sex (corresponding to a general commodification of existence), because it reduces living passion to the pleasures of material coupling—when such passion bears spiritual ramifications associated with a cleansing of the doors of perception—displaces emotional and spiritual value, leaving debased materiality sundered from its true source of strength, and thus weak and prone to disease: But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the new born Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (13-16)

Implicating the entire “chartered” world of Urizenic generation, the “plagues” extend from the consequences of sexual exploitation to general exploitation and injustice. Paul Miner notes that the “youthful Harlots” “were often little more than children” “not more than nine years old”, a fact in itself that is a condemnation of society in general. It is difficult to credit Paul Griffin’s view that the persona in the poem “operates with a very limited and restrictive perspective”, being implicated in a world from which he cannot distance himself. Conceptual distancing is not a precondition for valid criticism.108 The “Harlot” is a mere cog in the wheel of the societal 106

See Arthur N. Gilbert, “An Analysis of Some Eighteenth Century Army Recruiting Records”, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 54, no.217 (1976): 47. 107 Proverbs 9:17. See Europe: A Prophecy, Plate 3, line 6: “For stolen joys are sweet, & bread eaten in secret pleasant” (BCW 237). 108 See Paul Miner, “Blake’s London: Times & Spaces”, Studies in Romanticism 41, no.2 (2002): 287. Paul Griffin, “Misinterpreting the City in Blake’s ‘London’”, CEA Critic 48, no.4 (1986): 114-122 passim.

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machine founded on material abuse, lacking recourse to the Poetic Genius which would free vision of the “mind-forg’d manacles” perpetuated by humanity’s refusal to see beyond its immediate needs—a continuing fact with dire consequences for our own time.109 “The Tyger” (BCW 214), though already subjected to extensive (and contradictory) commentary by the critics, is a central exemplar of Blakean daemonic energy and cannot be excluded from the present chapter. Its posthuman resonances were first expressed in a “Proverb of Hell” (BCW 151, Plate 8): The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.

The agents of destruction and destruction itself, cannot be accounted for in conventional, orthodox terms, at the behest of reason. Being “portions of eternity”, they transcend temporal models centred in mortality, and so unseat a principal tenet of human vision—that humankind has governance over the perception of temporal “reality” and is therefore commissioned to set in place the means to protect this reality and ensure its continuance on behalf of itself. Such perception, of course, marks Urizen’s selfish universe, where self-interest is jealously guarded. “The Tyger” enacts the annulling of this perception: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (1-4)

The tyger, drawing on natural colours from the realm of corporeal perception, plumbs beneath this surface, “burning” with glowing inner energy in the active present tense, illuminating the darkness of enclosed vision, to question the borders of materiality and broach realisation of an “immortal” level of experience, even if not at first revealed to ordinary sight: “What” expression of immortality “Could frame” this terror-inducing creation? From the beginning of the poem, despite speculation about a demiurge whose creations are at variance with the nature of redemptive

109

Ferber quotes George Orwell: “there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charter’d street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature” (“‘London’ and its Politics”, 310).

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divinity,110 no mere label is going to circumscribe this expression. Thus the questioning continues, incorporating both heaven and hell in the dialectical symmetry of its speculations: In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? (5-8)

The expression of immortality, of “eternity”, must participate in the “productions of time” (“Proverbs of Hell”, Plate 7 (BCW 151)) in order to know and process these “productions”, hence its retrieval of the “fire of thine eyes”, the presence of “wings”, “hand” and “daring”; the implication is that creator and creature, apart from other shared qualities, are indistinguishable in their ferocity. This traversing of mortal and immortal spheres is daemonic, involving an injection of primal potency from “beyond the human” into our realm of experience, in turn provoking the perhaps vague awareness of an archetypal source of empowerment, which helps account for the haunting persistence of the poem in the popular imagination. As Jung, for instance, says of confrontation with the “shadow” archetype: This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. (Archetypes, 20)

The identity of creator and creature is further underlined in the following stanza, with its emphasis on brute materiality,111 and whose final line intentionally blurs any distinction:

110

Not least, stemming from Blake himself; Crabb Robinson was told by Blake that the heavens and earth were not created by Jehovah, but by the Elohim. See Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 428-429. See also, Jerusalem, Plate 27: “Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim” (BCW 649). 111 Linked to Milton’s daemonic Beelzebub by Paul Miner (with a reference to Paradise Lost 2.410-411), who asks of Satan, “what strength, what art” can challenge God? See Miner’s, ““Blake’s ‘Tyger’ as Miltonic Beast”, Studies in Romanticism 47, no.4 (2008): 484. In this essay Miner traces in a painstaking and fascinating way Miltonic influence in Blake’s prophetic books.

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And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? (9-12)

The technology of the forge is introduced, extending immortality deep into the realms of human imagination, involving Hellenic and Nordic myth, as well as Blake’s own mythology:112 What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? (13-16)

We might detect here, then, intimations of Poetic Genius invested in the creation of the tyger, in accord with Blake’s notion of the centrality of the “Genius” (or daemon) to imagination and existence in general. We recall Principle 1st from All Religions Are One: That the Poetic Genius is the true Man, and that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius, which by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon. (BCW 98)

If the creator of the tyger is its “Genius” then the identity of creator and creature becomes even more evident, as, again, the Genius or daemon is the divine aspect of mortal beings, or the bridge between mortality and immortality. Dennis Welch, too, perceives the presence of Poetic Genius in his reading of the poem’s redemptive nature: “Through Los, through Jesus, through Poetic Genius (in which the speaker of ‘The Tyger’ begins to participate by word and initial awareness), fallen existence becomes fortunate though not without enormous pain, suffering, and fear—not without the wrath of the Tyger”.113 And, with the ferocity of the tyger and its creator in mind, we should not forget Blake’s adherence to the teaching of Jacob Boehme, who claimed in his Mysterium Magnum: For the God of the Holy World, and the God of the dark World, are not two Gods; there is but one only God. He himself is the whole Being; he is Evil and Good, Heaven and Hell; Light and Darkness; Eternity and Time; Beginning and End. Where his Love is hid in any Thing, there his Anger is 112

See, for example, Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 432-434. See Dennis Welch, “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and Comic Vision”, CEA Critic 53, no.1 (1990): 33.

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However, present conditions in a materialistic age militate against the proper realisation of this bridging. Thus the consequences of allegiance to the circumscriptive vision of materiality are evident in the surrender of the heavenly hosts of “stars”,114 who mourn their defeat, appropriately, with the moisture of limiting generation (they “water’d” even the far reaches of “heaven with their tears”): When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? (17-20)

With all existence subject to the rule of ratio, the governing perspective of Urizen, the subjected senses cannot see beyond the incongruent coupling of tyger and “Lamb”, to the satisfaction of Urizen (he certainly “smiled”), who might thus cordon off energy and the sacral, and so ensure the perpetual elevation of reason. The concluding stanza, however, is not a simple recapitulation of the first; it circles back to the daemonic energy of the poem’s commencement, changing “Could” in its final line (which implies possible ability)115 to “Dare”, thus questioning at this point—now that we understand the present consequences of the relationship—the strength of the Urizenic creator’s continuing will to power, and so his continuing ability to contain this revolutionary energy: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (21-24)

114

Martin Nurmi points to the various instances in Blake of stars representing “rigidly categorical restrictions” derived from “abstract reason”, and “political repression”. See Martin Nurmi, “Blake’s Revisions of ‘The Tyger’”, PMLA 71, no.4 (1956): 672-673. As Raine notes, stars are traditionally associated with “the planetary spirits or governors of destiny”, controllers of human life (Blake and Tradition, 2:29); now they themselves are governed by Urizen. 115 See Joseph Brennan, “The Symbolic Framework of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’”, College English 22, no.6 (1961): 406: “could designates quite clearly the potency of the creator, his ability to imagine his creature and to render his image in matter”.

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Martin Nurmi’s detection at the poem’s conclusion of a “positively weighted synthesis” of “dreadfulness” and the benign aspect of divinity which also created the lamb is certainly attractive, but too neat for a creation “too great for the eye of man”. I am in agreement with Nurmi, however, when he refers to the “creative cosmic energy” of the tyger, Blake’s “ironic sense” of “evil”. The tyger’s evil is “accident”, not “substance”; its “substance” is “power”, “the power of that energy which will return man to Eden”—in my terms, daemonic. It is also not inapposite to refer to Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign in connection with this albeit daemonic tyger: “So long as ethics remains human, among men, it remains dogmatic, narcissistic, and not thinking. . . . The ‘unrecognizable’ is the awakening. It is what awakens, the very experience of being awake”.116 “Frame” takes on another connotation then, shifting from active creative verb to verb of containment. This energy, finally, cannot be “framed”, or contained by “hand or eye” of a partial, unawakened conception of divinity. It is one with, in Boehme’s term, “the whole Being” of a divinity not subject to limiting Urizenic categorization.

116

See Nurmi, “Blake’s Revisions of ‘The Tyger’”, 670 and 679. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 108. Derek Ryan notes of this passage, “Derrida resists the simple incorporation of animals into a human moral code”. See Derek Ryan, “Following Snakes and Moths: Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism”, Twentieth Century Literature 61, no.3 (2015): 288.

CHAPTER THREE BLAKE’S PROPHETIC BOOKS

Blake’s prophetic books proper—from America through to Jerusalem—tell of the enclosing of perception that separates humankind from the posthuman universe, and the ensuing task of liberating the senses. In simple terms, they do so through conveying a release of creative energy daemonic in its intensity. The vast scale of the enterprise—where various substrata of allegory (with Hellenic, Hebraic, Cabalistic, Hermetic and native British roots) contribute to a singular conception of humanity within the world— shows Blake’s extraordinary imaginative capacity: he forges something unique, “beyond the human” basis of his many sources. In the face of the detailed work of past critics, the best in my view being those of the classics, Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, Harold Bloom’s Blake’s Apocalypse, and Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition, my discussion of the prophetic books is modest indeed. I will consider select passages from America: A Prophecy, Europe: A Prophecy, The Song of Los, The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. I do so, once more, to highlight the effect of the daemonic and posthuman instances in these works, and the different ways in which they are used in the different books. Blake’s understanding of the word “prophet” seems a reasonable starting point. The following passage is taken from his annotations to Bishop Watson’s “An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine” (BCW 392): Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters: Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator.

Thus, in Blake’s eyes, a “Prophet” is not one who foretells the future in the deterministic fashion of “an Arbitrary Dictator”, but one who is so keenly observant of events in the present that he can gauge their probable consequences unless further steps are taken. It is also instructive to consider the role of inspiration in relation to Poetic Genius for the Blakean prophet,

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as in the passage below from the Bard’s opening section to Milton, that leads to the eponymous hero’s descent to earth and reincarnation in Blake. The Bard defends his vision, which reveals the debasement of “Pity and Love” through hypocrisy, an account that offends his heavenly audience, who cannot conceive of a debasement of such “venerable” properties (BCW 495): The Bard replied: “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity, To Whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore. Amen.” (13:51; 14:13)

Bard and prophet are one in Blake’s view; so, added to his prophetic ability to analyse present events and adduce their consequences is “the inspiration of the Poetic Genius”—the daemonic insight into the nature of things. As the point of the prophecies is the emergence of “Divine Humanity”, and as their source of “inspiration” is “the Poetic Genius”, we see, as in “The Tyger”, a congruence of creator and creature in them; they are wrought by Poetic Genius, and are an encapsulation of Poetic Genius. The daemonic energy inherent in the prophetic books, stemming from this Poetic Genius, depends in large part on the titanic personifications of the four chief attributes of human nature, what Blake will come to call “Zoas”: wisdom, love, imagination and instinct, or, in their “fallen” state, cold reason, rage, limited imagination and weakened instinct (Johnson and Grant in BPD 215). These personifications—which are also posthuman universal forces (subject to the perspective one employs, modulations dramatized in the poems themselves)—suggest something far greater than an anthropocentric universe, for all Blake’s emphasis on the ubiquitous nature of “the human form divine” (BCW 117). They are vehicles which convey limited human imagination and experience into the furthest reaches of creation and the very borders of what Blake himself calls “Non Entity”.1 Becoming absorbed in them is akin to observing images of distant galaxies from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, while at the same time reading Homer, the Norse Sagas and the Bible. The events in each prophecy have been adequately summarised by Johnson and Grant in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, and W. 1

At the conclusion of “Night the Third” of The Four Zoas, Ahania “Sleepless . . . wanders round, repell’d on the margin of Non Entity” (BCW 297). The state is also mentioned in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (7.15) and The Book of Ahania (4.54).

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H. Stevenson, in Blake: The Complete Poems,2 leaving me free to focus on those sections which suit the purposes of the present book. In America, it is Orc, the giant human manifestation of rebellion, who abounds with daemonic energy.3 In the opening plates of the prophecy, he reacts against the monstrously embodied form of a debased England, “Albion’s wrathful Prince”, who (in an intensification of Spenserian allegory) is “A dragon form, clashing his scales” (BCW 197): at midnight he arose, And flam’d red meteors round the land of Albion beneath; His voice, his locks, his awful shoulders, and his glowing eyes Appear to the Americans upon the cloudy night. (3.15-18; 4.1)

We perceive in the “awful shoulders” and “glowing eyes” of this “wrathful Prince”, aspects of the tyger and his creator, or the life force limited by the strictures of the reign of Urizen, and calibrated to inspire terror. But Orc’s wielding of energy is far more potent, in its summoning forth the human form divine amidst angry elements of nature (4.2-12). The power of the Atlantic is conveyed in its “heaving” “waves” and its “Swelling” growth, a growth which is in grotesque anticipation of its “belching from its deeps red clouds & raging fires”. The human states of “Albion” and “America”, by contrast, are “sick” and weak (“America faints”). This mighty elemental Atlantic hosts the ominous red clouds and the human simile associated with them: “As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven, / Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood”. What begins as simile ends as an expression of literal fact: the “clouds” are “vast wheels of blood”. Even if the simile governs this literalism, so that we read it as an extension of the simile, the imagery introduces a human form, embedded within the “red clouds”. A “Wonder”, it is “a Human fire” bearing extreme danger in its association with “the wedge” (the word itself wedged between lines, as if prising open what follows) “Of iron heated in the furnace”. Though not yet named Orc, the figure bears the qualities of Orcus, or hell, with his “terrible limbs” of fire, “surrounded” by the sinisterly indefinite “myriads of cloudy terrors” and militaristic “banners dark & towers”. The figure is also accompanied by the strangely oppressive heat void of light, covert, indwelling, dangerously repressed. The final reference to the “King of England”, Blake’s only explicit reference to George III, indicates 2

Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson (London: Longman, 1990). Bloom refers to America as “the first of Blake’s poem’s altogether in the mythmaking mode that is to lead to the epic Jerusalem”. See Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), 102. 3

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England’s wavering hold on imperial power: merely “looking” at the “vision” of America causes the King to “tremble”. Orc is first identified by “Albion’s Angel” (or guardian spirit) in Plate 7 (BCW 198), in the antithetical terms of supposed upholders of state morality,4 which fuel the tension needed for Orc to reveal the vigour of rebellious energy: “Art thou not Orc, who serpent-form’d Stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children? Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities, Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God’s Law, Why dost thou come to Angel’s eyes in this terrific form?” (7.3-7)

Orc’s response to the above draws on the ironic inversions of The Marriage of Heaven & Hell and adds millennialist fervour. Orc’s depiction of himself as the anti-tyrannical serpent of Genesis suits his rebellious intentions, but is also, again, as Raine notes, associated with matter and Eros, generation and regeneration (“Blake’s Debt”, 380, 425). Also appropriate here in terms of a mythic congruence (though no explicit influence is in evidence) is Coleridge’s understanding that “the serpent is . . . an emblem of the daemonic imagination, in which Coleridge identifies the Fallen and the godlike” (Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic, 79). Orc’s reference to the “ended” “times” is millennialist, and reveals his grasp of the historical moment, even if, in retrospect, his ensuing revolutionary vision is far too optimistic. As an expression of the energies released by the American and French Revolutions, Orc is a valid marker of that time: “I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree: The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning ’gins to break.” (8.1-2) In addition, though, he expresses a reaction against all the manifestations of human circumscription, beginning with the repressive Mosaic code, “perverter” of the “fiery joy” of Eros, of human desire. This code is linked with Urizen, arch-antagonist of the prophecies, not yet developed by Blake into a Zoa, or fundamental aspect of human functioning. Here he is a type of Moses, who diminishes the high potential implicit in “the starry hosts” by succumbing, it is implied, in “the wide wilderness” of depleted energies, to the “stony law” since observed by humankind at large (8.3-9). Bearing this weight of orthodox, legalistic authority in mind, the enormity of Orc’s 4

In the face of the Angel’s orthodox allusion to Revelation 7:1-4, for instance, with its divine woman and child-devouring dragon at her “gate”, Orc will invert the valuation of woman and dragon.

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response to the law is nothing short of socially explosive: “That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad / To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves”. The tightly argued abstract logic of Shelley and Hogg’s Necessity of Atheism pales by comparison.5 But a larger vision underlies this fury, as the “leaves” of religion, though they “rot on desart sands”, do so “To make the desarts blossom”, a reference to Isaiah 35:1, “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose”. In Isaiah, as in Blake, the blossoming desert follows the overturning of an existing order, though Blake’s vision of this is far different from the blood and thunder of Isaiah. For in Blake, it is not a question of eliminating persons, but rather a system centred in false perceptions (8.10-14). Perception must change so that “pale religious le[t]chery”, though despicable, may find “Virginity” “in a harlot”, and find “in coarse-clad honesty” (even if repeatedly and shockingly “ravish’d”) the “undefil’d”. The shift in perspective is that exhorted by Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, especially bearing in mind Orc’s conclusion, a restatement of Oothoon’s words, along with those of the Marygold: “For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life; / Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d”. This ultimately redemptive vision is very different from Isaiah’s murderously retributive one: “For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter” (Isaiah 34:2). The final image of the “man” “not consum’d” by the “Fires” which “inwrap the earthly globe” refers both to the indestructibility of the “soul” of humankind despite circumstances, and to Orc himself, impervious, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel, to the fires of earthly might, and even transfigured like Nebuchadnezzar himself (in his dream) by precious substances, which glorify him in emblematic terms reflective of his immortality and historical continuance (Daniel 3:25 and 2:32): “Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consum’d; Amidst the lustful fires he walks; his feet become like brass, His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.” (8.15-17)

Orc’s vision, in large measure, foreshadows the trajectory of the prophecies as a whole. In the remainder of the prophecy he intervenes successfully in the American Revolution, eventually drives plagues back over England, but is halted in his tracks by Urizen, who “Hides the Demon red with clouds & 5

This pamphlet was reproduced as note 13 to Book 7 of Queen Mab. See Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 813-818.

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cold mists from the earth”, but only for the “twelve years” until the beginning of the French Revolution, “when France reciev’d the Demon’s light” (BCW 203). Europe: A Prophecy has, as a type of extended epigraph, a wry account of enclosed human perception (BCW 237). A “Fairy” sings: “Five windows light the cavern’d Man: thro’ one he breathes the air; Thro’ one hears music of the spheres; thro’ one the eternal vine Flourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro’ one can look And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth; Thro’ one himself pass out what time he please; but he will not, For stolen joys are sweet & bread eaten in secret pleasant.” (1-6)

The “windows” are the “doors of perception” of Marriage, the five senses, easily detectable in what follows, though couched in manifest irony, for how does limited perception “hear music of the spheres” or taste “the eternal vine” of God’s spiritual abundance? Human sight and touch are plainly “mocked” by the Fairy, limited as they are to seeing “small portions” of the “eternal world”, and giving man the potential, through touch, to “pass out”, beyond the boundaries of corporeality—but, delighting in “stolen joys”, “he will not”. The final line is from Proverbs 9:17, and indicates a forsaking of wisdom for gratification centred in the sensualist recourse to secrecy (premised on absorption in selfhood) uncovered and castigated by Oothoon in Visions (7.8-11). Being caught by the speaker, the Fairy is compelled to answer a question from the heart of Enlightenment rationalism, “Then tell me, what is the material world, and is it dead?”, and responds by evoking a posthuman dimension redolent of enlarged vision: He, laughing, answer’d: “I will write a book on leaves of flowers, If you will feed me on love-thoughts & give me now and then A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsie, I’ll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.” (14-18)

The present “book on leaves of flowers” bears some connection with the “rural pen” of the “Introduction” to Innocence, though free of that image’s darker overtones, and indicates imaginative continuity with nature. Thus human “love-thoughts” directed at a child of nature, as well as the “cup of sparkling poetic fancies”, are integral to this continuity. Love and imagination, in short, might show us a “world” that is “all alive”, down to the lowest of the low, “when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy”.

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On the way home, the speaker and Fairy gather corporeal “wild flowers”, whose “eternal” aspect is revealed by the Fairy, who (once more recalling Oothoon’s encounter with the Marygold in Visions) is thus able to “laugh aloud to see them whimper because they were pluck’d”: he understands that “the soul of sweet delight / Can never pass away” (BCW 189). It is from this enlightened perspective that the Fairy is empowered to dictate Europe. At the centre of this prophecy is Enitharmon, at present a type of presiding queen of the giant forms elaborated on in the prophecies, though different from the sympathetic figure she will become. Mother of Orc, she does not participate in his “dawn of a new era”, but oversees what Johnson and Grant call “the beginning of a night when men yield up their power to women”. This female power is linked to Proverbs 9:17, regarding “stolen joys”, as Enitharmon’s promulgation of the notion that woman’s love is “Sin” makes it secretly desirable. Johnson and Grant state that her “curse on sex underlies Mariolatry, the chivalric code, and all devious efforts of women to wield power surreptitiously”, joined, they feel, to Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Marie Antoinette as a “charming tyrant” in her History of the French Revolution—presumably known to Blake (in BPD 122). If this is the case, then the nature of an historical figure coheres with Blake’s Neoplatonic conception of the fall from eternity into generation through sexual desire. The prophecy itself begins with the birth of Christ and the momentary peace that followed. A time of celebration, it enables Enitharmon to, in fact, enslave humanity within the bounds of bogus morality, centred in an ideal of chastity rewarded by “an allegorical abode where existence hath never come” (BCW 240): Now comes the night of Enitharmon’s joy! Who shall I call? Who shall I send, That Woman, lovely Woman, may have dominion? Arise, O Rintrah, thee I call! & Palamabron, thee! Go! tell the Human race that Woman’s love is Sin; That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come. Forbid all Joy, & from her childhood shall the little female Spread nets in every secret path. (5.1-9)

Assured that her wishes will be carried out, she sleeps for “eighteen hundred years”, figuring in this the alienation of an essential aspect of existence, the balanced interaction of feminine and masculine. The “terrors of strugling times” of the Christian era begin, where humankind’s senses are “barr’d and petrify’d against the infinite”. A deadening cycle follows (BCW 241), in the

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form of the serpent of materiality and the “devouring flame” of mortality (10.16-23). The aspects of fallen existence are present in comprehensive profusion: “pity” dependent on the suffering of others, enclosure of “eternal forests”, the “finite wall of flesh” the only reality of the human body, “infinity” “Shut up in finite revolutions”, the ideal of the “Angel” cordoned off from its contrary, a mechanised conception of “Heaven”, and God as “tyrant”. But energy cannot be repressed indefinitely. Enitharmon awakes, significantly, at the dawning of the French Revolution, and though at first it is still “night”, her element, there are signs of change, depicted through her “children”. For instance, Oothoon, as we saw in Visions, “gives up woman’s secrecy”, and all the other children “flee” to their “stations” as the symbolic dawn begins. As a consequence, “Enitharmon wept”. The prophecy concludes (BCW 244) with the release of Orc’s daemonic energies (14.37; 15.1-10). Enitharmon’s previous state of ubiquitously shared aloofness, figured by her “heights”, is no longer of consequence, as Orc, in Dionysian mode, bearing overtones of the resurrection of that god, “appears” in the “vineyards of red France”—through which a congruence of intoxicating wine and blood-letting is suggested. Orc’s “fiery” emblematic “sun” is also “red”, showing his ascendancy. The “furious terrors” on their “golden chariots” are not only suggestive of Revelation, as are the “Lions” and “Tigers”, but also of the Greek Erinyes, daemonic agents of divine vengeance. Enitharmon’s strangely abeyant reign is now ended, amidst her “groans & cries” of “anguish and dismay”. Los then appears for the first time, the spirit of prophecy, but also the great artisan, and potentially, therefore, a creator. But for the immediate present he, and his formidable host of “sons”, is immersed in the violence of revolution. His sudden and decisive presence, although it anticipates the appearance of the next prophetic book, The Song of Los, should not lead us to expect that this book continues from the present moment. Blake yet needs to give Los a voice, and The Song of Los provides this in explicit terms, as he “participates in world events as an artist, by singing of a relationship between the revolution” and Africa and Asia (Johnson and Grant in BPD 134). The Song of Los (BCW 245) begins with a short introductory section in the poet’s voice. The song is seen to have an impact on Urizen and the mysterious Ariston, perhaps referring to a Spartan king in Herodotus, who claimed for himself the beautiful wife of a friend (BPD 115n6). In Plutarch, one Ariston is in sycophantic sympathy with Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens

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at the time of the liberty-loving Solon.6 Elsewhere in Blake he is only mentioned (in passing) in America, but the possible original being a toady of Pisistratus might have suggested his significance to Blake, as a mere appendage of Urizen. Etymologically linked to “aristocrat”, the name might also claim a share in Urizenic exclusivity and superiority: I will sing you a song of Los, the Eternal Prophet: He sung it to four harps at the tables of Eternity. In heart-formed Africa. Urizen faded! Ariston shudder’d! (3.1-4)

This introduction creates a sense of expectation; why should the song have such an effect on Urizen and Ariston? What can so disturb them but a threat to their hegemony? The song itself deals with the conditions that led to the oppression of Africa and Asia, centred in the “dark delusions” generated by the restricted senses. The “children of Los” are central to the establishment of Urizenic law; on Plate 4 reference is made to “the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon” who “gave Laws and Religion” to humankind, binding them to the materialist perspective of “a Philosophy of Five Senses” evident in Europe, set in motion by Enitharmon, embodiment of material earth. It now emerges that Los was her partner, and both are subject to Urizen, who through his limited perspective causes all the trials and tribulations the patriarchs of the Bible must undergo, and forces into a state of servitude the sons of Ham, “the sunny African” (3.6-17). Adam and Noah respond in the manner of Urizen and Ariston in the short introduction: they “shudder” and “fade”. The implied inversion in power relations suggests that change is imminent. Johnson and Grant feel that because the last line of the “Africa” section of the song is identical with the first line of America (“The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent”), both continents share in the vision of “a world-wide revolution” in which, considering the outcome of the American Revolution, “the people of Africa will also be liberated”— though this is to overlook the perpetuation of slavery in America after the Revolution (BPD 134). The conclusion of the “Africa” section musters together Blake’s contemporary purveyors of materialist vision, suggesting in oblique terms a transition to Blake’s present historical age, the age of revolutions (4.17-21). Though “Urizen wept”, his tears were of joy, especially considering the materialist confidence inspired by “Newton & Locke”, and “Rousseau & Voltaire”, which permeates present times.7 The 6 Plutarch, Lives, vol.1, trans. John Dryden, ed. Arthur Hugh Clough (London: The Folio Society, 2010), 104. 7 Johnson and Grant, however, feel that even Urizen is depressed by the extreme materialism of the age (BPD 137n8).

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implication is that in this climactic moment of the triumph of the “Philosophy of Five Senses”, its end is nigh, especially considering the significance of the final line. Thus, even though revolution is not conveyed in explicit terms, it simmers beneath the surface, an incipient presence which gains in atomic potency (as it were) because of its containment. There is a difference at the conclusion of the “Asia” section of the song, as Orc emerges in all his glory, and evokes images of a final resurrection (Ezekiel 37:1-14), with its implicit promise of eternal life (BCW 248): Orc, raging in European darkness, Arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps, Like a serpent of fiery flame! The sullen Earth Shrunk! Forth from the dead dust, rattling bones to bones Join; shaking convuls’d, the shiv’ring clay breathes, And all flesh naked stands: Fathers and Friends, Mothers & Infants, Kings & Warriors. (4.26-34)

He overturns the sense of inhibition associated with the Neoplatonic “Grave” of generation: The Grave shrieks with delight & shakes Her hollow womb & clasps the solid stem: Her bosom swells with wild desire, And milk & blood & glandous wine In rivers rush & shout & dance, On mountain, dale and plain. The Song of Los is Ended. Urizen Wept. (4.35-42)

The release of the energy of “wild desire” in a world of the “Grave” so long restricted by bounded vision impacts not only on human elements of “womb”, “bosom”, “milk”, “blood” and “glandous wine” (perhaps spermatic secretion from sex glands), but extends into the realm of nature—as her “rivers” of energy flow “On mountain, dale and plain”. Perceptual expansion is affected through the humanizing desire released because of revolution, but with an emphasis on a revolution of the senses, not on bloodshed. Urizen’s tears are no longer of joy, but, like Enitharmon’s in Europe, are shed in recognition of failure. ***

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Johnson and Grant note that the next three prophetic books to be considered, The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, “were set up by Blake in double columns, with chapter and verse headings, to imitate the page design of the orthodox Bible” (BPD 140). This formal strategy indicates Blake’s intent to produce the “Bible of Hell” announced at the conclusion of the Marriage (BCW 158).8 Further evidence they adduce is the parallel between the title The First Book of Urizen and “The First Book of Moses”, the name given to Genesis. Blake’s syncretic countermyth draws not only on the Bible but also Hesiod’s Theogony and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Norse mythology, and the occultist Jakob Boehme, to convey “an authority of its own” which “challenges the authority even of the venerable Moses” (in BPD 140). The First Book of Urizen (BCW 222) presents Urizen, the “Eternal Priest”, and Los, the “Eternal Prophet”, as antagonists. In the creation story of this prophecy, the world has been in a fallen state since the beginning, infinite and eternal divinity, through Urizen, choosing limitation. In Blake’s account, as summarised by Johnson and Grant (BPD 141), “Urizen does not really create anything; all he ‘makes’ is an inner void in which he separates himself from the full life of the myriads in Eternity, and thus in an act of anti-creation he generates the error of perceiving life as finite and corrupt, limited to the plane of physical existence”. Los (as the spirit of imagination) suffers from having had Urizen (as eternal mind) torn from his side; Eternity does nothing to help, so Los takes action, though the result is more separation and contraction: time is subdivided mechanically, and the human body is reduced to five senses. Los feels “Pity” at what he has produced, and this is personified as a self-division, with the emergence of his feminine side, or Emanation, Enitharmon. Further division occurs when Orc is born, and arouses Los’s jealousy. The child is chained to a rock, like Prometheus; Urizen then exudes “The Net of Religion” (BCW 235), causing his children to shrink. But his son, Fuzon, gathers those who have escaped the net, and Moses-like, leads them out of Urizen’s bondage. Chapter 1 of Urizen (BCW 222-223) is daemonic in nature, though more in accord with the word’s negative sense. It begins with this self-alienated figure: 1. Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,

8

Again, Johnson and Grant’s observation does not obviate Dawson’s, that the aphorisms from Marriage comprise “The Bible of Hell” (Dawson, “Firm Perswasion”, 68). Both might be present in this “Bible”.

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Self-clos’d, all-repelling; what Demon Hath form’d this abominable void, This soul-shudd’ring vacuum? Some said “It is Urizen.” But unknown, abstracted, Brooding, secret, the dark power hid. (3.1-7)

Urizen’s sense of apartness from what should be ordinary life is apparent: he is “a shadow”, he is “unknown”, non-productive, closed off in himself, “repelling” all others. Presumably only a “Demon” in the worst sense could have formed such an “abominable void”, such a Newtonian “vacuum”. He embodies the qualities he is to generate: the mystery of what is “unknown”, a desire for the “abstract”, a predilection for “secrecy”.9 His need to abstract existence through measurement is next conveyed (3.8-12). He divides and measures time and space, but not to illuminate existence, rather to submerse it in “ninefold darkness”. McClellan and Harper note that for Blake “multiplicity is synonymous with the Fall; the creativeness of the number three—its extension of the point (one) and line (two) into the basis of form—Blake associates with the illusory world we call ‘reality’” (“Blake’s Demonic Triad”, 172).10 The “ninefold darkness”, where three is multiplied by itself, is thus redolent of illusion. What is daemonic in the positive sense in this stanza is the response of nature to Urizen’s psychosis, apparent in the adjectives and the psychologically-charged “perturbation”: the “desolate mountains” are the scene of “changes” “rifted furious” by “black winds of perturbation”. This response suggests nature’s resistance to any form of suppression. The unnaturalness of his position is underscored by the efforts he must make (3.13-17). Urizen “battles” with animate life forms and elemental ones, but this too in alienated circumstances: the “conflictions” are “unseen”. This “silent”, self-absorbed “activity”, of such “enormous” significance for him, conveys a disturbingly uncanny sense (3.18-22). His isolation is further emphasised by the fact that other “Eternals” exist, and he is estranged from their community. Further, he is cut off from commerce with others by the setting of “vast” primeval “forests”, as if from Norse saga—to be “avoided” by “all”: 5. But Eternals beheld his vast forests; Age on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown, 9 See “Nobodaddy” in “Poems from the Note-book 1793”: “Why art thou silent & invisible, / Father of Jealousy?” (BCW 171). 10 However, as Raine points out regarding an “alchemical theme”, the masculine holy trinity is “superior” and “eternal”; the feminine trinity is “inferior” and “mortal” (Blake and Tradition, 1:275-276).

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His secret “brooding” is not without purpose, for he amasses a vast elemental army, but of an icy or destructive nature antithetical to the life force (perhaps inspiring aspects of George Martin’s Game of Thrones): 6. His cold horrors silent, dark Urizen Prepar’d; his ten thousands of thunders, Rang’d in gloom’d array, stretch out across The dread world; & the rolling of wheels, As of swelling seas, sound in his clouds, In his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains Of hail & ice; voices of terror Are heard, like thunders of autumn When the cloud blazes over the harvests. (3.27-35)

The link with Satan and the war in heaven in Paradise Lost is obvious, as Blake unfolds his counter-myth of the religious error that has beset the world with the victory of Urizen over “eternal life”, as the first stanza of Chapter 2 has it (BCW 223). Urizen reveals that his self-isolation enabled him to confront the indeterminate “expansion” and “contraction” of the “all flexible senses” of “the will of the Immortal”, and bring into being “A wide world of solid obstruction” (BCW 224). Here he has confronted within himself the “Terrible monsters Sin-bred / Which the bosoms of all inhabit, / Seven deadly Sins of the soul” (4.28-30). His apparent moral stance is really a measure of his extreme discomfort at the unpredictability of the purveyors of living energy that these “Sins” are: from the point of view of selfhood, they are best repressed. This repression is served by the Urizenic code, paralleling the Mosaic one, engraved in a “Book” of “eternal brass”. The benign qualities of “peace”, “love”, “pity”, “compassion” and “forgiveness” (each supposedly in an “infinite mansion”—a supreme touch of irony) are undermined by the fact they are conditioned by “Laws”. Though “unity” might be considered a source of strength, Urizen capitalises on its idea of exclusivity to promote a monadic tyranny, culminating in the final line of stanza eight, with its “One King” and “one God”, and which itself culminates with the all-governing “one Law” (4.34-40). A predictable rebellion ensues, as “Rage, fury, intense indignation” seize “the strong” (4.44-45). Urizen flees, builds himself a vast Neoplatonic cavern of materiality, “like a womb” (5.28), “Like a human heart, struggling & beating” (5.36). This is the “vast world of Urizen” (5.37), separated from Eternity, “For Eternity stood wide apart” (5.41). It is now that Los appears, who first ensures that Urizen remains separate, then, underscoring the fluid

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state of Eternal existence, experiences the pain of having Urizen “rent from his side” (6.4), and being “affrighted” at the state of “formless, unmeasurable death” Urizen undergoes (6.8-9). He observes “changes” in Urizen, and, trapped by a need for containment, succumbs to form and measurement, and binds every change “With rivets of iron & brass” (8.10-11). What follows is Los’s moulding of Urizen through ages of “dismal woe” into human form divorced from its unbounded potential (BCW 228-230). Los’s pity at the sight of what he has done to Urizen “divides his soul”, causing “a round globe of blood” to emerge (14.58). It grows into “A female form, trembling and pale” (18.8). “All Eternity shudder’d” at seeing her (18.9); they call her “Pity” and flee (19.1). She is, in fact, Enitharmon, and with Los, is a parent of Orc, chained to a rock by the jealous Los, who is aware that Orc wants to murder him. The voice of the chained child who will become the spirit of rebellion instils life in all around him, including Urizen. In his “dens” of materiality he measures and divides his domain, and, though it “sickens” him, “His eternal creations appear”, “Sons & daughters of sorrow” (23.810), the most significant of whom is “Fuzon” (BCW 234). Urizen, like Los, feels immense “Pity” that is not distinguishable from self-pity (though it extends empathetically into the non-human world),11 arising from the fact that he saw That no flesh nor spirit could keep His iron laws one moment. 5. For he saw that life liv’d upon death: The Ox in the slaughter house moans, The Dog at the wintry door. (23.24-27; 25.1-2)

He wanders “on high” over the cities of the earth, “In weeping & pain & woe”, followed by a “cold shadow” (25. 5-10), which becomes “The Net of Religion” (25.22). The cardinal consequence of its formation is the “shrinking” of human “perceptions” (25.45-47). What is notable in the book, is that Urizen’s intentions are not malignant. The divorce from 11

Present debates concerning empathy with the non-human world, so marked in Blake, are discussed at some length by Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield in her essay, “Posthuman Compassions”, PMLA 130, no.5 (2015). She observes, for instance, in discussing Haraway and Derrida’s sense of compassion, the “commitment to paying attention and remaining open to the fundamental heterogeneity of other and self in relationship is what constitutes the essence of affective relating in posthuman ethics” (1474).

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Eternity is occasioned by his self-absorption, a need for distinct, unchanging identity. His pity might be hypocritical, a result of his awareness that he has no control over the fact that “life liv’d upon death”—but pity in itself, if condescending and premised on the suffering of others, is not evil. Even at this stage of Blake’s great myth, then, it is evident that his chief antagonist is selfhood, and that a revolution in consciousness will be needed to overcome it. For the present, Urizen’s monomania breeds discontent among his remaining sons, and, led by Fuzon, they leave “the pendulous earth” which they call Egypt. Their Exodus is not Mosaic, as soon becomes apparent in the subsequent prophetic book, The Book of Ahania (BCW 249). In The Book of Ahania, Fuzon is not a liberator of his people, but a rival to Urizen, an expression of his repressed rage and energy. Unlike Orc, who strives for the emancipation of all, his rebellious energy serves his own ambitions. In mortal combat with his father, he “divides” the “cold loins” of Urizen (2.29), and Ahania, Urizen’s “parted soul” (2.32), emerges from the wound. Urizen calls her “Sin” (2.34), but he kisses and weeps over her, and jealously hides her, evoking the selfish pleasure of secrecy. Urizen then slays Fuzon with a “poisoned rock” (3.24) and hangs his body on “the accursed Tree of Mystery” (4.6), the source of religious secrecy and hypocrisy, whose tangled roots cover the earth.12 “Forth flew the arrows of pestilence” around this tree (4.9), causing “Wailing and terror and woe” on earth (4.38). Fuzon somehow revives, again (as he is an expression of his father’s passion) intimating that Urizen might yet reclaim his own emotional nature. But the most expressive section of the book is the lament of Ahania at its conclusion, where, as Johnson and Grant note, “the reader is given a glimpse into what the life of the mind ought to be and even could be, as she describes the unfallen relationship between Urizen and herself, or between true wisdom and intellectual grace, fertility, excitement, and delight” (BPD 161). The expression of her love evokes an image of Urizen very different from the one we have thus far witnessed, and so dramatises the transformative power of this emotion: Ah, Urizen! Love! Flower of the morning! I weep on the verge Of Non-entity; how wide the Abyss Between Ahania and thee! (4.52-55) 12

This tree is associated with the fallen Urizen and the estranged and partial Enitharmon in the first version of “Night the Seventh” of The Four Zoas (BCW 321, 328).

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Though she cannot escape present “hard necessity”, she has access to a vision of perfected existence, in a balance of masculine and feminine. She mourns, Where [are] the sons of eternity singing 7. To awake bright Urizen, my king, To arise to the mountain sport, To the bliss of eternal valleys; 8. To awake my king in the morn, To embrace Ahania’s joy On the bredth of his open bosom? From my soft cloud of dew to fall In showers of life on his harvests, (5.6-14)

Her vision involves a fusion of activity, heightened emotion and the natural world—in “mountain sport” and the “bliss” associated with “eternal valleys”. It is replete with the “joy” of love and the giving of pure nutriments (“soft cloud of dew”) for life-giving “harvests”. From her perspective Urizen is seen to have been a promulgater of life— giving to her “happy soul” “sons of eternal joy” and taking “into” her “chambers of love” the “daughters of life”. 9. When he gave my happy soul To the sons of eternal joy, When he took the daughters of life Into my chambers of love, (5.15-18)

And it was his relationship with her that produced “babes of bliss”, fed on “bosoms of milk”. His “eternal seed” promised the continuation of “eternal births” singing “In interchange sweet of their joys!” 10. When I found babes of bliss on my beds And bosoms of milk in my chambers Fill’d with eternal seed. O eternal births sung round Ahania In interchange sweet of their joys! (5.19-23)

However, she is now the victim of another Urizen entirely, the shrunken, jealous version of her husband, Oothoon’s “mistaken Demon of heaven” (BCW 192), and the “Selfish father of men” from the “Introduction” of Experience (BCW 211). She is trapped in the wasteland to which he has consigned her (BCW 255):

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The “bones” of spent life scattered “On the bleak and snowy mountains”, correspond to the bones of the newly born, whose lives are equally spent even “Before they see the light”. The poem concludes on this chilling negation, and seems to quash any hope that may have been present in Ahania’s vision. It thus contributes to the sense of the need for the clarifying of perception which permeates all the prophetic books. Next comes The Book of Los, and the story of the creation in it is told from Los’s point of view. If he and Urizen both contribute to the “fall from spirit into matter” in Urizen, here Los is “to blame” (in BPD 169). Johnson and Grant state that “the error of perceiving reality as brute matter results from a failure of imagination or creative energy (the attributes of Los)”, though surely Urizen, intent on his laws, is not innocent in this regard? Los is not yet the true prophet of Milton or the artist of Jerusalem: “the product of his imaginings in Los is only the ‘Human Illusion’, a conception of mankind as mind contained and confined in flesh” (BPD 169). Yet Los “works with the fires of desire”, unlike the self-repressing Urizen. The book first tells of “remote” “times”, when even allegorical “Covet”, “Envy”, “Wrath” and “Wantonness” were fulfilled and had no need to conceal themselves. Then the perversion of life occurred, not dealt with in detail but obviously connected with the Urizenic “fall” of the previous books. Los, keeping watch over the seemingly dead Urizen, responds, and in terms which link him with the “living”, “intelligent” posthuman elements of the apocalyptic times (BCW 256): 6. Raging furious, the flames of desire Ran thro’ heaven & earth, living flames Intelligent, organiz’d, arm’d With destruction & plagues. In the midst The Eternal Prophet, bound in a chain, Compell’d to watch Urizen’s shadow, 7. Rag’d with curses & sparkles of fury. (3.27-33)

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The suggestion is that he himself is immersed in the limiting energy of desolation all around him. He falls endlessly, in the manner of Satan in Paradise Lost (4.32-36). It is in the process of this fall that Los begins to create, through Urizen, the bounded human form, in a remarkable version of the creation myth, itself exuding substantial energy, despite its limiting outcome.13 Here is the beginning of Chapter 4 (Plate 5): 1. Then Light first began: from the fires, Beams, conducted by fluid so pure, Flow’d around the Immense. Los beheld Forthwith, writhing upon the dark void, The Back bone of Urizen appear Hurtling upon the wind Like a serpent! like an iron chain Whirling about the Deep. (5.10-17)

Los appears to create his own bounded form at the same time, and his own “Anvil”, “Furnaces” and “Hammer”. He is thus intricated in his own creation, and, if an Eternal, accompanies circumscribed existence from the outset (5.18-23). Yet his response to the situation is hardly that of a deliberate creator; he seems at the mercy of a process beyond himself: he is “astonish’d and terrified” (5.20). This element of subjectivity infuses recognizably human energy into the creation of Urizen, suggesting a deeprooted continuity between the origin of material life and continuing life, which underlines the embedded nature of bound perception, and the immensity of the task to clean “the doors of perception”. Working on his anvil he “fram’d” “An immense Orb of fire”, apparently the “Sun”, which, to Los’s “joy” eventually stands “self-balanc’d”, complete in itself. He continues to work on Urizen, but a “Dark vacuity” displaces the “glowing illusion” that the limited material sun has become, and it is “here” that Urizen lies “In fierce torments on his glowing bed”. Bounded material existence is firmly in place, with the “Brain in a rock”, and the “fleshy slough” of the “Heart” being at one with the “four rivers” of heaven and hell which underpin orthodox belief. In this scenario the ambiguous sun, both material and spiritual, loses its spiritual significance, being “obscured” by the realm of illusion. And it is in this state that Urizen’s “Form” is “completed”, both a “Human Illusion” and generator of “Human” “Illusion”. Los himself, then, human imagination, yet remains “In darkness and deep clouds involv’d” (5.52-57). Again, the need for rectification of perception 13 This binding of Urizen is integrated into “Night the Fourth” of The Four Zoas (BCW 302-303).

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is pressed upon us, but the intractable nature of bound perception seems to override any possibility of doing so, creating the requisite antithetical tension for the whole cycle of prophetic books to complete itself. *** The next prophetic book is one of “epic proportions” (Johnson and Grant in BPD 214), referred to in brief as Vala, or the Four Zoas, though the original Vala, Or The Death and Judgment of the Ancient Man, A Dream of Nine Nights was reworked as The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgment of Albion the Ancient Man. It is considered to be unfinished, as if Blake abandoned it; but, as Bloom points out, the fact that the poet gave the manuscript to his “disciple” Linnell just before his death shows that he yet considered it important (Visionary Company, 76). Bloom, however, feels that the poem “fails Blake’s imagination” and becomes a “determinism” because it over-explains the circumstances of the fall and regeneration of the Zoas (90). Perhaps this is so, and perhaps Blake did begin to “trust it less and less”, seeing his vision of the Last Judgment in the final Night of the poem as too external, when a true Last Judgment, “as he came to understand, began within each man, and not in the outer cosmos” (90). Yet Blake is clear from the start that the struggle of the four Zoas is within each person,14 whatever the imaginative means used to convey this fact—which is not to say he presently “trusted” his means. And yet the energy of the poem is extraordinary. Bloom, indeed, calls it “the most energetic and inventive of Blake’s poems” (76). And Johnson and Grant point to the immense vitality involved in its creation when they note that “it is an attempt to coordinate and extend the separate stories told in Blake’s earlier books into one grand story of mankind, from his origins to the end of time” (BPD 214). The poem deals with the fall of humankind into disunity, caused by Vala, or Nature and sexual temptation. Nature is the veil (hence, perhaps, “Vala”) which obscures spiritual reality, while sexual temptation draws immortal souls into the realm of mortal generation (Raine, “Blake’s Debt”, 373, 403). In Hermetic terms, well known to Blake, Matter is activated by a spiritual principle that has “descended” and is captured like a prisoner; and the release of this imprisoned spirit, the deus absconditus, is the task of the Great Work. The two principles are symbolized as a male (spirit) and a female (matter). (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:271) 14

“Four Mighty Ones are in every Man” (BCW 264), found at the commencement of “Night the First” of the Zoas.

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This Hermetic understanding was familiar to Blake through his readings in Neoplatonism, Paracelsus and Boehme, providing a motivating force for his own “Great Work”, to be enhanced by his inclusion of Christ as redemptive force for male and female, as well as for the four primal elements of human nature, personified as the Zoas: wisdom, love, imagination, and instinct, perverted in the fallen state (as already noted) into “cold reason, wild emotion, misguided imagination, and weakened instinct” (Johnson and Grant in BPD 215). Frye traces the meaning of “Zoa” from the Greek “living creatures” to convey the four creatures drawing the chariot of divinity, or, as in Revelation, surrounding the divine throne. He also quotes from the Timaeus (acknowledging Blake’s syncretism) a passage which states that God, “intending to make this world like the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within all other animals of a kindred nature” (Fearful Symmetry, 273).15 Frye states, discerning the gist of Blake’s internalization of the Zoas as well as the pertinence of his imaginative vision (where the Zoas display the airborne proficiency of superheroes): The real chariot-furnace is the flaming energy of the spiritual or risen body, and it is the automotive power of the heart and lungs and bowels and brain of this body which we try to represent when we depict angels as winged.

The biblical and Platonic conceptions of the “living creatures” or “animals” accompanying the vehicle of existence, or body, whether of divinity or divinely appointed humanity, points to the fundamental suggestion of embodied energy perhaps sought by Blake in his apparent appropriation of the term “Zoa”. We should also not forget the suggestion made in Chapter One that Blake may have been inspired by the reference to “Zoan” in Bryant’s New System, where it is a term for the “soul”, based on the soul’s

15 Frye uses the Jowett translation of 1871. In Thomas Taylor’s translation of the Timaeus, the passage is rendered: “Divinity being willing to assimilate this universe in the most exquisite degree to that which is the most beautiful and every way perfect of intelligible objects, he composed it one visible animal, containing within itself all such animals as are allied to its nature” (Works of Plato vol 2, Timaeus 479). In Taylor’s Introduction to The Timaeus “Earth . . . is said, in the first place, to be our nurse, as possessing, in a certain respect, a power equivalent to heaven; and because, as heaven comprehends divine animals, so earth appears to contain such as are earthly” (447). In the same volume of the Works of Plato, dealing with The Laws, Taylor notes that for Plato “the mundane” or “divine animals” are “junior Gods” (Laws 29n1). Daemons might also be considered “junior Gods”.

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being “a divine emanation” of the sun, or “Zoan” (New System, 38). Either suggestion is feasible within the Blakean context “of the spiritual or risen body”. Perhaps more so than in the previous books, the energy inherent in this prophetic book depends on its personifications of the Zoas, Hellenic, Cabalistic and Miltonic in conception, as it is such figures which convey to us expressly and most pertinently a macrocosmic theatre of vast forces and conceptions “beyond the human”. The sleeping, unconscious Albion is the human form (as well as Britain as a whole) in the book, within whom and around whom the Zoas war, and for whom Christian salvation is possible. The Zoas are: Urizen, the “Eternal Priest” and rational power; Los, the “Eternal Prophet” and imaginative power, known as Urthona in Eternity; Orc, fiery energy and emotion, known as Luvah in Eternity; and Tharmas, instinct, also considered a father figure.16 In their fallen state the Zoas have become separated from their “Emanations” or embodied female consorts. Urizen’s Emanation is Ahania, associated with love and pleasure; Los’s is Enitharmon, his inspiration; Vala, or Nature and sexual desire, is the Emanation of Orc; while Tharmas’s is Enion, who, in Neoplatonic fashion, is a weaver of materiality and a mother figure (BCW 266). All four Emanations in the fallen state are associated with generation and its toils. They are reunited with their male consorts by the end of the book, in a vision of universal renewal following a Last Judgment. Johnson and Grant note that the “resurrection” associated with this Last Judgment “is prophesied throughout The Four Zoas in intermittent accounts of the Eternity from which Albion has fallen”. Their concisely rendered account of Eternity is useful: it is “a community of higher consciousness also called the Divine Humanity, and personified as Jesus”. It does not “precede Time”, but “is the fullness of any one moment in Time which is entered into and ‘opened’ by man’s consciousness”. Its eventual attainment by Albion is suggested by “the loving concern and protectiveness of Jesus” at various stages in the book (BPD 215). In truth, however, Albion is very much in the background of the events taking place in the book, and it is the Zoas and their Emanations in all their titanic magnificence who most obviously benefit from the presence of Jesus. In “Night the First” (BCW 269) Enion, estranged from Tharmas because of wanting to examine his “sins”, realises that she has “murdered” the “souls” of her “Children”, thinking them solely his “secret loves & Graces”, 16 Raine links the name Tharmas to the Greek “Thaumas”, the Hermetic term for “Wonder”, or “Nature being mingled with man”. She feels Blake originally intended all the Zoas “to be his progeny” (Blake and Tradition, 1:279-280). Instinct is, in a sense, the animating force of all sentient existence.

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and has become a “Solitary wanderer”. She gives birth to “two little Infants” in the desolate wilderness. She has the maternal strength to Raise the fierce boy & girl with glories from their heads out-beaming, Drawing forth drooping mother’s pity, drooping mother’s sorrow. (1.196-197)

The infants are Los and Enitharmon, who exhaust their mother’s strength and then, in the principal narrative, “wander far away”. But in a deleted passage Blake had a different conception, and combined an early account of Jesus’s potency and forgiveness with a passage of posthuman tenderness reflective of the redemptive outcome of the book as a whole: But those in Great Eternity Met in the Council of God As One Man, hovering over Gilead & Hermon. He is the Good Shepherd, He is the Lord & Master To Create Man Morning by Morning, to give gifts at Noon day. (1.198-201)

Instructive in presenting Jesus as both a “Council of God” and “One Man” (paralleling both the distinctness of the Zoas and their Emanations, and their unity within Albion),17 these lines also introduce his unconditional sense of forgiveness, which radiates through to the natural world, its elements made distinct by precise attributes conveyed by adjectives and nouns: Enion brooded o’er the rocks; the rough rocks groaning vegetate. Such power was given to the Solitary wanderer: The barked Oak, the long limb’d Beech, the Chestnut tree, the Pine, The Pear tree mild, the frowning Walnut, the sharp Crab, & Apple sweet, The rough bark opens; twittering peep forth little beaks & wings, The Nightingale, the Goldfinch, Robin, Lark, Linnet & Thrush. The Goat leap’d from the craggy cliff, the Sheep awoke from the mould, Upon its green stalk rose the Corn, waving innumerable, Infolding the bright Infants from the desolating winds. (1.202-210)

Even though she is embodied, Enion is at one with a divine creative force that transcends embodiment, and can bring forth these various expressions of life from “rough rocks”. She is not, however, their cause; each stands complete in its own being, a fact perhaps best expressed by the “Corn” “rising” “upon its green stalk”—at once energy and material form. But this redemptive moment comes far too soon in the book to enable the necessary forces and situations to unfold, and Blake for the present must consign her to “Non Entity, revolving round in dark despair” (1.219). He 17 The image is repeated and extended at the conclusion of the second draft of “Night the First” (BCW 279).

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does, however, in a remarkable passage which spotlights the energised perspectivism of the poem, gesture towards eventual redemption. The character Eno, only identified as “a daughter of Beulah” (a type of lower Paradise governed by the love of the “married” state),18 reflects the sublime goodness of Christ (albeit before “the Hand Divine” was revealed): Then Eno, a daughter of Beulah, took a Moment of Time And drew it out to seven thousand years with much care & affection And many tears, & in every year made windows into Eden. She also took an atom of space & opened its centre Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. Astonish’d sat her sisters of Beulah to see her soft affections To Enion & her children, & they ponder’d these things wond’ring, And they Alternate kept watch over the Youthful terrors. They saw not yet the Hand Divine, for it was not yet reveal’d, But they went on in silent Hope & Feminine repose. (1.222-231)

Moments and atoms open out to eternity and infinity, recalling the famous lines from “Auguries of Innocence” (BCW 431), copied in fair in 1803, roughly the time the final revisions (including the Eno passage) to the Zoas were made (1804): To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

What is marvellous about Eno’s words, is that she doesn’t just express the possibilities inherent in expanded perception within the familiar proximity of “the palm of your hand” and “an hour”, but, with capabilities “beyond the human”, she engages the imagination in an eternal moment and miniscule infinitude that are coterminous with spatio-temporal immensity. Blake tests the limits of imaginative expansiveness. Raine writes in some detail about the “opening of the centre” in Blake, in a way that reveals his extensive reading and precise understanding of alchemical “physics”: “Manifested being expands like a tree or a cloud of smoke from a little grain or seed, and to such a dimensionless point it returns again”. She notes the connection among Proclus’s “point”, Boehme’s “punctum”, Paracelsus’s “grain” and Blake’s “atom of space”: “Blake is but elaborating this traditional concept in all his characteristic images of minute centres in which there is eternity”. Traditional the concept may be, but as Raine notes, and as we 18

Isaiah 62:4.

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appreciate in the Eno passage, Blake’s “poetic genius has, in many passages, transmuted metaphysical thought into a form that may be directly and intuitively apprehended” (Blake and Tradition, 2:156-157). Alchemical “physics” would appear to be related to contemporary quantum mechanics. John Higgs notes in his recent intellectual biography of Blake, William Blake vs the World, “In the scientifically minded twenty-first century, the idea that there is a strange world entirely unlike our normal reality at scales too small for us to see has been readily accepted. The microchips our society runs on, for example, rely on our understanding of quantum mechanics to function”.19 Regarding “eternity”, Higgs offers a model (shared by Blake and the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli) which sees this, not as “all of time”, but “timelessness”, hidden from us by domination of left-brain functioning (to resort to the commonly accepted simplification I have already discussed in relation to McGilchrist’s work):20 The reason we are rarely consciously aware of this timeless moment is because the Urizen-like default mode network in our minds has constructed a narrative called the self, a useful and practical illusion we have come to identify with. Being a story, this self needs to believe in the past and future, which fools us into experiencing Einstein’s “stubbornly persistent illusion” of the passing of time. (Blake vs World, 293)

Enion, enmeshed in the “stubbornly persistent illusion”, continues her solitary wandering in “Night the First”, now “blind & age-bent”, and gives voice again to her awareness of posthuman tribulation (BCW 276). Her vision, which once probed the “sins” of Tharmas through “every vein & lacteal”, now (with opposite intent) considers the suffering of small birds, down to the level of “little” heart and tongue, as if in identity with a measure of suffering often overlooked (1.445-450). This is, of course, a human interpretation of the natural world, but it transports human perception to 19 John Higgs, William Blake vs the World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021), 66. 20 Iain McGilchrist emphasises the importance of both hemispheres in the making of art (“hemispheric lateralisation”): “I could not agree less that having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting or tends to suggest the left hemisphere’s attitude to language. They are the condition of all music and dance, the right hemisphere’s domain”. See Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist, “This Is Your Brain on Poetry”, Poetry 197, no.1 (2010): 44. See McGilchrist’s Matter With Things for repeated references to “hemispheric lateralisation” (187, 793, 2180). See also Jim Phelps, “Lawrence’s ‘Biological Psyche’ and the Neuroscience of the Divided Brain”, The D. H. Lawrence Review 44, no.1 (2019): 4, for an interesting discussion involving what he calls “hemispherical lateralisation”.

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places it would often avoid, places essentially posthuman, as I interpret the term. Human control of the natural world is also not spared: “Why is the Sheep given to the knife? the Lamb plays in the Sun: He starts! he hears the foot of Man! he says: Take thou my wool, But spare my life: but he knows not that winter cometh fast.” (1.454-456)

The effect of the word “winter” is doubled by the attached connotation of death: whether taking “wool” or “life”, “Man” is the despoiler of a life of which he has no true conception. Even the predatory world of the “Spider” is entered into sympathetically through Enion’s perception: “The Spider sits in his labour’d Web, eager watching for the Fly. Presently comes a famish’d Bird & takes away the Spider. His Web is left all desolate that his little anxious heart So careful wove & spread it out with sighs and weariness.” (1.457-460)

Again, Blake might be guilty of anthropomorphism here,21 but the “Web” left “desolate” and the “careful” weaving of the “little anxious heart” of the spider, along with the concurrent understanding of the need of the “famish’d Bird”, is a triumph of extended natural awareness worthy of John Clare. In “Night the Second”, Enitharmon, a “dissolv’d” form, estranged from Los through jealousy at his “false love” (an estrangement exemplative of the general sundering of Emanation and Zoa), regrets the pain she has caused him, and “revives him to Life” through a song (BCW 289-290). Enitharmon, the “Lovely one” who is the power of Nature, sings these words “in Rapturous delusive trance”, words which emphasise the delusion associated with female-governed generation. But her song conveys much more than this. She frames her song with the great cosmic bodies of human existence—“sun”, “moon”, and heavenly “spheres” (the “nine” “round the fiery king” of which she sings must include the earth and moon). In doing so she presents a heavenly pattern of the “harmony” of the sexes, where masculine sun and feminine moon exist in a state of reciprocal balance— the light of the sun is “echoed” in the “silver locks” of the moon, and she joins the other “bright spheres” to sing to the sun.22 Her song might be seen as incantatory, then, desirous of a healing of the division between her and 21

A futile charge: his central universal pattern is the human body. It is pertinent in this syncretic passage to recall Raine’s observation that for Blake, “the sun as the symbol of deity is one that unites his Christian with his classical symbols. Swedenborg’s angels saw the Lord as the Sun, in the midst of innumerable bright spirits; and so always did Blake himself” (“Sea of Time and Space”, 334). 22

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Los, but also extending to the divisions within the other Zoas. Further, she calls on the “golden sun” to “bear on my song”, empowering it, almost in the form of a Muse (with a hint of suggestive colouring from the “nine bright spheres of harmony”). The desired transfusion of power here is anticipatory of her reconciliation with Los through his association with the sun, as Sol (2.343-348). Raine writes: “It is notable that the name ‘Los’ is ‘Sol’ spelled backwards. It names the solar principle of the alchemists, present in the whole of creation. Is it fanciful to see the name Los as Sol seen in reflection, or mirrored in the water, or looking glass, of physical nature?” (Blake and Tradition, 1:234). We also recall Bryant’s evidence of the reversal of divine names (A New System, 28).23 There follows, though, an antithetical stanza, which delights in the “torments” stemming from physical love, showcasing through its perverse view, its fallen nature (2.349-353). Woman delights in having “her most best beloved” dying “for Love of her”; this is not an indirect misogynistic blow at womankind on Blake’s part—it is, for one thing, a covert exposure of the hypocrisy imbricated in the religious sanctification of love for the price of life-denying chastity, in which both men and women are involved; it is also, figuratively, an account of spirit descending (“dying”) into materiality. Frye notes Blake’s abhorrence of “the attempt to keep the Christian vision associated with an eternally chaste female principle who is never subject to human desires”. He sees such a principle, embodied in the mother of Christ, as “the visualized form of an objective nature”, whose “presence in the archetypal vision inoculates Christianity with the virus of Deism” (Fearful Symmetry, 393). In other words, the concept is divorced from the energy of subjective instinct, or the daemonic forces “beyond” objectively determined nature (implied by Deism). Alternating “jealousy” and “adoration”, both of “tormenting” intensity, mark the extremes of possessiveness and idealisation, or the selfish imprisonment of another, and sealing her off in a crystal cabinet of superhuman purity,24 supposedly the only quality worthy of such elevated “adoration”. The stanza is darkly encased in “The Lovers’ night”, which “bears” on the song in a manner that surely negates the influence of “The golden sun” in the previous stanza. If the “nine spheres” in that stanza “rise” spontaneously in celebration of the sun as “fiery king”, though they now “rejoice”, they no longer “rise” but are situated in a position “beneath” the control of another; their present 23 And, if we consider Los’s daemonic energy, Paul Miner notes that Blake may have learned through his esoteric reading the fact that “the Babylonian Lord of Hell” was named “Loz”. See Miner, “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ as Miltonic Beast”, 482. 24 See “The Crystal Cabinet” (BCW 429). This cabinet shatters when the “fierce ardor” of physical love manifests itself.

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rejoicing perhaps shows they lack the ability to discriminate between the figurative openness of day and secrecy of night, to recall Oothoon’s line of thought in Visions (BCW 194). Enitharmon, though, is true to the forces of corporeality of which she is an essential part: she appreciates the life force, in open, celebratory terms: “They sing unceasing to the notes of my immortal hand. The solemn, silent moon Reverberates the living harmony upon my limbs, The birds & beasts rejoice & play, And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.” (2.354-358)

The spheres of the night sky “sing unceasing” (at her behest, though perhaps coerced because of present universal conditions) and the “silent moon”, a feminine body, causes the sound to “reverberate” on Enitharmon’s “limbs”, a private sensual experience. But her enjoyment seems to extend to “The birds & beasts”, who “rejoice & play”, and “prove” their “inmost joy” with their “mates”. Their passion is “furious & terrible”, and “rends the nether deeps”, a dark space sealed off from “the living voice”. Enitharmon notes with approval that “the deep”, “lost in infinite humming wings” of living creatures, “vanishes with a cry”, “ever dying”, in contrast with “the living voice”, which “is ever living in its inmost joy”. Enitharmon, then, is certainly not averse to the passion and joy of sexual love (2.359-363). In the stanza which follows, she is able to proclaim this in terms of the central Blakean tenet: “every thing that lives is holy”. The physical energy and joyful song of the tiny birds express this holiness in a moment of identification that is magnificent in being able to embody (if in human terms, again, recalling Enion’s similar sense of identity) the “joy” and “bliss” of these creatures: “Arise, you little glancing wings & sing your infant joy! Arise and drink your bliss! For every thing that lives is holy; for the source of life Descends to be a weeping babe; For the Earthworm renews the moisture of the sandy plain.” (2.364-368)

From her materialist perspective, she can take pleasure in the fact that even the lowly “Earthworm” contributes to the watery realm of generation in “renewing the moisture of the sandy plain”. Enitharmon, despite her warped conception that “the joy of woman is the death” of her lover “who dies for Love of her” (perhaps not warped from the figurative point of view of the

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imperatives of mortal generation, or “death” of the soul), cherishes material existence. And, as the power of Nature, she can “strike the terrible string” to “wake sweet joy” and “plant a smile” in the “dens” and “forests” of materiality (2.369-373). The string is “terrible” in its consignment of the soul to corporeal existence—Enitharmon is aware of this fact. But, once more, she seems committed to “the bubbling springs of life”, if acknowledging they are situated “in regions of dark death” (another expression of her awareness of material limitation). That she too is subject to the strictures of her realm of generation, becomes apparent in the final stanza of this passage: “O, I am weary! lay thine hand upon me or I faint, I faint beneath these beams of thine, For thou hast touch’d my five senses & they answer’d thee. Now I am nothing, & I sink And on the bed of silence sleep till thou awakest me.” (2.374-378)

She addresses Los and, though estranged, acknowledges his influence on her: “I faint beneath these beams of thine”. Yet, even if aware of “the bubbling springs of life”, only her “five senses” respond to Los, the limited senses of corporeality, characterised by the “sleep” of the soul, into which she now retreats.25 The passage as a whole, then, even while it first voices a limited sectarian gender politics centred in false values, praises the life force, dramatizing its ability to surface and express itself, whatever the circumstances. Again, in terms of the whole poem, its final line anticipates the reconciliation of the Zoas and their Emanations, and so provides a point of relief from the continuing struggles of the book. In “Night the Fifth” we find a virtual conflagration of energy in response to the binding of Orc by Los, his father (BCW 308, starting at line 114). Though he is bound (and perhaps made all the more powerful in his desire to overcome restraint) his immense energy (explicitly daemonic—he is referred to as a “Demon”) bursts out to encompass various categories of life—“unceasing fire”, thousands of succouring “spirits”, “infinite mountains”, “veins of gold & silver”, “the hidden things of Vala” (or external Nature), the creatures and flora of the earth, the stars, and “Spirits of strength”, like Homeric warriors, “rejoicing over the slain”. Though “bound” (like Prometheus), he is not subdued, a fact immediately suggested by the way his “limbs” “mock at his chains” through an expression of his essential fiery nature, the “flame / Of circling fire” 25

Raine, “Sea of Time and Space”, 330.

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which “unceasing plays” over them. And in his bound state, he is not deprived of the “virtues of the Eternal worlds”, thanks to the immense host of ministering “spirits”. His needs are concrete enough, “wine & food”, and the “thrilling joys of sense” needed “to quell his ceaseless rage”, even though brought by the spirits from the “heavens of heavens”: At his enormous call they flee into the heavens of heavens And back return with wine & food, or dive into the deeps To bring the thrilling joys of sense to quell his ceaseless rage. (5.118-120)

His “large soul” is active through his “eyes”, the “lights” of that soul, showing his continuing spiritual awareness, despite the present emphasis on his senses. They retain their unfallen ability to “contract or else expand”, granting Orc (in their contracted, x-ray state) visual access to “the secrets of infinite mountains”, with their “veins of gold & silver & the hidden things of Vala”, as well as the inner aspects of flowers, with their “pure buds” and “fragrant souls”. In their expanded state, what the eyes perceive of the heavens seems to be magnified to a scale of “terror”, suggestive (with Burke in mind) of sublime immensity. Yet the “orbs of eccentric fire” convey Orc’s continuity with what he sees; he is not estranged from existence:26 His eyes, the lights of his large soul, contract or else expand: Contracted they behold the secrets of the infinite mountains, The veins of gold & silver & the hidden things of Vala, Whatever grows from its pure bud or breathes a fragrant soul: Expanded they behold the terrors of the Sun & Moon, The Elemental Planets & the orbs of eccentric fire. (5.121-126)

His nostrils, another material organ of sense, also tell of this continuity with his element of fire: they “breathe a fiery flame”, as if this element is indeed life-giving for him. At the same time his extra-human nature is made clear. He, like Albion, is both an individual and a topography, evident as the simile describing “his locks” becomes a literal expression of his ferocity: “his locks”, which are “like the forests” containing “wild beasts”, are seen really to contain “there” the “glaring” “lion” and “howling” “tyger & wolf”, as if a simile can yet bring forth an actuality (5.127-128). These beasts of prey might indeed express his potential to do harm (as in the revolutionary situation of America), but the “Eagle”, though also a fierce predator, finds refuge in Orc, finds a place to care for “her young” (5.129). He is not simply 26

“The type of attention we pay determines what it is we see. The way reality comes into being for us is like that famous picture by M. C. Escher of hands that draw hands” (McGilchrist, Ways of Attending, 16).

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destructive, then, a fact which becomes more apparent in the following lines, when his sensibility leans more towards that of his Emanation, Vala (5.130-134). Again, like Albion, he contains on his body the “starry heaven”, a Cabalistic blending of macrocosmos and microcosmos, to convey the all-pervasive life force.27 And, like the estranged and weakened Enitharmon, he, though bound, is yet sensitive to the finer levels of existence, from delighting in “the harvest & the vintage” of humankind’s fruitful interaction with the earth, to the life- and pleasure-giving “rivers of delight”. Posthuman expression is found where “the spontaneous flowers” (which, through the adjective, are credited with their own agency) “drink” from these waters, and, in Wordsworthian manner, also “laugh & sing”, or participate in the pleasure of the moment in a way that is imbricated in human perception. The humble creatures of nature are also incorporated in Orc, independently of any preamble—“the grasshopper, the Emmet & the Fly” are simply present; this shows a breadth of natural awareness also linked to Vala. More in the manner of Enion’s empathy, is the account of the “golden Moth”, with her “house”, and the careful way she “spreads her silken bed”. The final lines of the passage emphasise the sexual physicality of Orc, linked first to pastoral images of plenty, and then, in a more sinister way, to Homeric or Nordic ideals of militaristic manhood, though perhaps slightly tempered by a romantic biblical reference: His loins inwove with silken fires are like a furnace fierce: As the strong Bull in summer time when bees sing round the heath Where the herds low after the shadow & after the water spring, The num’rous flocks cover the mountain & shine along the valley. (5.135-138)

The sensuality of his “loins” is made manifest by their being “inwoven” (in the manner of the webs of generation—Orc’s fallen state) with “silken fires”, creamily smooth, if dangerous. His passion is evident in the “furnace fierce”, given expression in the Homeric simile of the “strong Bull” and generative “bees”; the “Bull” is an obvious enough image, but we also recall that for Porphyry in his commentary on Homer’s “cave of the nymphs”, honey refers to the sweetness of generation (On the Cave of the Nymphs, 5). The lines delight, too, in the natural details of “herds” seeking “shadow” and “water spring” in the heat of “summer”, and the way “num’rous flocks” 27 See Frye: “The myth of a primeval giant whose fall was the creation of the present universe is not in the Bible itself, but has been preserved by the Cabala in its conception of Adam Kadmon, the universal man who contained within his limbs all heaven and earth” (Fearful Symmetry, 125).

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“cover the mountain & shine along the valley”—radiant beings in their own right. The next line (if slightly indirectly) links Orc to the “beloved” of the Song of Solomon, whose “legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold” (Song of Solomon 5:15), and he, too, is almost simultaneously “terrible as an army with banners” (Song of Solomon 6:4), evincing the mingling of beauty and terror characteristic of the sublime. His knees are rocks of adamant & rubie & emerald: Spirits of strength in Palaces rejoice in golden armour Armed with spear & shield they drink & rejoice over the slain. Such is the Demon, such his terror in the nether deep. (5.139-142)

As already noted, the “Spirits of strength” in “golden armour”, and with “spear & shield”, seem Homeric, from the Iliad, especially in the way they “rejoice over the slain”, covertly expressing Blake’s antipathy to classical militarism (Webb, “Romantic Hellenism”, 172-173), yet including an aspect of Orc within that mindset, as he, the eventual spirit of rebellion, must wield the power to destroy. The concluding reference to him as a “Demon” ties in with the earlier reference, textually binding him (in daemonic aspect) within the attributes considered in the intervening lines. The one noteworthy passage in the first version of “Night the Seventh” (BCW 322), the confrontation between Orc and Urizen resembles that between Prometheus and Jupiter in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (at least in its essentials of a rebel associated with fire, facing a tyrant). The resemblance (perhaps based on common mythographic underpinnings and both poets’ shared revolutionary sympathies) gives further point to Raine’s assertion that Shelley is “Blake’s spiritual successor” (Defending Ancient Springs, 147). Orc speaks: “Curse thy hoary brows! What dost thou in this deep? Thy Pity I contemn. Scatter thy snows elsewhere. I rage in the deep, for Lo, my feet & hands are nail’d to the burning rock, Yet my fierce fires are better than thy snows. Shudd’ring thou sittest. Thou art not chain’d. Why shouldst thou sit, cold grovelling demon of woe, In tortures of dire coldness?” (7.69-74)

Though Urizen claims to feel “pity” for Orc, it is self-centred, as he hopes to benefit from the relationship;28 Orc realises the hypocrisy involved when he spurns Urizen: “Thy Pity I contemn”. In Shelley it is Prometheus who 28 In line 19 of this version of “Night the Seventh”, Urizen sits “brooding Envious over Orc”; his “envy” indicates a need (BCW 320).

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(Christ-like) feels pity for his oppressor, but, of course, Orc has not yet reached that stage of enlightenment. Yet Orc, like Prometheus, accepts what is inflicted upon him rather than succumb. Urizen, like Jupiter, proudly, and blindly, asserts his omnipotence: “Read my books, explore my Constellations, Enquire of my Sons & they shall teach thee how to War. Enquire of my Daughters, who, accurs’d in the dark depths, Knead bread of Sorrow by my stern command; for I am God.” (7.90-94)

In these rather blatant terms, he reinforces our perception of him as the principal antagonist of the book, and helps indicate to what depths the Zoas have fallen—though his bombast approaches that of a melodrama-villain. A few lines later, however, an example of his cruel deviousness makes of him a far more formidable, evilly daemonic antagonist. He proves himself a keen manipulator of human psychology. He instructs his “Daughters” to “Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts”; further, “when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough / Born, even too many”. “Flatter” the wife of the poor man, and “pity his children, till we can / Reduce all to our will, as spaniels are taught with art”. Cynically Machiavellian, Urizen advocates the suppression of need with the minimum of expense and effort, effected by the ironic disparity between what is stated and what is observed and provided (7.117-129). The mask of social hypocrisy, comprised of deceptive verbiage and “soft mild arts”, could hardly be better expressed, and prompts Orc’s subsequent outrage: “Curse thy Cold hypocrisy!” (BCW 323). Urizen’s Iago-like list of deceptive practices and his cold rationalism, especially notable in the Malthusian reference to a population explosion,29 highlights the helplessness 29 As Malthus himself noted in his Preface, “It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence”. See Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Improvement of Society (London: Joseph Johnson, 1798), Preface, page iii. On his “Contents” pages he summarises in part the content of Chapter 5: he will deal with “the powerful tendency of the poor laws to defeat their own purpose”, and “the absolute impossibility from the fixed laws of our nature, that the pressure of want can ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society” (Contents, page iii). Though he hoped to be understood as being “actuated solely by a love of truth”, stemming from “evidence”, his views could obviously be reduced to basics, and exploited by a conservative or Urizenic mindset. His own perspective is apparent in Chapter 5: “of the number of children who die annually, much too great a proportion belongs to those, who may be supposed unable to give their offspring proper food and attention; exposed as they are

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of the poor and weak, but with a satirical twist that condemns the purveyors of supposed beneficence. The power of the passage lies in its indirection (Urizen’s advocacy of irony ironically turns on him), and the subversive energy it harnesses through this oblique means. Very important in the redemptive trajectory of this book (and all three final prophecies) is the notion of self-annihilation,30 found in the same version of “Night the Seventh” (BCW 328). Los’s “Spectre”, a type of male emanation or spirit doppelgänger, which had been keeping watch over the chained Orc, now enters Los’s bosom, and, in Jungian fashion, Los must embrace this shadow-self (we recall that Los and Urthona are one and the same, in different states): But then the Spectre enter’d Los’s bosom. Every sigh & groan Of Enitharmon bore Urthona’s Spectre on its wings. Obdurate Los felt Pity. Enitharmon told the tale Of Urthona. Los embrac’d the Spectre, first as a brother, Then as another Self, astonish’d, humanizing & in tears, In Self abasement Giving up his Domineering lust. (7.336-341)

The Spectre brings with it a sense of estranged Enitharmon’s sufferings, in which Los’s own are implicated. His ensuing sense of “Pity” involves both of them, then, is not simply the condescending pity of charity, from “making somebody Poor” (as in “The Human Abstract” from Experience, BCW 217). In an initial move towards the integration of the whole universal Being immanent in the Zoas and their subdivisions, “Los embrac’d the Spectre”. He does so, first, in a stage of profound intimacy, “as a brother”; but this sense of kinship soon gives way to a realization of identity: “Then as another Self”. The effect is purgative; in a continuing “humanizing” process (implying the ongoing realization of better qualities within oneself) and with relieving “tears”, his sense of selfhood, characterised by “his Domineering lust”, is overcome. The Spectre, “inspir’d”, then speaks from a position of awareness of the mechanics of integration. Addressing Los as a “terrible Demon”, and so acknowledging his daemonic ability to bridge mortal and immortal spheres, occasionally to severe distress, and confined, perhaps, to unwholesome habitations and hard labour” (72). 30 This notion of “self-annihilation”, or removal of the limitations of selfhood in order to experience spiritual fulness is of extreme importance to all the Romantics in this book, as will be seen. It was also important for Coleridge, who, in a footnote to the 1797 version of “Religious Musings”, noted that with “All self-annihilated” the self might make “God its identity”. See Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic, 21-22.

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he tells of a necessary “Consummating” (or completing) through the “pains & labours” involved in uniting with the Spectre, “That mortal body” of fallen existence. This process is a “Self-annihilation”, a removal of the limitations of selfhood, which enables re-immersion in “life Eternal”: “Thou never canst embrace sweet Enitharmon, terrible Demon, Till Thou art united with thy Spectre, Consummating by pains & labours That mortal body, & by Self-annihilation back returning To life Eternal; be assur’d I am thy real self.” (7.342-345)

If the Spectre’s “real Self”,31 in the present context he certainly comes close to the Jungian “shadow” archetype, or primitive aspect of the self: “I was a ravening hungering & thirsting cruel lust & murder”—the lack of punctuation perhaps suggesting the unbridled nature of this level. The Spectre realises he is “horrible & Ghastly” to Los’s eyes, but must speak from the “inspir’d” level of prophecy premised on inherent awareness (7.348-352). We recall that for Jung, “the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment. . . . The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form” (Archetypes, 20). Uniting with the Spectre will enable the expanded perception of “another better world” through the channels of “heart & loins & wondrous brain”, which might be seen as the centres of the other three Zoas: Orc, Tharmas and Urizen. Through the three (existing “in Eternity”, unlike the deceptive trinity of generation) a “fourth Universe” will come into being, and will be “consummated” in the “Mental fires” which announce Los as the power of the imagination (7.353-356). If Los “refuses” unification, another will take his place. From the perspective which accepts the consequences of “Self-annihilation”, one’s being dispensable is not an issue. The Spectre is aware, through his inspired vision, of life being an energised immersion in the continual process of existence: Los is “nothing, being Created Continually by Mercy & Love divine” (7.357-360). But Los does not refuse: 31

Though the conclusion of this book refers to Los himself as a “delusive Phantom”, the integration of the Zoas sees his elevation into the enlightened Urthona. Steven Vine feels the ambiguously presented Spectre figure in Jerusalem dramatises Blake’s own creative struggles: “The problem for vision is how to assert that the Spectre and all its works ‘Exist not’, and at the same time that ‘every thing exists’ to the visionary eye”. For Vine, this is an “ambiguity which accounts both for the energies and the terrors of Jerusalem’s visionary language”. Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 161.

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Los’s words, reflecting Swedenborgian and Platonic views of “the outward World”—which offer a form of corroboration of his dawning enlarged perception—anticipate the culminating unification of all four Zoas. Before turning to that unification, I look at an earlier passage in “Night the Ninth”, where Urizen gains clarity regarding his errors, and so prepares the way for the liberation of all the Zoas. The passage begins at line 162 (BCW 361): Urizen wept in the dark deep, anxious his scaly form To reassume the human; & he wept in the dark deep, Saying: “O that I had never drunk the wine nor eat the bread Of dark mortality, or cast my view into futurity, nor turn’d My back, dark’ning the present, clouding [it] with a cloud.” (9.162-166)

This is not the first time Urizen weeps in the prophetic books, but now it is not through excess of joy or because of material loss, but because of his awareness of the systemically damaging nature of his influence, centred in the materialism of “dark mortality”, a reflection (from another perspective) of the consequences of eighteenth-century industrialization. He deeply regrets “building arches high, & cities, turrets & towers & domes Whose smoke destroy’d the pleasant gardens, & whose running kennels Chok’d the bright rivers; burd’ning with my Ships the angry deep.” (9.167-169)

His huge cities with their industrial “smoke” have “destroy’d” “pleasant gardens”; and the “running kennels”, or channels of city effluence, have, horribly, “Chok’d” the once “bright rivers”, as if throttling the life out of them with their filth—an image still shockingly relevant. His reflections then take on a philosophical bent, as he shows awareness of the simple grounds of human fulfilment, almost as if responding to Jesus’s exhortation to “consider the lilies of the field”, which “toil not” nor “spin”, yet are “arrayed” in splendour (Matthew 6:28-29). He has travelled “in spaces remote Seeking the Eternal which is always present to the wise;

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Seeking for pleasure which unsought falls round the infant’s path And on the fleeces of mild flocks who neither care nor labour.” (9.170-173)

And yet (in a self-pitying way) he still focusses on himself, on his lack of happiness despite all he has done and suffered. But his approach to enlightened vision, refracted through the restraints of his own nature, is perhaps fitting. His conversion, as it were, is within the bounds of credibility: “But I, the labourer of ages, whose unwearied hands Are thus deform’d with hardness, with the sword & with the spear And with the chisel & the mallet, I, whose labours vast Order the nations, separating family by family, Alone enjoy not.” (9.174-178)

His abjuration of his power, however, is not grudging; although he lives “in misery supreme” (like Theotormon), he has a firm understanding that despite all his efforts to control “futurity”, or the ongoing course of life, “futurity is in this moment”. On this basis he can “give” all his “joy” to “Luvah & Vala”, or the energised life force continually inspiriting the forms of nature: “I alone, in misery supreme, Ungratified give all my joy unto this Luvah & Vala. Then Go, O dark futurity! I will cast thee forth from these Heavens of my brain, nor will I look upon futurity more. I cast futurity away, & turn my back upon that void Which I have made; for lo! futurity is in this moment.” (9.178-183)

If reason is aware of the restrictions of “dark mortality”, and that “the Eternal” “is always present to the wise”, then desire, instinct and imagination are free of its control and might create the best conditions for untrammelled existence based on the enlarged senses. Urizen voices this idea in terms of the other Zoas and their Emanations, his violent expressions (while perhaps also in character) reflecting the influx of daemonic energy he now experiences: “Let Orc consume, let Tharmas rage, let dark Urthona give All strength to Los and Enitharmon, & let Los self-curs’d Rend down this fabric, as a wall ruin’d & family extinct. Rage, Orc! Rage Tharmas! Urizen no longer curbs your rage.” (9.184-187)

There follows a type of ascension of Urizen, who “rose into the heavens in naked majesty, / In radiant Youth” (192-193). His Emanation, Ahania, like “vocal may”, “comes dancing from the East”, overjoyed (194); though

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through “Excess of Joy” she then dies (197), this over-dramatic moment enables Albion to introduce “the Lamb of God”, who has caused him to “awake from death’s dark vale”, and will do the same for Ahania. This is a climactic moment in the book, when the significance of Jerusalem is revealed and the general healing of existence, along with the specific reinvigoration of Albion. Albion, “the Eternal Man”, speaks to Urizen: “Behold Jerusalem in whose bosom the Lamb of God Is seen; tho’ slain before her Gates, he self-renew’d remains Eternal, & I thro’ him awake from death’s dark vale. The times revolve; the time is coming when all these delights Shall be renew’d, & all these Elements that now consume Shall reflourish. Then bright Ahania shall awake from death, A glorious Vision to thine Eyes, a Self-renewing Vision.” (9.205-211)

Demeter-like, Ahania will renew herself and subside every year, in harmony with the deep patterns of the earth, telling of a cyclical continuity of existence that is Neoplatonic, not Hebraic in its roots: “The spring, the summer, to be thine; then sleep the wintry days In silken garments spun by her own hands against her funeral. The winter thou shalt plow & lay thy stores into thy barns Expecting to receive Ahania in the spring with joy.” (9.212-215)

Somewhat jarring to a modern sensibility is the expected subservience of woman, but Blake is attempting to show a productive interplay of contraries, where Milton’s influence is more apparent than Wollstonecraft’s (or Oothoon’s): “Immortal thou, Regenerate She, & all the lovely Sex From her shall learn obedience & prepare for a wintry grave, That spring may see them rise in tenfold joy & sweet delight.” (9.216-218)

The spiritual significance and depth of this balanced interplay soon becomes apparent: “Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity, Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride & wife That we his Children evermore may live in Jerusalem Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman, Mother of myriads redeem’d & born in her spiritual palaces, By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.” (9.219-224)

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A power from “beyond the human”, then, is in evidence, whose own expression will culminate in Jerusalem. Jerusalem, we gather from this passage, is “a Woman” as well as “a City”, and is the “bride & wife” created for himself by “the Lamb of God”; she is the Emanation of Jesus, then (in the present context), but far from being subservient is a symbol of perfection, of “a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death”, and a true measure (like Oothoon) of Blake’s estimation of the feminine principle. The conclusion of The Four Zoas is relatively brief after the “terrible” but regenerative pressing of the “Human Wine” and grinding of “all the Nations of Earth” “in the Mills of Urthona” (BCW 378). This “night of Time” is followed by the sunrise of a new era (BCW 379): The Sun has left his blackness & has found a fresher morning, And the mild moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night, And Man walks forth from midst of the fires: the evil is all consum’d. (9.825827)

The “stars” of reductive rationalism are “consum’d like a lamp blown out”, while, in their stead, “Angelic spheres arise night & day”.32 While enlarged human perception is central to this new era (“The Expanding Eyes of Man”), posthuman existence is distinct; human eyes see in it “the depths of wondrous worlds” beyond conceptual limitation: His eyes behold the Angelic spheres arising night & day; The stars consum’d like a lamp blown out, & in their stead, behold The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds! (9.828-830)

While in this new era a sense of deep continuity between human and natural worlds prevails, this is not to the extent that the human in any sense displaces the natural. Again, Blake’s emphasis is on the interplay of the two: One Earth, one sea beneath; nor Erring Globes wander, but Stars Of fire rise up nightly from the Ocean; & one Sun Each morning, like a New born Man, issues with songs & joy Calling the Plowman to his Labour & the Shepherd to his rest. He walks upon the Eternal Mountains, raising his heavenly voice, Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day, That, risen from the Sea of fire, renew’d walk o’er the Earth. (9.831-837)

32

Again, on stars in Blake representing “rigidly categorical restrictions” derived from “abstract reason”, and “political repression”, see Nurmi, “Blake’s Revisions of ‘The Tyger’”, 672-673.

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The “Erring Globes” of reductive materialism give way to the “Stars / Of fire” of energizing imaginative perception. The “Sun” simile (“like a New born Man”) reflects on the resurrection of Albion, and brings cosmic consciousness into the orbit of human activity (“Plowman” and “Shepherd”) and natural existence (“the Eternal Mountains”). The “Animal forms of wisdom” are notable, comprehending both animals as beasts in the usual sense, and the “junior Gods” of Thomas Taylor’s apprehension.33 In either case, the linking of “Animal” (which comprehends “anima” or soul) with “wisdom” ascribes a vast depth of understanding to the posthuman. The integration of the Zoas into the life of this renewed existence is indicated by the presence of Tharmas and Urthona, Tharmas bringing a pastoral calm that harkens back to one of Blake’s earliest poems, “To the Evening Star” (BCW 3).34 Urthona works at his forge, involved in the creation of vital existence, suggested by the “Lions” which “roar” around his “Furnaces”, also “chang’d” by the “fires”—purged, “not consum’d” (9.838-845). The “Sun”, linked with both Los and Urizen as “Prince of Light”, helps infuse existence with the abundance of “ten thousand thousand springs of life”. But Los as the forger of materiality was “delusive”, a “Spectre” of his real self; Urthona (Los in his eternal form) is now united with Enitharmon, and thus strengthened can “rise from the ruinous Walls” of materialism, well prepared for the “intellectual War”, the “Mental Fight”, that will build Jerusalem “In England’s green & pleasant land”:35 The Sun arises from his dewy bed, & the fresh airs Play in his smiling beams giving the seeds of life to grow, And the fresh Earth beams forth ten thousand thousand springs of life. Urthona is arisen in his strength, no longer now Divided from Enitharmon, no longer the Spectre Los. Where is the Spectre of Prophecy? where the delusive Phantom? Departed: & Urthona rises from the ruinous Walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now, The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns. (9.846-855)

33 We recall Taylor’s note that by “divine animals” Plato means “junior Gods” (Works of Plato vol 2, Laws 29n1). 34 “The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with / Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence” (13-14). 35 From the poem concluding the Preface to Milton (BCW 481), to be discussed below; it has since become, of course, the famous hymn, “Jerusalem”.

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We see that “sweet Science” is highly prized by Blake, once freed of its materialist pretensions.36 This conclusion is certainly an optimistic vision on Blake’s part, but it is geared to his unwavering belief in existential perfectibility, as voiced at the conclusion of The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, and repeated at regular intervals thereafter, including in the present book: “Every thing that lives is holy”.37 *** Milton, like the Four Zoas, repeats matter from the other prophetic books, but brings to it a new force, largely through the addition of two characters: Milton and Blake himself (speaking in the first person). Also attentiongrabbing are Milton’s re-entry into the sphere of mortality through the tarsus of Blake’s left foot (a possible pun on the Damascus road experience of Saul of Tarsus),38 and the appearance of Ololon (Milton’s Emanation), Milton’s Shadow and Milton himself in Blake’s cottage garden in Felpham. For some reason these conflations of the domestic and sublime do not seem strained, perhaps because the field of human regeneration must include what is close and familiar. On the other hand, prophetic vision needs to vibrate with the type of potentially transformative daemonic passion evident in the four quatrains which precede “Book the First” of Milton (BCW 480-481). The first two, with their suggestive questioning, which is not quite rhetorical, convey the tempting possibility (qualified by a distancing past-tense) of divine presence within both the most cherished and most affronting aspects

36 Blake anticipates, to an extent, a strand of posthumanist inclusiveness which appeals to Dana Phillips: posthumanism “erases boundaries which used to demarcate culture from nature and the humanities from the sciences”. See Dana Phillips, “Posthumanism, Environmental History, and Narratives of Collapse”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22, no.1 (2015): 65. McGilchrist distinguishes between “science” and “technology” in a way that resonates with Blake: “Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong” (Matter With Things, 21). 37 And as Frye notes, in “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetypes”, “The apocalyptic theme [as presented at the conclusion of The Four Zoas] turns the tragic vision inside out”; “in the prophecies, as they advance from social criticism to apocalyptic, the Promised Land is the city and garden that all human effort is trying to reach, and its conqueror can only be the Messiah or true form of man” (in BPD 520). The integration of the Zoas, of course, betokens the “true form of man”. 38 See Johnson and Grant in BPD 260n3.

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of present English topography—the “mountains green”, “pleasant pastures”, “clouded hills”, and “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? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills? (1-8)

The questioning mode accords “the holy Lamb of God” neither presence nor absence. Certainly, the “pleasant pastures” seem a fitting location for Jesus, but if Jerusalem once existed in England, as Plate 6 of Milton proclaims (BCW 485), the past is so incomprehensible to contemporary understanding as to be best left to itself; the present (signalled by the metonymic “dark Satanic Mills”) must be contested, and this is what the remainder of this lyric does: 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. I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green & pleasant Land. (9-16)

It does so in terms of the reinvigorated Milton’s awareness of the need to alter consciousness, to conduct the battle against gross materialism through the “Mental Fight” waged within oneself.39 The influence of expanded consciousness will radiate outwards to incorporate an internal and external Jerusalem in England, open to what is infinite and eternal. Milton, as we will see, will wage this fight through the self-annihilation broached by the Spectre of Los in The Four Zoas. The Bard’s account in heaven of the events leading up to the present state of existence, which concludes at the beginning of Plate 14, presents 39

Johnson and Grant point to Ephesians 6:10-20, for the sort of imagery which probably inspired Blake (BPD 238n1). Here we find “the whole armour of God”, “the breastplate of righteousness” and “the shield of faith”.

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the Daughters of Albion in a very different light from those in Visions. In Plate 5 they are committed to material existence, where being generated is seen as a Druidical sacrifice over which they preside. Informed (with satirical gusto) by an inverted model of the “Three Classes of Men” of Calvinist theology, the “Elect”, the “Redeemed” and the “Reprobate” are all products of material existence “Created by the Hammer of Los” and “Woven” in “Enitharmon’s Looms” (BCW 482). The Daughters favour neither the Elect, embodiments of negation, nor the Redeemed and Reprobate, embodiments of the contraries.40 The “threefold” nature of the daughters is a modulation of the limited trinity of corporeality, albeit in the ambiguous position of Beulah, which borders Eternity, and thus tells of potential liberation through the “Gates” of the “Three Heavens of Beulah”. Within these Heavens can be found “intoxicating delight”, surely of a materialist cast (refracted through the Daughters’ “Foreheads”, “Bosoms” and “Loins”)—even if expressive of the energy favoured in the Marriage. Capricious, they “take up” into these Heavens “whom they please”, leaving indeterminate the potential for relief among the “three Classes of Men”, making them all the more bound by the “fix’d destinations” of materiality (5.5-14). These “three Classes”, then, also reflect a limited trinity, where even the Reprobate Christ “took Sin in the Virgin’s Womb” (BCW 484). The coupling of the two “trinities” in this passage underlines the pervasive nature of materiality. The Druidical rite involving these daughters continues, and while they “prepare the Victims”, “Males” join in. They sing first of material entrapment, where reptilian materiality is conditioned by the curtailed organs of sense— the “little narrow orb” of the “Eye”, the “little shell” of the “Ear”, the feeble “Tongue”. These enfeebled governors of perception are the producers and captives of hypocritical “Moral Virtue”, which in turn is the originator of the presiding matriarch of the repression and subsequent perversion of desire, “the cruel Virgin Babylon” (5.19-27). But these males, following the sequential questioning pattern of Oothoon regarding the existing order of things, are also alert to the redemptive goal of the prophecies, and so, like the Daughters with their “Heavens”, exist in proximate relation to the enlightened state. Their interrogation (in effect) of the limited senses, involves a slantwise appraisal of the perfected senses, with which they are contrasted. The mechanical “tubes” of science cannot truly “Measure the sunny rays that point their 40 “The Elect are self-satisfied hypocrites, the Redeemed attempt to conform to the moral law, and the Reprobate are fiercely independent free-thinkers” (Johnson and Grant in BPD 240n3). Satan is of the Elect, Jesus is a Reprobate. The quality of satire here has its roots in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell.

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spears on Udanadan”, or merely passively reflective existence.41 The Ear “fill’d with the vapours of the yawning pit” of hellish material existence cannot “Judge” the sound of “the pure melodious harp” of enlarged perception. Neither can “Nostrils”, “Tongue” or “Lips” have access to such perception: all are “folded within themselves” (5.28-37). Being aware of what can be attained yet not being able to achieve it is worse than not being aware. This liminal condition, then, is one undercut by existential instability, by capricious behaviour and thwarting of potential. In Plate 6 (BCW 485) an account of “the spiritual Four-fold London eternal” is provided, also liminal in nature, though currently subject to the material forges of Los. The location, however, brings us that much closer to Milton himself, and his redemptive potential: From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal, In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling, 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: (6.1-5)

With Enitharmon’s “Loom” of generation added to Los’s labours, the whole extent of England is involved: and the weights Of Enitharmon’s Loom play lulling cadences on the winds of Albion From Caithness in the north to Lizard-point & Dover in the south. (6.5-7)

Los, as mistaken imagination, accepts his task, but his eye is on the “Harvest” of the Last Judgment, as he “forges the instruments / Of Harvest, the Plow & Harrow to pass over the Nations” (6.8-13). Having no notion yet of Milton’s return, nor its consequences, his apocalyptic work is carried out in ignorance; he is seemingly unaware of the resurrection which follows judgment, and so is party to the Bard’s lament concerning the loss of Jerusalem. The “Oak Groves” of Druidism have displaced an English Jerusalem in which “every Nation” on earth appears to have participated. Los, involved in the reduction of Urizen into matter, has thus ensured the collapse of a previous Jerusalem in “a heap of burning ashes” (6.14-17). The Bard, whose words will have an impact on Milton, tells, in brief, of the loss of the spiritual and growth of the material Albion—of the “Spectre of Albion” as disruptive “Babel”. According to the Bard, imperialist wrongdoing has its source in the violence associated with the “Druid 41 Frye refers to “the symbol of the mind which passively reflects its sense experience . . . which Blake calls Udanadan” (Fearful Symmetry, 380).

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Temples” of ancient Britain, linked to Priam’s “detestable” militaristic gods (BCW 495) through the legend of the colonization of Albion by Trojan Brutus.42 The materialistic influence of the “Druid Temples”—issuing in “glory & war”—encompasses “Ireland”, “Mexico”, “Peru”, “China” and “Japan”: representatives of “all the Nations”. Writing at a time when Britain’s world-wide domination and influence was a fact, Blake was not misguided in declaring (even if his sense is more symbolic than literal): “All things begin & end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore”. The resonant final line tells of the spiritual depletion attending this material expansionism, in a valuation of the state of humankind’s soul: “But now the Starry Heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion” (6.18-26).43 The Bard concludes his account of the “Six Thousand years” of the fall from eternity with the coming of Christ, and its consequences yet in process in the fallen state (BCW 494). The Elohim send Jehovah to guard a hypocritically mild Satan in his material space; Jehovah, fearing the state of being dead to eternity implicit in this task, calls out, stretching his hand to Eternity, as a consequence of which “the Body of Death was perfected in hypocrite holiness, / Around the Lamb, a Female Tabernacle woven in Cathedron’s Looms” (13.25-29). The “Cathedron” “Looms” are those of Enitharmon, from which the mortal fabric of humankind is woven.44 Christ assumed this mortal fabric, in the face of eternal death, to redeem humankind through his doctrine of forgiveness, and yet, from a Pharisaic viewpoint was “a Transgressor”; from a Calvinist one, ironically, “a Reprobate”. The Bard’s critique of the misapplication of “Pity and Love” in the case of Satan, with the ensuing fall from eternity, draws “condemnation” from his audience (BCW 495).45 He remains firm: The Bard replied: “I am Inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity, To whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore. Amen.” (13.51; 14.1-3) 42

As rendered approvingly by a “Minstrel” at the conclusion of King Edward the Third, in Poetical Sketches; the minstrel, however, evokes Brutus in the cause of “Liberty” (BCW 31-33). 43 Raine feels that this repeated refrain “is like writing on the tomb of a nation under the domination of the positivist philosophy” (“Debt to Antiquity”, 445). 44 “And the herbs & flowers & furniture & beds & chambers / Continually woven in the Looms of Enitharmon’s Daughters, / In bright Cathedron’s golden Dome with care & love & tears” (26.34-36). 45 “Pity and Love”, the heavenly audience claim, “are too venerable for the imputation / Of Guilt” (13.48-49).

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The ensuing expressions of outrage cause the Bard, “terrify’d”, to take “refuge in Milton’s bosom”. It is from this point that Milton knows what his mission is to be. He must leave heaven and descend to the “Eternal Death” of mortality to correct the errors pointed out by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell: there Milton, for instance, mistakenly called “the Governor or Reason” the Messiah (BCW 150). In Johnson and Grant’s words, he “reenters the world of time and space in order to achieve self-redefinition through his influence on Blake”. To do so he “falls through the bosom of Albion”, “enters into Blake the artist, and wrestles in the Holy Land to reshape Urizen” (in BPD 235). At the beginning of his mission, he realizes against whom he must truly contend: “I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! He is my Spectre! in my obedience to loose him from my Hells, To claim the Hells, my Furnaces, I go to Eternal Death.” (14.30-32)

It is soon after this moment that Blake introduces himself, in the first person, into the narrative. Milton enters his “hermaphroditic” “Shadow”, perhaps an embodiment of his spiritually and emotionally barren relationship with women, in which he failed both the female and male principles, or perhaps a reference to generated man, part mortal, part immortal (Raine, “Debt to Antiquity”, 403). The “dread shadow” “Reach’d to the depths of direst Hell & thence to Albion’s land”, which, says Blake, “is this earth of vegetation on which now I write” (14.36-42). This sense of authorial proximity to his material, which challenges the supposedly fictive nature of what we are reading, helps readjust our awareness to the internality of the processes unfolding before us. The theatre of action is the self, as Milton underlines. It is only from the centre of the self that external change will take place. Blake’s characters are daemonic dramatizations, we remind ourselves (once more, they are often referred to as “Demons”); they are aligned with aspects of the self and its relation to the world and issues in the world. Furthermore, inspiriting Blake (as it does the Bard) is “Poetic Genius”, who is one with the “eternal” “Divine Humanity” in all of us. In Plate 20 Milton begins his task of rectification, by working on “darken’d Urizen” to form “bright Urizen”. Consequently, “Albion’s sleeping Humanity began to turn upon his Couch”—that is, Albion begins to emerge from corporeal entrapment (20.25). We are once more reminded of Blake’s presence as he tells of his incapacity to convey his material (reflecting traditional practice), yet this acknowledgement brings the human dimension closer to the extraordinary imagery:

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For that portion nam’d the Elect, the Spectrous body of Milton, Redounding from my left foot into Los’s Mundane space, Brooded over his Body in Horeb against the Resurrection, Preparing it for the Great Consummation; red the Cherub on Sinai Glow’d, but in terrors folded round his clouds of blood. (20.20-24)

The “Elect”, bound to corporeality, perceive the “Spectrous body of Milton” brooding over his “Mortal part”, his “Body in Horeb”, and its “Resurrection” and “Great Consummation”; their anxiety at this prospect is reflected in the “terrors” of the “Covering Cherub” which seals off mortal existence from the eternal. As Albion stirs, “Feeling the electric flame of Milton’s awful precipitate descent”, Blake—with a direct address—immerses the reader in an experience of expanded awareness, where the posthuman merges with the visionary: Seest thou the 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. (20.25-29)

Creation is replete with divine presence, from the miniscule “little winged fly” to the “mortal man”, “cloth’d with human beauty”. The fly, however, is open to what is “wondrous & expansive”, “its gates are not clos’d”; Blake’s “hope” that ours “are not” closed, conveys the indeterminate nature of humankind’s relation to “expansive” vision, and thus prefaces his following warning: Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies, There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old. For every human heart has gates of brass & bars of adamant Which few dare unbar, because dread Og & Anak guard the gates Terrific: and each mortal brain is wall’d and moated round Within, and Og & Anak watch here: here is the Seat Of Satan in its Webs: for in brain and heart and loins Gates open behind Satan’s Seat to the City of Golgonooza, Which is the spiritual fourfold London in the loins of Albion. (20.32-40)

If “every thing that lives is holy”, then, argues Blake, the quest for divinity “beyond the skies” involves what is imponderable and incomprehensible: “ancient Night & Og & Anak old”, embodiments, from one perspective, of

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dark superstition.46 From another perspective, they are the repressive aspects of human psychology, entrapping the mind within its own limitations, and requiring great “daring” to broach.47 In Blake’s terms they are aspects of that Selfhood which is Satan, barring us from “the City of Golgonooza”, or the empowering imagination and vision, “the spiritual fourfold London in the loins of Albion”—loins productive of spiritual life. Aware of the stirring of Albion and the presence of Milton, Los in Plate 25 prepares for the last “Harvest & Vintage” of the peoples of the earth (BCW 510). Without discrimination, he “puts all into the Press, the Opressor & the Opressed”, “ripe for the Harvest & Vintage & ready for the Loom”. Los calls “to the Labourers of the Vintage”, and tells of the coming of “the Awakener” Milton. We note how posthuman “Wisdom” “hidden” in Neoplatonic “caves & dens” is to be “sought out from Animal & Vegetable & Mineral”. Albion “Awakes”, however, to the deprivations of modern times: “War”, the “mocking” of “Faith” and “denial” of “Providence”, or God’s care for the earth (25.20-25). Though the sowing of mortality was carried out “in tears”, the reaping shall be a time of “rejoicing”. But dangers still attend life, even for the “Reapers”: the temptations of “mortal & perishing delights” in the absence of “the Lord” and “Jerusalem”, the “wrath” through which “Tirzah” “vegetates” life. Interestingly, “pity”, rightly proffered (not masked by hypocrisy, as in Satan’s case), is a virtue, as in the Songs of Innocence: “pity the weak as your infant care”. Los, though encountering “lightnings of discontent” from the Eternals, persists in “the Harvest & Vintage” that will “consume” “Creation” and lead to the “glorious” spiritual “Vegetation” (25.54-62). And Blake, putting the whole process and extent of creation into perspective, offers a cosmic posthuman vision, centred in Los (with his “Sons” and “Children”) as the productive imagination or liberated creative force of existence. Blake’s vision extends into Plate 26, and includes our own direct participation (“Thou seest” is repeated three times): Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & wondrous Night: They rise in order and continue their immortal courses Upon the mountain & in vales with harp & heavenly song, With flute & clarion, with cups & measures fill’d with foaming wine. Glitt’ring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude, And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths his awful waves: 46 Og and Anak are giants of the old Testament; Og is mentioned in Deuteronomy 3:10-11, Anak in Numbers 13:33. 47 Again, the parallel with Jungian psychology and confrontation with the shadow of the unconscious is in evidence (Jung, Archetypes, 20).

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These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the Vintage. (25.66-71; 26.1)

The “Constellations” which move through “the deep & wondrous Night” are both Hebraic and Hellenic in conception, with their biblical “harps & heavenly song”, their “flutes & clarions” (which allude to the Pythagorean music of the spheres), and their “cups & measures fill’d with foaming wine” (which allude to the regenerative rites of Dionysus).48 A unity of heaven and earth is apparent in the way the “Vision of beatitude” apparent in the constellations is reflected in the “Glitt’ring streams” below. Again, as with Enion, cosmic vision includes the miniscule, the most humble, whose elements also participate in the intricacies of consciousness that permeate the universe. Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave: Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance, To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return: These are the Children of Los. (26.2-7)

These “gorgeous clothed Flies” must be butterflies or gnats (the latter, considering the presence of their “music”?), who “dance” in “intricate mazes” known to each, indicating the spontaneous, unconfined play of autonomous posthuman intelligence, captured in the closely observed and rhythmically repetitive, “To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return”. Even supposedly inanimate life is imbued with a type of consciousness: Thou seest the Trees on mountains, The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom sky, Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons Of men: These are the Sons of Los: These the Visions of Eternity, But we see only as it were the hem of their garments When with our vegetable eyes we view these wondrous Visions. (26.7-12)

48

See, for example, Thomas Taylor’s The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries: A Dissertation (London, 1790; San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1987), 144: “one principal reason why grapes were consecrated to Bacchus” was because a grape “represents that which is collected into one; and when it is pressed into juice, it no less aptly represents the diffusion of that which was before collected and entire”. Dionysus was “diffused” into existence each spring.

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The suggestive soughing of trees on dark and windy mountain heights bears its own message to receptive “sons of men”, prompting, it may be, subtle energies of perception that penetrate beneath the surfaces of things otherwise limited by viewing “with” rather than “through” “our vegetable eyes”. Blake concludes Plate 26 with an observation that goes back at least to Swedenborg’s Divine Love, pages 285-286, which he annotated approvingly (BCW 95): “The Heat, Light and Atmospheres of the natural World only open Seeds; . . . but this not by Powers derived from their own Sun but by Powers from the spiritual Sun . . . for the Image of Creation is Spiritual”: Every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not A natural; for a Natural Cause only seems: it is a Delusion Of Ulro & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory. (26.44-46)

Blake’s emphatic statement, gathering weight from his preceding posthuman excursus, clinches our sense of the centrality of the rejuvenated Los and the reality of the “Visions of Eternity”. The “Delusion / Of Ulro” and “ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory”, are, again, apparent to McGilchrist in his account of the importance of right-brain functioning, as if Blake’s intuition had anticipated such findings: We need to see through the eye, through the image, past the surface: there is a fatal tendency for the eye to replace the depth of reality—a depth which implies the vitality, the corporeality and the empathic resonance of the world—with a planar re-presentation, that is, a picture. In doing so, the sublime becomes merely the picturesque. (Master and Emissary, 373)

The flow of a primary spiritual sense (an immediacy of experience, as opposed to a left-hemisphere encapsulation of it in language), along with aesthetic appreciation, is mediated by the right hemisphere, leading to an appreciation of the world such as Blake has in mind. McGilchrist, like Blake, is all too aware of the present ascendancy of unchecked, left-brain rationalism, and the devastating impact of its materialist logic (Master and Emissary, 438). In “Book the Second” of Milton, Ololon, at first a vast conglomerate of beings, but eventually coalescing into Milton’s Emanation, descends into the realm of time and space (BCW 526). She does so by finding the “Moment” present in “each Day” that neither Satan nor his “Watch Fiends” can find, and enters through it. Two natural daemonic presences are linked to her descent, the “Wild Thyme”, which is “a mighty Demon”, and the

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“Lark”, “a mighty Angel”.49 “The Wild Thyme is Los’s Messenger to Eden”, while the “Lark” is Los’s Messenger thro’ the Twenty-seven Churches, That the Seven Eyes of God, who walk even to Satan’s Seat Thro’ all the Twenty-seven Heavens, may not slumber nor sleep. (35.63-65)

The “Twenty-seven Churches” are the forms of belief based on error, stretching to the reaches of eternity, while the “Seven Eyes of God” are interceders for and protectors of the beings of time and space.50 Ololon’s proximity to these two daemons is propitious, and heralds her appearance in Blake’s Felpham garden. Blake’s account has all the immediacy of autobiography, albeit coloured by the imaginative potency of vision. If the account strains our credulity, we should take cognizance of the fact that the “Wild Thyme” and “Lark” might only appear insignificant to us because we cannot, immediately on apprehending them, appreciate them in their fullness; to do so, even from a scientific point of view, would be remarkable. It would be at once to perceive (in a type of science-fiction, three-dimensional projection) the arrangement and composition of all their material elements, from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, their evolutionary history, their genus and species extensions, the data obtained from comprehensive statistical information and analyses, and so on. Jacob Bronowski, for instance, takes the example of the human face, perceived across “the whole spectrum of electromagnetic information”: “The question I am going to ask is: How fine and how exact is the detail that we can see with the best instruments in the world—even with a perfect instrument, if we can conceive one? And seeing the detail need not be confined to seeing with visible light”. He notes how James Clerk Maxwell “proposed that light is an electromagnetic wave”, with his related equations “implying that there are others”. As Bronowski observes, “the spectrum of visible light, from red to violet, is only an octave 49 And in Blake’s “Descriptions of the Illustrations to Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’” he depicts Milton’s lark as “an Angel on the Wing” (BCW 618). 50 “The Seven, in general, appear as guardians and advisers of humanity; in Milton in particular they are his companions and protectors, who go into the fallen world with him in order to maintain his vision of eternity” (Stevenson in Blake, 510n). In the same footnote Stevenson also observes that “Revelation has many sevens, mostly agents of divine purpose”. Elsewhere he notes: “The twenty-seven Churches . . . are a sequence of manifestations of religious error” (Stevenson in Blake, 554n). We observe that for Blake the numbers twenty-seven and seven are imperfect, the first a multiple of three, the second a prime number, one short of the composite number, eight. Milton will make of the seven an eighth.

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or so in the range of invisible radiations. There is a whole keyboard of information, all the way from the longest wavelengths of radiowaves (the low notes) to the shortest wavelengths of X-rays and beyond”; the face appears in different guise according to which wavelengths are shone onto it, from longest to shortest. At the extreme, using the electron microscope, “the rays are so concentrated that we no longer know whether to call them waves or particles”.51 Blake perceives the material data in terms of the analogies among the grosser and more refined strata of existence, analogies which make concrete the ever-present manifestations of the underlying energy of Being. In his words, for example, “Los is by mortals nam’d Time, Enitharmon is nam’d Space” (24.68). Blake, through imaginative empathy and engagement based on sensitization of perception, sees, and conveys, far more than these abstractions do, dulled as they are by overuse into becoming mere labels. That Blake himself was committed to his visions is evident in the conviction expressed in A Descriptive Catalogue, where he comments on a lost work, “The Ancient Britons” (BCW 578): All these things are written in Eden. The artist is an inhabitant of that happy country; and if every thing goes on as it has begun, the world of vegetation and generation may expect to be opened again to Heaven, through Eden, as it was in the beginning.

And he shows a canniness regarding his depictions of a spiritual dimension, when, discussing his illustration of Gray’s “The Bard”, he compares his work (in the third person) with Greek sculpture (BCW 576): The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. B.’s mode of representing spirits with real bodies, would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the mortal perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. B. requires the same latitude, and all is well.

And yet, so that we do not doubt the concrete veracity of his visions, he adds: “A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce”. Blake emphatically asserts “that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized than any thing seen by his mortal eye”. Peter Ackroyd ascribes Blake’s visions to the construction of hallucinatory 51

See Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (London: BBC, 1973), 353-356.

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“eidetic imagery”, a genetically embedded tendency (Ackroyd, Blake, 35). Because the idea of an hallucination implies the random imposition of images, it would be more profitable, considering the coherence of Blake’s visions, to argue that he had a gift of vision continuous with that experienced in lucid dreams, where the dreamer guides the mind through the experience.52 Ololon appears to Blake, and he addresses her, “as a Daughter of Beulah” (with whom he appears to have commerce), in courteous terms, reminiscent of those used in the encounters between mortals and immortals in The Iliad and The Odyssey (BCW 527): Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah: “Virgin of Providence, fear not to enter my Cottage. What is thy message to thy friend? What am I now to do? Is it again to plunge into deeper affliction? behold me Ready to obey, but pity thou my Shadow of Delight: Enter my Cottage, comfort her, for she is sick with fatigue.” (36.26-32)

Like Job, too, though, he expects to be “plunged into deeper affliction”; and his wife “is sick with fatigue”. This intimate detail, totally at odds with what is about to be conveyed, is—in a very immediate way—reflective of the mortal condition, and will contrast dramatically with the consequences of Ololon’s arrival, which involves an easily confounding sense of the different layers of psychological existence; readers need to focus on the central action and not lose themselves in the apparent illogic of parallel being and temporality. Ololon reveals that she is looking for Milton, in a voice so distinct that Milton’s Shadow hears it, he who is the Covering Cherub blocking the path to immortality; within the Cherub are Satan and Rahab, “in the Selfhood deadly” (37.10), a clue as to the centralized nature of the host associated with Milton. At the same time, Milton (at once “a Cloud & a Human Form”) descends into Blake’s garden (37.13-18). Before he interacts with Ololon, Milton (in spirit form) must confront this Satan in the type of parallel universe mentioned above (“the Eastern porch of Satan’s Universe”): “Satan! my Spectre! I know my power thee to annihilate And be a greater in thy place & be thy Tabernacle, A covering for thee to do thy will, till one greater comes 52

See J. Allan Hobson, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140. Hobson discusses the vividness experienced in lucid dreaming.

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Chapter Three And smites me as I smote thee & becomes my covering. Such are the Laws of thy false Heav’ns; but Laws of Eternity Are not such; know thou, I come to Self-Annihilation. Such are the Laws of Eternity, that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for others’ good, as I for thee.” (38.28-36)

Milton is against the recurrent displacement of the weaker by the coming of the “greater” in endless cycle, centred in the “Laws” of Satan’s “false Heav’ns”; he proclaims his intention to practise “Self-Annihilation”, and so destroy the bounds of selfhood represented by Satan. In expanding on this notion, he summarizes exactly what it is that he opposes: “Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches Is to impress on men the fear of death, to teach Trembling & fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness.” (38.37-39)

He contrasts this with his own mission: “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.” (38.40-42)

Satan for his part is intransigent: “I am God the judge of all, the living and the dead” (38.51). He refers to Jesus as “the Divine Delusion” (39.2), in an ironic expression of his own delusory being, just before the awakening of Albion (BCW 530). While “Milton’s Spirit” is thus striving with Satan in a parallel “Universe”, Milton himself remains at Blake’s cottage to speak with “the Eternal Form”, Ololon (40.1). Again, we must appreciate the atemporal simultaneity of events associated with different facets of the self as selfunderstanding takes place; doing so, even as a thought experiment, at least gives us an intimation of being free of temporal linearity, as present Blakean vision requires. Blake cannot clearly understand what passes between them, but hears Ololon questioning Milton’s self-annihilation; she wonders if the “Feminine portions” of men such as Milton, who oppose “Natural Religion”, actually “cause” such religion (40.9-14). The appearance of “Rahab Babylon” is a response to this question, and, though a female, she “glows” “in Satan’s bosom”, and is thus a “Female hidden in a Male”—implicating both sexes in the rational materialism dominating on earth, as expressed, in part, through “Natural Religion”. Rahab is also “Religion hidden in War”, and “Nam’d Moral Virtue”, the violent suppression of self and others through rationally derived (and thus limited) codes of behaviour (40.17-22).

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Milton’s response to Ololon is comprehensive, a type of passionate Blakean manifesto (once more) aimed at mechanical rationalism, hypocrisy, and (with a fiercely personal thrust) purveyors of bad art. The rhythmical use of anaphoric repetition conveys the power of a solemn spoken credo. First Milton insists on the authority of inspiration as manifested in Poetic Genius: “Obey thou the Words of the Inspired Man” (40.29). He then tells of the need for the “annihilation” of the premises and conditions of material “slavery” in terms of the Contraries and Negations first discussed in the Marriage: “The Negation must be destroy’d to redeem the Contraries”. This is because the Negation is “a false Body”, “a Selfhood” covering the “Immortal Spirit” (40.30-36). His reasoning here, with a concrete example, so to speak, sheds light on the rather abstract pronouncements of the Marriage. “Negation” as “Selfhood” is seen to be a circumscriptive force, exclusionary mechanical reasoning, which (making abject the “Immortal Spirit”) claims prime understanding of the complexities of existence, thereby reducing it to a field of automatic operations of cause and effect. Blake, of course, opposes linear cause and effect with ongoing process, the interplay of “Contraries” such as male and female, which leads to the furtherance of life.53 Milton’s credo then follows: To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination, To bathe in the Waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human, I come in Self-annihilation & grandeur of Inspiration, To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour, To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration. (40.37; 41.1-4)

“Self-annihilation” involves the displacement of what is false with what is true, in a familiar Blakean collocation, but given new urgency in this context of extended apocalyptic vision: “Faith in the Saviour” in place of “Rational Demonstration” (or experiment), and “Inspiration” in place of “Memory”. The unholy trinity of “Bacon, Locke & Newton” is again granted no mercy, but seems more potently antagonistic in relation to the human embodiment of Albion with his “filthy garments”, which need to be removed so that he can be clothed “with Imagination”; Milton will also “cast 53 Though the right hemisphere of the brain should enable the left to appreciate the value of continuing process involved in the play of contraries, “the self-consistent rationalism of the left hemisphere has convinced it that it does not need to concern itself with what the right hemisphere knows: it believes it has the whole story itself. And it has three great advantages. First, it has control of the voice and the means of argument: the three Ls—language, logic and linearity—are all ultimately under lefthemisphere control” (McGilchrist, Ways of Attending, 25-26).

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aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration” (41.5-7). Then comes Blake’s more personal animus against the “tame” societal norm, evident in the cruel critique by Robert Hunt of Blake’s only exhibition. Hunt had written of Blake as an “unfortunate lunatic”, whose catalogue for his exhibition was a “farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain” (in Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 411).54 Blake, through Milton, rebuffs with a splendid indignation “the aspersion of Madness” that is “Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finishers” of weak, “paltry” art: “paltry Blots”, “paltry Rhymes” and “paltry Harmonies” (41.810). This indignation, certainly Miltonic in its intensity, informs the entire passage, recalling Thomas Greene’s awareness of Milton’s evincing a deep “understanding of Old Testament language, with its dense orchestration of imagery, its poetic abandon, its visionary fire, not more restrained . . . but less restrained than classical poetry” (Greene, Descent from Heaven, 381). For Greene, it will be remembered, Milton shows “that electric dynamism the ancients thought was divine or demonic” (Descent from Heaven, 23). The same might be said of Blake at present. Blake’s focus becomes wider, to encompass the “caterpillar” of corruption in “State Government”, the questioning state of mind which thrives on doubt because of envy of true knowledge centred in “the wisdom of the ages”, and the hypocritical purveyors of “Benevolence & Virtue”. He excoriates one “Who creeps into State Government like a caterpillar to destroy” (41.11),55 and he would “cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning / But never capable of answering”, “Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge”, and who, while “talking of Benevolence & Virtue”, “murders time on time” “those who act with Benevolence & Virtue” (41.1220). In summation, he brands all as the “destroyers of Jerusalem” and “murderers” of “Jesus”, “who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life”, bringing this lack of spiritual awareness into proximity with aesthetic bankruptcy. The conflation is highly significant for Blake, underlining the connection of Poetic Genius with the Real Man, the Christ within everyone, concealed by material delusion: “These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers 54

The exhibition was in 1809, a year after the final etching date of Milton, but judging from other of Blake’s remarks in the catalogue, Hunt’s views are broadly representative. It is fitting that Blake in Jerusalem should have characterised the three Hunt brothers as a triple-headed giant named “Hand” (the Hunt sigil; the printer’s emblem of a pointing hand—a type of meme), who plots “to devour Albion’s Body of Humanity & Love” (BCW 708). 55 With shades of the “invisible worm” which “destroys” the “Rose” in Songs of Experience (BCW 213).

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Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal Life, Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination By imitation of Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance.” (41.21-24)

A reference to the Last Judgment, with which the poem concludes, forms the climax of this diatribe, and thus ties in with the conjoining of Milton with his Emanation, signalling the end of his mission, which had begun with the exclamation: “What do I here before the Judgment? without my Emanation / With the daughters of memory & not with the daughters of inspiration?” (14.28-29). Also, the “Divine Voice” “heard in the Songs of Beulah” referred to Milton as having “descended to Redeem the Female Shade / From Death Eternal” (33.11-12). “Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance” are a manifestation of materiality repeating itself, shut off from eternity: “These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation, Hiding the Human Lineaments as with an Ark & Curtains Which Jesus rent & now shall wholly purge away with Fire Till Generation is swallow’d up in Regeneration.” (41.25-28)

The circumscriptive “Ark” here (though bearing the same maternal connotations) differs from that linked to the descent of Ololon, to be discussed below. “Generation” “swallow’d up in Regeneration” is the consummation of the Last Judgment, but that “redemption” of the “Female Shade” “From Death Eternal” is yet to take place. However, the final integration of Ololon is not a simple matter, involving once more different layers of being, which demand of the reader a threefold awareness, at least, that undermines any sense of a comfortable resolution. Blake thus demands a sense of enlarged perception to encompass the concluding events, even if only achievable in terms of a rational following of what is presented. This, Blake clearly believes, is a first step towards our sharing his vision of the cleansing of ingrained habit, and the spiritual purgation of which this is allegoric. First, the conglomerate “Six-fold Miltonic Female” questions Milton (41.30), is overcome by the thought of “Eternal Death”, and her “Virgin” component separates off into “Milton’s Shadow”, a lower self, based in material existence, the “Covering Cherub”, “within” who is Satan, the “Selfhood deadly”:56

56 In Plate 37 of the poem, we see that “Milton’s Shadow” is “the Covering Cherub” and “The Spectre of Albion in which the Spectre of Luvah inhabits”, as well as “Satan” and “Rahab” “in the Selfhood deadly”: all these are material proponents of “the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of Creation” (BCW 527-528).

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the Virgin divided Six-fold, & with a shriek Dolorous that ran thro’ all Creation, a Double Six-fold Wonder Away from Ololon she divided & fled into the depths Of Milton’s Shadow, as a Dove upon the stormy Sea. (42.3-6)

The “Dove” upon the “stormy Sea” alludes to the beginning of Paradise Lost, where God “Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss / And mad’st it pregnant”.57 This materialist Jehovah, then, is linked fittingly through the “Double Six-fold Wonder” to “Milton’s Shadow”. The part of Ololon that is her better self, descends in a gory manner which nevertheless betokens the unification of Milton with his seven guardian angels, who become eight and then one, “Jesus the Saviour”, prepared for the mental fight underlying the Last Judgment with its “Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body”, to which Blake’s “soul”—after its visionary excursus—now returns, companioned by his own “sweet Shadow of Delight”, his wife Catherine: Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felpham’s Vale In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings Into the Fires of Intellect that rejoic’d in Felpham’s Vale Around the Starry Eight; with one accord the Starry Eight became One Man, Jesus the Saviour, wonderful! round his limbs The Clouds of Ololon folded as a Garment dipped in blood, Written within & without in woven letters, & the Writing Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression, A Garment of War. I heard it nam’d the Woof of Six Thousand Years. (42.7-15)

Feminine moon imagery, as well as the sense of the feminine as the sacred vessel or “Ark” of life, is incorporated in her descent.58 The clouds of blood seem to be the trappings of corporeality which need to pass through the “rejoicing” “Fires of Intellect”. This process results in the emergence of “Jesus the Saviour” wrapped in the bloody “Clouds of Ololon”, perhaps 57

Paradise Lost, 1.21-22.

58 Apart from his readings in Taylor, Blake would have found references to the “Ark”

of Isis in Bryant (New System, 252), and to her being sister of Osiris, the sun—hence the present moon imagery (27n93). Jung provides suggestive archetypal speculation: “The richly varied allegories of the Mother of God have . . . retained some connection with her pagan prefigurations in Isis (Io) and Semele. Not only are Isis and the Horus-child iconological exemplars, but the ascension of Semele, the originally mortal mother of Dionysus, likewise anticipates the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin” (Archetypes, 107). Ololon’s clouds wrapped around Jesus suggest something of her “Mother of God” status. The mother archetype is also symbolised by various vessels, including, one can assume, the ark (Archetypes, 81).

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reflective of both his assumption of mortality and the promise of immortality to follow, after the “Divine Revelation” of the apocalypse conveyed by John of Patmos. It is thus a “Garment of War”, but of spiritual war, which liberates from the “Woof of Six Thousand Years” of unenlightened material perception. The conclusion of the poem, which anticipates the Last Judgment, is sombre enough from a material perspective, eliciting the “weeping” of Oothoon “o’er her Human Harvest” and the “anger” of Los at the “Cry of the Poor Man” (42.32-35). Agents of wrath, “Lions & Tygers”, “sport & play” in anticipation of their destructive, if cleansing, task.59 Interestingly, “All Animals upon the Earth are prepar’d in all their strength” to do what is required, in an echo of Revelation 5:13, but also with an acknowledgement of their importance in the great scheme of redemptive existence, usually only considered in human terms (42.38-39).60 From a psychological perspective, this last judgment is the self-annihilation which enables the cleansing of the doors of perception, and the assumption of enlarged consciousness. From a spiritual perspective, it heralds promise for the future: Rintrah & Palamabron view the Human Harvest beneath. Their Wine-presses & Barns stand open, the Ovens are prepar’d, The Waggons ready; terrific Lions & Tygers sport & play. All Animals upon the Earth are prepar’d in all their strength To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations. (42.36-39; 43.1)

Perhaps because he did not wish to deflect from the momentousness of the occasion, Blake only provided explicit mention of this promise in a line written on the back of the final design, the image of a woman with arms upraised, stepping out of what may be a veil of generation, flanked by two male figures enfolded in leaves, which are either of the enclosing “vegetable world” or are also symbolic of regeneration: “Father & Mother, I return from flames of fire tried & pure & white”. The image itself, without these words, is ambiguous, because, though it seems an expression of praise and possible release, it doesn’t necessarily evoke a “return”.61 As frequently 59 Again, the tyger’s evil is “accident”, not “substance”; its “substance” is “power”, “the power of that energy which will return man to Eden”—in my terms, daemonic. See Nurmi, “Blake’s Revisions of ‘The Tyger’”, 670, 679. 60 Might Blake also have been playing with the Platonic notion of divine “animal” as “junior God”? 61 The spiritual father and mother are Jesus and his Emanation, Jerusalem; though she is considered the Emanation of Albion in Jerusalem, to be discussed next, an

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pointed out by others, Blakean meaning is often dependent on both word and image. *** What is arguably Blake’s masterpiece, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (BCW 620), is the culminating expression of his core myth of the fall of existence from eternity and its eventual redemption through divine mercy (centred in Albion as humanity and world). It comprises four chapters, each with a dedicatory preface containing daemonic (“beyond the human”) matter. Speaking in his own voice in these prefaces, Blake also addresses the reader in seven other passages in the epic, personalizing his involvement in the poem, though he is not an actor in it, as he is in Milton. Also notable in the epic is the appearance of the motley crew involved in Blake’s trial for sedition, barely disguised by rather grotesque renderings of their names; for example, the soldier Schofield is “Scofeld” and “Skofield” (with other variants), Cock, his supporter, is “Kox”, Quantock, one of the justices at the trial, is “Gwantok”. These are fitting representatives of the state of England’s manhood in its fallen condition; however, not simply limited butts of Blake’s indignation and resentment, they are permitted a past grace, having once presided in peace and love over all the districts of the British isles (BCW 709-710). Like all the protagonists and antagonists in the poem, they are in the end situated in relation to their eternal condition. The first preface, “To the Public”, states Blake’s principal belief: “The Spirit of Jesus is continual forgiveness of Sin” (BCW 621). The ongoing process of “forgiveness” is important in our present condition, and perhaps particularly for Blake in the wake of his trial and after the Hunt reviews of his exhibition.62 In Chapter Three of the epic (BCW 694), Joseph tells Mary, mother of Christ, of an “Angel” chastising him in a dream because of his imputation that the pregnant Mary is “a Harlot & an Adulteress”: “Jehovah’s Salvation Is without Money & without Price, in the Continual Forgiveness of Sins, In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity; for behold, There is none that liveth & Sinneth not!” (3.61.21-24)

The idea of “Mutual Sacrifice” is given clarity through Jesus’s words from Chapter Four (BCW 743): identity between Albion and Jesus has been underscored by the end of the poem. Indeed, this sense of identity extends to “All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth & Stone”. The “Name of their Emanations” is Jerusalem (BCW 747). 62 Bloom refers to the “two hideous attacks” made on Blake in the pages of the Hunt’s The Examiner (Visionary Company, 108).

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“And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love As God is Love; every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood.” (4.96.25-28)

Jesus perpetually sacrifices his divinity to enable humankind to exist; that is, he is immersed in materiality for our sakes. And because he is in us and we in him, our “kindness”, such as an act of “Forgiveness” in the material realm, takes from him a measure of his eternal nature, as it does from us (a sacrifice causing “a little Death / In the Divine Image” that he is, and that is within us). This “Continual Forgiveness of Sins”, then, is of universal import, with positive reverberations throughout the realms of spirit and matter. Blake realises that, in practical terms, it is the basis of a world free of all the consequences of non-forgiveness, from wars of retaliation to problems in societal and personal relationships. In figurative terms, forgiveness along with “self-annihilation” would result in the alignment of the four Zoas and their Emanations, and the cleansing of the doors of perception. Blake’s direct address to his readers contains his most frank expression of his awareness of his own nature, and the connection between love and forgiveness (BCW 621): I am perhaps the most sinful of men. I pretend not to holiness: yet I pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily as man with man, & the more to have an interest in the Friend of Sinners. Therefore, dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.

This disarming address (where “pretend to” means “lay claim to”) brings the articulation of love and forgiveness into the direct orbit of the reader, and must influence the reception of the following verse, which tells of the daemonic instruction involved in the learning of writing, from that God from whom all books are given, Who in mysterious Sinai’s awful cave To Man the wondrous art of writing gave: (2-4)

If Blake’s claim to divine mediumship is reinforced by the parallel with Milton, he capitalizes on the parallel by addressing this verse to a reader who is both a “lover of books” and a “lover of heaven”. That is, the sublime is confluent with human production, humanizing the extravagant claim which follows, that through Blake’s epic God “again”

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The “unfathom’d caverns” of the ear have admittance to eternity, but this is thanks to what has been bestowed, not because of any special preferment on Blake’s part, who is “perhaps the most sinful of men”. The conclusion of this verse is also extravagant, but perhaps no less so than The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, especially in the light of the preceding contextualization set up by Blake: Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be: Heaven, Earth & Hell henceforth shall live in harmony. (9-10)

The verse’s ambition is restrained by Blake’s focus on the “energetic exertion” of his “talent”. But despite these humanizing touches, Blake is insistent regarding daemonic agency, the expression of which takes on a distinct Neoplatonic cast, despite Blake’s example of the words of Jesus, just prior to his ascension.63 Blake writes: We who dwell on Earth can do nothing of ourselves; every thing is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep.

In Thomas Taylor’s notes to his translation of The Mysteries of Iamblichus (364), Blake might have found a reference to the “Daemons [who] preside over the parts of our body”: Proclus in the fragments of his Ten Doubts concerning Providence, preserved by Fabricius in the eighth vol. of his Bibliotheca Graeca, observes, “That the Gods, with an exempt transcendency, extend their providence to all things, but that daemons, dividing their superessential subsistence, receive the guardianship of different herds of animals, distributing the providence of the Gods, as Plato says, as far as the most ultimate division”.

That daemonic “dividing [of] their superessential subsistence” seems related to the dividing that occurs amongst Blake’s titanic daemons, into sons and daughters, Emanations and Spectres, all with different functions. Taylor continues to quote from Proclus:

63 Blake quotes, in Greek, Jesus’s “last words” prior to his ascension: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).

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“Hence some of them preside over men, others over lions or other animals, and others over plants; and still more partially, some are the inspective guardians of the eye, others of the heart, and others of the liver”. He adds, “all things, however, are full of Gods, some of whom exert their providential energies immediately, but others through daemons as media: not that the Gods are incapable of being present to all things, but that ultimates are themselves unable to participate primary natures”.

Taylor’s conclusion is in accord with Blake’s statement that “every thing” on earth “is conducted by Spirits, no less than Digestion or Sleep”: Hence it must be said that there is one principal daemon, who is the guardian and governor of every thing that is in us, and many daemons subordinate to him, who preside over our parts.

These syncretic allusions add to Blake’s intention in melding the stereotypes of printing with the archetypes of myth, when he writes “nor vain my types shall be” (Johnson and Grant in BPD 312n7). That is, printed words, images, and actual fields of energy (spiritual in his eyes) contribute to his enlightening productions. In the material “sleep” of Albion, his sons are active in attempting to destroy Jerusalem and the Eternity for which she stands (BCW 627). Los realises his “terrible Spectre” is his own “Pride & Self-righteousness”, and commands him to labour at the forge of material construction with him, at the same time detailing what the sons of Albion are up to: “Hand & Hyle & Koban, Skofeld, Kox & Kotope labour mightily In the Wars of Babel & Shinar; all their Emanations were Condens’d. Hand has absorb’d all his Brethren in his might; All the infant Loves & Graces were lost, for the mighty Hand Condens’d his Emanations into hard opake substances, And his infant thoughts & desires into cold dark cliffs of death.” (1.8.41-44; 1.9.1-2)

The representative Hand is an active agent of spiritual diminution, but we should not forget that the energised depiction of his condensing and hardening of the subtler elements of life works in concert with Los’s antipathy towards all he stands for. We need to be aware of a tension, then, as Los describes the works of Hand: “His hammer of gold he siez’d, and his anvil of adamant; He siez’d the bars of condens’d thoughts to forge them Into the sword of war, into the bow and arrow,

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Of course, the weapons of war must be imagined before they are created, but this is a gross misuse of divine imagination, a condensation, then, of the spiritual. Hand also reduces with his touch natural manifestations: “I saw the limbs form’d for exercise contemn’d, & the beauty of Eternity look’d upon as deformity, & loveliness as a dry tree.” (1.9.7-8)

Worse is his influence over the source of earthly spirituality, and his intention to utterly despoil his parent homeland: “I saw disease forming a Body of Death around the Lamb Of God to destroy Jerusalem & to devour the body of Albion, By war and stratagem to win the labour of the husbandman.” (1.9.9-11)

Farm labourers, “husbandmen”, bringers of life, are to become soldiers, bringers of death. Los’s sense of outrage is apparent in his denunciation of the sheer “folly” involved (a prime Blakean flaw). War, and its grotesqueries and perversions, is accompanied by suppression of Emanative passion through religious edict, suppression of artistic talent, as well as the suppression of the daemonic force of inspiration: “Genius forbidden by laws of punishment” (1.9.12-17). Los, compelled to labour at his forge, takes the effects of the oppression—“the sighs & tears & bitter groans”—and makes of them a weapon, “the spiritual sword” that works covertly to “lay open the hidden heart” to influences not bound by present circumstance (1.9.17-19). More, he uses the consequences of the ravenings of his enemies, the fallen sons and daughters of Albion, “Gwendolen & Cambel & Gwineverra”, to create a type of counter-offensive. Though his “tears flow down”, he “labours day and night” “in hope” to hammer “the soft affections” “into forms of cruelty” (1.9.19-28). He gives his reason for his apparently compliant labour: “That he who will not defend Truth may be compell’d to defend / A Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken”. The attractive “Lie” constructed from precious metals and “every precious stone” will be “defended” by these deviants, who surely delight in these “forms of cruelty”; the “Lie” will thus “snare” and catch them, enabling a resurgence of “Enthusiasm and Life” through the “arising” of his “Spectre” (1.9.29-31). Los is in effect building Golgonooza, the city of art in the midst of the wasteland of Ulro, in order to enable the continuance of “Enthusiasm and Life” in these depleted and delusive surroundings. This fact is made explicit soon after, as we also learn how the Urizenic Sons of Albion negate the Contraries of progression:

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And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength: They take the Two Contraries which are call’d Qualities, with which Every Substance is clothed: they name them Good & Evil; From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation Not only of the Substance from which it is derived, A murderer of its own Body, but also a murderer Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power, An Abstract objecting power that Negatives every thing. This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power, And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation. (1.10.7-16)

Obviously these Sons are under the sway of the “Holy Reasoning Power” of the Marriage, with its distinction between “Good” and “Evil”. But now it is made clear that the energies underlying these labels (attached to “Every Substance”, including, one must suppose, the human) are Contraries, and the distinction itself, “an Abstract” as opposed to a “Substance”, is a “Negation”. The “Negation” is “a murderer” of “Substance” because it turns the energy of “Substance” into static objects for the sake of false categorization based on a life-denying moral imperative: “in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation”. The building of Golgonooza stems from Los’s awareness of the Sons’ work: Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza, Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty; trembling in fear The Spectre weeps, but Los unmov’d by tears or threats remains. “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” (1.10.17-21)

Los’s declaration about “Creating a System”, then, so often ascribed to Blake himself,64 refers to the building of Golgonooza, the construction within the limits of delusive materiality of an outpost of art devoted to the elevation of consciousness, the cleansing of the doors of perception. The creation of Golgonooza is itself a creation; Los, though working at his forge, knows it is his “business” “to Create”, a term which embraces far more than the “forms” usually issuing from a forge. Through this utterance, Los begins to assume his role as the spirit of artistic inspiration and creation. He becomes, in effect, a daemon of “Poetic Genius”.

64 See, for instance, Edward Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 107.

Larrissy, though, is making a general point about the importance of Schlegelian “constant seeking” without end, and later ascribes the words to Los.

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Plate 19 (BCW 641) begins with a passage that is indicative of the ability of Blakean “prophecy” to project into the future on the basis of present conditions. The state of Albion bears an unsettling resemblance to the state of today’s world, in terms of, for instance, climate, extinction of species and refugee crises: His Children exil’d from his breast pass to and fro before him, His birds are silent on his hills, flocks die beneath his branches, His tents are fall’n; his trumpets and the sweet sound of his harp Are silent on his clouded hills that belch forth storms & fire. His milk of Cows & honey of Bees & fruit of golden harvest Is gather’d in the scorching heat & in the driving rain. (1.19.1-6)

Exile, extinction and pollution are all apparent in the first four lines, while extreme climate conditions are found in the next two lines. Though one does not want to impose contemporary concerns on past works, Blake’s predictions (based on present conditions he too experienced, no doubt) are the fruit of his own keen (prophetic) awareness of the future consequences of what was happening around him. They have an impact on Albion both as person and country. His psyche is conditioned by “misery and pain”, and his environment, once a space of “beauty and perfection”, is “fallen into dust”. As we are, so we see, and this is true of Albion, whose elements of paradise have become inverted: “corn is turn’d to thistles”, “apples into poison”, songbirds into “murderous crows”, “joys” into “bitter groans”, “voices of children” into “cries of helpless infants”. His restricted consciousness makes him “selfexiled from the face of light & shine of morning”. The “narrow house” that the world has become offers no “rest”; his Emanation or “Eon”, Jerusalem, “weeping”, is “hidden far within” “the cold and desolated Earth” of material circumscription. Material conditions influence mental conditions; mental acts caused those material conditions (1.19.7-16). Towards the end of Chapter One (BCW 648), in a manner akin to Shelley’s Prometheus, Albion recants his “all-powerful Human Words”, a curse on “Manhood”, that “God” “vengeance take” and “draw [it] down into this Abyss of sorrow and torture” (1.23.38-39). His recantation anticipates the return of the “Lamb of God”, and the deliverance of the Zoas, though his despair creates in him a swirl of contrary energies, as he at once denies and affirms divine presence. He sees Luvah (in his material guise) as the cause of the present state, not acknowledging his own role in the descent into material limitation.65 He recalls a former golden time (“the Mount of 65 In Zoas 3.41ff, Vala, Luvah’s Emanation, seduced Albion, after which he worshipped the image of Luvah seen in a cloud (BCW 292-293). Vala, material

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Olives was beheld over the whole Earth” “From bright Japan & China to Hesperia, France & England”) as foil to the present—reflecting, incidentally, British imperial extent, a reason why Blake makes Albion so central to his vision of the need for a world-wide regeneration, as indicated previously (1.24.46-53). Albion thus uses a common ploy to question divine engagement with the living—the apparent callousness of divinity leads to the conclusion that it is indifferent, as the Deists believed. His despair regarding the entombment of the “Lamb” (which effortlessly segues into disbelief) is accompanied by his equation of Jerusalem with his “Sin”, a notion generated by his “Sons”, who champion Vala—“she is our Mother! Nature!” (1.18.30)—and to which he still pays heed, despite immediately thereafter accusing his “Children” of a type of patricide: “you have assum’d the Providence of God & slain your Father” (1.24.56). And then, confusingly, he sees Jesus “before” him; these rapid shifts in perspective convey his state of turmoil, but also bring to the fore an interchange of conflicting energies which dramatize his emotional state: “Dost thou appear before me, who liest dead in Luvah’s Sepulcher? Dost thou forgive me, thou who wast Dead & art Alive? Look not so merciful upon me, O thou Slain Lamb of God! I die! I die in thy arms, tho’ Hope is banish’d from me.” (1.24.57-60)

Even though he dies, and so causes the “Veil” of materiality to “Vegetate” (24.61), his death in the “arms” of the “Lamb” is reason for “Hope” (although he sees the opposite). All Beulah laments this fall, and points out to the “Sons” that the vengeance they wrought on Luvah is continuous with that “Done to the Divine Lord & Saviour, who suffers with those that suffer”. Their means of illustration is based on Matthew 10:29-31 (the “fall” of a sparrow does not go unnoticed by God), which would emphasise the importance of apparently insignificant aspects of nature, stressing the value of an enlarged, posthuman perspective: “For not one sparrow can suffer & the whole Universe not suffer also In all its Regions, & its Father & Saviour not pity and weep.” (1.25.8-9)

One of the many exhortations in the poem follows; all of them (to Jesus, to Albion, to Jerusalem, to the “Holy Spirit”, to humankind) derive energy from each other, almost in the manner of a refrain: “Descend, O Lamb of God, & take away the imputation of Sin / By the Creation of States & the deliverance of Individuals Evermore. Amen” (1.25.12-13). “States”, for nature, is a signifier of Luvah’s own materiality, which in turn signifies the entrapment of “the Lamb of God” within a material “sepulchre”.

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Blake, are temporary conditions, through which individuals pass. Individuals bear no sin; the states through which they pass do. In Chapter One, Erin (spirit of Ireland—granted an authority by Blake denied by the English government of the time) speaks to the Daughters of Beulah (BCW 680): “Satan is the State of Death & not a Human existence; But Luvah is named Satan because he has enter’d that State: A World where Man is by Nature the enemy of Man, Because the Evil is Created into a State, that Men May be deliver’d time after time, evermore. Amen. Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the Eternal Human That walks about among the stones of fire in bliss & woe Alternate, from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels. This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies.” (1.49.67-75)

Hence, Beulah’s exhortation to Jesus. It is given especial force by being mounted in the face of much “doubt & despair”, and a submersion in the delusive “Sleep in Ulro”. The second preface, “To the Jews” (BCW 649), seems to draw on the ideas of certain antiquaries of the time, who stressed the connection among the tribes of the Old Testament and the Celtic peoples. Joseph Leerssen refers to the eighteen-century antiquarian, Charles Vallancey, whose name “has by now become a by-word for hare-brained fancy”, because of, for instance, his “basing elaborate theories on comparisons between languages of which he was utterly ignorant—Gaelic and Algonquin, or Gaelic and Chinese”. However, as Leerssen points out, Vallancey worked in a context where the central model of cultural antiquity was provided by the Old Testament. In that biblical context, it makes perfect sense to see kinship between Gaelic and Hebrew, or Gaelic and Chinese, since all linguistic difference dates back only to the Tower of Babel, and all the world’s nations are related, in that all descend from the three sons of Noah.

Leerssen further states that, “According to the paradigm in which Vallancey worked, the nations of Northern Europe were all descended from Japhet, son of Noah. . . . In particular, the European continent was held to have been populated by the offspring of Japhet’s progeny Gomer and Magog”.66 From this biblical context, then, Blake asks of the Jews: 66 Joseph Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), 71-72. Bryant’s work was based on similar assumptions (New System, “Preface”).

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Was Britain the Primitive Seat of the Patriarchal Religion? If it is true, my title-page is also True, that Jerusalem was & is the Emanation of the Giant Albion. It is True and cannot be controverted. Ye are united, O ye Inhabitants of Earth, in One Religion, The Religion of Jesus, the most Ancient, the Eternal & the Everlasting Gospel.

Of course, Blake is not preaching orthodox Christianity in a proselytizing way, but the age-old “Christianity” of selflessness and forgiveness centred in “Jesus the Imagination”.67 Whether guided more by mythopoeic inspiration or the strictures of biblical lore, Blake is sincere in his syncretism: Your Ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem and Noah, who were Druids, as the Druid Temples (which are the Patriarchal Pillars & Oak Groves) over the whole Earth witness to this day.

He then refers to the Adam Kadmon of Cabalistic tradition, in terms that surely equate him with “Jesus the Imagination”:68 You have a tradition, that Man anciently contain’d in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth: this you recieved from the Druids. . . . Albion was the Parent of the Druids, & in his Chaotic State of Sleep, Satan & Adam & the whole World was Created by the Elohim.

Fortified by such an equation, near the conclusion of this preface, Blake can assure the Jews that, because of their “Humility”, they “are the true Christians”. More, he ties the Jews and the Old Testament to his own myth of the fall into materiality and the promise of release (BCW 652):

67

According to Raine, Blake would have been acquainted with Philo (through Priestley’s Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ), for whom “the Logos is in the likeness of a man”. Philo, too, uses “the image of the Shepherd, dear to Blake, and found also in the Hermetica”. For Philo, the Logos is “‘that by which he both made the world, and also conversed with the patriarchs of the Old Testament’”. Thus, says Raine, “the Logos is both the Platonic world of ideas and the Hebrew spirit of prophecy”. The ideal world of the Platonists, according to Philo, “‘is no other than the logos of God, who makes the world’—and the physical world is a copy of this divine archetype” (Blake and Tradition, 2:194). 68 “‘The True Man’ is intellect, the Logos, who is, and contains, the intelligible world” (Blake and Tradition, 2:196). See also, Raine, Yeats the Initiate (Mountrath: The Dolmen Press, 1986), 109, where she refers to this specific passage in terms of Adam Kadmon.

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Perhaps sounding like the worst type of proselytising, Blake’s concluding exhortation to the Jews is actually, once more, based on his comprehensive understanding of “Jesus the Imagination”, the Cabalistic Adam Kadmon, and is thus an appeal to the Jews’ recognising the significance of this fact. Plate 38 of Chapter Two provides a passage which contrasts Albion’s materially and emotionally “petrific” state with a movingly personal evocation of divine immanence (BCW 664): His strong limbs shudder’d upon his mountains high and dark Turning from Universal Love, petrific as he went, His cold against the warmth of Eden rag’d with loud Thunders of deadly war (the fever of the human soul) Fires and clouds of rolling smoke! but mild, the Saviour follow’d him, Displaying the Eternal Vision, the Divine Similitude, In loves and tears of brothers, sisters, sons, fathers and friends, Which if Man ceases to behold, he ceases to exist. (2.38.6-13)

“Eternal Vision” and “Divine Similitude” (extensions of each other) manifest themselves in specific purveyors of human love and compassion: “brothers, sisters, sons, fathers and friends”—making up “the Divine Family”. Blake’s own conclusion—“if Man ceases to behold” this “Similitude”, “he ceases to exist”—is keyed to his humanization of the immensities which he is discussing, and (in figurative terms) does not shy away from the negating consequences of selfish indifference. When Jesus speaks (as the manifold Divine Family) he does so in an entirely selfless way, which, somewhat tempering the inevitable sentimentality attached to any account of the “Lamb of God”, broaches the necessity of “mental fight” and, in presenting the Saviour in the third person, underlines his ubiquitous presence: “Albion! Our wars are wars of life, & wounds of love With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought. Mutual in one another’s love and wrath all renewing We love as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses We behold multitude, or expanding, we behold as one, As One Man all the Universal Family, and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him

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Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life, Giving, recieving, and forgiving each other’s trespasses.” (2.38.14-22)

The action of “mutual” “love and wrath” leads to “renewal”, telling of the presence of the contraries of progress, with a glance back at the importance of the energy of wrath as recorded in the Marriage. The perspectivism attending the distinction of the one and the many underlines the need for world unity; we are all (not just humanity) participating in a single common life-force, whatever our creed. To be bound in awareness of that unity underlies the imperative mutually to care for our planet. We note that the “perfect harmony” of life in Eden is not an impossible Utopia void of contraries, but all negation there is overcome through the key attribute of forgiveness: in Eden there is “Giving, recieving, and forgiving each other’s trespasses”. The passage ends with an appeal to Albion to offer this forgiveness, while incorporating (for those who can see, and perhaps to satisfy his own sense of inclusiveness) allusions to Philo’s Hermetic Logos and “Shepherd” imagery, as well as the “all in all” of Boehme (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2:194): “He is the Good shepherd, he is the Lord and master, He is the Shepherd of Albion, he is all in all, In Eden, in the garden of God, and in heavenly Jerusalem. If we have offended, forgive us; take not vengeance against us.” (2.38.23-26)

That is, Blake is not being sectarian, though he is, says Raine, “affirming an aspect of the traditional doctrine that had been strongly reaffirmed by early Protestantism”. Raine feels that “Protestantism need never have come into existence as a separate sect had not the Roman Church tended for a time to present the objects of faith more and more as external and objective persons and events”. She sees Boehme as providing access to this traditional doctrine, and quotes the following passage from his Three Principles, a passage which illuminates much of Blake’s thought, and certainly underlies Jerusalem: Though we speak of the Creation of the World, as if we had been by as present, and had seen it, none ought to marvel at it, nor hold it impossible. For the Spirit that is in us, which one Man inherits from the other, that was breathed out of Eternity into Adam, that same Spirit has seen it all, and in the Light of God it sees it still; and there is nothing that is far off, or unsearchable: For the eternal Birth, which stands hidden in the Centre of Man, that does nothing new, it knows, works and does even the same that ever it did from Eternity. (In Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2:197)

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As Raine says, “had Coleridge perceived, as Blake did, that this living power and prime agent is indeed the eternal Jesus, the lifelong conflict between the poet and the Christian in Coleridge might have found, as in Blake, a perfect resolution and harmony” (197).69 Regarded as “Sin” by Albion and his “Sons”, Jerusalem is hidden in Beulah by the Daughters of Beulah, an act which expresses the care exerted by the Divine Family, and which includes, again, Blake’s notion of the Boehmean “punctum”, the opening of the centre to Eternity (BCW 668). Oothoon, that early champion of liberated energy, also plays a role— through the shelter afforded by her “palace”: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find, Nor can his Watch Fiends find it; ’tis translucent & has many Angles, But he who finds it will find Oothoon’s palace; for within Opening into Beulah, every angle is a lovely heaven. But should the Watch Fiends find it, they would call it Sin And lay its Heavens & their inhabitants in blood of punishment. (2.41.15-20)

This miniscule “Grain of Sand”, again, is a portal to the centre, to vision free of the limitations of the five senses, beautiful in itself—with its diamond-like “translucency” and “many Angles”—and the means to the beauty of enlightened perspective. Through this perspective, Jerusalem, like Oothoon, will be seen in her true form, not as the “harlot” imputed by fallen manhood. The guardians of bogus morality, the “Watch Fiends” of temporal delusion, would of course detect “Sin” in this liberated state, and condemn it. Interestingly, accompanying Jerusalem is Vala, spirit of material nature, also in hiding, though championed by the Sons of Albion. Their congruence here reaffirms the participation of all in the Divine Family, and looks forward to a passage in Plate 44 (BCW 675), where Blake speaks in his own voice, exhorting humankind: Man is adjoin’d to Man by his Emanative portion Who is Jerusalem in every individual Man, and her Shadow is Vala, builded by the Reasoning power in Man. O search & see: turn your eyes inward: open, O thou World 69

See the expression of Coleridge’s guilt regarding the conflict between his Christianity and the “living power” in “The Eolian Harp”, lines 54-64 (Complete Poetical Work, 102). But see, again, Leadbetter’s detection of daemonic intransigence in Coleridge’s guilt; he quotes the poet: “Metaphysics and Poetry, and ‘Facts of mind’—(i.e. Accounts of all the strange phantasms that ever possessed your philosophy-dreamers from Tauth, the Egyptian to Taylor, the English Pagan) are my darling Studies” (in Coleridge and the Daemonic, 26).

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Of Love & Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates! (2.44.38-42)

The passage is important in affirming the ubiquity of Jerusalem, but also the necessity of the “Reasoning power” in its proper application, where material and spiritual are acknowledged as one, as in the Marriage.70 Chapter Two ends with the Daughters of Beulah singing a type of redemptive hymn, another exhortation to the “Lamb of God” (BCW 681). Their emphasis on “Sin” acknowledges its presence rather than claiming categorical misapplication of the term, but refracts it through three perspectives which help illuminate which is the worst sin: “Come, O thou Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of Sin. To Sin & to hide the Sin in sweet deceit is lovely! To Sin in the open face of day is cruel & pitiless! But To record the Sin for a reproach, to let the Sun go down In a remembrance of the Sin, is a Woe & a Horror, A brooder of an Evil Day and a Sun rising in blood! Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the remembrance of Sin.” (2.50.2430)

If the first perspective regards sin in the light of sexual experience, it is not “sin” in Oothoon’s terms. For her, though, the pleasure derived from any secret act is unnatural, because cloaked in shame and hypocrisy. These Daughters, however, who are not hypocrites, accept the pleasure, whatever its source (and the human weakness), associated with such “sweet deceit”. The second perspective pertains to blatantly committed misdeeds that show no concern for the victims or consequences. The third perspective, linked to the poisonous effects of the suppression of anger as expressed in “A Poison Tree” (BCW 218),71 abstracting the act by objectifying it in memory for future use, is far worse than the second. Here the “Reasoning power” uses memory as a tool for vengeance, which would act in the future to negate the practice of forgiveness. 70

McGilchrist notes: “Deciding when to go with logic and when to go with realworld experience activates the right hemisphere, since, when it is inactive, we answer the question ‘is this true?’ by reference to the internal logic of the system alone” (Matter With Things, 258). In his example, the freezing cold Sahara being ice-bound is a “true” observation according to the “internal logic” of the left hemisphere of the brain; we need the intervention of the right hemisphere to bring us back to the real world, to perceive the proper context, and realise the limitations of a purely logical approach. 71 Ephesians 4:26: “Be ye angry, and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath”.

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The preface to Chapter Three is addressed “To the Deists” (BCW 681), and begins with an outright attack: “He never can be a Friend to the Human Race who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion”. He ties Deism, in passionate, exclamatory mode, to his concern with sin and forgiveness: Listen! Every Religion that Preaches Vengeance for Sin is the Religion of the Enemy & Avenger and not of the Forgiver of Sin, and their God is Satan, Named by the Divine Name. Your Religion, O Deists! Deism, is the Worship of the God of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the Religion of the Pharisees who murder’d Jesus.

When it comes to hypocrisy, the natural philosophers and thinkers of the Enlightenment (Blake’s usual suspects) are guilty of it, not those religious traditionalists they accuse: Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Hume, charge the Spiritually Religious with Hypocrisy; but how a Monk, or a Methodist either, can be a Hypocrite, I cannot conceive. We are Men of like passions with others & pretend not to be holier than others; therefore, when a Religious Man falls into Sin, he ought not to be call’d a Hypocrite; this title is more properly to be given to a Player who falls into Sin, whose profession is Virtue & Morality & the making Men Self-Righteous.

His criticism of Rousseau would find an ally in J. M. Coetzee, who, in his inaugural address at the University of Cape Town,72 exposes the regression into “Self-Righteousness” involved in Rousseau’s apparent autobiographical sincerity: To hope to attain the truth of one’s life-story by self-interrogation merely lands one in an endless regression, since any position one settles on as the truth, however unkind it may be, can be subjected to sceptical questioning. For example: “But am I not lying to myself? Am I not making myself out to be worse than I am in order to make myself feel good about my ruthless honesty?”

In Blake’s terms, “The Book written by Rousseau call’d his Confessions, is an apology & cloke for his sin & not a confession”. Secluded and alone in

72 J. M. Coetzee, Truth in Autobiography (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1984), 4. Coetzee follows Dostoevsky’s critique of Rousseau.

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the world, he “found no Friend”, for “Friendship cannot exist without Forgiveness of Sins continually”. Enlightenment thinkers, because of their allegiance to the model of rule and measurement stemming from classical times, become, by association, accomplices in the Greek and Roman promulgation of instrumental violence, hence they “acquit & flatter the Alexanders & Caesars”, along with contemporary tyrants, “the Lewis’s & Fredericks”, the “causes of War”: Those who Martyr others or who cause War are Deists, but never can be Forgivers of Sin. The Glory of Christianity is To Conquer by Forgiveness. All the Destruction, therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural religion.

The fight with Deism, of course, goes back at least as far as There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One (BCW 97-98), though there Blake’s focus is on the importance of Poetic Genius in expanding perception, not the practical necessity of forgiveness in its relation to Jesus to achieve the same end:73 “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”. “Repeating the same dull round over again” corresponds figuratively to the petrific “States” in which Albion is now trapped, the “terrible Surfaces” referred to by Erin, which can only be “removed” by Jesus: “If thou hadst been here, our brother Albion had not died” (2.50.11). Involved in “the ratio of all things”, Deism is in the position of Satan in the stanzas which conclude the preface: When Satan first the black bow bent And the Moral Law from the Gospel rent, He forg’d the Law into a Sword And spilled the blood of mercy’s Lord. (17-20)

Satan installed the tyrannical Mosaic code, a code counter to the message of forgiveness in “the Gospel”, as the Marriage long since pointed out: for instance, did Jesus not “turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery?” More generally, “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules” (BCW 158). Law without “mercy” simply follows the letter in mechanistic fashion, and so becomes a “Sword”; adherence to such “Law” 73

Though Jesus and Poetic Genius are synonymous in Blake’s terms, present emphasis is on Jesus as redeemer.

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figuratively “spilled the blood” of the biblical Jesus. Blake deliberately spiritualizes the suffering brought about by Deistic materialism, to emphasise in an antithetical way its counterproductive worldview: For a Tear is an Intellectual thing, And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow. (25-28)

The mental war of enlarged perception is apparent in the metaphoric transpositions: the “Tear” is “Intellectual” or spiritually potent; the “Sigh”, a mental “Sword” that bears the strength “of an Angel King”; the “bitter groan” of the “Martyr” bears the even greater strength of “an Arrow” from God’s “Bow”. The undercutting of materialism by a spiritual dimension, figured by this stanza, is at the heart of the mental war in Jerusalem. In the body of Chapter Three, Jesus, speaking with Jerusalem, gives explicit expression to his posthuman core (BCW 696). He is daemonic in the sense of being “beyond the human”, but also in his bridging the human and divine: “I am the Resurrection & the Life. I Die & pass the limits of possibility as it appears To individual perception.” (3.62.18-20)

He is keenly aware of the need to mend the breech between the material and spiritual, figured here through Luvah and Vala, trapped in the “Grave” of corporeality: “Luvah must be Created And Vala, for I cannot leave them in the gnawing Grave But will prepare a way for my banished-ones to return.” (3.62.20-22)

Also aware of limited “individual perception”, he will offer support until a general expansion of vision occurs. His focus remains on Jerusalem in her fallen state (representative of humankind in general, as she is within us all). He calls to her: “Come now with me into the villages, walk thro’ all the cities.” He evokes the locations and tribulations of common corporeal existence, indicating the extent of the sphere of his care and influence: “villages”, “cities”, “streets”, “prison & judgment”, “hard journeys” and “howling wildernesses” (3.62.23-29). He radiates within Luvah’s albeit “bloody” “Cloud” a “Divine Vision”, perceived by Los, and giving him “hope” in the midst of his “despair”. The despair finds expression in a passage following this, in which “the Four Zoas

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of Albion, the Four Living Creatures, the Cherubim” are harnessed in the “Plow” of “Nations”, and “tremble before the Spectre” of Los. This fear seems to signal the beginning of the sundering of their unity. It is located in a passage notable for its syncretic density: Luvah slew Tharmas, the Angel of the Tongue, & Albion brought him To Justice in his own City of Paris, denying the Resurrection. Then Vala, the Wife of Albion, who is the Daughter of Luvah, Took vengeance Twelve-fold among the Chaotic Rocks of the Druids Where the Human Victims howl to the Moon, & Thor & Friga Dance the dance of death, contending with Jehovah among the Cherubim. The Chariot Wheels filled with Eyes rage along the howling Valley In the Dividing of Reuben & Benjamin bleeding from Chester’s River. (3.63.512)

As Stevenson suggests, the slaying of Tharmas, “the Angel of the Tongue”, likely refers to the curtailment of free speech in revolutionary Paris, and “consequent post-war suppression of all revolutionary elements” (in Blake, 765n).74 While the “Resurrection” might indeed refer to the Revolution, its denial also refers to the general blindness of materialism. Druidic human sacrifice is included, along with the Scandinavian “Thor & Friga”, seemingly on the same level as “Jehovah among the Cherubim”. Ezekiel’s “Chariot Wheels filled with Eyes” (Ezekiel 10:12) appear to “divide” Albion from the Holy Land (as Stevenson notes, division is apparent when Cheshire was given to Benjamin on Plate 16 of Chapter One (BCW 637)).75 The multifold, furious nature of this visionary explosion, meant to involve various perspectives in a sense of existential turmoil, from historical to theological and mythical, is balanced by a passage referred to at the beginning of my discussion of Jerusalem, that involving Mary and Joseph. I return to this passage now in more detail. The “vision” of Mary and Joseph is offered by “the Divine Voice” to Jerusalem, almost as a living tableau (hence bearing an aesthetic import, related to “Jesus the Imagination”), to “comfort” her. The interaction between Mary and Joseph hearkens back to that between Oothoon and Theotormon, but with a stirringly positive conclusion which highlights the resonances of forgiveness. First an

74

Stevenson ascribes this insight to Erdman, but Erdman’s suggestion is far more general: “when the armies of Albion were trying a brother Nation ‘in his own City of Paris’, they were demonstrating that a certain kind of peace can strangle nations as cruelly as war”. Erdman’s footnote (cited by Stevenson) adds nothing to this observation (Erdman, Prophet Against Empire, 463). 75 Stevenson in Blake, 766n. This is one division among many.

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obviously pregnant Mary tries to reason with the “furious” Joseph, who brands her as “a Harlot & an Adulteress” (BCW 694): She looked & saw Joseph the Carpenter in Nazareth & Mary His espoused Wife. And Mary said, “If thou put me away from thee Dost thou not murder me?” Joseph spoke in anger & fury, “Should I Marry a Harlot & an Adulteress?” (3.61.3-6)

What makes Blake’s account of Joseph’s jealousy even more human, is the poet’s belief that Mary was indeed not a virgin. This detracts nothing from the glory of Christ; quite the opposite—the facts of his birth make him inextricably bound to earthly “sin” and aware (through proximity) of its nature, and, subsequently, the strength in its forgiveness. The following passage is from The Everlasting Gospel (BCW 756): Was Jesus Born of a Virgin Pure With narrow Soul & looks demure? If he intended to take on Sin The Mother should an Harlot been, Just such a one as Magdalen With seven devils in her Pen; Or were Jew Virgins still more Curst, And more sucking devils nurst? (1.1-8)

Into this Blakean context, Mary raises the example of the woman caught in adultery and protected by Jesus, and confronts Joseph with the same issue: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). She thus responds to Joseph: “Art thou more pure Than thy Maker who forgiveth Sins & calls again Her that is Lost? Tho’ She hates, he calls her again in love. I love my dear Joseph, But he driveth me away from his presence; yet I hear the voice of God In the voice of my Husband: tho’ he is angry for a moment, he will not Utterly cast me away;” (3.61.6-11)

Though Mary’s subservient attitude is certainly reflective of a maledominated world (in biblical times and in Blake’s time—the present cannot be excluded, either), her inherent character, compared with that of Joseph, is far superior (again, not unlike Oothoon’s), challenging the chauvinistic spirit of the age: “if I were pure, never could I taste the sweets Of the Forgive[ne]ss of Sins; if I were holy, I never could behold the tears

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Of love, of him who loves me in the midst of his anger in furnace of fire.” (3.61.11-13)

Unlike Theotormon, Joseph relents; but, as noted earlier, only after the visionary encounter with a tutelary Angel in a dream. His response incorporates Jerusalem, making her story continuous with that of the holy family (augmented by a reference to the personification of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16, as a woman nurtured by God): “Ah my Mary!” said Joseph, weeping & embracing her closely in His arms: “Doth he forgive Jerusalem, & not exact Purity from her who is Polluted? I heard his voice in my sleep & his Angel in my dream, Saying, ‘Doth Jehovah Forgive a Debt only on condition that it shall Be Payed? Doth he Forgive Pollution only on conditions of Purity?’” (3.61.1418)

The angel underlines, once more, “Forgiveness”: “‘Jehovah’s Salvation Is without Money & without Price, in the Continual Forgiveness of Sins, In the Perpetual Mutual Sacrifice in Great Eternity; for behold, There is none that liveth & Sinneth not! And this is the Covenant Of Jehovah: If you Forgive one-another, so shall Jehovah Forgive You, That He Himself may Dwell among You. Fear not then to take To thee Mary thy Wife, for she is with Child by the Holy Ghost.’” (3.61.21-27)

I dealt with the notion of “Mutual Sacrifice” earlier, and related it to Jesus’s words near the end of the epic: “if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself / Eternally for Man, Man could not exist” (4.96.25-26). As God is in Man, the giving of self is “Mutual”. And that Blake now writes that Mary “is with Child by the Holy Ghost” is not a recantation of the earlier view regarding the corporeal source of her pregnancy: the “Holy Ghost” is within us all. What is it, then, that makes “the Lamb of God” special? His openness to Eternity; a potential that needs to be fulfilled in each individual. It is Mary’s response that is particularly uplifting, a joyous expression of life’s continuities, including the sense of blending with and caring for the posthuman world: Then Mary burst forth into a Song: she flowed like a River of Many Streams in the arms of Joseph & gave forth her tears of joy Like many waters, and Emanating into gardens & palaces upon Euphrates, & to forests & floods & animals wild & tame from Gihon to Hiddekel, & to corn fields & villages & inhabitants Upon Pison & Arnon & Jordan. (3.61.28-33)

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The repeated ampersand (eleven times in five lines, not counting the regular “and”) underlines the burgeoning of continuous life, with “many waters”, “gardens”, “palaces”, “forests”, “animals”, “corn fields” and “villages”, along with specifically named riverine (and therefore fertile) locations. Mary’s response is a dramatization of the effects of forgiveness. It is a potent encapsulation of Blake’s purpose in Jerusalem. The preface to the final chapter of Jerusalem is “To the Christians” (BCW 716). Here Blake voices his credo in the most explicit terms in all his writings. One of its epigraphs is the well-known quatrain from Plate 77: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

The dangerous labyrinth of materialist existence, stemming back to the myth of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur, is implied by the lines. “Winding” the “golden string” which Blake offers through the conviction expressed in his writings “into a ball”, is to follow the words and images in the epic to the state of clarified vision figured by “Heaven’s gate” in the “wall” of the mundane world, a world transformed by the implications of imaginative vision into “Jerusalem”. In the preface proper Blake indeed affirms his “golden string” to be the “exercise [of] the Divine Arts of Imagination”: I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination, Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more. (BCW 716-717)

“Imagination” is clearly not that which deals with the imaginary. Naming it in this way, Blake perceives it as an active “World” informed by continuing creation. What precisely can he mean when he calls it “real & eternal”? The “exercise” of imagination is to participate in a permeative, eternal life-force, which can be seen in a way that is consistent with an ordinary experience of continuing material existence, which carries on within us and (indefinitely) without us, so to speak. That Blake spiritualizes this life-force is itself consistent with his visionary capabilities, an expansion, by all accounts, of

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what is considered normal perception.76 Sharing through his art the thought on which his visions are based was his means of indicating that behind material life are strata of energy (the interacting contraries, dramatized in the Prophetic Books), including the energy of human thinking, and, ultimately, the pure Being from which all existence emerges.77 Moreso than Coleridge, Blake sees himself as participating in the creative energy which derives from pure Being.78 He continues: The Apostles knew of no other Gospel. What were all their spiritual gifts? What is the Divine Spirit? is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain? What is the Harvest of the Gospel & its Labours? What is that Talent which it is a curse to hide? What are the Treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies & Performances? What are the Gifts of the Gospel, are they not all Mental Gifts? Is God a Spirit who must be worshipped in Spirit & in Truth, and are not the Gifts of the Spirit Every-thing to Man?

The “Holy Ghost” is “an Intellectual Fountain”, or source of mental activity at one with individual intellect. Therefore it can itself be equated with human mental activity. Thus, the gifts pertaining to it, the “Harvest”, the “Talent”, “the Treasures of Heaven”, are all “Mental Studies & Performances”, are “all Mental Gifts”. They are, in effect, “Gifts of the Spirit” from God as “Spirit”, and must be “Every-thing to Man”. Blake has stated the case elsewhere, but never so persistently. He is not writing in a metaphorical way, though we inevitably take it as such. The reality of mental existence is not something we usually think about. And “Mental Studies” for him include “Science”—taken in its original sense as meaning “knowledge”

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McGilchrist refers with approval to Michael Clarke’s Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: “Homeric man does not have a body or a mind: ‘rather this thought and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism’”. Clarke, in accord with McGilchrist’s ideal of harmonised interaction of the brain hemispheres, “stresses the importance of flow, of melting and of coagulation” (in Master and Emissary, 263-264; see Clarke, Flesh and Spirit, 115). 77 Mark Ferrara refers to this state when he tells of “the discarding of linear notions and superfluous conceptions of reality for a pure experience of the ground of being”. See “Blake’s Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia”, Utopian Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 22. 78 I refer, of course, to Coleridgean “secondary Imagination”, as discussed in the Biographia Literaria (London: Routledge, 1983), 304. Coleridge, though, would not have seen our mortal reflecting of divine operations, “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am”, as divine in themselves. However, as Leadbetter points out, in “Dejection”, Coleridge unites “poetic realisation with his active convergence with autonomous forces beyond the self” (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 55).

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(scientia), but, by the late eighteenth century, incorporating scientific knowledge as currently understood: O ye Religious, discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise Art & Science! I call upon you in the Name of Jesus! What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? is it Meat & Drink? is not the Body more than Raiment? What is Mortality but the things relating to the Body which Dies? What is Immortality but the things relating to the Spirit which Lives Eternally? What is the Joy of Heaven but Improvement in the things of the Spirit? What are the Pains of Hell but Ignorance, Bodily Lust, Idleness & devastation of the things of the Spirit?

If Blake passionately fulminates as if from the pulpit, it is not a common lesson he preaches. His object is not sin and repentance, or the selfish pursuit of goodness in the light of a divine ideal, but a reasoned and reasonable understanding of the significance of the mental life. His orthodox terms (such as “labours of the Gospel”) are far from orthodox in import: Answer this to yourselves, & expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel. Is not this plain & manifest to thought? Can you think at all & not pronounce heartily That to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem, and to Despise Knowledge is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders.

Here is the crux of his message “To the Christians” in the context of the present poem: “to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem”. Mental labour is to build up Jerusalem, or construct in terms other than material ones, creations and habitations of thought that are of enduring value, and which are inestimably enriching. If there is a personal note in what follows, Blake is revealing and acknowledging his own humanity, but, in more broad terms, is continuing his mental fight against ignorance and (in congruence with Jerusalem as a whole) the misconception about “Sin”: And remember: He who despises & mocks a Mental Gift in another, calling it pride & selfishness & sin, mocks Jesus the giver of every Mental Gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving Hypocrite as Sins; but that which is a Sin in the sight of cruel Man is not so in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly & publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem.

By calling generally for “some Mental pursuit” in order to “Build up Jerusalem”, Blake is hardly being prescriptive. But if not insisting on a cleansing of the doors of perception, he is insisting that a degree of

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sacredness is involved in whatever our “Mental pursuit” might be. Blake would focus our attention on the significance of such work. If this focus usually slips our attention, it is because we are conditioned by what Blake would call our fallen state. From the position of this fallen state, the “human condition”, Blake’s entire effort in Jerusalem is posthuman. The very notion of a world-wide redeemed state of existence is posthuman. So Blake, ever canny and pragmatic, and, in his view, “perhaps the most sinful of men” (which we can surely doubt), emphasises a continuing “Building up of Jerusalem”, a continuing mental fight. A sense of this continuing mental fight in our own day is conveyed by Steve Mentz: “How can we combine our human need to reform the great city with our awareness of the posthuman plurality that environs our bodies? The human in the prophet preaches repentance, change, and survival. The posthuman into which the prophet dives promises shock, disorientation, and possibilities we cannot contain”.79 From Chapter Four itself, I first single out a passage where Los comes into his own (BCW 738). He calls on his Spectre to go to “the Giants of Albion”, who “call themselves Deists” and worship “Nature and Natural Religion”. He recapitulates some of the points made in the preface, underlining an identity with Blake himself: “Go to these Fiends of Righteousness, Tell them to obey their Humanities & not pretend Holiness When they are murderers: as far as my Hammer & Anvil permit. Go, tell them that the Worship of God is honouring his gifts In other men: & loving the greatest men best, each according To his Genius: which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other God than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity.” (4.91.5-11)

Daemonic “Genius” “is the Holy Ghost in Man”; Blake could not be more explicit. His mental war is conducted against hypocritical orthodoxy in all its external manifestations: “He who envies or calumniates, which is murder & cruelty, Murders the Holy-one. Go, tell them this, & overthrow their cup, Their bread, their altar-table, their incense & their oath, Their marriage & their baptism, their burial & consecration.” (4.91.12-15)

He then tells of the importance of “spiritual gifts” in relation to friendship, as opposed to “corporeal gifts”, which seem to breed misunderstanding and 79 See Steve Mentz, Break Up the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 71.

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dissent (perhaps with a glance in the direction of Blake’s problems with Hayley):80 “I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only Made enemies. I never made friends but by spiritual gifts, By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought.” (4.91.16-18)

“Severe contentions of friendship” seems to imply the productive interaction of contraries in his relationships; “the burning fire of thought” is obviously related to the promulgation and interchange of energised ideas, in themselves “burning” but also conveying inspirational flame to others, in the nature of “fire”. He emphasises that divinity is attainable in the proximate, quotidian environs of the family, not in supersensual reaches: “He who would see the Divinity must see him in his Children, One first, in friendship & love, then a Divine Family, & in the midst Jesus will appear;” (4.91.19-21)

He then, building on this notion of starting with “One first” (a person’s own “Children”), establishes the importance of true “Minute Particulars”, “Organized”, not the “Disorganized” “bloated Forms” that the “Fiends of Righteousness” call by this name: “so he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole, Must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organized, & not as thou, O Fiend of Righteousness, pretendest; thine is a Disorganized And snowy cloud, brooder of tempests & destructive War. You smile with pomp & rigor, you talk of benevolence & virtue; I act with benevolence & Virtue & get murder’d time after time. You accumulate Particulars & murder by analyzing, that you May take the aggregate, & you call the aggregate Moral Law, And you call that swell’d & bloated Form a Minute Particular; But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, & every Particular is a Man, a Divine Member of the Divine Jesus.” (4.91.21-31)

Comprehension of the “Minute Particulars” (which Bloom refers to as “the irreducible individualities that make up a human” (Blake’s Apocalypse, 80 See, for instance, Ackroyd, Blake, 235: “Blake had also shown [Hayley] part of an epic poem he was writing in the cottage but, according to Blake himself, his attitude had been one of ‘contempt’—‘he is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a Chapter in the Bible’, by which he meant that Hayley did not have the spiritual capacity to understand him at all”.

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399), but a term whose application extends beyond the human to any entity or form), involves a focus on “the irreducible individualities” to compass “a perfect Whole”.81 “Vision” is not vague, a “snowy cloud”, but precise— again, “Organized”. “Disorganization” belongs to the world of “pretence”, where lack of coherence, perhaps, imaged in the “snowy cloud” of deceitful materiality82 leads to the misunderstandings that provoke “tempests” of anger and “destructive War”. Mere “talk of benevolence & virtue” is very different from “acting with benevolence & Virtue”; practising the former is to resort to the protection afforded by a hypocritical veneer to those who speak and never act, while the forthrightness marking the latter (of extreme discomfort to the target of virtuous indignation) leads to “murder” by societal contumely. Not that the “righteous” are unaware of particulars; logical or mechanical analysis deals in particulars, a type of “murder” caused by disassemblage for the sake of “the aggregate”, a generalization based on quantification and not an appreciation of the “irreducible individualities” that make up a “Whole”. “Moral Law” derived from quantity and not quality (the act judged according to the letter, with its long string of precedents, and not according to the reason for or circumstances surrounding it) is bogus, “swell’d & bloated” by the complacencies attending analysis void of the faceted explorations of conscience. To focus on the particulars is to find the quality, the “vitality” within them. By calling every particular “a Man”, Los is ascribing consciousness and divine value to even the tiniest elements of existence, recalling the daemonic extensions of Proclus, throughout the world and within the body of individual humans, as reported in Iamblichus (Mysteries of Iamblichus, 364). There is a curious image at the beginning of Plate 93 (BCW 740), of pointing figures who kneel in a small, flaming space at the top of the plate. They bear the names “Anytus”, “Melitus” and “Lycon”, the three accusers of Socrates at his trial. Appearing on the thigh of the first figure, and continuing to that of the second, are the words completing a whole statement: “Anytus, Melitus and Lycon thought Socrates a very Pernicious Man. So Caiaphas thought of Jesus”. If these are the accusers of Socrates, their confined, crouching postures and strained pointing at supposed guilt (as they glance at each other for group-confirmation, at the expense of independent decision making), show their limited perception and their hypocritical sense of societal “righteousness”. Likened to Caiaphas, they are absorbed by Blake into his vision of Jesus, another indication of his 81 As Blake writes in Chapter Three: “Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars” (BCW 687). 82 Again, “cloud is Blake’s constant symbol of the physical body” (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:77).

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syncretic predisposition, and his recognition of the value of certain classical possessors of “Mental Gifts”, whatever his concerns about classical militarism. Within the lines of Jerusalem, Blake’s three accusers at his trial, likened to the accusers of Socrates by Bloom (Blake’s Apocalypse, 412),83 are amalgamated in Hand, with his “Three strong sinewy Necks & Three awful and terrible Heads” (BCW 708). In his “Introduction to the Apology of Socrates”, Thomas Taylor writes that Melitus could only have accused Socrates of impiety because of the philosopher saying that he “was connected with a presiding daemon” (4:196). Blake would understand this “presiding daemon” as Socrates’s Genius; and Jesus was similarly condemned for, in effect, following his own Genius, his Divine Humanity. This image, then, taking up just over a third of the original plate, and strategically appearing towards the end of Jerusalem, bears a weight of significance and allusion: a confluence of Platonic, Christian, mythic and personal energies for Blake, meant to provoke thought. Blake’s magnificent conclusion to Jerusalem brings the four Zoas together (BCW 745-747), with an initial expression of their “Incomprehensible” nature (“beyond the human” indeed), with multi-faceted identities, so carefully “organized” by Blake over the course of the prophecies that their appearance now seems inevitable: The Four Living Creatures, Chariots of Humanity Divine Incomprehensible, In beautiful Paradises expand. These are the Four Rivers of Paradise And the Four Faces of Humanity, fronting the Four Cardinal Points Of Heaven, going forward, forward irresistible from Eternity to Eternity. (4.98.24-27)

The “Living Creatures” and “Chariots” of Revelation, the “Rivers of Paradise” of the Old Testament, the Blakean “Faces of Humanity”, the “Cardinal Points” of “Heaven”, combine in an “irresistible” forward surge “from Eternity to Eternity”. The expansive sweep of the language is almost too hyperbolic, but by now in our reading of Blake “Eternity” has become localised within his poetic creations; at least, it is so familiar as to be imaginatively comprehensible, especially if we recall the “opening of the centre”, the “infinity” within “a grain of sand”, and the “Eternity in an hour”. Their conversation embraces and informs the creation of a universe: And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright 83 Bloom, in turn, refers to Frye: “We may remember that in Faithful’s trial in Bunyan there were three accusers as well as twelve jurors, named Envy, Superstition and Pickthank, and the same image of three accusers turns up in the Book of Job and the trial of Socrates” (Fearful Symmetry, 377).

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Redounded from the Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect, Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders Divine Of Human Imagination throughout all the Three Regions immense Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age; (4.98.28-33)

As the “Human Imagination” and “Three Regions immense” of humankind are evoked as the creative centre, the founding speech of the Zoas is indeed localised; or, rather, their creative expansiveness is seen to be coeval with consciousness, realised now, through Blake’s language, as illimitable: & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens Of Death was seen in regeneration terrific or complacent, varying According to the subject of discourse: & every Word & Every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakeness of Nervous fibres: such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary; & they walked To & fro in Eternity as One Man, reflecting each in each & clearly seen And seeing, according to fitness & order. (4.98.33-40)

A justness of organization is evident, of “fitness & order”, where (in a continuum of lettered “discourse”—on “Death” “seen in regeneration”, and “Human” being) the “varying” “Organs of Perception” determine limits of “Expansion or Contraction”, and “the Translucence or / Opakeness of Nervous fibres”. From the perspective of Eternity, this diversity is a unity of “One Man”, a progressive interaction of contraries. This influence extends in posthuman terms, as Revelation and Ezekiel are again evoked, with Blake’s first-person reportage adding a sense of prophetic authority, conditioned by our awareness of the presumption of this allusiveness and the corresponding immersion in his material the poet must have felt—a type of self-annihilation perhaps: And I heard Jehovah speak Terrific from his Holy Place, & saw the Words of the Mutual Covenant Divine On Chariots of gold & jewels, with Living Creatures, starry & flaming With every Colour, Lion, Tyger, Horse, Elephant, Eagle, Dove, Fly, Worm And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array, Humanize In the Forgiveness of Sins according to thy Covenant, Jehovah. (4.98.40-45)

The “Living Creatures” (Zoas) seem continuous with the earthly creatures, from the magnificent “Lion” and “Tyger” to the lowly “worm”. The “all wondrous Serpent” has by now a host of Blakean textual references, such as the serpentine mutations of Orc and the other Zoas. Visually, images range from the Immortals enwrapped by serpents, falling into mortality,

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from Plate 7 of Urizen (1794), the tempera colour monotype of the creation of Adam (1795), where Adam too is enwrapped by the serpent of materiality, to the figure of Satan in Blake’s engraving for Job (much later than Jerusalem, 1826).84 They “Humanize / In the Forgiveness of Sins”, implying, with the “all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array” at their head, a turn from pure materiality (and the “sinful” fall into mortality) to a desire for higher consciousness. The “Cry from all the Earth”, with its “Living Creatures”, its “great City of Golgonooza in the Shadowy Generation”, its “Thirty-two Nations”, even “All Human Forms” of “Tree, Metal, Earth & Stone”, is heard: “Where is the Covenant of Priam, the Moral Virtues of the Heathen? Where is the Tree of Good & Evil that rooted beneath the cruel heel Of Albion’s Spectre, the Patriarch Druid? where are all his Human Sacrifices For Sin in War & in the Druid Temples of the Accuser of Sin, beneath The Oak Groves of Albion that cover’d the whole Earth beneath his Spectre? Where are the Kingdoms of the World & all their glory that grew on Desolation, The Fruit of Albion’s Poverty Tree, when the Triple Headed Gog-Magog Giant Of Albion Taxed the Nations into Desolation & then gave the Spectrous Oath?” (4.98.46-53)

The questions encompass the sins of the world over the span of manifest creation, with a specific focus on Albion, and would seem to seek forgiveness “according to [the] Covenant” of “Jehovah”, as traditionally understood (Genesis:9, 17).85 At the head of the purveyors of these sins is “Priam”, a Trojan forefather of Britain through the legend of Brutus, associated by Blake with the dubious “Covenant” of the murderous Homeric divinities and classical war-mongering. The “Tree of Good & Evil”, which “rooted beneath the cruel heel / Of Albion’s Spectre” is linked by Raine to the following passage from Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia: Beneath the left foot . . . are such as have attributed all things to nature, yet still have confessed an ens of the universe from which come all things appertaining to nature; but exploration was made whether they believed in any ens of the universe or highest deity, as having created all things, but it was perceived . . . that what they believed in was as somewhat inanimate. . . they did not acknowledge the creator of the universe, but nature.

84 85

See Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2:13, 55, 65. That is, not issuing from the Urizenic “Jehovah” of Marriage.

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As Raine notes, “These Blake would have understood as the deists, responsible for ‘Natural Religion’” (Blake and Tradition, 2:51).86 The “Human Sacrifices” Blake has always associated with Druidic practice, are now linked to “the Accuser of Sin”, the Urizenic Jehovah, whose “Oak Groves” of false religion were a Spectral “covering of the whole Earth”. British imperialism, taxing the world under its sway through the “Triple Headed Gog-Magog” (related to Blake’s triple-headed accuser), from Ezekiel:38-39, with its “Spectrous Oath” (perhaps a reattribution through proximity of the extremely violent oath levelled at Gog-Magog by Jehovah, false and “Spectrous” in its distance from the practice of forgiveness), is the culminating expression of this sin. With forgiveness always immanent (understanding it to be a continuous act), “all” the earth’s living “Forms” engage in the cycle of existence. Again, although there is eventually an “Awaking” into “Immortality”, Blake is not offering an easily achieved Utopia:87 All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth & Stone: all Human Forms identified, living, going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing, And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality. (4.99.1-4)

What is notable at the very conclusion of the poem, however, is the presence of Jerusalem (whatever the present state of “the Organs of Perception”);88 if continually being built, she is yet always a source of inspiration, of the fullyfledged guarantee of creative embeddedness in existence: And I heard the Name of their Emanations: they are named Jerusalem. (4.99.5)

I reiterate the point that considering the fallen state of humanity (when more notable than at present?), Blake’s avowal of the immanence of this 86

In The Book of Ahania, the “pained root” of the tree of “Mystery” “shoots” from “under the heel” of Cruelty (already called Urizen) (Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2:50). As Milton entered Blake’s left foot in that epic, Blake is pointedly challenging those who, through the left foot “attribute all things to nature” (BCW 503). 87 As Ferrara notes, “Blake does not rally the reader towards some ‘ensuing peaceful millennium’ but rather to find enlightenment in the eternal moment” (“Perennial Utopia”, 20). Ferrara’s embedded quotation is from Magnus Ankarsjö’s William Blake and Gender (London: McFarland, 2006), 15. 88 Ferrara also notes that “the fact that the possibility of awakening remains open to all people at any time lends Blake’s soteriology its Universalism, another characteristic of the philosophia perennis from which the Perennial utopia draws its name” (“Perennial Utopia”, 20). “Perennial”, Ferrara feels, “broadly denotes a universal philosophy that seeks unity with the divine through collapse of the ego” (21).

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embeddedness is posthuman, in that it generates a sense of inclusiveness beyond the narrow ranges of human self-interest and blind destructiveness, and incorporates a cherishing of the world at large. Blakes’ entire corpus converges at this point, the punctum of the eternal moment: “they are named Jerusalem”.

CHAPTER FOUR SHELLEY: THE DAEMON OF THE WORLD, ALASTOR AND PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

At last Apollo mastered the breast of the Delphian priestess. . . . She boils over with fierce fire, while enduring the wrath of Phoebus. Nor does he ply the whip and goad alone, and dart flame into her vitals: she has to bear the curb as well, and is not permitted to reveal as much as she is suffered to know. All time is gathering up together: all the centuries crowd her breast and torture it; the endless chain of events is revealed; all the future struggles to the light; destiny contends with destiny, seeking to be uttered. The creation of the world and its destruction, the compass of the Ocean and the sum of the sands—all these are before her. (Lucan, Pharsalia 5:165-182; my emphasis)

Percy Bysshe Shelley used the embedded passage in italics above, from Lucan’s Pharsalia (or The Civil War), as epigraph to his The Daemon of the World, to indicate the extent and weight of poetic prophecy.1 The posthuman resonances in the response of the priestess, together with its daemonic form (she mediates between divinity and humankind with uncontrollable frenzy), help indicate Shelley’s awe in the presence of the workings of the cosmos, and human interaction with those workings. He himself, following to an extent Lucan’s “Delphian priestess”, sought to give voice to it through the Daemon of the world, who instructs the soul of Ianthe, protagonist of the poem, through revelation. The daemonic vision of the poet-prophet, though, is present in much of Shelley’s poetry, most famously in “Ode to the West Wind” (SPW 577). 1

Shelley used the original Latin version. See Mary Quinn’s detailed discussion: “The Daemon of the World: Shelley’s Antidote to the Scepticism of Alastor”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 25, no.4 (1984): 758. Quinn contextualises the Lucan passage: the Roman, Appius, would learn from the Delphic oracle (banned by Nero in Lucan’s time—a fact of political import for Shelley)—the future of Rome: would Pompey or Caesar triumph?

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Kathleen Raine is very aware of this fact when she links Blake and Shelley (as we saw in Chapter One) through a skylark, connected in turn with Milton in Blake’s eponymous poem, and called by Blake “a mighty Angel” (BCW 527). For both Romantic poets Milton was “the type of the inspired man”. This observation prompts Raine to ponder: It is tempting to wonder what of Blake’s work Shelley might have seen; for Godwin, or perhaps Mary Shelley herself . . . might well have possessed some of his illuminated books. Does the image of the eagle struggling with a serpent, which Shelley uses in The Revolt of Islam as an image of revolution, bear only an accidental resemblance to the emblem used in the same sense, of The Marriage of Heaven & Hell? Had Shelley read Blake’s defence of free love (written perhaps with Mary Wollstonecraft herself in mind), the Visions of the Daughters of Albion? Blake’s Urizen and that Godsimulating Satan whose image his Milton casts down is uncommonly like Shelley’s Jupiter. Had he even met Blake himself (who outlived Shelley by five years) in London?

She then makes that even closer connection, which I quoted in Chapter One: Shelley is, whether he knew it or not, Blake’s spiritual successor; and his skylark has its prototype in Blake’s, whose “Nest is at the Gate of Los”, spirit of prophecy. Perhaps both poets, supremely admiring Milton, chose the lark as the bird who in “L’Allegro” sings “From his watch-tower in the skies”. Shelley’s skylark can, in any case, be seen as his tribute to Milton as the defender and exemplar of the Platonic doctrine of poetic inspiration. (Defending Ancient Springs, 147)

The link is certainly suggestive; but what is of prime interest to me is Shelley’s extraordinary daemonism, his power to shift us “beyond the human”, which, perhaps because of his initial Necessitarian leanings, at times approaches the limits of the posthuman without any mediating human or enhanced, superhuman form, as we find in Blake. In this chapter I will look at passages from The Daemon of the World, Alastor, and Prometheus Unbound. In the chapter following, I will examine the lyrics, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Mont Blanc”, “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark”. As in the chapters on Blake, I explore both daemonic and posthuman elements in the poet, to gauge Shelley’s specific relation to them.

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I begin with The Daemon of the World (SPW 1),2 which, though derived from Queen Mab, is more concentrated in its revelation of cosmic, posthuman vision to the “spirit” of the protagonist, Ianthe, than is its parent poem. The passage from Lucan whence Shelley derives his brief epigraph, gives some sense of the scope of what is to be revealed to Ianthe by the Daemon of the World, “the endless chain of events”, in which “all the future struggles to the light”, and “destiny contends with destiny” (though the Daemon far outdoes this vision—at least in cosmic extent). Shelley begins, however, by underlining the “strange and wonderful” nature of what is decidedly human in scale, if cloaked in “otherness”: How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep! One pale as yonder wan and hornèd moon, With lips of lurid blue, The other glowing like the vital morn, When throned on ocean’s wave It breathes over the world: Yet both so passing strange and wonderful! (1.1-8)

The opening declamation of the poem (a repetition of that of Queen Mab) certainly comes from “beyond the human” regarding our usual relation to “Death”, and is, in my terms, daemonic.3 The surprise which this declamation occasions, triggering an influx of “otherness” into our 2

As previously noted, I use Shelley’s Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 813-818. From now on referred to as SPW. I use this Hutchinson edition throughout, for the sake of consistency, despite Lawrence Zillman’s noting that “certain details” of this text “leave much to be desired”, as it adheres closely to the Buxton Forman edition of 1876, which “continued or initiated a number of errors”. See Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, ed. Lawrence John Zillman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), 14-17. My reading of the Hutchinson is buttressed by the Norton second edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002). 3 There is something of Emmanuel Levinas’s relation of death to “otherness” in Shelley. In Levinas the thought of death corresponds to an awareness of the inconceivable nature of nothingness. The self (usually bound to itself as a centre of reference in its experience of the world), confronted by death, for once exists in relation to what comes from beyond itself, with what might be seen as mystery, “where something absolutely unknowable appears”. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 70-71. Shelley at the beginning of The Daemon of the World would instil an altered perspective by similar means. Here readers of Queen Mab would further experience the uncanniness of dislocated familiarity.

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awareness, is immediately qualified by the mediating second line, in which the link between “Sleep” and “Death”, made familiar by Hamlet for one, situates extreme otherness within human experience, even if that experience is of the otherness involved in the loss of conscious awareness during sleep. Characterised by “lurid blue” lips, and contrasted with the “glowing”, “vital morn” of Sleep, Death is not shorn of its dismal, desolate qualities, but, like Sleep, is yet deemed “passing strange and wonderful”. Its potency is considered in the case of the sleeping Ianthe, where, if it has helped extend our awareness of the wonderful strangeness of a world we usually take for granted, its threat to material existence is not overlooked: Hath then the iron-sceptred Skeleton, Whose reign is in the tainted sepulchres, To the hell dogs that couch beneath his throne Cast that fair prey? (1.9-12)

The imagery is both Gothic and classical—a King Death figure and “hell dogs” which would be at home in Hades—telling of Shelley’s own syncretism, somewhat more linguistically conservative than Blake’s, and its rather lurid, adolescent images not as passionately inhabited by the author. The threat is expressed more potently through the contrast with “that fair prey” who is Ianthe (must her beautiful body “decay”?): Must that divinest form, Which love and admiration cannot view Without a beating heart, whose azure veins Steal like dark streams along a field of snow, Whose outline is as fair as marble clothed In light of some sublimest mind, decay? (1.12-17)

Ianthe’s beauty, however, might itself be read as being imbued with posthuman otherness, as opposed to an anthropomorphic depiction of nature, conveyed in terms of veins which reflect the “azure” of the sky and which “Steal like dark streams along [the] field of snow” that is her flesh. Further, her form is sculptural, “fair as marble”, the creation of “some sublimest”, Phidian “mind”. This introduction to Ianthe, which at this stage does not distinguish between death and sleep, is a means to help modulate into a perception of her ideal, Platonic soul state, from which she will be guided in vision by the Daemon of the World. This beautiful form, if not dead, is perhaps asleep: Or is it but that downy-wingèd slumbers Have charmed their nurse coy Silence near her lids

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To watch their own repose? (1.23-25)

The “downy-wingèd slumbers” and the “nurse coy Silence” are early instances of Shelley’s tendency to embody intangible states, and so animate the life within and around us in a way not governed by self-reference. The very state of “Silence” which we objectify, is seen as an autonomous agent, with its own subjectivity. And “slumbers”, usually considered a part of our material functioning, so to speak, are likewise autonomous. The shift in our perspective, hearkening back to the spirit-imbued world of classical times, is radical: Will they, when morning’s beam Flows through those wells of light, Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave? (1.26-30)

The autonomous “slumbers” are at one with the posthuman world, being shy agents who would be happiest “far from noise and day”, in a “western cave” associated with death at least since Egyptian times (Bryant, New System, 439). There are traces of Porphyry’s “cave of the nymphs” in the location evoked by Shelley, “Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds / A lulling murmur weave”. Yeats, though writing of “The Witch of Atlas”, noted in his essay, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”:4 So good a Platonist as Shelley could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking of Plato’s cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on “the Cave of the Nymphs” in his mind. When I compare Porphyry’s description of the cave where the Phaeacian boat left Odysseus, with Shelley’s description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas, to name but one of many, I find it hard to think otherwise.

We recall Taylor’s translation of the passage from Homer, and note partial congruences in Shelley, indicative, at least, of an awareness of an ethos: High at the head a branching olive grows And crowns the pointed cliffs with shady boughs. A cavern pleasant, though involved in night, Beneath it lies, the Naiades’ delight. (In Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, 5)

The “downy-wingèd slumbers” are perhaps nymph-like, but, more importantly, their “western cave”, associated with death and the “death” that is sleep, like 4

W. B. Yeats, Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924), 100.

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the cave of the nymphs, tells of the mortal sphere, implying the death or sleep of the soul; this is significant, as the poet is preparing the ground for the awakening of Ianthe’s soul in the presence of the Daemon of the World. The Daemon descends (SPW 2) in terms redolent of the otherness of nature and the clothing of that otherness with the materials of human imagination, both classical and (through “genii”) oriental:5 Hark! whence that rushing sound? ’Tis like a wondrous strain that sweeps Around a lonely ruin When west winds sigh and evening waves respond In whispers from the shore: ’Tis wilder than the unmeasured notes Which from the unseen lyres of dells and groves The genii of the breezes sweep. (1.48-55)

The sublime hauntedness of “a lonely ruin” makes it one with the ephemeral elements of nature that inhabit and surround it, which the sound of the chariot of the Daemon evokes through simile: the “wondrous strain” the ruin produces from the “sighing” “west winds”, and the “response” to this of “evening waves” “In whispers from the shore”. Coleridgean “lyres of dells and groves” are also implicated in the sound, “wilder” than their breezeproduced “unmeasured notes” (not constrained by human interference), and given voice by “The genii of the breezes”.6 From this hybrid domain of inspirited nature and imagination, the Daemon issues: Floating on waves of music and of light, The chariot of the Daemon of the World 5

Regarding Shelley’s orientalism, Stuart Curran, for instance, confidently asserts Shelley’s knowledge of the Zend-Avesta, published in French translation in 1771 by Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil du Perron. The author’s conclusions “support the complex uses to which Shelley puts them in Prometheus Unbound” (Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, 68). 6 Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat observe in a footnote to the related passage in Queen Mab: “The image of the poet as an Aeolian harp moved by the winds of a spiritual force or being is prominent in Romantic poetry”. See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 18n8. The spontaneously generated “witchery of sound” of Coleridge’s wind harp prompts that poet to consider “the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul” (“The Eolian Harp”, 26-27). Leadbetter notes that the “Intellectual breeze” of the poem marks “the irruption of Coleridge’s daemonic will” (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 33). Shelley will use the image in, for instance, the present Daemon of the World, Alastor, the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, and the “Essay on Christianity” (as we will see).

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Descends in silent power. (1.56-58)

“Power” will become a key appellation with respect to the creative force of existence in “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, but here it is an attribute of the Daemon, herself thought of in a traditional Neoplatonic manner by Shelley. In a footnote to his The First Alcibiades, Taylor provides an extract from Proclus’s commentary on the same: The daemon alone moves, governs, and orderly disposes, all our affairs. For he gives perfection to reason, measures the passions, inspires nature, connects the body, supplies things fortuitous, accomplishes the decrees of fate, and imparts the gifts of providence. In short, he is the king of every thing in and about us, and is the pilot of the whole of our life. (Taylor, Plato, 1:22n)

The “chariot” seems pure imagination, but its “waves of music and of light” touch on contemporary science, references to which are found in “Notes on Queen Mab” (SPW 800). Shelley’s is an early version of the dual particle and wave theory of light: “Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body”. “Vibrations” of “light” and Pythagorean sound, “music”, which follows the rules of mathematical proportion,7 might be seen to inform supersensual bodies. The Daemon herself is a delicate “luminous body”: slight as some cloud That catches but the palest tinge of day When evening yields to night, Bright as that fibrous woof when stars indue Its transitory robe. (1.59-63)

Shelley’s extremely fine tints are based on the minutest scrutiny of natural phenomena, situating the ephemeral delicacy in elements of nature observable to all, but perhaps not noted with such acute discrimination by 7

Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol.1 (New York: Image Books, 1962), 49. For the Pythagoreans, “musical pitch may be said to depend on number, in so far as it depends on the lengths, and the intervals on the scale may be expressed by numerical ratios”. See also Tam Hunt, “The Hippies Were Right: It’s all about Vibrations, Man!”, Scientific American, Dec 5, 2018. Accessed September 22, 2022. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-allabout-vibrations-man/. This paper refers to recent theories that all existence (including consciousness) is ultimately comprised of vibrations of different frequencies. Shelley’s probing imagination and intellect seem to have anticipated such theories.

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most. The combination of the ephemeral with this degree of precision, imbues it with substantiality, making the characters in the poet’s vision much more than the products of vague maunderings. He also uses a type of synaesthesia, or at least an interpenetration of sensory data which creates a singular effect. The Daemon looks down on Ianthe, her presence accompanied by sweet sounds which also evoke scents, and then she addresses her through subliminal communication: Such sounds as breathed around like odorous winds Of wakening spring arose, Filling the chamber and moonlight sky. Maiden, the world’s supremest spirit Beneath the shadow of her wings Folds all thy memory doth inherit From ruin of divinest things, Feelings that lure thee to betray, And light of thoughts that pass away. (1.75-83)

The Daemon, “the world’s supremest spirit”, or, as Taylor’s Proclus wrote of the personal daemon, “the pilot of the whole of our life”, would first relieve Ianthe of the traces of “ruin of divinest things”, along with “feelings” and “thoughts” that have the potential to trouble her mind. She, because of the “majesty” of her “mind”, has earned the privilege to learn those “truths which wisest poets see” only “dimly”. To do so, Ianthe must experience a type of Blakean self-annihilation, a “self-oblivious solitude”. The Daemon is clear regarding Ianthe’s virtues (SPW 3); she is free of the Urizenic shackles which Shelley will later ascribe to the reign of Jupiter, in Prometheus Unbound: Custom, and Faith, and Power thou spurnest; From hate and awe thy heart is free; Ardent and pure as day thou burnest, For dark and cold mortality A living light, to cheer it long, The watch-fires of the world among. (1.90-95)

She is not duped by social or religious orthodoxy, with their dulling complacency; and takes no interest in political “Power”. Almost as a corollary, her “heart is free” of “hate and awe”, on which destruction and fawning subservience are premised. She herself is imbued with daemonic energy, as she burns as “ardent and pure as day”; that is, with the clear natural fire of the sun, but also inspirited by human passion. Ianthe is a “living light”, one of the “watch-fires of the world”, to “cheer” “dark and

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cold mortality”.8 She will be the one, then, to “rend” “the veil” concealing “nature’s inner shrine”. The Daemon refers to the uroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, representative of “Eternity”:9 Therefore from nature’s inner shrine, Where gods and fiends in worship bend, Majestic spirit, be it thine The flame to seize, the veil to rend, Where the vast snake Eternity In charmèd sleep doth ever lie. (1.96-101)

If Shelley’s “vast snake Eternity” lies in “charmèd sleep” for “ever” in “nature’s inner shrine”, it must be a type of ground of the materiality it presupposes, as speculated upon by Raine (Blake and Tradition, 1:117).10 In any event, in its “charmèd sleep” it is sealed off from human vision. In Prometheus Unbound, Demogorgon utters that “the deep truth is imageless” (SPW 238); the “sleep” of this snake is likewise imageless, even if the form of the snake itself carries traditional resonances. And the Daemon underlines the “unsubstantiality” of material existence in the following stanza: All that inspires thy voice of love, Or speaks in thy unclosing eyes, Or through thy frame doth burn or move, Or think or feel, awake, arise! Spirit, leave for mine and me Earth’s unsubstantial mimicry! (1.102-107)

The Daemon, in wishing to transport her to a realm of cosmic vision, appropriately appeals to Ianthe’s spirit in terms of her inner qualities: the “inspiring” sense of “love”, the “speech” of the “unclosing eyes” of the inner self or soul, the Blakean “burning” energy of the body or “frame”, thoughts and “feelings”.

8 Though the “watch-fire” in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon bears a terrible irony, the lines pertaining to it (a possible source for Shelley’s image) might stand alone: “Now let there be again redemption from distress, / the flare burning from the blackness in good augury”. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus, eds. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (London: The Folio Society, 2011), 41. 9 Jung, Archetypes, 361. 10 Curran notes that Shelley was aware that “the great serpent Cneph” of the Egyptians was “a symbol of eternity”, “conceived to be both preserver of the earth and the demiurgic Mind from which the cosmos issued” (Annus Mirabilis, 52).

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Ianthe’s spirit responds, in a way that correlates, to an extent, with reports about astral projection:11 from the mute and moveless frame A radiant spirit arose, All beautiful in naked purity. Robed in its human hues it did ascend, Disparting as it went the silver clouds, It moved towards the car, and took its seat Beside the Daemon shape. (1.108-114)

Entering a posthuman state, the spirit is yet “robed in its human hues”, ensuring its functionality as a focalising protagonist, despite its etherealised nature. Shelley then encodes within the Daemon’s gift of vision, an awareness of the cosmically posthuman of which he too was intensely aware. In the “Notes on Queen Mab” (SPW 801), for example, Shelley first discounts the “childish mummeries” of orthodox belief, including “that miserable tale of the Devil”, in a way that might have found some sympathy with Blake, though Shelley’s Enlightenment rationalism balances fact against superstition, while Blake attacks the false moral values instilled by the rational legalism of orthodox belief. It is intriguing that Shelley’s rationalism (if infused with his wonder at the facts of the case) sought the same ends as Blake’s anti-rationalist, passionate indignation: The plurality of worlds—the indefinite immensity of the universe, is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that 11

See Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, The Phenomena of Astral Projection, (London: Rider, 1969), 160-161. Shelley, though, when it comes to scientific reasoning regarding existence outside the body, is sceptical: “let thought be considered as some peculiar substance, which permeates, and is the cause of, the animation of living beings. Why should that substance be assumed to be something essentially distinct from all others, and exempt from subjection of those laws from which no other substance is exempt?” “On a Future State” (1815), in Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), 463. There is an interesting dialectical tension between Shelley’s poetic imaginings and his rational thinking. Timothy Webb speaks of Shelley’s “never-ending process of intellectual adjustment, a perpetual balancing of hypothesis against hypothesis, a guarded series of approaches to the ultimately unknowable truth”. See “Introduction” to Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems, ed. Timothy Webb (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), xxviii.

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necessity, which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.

Shelley proceeds to expound didactically on an idea to which he will do more justice in his poem: The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Sirius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles from the earth. That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Millions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity.

Yet his distancing of what he has gleaned from William Nicholson’s Encyclopedia on “Light” (as he indicates in a footnote)12 from human sympathy (“the indefinite immensity of the universe”, “a most awful subject of contemplation”), is an indication of Shelley’s fearless embrace of the implications of posthumanism. In terms of the co-existence of the rational and poetic in Shelley, however, perhaps what he wrote of Plato might be applied to the poet himself: “Plato exhibits that rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendour and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward, as in a breathless career” (“On the Symposium”, Selected Poetry and Prose, 493). In the poem, we find the Daemon and spirit casting their gaze over the cosmic immensity offered by the Daemon’s perspective; the matter conveyed by the careful precision of Nicholson’s prose becomes inspirited. First, though, a recognisable natural world is seen from an albeit elevated perspective. A natural progression leads us from the familiar world of “pale and waning stars” as the day dawns, with its “grey light” faintly colouring the “fleecy clouds”: Far, far below the chariot’s stormy path, Calm as a slumbering babe, Tremendous ocean lay. Its broad and silent mirror gave to view 12 William Nicholson, The British Encyclopedia; or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences vol.4 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809), s.v. “light”.

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Immediately, however, we sweep beyond—a juxtaposition which helps convey the absence of barriers to vision, or what the human mind can conceive. And yet the “immense concave”, with its “million constellations” and “shades of infinite colour”, certainly cannot be visualised in normal terms. Shelley’s language reaches beyond ordinary conceptualisation, towards a yielding of concrete substance to the evocatory power of the words themselves, as if they are daemonic mediators between us and what “does not belong to knowledge”: The chariot seemed to fly Through the abyss of an immense concave, Radiant with million constellations, tinged With shades of infinite colour, And semicircled with a belt Flashing incessant meteors. (1.142-147)

For Harold Bloom, in his magnificent essay on Shelley in The Ringers in the Tower, “The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction to Shelley”, there is in Shelley “a continuous effort to subvert the poetic image, so as to arrive at a more radical kind of verbal figure, which Shelley never altogether achieved”; his “tenor and vehicle are imported into one another, and the choice of natural imagery increasingly favors those already on the point of vanishing, just within the ken of eye and ear”. Bloom also notes: “Shelley, at his greatest, precisely chants an energetic becoming that cannot be described in the concrete because its entire purpose is to modify the concrete, to compel a greater reality to appear”.13 Shelleyan visionary cosmology, however, is informed by current scientific understanding, as found, for example, in the “Stars” section of the Nicholson Encyclopedia: The Sun, at the distance of the fixed stars, would appear no larger than a star; none of our planets, at that distance, could be seen at all; is it not probable, therefore, that each of the fixed stars is a fixed sun, surrounded by a system

13 For the ineffable nature of “that which does not belong to knowledge”, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. For Harold Bloom’s observations, see The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 109, 115.

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of planets and comets, which may be again furnished with different numbers of satellites, or moons, though invisible to us? 14

With his use of the word “systems” (as used by Nicholson), Shelley also taps into the scientific conceptualisation apparent in Nicholson: Earth’s distant orb appeared The smallest light that twinkles in the heavens, Whilst round the chariot’s way Innumerable systems widely rolled, And countless spheres diffused An ever varying glory. (1.160-165)

Though Shelley will soon counter Nicholson’s religious orthodoxy, he agrees that “glory” is present—not “redounding” to the credit of “the great Creator and Governor of the universe”, but inherent in the “countless spheres” themselves. Nicholson writes: From what has been said, concerning the number, nature, and distance of the fixed stars, the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, wherein each fixed star serves as a sun to a system of planets, seems rational, worthy of a philosopher, and greatly displays the wisdom, and redounds to the glory of the great Creator and Governor of the universe.

Shelley’s allegiance is to a posthuman force, not a God in the image of humankind: Spirit of Nature! here In this interminable wilderness Of worlds, at whose involved immensity Even soaring fancy staggers, Here is thy fitting temple. Yet not the lightest leaf That quivers to the passing breeze Is less instinct with thee— Yet not the meanest worm, That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead, Less shares thy eternal breath. Spirit of Nature! thou Imperishable as this glorious scene, Here is thy fitting temple. (1.175-188)

14

The British Encyclopedia, or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences vol.6, s.v. “stars”.

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Also apparent here, as in Blake, is a trace of Matthew 10:29-31, which emphasises, again, through the sparrow, the importance of apparently insignificant aspects of nature. In Blake’s terms, in his annotations to Lavater, and drawing on worm imagery, like Shelley, “God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes; for he is become a worm that he may nourish the weak” (BCW 87). We remember that for Oothoon, for whom “every thing that lives is holy”, the worm recycles the dead matter of “the mouldering church yard” to create a “palace of eternity” (BCW 193). Shelley’s perspective at present is more committedly posthuman than Blake’s, whose emphasis on love and “nourishment” marks his “God” (as free of doctrine as Shelley’s, and, being within us, “sharing” the “eternal breath” the younger poet evokes) to be intimately involved in human life. For Shelley, anticipating ideas to be expressed in “Mont Blanc”, “this interminable wilderness”, totally alien to human life, is the “fitting temple” of the “Spirit of Nature”. Bloom writes that “had Shelley been able to accept any known faith, he would have given us the name and nature” of that “Spirit” (Ringers in the Tower, 116). Clearly “Spirit of Nature”, “secret Strength of things” and “Power” sufficed for him, markers of an inherent posthumanist agency he called at times “Necessity”. Though, as I. J. Kapstein points out, regarding Shelley’s allegiance to Holbach’s “Necessity”, the doctrine merely points to “the unbroken chain of causes and effects, whose operation is responsible for the continuous change in natural phenomena”, we should also take into account John Shawcross’s insight: Shelleyan Necessity “revealed itself as an aspect of that permanent and changeless reality, fixed far above the flux of time, which was the object of his lifelong aspiration. His necessarianism is thus the earliest form of his socalled Platonism”.15 The doctrine, nevertheless, seems mechanistic compared with “Spirit of Nature” and “Power”, which imply informed agency rather than mechanical operation.16 Shelley is not behind in his depiction of humankind’s fallen state, however; imagined by Blake within a specific mythological radius, with its own extended “family” of figures, this fallen state for Shelley is less personal, so to say, more general in its resonances. After the “wonderous” cosmic spectacle presented to “the Spirit”, the subsequent grotesquery is truly disturbing. First, though, comes a dans macabre, seemingly Gothic in inspiration:

15

In Shelley’s Literary and Philosophical Criticism, ed. John Shawcross (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), xiii. 16 See I. J. Kapstein, “The Symbolism of the Wind and the Leaves in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind”, PMLA 51, no.4 (1936): 1072.

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Awhile the Spirit paused in ecstasy, Yet soon she saw, as the vast spheres swept by, Strange things within their belted orbs appear. Like animated frenzies, dimly moved Shadows, and skeletons, and fiendly shapes, Thronging round human graves, and o’er the dead Sculpturing records for each memory In verse, such as malignant gods pronounce, Blasting the hopes of men, when heaven and hell Confounded burst in ruin o’er the world. (1.253-262)

The “confounding” of “heaven and hell” parallels Blake’s thoughts in the Marriage, suggesting an inversion of values, though here destructive in its consequences; the “sculptured” “verse” (on tombstones?) possibly gives hope of future existence, premised on denial in this life, a perversion “such as malignant gods pronounce”. The record of human atrocities which follows is worse: And they did build vast trophies, instruments Of murder, human bones, barbaric gold, Skins torn from living men, and towers of skulls With sightless holes gazing on blinder heaven, Mitres, and crowns, and brazen chariots stained With blood, and scrolls of mystic wickedness, The sanguine codes of venerable crime. (1.263-269)

Ages of human conflict are recorded in these details, some biblical (from Ezekiel and Revelation—again, in the manner of Blake), some from historical sources. For instance, Shelley may have had access to John Toland’s Tetradymus, which records the brutal flaying alive by Christians (purveyors of “mystic wickedness”) of Hypatia, the pagan Neoplatonic philosopher and astronomer of Alexandria. Whether from Toland or not, the account was well known in Shelley’s time.17 17 John Toland, Tetradymus (London: Brotherton and Meadows, 1720), 130. Might Shelley have read Elizabeth Tollet’s poem “Hypatia”? For a copy of the poem, with footnotes showing Tollet’s keen awareness (in a Shelleyan spirit) of contemporary science, see Literature in English, eds. W. H. New and W. E. Messenger (Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice Hall, 1994), 557-560. There is a strong case to be made, in the light of Shelley’s close involvement in the Godwin circle, and because his wife Mary was, of course, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley’s knowledge of Toland’s thought is also apparent in his awareness that matter “is not inert”, but is “infinitely active and subtile”, a non-Newtonian definition of motion expressed by Toland in 1704 (though referred to extensively in “one of Shelley’s favourite texts”, d’Holbach’s Système de la Nature). See Daniel Stempel, “‘A Rude Idealism’:

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In the processional vein of The Mask of Anarchy and The Triumph of Life (and with grisly Dantean touches),18 a tyrant figure joins the apocalyptic throng, “a thronèd king” with a “threefold crown”, who “gnaws” a “human heart” “Concealed beneath his robe” (1.270-276). He is surrounded by a fawning, hypocritical “throng” of subjects, who, in subscribing to his views in cowardly “submission” (their submissive “looks” are “false”), perpetuate his continuing hold over them (1.276-285). Their being under the sway of this tyrant who secretly “gnaws” at the “heart” of their humanity, reflects the general condition of humankind, bound to its destructive traditions and prejudices, and to world views and attitudes dictated by the self-interested needs of those with power and influence. “The Daemon of the World”, the “Spirit of Nature”, is thereby spurned, “blasphemed” against. And yet, as Ianthe’s “pure Spirit” gazes on the scene below, “Necessity’s unchanging harmony” remains, implying, in the face of current deprivations, a view as optimistic as Blake’s regarding eventual existential perfectibility, but, again, in terms of posthuman force, not redemptive expansion of human awareness centred in embedded holiness:19 the pure Spirit, Serene and inaccessibly secure, Stood on an isolated pinnacle, The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe Above, and all around Necessity’s unchanging harmony. (1.285-291)

“The flood of ages combating below” might suggest the toils and tribulations of the watery realm of generation of the Neoplatonists, though it also evokes the second biblical fall, with its great “flood”. Located “below”, it is directly opposite (symbolically and factually) to what is “above”—“The depth of the unbounded universe”, making insignificant the human realm of limited striving and unhappiness. Hence the sense of limitless presence generated by the conflation of “unbounded universe” and “all around”, pertaining to Models of Nature and History in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound”, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 21, no.2 / 3 (1988): 119. 18 Quinn sees Shelley as borrowing imagery from “three Christian poets, Dante, Spenser, and Milton” (“Shelley’s Antidote”, 769). 19 Shelley offers a different emphasis in “Part 2” of The Daemon, an emphasis that is most famously expressed in “Ode to the West Wind”. Bloom writes of this poem’s final stanza that here the poet would “affirm again the human dignity of the prophet’s vocation, and . . . suggest a mode of imaginative renovation that goes beyond the cyclic limitations of nature” (Ringers in the Tower, 101).

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“Necessity’s unchanging harmony”. “Harmony” implies a perfectly fitting combination of elements, a self-sufficing perfection. Necessity from this point of view is not indifferent to human affairs, it is indescribably above and beyond them, while absorbing the irritation they cause. Part 2 of the poem (SPW 7) offers an idealistic vision of human perfectibility, perhaps in antithetical dialectic play with Alastor, as Mary Quinn argues (“Shelley’s Antidote”, 758), a point to be discussed in more detail presently.20 At the beginning of this part, the poet’s apostrophe to the roots any notion of “Heaven” in the itself: O happy Earth! reality of Heaven! To which those restless powers that ceaselessly Throng through the human universe aspire; Thou consummation of all mortal hope! Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will! Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time, Verge to one point and blend for ever there: Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place! Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime, Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come: O happy Earth! reality of Heaven! (2.292-302)

Implicit in Heaven on Earth, then, is the rejuvenation of the human species, achievable through what lies around us and within us, not through access to any transcendent realm. The “ceaselessly” “aspiring” “restless powers” considered at the conclusion of Part 1, who, mistakenly, seek satisfaction through “the sanguine codes of venerable crime”, actually seek the heaven on earth, which is the “consummation of all mortal hope”. The “blindlyworking will” of the restless powers, is not yet aligned with the higher purpose of achieving its true goal (in accordance with Necessity), but the goal is inevitably present. The “rays” of this “glorious prize” are “diffused throughout all space and time”, and “Verge” to the “one point” of Earth as “reality” of Heaven, to “blend” the two states (as it were) “for ever there”. At present, it is only the “pure dwelling-place” of “purest spirits”, and, in 20 Quinn, however, feels that Part 2 should not be “appended” to the poem, as Shelley

“clearly” “cut short Ianthe’s vision to emphasize his radical criticism of England in 1815”’s Antidote”, 761n10). This argument does not obviate the fact that a Part 2 does exist, and obviously featured in Shelley’s understanding of the Daemon’s overall vision. In the absence of Part 2, Quinn must observe, a bit awkwardly, “presumably, Ianthe would have borne the burden of understanding the past and the future while attempting . . . to guide fallen man toward insight into his past error with hope of bringing about a brighter future” (771).

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itself, is not characterised by contraries. Does the poet, lacking the “Vision of Evil”, as Yeats believed, present an unachievable utopian state?: Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime, Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come: O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!

For Yeats, Shelley, unlike Blake, “could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict”.21 The Yeatsian “Vision of Evil” is related to the poet’s notion of the mentally clarifying effect of violence (Blake would have called “Evil” “energy”), where “memory of danger” is linked to the “exceptional moments” which inform “exceptional” “activities of the mind” (Essays, 320). Yeats’s present understanding of Shelley, though, seems largely based on the utopianism at the conclusion of Prometheus Unbound, which so inspired him in his youth, with its “hopes for the future of mankind”. Bloom, however, in evoking Humean philosophical views in Shelley’s relation to experience, where scepticism vies with human nature’s tendency to overcome it, sees an interplay between Shelley’s scepticism and idealism; this interplay might be regarded as a version of the productive Blakean contraries and the interacting Yeatsian antinomies. Writing of “Mont Blanc”, Bloom notes: There is a Power, a secret strength of things, but it hides its true shape or its shapelessness behind or beneath a dread mountain, and it shows itself only as an indifference, or even pragmatically a malevolence, toward the wellbeing of men. But the Power speaks forth, through the poet’s act of confrontation with it . . . and the Power, rightly interpreted, can be used to repeal the large code of fraud, institutional and historical Christianity, and the equally massive code of woe, the laws of the nation-states of Europe in the age of Castlereagh and Metternich. (Ringers in the Tower, 89)

Shelley’s “Power”, so above and beyond human affairs, is, for Bloom, both malevolent and enlightening. Then, like Quinn, extending the focus of concern beyond the range of a single poem, Bloom includes the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, where “a very different Power is invoked”, which “sweeps through our dull sense world, momentarily awakening both nature and man to a sense of love and beauty”, even though it is inconstant (90). The two poems dramatize, it may be, the interplay, as we will later consider. Yet even within the present poem Shelley is certainly not unaware of opposing forces, as we see in the distinction between the conclusion of Part 1 and beginning of Part 2. If not a continuing conflict, there is, as in “Ode 21

Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962), 144.

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to the West Wind”, a sense of natural cyclicality behind the ability of daemonic vision (“Genius”) to foresee the end of the present cycle. “Genius has seen” the “happy Earth, reality of Heaven” in her passionate dreams, And dim forebodings of [its] loveliness, Haunting the human heart, have there entwined Those rooted hopes, that the proud Power of Evil Shall not for ever on this fairest world Shake pestilence and war. (2.303-308)

While not explicitly cyclical, millennial change implies a counterforce to the “proud Power of Evil”, and a distinct awareness of the “Vision of Evil” in relation to “the dauntless and the good”, who “dare to hurl / Defiance at his throne”. Shelley’s emphasis on benign “Futurity”, which would perhaps trouble Yeats, does not negate the continual striving that characterizes the type of “mental fight” wrought by the albeit redeemed Zoas in Blake’s vision. Indeed, later in Part 2, the Daemon tells the Spirit that she is “destined an eternal war to wage” against “tyranny and falsehood”.22 What I am indicating, is that Shelley’s idealism is not unchecked: Thou hast beheld [Evil’s] empire, o’er the present and the past; It was a desolate sight—now gaze on mine, Futurity. (2.316-319)

And the Daemon reveals to the Spirit of Ianthe a vision of the “renovated world”—first, through the expressive power of the natural world: The Spirit saw The vast frame of the renovated world Smile in the lap of Chaos, and the sense Of hope thro’ her fine texture did suffuse Such varying glow, as summer evening casts On undulating clouds and deepening lakes. Like the vague sighings of a wind at even, That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea And dies on the creation of its breath, And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits, Was the sweet stream of thought that with wild motion Flowed o’er the Spirit’s human sympathies. (2.325-336) 22

The Daemon tells Ianthe, the “Surpassing Spirit”, to “return” to the world, and wage her “eternal war” in order to “uproot” the “germs of misery from the human heart” (2.572-576).

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The subtle colours and sounds recall those from the beginning of the poem, indicating the extent of the Daemon’s influence, from local to cosmic, inherent in the “language” of nature. Here the natural similes themselves indicate an interplay of forces: the “vague sighings of a wind at even” (of symbolic import for Shelley)23 both “wakes the wavelets” with its motion “And dies on the creation of its breath”—it “sinks and rises, fails and swells” in antinomic pattern. Further, these patterns pertain to the shifts in perception registered in “human sympathies”. The toing-and-froing of opposite forces, it is suggested, underlies existence in general. Then, the Daemon gives voice to the force of earthly life in its various manifestations (SPW 8). Her vision, like that of Asia in Act 3 of Prometheus Unbound, is “millennial rather than apocalyptic”, in that it presents a “redeemed nature” rather than an “ultimate reality” (Bloom, Ringers, 96).24 Her tutelary role is evident, recalling (mutatis mutandis) Iamblichus’s notion that there is “one principal daemon, who is the guardian and governor of every thing that is in us” (Mysteries, 364): To me is given The wonders of the human world to keep— Space, matter, time and mind—let the sight Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope. All things are recreated, and the flame Of consentaneous love inspires all life; (2.339-344)

The maternal earth gives sustenance to life through the etherealized agency of the wind (with its above-mentioned connotations underlined by “breathings”): The balmy breathings of the wind inhale Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad: Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere, Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream; (2.348-351)

23

Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning note in connection with “Ode to the West Wind”, “there is a tradition, as old as the Bible, of wind as metaphor of life and inspiration—particularly the West Wind as harbinger of future seasons, events, and transformations, not only in weather, but by symbolic extension, in emotional, spiritual, and political life”. They further note, “the Latin for ‘wind’, spiritus, also means ‘breath’ and soul or spirit, as well as being the root-word for ‘inspiration’ (a taking-in of energy)”. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics, eds. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning (Boston: Pearson, 2012), 889. 24 A redeemed state implies its opposite, and so continual striving; an apocalypse is unitary, absolute.

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“Health”, otherwise limited to its abstract nominal function, when imagistically conjoined to the “balmy breathings of the wind”, assumes a faint substance (it “floats”) which produces discernible effects (it “glows” in “fruits” and “mantles on the stream”). The Paradisal vision of human perfection which follows, is Miltonic in tone (SPW 10): Here now the human being stands adorning This loveliest earth with taintless body and mind: Blest from his birth with all bland impulses, Which gently in his noble bosom wake All kindly passions and all pure desires. (2.430-434)

The present is contrasted with the past, as the didacticism (which Shelley supposedly “abhors”)25 is nevertheless expressed with a daemonic intensity which might have turned the mind of any young reader—vegetarian Shelley isolates a single cause of humankind’s misery; “no longer now” does man slay the beast that sports around his dwelling And horribly devours its mangled flesh, Or drinks its vital blood, which like a stream Of poison thro’ his fevered veins did flow Feeding a plague that secretly consumed His feeble frame, and kindling in his mind Hatred, despair, and fear and vain belief, The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. (2.444-451)

The Daemon doesn’t deny the realities of existence, such as death, but implies (again, in Blakean fashion) that they will be faced with the benefit of enlarged perception; that this perception is aligned with “necessity”, gives it the substance and force of quotidian experience, tempering the idealism (SPW 11):

25 Shelley famously writes in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound: “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse” (SPW 207). He continues, however, that he does wish to “familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence”—a type of instruction through example, which is fully aware of the obstructions to the ideal. As James Evans writes, “to see Shelley’s idealism in any but his own terms is to be less than fair to his genius” (“Masks of the Self: Self-Confrontation in Shelley’s Poetry”, KeatsShelley Journal 24 (1975): 70).

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Considering a passage such as this one, we can see that Bloom is mistaken when he states so categorically: “No Platonist would have doubted immortality as darkly as Shelley did, or indeed would have so recurrently doubted the very existence of anything transcendent” (Ringers, 95). We need to grant Shelley an intellectual openness. “It appears that Shelley also experienced direct and vivid intimations of immortality”, says Timothy Webb, “through the almost mystical process of poetic inspiration so magnificently analysed in A Defence of Poetry” (Webb, Selected Poems, xxix). Webb might be thinking of the famous passage beginning: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 531). Near the conclusion of Part 2 (SPW 12), the Daemon, no longer focussing on the perfection of the “Future”, encourages a slow ascent, but in the context of an extraordinary encapsulation of the “universal mind” emerging from primeval “silence” to become conscious and directed in its operations: Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course, Let virtue teach thee firmly to pursue The gradual paths of an aspiring change: (2.529-531)

The “paths of an aspiring change” are “gradual”, there is no sudden entrance into Paradise. While offering instruction, the Daemon doesn’t herself “teach”, but assumes the instructive value of a natural “virtue”, to hold the Spirit of Ianthe to her course. The problematic nature of what “virtue” is, is not even considered, as it would be in Blake, perhaps because the Daemon is aware that Ianthe is an exemplary figure, a “Surpassing Spirit” (SPW 13). Then, the Daemon reveals the different states that “tend to perfect happiness” and “urge” “on their way” “the restless wheels of being”. Each is an agent of “being”: “birth and life and death”, though the first and last are not usually considered states, are necessarily associated with existence, in terms of the holistic structuration of the Aristotelian beginning, middle and end: For birth and life and death, and that strange state

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Before the naked powers that thro’ the world Wander like winds have found a human home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge The restless wheels of being on their way, Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life, Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal: (2.532-538)

The “strange state” is outside this structure, a type of pre-existence “before” the “human home”, ratified by the Aristotelian whole, has been “found” by the “naked powers”, and linked to the slightly melancholy “winds” that “wander” “thro’ the world”. The “flashing spokes” of the “wheels of being”, are not deterministic Blakean wheels associated with bleak industrialisation, but generative wheels, “instinct with infinite life”.26 The passage culminates with an evocation of “the universal mind”, woken to “individual sense” by the “birth” of individual existence. Without such existence, its expansive “mighty streams” “might else in silence flow”: For birth but wakes the universal mind Whose mighty streams might else in silence flow Thro’ the vast world, to individual sense Of outward shows, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe; (2.539-546)

This giant consciousness is not simply passive, a Yeatsian Anima Mundi or collective storehouse of images (though “the store” containing “all events” that “variegate the eternal universe” is also “aggregated there”). Channelling itself as “individual sense”, its “unexperienced shape” is free of predetermination, enabling it to access “new modes of passion”. The Daemon thus emphasises regeneration with its associated “eternal hope” (even in a post-mortem condition), but, again, does not conceal the 26

Possibly related to the hand-crank electricity generators used by Shelley at Syon House and Oxford (stimulated by the experiments of Dr Adam Walker). See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 16. As it was for Blake, but even more explicitly, science was of foundational importance for Shelley. The poet would not disagree with McGilchrist, in a passage previously quoted: “We desperately need what science can tell us, and postmodern attempts to undermine it should be vigorously resisted. Two important truths, then: science cannot tell us everything; but what science can tell us is pure gold. Any attempt to suppress science (I distinguish science sharply from technology), for whatever reason, is dangerous and wrong” (Matter With Things, 21).

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reality of the need for human striving. Webb observes that “Shelley insists on the necessity of continuous effort; unlike Godwin, he also recognizes that should man achieve Utopian society on earth he will still be merely man, still subject to many limitations and always in danger of sliding back into an unregenerated state” (in Selected Poems, xxvii): Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness of its Bloom, Yet spring’s awakening breath will woo the earth, To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, Lighting the green wood with its sunny smile. (2.547-556)

Stanza 21 of Canto 9 of The Revolt of Islam (earlier known as Laon and Cythna) is often cited as informing “Ode to the West Wind”.27 The above passage might also be included. Webb notes the “dialectical pattern” in the shorter poems, such as “Ode to Heaven” and “The Two Spirits”. He continues: It is part of Shelley’s particular subtlety that he argues against himself within the confines of individual poems and that he also sets up poem against poem. The result is a continuous and fruitful dialectic, an energizing tension which gives force to most of his poetry. (In Selected Poems, xxviii)

In truth, then, Alastor needs no “antidote” in the context of Shelleyan perception as a whole, but it will be interesting to consider it in relation to the present poem’s particular daemonic vision. As Quinn notes, “through its many resonances with Alastor, the Daemon lends new dimension to that much debated poem” (“Shelley’s Antidote”, 756). Neil Fraistat also points to the possible coupling of the poems in Shelley’s thought processes, when he notes that “in his haste to see the book through the press, Shelley most 27

The blasts of Autumn drive the wingèd seeds Over the earth—next come the snows, and rain, And frosts, and storms, which dreary Winter leads Out of his Scythian cave, a savage train: Behold! Spring sweeps over the world again, Shedding soft dews from her ethereal wings. (3649-3654; SPW 127) Consider also “Fragment 6” of Prince Athanase, which begins: “In spring, which moves the unawakened forest” (SPW 166).

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probably read the proofs of Alastor while still working on The Daemon. The short distance between his home in Bishopsgate and Hamilton’s shop in Weybridge, Surrey, not only permitted a quick exchange of MSS and proofs, but also allowed Shelley to supervise the printing of his work”.28 James Evans considers Alastor to be the first of Shelley’s works in which “through the medium of imaginative participation in the poetic process” we “perceive an ideal self”. The “imaginative process of seeing the self is one of the fundamental images that Shelley uses in his poetry to express the realization (or in specifically psychological terms, the ‘actualization’) of the ideal”. The poem “establishes a symbolic gravitational center to which Shelley is drawn throughout the remainder of his poetic career” (“Masks of the Self”, 71-72). This other self can be regarded as daemonic, if we further consider that Shelley sees that self “in terms of a Doppelgänger, a man confronting his own image”, implicit, for Evans, in Shelley’s perception in A Defence of Poetry of Athenian tragedies as a “mirror in which the spectator beholds himself” (in Poetry and Prose, 520). The “psychological significance of vision and self”, says Evans, “is emphasized because the poet gazes not into a mirror but through a dream” (“Masks of the Self”, 72). We might note that the “own image”, asleep, of Ianthe, is doubled by a “radiant spirit” which accompanies the Daemon on her flight.29 *** Before we come to the dream in Alastor, however, we need to consider earlier passages, both from the Preface and the poem itself. Doing so is to take into account the fact that the poem has “three distinct versions of the vision theme”: in the introductory invocation to Nature; in the story of the Poet; in the Preface.30 The distinct versions point to a long-recognised inconsistency in the views offered by the poem, yet each provides its own interest and significance. The Preface, in proposing that the poem is “allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind”, 28 Neil Fraistat, “Poetic Quests and Questioning in Shelley’s Alastor Collection”, Keats-Shelley Journal 33 (1984): 161n2. Fraistat also emphasises the fact that, as published in 1816, The Daemon “consists of only part one of the two-part poem” that began to appear with the Forman edition in 1876 (176n20). 29 It is at least of anecdotal interest to note that Shelley confronted his own Doppelgänger on the terrace of his home, Casa Magni, a few months before his death. It asked him: “How long do you mean to be content?”. As a question prompting self-development, it is daemonic in a Yeatsian sense. See Claire Tomalin, Shelley and His World (London: Penguin, 1992), 103. 30 Frederick L. Jones, “The Vision Theme in Shelley’s Alastor and Related Works”, Studies in Philology 44, no.1 (1947): 108.

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relieves the poem’s pessimism, to an extent, by pointing to a type of virtuous strength associated with “generous error” that has no recourse to transcendent consolation. If failure of vision is inevitable in the end, a point The Triumph of Life fragment arguably seconds, it is with qualifications that belie the glibness of the expression, “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”.31 The protagonist of the poem, the “Poet”, is Faustian in his ambitions, in his desire for universal knowledge amidst the realm of “objects”. Even though “infinite and unmeasured”, making him “joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed”, “these objects”, after a time, “cease to suffice”, as all mere “objects” of knowledge surely must. His “awakened” mind then seeks subjective fulfilment, an access to a rich internality continuous with what Shelley will come to call Intellectual Beauty, the spiritual intellect understood by Blake, which incorporates imagination and expanded senses: So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture.

However, his “embodied” “vision” of these qualities, despite their being derived from his “speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures”, lacks the vital concrete support of human communion: The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other 31

See Tennyson, “In Memoriam A. H. H.”, 27:15-16. We can, of course, never know what Shelley’s conclusion to The Triumph of Life would have been, but I tend to agree with Jones that it would not have been pessimistic: “The Triumph of Life gives no indication that the poet would ever do more than profit by the steadying influence of the unseen but ever-felt presence of Beauty-Truth-Love (the ‘fair Shape’)” (Jones, “Vision Theme in Alastor”, 124). And apart from the evidence put forward by Prometheus Unbound itself, consider Mary Shelley’s Note to the poem, written after Shelley’s death by the one human being who knew him better than anyone else, and who, in this instance, could have had no ulterior motive regarding the poet’s public image: “Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these Notes to notice the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to mention the fact that he entertained it, and was indeed attached to it with fervent enthusiasm” (SPW 271).

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human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image.

His search for a Platonic “prototype” is doomed to failure: “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave”. This critique of unanchored idealism, however, is not in contradistinction to the idealism espoused in The Daemon. There, the Daemon herself is aware of the continual striving that is needed to keep the ideal in view, whatever the consequences. Here, there is no such distanced awareness. The Poet of the Preface is overtaken by his vision. As Fraistat observes, if the earth is the closed-system of all we know (a view purveyed by the original Alastor volume of poems), “both modern physics and philosophy tell us what Shelley already had deduced: in order to know a closed system fully, one would have to be standing outside of it” (“Poetic Quests”, 163). It is this conceptual subjective immersion which deprives the individual of the necessary balance in an approach to existence; and yet, this does not obviate the influence of the “Power”, at one with the “Spirit of Nature”, or Daemon of the World. A distinction is made based on either enthusiastic allegiance to the Power (through an “exquisite . . . perception of its influences”) or a stark “abjuration” of those influences. Even though the end is, finally, the same, those “deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond . . . have their apportioned curse”: They languish, because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country.

Here the Preface diverges from the story of the Poet within the poem, in calling the vision of the maid as stemming from the avenging “furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin”, whereas she was sent by the spirit of sweet love. The fierce daemonism of the Preface is centred in Greek tragedy, far more punishing in its outlook than what we find in the poem. This point does not prevent Shelley from allying the Poet in the Preface to one who, though he “attempts to exist without human sympathy” following a sudden experience of “vacancy of spirit”, is inherently “pure and tender-hearted”: All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

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Part of the point is, I think, that broader accommodations need to be made for human nature than those based on simplified categories, and this in the face of the Wordsworthian categories from The Excursion, which conclude Shelley’s Preface: “The good die first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, / Burn to the socket!” Though Shelley obviously agrees with the Wordsworth who originally made this observation, he perceives the irony in the lines, stemming from the now reactionary older poet.32 The irony unsettles the assurance of the statement, questioning its dualistic foundation. The irony also, if unwittingly, questions Shelley’s own assumptions, so categorically stated, with all the assurance of a Prometheus cursing Jupiter before he “repents” his words (SPW 214). Though Shelley’s indignation at present (levelled largely at Wordsworth) is clearly not reflexive, his thinking as a whole leaves space for retrospective views, as the example of Prometheus indicates. I think the energies of the two poems working in concert, tempering and modifying each other, also help temper the bitterness of this Preface. As Stuart Sperry notes, “optimism and pessimism compose the necessary polarity along which Shelley pursues, in poem after poem, his ever deepening investigation of the human heart and mind”.33 Perhaps the daemonic bitterness of the Preface to Alastor should not be questioned, but (despite the underlying currents involved) it does for the present jeopardize our usual awareness of Shelleyan subtlety. In the body of the poem, the opening lines by the Narrator34 tell of a deep love for the natural world, viewed as a “brotherhood” of “earth, ocean, air”, presided over by “our great Mother”, surely the Daemon of the World herself (SPW 15). Here is the first of five clauses beginning with “If”, which lead, in syllogistic fashion, to a conclusion based on their premises: Earth, ocean, air, belovèd brotherhood! If our great Mother has imbued my soul With aught of natural piety to feel

32

As Christopher Heppner points out, as long ago as 1934 Mueschke and Griggs saw the poem as “allegorical of the premature decay of genius”, “a view of Wordsworth”, says Heppner, prompted by Shelley’s reading of The Excursion in 1814”. This view “has remained strongly influential”. Christopher Heppner, “Alastor: The Poet and Narrator Reconsidered”, Keats-Shelley Journal 37 (1988): 91. 33 Stuart M. Sperry, “Optimism and Pessimism: Shelley’s Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, in The Most Unfailing Herald: Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1992, ed. Alan Weinberg and Romaine Hill (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 1996), 92. 34 It is not clear why Heppner believes that “the best, and most natural way to read it is as the voice of the Poet”. Nothing in the poem as it stands separates this invocation from the voice of the Narrator. (See Heppner, “Poet and Narrator”, 95.)

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Your love, and recompense the boon with mine; (1-4)

Imploring the “favour” of this “brethren”, the passage is an invocation, where the Muses are naturalised as the elements of nature. Wordsworthian “natural piety” is alluded to, as a promotor of reciprocal “love” between the elements and the Narrator. The invocation incorporates the cyclical variety of nature, suggesting continuity, in opposition to the “sudden darkness and extinction” which can strike “the luminaries of the world” in the Preface: If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even, With sunset and its gorgeous ministers, And solemn midnight’s tingling silentness; If autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood, And winter robing with pure snow and crowns Of starry ice the grey grass and bare boughs; (5-10)

The Narrator and author of the Preface, then, are distinct from the Poet protagonist, presented as one of “the luminaries of the world”, subject to “sudden darkness and extinction” after “too exquisite a perception” of the “influences” of the Power. The cyclicality is further elaborated upon: If spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes Her first sweet kisses, have been dear to me; If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred; then forgive This boast, belovèd brethren, and withdraw No portion of your wonted favour now! (11-17)

The continuity emphasised by the Narrator tells of a different perspective from this sense of “sudden extinction”, a continuity more closely aligned with that in “Ode to the West Wind”, aware of the unceasing life which lies beyond the scope of a limited human lifetime. The Narrator, employing the trope of the wind-lyre which will later be used in this very “Ode”, seeks daemonic intervention from the “great Mother” to tell this tale of existential overreaching, based on a cutting off from that which had been revealed through the Power that the Mother in fact is. In this detail too, then, we perceive that the pessimism of the conclusion of the poem needs to be understood in terms of a larger context of the relationship between the mind and nature (or between mind, its expectations regarding nature, and how it responds to what is actually

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granted by nature). Shelley evokes, in some measure, Milton’s Platonist, from Il Penseroso, observing the night sky from his tower:35 In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, Like an inspired and desperate alchymist Staking his very life on some dark hope, Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks With my most innocent love, until strange tears Uniting with those breathless kisses, made Such magic as compels the charmèd night To render up thy charge: (29-37)

In doing so, he recalls the expectations of this Platonist, to plumb the “immortal mind” coextensive with the “daemons” of the elements. Hardly the sceptical rationalist, then, the Narrator, as much as his protagonist, would commune with what lies “beyond the human”. His esoteric researches, though, are conducted in the substantial presence of his “innocent love” and their shared “breathless kisses”, underlining his reliance on “human sympathy”, unlike the Poet and his visionary “Alastor”.36 Further, the Narrator’s honest admission of never having been able to attain the “inmost sanctuary” of this Daemon, situates him in the world of common human experience. His esoteric needs are qualified by the limitations of this world: and, though ne’er yet Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary, Enough from incommunicable dream, And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought, Has shone within me, that serenely now And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre Suspended in the solitary dome Of some mysterious and deserted fane, I wait thy breath, Great Parent, (37-45)

35

See Il Penseroso, lines 85-96, beginning “Or let my lamp at midnight hour” and ending with the “daemons” of “fire, air, flood, or under ground”, “whose power” is linked to “planet” or “element”. The Daemon and Alastor make up a complementary pair, to an extent, like L’Allegro” and Il Penseroso. 36 According to Thomas Love Peacock, an “Alastor” is an evil daemon, or kakodaimon (Wu, Romanticism, 1081). For Shelley’s unnamed Poet she is, in rather more complex terms, an impossible-to-achieve (and impossible-to-relinquish) object of desire and the need for deep communion (a sublimation of self-communion).

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The Daemon of the World has never “unveiled” to the Narrator her “inmost sanctuary”; however, the vague traces in “incommunicable dream”, “twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought” shining “within” him have been “enough” to prepare him to be the medium (as it were) of the Daemon. He waits in “serene” expectation, though “moveless” as “a longforgotten lyre”, hanging in a “deserted” temple (so long has the wait been, that the religion itself appears to be “long-forgotten”). The simile, while not expressing hopelessness, implies through its evoked time scale the patience and preparedness necessary to take up the “breath” of the “Great Parent”: that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air And motions of the forests and the sea, And voice of living beings, and woven hymns Of night and day, and the deep heart of man. (45-49)

The dedication will be worth it, for the Narrator’s voice will assume the subtle manifestations of the Power in “murmurs of the air”, in “motions of the forests and the sea”, the “voice of living beings” (not human), and the “woven hymns” of the continuing diurnal but sacral pattern (“hymns”) of “night and day”. “Modulating” with “the deep heart of man”, the “strain” of the Narrator will also affirm human communion. We must assume that the antithetical narration which follows is informed by this inspirational “breath”: its optimistic source is strong enough to accommodate a pessimistic outcome—seen as another of the poem’s inconsistencies, though the invocation and conclusion might also be seen in dialectical terms (anticipating the “destroyer and preserver” of the west wind). We are told at the beginning of the solitary “untimely” death of the unnamed “Poet” of the narration, which must qualify our reading of the following account. It colours with an acute poignancy our awareness that this Poet seems particularly suited to be the subject and originator of inspired vision: He lived, he died, he sung, in solitude. Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes, And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes. The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn, And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell. (60-66)

That he had an impact on common humanity of which he seemed oblivious, shows that “solitude” was his own choice, determined by a “spirit”, an

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“Alastor”, within him. Otherwise, he might well have shared “their common nature” with others. He is imbued with a thirst for understanding the world and all its products, material and intellectual, but the motivating forces are subjective, a “nurturing” stemming from his nature (subject to “solemn vision, and bright silver dream”, not society. He absorbs the “choicest impulses” from the “vast” posthuman world around him, and knowledge from “the fountains of divine philosophy”. He “felt / And knew” the store of experience and knowledge “consecrated” “in truth or fable” (67-75). Having absorbed all of manifold experience in his early youth, but apparently not understood at home—the “fireside” is “cold” and the “home” itself is “alienated”—he begins his wandering over the earth. He “seeks strange truths in undiscovered lands”, and, though confronted by “savage men”, because of “his sweet voice and eyes” he is offered by them “rest and food” (75-81). He himself is like a “pursuing” spirit, a “shadow” following the “most secret steps” of “Nature”, an image which looks forward to the appearance of the Alastor, a “spirit” both pursued by and (in terms of a haunting presence) pursuing the Poet.37 He goes where volcanic emissions hang over “fields of snow and pinnacles of ice”, past “bitumen lakes”, through “secret caves” with “starry domes” of “diamond” and “gold”, through “immeasurable halls” with their “crystal columns” and “clear shrines” of “pearl”, and past “thrones radiant with chrysolite” (81-94). This passage offers an example of the encyclopaedic store of knowledge he is to gain from Nature’s “secrets”; and the mineral splendour hidden in the caverns of materiality (with their symbolic resonance) is reflected in the “scene of ampler majesty” in “the varying roof of heaven”, a type of Hermetic correspondence hinting at Shelley’s possible awareness of the Smaragdine Table known to Blake.38 The Poet also traverses the ruins of past civilisations, dating back to “the world’s youth”, and eventually, through continued “gazing”, understands the ancient languages, until he saw “the thrilling secrets of the birth of time” (128). The crux of the poem follows soon after, when a flesh-and-blood “Arab maiden” (129), desperately in love with him, fails to attract his interest in the slightest, and is presently displaced by “a veilèd maid” in a dream vision; this is, of course, the Alastor, and she manifests herself with an erotic abandon that melds with the deep intellectual and psychic communion that 37 Richard Holmes, discussing Prometheus Unbound, refers to the “familiar idea” in Shelley of “the double nature, the pursuer and pursued, the doppelgänger” (Pursuit, 497). I’ll return to the daemonic implications of this theme in my own discussion of Prometheus Unbound. 38 Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:118-119.

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a physical relationship might have brought him. First, though, is the novelty of the situation; the vision bears “hopes” never given conscious attention before, and felt in his physical being, or at least having the potential to be thus felt—as suggested by “flushed his cheek”. This, registered then as a type of initiation into the profundities attending self-awareness, can be foreseen as having a deep impact on him: A vision on his sleep There came, a dream of hopes that never yet Had flushed his cheek. (149-151)

There follows the realisation that the dream maid speaks with “the voice of his own soul” as “heard in the calm of thought”: He dreamed a veilèd maid Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. (151-157)

She is a poet too, and her thoughts are the same as his (not remarkable if she is a conscious projection; but this insipid, instrumentalist option is overridden in his mind by his absorption in the fact that she, alone in the world, affirms all that lies at the very roots of his being): Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, And lofty hopes of divine liberty, Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, Herself a poet. (158-161)

Her voice is a modulation of what the Narrator senses when in communion or near-communion with the “Great Parent”, and the “murmurs of the air” and “motions of the forests and the sea”: “like the voice of his own soul”, the voice of the maid is “like woven sounds of streams and breezes”; hence unity with the subtle motions and forces of nature is emphasised. The “solemn mood” of “her pure mind” seems a substantial foundation for the “kindling” of emotional “fire”, otherwise not thus anchored. The “wild numbers” of her poetry are sung in a “voice” whose “tremulous sobs”, though “stifling” and “subduing” the words, express that emotion through other than verbal means, more charged because of being contained: Soon the solemn mood

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The “ineffable tale” of the emotions is expressed through the “eloquent blood” of her “branching veins”; her passion is also evident in the sound of her “beating heart” in the “pauses” of the music, and the “tumultuous” “breath” “according” with the “fits” of “song” that comes in “intermitted” bursts (with a glance at the “half-intermitted burst” of “Kubla Khan”):39 The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath Tumultuously accorded with those fits Of intermitted song. (169-172)

Then comes the erotic culmination of this passion, as if it can no longer be contained; it is a “bursting burthen” “impatiently endured”. The Poet, in near synchrony with the maid, “turns” as she “rises”, and sees her physical beauty, radiated by the “warmth” of her “own life”. The details are sensuously entrancing: the “glowing limbs”, the “outspread”, “bare” arms, “her dark locks floating in the breath of night”, and (perhaps the most arousing detail) her lips, “parted” and “quivering eagerly”: Sudden she rose, As if her heart impatiently endured Its bursting burthen: at the sound he turned, And saw by the warm light of their own life Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil Of woven wind, her outspread arms now bare, Her dark locks floating in the breath of night, Her beamy bending eyes, her parted lips Outstretched, and pale, and quivering eagerly. (172-180)

His response is equally powerful, as his heart “sickens with excess” of “love”; he “rears his shuddering limbs”, and needs to “quell” his “gasping 39 The vocabulary and maid herself evoke aspects of “Kubla Khan”, a daemonic poem in its own right, where nature, too, is infused with an overabundance of energy (Coleridge, Selected Poems, 239). There are as many Coleridgean as Wordsworthian echoes in Shelley.

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breath” as he “spreads his arms” to clasp her “panting bosom”. First drawing back, enticingly, she then “with frantic gesture and short breathless cry” enfolds him in her “dissolving arms”. The adjective, “dissolving”, might be considered at first part of the burning, melting passion, but, of course, also bears another meaning—she dissolves into nothingness: His strong heart sunk and sickened with excess Of love. He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet Her panting bosom: . . . she drew back a while, Then, yielding to the irresistible joy, With frantic gesture and short breathless cry Folded his frame in her dissolving arms. (181-187)

The word, “dissolving”, looking both ways, as it were, capitalizes on both, dramatizing orgasmic and visionary dissolution. The whole dream sequence is also a naturalistic account of absorption in a dream, being wrenched out of it, and relapsing into ordinary sleep (sleep “rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain” (191)). The sensuous realism of the description, though, gives warrant to the Poet’s credence. Whether a projection of his ripe imagination or a chance dream, its vividness brings it into the world of his lived experience. The maid becomes, in effect, a bridge between himself and the seemingly paradisal experience that lies beyond ordinary human experience: she is certainly daemonic. This remarkably passionate effusion of sensual love, then, embodies in very human terms the need for what is beyond the reach of the human, the daemonic in general, but is most closely related to the sense that what we seek is actually within us, though normally inaccessible. Much more than simple narcissism, this is an expression of a glimpse of a sundered part of the self, linked archetypally to the Platonic parable of the egg, which originally contained both male and female, or, as Yeats expressed it in “Among School Children”: It seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. (13-16)

For Blake this “blending” would involve a reconciliation of Zoa and Emanation.40 40 Not, as Nigel Leask would have it, “a narcissistic discovery of the same”, she is “a radical Other, a sublime Other, an Other who represents the imagination’s limits”.

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Frustrated in this vision of an almost perfect communion, the Poet’s attention is then focussed on trying to regain the means (SPW 19): The spirit of sweet human love has sent A vision to the sleep of him who spurned Her choicest gifts. He eagerly pursues Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; He overleaps the bounds. (203-207)

It seems clear from this reference to the “spirit of sweet human love” which “sent” the “vision”, that the dream maid was not a kakodaimon, a succubus.41 It is the poet’s response which makes of the vision something destructive. The dream had the potential to turn his awareness towards human communion, but he would rather pursue the unobtainable phantasmic expression of a spiritual ideal.42 That pursuit is no longer informed by his wonder at the posthuman “thrilling secrets of the birth of time” or the “aërial mountains” through which “in joy and exultation” he “held his way” (SPW 18), but is now undercut by existential doubt, and it is this, posthuman in a different sense— being centred in a metaphysical distinction beyond usual human understanding—which leads to his eventual decline and death. He thinks back on the extraordinary material autonomy of the dream image, and (this is implicit in his sense of loss) cannot accept it as less real than the world around him: Were limbs, and breath, and being intertwined Thus treacherously? Lost, lost, for ever lost, In the wide pathless desert of dim sleep, See Manu Samriti Chander, “Framing Difference: The Orientalist Aesthetics of David Roberts and Percy Shelley”, Keats-Shelley Journal 60 (2011): 89. Chander quotes from Nigel Leask’s essay, “‘Wandering through Elbis’: Absorption and Containment in Romantic Exoticism”, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 182. 41 Michael Ferber feels “she is better described as a spirit of love than of solitude”, and though the Preface refers to the pursuing “furies of an irresistible passion”, as previously discussed, “many readers feel that the Preface is not consistent with the poem and should have no more weight than Peacock’s comment” concerning the meaning of an Alastor. See Ferber’s essay, “Alastor”, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 655. 42 I thus disagree with Frederick Jones, who believes “sweet human love” sent him the vision “to punish him for neglecting human fellowship” (“Vision Theme in Alastor”, 113).

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That beautiful shape! (208-211)

This leads him to speculate, like Hamlet enlisting the experience of sleep and dream,43 about existence beyond the borders of death: Does the dark gate of death Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, O Sleep? (211-213)

In that case, are the beauties of material existence which so entranced him before merely an outward show, underpinned by nothing but its own “black and watery depth” (in Neoplatonic fashion—pertaining to watery generation)? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds, And pendant mountains seen in the calm lake, Lead only to a black and watery depth? (213-215)

Death, on the other hand, might lead to an awakening of the paradisal “reality” he experienced in his dream: While death’s blue vault, with loathliest vapours hung, Where every shade which the foul grave exhales Hides its dead eye from the detested day, Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms? (216-219)

It is this possibility that determines the obsessive nature of his ensuing quest, where he seeks, like Blake’s sunflower, for “that sweet golden clime / Where the traveller’s journey is done” (BCW 215): This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart, The insatiate hope which it awakened, stung His brain even like despair. (220-222)

The word “despair” signals the misguided nature of his speculation and his quest. From now, he himself becomes an Alastor, a “spirit of solitude”, 44 and the nature of the quest takes on a dark tone. Thus the “vision” sent by the “spirit of sweet human love”, becomes an illusory “fair fiend”, projected, now, by “his own deep mind” (298). The Poet travels through symbolic material realms of generational water and, once more, Platonic caverns in pursuit of his vision. Ironically, he is 43

A connection also made by Heppner (“Poet and Narrator”, 98). He seems to be “the Spirit of wind”, with his “lightning eyes, and eager breath” (259-260). 44

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driven by love, just as descending spirits, in Neoplatonic understanding, are driven by the desire for human love and generation. That the poet is in love with a spirit, inverts the position of the actors in this process, while reflecting it. This ironic inversion suggests, with a daemonic flourish, that the material entrapment of spirit reflects a corresponding spiritual entrapment of materiality: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”, as Blake put it (Marriage, 7.10). Whether Shelley intended this equation in such neat terms is debatable, but he (as much as Blake) is chary of an exclusive focus on “that sweet golden clime”. At one point in his wanderings, the Poet has an encounter suggestive of Wordsworth’s haunting awareness of a “spirit in the woods”, in “Nutting” (Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 147). This too, beckoning him on, could be considered an Alastor, and yet the outcome might have been different; a reconciliation with the gifts of nature, for instance (SPW 25): He heard The motion of the leaves, the grass that sprung Startled and glanced and trembled even to feel An unaccustomed presence, and the sound Of the sweet brook that from the secret springs Of that dark fountain rose. A Spirit seemed To stand beside him—clothed in no bright robes Of shadowy silver or enshrining light. Borrowed from aught the visible world affords Of grace, or majesty, or mystery;— (474-483)

At first the Spirit is deliberately presented as free of the human trappings suggestive of projection or imaginatively inspired vision: she is not “clothed” in the “bright robes” of “shadowy silver” and “enshrining light”, as found in Renaissance paintings of supernatural presences, with their attendant “grace”, “majesty” and sense of “mystery”. Rather, her “seeming” presence manifests itself in the “speech” of nature, paralleling that in the Narrator’s invocation, and the Spirit holds “commune with him” in an exclusive manner, “as if he and it / Were all that was”: But, undulating woods, and silent well, And leaping rivulet, and evening gloom Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming, Held commune with him, as if he and it Were all that was,— (484-488)

The following broken narration first adds to the sense of indeterminate presence, but also suggests a wavering from the previous perspective; and

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now an element which appeals to the senses in human terms enters the Poet’s awareness, “two eyes”, which might or might not simply be imagined: only . . . when his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness, . . . two eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed with their serene and azure smiles To beckon him. (488-492)

Within the shelter of inviolate nature, and in deep communion with it, he might have become alert, like Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey”, to the “still, sad music of humanity” (Poetical Works, 164), and joined the human community, but he chooses to attend to the “seeming” nature of “the gloom of thought”, and, in the lines which follow, is “Obedient to the light / That shone within his soul” (492-493), and keeps on, with self-destructive consequences, “pursuing” his immaterial vision. In the Preface to the poem (instances of inconsistent attitude aside) Shelley refers to the “Power” influencing the Poet’s vision, which causes him his “irresistible passion”, his being immersed in “too exquisite a perception of its influences”. Implicitly, then, the Power wields influence from beyond the limitations of materiality. However, even though it is an informing Power of the universe (as in “Mont Blanc”), which accommodates the “great Mother” or Daemon of the World, there is no guarantee that it implies, for humans, continuing spiritual existence after death. I think it is this fact, linked to the pessimistic side of Shelley’s nature, which makes the death of the Poet, as presented in what follows, particularly sombre. The outlook is bleak, antedating the apparently pessimistic (though incomplete) conclusion of The Triumph of Life fragment by a number of years (SPW 29):45 But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. (659-662)

The “voiceless earth and vacant air” underscore the bereft nature of the human corpse, while establishing their own separateness—they cannot be accommodated in human terms of voice and presence. The image of the wind-lyre or lute from the beginning of the poem returns (“A fragile lute” 45 Again, I agree with Jones that this conclusion would not have been pessimistic, for reasons given (Jones, “Vision Theme in Alastor”, 124).

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conveying “the breath of heaven”), conflating, to an extent, Poet and Narrator, seeming to undermine, in the end, the Narrator’s distinguishing optimism (667-671). Michael Ferber, for instance, notes that “The naturally pious Narrator ends by railing against nature’s limits”.46 The Narrator’s wish for a different outcome is derailed by its own impossible nature, as he evokes the rejuvenatory potion of Medea, and the immortality of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew (672-682): the end of Medea’s story is not a happy one, and even material immortality, were the Jew to exist, is a “blighting curse”. Ferber remarks that the type of the nature poet, the Narrator, now “imagines himself trafficking in the supernatural in the closing passage, searching for an elixir of life, and he seems to believe in the story of the Wandering Jew” (Ferber, “Alastor”, 662). According to Earl Wasserman, “the Narrator’s faith in the Spirit of Nature either ironically undermines itself or is gradually eroded as a consequence of the opposing presence of the Visionary [that is, the Poet]”. Kenneth Neill Cameron argues: “It is unfortunate that . . . some critics seem to feel the only way to save Shelley’s intellectual respectability is to depict him as a sceptical misanthrope or philosophical eclectic”. While still maintaining that dialectical opposition has a place in the poem, I would tend to agree with Frederick Kirchhoff, that “the identities of Shelley, the Narrator, and the Poet” are “all interinvolved and indeterminate”.47 Thus prefaced by “voiceless earth and vacant air”, the concluding lines bring into question any human aspiration, but, with a shift of perspective, give voice to posthuman autonomy, obliquely hinting at that same bracing (if simultaneously disorientating) quality we find at the conclusion of “Mont Blanc”. It does so, first, by emphasising the “frail and vain” nature of the “feeble imagery” of human aesthetic encapsulations of grief: Art and eloquence, And all the shows o’ the world are frail and vain To weep a loss that turns their lights to shade. (710-712)

46

Ferber, “Alastor”, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 661. Here is another instance of critics’ awareness of the poem’s perceived inconsistency. As already argued, the poem’s optimistic introductory evocation of Nature might accommodate an antithetical swing; after all, we learn of the Poet’s death within the first few lines of the narration following this evocation. 47 See Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 36. See Kenneth Neill Cameron, “Shelley as Philosophical and Social Thinker: Some Modern Evaluations”, Studies in Romanticism 21, no.3 (1982): 366. See Frederick Kirchhoff, “Shelley’s Alastor: The Poet Who Refuses to Write Language”, Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983): 109.

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Then, the lines question the possibility of any human intervention at all concerning the passing of the Poet, apart from acceptance of “pale despair and cold tranquillity”, a type of emotional void. The lines thereby imply the imperturbable region that human absence entails—a posthuman region: It is a woe too “deep for tears,” when all Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit, Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope; But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. (713-720)

If this is at odds with the direct tone of mourning at the conclusion, it is not at odds with the idea that any venting of human concern is fruitless. The poem itself (quoting Wordsworth’s expression from the “Intimations of Immortality” ode, of that which is emotionally ineffable)48 ensures the undoing of its own demonstration of mourning. One’s perspective shifts to encompass existential otherness: things “are not as they were”. What takes place here is a type of “self-annihilation” (in literal terms), which, in effect, frees nature of mediating human consciousness. This is an extreme version of what Jennifer Lokash perceives in Keats: “Through a self-annihilating act of imagination [in the case of his identifying completely with a sparrow], Keats achieves the temporary but total effacement [of] his personal identity in the empathetic identification with the objects of his perception”.49 “Empathetic identification” is displaced in Shelley by a complete removal of human identity.50 48

Wordsworth, Collected Works, 462. Jennifer Lokash, “Shelley’s Organic Sympathy: Natural Communitarianism and the Example of Alastor”, The Wordsworth Circle 28, no.3 (1997): 178. Lokash further notes that “the images of limitless expansion and endless connection represented by the growth of the natural world in Alastor constitute an early poetic articulation of Shelley’s conviction that poetry’s affective power is to progressively expand the mind’s imaginative capacity to sympathize”. For her, the poem is Shelley’s “cautionary tale” to himself (183). 50 Lisa M. Steinman (in “Shelley’s Skepticism: Allegory in Alastor”, ELH 45, no.2 (1978): 266), links the observation in Shelley’s “Essay on Life”, that he finds himself “on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down in the dark abyss of how little we know”, with the end of the Poet: “The image (here, of being on the edge of an abyss and growing dizzy) serves as an emblem of the mind’s position upon reaching the end of knowledge”. She continues, “the visionary’s death occurs as he lies ‘on the smooth brink / Of that obscurest chasm’, 49

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*** The Preface to The Revolt of Islam is an extraordinary document. The importance of Shelley’s prefaces in general regarding their daemonic energy (as I would see it) is expressed by Elise Gold: Shelley rarely submitted to guidelines governing current literary taste that would have caused him to compromise his poetic philosophy. . . . Shelley shows an artistic stubbornness, a combative disdain for the heavy didacticism, moral and political conservatism, tawdry sentimentalism, and facile literary conventions that would have guaranteed him the fame, broad audience, and critical approval he initially sought.51

I only consider the Preface of The Revolt, not the poem itself. It expounds in literal terms all that Blake, no less aware than Shelley of prevailing conditions, expounded with such visionary fervour. Shelley’s verbal attack seems more rationally controlled, but its sentiments are as passionate. Shelley’s daemonism, I would say, subscribes to the linguistic propriety of the Enlightenment; Blake forges his own linguistic means. Shelley first expresses a concern with the survival of “a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society” “among the enlightened and refined”, despite “the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live” (SPW 32). His means for bolstering such a need are those of the poet: “the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a Poem, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality”. Again, his careful and astute delineation of the problem and his means of addressing it might seem, in its rationalism, too emotionally distant. But we cannot doubt the strength of his disappointment in his awareness (though expressed indirectly) of the response to the “tempests which have shaken” the present among erstwhile heroes such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. These figures still trail in his mind the albeit fast-dissolving clouds of glory of “the enlightened and refined”, and part of Shelley must hope to re-establish their “faith and hope in something good” through reasoned argument; he wishes to:

so that his end echoes the end imaged as the edge of an abyss in the ‘Essay on Life’” (267). The “abyss” will not admit human identity. 51 See Elise Gold, “Touring the Inventions: Shelley’s Prefatory Writing”, KeatsShelley Journal 36 (1987): 77.

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kindle within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind. (SPW 32)

The point is, then, that those who have lost faith in the ideals of revolution, in the apparent “desolation of all their cherished hopes” (SPW 33), can indeed be reinspired: “faith and hope in something good” can never be “totally extinguished”. That Shelley can believe this in the face of the scepticism expressed at the conclusion of Alastor, shows once again his dialectical awareness, but also the strength of his present optimistic conviction. His means of reinspiring his readers is to draw on “human passion in its most universal character”, certainly a Blakean ideal. If this expression of the issue is, once more, somewhat restrained, the catalogue of what is involved in “the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence” which follows can barely be contained within the bounds of normal punctuation. Twenty topics are listed as clauses separated only by semicolons (and in a few instances by commas, as with the final two topics— “the transient nature of ignorance and error, and the eternity of genius and virtue”). Though the effect is not exactly of a breathless outpouring, the onrush of energy is very apparent in the piling up of these topics, with their brief pauses. The Poem’s general goal for “individual mind aspiring after excellence” is first outlined (SPW 32): The Poem therefore . . . is narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind.

The catalogue begins. Blakean in the first clause is the conjoining of imagination, intellect and sense, and their purification and refinement, while their animus against “oppression” and their need to enlighten humankind in the next two clauses is also Blakean. Shelley writes of mind’s influence in refining and making pure the most daring and uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the senses; its impatience at “all the oppressions which are done under the sun”; its tendency to awaken public hope, and to enlighten and improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that tendency; 52

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The fifth clause with its “awakening of an immense nation” from “slavery and degradation”, is suggestive of Blake’s myth of Albion; and the “religious frauds” “deluding” a populace “into submission”, which follows, is also a preoccupation of Blake’s: the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the bloodless dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious frauds by which they have been deluded into submission;

There follows praise of “true philanthropy”, excoriation of the use of mercenaries, an appeal for justice based on “kindness and pity”, criticism of “faithless” “tyrants” and coercive world rulers overturning the democratic achievements of revolution, a criticism of “despotism” founded on nationalist fears and its consequences (“civil war, famine, plague, superstition, and an utter extinction of domestic affections”). He also appeals against the “judicial murder of the advocates of Liberty”, and “the temporary triumph of oppression” which in fact leads to its “fall”. While the entire “catalogue”, indeed, might be seen as expressing Blake’s feelings and concerns, the final two clauses (coming as a type of climax) encapsulate the range of Blakean myth given in the prophecies: “the transient nature of ignorance and error, and the eternity of genius and virtue”. We should not doubt the ardour which lies below Shellley’s almost urbane, controlled linguistic surface. He would transform minds through the strength of this battery of a “series of delineations”. In truth, I think his intellectual ardour, which finds expression in political incisiveness,53 is his own means of conveying a sense of Miltonic daemonism, and this becomes apparent on the following page, when he engages in empathetic reasoning regarding the consequences of centuries of oppression; his words are surely in response to the reactionary backtracking of the Southey circle: “It has ceased to be believed that whole generations of mankind ought to consign themselves to a hopeless inheritance of ignorance and misery, because a nation of men who had been dupes and slaves for centuries were incapable of conducting themselves with the wisdom and tranquillity of freemen so soon as some of their fetters were partially loosened”. He makes of the “ferocity and thoughtlessness” of the French Revolution the very reason for not oppressing others: 53 Cameron observes of Shelley’s political vision: “it was not primarily emotional but intellectual. His ‘vision’ was founded on an examination of the new sweep of history from the American and French revolutions to the Greek war for national liberation” (“Shelley as Philosophical and Social Thinker”, 364).

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That their conduct could not have been marked by any other characters than ferocity and thoughtlessness is the historical fact from which liberty derives all its recommendations, and falsehood the worst features of its deformity. There is a reflux in the tide of human things which bears the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven after the storms are past. Methinks, those who now live have survived an age of despair.

He argues, again, astutely, that to have only expected “unmingled good” from the French Revolution was a bit naïve: “such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realise”. The extreme horror attending the revolution underlines the seriousness of its causes: “If the Revolution had been in every respect prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the slightest motion of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the soul”. Though pessimism is a force with which Shelley often has to combat, it is not connected with an ultimate disbelief in human potential: Many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair.

The insight is subtle, and offers a means of lessening the grip of societal pessimism during Shelley’s historical moment; if “the solace” of “disappointment” is to “find relief only” in a “wilful exaggeration of its own despair”, then “despair” does not wield absolute power, it can be manipulated, and in a self-deluding way that exaggerates its own power. If Shelley’s analysis is correct, and to me its psychological penetration bears a hard-headed sense of reality, then his faintly qualified expression of optimism is justified: “But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change”. He sets himself against being moved by superficial social lessons, in favour of this “slow, gradual, silent change” (SPW 34). Another important moment in the Preface is when he turns on the critics (almost in anticipation of Adonais); he tells of how he has “written fearlessly”, despite their excessive cultural influence: It is the misfortune of this age that its Writers, too thoughtless of immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame. They

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In then separating Longinus from Homer, and Boileau from Horace, Shelley also implies that each age has its own spirit and presiding genius, is not subject to the standardized “regulations” determined by “the opinion of mankind”. The pernicious influence of such “opinion” can even be felt amongst “some of our greatest Poets”: Longinus could not have been the contemporary of Homer, nor Boileau of Horace. Yet this species of criticism never presumed to assert an understanding of its own: it has always, unlike true science, followed, not preceded, the opinion of mankind, and would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius either not so aspiring or not so fortunate as their own. I have sought therefore to write, as I believe that Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, wrote, with an utter disregard of anonymous censure.

Puffed up by “worthless adulation” even these poets heed the words of critics, thus curbing their own inherent impulses, “imposing gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations”, and purveying standards damaging to the writers around them through giving credence to the popular views informing the adulation. Also instructive in the Preface is the way Shelley distinguishes between his own views, and those of his characters, choosing this moment to clarify his own opinion regarding the “Supreme Being”.54 Again, his views on this matter come close to those of Blake: I trust that the reader will carefully distinguish between those opinions which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the characters which they are designed to elucidate, and such as are properly my own. The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself. 54 Colin Jager lists various works which discuss the “uproar” following Shelley’s signing himself as “Atheist” in hotel registers in Chamonix and Montanvert. See “Shelley after Atheism”, Studies in Romanticism 49, no.4 (2010): 611n2. See also, Holmes, Pursuit, 342: “Southey, among others, seized upon it and spread the story, and it played a prominent part in the major newspaper attacks on Shelley in the Quarterly of January 1818, and the London Chronicle of June 1819”. The entry appeared in the registers in 1816, adding to the common critical armoury first established by the fact that Shelley had been sent down from Oxford in 1811 because of his and Hogg’s notorious pamphlet on atheism.

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He makes explicit the distinction between author and character in this regard: The belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely different from my own.

His allegiance to Love serves as the climax to the Preface, and this in contrast to the “violent and malignant passions of our nature”: In recommending also a great and important change in the spirit which animates the social institutions of mankind, I have avoided all flattery to those violent and malignant passions of our nature which are ever on the watch to mingle with and to alloy the most beneficial innovations. There is no quarter given to Revenge, or Envy, or Prejudice. Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world. (SPW 37)

The celebration of Love “as the sole law which should govern the moral world”, is not naïve or uninformed. Judging from Alastor and the example of Shelley’s life up until this point, the perception has been hard won. Shelley’s “finest poem”,55 Prometheus Unbound, also contributes to establishing this fact. Prometheus Unbound was composed between September 1818 and December 1819.56 It offers, first, another Preface (SPW 204) brimming with its own “combative” energy, to use Elise Gold’s term. She calls this Preface Shelley’s “boldest manifesto of methods”: The poet’s strategy in the introductory material is to foreshadow the play’s central struggle, treating there variations on a single theme—the clash of oppressive literary tradition and imitation with artistic originality and independence. In the subtitle—A Lyrical Drama—he alludes, as he often does in his subtitles, to his revision of generic practices to suit his subject; in the Ciceronian epigraph [“Audisne haec Amphiarae, sub terram abdite?”],57 he challenges the shade of Aeschylus, his literary adversary, and 55

According to Lawrence Zillman, in the Introduction to the variorum edition of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley considered the Prometheus “his finest poem” (in Variorum Prometheus, 9). My personal vote, however, would be in favour of “Ode to the West Wind”. 56 Zillman states that “it is almost certain that the poem was published in August 1820”, though Shelley only sent a list of its numerous errata to his publishers on January 20, 1821 (Variorum Prometheus, 7-8). 57 Neville Rogers, in the Folio edition of Shelley’s poems, translates the epigraph: “Do you hear this, Amphiaraus, away down there in the earth?” He further observes that “Cicero quotes the passage from a play called Epigoni which has been lost,

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Chapter Four the reader to behold how he has repudiated the cursed burden of classical tradition. . . . In this context, then, the prefatory material to Prometheus Unbound is more than an apologia; it is also an integral part of experiencing the drama. It records the unbinding of the reader as well as the poet from imaginative and moral fetters in preparation for the Promethean fable to come. (“Touring the Inventions”, 67-68)

“Oppressive literary tradition and imitation”, and “the cursed burden of classical tradition” are strong words, not really in accord with Shelley’s sentiments in the Preface, where he sees himself as actually following “the Greek tragic writers” in not being “bound to adhere to the common interpretation” of a story (SPW 204). Her premise, in my view, is thus incorrect. Shelley is not primarily involved in a Promethean struggle where “artistic originality and independence” clash with “oppressive literary tradition and imitation”. His reasoning is centred on psychological and social liberation. He first tells of how Greek tragedians were not bound by singular models. He then links himself to this approach, and subsequently explains his divergence from the Aeschylean model in terms of Prometheus as liberator of humankind from tyrannical oppression rather than as one who compromises with a tyrant. In a short, apparently tangential paragraph, he tells of the context of the writing, a Roman Spring and its intoxicating effect, with his being embowered “among the flowery glades” of the Baths of Caracalla to compose his drama. But he thereby implies his own microcosmic involvement (through the season) in the general human renewal depicted in the drama. He then discusses his “imagery”, which “will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind or from those external actions by which they are expressed”, as found in Dante, Shakespeare, and “the Greek poets”, all of whom, he feels, influenced him. Building on the notion of influence, he feels that of “contemporary writers” is an influence that is inevitable, not through “the spirit of their genius”,

together with the identity of its author”. Amphiaraus was a seer involved in the Seven against Thebes, saved from his enemies by Zeus, who caused the earth to swallow him; after which, “he was regarded as an oracular god”. Recording the quotation in his notebook, Shelley wrote next to it, “To the ghost of Aeschylus”. As Rogers states, Shelley, diverging from Aeschylus by his depiction of Prometheus as firm in his resistance to Jupiter, offers the epigraph as “a whimsical answer to an imagined protest from Aeschylus”. But “the epigraph is addressed, no less, to ‘the upholders of tyranny’” (in Shelley, Collected Poems, ed. Neville Rogers (London: The Folio Society, 2008), 519).

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which remains theirs alone, but through the “forms” of expression, generated by the era.58 In a consideration of the consequences of such influence, his following paragraph discusses the “peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England”, and that emerges from the “mass of capabilities” (centred in the hypothetical model of “forty republics” within England, equivalent “in population and extent to Athens”) wakened into “action” by particular “circumstances”. For example, the “golden age” of English literature from Shakespeare to Milton was the product of “that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion”. His prime exemplar of this last, as it is for Blake, is Milton (though with qualifications when it comes to “the devil’s party”, or one regarded by Shelley as “the Hero of Paradise Lost”). Milton himself, like Shelley, is the artist as rebel, a Promethean man (at least an aspiring one on Shelley’s part—he would not have listed himself among “the great writers of our own age”, though we might): “the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion”. The crux of the Preface follows, and it is this evocation of the revolutionary spirit of the age which links story content to present mental participation in the act of human transformation. This is what Shelley aspires to in his drama: The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging a collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or is about to be restored. (SPW 206)

“The equilibrium between institutions and opinions”: that is, the balance among ideas and social constructs, or the wisdom used in informing the social constructs that help promote general human practices. Shelley’s essential optimism regarding human society, then, is embedded in this Preface, itself an essential part of a drama displaying the transformation of that society through the altered consciousness of Prometheus, representative of enlightened humanity, or champion of that enlightenment; and this despite the terrible circumstances to which he is subjected (reflective of socially damaging contemporary circumstances). 58 Though Zillman emphasises that Shelley, in “the last five paragraphs” of the Preface, was defending himself against “the charge of imitation” mounted in the Quarterly Review for April, 1819, it is clear that the poet’s concerns extend far beyond the personal. See Zillman in the Variorum Prometheus, 23-24.

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Gold’s insight, however, is important in alerting us to a fusion of participatory enactment and story content that reaches the heart of Shelley’s intentions. In reading we enact, to an extent, the burden of the “fable”, a deep level of involvement, where words are not distinct from events, especially as those events are expressive of “operations of the human mind” (SPW 205). Gold here, then, detects the pattern of a verbal reach beyond mere signification, where a type of power is transferred, making Shelley’s utterances daemonic; they infuse psychic energy (as do Blake’s words), the energy of the active process of thought, in a manner beyond the contentexpressing function of words.59 As Shelley remarks, in a somewhat understated way, “every man’s mind is . . . modified by all the objects of nature and art; by every word and every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness”. Not everyone is that receptive; Shelley, in perhaps revealing his own propensity to “admit” various “words” and “suggestions” “to act upon his consciousness”, also reveals what he would achieve for others through his art, provided they are (as he obviously is) careful, “select” “poetical readers”. In the penultimate paragraph he indicates, explicitly, the means he uses to do so (SPW 207): My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with the beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.

It is not enough simply to present “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence”; the word “familiarise” implies the type of immersion through example in these idealisms that only an active process of thought will accomplish. Otherwise love, admiration, hope, and endurance remain “seeds”, to be “trampled into dust”, mere potentiality locked in abstract words, not active qualities in the mind.60 59

Leadbetter draws attention to a congruence with the thought of Coleridge; Coleridge writes in 1822 (the year of Shelley’s death): “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized” (in Coleridge and the Daemonic, 85). 60 We recall what Kathleen Wheeler ascribes to the Greeks and Romantics in general: “For them, communication, especially verbal communication, involves treating words not like coins, as Socrates complained in the Symposium, with a fixed

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Early in Act 1 (SPW 208), Prometheus lists the posthuman agents of his suffering; they serve to crystallise in his mind awareness of the active negativity of a universe perverted by the will-to-power divorced from empathy, as figured in Jupiter: The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals, the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones. (1.31-33) While from their loud abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. (1.41-43)

The implication is that the negligent will, blind to consequences, turns the earth against humankind, almost in an enactment of what is happening on the planet today. Jupiter’s two-dimensional, absolute relation to power has been questioned by critics in various contexts. Susan Hawk Brisman, for instance, in the context of problematic language use, sees the Titan’s depiction of Jupiter as revealing an “unShelleyan conviction that evil is intrinsic to the universe and cannot be expunged”. In his “conviction of Jupiter’s incapacity for self-correction”, Prometheus “now seems to play Milton’s God to a Satanic and reprobate Jupiter, but the Titan once had higher expectations and more generous thoughts”. What we have witnessed of power-mongers in our own time would confirm Shelley’s Prometheus in his understanding of Jupiter. But more than simply “evil”, the “Jupiter” aspect of our psyche refuses the dialectical interchange of contraries proposed by Blake, and thus serves no productive function.61 Consequently, Jupiter is, in fact, “expunged”. Lilian Steichan argues that “the moment Prometheus pitied Jupiter” he “made the sphere of his love absolutely allinclusive”. What she doesn’t say, is that this expression of “love” ironically precipitates the god’s doom. This is not an inconsistency on Shelley’s part: value to be handed passively from one person to another: words are living things and powers” (“Blake, Coleridge, and Eighteenth-Century Greek Scholarship”, 92). 61 McGilchrist refers to the left hemisphere of the brain’s “tendency towards stasis”; it “lacks appropriate emotional depth, or concern, tending to be irritable or facetious, especially when challenged. It tends to disown problems, and pass the responsibility to others; is overconfident about what it cannot in the nature of things know much about; fabricates (often improbable) stories to cover its ignorance; sees parts at the expense of wholes; tends to see ‘from the outside’, rather than experience ‘from the inside’; and has an affinity for the inanimate, and for tools and machines in particular. It is also quite confident it is right” (Matter With Things, 164). Shelley’s Jupiter certainly corresponds with left hemisphere dominance.

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love dissolves hatred. Later in her essay, Steichan observes that “in representing Jove as begetting his own ruin, Shelley expresses his belief that evil is self-destructive”.62 But Shelley’s model at present is in Aeschylus. In Prometheus Bound, Hephaestus addresses the daemons “Might” and “Violence”, and so highlights the nature of Zeus (Jupiter): Might and Violence, in you the command of Zeus has its perfect fulfilment: in you there is nothing to stand in its way. But, for myself, I have not the heart to bind violently a god who is my kin here on this wintry cliff. Yet there is constraint upon me to have the heart for just that, for it is a dangerous thing to treat the Father’s words lightly. (12-17)

Prometheus too, though he foresees the reconciliation which Shelley deems “feeble”, knows that Zeus “is savage: and his justice / a thing he keeps by his own standard” (188-189). His resolution is as firm as that of Shelley’s figure, as he too confronts the posthuman agents of suffering: So let the curling tendril of fire from the lightning bolt be sent against me: let the air be stirred with thunderclaps, the winds in savage blasts convulsing all the world. Let earth to her foundations shake, yet to her root, before the quivering storm: let it confuse the paths of heavenly stars and the sea’s waves in a wild surging torrent: this my body let Him raise up on high and dash it down into black Tartarus with rigorous compulsive eddies: death he cannot give me. (1043-1052)

And for Shelley’s Prometheus, the posthuman world yet resonates with a hatred issuing from Prometheus himself, showing a shared burden of influence, which will be acknowledged when he summons the Phantasm of Jupiter to repeat his curse (SPW 209). Brisman notes that “Prometheus chooses Jupiter’s shadow to voice the curse, not because he shirks responsibility for his evil words, but because he thinks he can thereby avoid revitalizing the evil will that made his high indignation articulate” (“Problem of Voice”, 60). Roland Duerksen writes of “the egregious moral 62 Susan Hawk Brisman, “‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound”, Studies in Romanticism 16, no.1 (1977): 53. See Lilian Steichan, “A Study of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound”, The Sewanee Review 12, no.1 (1904): 46, 49.

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failure implicit in [Prometheus’s] response to being victimized by Jupiter. He has succumbed to respond in kind to Jupiter’s vengefulness, has called down a horrendous curse upon Jupiter, and has been motivated by hatred through all the years of his endurance”. He continues: “Before he can be prepared to reanimate and preserve the imaginative creativity implicit in his reunion with Asia, Prometheus must recognize the need to destroy within himself the calculation-violence-power complex that has for so long motivated him”.63 More than this, in “recalling” or remembering the curse (1.59), he comes close to the self-annihilation of Blake, emptying himself of the crippling ego, which would relate all of existence to itself. For the present, he tells of its fearful extent, and, indirectly, of the impact of human interference on the world. Material, as well as psychic regeneration, it is implied, begins within the mind of humankind. “Mountains”, “icy Springs”, “serenest Air”, “swift Whirlwinds”, all heard Prometheus’s “curse” and are thus in a position to help him “recall” or remember it: If then my words had power, Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within; although no memory be Of what is hate, let them not lose it now! What was that curse? for ye all heard me speak. (1.69-73)

The response of the elements of earth confirms the potency of unchecked human will, “the voice of thine unrest” (1.92), as the First Voice (from the Mountains) puts it. The Earth herself then speaks (SPW 210): The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills Cried “Misery!” then; the hollow Heaven replied, “Misery!” And the Ocean’s purple waves, Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds, And the pale nations heard it, “Misery!” (1.107-111)

As in the case of Blake, one cannot impose present conditions onto the past, but it seems fair to say that what Jupiter, the posthuman represents for Shelley is the limited “operation of the human mind” that leads to such conditions as we find on the planet today. In McGilchrist’s terms, “to exert power over something requires us only to know what happens when we pull the levers, press the button, or utter the spell”; as a consequence, “it is hardly surprising that while we have succeeded in coercing the world to our will to an extent unimaginable even a few generations ago, we have at the same 63 Roland Duerksen, “Shelley’s Prometheus: Destroyer and Preserver”, Studies in English Literature 18, no.4 (1978): 625-626.

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time wrought havoc on that world precisely because we have not understood it” (Matter With Things, 11). For Shelley, the effect of the cause is gauged as the Earth continues to speak, and we (from our present perspective) read into her account the devastating effects of climate change (SPW 211): the sea Was lifted by strange tempest, and new fire From earthquake-rifted mountains of bright snow Shook its portentous hair beneath Heaven’s frown; Lightning and Inundation vexed the plains; Blue thistles bloomed in cities; foodless toads Within voluptuous chambers panting crawled: When Plague had fallen on man, and beast, and worm, And Famine; and black blight on herb and tree; And in the corn, and vines, and meadow-grass, Teemed ineradicable poisonous weeds Draining their growth, for my wan breast was dry With grief; and the thin air, my breath, was stained With the contagion of a mother’s hate Breathed on her child’s destroyer. (1.165-179)

Shelley has dramatized the extended consequences of what flawed consciousness promotes on earth, whatever the period (and the consequences of the Industrial Revolution can be read into Earth’s account). The goal is to transform consciousness, and to do so a daemonic confrontation with an aspect of the human self is necessary. The Earth, in a famous passage, tells of the “Magus Zoroaster” confronting his double (1.191-194), recalling (not without a present significance) Yeats’s later statement, the Daemon “is indeed my double” though “most unlike, being my anti-self” (Essays, 484). The Yeatsian Daemon (still spelt thus by Yeats in 1924), which would complete us through the enlargement of consciousness implicit in the conjunction of opposites, is, in effect, the mediator between our present state and our potentiality. Depicted as an almost empty simulacrum here, its function, nevertheless, is to muster the elements in our own depths necessary to affect change: For know there are two worlds of life and death: One which thou beholdest; but the other Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit The shadows of all forms that think and live Till death unite them and they part no more.

Also “underneath the grave” is the “shade” of Prometheus, the phantasm of Jupiter, the posthuman, whose original is linked so closely to Prometheus in

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hate as to be an aspect, however unwittingly, of his own nature, and “Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom” (1.195-207). If the Yeatsian Daemon is anachronistically suggestive regarding the double, Stuart Curran, in Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, offers a direct influence on Shelley’s thought, the Zoroastrian “Fravashi”. He defines this word as “a daemonic force resembling that which Socrates claimed to possess and, in the aggregate, bearing affinities with the pantheon of Christian saints”, a reference which points to the mediatory function of the daemon (Annus Mirabilis, 73). Curran also posits an “exact source” for the double referred to in the above passage, from the Iescht Farvardin (a section of the Zend-Avesta), where Zoroaster turns to his own Fravashi in an act of worship.64 According to Curran, when Prometheus calls upon the Phantasm of Jupiter, the Titan is allowed to observe the inextricable relationship between himself and Jupiter, between self-regarding good and self-serving evil. Ultimately, they are the same. The Phantasm of Jupiter reads back Prometheus’s curse, in effect cursing that being who, by first uttering the imprecation, ironically cursed himself and all those who sought his protection. . . . Comrades in rebellion against Saturn, they have remained in linked manacles underneath the cloak of their antagonism. (Annus Mirabilis, 74)

This is an elegant formulation of what really “binds” Prometheus. Curran detects further Zoroastrian traces in Prometheus’s abjuration of the curse: “In rejecting his curse and the mental kinship with his oppressor, the Titan speaks with a moving formulaic selflessness—‘it doth repent me’—strongly recalling the standard Zoroastrian prayer of repentance for evil thoughts, words, or actions: ‘I renounce them by these three words: I repent them’” (74). Curran’s evocation of the Zoroastrian aspect of Prometheus Unbound is of especial interest to me because of a Neoplatonic connection with Romantic thought discussed in my first chapter. This pertains to the use of caves by Zoroastrians, explicitly noted by Porphyry in Thomas Taylor’s translation of On the Cave of the Nymphs (11-12): “according to Eubulus, Zoroaster . . . consecrated a natural cave, florid and watered with fountains, in honour of Mithras the father of all things: a cave in the opinion of Zoroaster bearing a resemblance of the world fabricated by Mithras”. Curran, referring to this translation, connects the Zoroastrian cave with “the Promethean cave of interior symbols” (Annus Mirabilis, 75), and the shift

64

Curran’s source is Anquetil du Perron’s Zend-Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre vol.2 (Paris, 1771), 263, 276. Notopoulos feels the phrase “two worlds” refers to two Platonic notions: “the eternal versus the relative world, and the immortality of the soul” (Platonism of Shelley, 242).

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from the external mountainous scene to an internal one commensurate with the regenerative “operations of the human mind”: The balanced Zoroastrian contexts of mountain and cave sharpen our awareness of the extent of the revolution Prometheus has undergone. The altar of the drama’s beginning, erected to the principle of self, allows only one worship, which is hate. In exchanging mountain for cave, an external and unresponsive nature for a world of intellectual symbols, Prometheus commits himself to the destiny of man, to a human fellowship and the love that renders it possible. (77)

While I would largely agree with Curran, the concern of Mithras, “the father of all things”, is also that of Prometheus (a protective, caring foster-parent of earth), who never sees the elements of nature as simply “external and unresponsive”. For instance, near the beginning of the drama he cries out (SPW 210): Oh, rock-embosomed lawns, and snow-fed streams, Now seen athwart frore vapours, deep below, Through whose o’ershadowing woods I wandered once With Asia, drinking life from her loved eyes; Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now To commune with me? me alone, who checked, As one who checks a fiend-drawn charioteer, The falsehood and the force of him who reigns Supreme? (1.120-128)

And in Act 2 (SPW 237) Asia speaks of Prometheus’s initial influence on earth being greater than that of Jupiter, regarding both his power to grant “dominion” and his fostering humanitarianism: Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And with this law alone, “Let man be free”, Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. (2.4.43-46)

Indeed, Prometheus’s human and posthuman influence is made explicit by Demogorgon at the conclusion of the drama, when “Earth”, “Moon”, “Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods”, the “happy Dead”, the “elemental Genii” (even those within “sullen lead”), the “Spirits” of “beasts and birds”, “worms and fish”, “living leaves and buds”, “lightning and wind”, “meteors and mists”, and finally, “Man”, all experience the power

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of “love” as it “folds over the world its healing wings” (SPW 266-267).65 A change of consciousness is central to this transformation by love; permanent change (socially and environmentally) can only come about through a change in consciousness, through the deeply rooted assumption of “Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance”, not through superficial political means (SPW 267-268): Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance, These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction’s strength; And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length; These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o’er the disentangled doom. (4.562-569)

Knowledge of the basis on which to “reassume” the benign rule of love, a reassumption which implies the cycles of change within the vast span of “Eternity” (and hence not the stasis of ungrounded idealistic projection), will guarantee future triumph over “doom” (with its evocation of the old Neoplatonic “serpent” of materiality). Carl Grabo links the cycles of universal destruction and recreation implied here to Indian philosophy, Plato, and the “hypotheses of Newton, Herschel, and Erasmus Darwin”. Of the three, it was Darwin who “had predicted a rebirth” in noting “all the suns, and the planets which circle round them, may again sink into one central chaos; and may again by explosions produce a new world; which in process of time may resemble the present one, and at length again undergo the same catastrophe”.66 The “healing wings” of all-embracing love are pertinent, indeed, regarding a Platonic source recently translated by Shelley (1818), Plato’s Symposium. I refer to the passage on the great daemon, Love, quoted near the beginning of Chapter One of the present book: The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love; and he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely 65 The universal regeneration at the conclusion of Prometheus Unbound is anticipated in general in Canto 8 of Queen Mab (SPW 792-796), and, as we have seen, in the second part of The Daemon of the World. 66 See Carl Grabo, Prometheus Unbound: An Interpretation (New York: Gordian Press, 1968), 157-158.

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Again, the daemonic nature of Love is of great importance at the conclusion of this drama, where layers of conscious existence from divine to the basest metal are explicitly evoked by Shelley, as being subject to its healing influence (as indicated above). A force from “beyond the human” is needed to alter a state of consciousness all too apparently bound by the human, with its ensuing limited perception of existence and all the elements of existence. The poetic warrant of an energizing daemon can be explained in materialist terms, as Floyd Stovall does, drawing extensively on the Necessitarian views of Queen Mab: Since in Shelley’s doctrine virtue is the desire for universal happiness, which is a form of benevolence or love, and since happiness in the physical universe may be interpreted as a harmonious adjustment of part to part, the harmony of nature is convincing evidence of the active presence there of love. Love, therefore, is the principle which actuates the life of the universe, and determines its inevitable progress towards perfection. In the regenerated world all things shall live by the rule of Love.68

He then quotes, in support of the above, from Canto 8 of Queen Mab (SPW 794):69 All things are recreated, and the flame Of consentaneous love inspires all life. (8.107-108)

Whether spontaneous harmonious adjustment on a material level or spiritual daemonic force, Love, for Shelley, is central to universal stability. Shelley’s thinking at the conclusion of Prometheus Unbound is also in accord with his understanding of Christ. According to Jesus: some evil spirit has dominion in this imperfect world. But there will come a time when the human mind shall be visited exclusively by the influences of the benignant Power. . . . The unobscured irradiations from the fountain-fire of all goodness shall reveal all that is mysterious and unintelligible, until the mutual communications of knowledge and of happiness throughout all thinking natures constitute a harmony of good that ever varies and never ends.

67

In Notopoulos, Platonism of Shelley, 441-442. Floyd Stovall, “Shelley’s Doctrine of Love”, PMLA 45, no.1 (1930): 288. 69 A passage included, too, as we saw, in The Daemon of the World (2.343-344). 68

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This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fullness of its power the universal frame of things.

Shelley’s scepticism then surfaces, but he cannot contain his enthusiasm, and asserts the inherent value of such a “bold assertion” (“even if it be not true”) in the face of the “narrow limits” of life as it is lived; such speculation in itself can improve the quality of our experience. It should also be noted, however, that he does not deny the possibility of such perfectibility: Our happiness also corresponds with, and is adapted to, the nature of what is most excellent in our being. We see God, and we see that he is good. How delightful a picture, even if it be not true! How magnificent is the conception which this bold theory suggests to the contemplation, even if it be no more than the imagination of some sublimest and most holy poet, who, impress with the loveliness and majesty of his own nature, is impatient and discontented with the narrow limits which this imperfect life and the dark grave have for ever as his melancholy portion.70

I comment further on the above quotation at the conclusion of the discussion on “Mont Blanc”, below. If the consciousness of Christ helps promote “what is most excellent in our being”, an extreme expression of consciousness within an unfathomable otherness is Demogorgon, that “tremendous gloom”. As “Eternity” (3.1.52), he is beyond linear time, and is thus an incomprehensible nexus of the fulfilment of all moments in time. Questioned by Asia (SPW 238), he can only tell of what pertains, confirming, however, her intuitive understanding: If the abysm Could vomit forth its secrets. . . . But a voice Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless; For what would it avail to bid thee gaze On the revolving world? What to bid speak Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal Love. (2.4.114-120)

70 “Essay on Christianity” (Shelley’s Criticism) 95-96. Though Shelley wrote this essay in late 1817, he was still referring to the “excellent doctrines” of Christ in November 1819 (Platonism of Shelley, 340). Ian Balfour, however, points out that “in a number of private letters” Shelley “expressed a far dimmer view of Jesus, though even in these unguarded letters he often critiques the use which Jesus has been put rather than what he said or preached”. See “Shelley and the Bible”, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 414.

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Her question, “Who is the master of the slave?” is thus answered, without the inconceivable immensity of awareness needed to probe the workings of “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change”. After this, questioned about the “destined hour” of Prometheus (SPW 239), Demogorgon only reveals what is already taking place: Demogorgon: Behold! Asia: The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night I see cars drawn by rainbow-wingèd steads Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight (2.4.128-132) Demogorgon: These are the immortal Hours, Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee. (2.4.140-141)

In short, he cannot be understood in human terms, let alone defined, being truly “beyond the human”. He is Shelley’s means of localizing unbounded consciousness, showing its paradoxical immanence in relation to the necessary unfolding of universal events and cycles. Notopoulos warns that it is important to bear in mind, as we consider the possible sources of Shelley’s thought, that “in view of Shelley’s own natural mythopoeic and symbolic talent it is difficult to differentiate between his own creation and derivation from the Platonic tradition. . . . No single idea or source should be regarded as basic or decisive” (Platonism of Shelley, 241). The point is well made (also in relation to Shelley’s understanding of Christ), but it is clear that at the time of writing Prometheus Unbound Shelley was deeply influenced by The Symposium, and possibly saw in its daemonic embodiments and actions a means of conveying imagistically the more abstract “harmonious adjustment of part to part” of “the physical universe”. In a letter to Godwin quoted by Mary Shelley in the “Note on The Revolt of Islam”, Shelley tells of his propensity to “apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole” (SPW 158). Ineffably “minute and remote distinctions” pertaining to “the moral or material universe” might be given linguistic substance through Platonic understanding, which broaches the ineffable through humanly accessible forms. As Notopoulos points out regarding a far more obvious example, “Shelley pictures astronomical phenomena in terms of Platonic concepts and emotions, such as a spirit governing each planet” (Platonism of Shelley, 261). More subtly, and based on Shelley’s actual practice in the drama, not external doctrine, Pierce notes that “throughout Prometheus

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Unbound a silent discourse based on thought, feeling and dreams becomes the essence of signification”. He elaborates: “the regenerative action of the play is expressed only through indirections, a rhetoric of silence that posits the superiority of subconscious feeling, intuition, dreams and echoes over the mechanisms of conscious thought such as plain speech and willed action”.71 In the “Note on Prometheus Unbound”, Mary (for me, one who bears an astute understanding of her husband’s mind) writes of Shelley’s ability “to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind” (SPW 272-273). She offers as an example a passage from “one of his manuscript books” “on a line in the Oedipus Tyrannus”: “Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought”. Shelley referred to this as “a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry”, in effect discerning in Sophocles the same ability as he himself possesses (if in a lesser degree, he would argue, though his interpretation of the line would suggest otherwise) to plumb “minute and remote distinctions”: What a picture does this line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the universe, which is made its symbol; a world within a world which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.

That is, what Shelley reads into the line from Sophocles reveals much about his own subtly penetrating thought processes. The “mind as a wilderness of intricate paths” is an image of the multiple complexities of thought (an image itself “of almost unfathomable depth”), some of which can be expressed through poetry, or at least (it is implied) gestured towards— “almost unfathomable depth of poetry” (my emphasis). C. M. Bowra wrote that Prometheus Unbound is not concerned “with events in time but with the eternal situation of man and the universe”; Shelley was “always seeking for a single abiding reality behind the multiplicity of transient things, and his mind turned naturally to the universal and the permanent whose faint reflections he saw in the phenomenal world”.72 But his being able to give voice to the hints offered by “faint reflections” of “the universal and the permanent”, is what makes the poem a difficult one, as our literal minds tend to reduce the figures in the drama to the actors in an impossible idealistic masque. As Bowra also 71

See John Pierce, “‘Mont Blanc’ and Prometheus Unbound: Shelley’s Use of the Rhetoric of Silence”, Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989): 113, 116. 72 C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 124-125.

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wrote, however, if at times we cannot follow Shelley into certain “rarefied spheres”, “that is not so much his fault as ours”: His triumph is that at other times, through the enchantment which his poetry sets on us, we are able to explore regions of which he is the discoverer and almost only denizen, and to know in his company the delights of a condition in which the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy is healed, and the pallid abstractions of analytical thought take on the glow and the glory of visible things. (Romantic Imagination, 125)

That “old quarrel” was begun by Plato in The Republic, of course. However, Plato’s concern (through Socrates) about the influence of poetry would have suggested to Shelley its power to affect social transformation, but also, more indirectly, its power to refine consciousness. Thomas Taylor commented on Proclus’s “Apology for the Fables of Homer” in his Introduction to the second and third books of The Republic: “in this apology Homer and Plato are so admirably reconciled, that the poetry of the one and the philosophy of the other are in the highest degree honoured by the expulsion of the former from the polity of the latter” (Works of Plato, vol.1, 133). Proclus states that what concerned Socrates was the fact that as far as education of the youth goes (the especial concern of The Republic), the youth are too literal minded to perceive the deeper truths of poetry (143), reserved for what Shelley would call in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (as we have seen), “the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers”. Shelley, however, was aware of both its populist energy (as displayed in The Mask of Anarchy) and its refining powers.73 Bowra is correct, though, in levelling blame at Shelley’s readers—if we read him with due care and attention regarding his focus on animating “operations of the mind”, we will indeed appreciate how in his writing the “abstractions of analytical thought take on the glow . . . of visible things”. Colin Jager writes that “the notorious difficulty of Shelley’s writing has its source in the expanded sensory capacities toward which it points—matters of the body as much as the mind, of sensing and feeling as much as thinking” (“Shelley after Atheism”, 626). William Keach points towards the ensuing expanded vision when he writes of Shelley’s rejection of the dualism of mind and body: this rejection “forms part of the conceptual basis for a range of practices that are about remaking the world of human experience by 73

Notopoulos notes that “it is probable that Shelley, who was acquainted with Taylor, had a copy of the five volumes of Taylor’s translation of Plato”, or, at least, “had seen it among the books of Peacock, who was a friend of Taylor” (Platonism of Shelley, 41n53).

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releasing its full potential as a dynamic and differentiated totality”.74 In the present case, Shelley would illuminate the interior of our minds with the mythological means at his disposal, but he also expects a type of double vision on our part: the image should not be mistaken for the illumination, though it is through the writer’s conviction, so nearly joined to the pair, that transcendence of the distinction of vehicle and tenor takes place, or, in Bloom’s terms, his “tenor and vehicle are imported into one another” (Ringers in the Tower, 109). What ensues for the receptive mind comes from “beyond the human”, is daemonic.

74 See William Keach, “The Political Poet”, in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 137.

CHAPTER FIVE SHELLEY: “HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY”, “MONT BLANC”, “ODE TO THE WEST WIND” AND “TO A SKYLARK”

The pair of poems, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and, especially, “Mont Blanc”, because of the absence of mythological machinery, are easier to assimilate than Prometheus Unbound in terms of a perception of the mind’s relation to existence. Written before Prometheus Unbound, they yet participate in its subtle delineations of the interfusion of mind and matter, and its invocation of the immensity of non-human existence. Daniel Stempel sees the pair of poems as being informed by Shelley’s awareness of a shift in the scientific model of existence, from the classical CartesianNewtonian geometric model to that involving “the propagation of energy through a fluid medium” in a circulatory process, where, for Shelley, “the process of the universe can be described only by alternate and complementary explanations”. As an instance of this, a note to Queen Mab (already referred to in my discussion on The Daemon of the World) states that “Light consists either of vibrations propelled through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body” (SPW 800). Stempel remarks: “What is noteworthy is not Shelley’s early recognition of the wave theory of light, but the either-or-construction which permits two possible but contradictory explanations” (“Rude Idealism”, 106-108). Stempel applies this insight to “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”: The companion pieces of 1816, “Mont Blanc” and the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, test two epistemological models of experience by opposing the priority of natural law and the priority of perception: in each of these poems there is an “unseen Power” that eludes the pragmatic “intellectual philosophy” of Shelley’s time, which defines all experience in terms of common perception. Each both complements and contradicts the other, revealing its own failure in the act of opposition. (“Rude Idealism”, 108)

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He elaborates: “Intellectual Beauty exists only in and through the operation of the powers of the mind” (debateable, as discussed below), while “the unseen Power in ‘Mont Blanc’ is sensed as a ‘secret strength’ that flows through the mind from a source which exists independent of all perception and, more important, of any percipient” (108-109). These “two possible but contradictory” models inform an energizing tension, a process-driven indeterminacy which requires the active engagement of thought. For me, the “two possible but contradictory” models (having the same effect as Stempel notes) are rather those of two types of posthuman positioning regarding the human: proximate and benignant or distant and indifferent. And each model, though predominant in its specific poem, is not limited to that poem, but is found in both, as is seen in what follows. I deal first with the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” (SPW 529). Stempel notes that for Shelley “beauty is not a quality of the object; it is ‘a certain rhythm and order’ that appears in the act of perception. A shift of focus, a relaxation of attention, and it disappears” (“Rude Idealism”, 108).1 This is a useful brief encapsulation of one of the perspectives offered by the poem. But looking at the first stanza, we notice more: The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats though unseen among us,—visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,— Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance; Like hues and harmonies of evening,— Like clouds in starlight widely spread,— Like memory of music fled,— Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. (1-12)

The felt presence is the “shadow” of the “Power”, an indeterminate formulation which suggests either a modified reflection of it (as full revelation would be overwhelming), or all that is vaguely perceptible of it when the sense of sight is not attuned. While it is true that its “inconstancy” is tied to our perception, it is also true that it is presented as having independent agency: it “visits” the “world” we inhabit (thus not existing

1

The embedded quotation is from A Defence of Poetry (Shelley’s Criticism, 122). Shelley actually writes “a certain rhythm or order”, but in the context of a discussion where the two words appear to be interchangeable.

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“only in and through the operation of the powers of the mind”, as Stempel would have it). That is, even before translating The Symposium, Shelley was aware of the daemonic potential of beauty. Its independent presence is emphasised by the natural similes, both figurative analogies of it and encapsulations of it in the actual world: “As summer winds that creep from flower to flower”, not seen but causing movement and, through imagistic propinquity rather than natural causality, infusing the substance of the flower. The following simile, indeed, like “Mont Blanc”, might imply (with the operative word “behind”) the absence of human perception in the workings of beauty: “Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower”. The evanescent “moonbeams” are a moving “shower” of subtle light, illuminating the substantial “mountain” and its defining pine forests, whether we perceive the phenomenon or not. The following two lines, it is true, indicate the importance of perception, but also, once more, the preparedness or not of human consciousness to take cognizance of what is independent of subjective perception (“It visits”): It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance.

The similes tell of a posthuman profusion of beauty, not always present to us because of our own limitations, rather than because of its own nature, however much we tie that nature to our limited consciousness: Like hues and harmonies of evening,— Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—

Shelley then turns once more to the flawed human perceiver, “Like memory of music fled”, perhaps intending to draw the previous instances into the realm of human perception, to accord with the conclusion of the stanza: Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

“Grace” has supersensual overtones, along with the sensual ones of natural beauty, and thus points both to autonomous beauty and beauty dependent on perception; but then comes the immersion in the human predilection for what is “beyond the human”, for the daemonic reaches which exclude perception, and which are valued for precisely this reason: “grace” bestows value, but “mystery” bestows more. Shelley implies as much in the “Essay on Christianity”: “The universal Being can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin”

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(Shelley’s Criticism, 91). An acceptance of “indefiniteness” allows existential unfolding, as opposed to the imposition of prefigured pattern (as in the case of “anthropomorphism”), with all its limitations. The following stanza addresses the “Spirit of Beauty” directly, and while it stresses the role of human perception, also points to an objective sense of absence, not dependent on perception, suggestive of a feeling of alienation not projected by consciousness: Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form,—where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom,—why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope? (13-24)

Beauty is not just perceived outside us, according to the dictates of the mind, it is within the human mind as well. It is, here, specifically related to “human thought or form”. This means that the ground of perception is conditioned by it, the perceiver is coloured by it or not, prior to perceiving. The absence of beauty from our psyche results in depression, a psychological state exclusive of the epistemological considerations of natural philosophy: where art thou gone? Why does thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

The “state” of humankind here is an internal one; that is, the biblical metaphor (“dim vast vale of tears”) indicates a reflexive textuality,2 a reversed perspective from that of the “summer winds that creep from flower to flower”. The sense of vacancy and desolation are attributes of deep depression. But, of course, this internalization is linked to a general impression of existence, and so colours perception, to be of existential import: Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain river.

2

Psalm 84:6 in the Bishops’ Bible.

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An objective observation with a wider resonance follows: “Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown”. And then comes a return to the inner perspective of “fear and dream”, shifting immediately to the existential limits of “death and birth”, where both perspectives combined can cast “such gloom”. My point, again, is that the sense of alienation associated with nature is not found in “Mont Blanc” alone. It is deeply felt in the present poem too. The stanza ends, however, with something more than a consideration of Blake’s “contrary states of the human soul”; here we find a summation of human inconstancy, an interplay that lacks any productivity, and which undercuts the idealism that will inform Prometheus Unbound with a sense of realism that acknowledges those facets of existence not productive of peace and security. Why is it that humankind has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?

The questions are unanswerable, and must remain so, but this does not mean that an enlightened view cannot be proposed, as Prometheus Unbound does. Taking stock of our present situation gives emphasis to the scale of the change that needs to take place in our interaction with the physical realm of intellectual beauty, and Shelley’s present internal emphasis begins to gesture towards the necessary change of human consciousness that needs to be implemented. Shelley is not as direct as Blake in requiring a cleansing of the “doors of perception”, but such a cleansing is implicit in his analysis of a human situation where inconstancy and mutability hold sway. We recall Shawcross’s observation that Shelleyan necessity was “an aspect of that permanent and changeless reality, fixed far above the flux of time”, and was thus “the earliest form of his so-called Platonism” (Shelley’s Criticism, xiii). In a related passage, Shawcross also notes, “the essence of morality lay, for him, not in the rigid application of a code of conduct, but in an ordered and harmonious condition of the soul” (Shelley’s Criticism, xxv). Stanza three continues with taking stock, indicating how superstition is central in holding at bay this inconstancy, while bracketing the poet’s own apostrophe to the “Spirit”; this indicates the self-awareness apparent in the appeal, how such self-awareness distances the mind from programmatic spiritual responses based on unreflective clichés: No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given— Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour, (25-28)

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That these “records” are simply “names” underscores their arbitrary, superficial nature. Reiman and Fraistat point out that “God” replaces “Demon” when Shelley corrected this line in the Examiner (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 94n4). In the “Essay on Christianity”, Shelley wrote: “It is important to observe that the author of the Christian system had a conception widely differing from the gross imaginations of the vulgar relatively to the ruling Power of the universe”. The contamination of the word “God” stems from these “gross imaginations”: “Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own” (Shelley’s Criticism, 88, 99). And we find in his essay, “On the Revival of Literature”: “Superstition, of whatever kind, whether earthly or divine, has hitherto been the weight which clogged man to earth, and prevented his genius from soaring aloft amid its native skies”.3 The active mind, however, which Shelley mobilizes in his apostrophe, “seems to govern the world without visible or substantial means. Its birth is unknown; its action and influences unperceived; and its being seems eternal” (Shelley’s Criticism, 118). The “names” are Frail spells—whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. (29-31)

The active mind acknowledges “Doubt, chance, and mutability”, combating the tendency to accept second-hand sources of comfort based more on blind need than a considered assessment of the circumstances. Shelley implies that it is only from such a sceptical foundation, free from spiritual cliché, that one can assume to address the spirit of intellectual beauty: Thy light alone—like mist o’er mountains driven, Or music by the night-wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream. (32-36)

The spirit, after all, is rooted in the “material and tangible” “works of nature” (Shelley’s Criticism, 118), even if expressed, at times, in a finer 3

More fiercely, he writes of superstitious conceptions, which “are the idle dreams of the visionary, or the pernicious representations of imposters, who have fabricated from the very materials of wisdom a cloak for their own dwarfish or imbecile conceptions” (“Essay on Christianity”, Shelley’s Criticism, 89).

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tone: “mist”, “mountains”, “night-wind”, “moonlight”, a “stream” and the mediumistic sounds of an aeolian lyre—a human intervention, yet animated by nature. Stanza four declares a form of belief in intellectual beauty, and a covert acknowledgement of why the “names” of superstition were and are important to human beings. Shelley himself feels this same need (“lest the grave should be” “a dark reality”), and openly acknowledges it. He appeals, though, to a “Power” with whom he is actively involved, measured in the actual terms, again, of elements of nature, not to what he deems to be wornout fabrications centred in superstitions: Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart And come, for some uncertain moments lent. Man were immortal, and omnipotent, Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. (37-41)

Mental states, subject to mutability, are yet uppermost: “Love, Hope, and Self-esteem”. The conceptions of human immortality and omnipotence here suggest a spiritual participation in intellectual beauty, a cleansing of consciousness to the point of participation in the eternal Being that intellectual beauty and her “glorious train” of associated agents of beauty presuppose. Blake and Shelley both desire the same access to an eternal perspective. Shelley’s understanding of this beauty as a daemonic “messenger” follows: Thou messenger of sympathies, That wax and wane in lovers’ eyes— Thou—that to human thought art nourishment, Like darkness to a dying flame! Depart not as thy shadow came, Depart not—lest the grave should be, Like life and fear, a dark reality. (42-48)

Human looks of love, it is implied, inconstant as they are, are daemonically mediated, as if from a constant Platonic source. The simile which follows, stresses the play of the inconstant and constant, where the unexpected idea of “darkness” offering “nourishment” “to a dying flame”, hints at the otherness of the “Power”, its being beyond easily assimilable notions of beauty and divine nourishment. The all-to-human appeal, “Depart not”, repeated, despite its urgency (or perhaps because of its urgency), is a prayer which, in truth, acknowledges the inevitability of departure, but which erects what can only be a transient buffer in the face of the total mystery of

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our mortality. Shelley, like one with orthodox religious belief, seeks an indication of post-mortem betterment; but, unlike the orthodox, does not afford himself the comfort of a generally-subscribed-to belief. The following stanza outlines his early willingness to believe, a willingness undermined by the strictures imposed by his sceptical nature, geared to the necessity for empirical proof. His earnest seeking for ghosts as a boy, though, was hardly aligned with orthodox belief, but suggests the need to move beyond what is immediately apparent to our senses: While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. (49-52)

He doesn’t trivialize his past actions; the intensity of his experiences is conveyed by the apparent breathlessness of his search: he “sped” through various locations. Despite the breathlessness, however, the visited locations (eerie enough in themselves) seem to quiver on the edge of revelation, as the adjectival “listening” conveys—a silent, “listening chamber” might somehow respond. And his emphasis on “high talk” tells of a serious quest for knowledge from “the departed dead”, not just a need for thrills. The next two lines of the stanza comprise part of what Reiman and Fraistat refer to as the “new wrinkle” “introduced into the textual history of the poem”, when the Scrope Davies Notebook was discovered in 1976 (in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 93). In the Hutchinson edition the lines appear as: I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed; I was not heard—I saw them not— (53-54)

In the Scrope Davies Notebook these are rendered as the more considered: I called on that false name with which our youth is fed He heard me not—I saw them not—

Whichever version is favoured, it is clear that the poet resorted, unsuccessfully, to the practices of orthodox belief after his initial spiritualist endeavours. Both “poisonous names” and “that false name” point to understanding centred in the level of control over that which cannot be so easily defined and controlled verbally.4 They are toxic and false in the sense

4

Again, in the “Essay on Christianity”, Shelley writes that institutionalised religion has “profanely perverted [the name of God] to the sanctioning of the most enormous

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that they limit access to a better appreciation of the immensity which they attempt to broach but really undermine, because of the tired conventions they mouth, which have lost touch with the living reality. Shelley was later to write in A Defence of Poetry of this tendency of words to lose their vitality over time. Originally, the language of poets is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human discourse. (Shelley’s Criticism, 123)

Words thus abstracted from reality, “dead to all the nobler purposes of human discourse” because mere “signs” of “classes of thoughts” and not “pictures of integral thoughts”, not fundamental, cannot hope to transcend themselves and attain that sense of the numinous Shelley was seeking.5 Again, as in Blake, reason must give way to experience void of limiting definition and anticipation: When musing deeply on the lot Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing All vital things that wake to bring News of birds and blossoming,— Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! (55-60)

The affirmation of Spring, underpinned by symbolic associations, bypasses the intentionality of the intellect, to reveal in an epiphanic instant that which is “beyond the human”. Once more, it is the “shadow” of intellectual beauty that is perceived, a faint suggestion of that which lies beyond, given and abominable crimes”, an awareness colouring his present perception (Shelley’s Criticism, 88). 5 Referring to religious iconography, McGilchrist notes that one of Cranach’s masterpieces “is in its self-referentiality the perfect expression of left-hemisphere emptiness, and a precursor of post-modernism. There is no longer anything to point to beyond, nothing Other, so it points pointlessly to itself”. He concludes, “rather paradoxically for a movement that began as a revolt against apparently empty structures [the Reformation], it is in fact the structures, not the content, of religion, that come into focus as the content” (Master and Emissary, 317). Shelley is opposed to the “structures”, “not the content”, at least in as far as that “content” is not subservient to imposed ideology.

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momentary presence by the “vital things that wake” in early Spring. The poet’s response is Dionysian, pre-Christian: “I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!” The “shriek” is a spontaneous sound, made without any accommodation for propriety or specific fixed meaning, unlike the rigid, preordained words which are “signs for portions or classes of thoughts”. The experience marks a turning point, involving an almost priestly commitment on his part: I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow? (61-62)

We must understand that all Shelley’s work until now has been dedicated to this beauty and her agents (it is not clear who make up this “glorious train”—perhaps various lesser anticipations of beauty on earth, “every form containing thee”, as the final stanza would have it). In summoning “the phantoms of a thousand hours”, the poet, like Prometheus, partakes in an intensification of perception where elements of stored time take on form and agency: if an expression of memory, the hours thus vitalized bear an additional strength of immediacy, whereas memory alone can become clouded by accumulations of time. The poet emphasises the veracity of his commitment, witnessed by time objectified into “phantom” forms: With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers Of studious zeal or love’s delight Outwatched with me the envious night— (63-67)

Evoking again Milton’s Il Penseroso, who “outwatched the Bear” in his dedication to his quest, the poet also recalls the narrator in Alastor, one who probed too the secrets of existence with his beloved, thus grounding the pursuit of what is beyond us in the material expressions of a higher Power. The “night” is perhaps “envious” of both “love’s delight” and the manifestation of beauty in the material world, encompassing microcosm and macrocosm. But earthly “delight” and “joy” are premised on the “hope” for something far beyond the human: They know that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery, That thou—O awful LOVELINESS, Would give whate’er these words cannot express. (68-72)

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The “phantoms of the hours” bear witness not only to the poet’s dedication, but to the inspiriting effect of the “hope” of beauty, always embedded in any expression of “joy” he experiences. Should the potency of this beauty match the intensity of his hope, it would transform existence. But Shelley conveys more. The beauty would affect transformation through direct experience of itself, through “whate’er these words cannot express”. In a sense, his words are a failed evocation of intellectual beauty, but nevertheless serve as an intimation of its presence and potency. The descriptive final stanza links through simile an autumn moment, human psychology and the spirit of beauty: The day becomes more solemn and serene When noon is past—there is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, Which through the summer is not heard or seen, As if it could not be, as if it had not been! Thus let thy power, which like the truth Of nature on my passive youth Descended, to my onward life supply Its calm—to one who worships thee, And every form containing thee, Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind To fear himself, and love all human kind. (73-84)

After the six somewhat reflective stanzas, this seventh one, though still philosophical, evokes, too, the lived moment of an autumn afternoon, depicting its own particular subtle beauty, characterized by the “solemn and serene” sense “When noon is past”, and the awareness of overall “harmony”. The “lustre in its sky” is a delicate illumination, unimaginable in the summer months, and sharing in something of the “inconstant glance” associated with beauty: “As if it could not be, as if it had not been!” As the poet’s prayer continues, we learn that this beauty expressed for him “the truth / Of nature”, for this is what “Descended” on him in stanza five. His epiphany there involved a perception of “truth” as opposed to one conditioned by superstition, with its “Frail spells”. The solemnity, serenity, and “calm” of autumn make it a fit expression of “thy power”. He would tie the moment of epiphany of his “passive youth” (the word “passive” adverting to his unpremeditated receptivity to the “truth”) to his future, to his “onward life” (an expression encapsulating its forward moving energy), through the calming “power” of active beauty. That Shelley can “worship” this beauty after his criticism of the “Frail spells” of the religiously orthodox and superstitious, intimates that his awareness of “the truth / Of nature” inherent in the “SPIRIT fair” must be considered apart from forms of worship based

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on contaminated transcendental abstractions. If even the “hours” are embodied as “phantoms” with agency, then more substantial nature certainly has its own inherent life, as we have seen, and it would seem to be on this foundation that Shelley is able to declare openly his “worship” of the spirit of beauty. The “spells” of the spirit which “bind” him displace the “Frail spells” of superstition, and the experience of “love” for “all human kind”, felt on the pulses, displaces exclusive religious doctrine based on ideology and involved in state manipulation. Most editors interpret “To fear himself” as “to revere himself”, following its archaic sense (based on the French révérer, with its Latin root, vereri, “to fear”). Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning also suggest “fear for”, implying Shelley’s uncertainty regarding his own abilities and convictions, the questioning stance of a healthy scepticism.6 In either case, the perception of intellectual beauty inspirits the poet. Whether such a “Power” is ultimately indifferent to human affairs or not, is not of concern in this poem, but it is interesting, in this regard, to refer again to certain passages of Shelley’s “Essay on Christianity”, dating from 1817,7 one year after the writing of the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”. It is clear that Shelley is not averse to the idea of divine intervention in human nature (to use an expression that simplifies the subtlety of his conceptions): Whosoever is free from the contamination of luxury and licence, may go forth to the fields and to the woods, inhaling joyous renovation from the breath of Spring, or catching from the odours and sounds of Autumn some diviner mood of sweetest sadness, which improves the softened heart. Whosoever is no deceiver or destroyer of his fellow men—no liar, no flatterer, no murderer—may walk among his species, deriving, from the communion with all which they contain of beautiful or of majestic, some intercourse with the Universal God. Whosoever has maintained with his own heart the strictest correspondence of confidence, who dares to examine and to estimate every imagination which suggests itself to his mind—whosoever is that which he designs to become, and only aspires to that which the 6 Longman Anthology: Romantics, 877. Loving oneself, of course, is, according to Christian understanding, central to loving others. Matthew 22:37-39: “Love thy neighbour as thyself”. Shelley had immense admiration for the teaching of Christ (as opposed to the practices of institutionalised religion). In the “Essay on Christianity” he alludes to Matthew 5:43-48: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, that ye may be the sons of your Heavenly Father, who makes the sun to shine on the good and on the evil, and the rain to fall on the just and unjust” (Shelley’s Criticism, 92). 7 Shawcross dates the essay 1815, but Gavin Hopps prefers “late 1817”, as established by E. B. Murray on manuscript evidence (Hopps, “Religion and Ethics”, in The Oxford Handbook of Shelley, 121).

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He becomes even more explicit in his evocation of a higher “Power”, and summons imagery which indicates that much in this section of the essay was informed by his thought in the “Hymn”: We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will.

He envisages a hierarchy within the human frame, and within humanity’s relation to existence: Our most imperial and stupendous qualities—those on which the majesty and the power of humanity is erected—are, relatively to the inferior portion of its mechanism, active and imperial; but they are the passive slaves of some higher and more omnipotent Power. This Power is God; and those who have seen God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature, been harmonized by their own will to so exquisite [a] consentaneity of power as to give forth divinest melody, when the breath of universal being sweeps over their frame. (Shelley Criticism, 90-91)

That “breath of universal being” which “swept over the frame” of Christ endowed him with the “power” “to give forth divinest melody”. I believe this “breath” to be coterminous with “Intellectual Beauty”. It receives its most subtle, daemonic expression in the following passage from A Defence of Poetry, where divinity is intimated at, but not openly declared: We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression; so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its objects. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. (Shelley’s Criticism, 154)

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*** As the words “Power” and “God” are synonymous in the previous extracts from the “Essay on Christianity”, this fact must surely resonate in our minds as we turn to “Mont Blanc” (SPW 532): The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings Of waters,—with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap for ever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves. (1-11)

This first section of the poem, one long sentence of eleven lines, with its delayed rhyme of “waves / raves” (lines 2 and 11) emphasizing its extent, enacts the flowing of a vast river, the “things” of existence which consciousness accepts, frames and adds to, as a tributary.8 The receptive mind also creates, in an echo of Wordsworth’s lines 108-110 from Tintern Abbey: “of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear (both what they half-create / And what perceive)”. Its “sound” is “but half its own”. The following simile immerses consciousness in the river imagery, suggesting a continuity of “things” and the “source of human thought”, the well-spring of consciousness. The effect of the simile, however, contrasting a “feeble brook” with a “vast river”, is to place human input into the experience of existence within its proper context. The natural elements, through sight and sound, dramatize the distinction; humanity’s “sound” is Such as a feeble brook will oft assume 8

Robert Mitchell (who will be discussed more extensively in relation to Keats) writes of the poem’s “peculiar use of rhyme”, which makes it seem “suspended between blank verse and rhyme”. He notes, “I read rhyme in the poem as premised on the principle that sensation must be freed to seek—while remaining uncertain that it has found—the consistent and stable measures of rhyme that would allow for a subsequent judgment concerning the relation of rhyme to reason”. See Robert Mitchell, “Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance”, PMLA 126, no.1 (2011): 114-115. Angela Leighton feels Mont Blanc is the “site of a new and peculiarly Shelleyan struggle, between Power and its representation in words”. See Shelley and the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49.

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The posthuman world engulfs the human presence, situated amidst “wild woods”, “mountains lone”, “leaping” “waterfalls”, soughing “winds” in the branches, and the “bursting” and “raving” over “rocks” of a “vast river”. We sense a vast natural theatre, replete with its own self-sufficient agents. The human is all but excluded, its very presence registered in diminished terms as a “feeble brook”. The apostrophe to the “Ravine of Arve”, in the form of a traditional appeal to a higher power, acknowledges the superiority of posthuman existence: Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine— Thou many-coloured, many-voicèd vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: (12-15)

That is, the “Ravine” merges into the imagery of the simile, as mental image and natural presence become one in explicit terms: “Thus thou, Ravine of Arve”. A near paradoxical mingling of opposites points to the unconstrained nature of posthuman existence, not limited by rational exclusivity: the “Ravine” is “dark” and “deep”, but its proximate “vale” is lively, in terms of both sound and sight: it is “many-voicèd”, containing “pines”, “crags” and “caverns”, the whole mottled by antithetical qualities of dark and light: “cloud-shadow and sunbeams”. The scene fills the human observer with “awe”, an expected response of Shelley’s era to the Burkean sublime, but the poet invests it with a degree of energised presence that cannot be constrained within the limits of any verbal conceptualization: awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest; (15-19)

The “Power” is “in likeness of the Arve”—it is indwelling in the “awful scene”, but its simultaneous autonomous existence, while factually linked

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to the process of descending icy waters joining the Arve,9 is also figuratively rendered in the “secret throne” “girded” by “ice-gulfs”, images which convey a sense of majestic otherness. The proximity of “ice-gulfs” and “flame”—which suggest the “rare device” of conjoined “sunny pleasuredome” and “caves of ice” of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (lines 35-36)—as in that poem, invoke antinomian paradox, as the “Power” is both a “Bursting” “vast river” fed in part by “ice-gulfs”, but whose penetrative ability is also “like” the “flame” of “lightning” illuminating the “dark mountains” around. And then trees, winds, scents and natural harmony convey their own sense of a distinct community, independent of humanity: —thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear—an old and solemn harmony; (19-24)

The anthropomorphisation, far from evoking a type of idolatry,10 has something of the quality of myth,11 set in “elder time”, where analogy suggests life lived beyond the reaches of human familiarity: the “giant brood of pines”, “Children of elder time” seem more strangely alien than human because of the suggestive metaphorical collocation. The autonomous natural force of the immemorial “chainless winds” which “still come and ever came” to this brood is given substance through the “odours” of the pines, which they carry, and the sound they provoke in the “mighty swinging” of their branches—“an old and solemn harmony”. Precise naturalistic description is augmented by subtle comparison: the “rainbows” created by light and spray are “earthly”, perhaps because below the horizon, in a material structure “across the sweep” of the “waterfall”, while the mists of the “waterfall” are “aethereal” and unstructured. By 9 Richard Isomaki, noting Shelley’s turn from Lockean to Humean understanding, observes, “We cannot know and represent an ultimate Power; the best we can do is follow, as does ‘Mont Blanc’, the process of the mind’s creation of cause and effect”. See “Interpretation and Value in ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’”, Studies in Romanticism 30, no.1 (1991): 61. 10 Shelley: “Where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin” (Shelley’s Criticism, 91). 11 Christopher Hitt, “Shelley’s Unwriting of ‘Mont Blanc’”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47, no.2 (2005): 143: “the poet is aware of and compelled to seek that which lies beyond the circumference of the imagination despite the irresistible urge to mythologize, allegorize, or otherwise project outward”.

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extension, the colours of the earth are manifested from an aethereal source, literally and figuratively. As we have seen, Shelley quoted from Nicholson’s Encyclopaedia in a footnote from Queen Mab. From the same article we find a reference to Newton’s experiments with light and a prism, where Nicholson observes that light divided into rays by a prism “excites the sensation of different colours; namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet” (The British Encyclopedia, or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, s.v. “light”). Figuratively, like light, distinct entities emerge from an underlying continuum of potential which Shelley equates with divinity: “the Power which models, as they pass, all the elements of this mixed universe to the purest and most perfect shape which it belongs in their nature to assume” (“Essay on Christianity”, Shelley’s Criticism, 95). Further, behind this aethereal mist and spray is dimly seen a form, perhaps part of the rock face, suggesting an “unsculptured image” “Robed” by a “veil”—human imagination colours perception, but the “unsculptured” nature of the image also limits human interposition. Then comes, in the image of “the strange sleep”, a suggestion of the profound ground-bass underlying all the other sounds of the wilderness, “the voices of the desert”; these “voices” strive against it, but occasionally “fail”, indicating its ascendancy—in such moments it “Wraps all in its own deep eternity”, becoming a type of fundamental vibration underlying existence. It is “A loud, lone sound” not constrained or “tamed” by any other sound, and this “unresting sound” is accompanied by the “ceaseless motion” of the Arve: Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity;— Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion, A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; (25-31)

It is the “Ravine”, however, that is a most suggestive model. All flows through this “Ravine”, like the “universe of things” through the mind; but it is “pervaded” by “ceaseless motion” and is the “path” of “unresting sound”—it is thus, unlike the individual mind, an eternal witness of what passes through it. It is a “Dizzy Ravine” both in relation to this thought and in relation to its material prospect: Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound— Dizzy Ravine! (32-34)

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The poet’s consciousness now enters the scene, perceiving (pace Stempel) and reflecting that scene, in its own “unremitting interchange” with the world around it. “Gazing” on the Ravine, in its “strange sleep” of eternal process, Shelley “seems” to fall into a linked “strange” “trance”, through which he detects an overall analogy with what is suggested by the Ravine: and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; (34-40)

His “human mind” is “passive”, that is, is open to the processes of interaction and reception taking place in relation to “the clear universe of things around”. The idea is in accord with what Shelley expressed in the “Essay on Christianity”: “All that it contains of pure or of divine visits the passive mind in some serenest mood” (Shelley’s Criticism, 96). Anthony Howe writes of these lines: “That sudden slowing as Shelley ponders his ‘human mind’ is a moment both of alienation and revelation, a recognition that what is ‘familiar’, however fundamentally it defines our sense of self, is finally inauthentic, a ‘separate phantasy’—or fantasy of separation—that must be overcome in order for ‘mind’ and ‘clear universe’ to be recognized in their true alignment”. Howe links this to the lapse of perception warned against by William Drummond, a philosopher closely followed by Shelley. We have become “inured” and “unresponsive” to the “great miracle” of life (Howe, “Shelley and Philosophy”, 112). For Geoffrey Hartman, however, “the trance induced by the sublime landscape does not point to a loss or sacrifice of intellect”. Shelley proudly “refuses an abject position vis-à-vis sublime phenomena, knowing the danger of religious and political exploitation of feelings capable of producing ‘a shade from [man’s] own soul upthrown’”. Hartman concludes that “Shelley, in the final analysis, encountered himself, in the sense in which William Blake declared ‘the Poetical Genius is the true Man’” (“Gods, Ghosts, and Shelley’s ‘Atheos’”, 10, 15).12 The poet’s imagination “renders” a “legion of wild thoughts”, at first not at the behest of conscious intention: they have “wandering wings”, and merely “float above” the “darkness” of the Ravine: 12

Hartman quotes from Canto 8 of The Revolt of Islam (3244ff.) and (though Hartman ascribes it to Blake’s There Is No Natural Religion) All Religions Are One. Blake actually writes “Poetic Genius”, not “Poetical Genius” (BCW 98).

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Chapter Five One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! (41-48)

Eventually “resting” in “the still cave of the witch Poesy”, as if now part of a barely conscious process, they then participate in the workings of human imagination, “Seeking among” the passing “shadows” “some shade” or “faint image” of the Power. Reiman and Fraistat feel that it is the “shadows” that will be called back by the “anthropomorphized breast” of an otherwise indistinct source (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 98n6). I consider the “breast” to be the poet’s own, where “recalls them” means “reminds them” (as when Prometheus would “recall” or remember his curse) rather than “calls them back”: the “wild thoughts” are reminded through their relation to the “breast” of the poet that “thou art there!”, within that very “breast” and “human mind”. If Reiman and Fraistat are correct (and the syntax does make these lines open to interpretation), then the “shadows” and “Ghosts” contain a trace of the Power, briefly present until they are called back by the “anthropomorphized breast”. In either case, the Power’s presence is felt by the poet. Shelley, bolstered by this presence, then ponders liminal experience in terms of life and death, and dream and reality. Prefaced by “Some say”, his thought is non-committal but suggestive, a skeptical position which favours what is probable, in Humean vein, but which doesn’t discount what is beyond ordinary experience: Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live. (49-52)

“Sleep” may be permeated by “gleams of a remoter world”, and “death” may be sleep, filled with numerous “shapes”, such as, it may be, the “Ghosts of all things that are”, from the previous section. The indistinction of existential spaces here tells of a permeative universe, where an unthoughtthrough doctrine of materialism cannot hold sway, whatever the attractions of the scientific method. Shelley broaches Berkeleyan thought, with its emphasis on the centrality of perception, but foregrounds direct experience,

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not theoretical speculation. Howe writes: “Berkeley jumped . . . from scepticism about an external world of matter to the claim that existence is perception, that ‘ideas’, rather than being different in kind from the reality they apparently represent, are in fact constitutive of that reality. A similar jump appears to be taken by the older Shelley” (“Shelley and Philosophy”, 108).13 In “On Life” (1815), Shelley had written: “I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived” (Shelley’s Criticism, 54).14 The presence of Mont Blanc overawes the poet, and obviously is of central importance in prompting his present “liminal” thought: —I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death? or do I lie In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep Spread far around and inaccessibly Its circles? For the very spirit fails, Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep That vanishes among the viewless gales! (52-59)

His slightly dazed subjective state prompts metaphorical thought: either the “veil” between “life and death” has been put aside, or he “dreams” and is encircled by “the mightier world of sleep”, “inaccessibly” cordoned-off from quotidian existence. In such a state the human “spirit” founders, and enters, through simile, posthuman existence, as a wind-driven “homeless cloud”, unanchored, helplessly mounting ever higher, “from steep to steep”, up a “vanishing” prospect swept by “viewless gales”. Ephemeral itself, it is in an indefinite world, void of the abilities of human sense. But far above this realm of indistinction the heights of the majestic mountain appear, as if triumphing over it, gaining in presence through comparison with what “vanishes” and is “viewless”. Its monumental structure is accompanied by a sense of unassailable majesty and distinction, conveyed by the bracketed sibilant sequence, “—still, snowy, and serene—”, where description and internally generated state (“serene”, in key position at the end of the sequence and the line) merge. The “subject mountains”,

13 See George Berkley, The Works of George Berkley, vol.1, ed. Alexander Campbell

Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 10. As Howe also warns, however, Shelley’s philosophical allegiances were qualified by various “emotively immediate” divergences (“Shelley and Philosophy”, 107). 14

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too, add to this sense of majesty;15 the anthropomorphisation in their case is, once more, qualified by the elements of raw nature: “unearthly forms” of “ice and rock”, “frozen floods” of glaciers, “unfathomable deeps”, blue and as unfathomable as the equally alien “overhanging heaven”: Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene— Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread And wind among the accumulated steeps; (60-66)

The posthuman qualifications continue, coloured by the elemental energies of “storms” and the intentions of predators, “eagle” and “owl”, and the ambiguous “hunter’s bone” (either the hunter’s own or that of his prey). A desert peopled by the storms alone, Save where the eagle brings some hunter’s bone, And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. (67-71)

The “desert” is anathema to the human senses, its “rude” “shapes” conveying a feeling of “hideousness”, of intense fearsomeness and loathsomeness. This human response to an unresponsive nature invites imaginative speculation, once more in mythopoeic mode: —Is this the scene Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea Of fire envelop once this silent snow? None can reply—all seems eternal now. (71-75)

If the “old Earthquake-daemon” is a clear figuration of a natural phenomenon, the intervention of human imagination here brings to the fore 15

David Duff notes that Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, in Mont Blanc: An Irregular Lyric Poem (1788), wrote of it using a “royalist symbolism” with an image such as the “monarch Mountain” surrounded by its “vassal Alps”. Duff feels that such imagery would have been “inimical to Shelley”. See “Lyric Development”, in The Oxford Handbook of Shelley, 254. What Duff does not acknowledge is that Shelley does use such imagery, but avoids ideological cow-towing by situating the mountain in an extreme conceptual otherness (what I have called the posthuman), indifferent to human concerns.

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the primeval fears and conceptual wrestlings associated with uncontrollable and unpredictable natural forces.16 The gigantic forms seen as “toys” make insignificant a human perspective, and the paradoxical undercutting of the “silent snow” with a former “sea / Of fire” in this very location strains credulity to the point of conceptual impasse: “None can reply—all seems eternal now”; an “eternal” perspective is not available to human sense. The reflection which follows seems a type of momentary gathering of familiar resources of the mind to try to come to terms with what is before one: The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild, So solemn, so serene, that man may be, But for such faith, with nature reconciled; Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood By all, but which the wise, and great, and good Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel. (76-83)

The meaning of the first four of the above lines, initially difficult to comprehend, is clarified by Reiman and Fraistat’s footnotes. They gloss “awful doubt” as “reverent open-mindedness”, where Wu suggests “aweinspired scepticism—essentially Shelley’s own position”.17 While both glosses are helpful, “open-mindedness” comes closer to Shelley’s own brand of “scepticism”, which questions and adjusts rather than rejects. The lines on “faith so mild”, leading to tortuous intellectual twists if “But” is taken to mean “except”, on manuscript evidence show that “But” means “only” or “merely”. The Scrope Davies notebook, indeed, contains the elegant “In such a faith”.18 Thus, the posthuman “mysterious tongue” of “the wilderness”, can, in fact, convey sense, but it “teaches” through the covert means associated with open-mindedness and “faith” “reconciled” with “nature”; that is, faith not subject to doctrinal imposition, to the “Large 16 Hitt sees Charlotte Smith’s 1807 poem, “Beachy Head”, as a possible influence in this section. She imagines (evoking vast reaches of time) what once made up the landscape before her: “did this range of chalky mountains, once / Form a vast basin, where the Ocean waves / Swell’d fathomless?” (“Unwriting ‘Mont Blanc’”, 147148). For Smith’s poem see Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology, 126-146. Reading the whole poem, one appreciates that Smith’s posthumanism has a Miltonic grandeur. 17 Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 99n2; Wu, Romanticism, 1106n10. 18 Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 99n4. See Michael O’Neill’s discussion in this same volume (“Shelley’s Lyric Art”, 619).

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codes of fraud and woe” rigidly-adhered-to-doctrine generates. The lessons of the “tongue” are only understood by receptive minds, made receptive by their own inherent qualities of “wisdom”, “greatness” (of perception, one takes it) and “goodness”. “Interpretation” is bolstered by the ability to convey what is learnt through “feeling”, more fundamental, and more closely allied to intuition (the quality Shelley came to admire in Plato).19 In the following section, Shelley first musters the “universe of things”, which he will contrast with the Power and its blasted surroundings. All within this “universe of things”, from various environments (“fields”, “lakes”, “forests”, “streams”, “Ocean”), through elemental substances and forces (“lightning”, “rain”, “Earthquake”), through the impact of seasons on plant life, to the “works and ways” of humanity, “revolve, subside and swell” continuously, all “Are born and die”. As he will show later, in “Ode to the West Wind”, Shelley here reveals a deep empathy with the “buds”, yet still “hidden”, immersed either in “feeble dreams” or in a “dreamless sleep”, which, amazingly, “Hold every future leaf and flower”, and anticipate “the bound / With which from that detested trance they leap”. The life force is thus deeply valued and pitted against the “torpor of the year”, the seeming disengagement of indifferent facets of existence: The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower;—the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. (84-95)

His initial distinction gains further definition when Shelley considers the world surrounding Mont Blanc, though first he indicates the mountain’s transcendence of these surroundings, in a way that links both with his previous sense of its “still, snowy, and serene” majesty, and the “inaccessibility” of the “world of sleep”, beyond conscious probing:

19

Plato’s “excellence consists especially in intuition, and it is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle, whose genius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison with that of Plato” (“On The Symposium”, Shelley’s Criticism, 42).

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Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible: (96-97)

Two lines are enough to convey its “Remote” indifference, a token of the vanity of language in relation to such a presence. Shelley wrote in the essay, “On Life”: “How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being” (Shelley’s Criticism, 53); as vain to think they can penetrate the mystery of an “inaccessible” “Power”. We then come to the surroundings. Intensely hostile, they yet “Teach the adverting mind”: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice, Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice. (98-106)

Here, in contrast with the productive (though bound to mortality) aspect of existence, is its destructive aspect, in full force. The winding, slowly moving “glaciers” are, appropriately, like cold-blooded predators, “snakes”, waiting their moment to strike. Whence they came comprises “many a precipice”, the work of “Frost and the Sun”, which far outstrips any “mortal” ability. The shapes, though, mock “mortal power”, mirroring human work, but on a far larger scale: “dome, pyramid, and pinnacle”, distinct structures of various human cultures, but, in their barren iciness, the forms of “A city of death”, whose “beaming ice” teaches that an illusory beauty can hide depths of unparalleled danger. Perception, in these illusory circumstances, shifts almost immediately, as the impression of a “flood of ruin” displaces that of an ordered “city”. Natural, disorderly destructiveness in process is more appropriate than the aftermath of destruction recorded in the still recognizable order of an abandoned city: Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world,

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Glacier and avalanche plough all before them, as far as the eye can see, “Rolling” them in a “perpetual stream” of destroyed fragments of nature, a bitter inversion of the “universe of things” which flows through the mind, also with a “rolling” motion: “vast pines”, “mangled soil” with other “Branchless and shattered” pines, and “rocks”. The latter, displaced by avalanche, have thus crossed the bounding line between permanent ice, inhabitable wilderness and the realm of natural growth (an unwitting anticipation of one of the consequences of global warming, where the impossibility of “reclamation” is on a scale Shelley could not possibly have foreseen). He then imagines what of life has been lost because of this incursion of non-life: The dwelling-place Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil Their food and their retreat for ever gone, So much of life and joy is lost. The race Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream, And their place is not known. (114-120)

Ecological micro-systems for “insects, beasts, and birds” (“Their food and their retreat”) are forever lost. “So much of life and joy is lost”, says Shelley, again empathetically identifying with that which many would consider to be peripheral to human concerns. Human life, too, is impacted upon by wintry destruction, as all traces of human industry and habitation are obliterated by it, the imagery suggesting its fragility, disappearing “like smoke before the tempest’s stream”; though such depictions of human fragility are not uncommon (consider the thought behind Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), this one is linked by Reiman and Fraistat to a suitably foundational source, Psalm 103:15-16: “As for man, his days are as grass. . . . For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 100n1). If not exactly apocalyptic in tenor, the allusion helps invest Shelley’s imagery with the authority of a venerable and familiar truism, which ever undercuts our relation to existence. The final lines of this section, like the “earthly rainbows” emerging from “aethereal” mists in section 2, again subtly imply natural emergence from a hidden channel, while also telling of a vast natural process impacting on “distant lands”: Below, vast caves

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Shine in the rushing torrents’ restless gleam, Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling Meet in the vale, and one majestic River, The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves, Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air. (120-126)

From this “secret” conduit of a life-force that is associated with the “breath and blood of distant lands”, the waters emerge to form “one majestic River”. The Arve is a perpetual life-force, which joins its sustenance-providing “loud waters” and its oxygen-generating “swift vapours” to the even greater forces of “the ocean-waves” and the “circling air”. The section thus ends in affirmative vein, dwelling on benevolent, far-reaching natural process. Further, we note that living nature, so to speak, begins and ends the section, as if incorporating within itself, in holistic fashion, the antithetical non-life recorded in its central lines. The concluding section returns to the “Mountain” itself, separate, “still and solemn”, yet invested in a “power” that encompasses all that has been witnessed in the poem: the “power of many sights”, “many sounds”, “and much of life and death”: Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights, And many sounds, and much of life and death. (127-129)

Emphasised, again, is the posthuman separateness of the “Mountain” and its world. If, in Berkeleyan terms, “existence is perception” (Berkley, Works, 10), here there are no perceivers; existence, by implication, is suspended, so an extreme otherness must prevail: “none beholds” the descending “snows”, either in dark “moonless nights” or in the “lone glare of day”, where process and setting are equally indifferent in human terms. We must, in turn, suspend our sense of participation, and apprehend, through the fine details, a world emptied of human presence, where snowflakes, unobserved, “burn in the sinking sun”, or when “star-beams dart through them”: In the calm darkness of the moonless nights, In the lone glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them: (130-134)

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Disembodied “Winds”, even as they “contend” in a type of strange mime of human striving, work “silently”, in a deep silence established through repetition. Even the “lightning” (“innocent” of any power to do harm in this waste) participates in the silence, “voiceless”, too remote for its thunder to be heard, its intermittent illuminations of mountains and clouds being like “vapour” over the far expanses of snow: —Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home The voiceless lightning in these solitudes Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods Over the snow. (134-139)

The famous conclusion of the poem follows. As we have seen, in the “Essay on Christianity” Shelley does not shy away from using the word “God”, and in a way which corresponds closely to his present conception of “The secret Strength of things”: God “is the [interpoint] and overruling Spirit of all the energy and wisdom included within the circle of existing things”. Christ “everywhere represents this Power as something mysteriously and illimitably prevading the frame of things”.20 Mont Blanc is penetrated and “inhabited” by “The secret Strength of things”, which pervades all existence, from human “thought” to the furthest reaches of the universe, “the infinite dome / Of Heaven”. That it “governs” “as a law”, however, indicates its alignment with Necessity, and thus, in a swerve away from Christ’s conception of a benevolent God (with which Shelley is in deep sympathy), its ultimately indifferent, or, better, incomprehensible nature as far as human understanding goes. Mont Blanc is a concrete expression of this supreme otherness: The secret Strength of things Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee! (139-141)

The final question prompts us to enter a space of uncertainty, of indistinction, conveying (as far as language can) a sense of this otherness. Shelley’s question shakes the foundations of Coleridge’s complacent acceptance of Mont Blanc as offering proof of God’s existence in his (imagined) encounter with it. As David Duff notes, “Where, in answer to the question of the Ultimate Cause, the anthropomorphized landscape of

20

Shelley’s Criticism, 88. “Prevading” means “penetrating”.

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Coleridge’s poem thunders the word ‘God!’, Shelley’s by contrast ‘teaches awful doubt’” (“Lyric Development”, 254): And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy? (142-144)

The mountain is addressed as representative of this “secret Strength”, a positive presence, then, as are, through linguistic propinquity, “earth, and stars, and sea”. But then comes the “If” clause, and “the human mind’s imaginings” enter the equation. “Silence and solitude” are broached in the poem through these “imaginings”, being situated beyond the borders of habitable existence. Are “silence and solitude”, though, to quote Cary Wolfe, “nonliving systems”, which “challenge representational strategies” by introducing “problems of time, duration, movement, affect, and selfreference” that “pose a limit or barrier to what can be thought, known, drawn, and—more pointedly—rendered”?21 To an extent this sense of “a limit or barrier” can be applied to the “Silence and solitude” of Mont Blanc and its world, though Wolfe is thinking more of the implications of the relationship between “living” natural existence and constructed “posthuman” systems. We then return to the notion that “existence is perception”, and the implicit absence of existence where perception cannot penetrate. From this perspective, silence and solitude are indeed “vacancy”. But what if we take “the human mind’s imaginings” to be a form of perception, a fact to which the images generated by the poem are witness?22 That is, poetry can transcend philosophical doctrine and materialist definitions of distinctions between life and death, to operate in the realm of intuition, a supreme faculty for Shelley.23 Gavin Hopps makes an interesting 21

See Cary Wolfe, “Postscript: On ‘The Living’”, Mechademia: Second Arc 3 (2008): 255. 22 Isomaki refers to “And what were thou . . . ?” as “the contrary-to-fact conditional”: “Silence, we know, is not vacancy. The answer to Shelley’s question must be negative, in that one finds an absolute incapacity to imagine the vacancy—a negative that becomes a potential positive, in its assurance of the mind’s power to perform some act” (“Interpretation and Value”, 63-64). And Gerald McNeice says of “Mont Blanc” as a whole, that the poet broaches what is “remote” in relation to “the proportions of human knowledge and value”. See Gerald McNeice, “The Poet as Ironist in ‘Mont Blanc’ and ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’”, Studies in Romanticism 14, no.4 (1975): 319. 23Again, Shelley writes of Plato: there are “scarcely any of his treatises” which do not contain “the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the human mind”. Further, as already quoted, “it is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle, whose genius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison

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point in this connection, concerning a passage in “On Christianity” already examined by us, in which Shelley considers the life after death as presented by Christ. Shelley writes: How delightful a picture even if it be not true! How magnificent and illustrious is the conception which this bold theory suggests to the contemplation, even if it be no more than the imagination of some sublimest and most holy poet. (Shelley’s Criticism, 96)

Hopps comments, revealing in Shelley’s attitude something of the indeterminacy found at the conclusion of “Mont Blanc”: What his reflexive scepticism takes away with one hand, however, in retrospectively casting his description as a hypothesis, it surreptitiously returns with the other; as the need he feels to disown the account suggests a defensive recognition—as though he were embarrassed in front of his own scepticism—of how much of himself is invested in it. We should also notice that it is left as an “if”—so that his sceptical gainsaying is itself half gainsaid. (There is as well an odd kind of double-crossing logic to the apparent putdown “even if it be no more than the imagination of some sublimest and most holy poet”, since for Shelley of course there is nothing higher.)24

The “apparent put-down” is more in line with what Shelley ascribes to Christ, an “accommodation” of ideas “to the opinions of his auditors” (Shelley’s Criticism, 101), an acknowledgement of contemporary intellectual currents which modify the poet’s particular presentation of certain issues. The note of scepticism is immediately qualified, in Shelley’s terms (as Hopps notes), by the reference to the “poet”, though the sense of an “accommodation” to the trivializing “opinions of auditors” regarding poets remains attached to this appellation. At issue are conservative blind faith and poetic vision, one upheld by society at large, the other held in slight regard. Shelley, though slantwise, attacks the one and defends the other. Religious conservatism is undermined by Heaven being considered as possibly “no more than the imagination” of a poet (even if that poet be Jesus), and philistinism regarding the arts (its adherents probably allied with the religiously conservative) being confronted with Christ as “sublimest and

with that of Plato” (“On The Symposium”, Shelley’s Criticism, 42). As Howe notes, attractive for Shelley in Plato (a “worthy poet” in Shelley’s eyes, see A Defence of Poetry in Shelley’s Criticism, 144), is the “dynamic” “dialogic form”, “often beginning critically with respect to specific doctrines before moving to a celebration of more general profundity or intuition” (“Shelley and Philosophy”, 102). 24 See Gavin Hopps, “Religion and Ethics”, 129.

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most holy poet”. Rigid scientific materialism is also covertly questioned, through Shelley’s elevation of the role of the poet. It is, of course, in A Defence of Poetry that Shelley reveals most clearly his estimation of the poetic faculty, and its role in “the human mind’s imaginings”, as at the conclusion of “Mont Blanc”: It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. (Shelley’s Criticism, 156)

As a tool to “create anew the universe”, the conclusion of “Mont Blanc”, while retaining its due measure of ontological doubt, at the same time “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity” put in place by dull acceptance of convention.25 *** Two daemonic poems of particular interest to me are “Ode to the West Wind” (SPW 577) and “To a Skylark” (SPW 602), both originally published with Prometheus Unbound in 1820. “Ode to the West Wind” is, to my mind, a masterpiece, a technical and emotive tour de force, with its five embedded sonnets, structured in Dantean terza rima.26 The wind is addressed as a seasonal daemon (bridging a greater force with its own), with specific functions of clearing away the old and ensuring the new. It operates in a posthuman world in which the poet would also be immersed, if for the sake of a rejuvenation of human consciousness. It disrupts the “harmony” of autumn found in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” with its purgative wielding of a power at once arcane and clinical—both “ghosts” and “Pestilence-stricken multitudes” are dealt with:

25

Howe notes that Shelley’s “intense investment in poetry” in a Defence highlights the “high value” he places on the “intellectual system”, or supportive philosophy seen as “aesthetic artefact”, “a thing of wonder, a dizzying vision like a sublime poem or a stunning natural prospect”, which has “remarkable intellectual possibilities that have the capacity to stimulate and reorganize degraded perception” (“Shelley and Philosophy”, 115). 26 “Although Shelley never alluded to the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in his correspondence or reported conversations, he apparently thought of it as a central poem in his canon” (Curran, Annus Mirabilis, 172).

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As “breath” it is a pointedly invisible manifestation (an “unseen presence”) of a living posthuman power, a “being”, not a monumental signature of such power, as is Mont Blanc. “Dead” placed directly beneath “being” draws out (through contrast) the qualities of both living force and dead leaves; in the commotion caused by the wind, autumn is seen in process, not as a composed, harmonious tapestry of colours, as these same leaves with their autumn tints might, from an altered perspective, suggest. Ghosts must be exorcised, and pestilence must be cured; psychological and material symptoms must be dealt with, an incorporation of human perception within the impersonal workings of nature, but indicating an actual natural cleansing that is taking place as part of inevitable (necessary) cyclicality. The extreme nature of the imagery suggests intense excitement, far from the calm of Wordsworth’s inspirited “golden daffodils” (Poetical Works, 149). This Gothic beginning to the poem, then, is a type of daemonic correlative (in its excessiveness) to the turmoil of the wind. And within this same purgative process the elements of renewal are put in place, as the “wingèd seeds” are also “driven”, but to other ends: from the viewpoint of “beyond the human”, death and birth are continuous:27 O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: (5-12)

27 Mitchell, referring to Keats’s “To Autumn”, notes the “queer vitality” which “persists in the poem’s ‘stubble plains’ and ‘soft-dying day’, for both are linked to the simple life of the ‘store’ of granary seed, which remains in suspended animation during the winter” (Mitchell, “Suspended Animation”, 112). Their apparent death holds life. Shelley’s seeds, however, are set against a tempestuous moment in the season.

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As in a sculptured frieze or painting in the “Florence Gallery”,28 Autumn and Spring winds are “sisters”, a classical or Renaissance touch (along with “chariotest”), indicating human sensitivity to the empathetic connections with the natural world, centred in an ancient, sacralised view of the earth and her elements. The image of the driven “buds”, like “flocks” “feeding in air”, is perhaps even more extraordinarily imaginative than the pestilence stricken leaves, but is pastoral in tenor, restorative, rather than proof of inconstancy (as seen in Shakespeare’s “darling buds” shaken by intemperate “rough winds”).29 The concluding couplet affirms that this “spirit” apparent in autumn is, in fact, “moving everywhere”, giving it the universal significance attached to “Destroyer and preserver”. As Curran writes: The “Destroyer and preserver” is a single force of universal proportions, moving over “the dreaming earth” at the end of winter as over the dreaming Mediterranean at the end of summer, forcing both earth and water, elemental properties, into activity: into life, into death. (Annus Mirabilis, 157)

Curran also notes the influence of Indian orientalism in Shelley’s thought, with this singular “Destroyer and preserver”, a fact which adds to its universal resonance: The “Destroyer and preserver” Shelley calls upon to hear him is the combined form of Siva and Vishnu, whose qualities were, from the beginning of English explorations of Indian religion, rendered in those precise terms.

Curran adds the important point, of further universalising significance, to which the poem later subscribes: But the Indian godhead has a third member, whose presence is missing from this invocation. So, indeed, does the Christian trinity, whose God and Holy Spirit, at least as represented by mythologists, function similarly to Siva and Vishnu. The wrathful force of Jehovah is balanced by the regenerative power of the spring Zephyr, but what is missing—and indeed demanded by the poet—is the creative power of Brahma and of Christ. (Annus Mirabilis, 163164)

For the present, the paradoxical activity of the first twelve lines of the poem is compressed within the phrase, augmented with the repeated prayer to be 28

A fragment in Shelley’s Criticism is named “Critical Notices on Sculpture in the Florence Gallery” (23). This is the Uffizi Gallery. 29 Shelley’s allusion is surely a pointed one. For Sonnet 18, see Vendler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 119.

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“heard”. This last is not an automatic assumption of reciprocity, but it tempts the possibility, as if granting imagination the intimation of such, in a bolstering fashion, whether possible or not. The prayerful exhortation in itself carries an energy of intent, a boost to consciousness, reinforced by biblical echoes, as Michael O’Neill points out in a reference to Psalm 102:1: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee”:30 Wild spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! (13-14)

Natural wholeness is suggested by the correspondence between “shed” leaves and “Loose clouds”, also shaken by the “commotion” of wind. The “steep sky” and Po Valley are thus linked through the activity of the wind and the parallel between different substances, a fact which, in subtle terms, gives support to the possibility of the wind being able to influence human consciousness: Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: (15-18)

The clouds are messengers of elemental forces, being “Angels of rain and lightning”, daemonic mediators between literal heaven and earth. With a syncretic flourish, the angelic messengers metamorphose into the “bright hair” of a “fierce Maenad”, almost certainly inspired by those on the “pedestal” of Minerva in the “Florence Gallery”, with “hair, loose and floating”, which “seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion” (Shelley’s Criticism, 27). The “Maenad” imagery evokes divine possession, daemonic in its own way, while also being suggestive of the cirrus type of cloud, the word “cirrus” meaning “lock of hair” in Latin, as Reiman and Fraistat point out (Poetry and Prose, 299n6). Figurative suggestion is thus buttressed by scientific appellation, in a density of signification, where the elements of myth exist on equal terms with factual observation: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge 30

Michael O’Neill, “Sonnets and Odes”, 333n2.

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Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. (18-23)

The elemental might of “the approaching storm” absorbs these suggestions into its own vastness, “from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith’s height”. Sight modulates into sound, prompted by the expanse of cloud, which, in the duskiness of the “closing night”, suggests “the dome of a vast sepulchre”, through which the sound of the wind is the funeral “dirge” of the “dying year”: Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear! (23-28)

But this “sepulchre” is hardly reflective of eternal rest; quite the opposite— and this is its point. It is the site of a destructiveness that will ensure not death, but the continuing flux of life, being “Vaulted” with “vapours”, whose “solid atmosphere” will void “Black rain, and fire, and hail”, purgative, like the wind, but, in this, sharing in its reproductive function. Perspective shifts from clouds and air to sea, as the “blue Mediterranean” is woken by the wind from the lulling calm of “summer dreams”, languidly rhyming with “the coil of his crystalline streams”. Dream consciousness (even though an actual phenomenon is presented)31 seems to offer a view into the past, “old palaces and towers” beneath the waves, enhanced by its aesthetic distancing from the present. Shelley wrote in the first of what Mary later named “Three Fragments on Beauty”: Why is the reflection in that canal more beautiful than the objects it reflects? The colours are more vivid, and yet blended with more harmony; the openings from within into the soft and tender colours of the distant wood, and the intersection of the mountain lines, surpass and misrepresent truth. (Shelley’s Criticism, 22)

31

See Manuela Callari, “AI Is Bringing the Internet to Submerged Roman Ruins”, MIT Technology Review, Jan / Feb 2023. Accessed 16 May, 2023. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/29/1064745/underwater-internet-airoman-ruins/.

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Distancing submarine “reflections” of the sunken Roman buildings, enhanced by the “vivid” colours of the “azure moss and flowers” of the seaweeds, is combined with temporal distancing afforded by awareness of a past utterly transformed by the centuries. The Mediterranean aspect of the ocean preserves beauty over the cycle of seasons, even if it helps “surpass and misrepresent truth” in doing so—its allegiance is to a beauty perhaps connected to its classical heritage, but also connected to objective observation: Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! (29-36)

It is far other with the expanse of the Atlantic and its wind-cloven “chasms”, where even submarine life is subjected to the same seasonal turmoil which takes place on land, as Shelley’s famous note indicates.32 Its agitated response as its “sea-blooms” and “oozy woods” “suddenly grow gray with fear / And tremble and despoil themselves”, shows its awareness of the “destroyer” aspect of existence: Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear! (36-42)

32 “The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it” (SPW 577n1).

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The final “oh, hear!”, a concluding refrain for stanzas 1 to 3, is a summation of acknowledgement of this immense power, and thus of the potential it conveys for the human spirit. If that spirit could ally itself with this natural force, materially and psychically, what could not be achieved by human intention? Having addressed the wind in its various areas of influence, then, the poet now focusses on its possible relation to himself, necessarily adopting a subjunctive mood, though he himself seems brimming, again, with the energy of intent: If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! (43-47)

His intent has nothing to do with the assumption of “uncontrollable” power impossible to withstand; he would be the lowliest of elements, “a dead leaf”, if only he might be “borne” by the “power” of the winds, if only he might “share / The impulse of thy strength”. That this energy is not physical (even if expressed in physical terms) but psychic, is made clear in a reference to his childhood self, and its ability, through imagination, to transcend material limitations and gain access to a field of perception where “vision” is conflated with reality, to the point where a higher state of consciousness is achieved, and one is figuratively raised above “the thorns of life”, like the posthuman sequence of the “wave”, “leaf” and “cloud” of the poem, even while being immersed in life: If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! (47-54)

The Christian connotations of the “thorns of life” mark a sense of communion with the sufferings of Christ (the archetype of a higher consciousness in Western tradition) at the hands of ignorant humankind.33 33 Though Shelley questions the absolute divinity of Jesus, he does not hesitate in associating the attributes of a higher state of consciousness with him: “His

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The poet’s indirect point made through this allusion is that if this is what happens to selfless human aspiration in the case of the highest exemplum of such aspiration, then in his lesser case he surely needs an infusion of the elemental power of the winds, and all that it represents: A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. (55-56)

The “heavy weight of hours”, unrelenting time with all its trials and tribulations, has “chained and bowed” him, despite his association with the wind. It is his limitations which make him “too like thee”, as, even if he possesses the wind’s characteristics (being “tameless, and swift, and proud”), he lacks the wind’s strength to give them full expression. Thus, in the final stanza, he returns to his customary image of the “lyre”, the instrument of higher powers, possibly inspired by Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp”, as previously mentioned.34 A mediatory instrument between higher powers and humanity, the lyre is daemonic, a medium for voices from “beyond the human”. Shelley would merge with this daemon (“Be thou me, impetuous one”), but, in truth, not “even as” the inarticulate “forest is”. “Tumultuous” strength is certainly desired, and elemental “mighty harmonies” with their “deep, autumnal tone”, where the mere sound of “sweet” “sadness” conveys meaning: Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! (57-62)

extraordinary genius, the wide and rapid effect of his unexampled doctrines, his invincible gentleness and benignity, the devoted love borne to him by his adherents, suggested a persuasion to them that he was something divine” (“Essay on Christianity”, Shelley’s Criticism, 86). Like Blake, he believed in “the divinity of his own nature” (90). 34 As noted earlier, the spontaneously generated “witchery of sound” of Coleridge’s wind harp prompts that poet to consider “the one Life within us and abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul” (“Eolian Harp, The”, 26-27). Again, for Leadbetter the “Intellectual breeze” of the poem marks “the irruption of Coleridge’s daemonic will” (Coleridge and the Daemonic, 33). The image was used by Shelley in The Daemon of the World, Alastor, the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, and the “Essay on Christianity”, as previously noted.

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The poet, though, would also convey articulate “thoughts over the universe”, with the express purpose, like the wind, “to quicken a new birth”. The particular lyre the poet is, being constituted as he is, conveys redemptive meaning; though as receptive as the forest is to the “Spirit fierce”, because he is a different medium his expression is different. The “incantation” of this very verse before us, as human breath joins the breath of the wind, is then the expression of this power. The “unextinguished hearth”, though cumbered by dead “Ashes”, also contains “sparks”, which the breath empowers through its inspirational words: Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (63-67)

But then a change in medium comes, as the poet becomes an equally daemonic “trumpet of a prophecy”, the penetrating sound of a war instrument, tying in with the “clarion” of the Spring from the first stanza (and gaining impetus from this implied cyclicality), to rouse the “unawakened earth”, and free it of its perceptual restrictions. Reiman and Fraistat quote from A Philosophical View of Reform: “It is impossible to read the productions of our most celebrated writers . . . without being startled with the electric life which there is in their words”. They are “the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic forms which futurity casts upon the present”. As their “inspiration” is “unapprehended”, they “express what they conceive not, the trumpet which sings to battle and feels not what it inspires, the influence which is moved not but moves” (Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 301n6). Shelley, though, has certainly “conceived” his own hopes for “futurity”: Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (68-70)

The final line, though couched as a rhetorical question, and hence reflecting a measure of indeterminacy, actually affirms the necessity of seasonal change. The indeterminacy, though, can be applied to the state of human affairs, which may never emerge from its figurative “Winter”. This can hardly have been Shelley’s intention, though I believe his adjustment of this final line is to convey some sense of the immensity of the task. O’Neill notes

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of this final line, that “for all its rhetorical form”, it “retreats from the certainty of the draft reading, ‘When Winter comes Spring lags not far behind’”. O’Neill continues, “the assurance that spring will follow winter is only a frail guarantee that freedom will follow tyranny” (“Sonnets and Odes”, 334-335). Again, I don’t believe Shelley’s intention was to offer a “frail guarantee”. Anachronistically, however, the indeterminacy also anticipates the consequences of climate change, and the immensity of the task to redress human damage to the earth that lies ahead of us. From this perspective, Shelley’s fragment, “Rome and Nature”, also from 1819 (SPW 588), seems chillingly overoptimistic regarding the stable functioning of natural necessity: Rome has fallen, ye see it lying Heaped in undistinguished ruin: Nature is alone undying.

*** I turn, finally, to “To a Skylark” (SPW 602), where a little bird is the daemonic presence which moves the poet to express verbally (and encapsulate) something of the significance of the bird and its song:35 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. (1-5)

Like the west wind, this “bird” participates in the sublime dimension of “Spirit”; it is not a mundane being to which we unthinkingly attach a generalizing noun, “bird”.36 Of course, Shelley reworks our perception of 35

As Jessica K. Quillin notes, Shelley became increasingly convinced of the importance of music after 1817: “building on his understanding of early German Romanticism and the musical ideas of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley was also drawn to a more organic notion of music as the highest form of the arts because of its affective capacity as sound to impact directly the mind and soul of its auditor without the encumbrance of the material—i.e., written language”. See “Shelley and Music”, The Oxford Handbook of Shelley, 535. 36 It bears a relation, as previously noted, to Blake’s skylark in Milton, though it is unlikely that Shelley knew the poem. For Blake, his skylark is a “mighty Angel” (BCW 527). Raine, we recall, linked Shelley and Blake through this image, calling Shelley Blake’s “spiritual successor, whether he knew it or not” (Defending Ancient Springs, 147).

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what a bird is through imaginative exercises, in order to touch on the actual wonder of this natural creation, and, in the manner of William Drummond, clear away “the overgrowth of ages” (“On Life”, Shelley’s Criticism, 55). The bird’s song is “unpremeditated”, as is the sound of the wind in the forest—it too is a type of Aeolian lyre, a daemonic medium of something far greater. Its apparent insignificance is important in the light of that which Shelley wishes to undertake—the unveiling of a portion of what would “overawe” us were it to be fully revealed: Life, the great miracle, we admire not, because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object. (“On Life”, Shelley’s Criticism, 53)

The second stanza begins the work of defamiliarization in a dramatic manner, with the simile of the “cloud of fire”. G. M. Matthews, arguing the political import of Shelley’s writing, long since (1957) pointed out that “the flight of the skylark is not quite so innocuous as it might seem”. His premise is, famously: A “cloud of fire” which “springs” from the earth can only be, like the “burning smoke” of Alastor, the nuée ardente of an active volcano, a mass of superheated steam and incandescent dust which, as an observer had seen it over Vesuvius, “appeared in the night tinged like clouds with the setting sun”.37

As Matthews argues, “seismic” political “events” have taken place in Shelley’s era—the American and French revolutions—and the skylark’s volcanic correspondence reflects the temper of such events (“Volcano’s Voice”, 194). It shares, for a brief moment, the same function as Blake’s Orc: Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; (6-8)

What is also clear, however, apart from the immense power which underlies all life forms, and in which the skylark participates, is its avian delight as it “wingest” untrammelled the gorgeous “blue deep” of its natural element, accompanying its mighty “soaring” exertion with song, beauteous vocal expression with no apparent object apart from its own necessity: 37

G. M. Matthews, “A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley”, ELH 24, no.3 (1957): 193-194.

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The volcanic “fire” imagery continues into the following stanza, to an extent, with the illuminated clouds (though their primary source of illumination is the “sunken sun”), but so does the strand of existential delight, the bird’s delight in its own pure being, free of any ideological connotation: In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O’er which clouds are bright’ning, Thou dost float and run; (11-14)

So at home in the air is the bird that it appears to “run” through it at will, as if on a stable footing; a virtuoso athlete, it can also “float”, suspended above its track, so to speak. And its movements are so astonishing that it (especially at its extreme height) can slip into a non-material state as “an unbodied joy” almost as a matter of course, tapping into the Shelleyan traversal of conceptual limits, so apparent in Prometheus Unbound: Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. (15)

Its “unseen” nature is emphasised by the “melting” of a material manifestation of nature, the “even”, “pale purple” now, but in the process of change. The simile proposes, in material terms, the potency of the unseen, through the example of stars in daylight. We take it on trust that they yet shine, but most of the time do not even think about this, so accustomed are we to their perceived absence during the day; the bird relieves our customary obliviousness regarding the unseen in the heavens in daylight; in a sense, it releases heavenly energy into our view: The pale purple even Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven, In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, (16-20)

In the continuing traversing mode, now involving synaesthesia, the song of the bird assumes the “keenness” of “arrows” of light from the morning star, an agent of heavenly power, again, in the process of change, like the “purple

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even”, but at the other end of the day, “the white dawn clear”, a process which transforms vision (as light melds with light) into “feeling”: Keen as are the arrows Of that silver sphere, Whose intense lamp narrows In the white dawn clear Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there. (21-25)

Yet another heavenly body is then evoked, the moon, and another synaesthetic image involving light and song. The simile fuses light and song over the immensity of heaven, providing an appropriate sense of scale as far as elaborating on the extraordinary qualities of the tiny bird goes. Ordinary perception would baulk at the disproportion, but Shelley’s imagistic doctoring overcomes this limitation, centred in superficial observation: All the earth and air With thy voice is loud, As, when night is bare, From one lonely cloud The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed. (26-30)

The surge of similes is momentarily paused, with an admission of ignorance regarding what this bird actually is (or the inability of logic-bound language to encompass its mysteries)—and hence a justification for the further use of similes: “What is most like thee?”: What thou art we know not; What is most like thee? (31-32)

Then comes the comparison, with colour, liquefaction and musical sound blending into each other, as if distinct categories are too rigid to convey any sense of the bird: From rainbow clouds there flow not Drops so bright to see As from thy presence showers a rain of melody. (33-35)

The simile string following, governed by the repeated “Like”, adds to the ever-widening scope needed to begin to approach what the bird is. First, the “Poet”, with unpremeditated “hymns” that might expand the awareness of an otherwise heedless “world”; the “unbidden” nature of the hymns puts the poet on the same footing, to an extent, with the bird:

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Then, with a shift to the realm of romance, and its aesthetic enhancement (also through “music”) of the difficulties surrounding love relationships, “a high-born maiden” is evoked: Like a high-born maiden In a palace-tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: (41-45)

A breath-taking change in perspective evokes the lowly “glow-worm”, which, however, because of the conjunction, is granted its own place in this succession of valued images (actual and fictional) called forth by the mind in the presence of the sky-lark’s song. Romance gives way to delicate natural description, which generates its own sense of wonder: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aëreal hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view! (46-50)

The light-producing source, as hidden from view as the lark, is soon complemented by another natural element, the rose, hidden from view by “its own green leaves”, but detected by its scent, a sweetness linked in slightly erotic fashion to its “deflowered” status (perhaps both literal and figurative), and its intoxicating effect on the bees, presented as lightly transgressive “heavy-wingèd thieves”: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingèd thieves: (51-55)

But this accumulation of rich similes, drawn from nature and the imagination, cannot begin to do justice to the skylark’s song. At the same time, because of calling the similes forth in the poet’s mind, the song is an

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essential expression of these elements, or a type of aesthetic correlative of “All that ever was / Joyous, and clear, and fresh”. Spring, the rejuvenating force in “Ode to the West Wind”, manifests herself in the “vernal showers” falling on the lively “twinkling grass” and “awakening” the “flowers”, emblems of beauty and new life: Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass: (56-60)

Not with the intensity with which he appeals to the wind, the poet nevertheless appeals to the bird, seeking internal confirmation, as it were, of the joy of its outward expressions. But the appeal is whimsical, actually an acknowledgement of the poet’s outsider status; his perception is bound to human expectations (such as inspiration being the product of types of inebriation, as implied in “Praise of love or wine”),38 but he is well aware of the posthuman nature of his subject, from which he is excluded: Teach us, Sprite or Bird, What sweet thoughts are thine: I have never heard Praise of love or wine That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. (61-65)

Remaining in the human sphere, the poet compares the bird’s song to the lack apparent in songs of love and war, “empty” praising or boasting, an indefinable absence (“hidden want”) perhaps associated, in deconstructive fashion, with the inevitable gaps between signifiers and signified: Chorus Hymeneal, Or triumphal chant, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. (66-70)

This outlining of the flawed nature of human communication gives way to a consideration of possible posthuman causation (though the sources of 38 “Short poems in praise of love or wine, called Anacreontics, were an established tradition descending from the Greek poet Anacreon” (Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 306n5). The implicit reference to Anacreon might also be seen as bound to “human expectations”.

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inspiration are still seen in human terms, from the aesthetic beauty of natural features to the celebration of feelings): What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? (71-75)

Another comparison is made, which, though still in human-centred terms which assume the “joyance” of the bird, are more a brief catalogue of human failings, involving “Languor”, “annoyance” and “love’s sad satiety”. The quality of the pure sound of the bird excludes all these: With thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be: Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee: Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety. (76-80)

The peculiarly human concern with mortality is another failing, of which a bird’s consciousness is oblivious; the point is, though, that the bird’s very being is attuned to how “true and deep” natural causation and its end process are, and has no need to enter Hamlet’s dialectic regarding death: Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? (81-85)

The following stanza outlines the prospecting nature of human consciousness (always ahead of the moment in which it is presently living), its strength from one point of view, but from another an indication of its loss of natural attunement: We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. (86-90)

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Somewhat perversely, indeed, so lacking in attunement are we that our “sweetest” aesthetic accomplishments depend for their efficacy on the melancholy they impart. So “beyond the human” is the bird, that even the poet’s thought-world of a humanity purged of “Hate, and pride, and fear” (as at the conclusion of Prometheus Unbound), cannot “ever” be conceived to partake in the skylark’s intensity of “joy”: Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. (91-95)

Its superlative nature is finally summarized; it exceeds the “measures” of (presumably) human-constructed “delightful sound”, along with whatever may be found in “books”—the human means of storing the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. Shelley’s final compliment is his supreme one: “Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!” Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! (96-100)

The posthuman abilities of the bird, soaring far above what is mundane, figuratively and literally, are those of the “poet”, or one who “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being”; the poet “creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” (A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Criticism, 156). Shelley, through the skylark, but while never equalling the skylark’s purity of song and its daemonic energy, has attempted to “create anew the universe”, at least within the accessible area of the human frame’s relationship with a bird:39 Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness 39 Quillin observes of this stanza, “music becomes a radical vehicle for change, as the poet longs to harness his revelatory experience with the musical voice and its incumbent access to the fundamental beauty and harmony of the divine” (“Shelley and Music”, 539).

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His acknowledgement of his inferior status is an acknowledgement of the limitations of the human condition; 40 yet he sells himself short to an extent. After all, his flawed means have provided an intimation of an expression of pure Being allied to the posthuman, that resonates in human consciousness with the ideal of perfectibility that Shelley never abandoned, despite the ever-harsher circumstances of his personal life in his final years.

40

“The final alexandrine captures the panting forth of the ‘flood of rapture’ in such a way that Shelley seems to possess the inspiration he desires”. However, “at the same time, the recognition of some ‘hidden want’ latent in even the best human poetry both impels Shelley’s drive to imitate the skylark and explains his poem’s sense of exclusion from the ‘clear keen joyance’ that it admires”. See Michael O’Neill, “Sonnets and Odes”, 336.

CHAPTER SIX KEATS: FROM ENDYMION TO THE FALL OF HYPERION

John Keats is able to open himself to the daemonic nature of imaginative absorption in otherness, as if unfettered by linguistic, rational constraints.1 An ability he recognized in Shakespeare and Milton, of which he was thus consciously aware (in tandem with his unconscious, intuitive capacity for it), it was presented by him in terms which have since become standard in literary criticism. In December 1817, for instance (in a private letter to his brother Tom—surely a selfless medium regarding any possible eye on futurity), he wrote famously of “Negative Capability”, though the term itself might stem from the inability of the young second husband of Georgiana Keats, John Jeffrey (who copied out certain of Keats’s letters, perhaps in the hopes of profiting thereby), to read the poet’s handwriting. Keats writes to Charles Dilke: several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that

1

McGilchrist notes: “Wordsworth’s achievement, like that of Blake and Keats, is that he retains a degree of innocence despite his experience, an innocence which all three evidence in what one might call their vulnerability. Through it alone they are enabled to achieve an inspired quality which could be mistaken by the foolish, at times, for foolishness. The price of their achievement is that they must make themselves open, even to ridicule, rather than shelter behind a self-protective carapace of ironic knowingness and cynicism” (Master and Emissary, 450).

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Chapter Six with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.2

Contemporaneous with the writing of his first major production, Endymion, then (whatever term Keats actually used—a point of uncertainty which in a sense suits the matter of the passage), the “quality” “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”, indicates his awareness of what he himself possesses, the ability to enter the realm of the other without any trace of the self-consciousness which can obtrude on imaginative projection.3 For instance, a year prior to writing the above, Keats composed “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”,4 where his description of the natural world around him is hardly of an objectively distanced kind. He seems at one with the inspiriting forces of this world, as in the following lines: The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn, And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves, For not the faintest motion could be seen Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green. (8-14)

Antedating Shelley’s image (in “Ode to the West Wind”) of lively, “driven” “flocks” of “sweet buds” feeding “in air” by some three years, Keats’s “clouds” are tranquil, buoyed in nourishing sweet sleep by “the blue fields of heaven”. They are at one with their world, imbibing it as one’s nervous system imbibes the effects of sleep, not projecting a force into it. By extension, the poet is content that his consciousness should be part of the present moment, not acting on it. The “little noiseless noise” which follows is indeterminate, beyond formal encompassment, yet present. Leigh Hunt said of the line, it was “a fancy founded . . . on a strong sense of what really 2

Letters of John Keats, 43. Gittings comments on Jeffrey’s errors or inventions on page xxii of his Introduction. 3 “Excessive self-consciousness, like the mental world of schizophrenia, is a prison: its inbuilt reflexivity—the hall of mirrors—sends the mind ever back into itself. Breaking out of the prison presents a problem, since self-consciousness cannot be curbed by a conscious act of will” (McGilchrist, Master and Emissary, 450). Aware of the problem, associated with the discomfort of the ever-alert mind in the presence of “uncertainties”, Keats seems to float above it. 4 Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1977), 85. From now on referred to as KCP.

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exists or occurs” (KCP 86n), apparently sensing Keats’s tendency not to foreclose in any way felt (and therefore “real”) experience. Yet, once more, as in “Sleep and Poetry” (KCP 79), written in the same period, he is aware of the creative perspective necessary for such observations, of the need for creative “power” to be transferred through minimum conscious intervention: A drainless shower Of light is Poesy; ’tis the supreme of power; ’Tis might half slumbering on its own right arm. The very archings of her eye-lids charm A thousand willing agents to obey, And still she governs with the mildest sway. (235-240)

The imagery points to the creative power latent in sleep or its near correlative, a drowsy “half slumbering”; half in and half out of sleep, the poet (still an independent consciousness) becomes part of the creative process inherent in all natural process, where “sleep” conveys the secret workings of such process, as in the growth from seed to sapling. That the imagery hints at aesthetic sources of inspiration, such as the Elgin marbles and Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”, line 33 (“Music slumbering on her instrument”), gestures at a type of “natural” nourishment suitable for “poesy”. *** In Endymion (KCP 116), the daemonic body of “the great god, Pan”, is a posthuman means of support of the poetic consciousness.5 In the hymn to Pan, in Book 1, we find the following, addressed to the god: 5 Charles Patterson long since pointed out the pertinence of an understanding of the daemonic in relation to Keats: “Keats was aware of the pre-Christian Greek conception of a nonmalicious daemon who is neither good nor evil but who dwells outside the pale of human restrictions in a realm of greater joy and beauty. . . . I found in Keats’s copy of Palmerin of England that he had frequently underlined and scored accounts of similar creatures and their effects on human beings in this romance of chivalry”. For Patterson, the word has two senses: “In the first sense the word indicates a special mode of intense perception; in the second sense it indicates the extraordinary qualities of the objects when known through that mode of perceiving”. See Charles I. Patterson, The Daemonic in the Poetry of John Keats, Urbana: University of Illinois Press (1970), vii, 3. For me, “intense perception” and “extraordinary qualities” in what is perceived, though eminently useful, are not enough to indicate the daemonic. Bloom’s “beyond the human”, while more general and intuitive in application, seems more serviceable.

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Though “unimaginable”, “thinkings” can still take place, albeit involving thoughts never firmly conceptualized; but even if in the process of being followed they “dodge” one’s understanding, they yet extend it “to the very bourne of heaven”, an enriching process free of the necessity of an outcome. The “brain”, left “naked”, is nevertheless free for more appropriate excursions of thought: be still the leaven, That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal, a new birth; (l.296-298)

That is, daemonic Pan is also a transformative substance, a “leaven”, that provides materiality with something beyond its “clodded” limitations, “a touch ethereal”; even though it is a “touch”, it is transformative enough to inform “a new birth” regarding human perception. As “a symbol of immensity”, Pan encompasses that Romantic expression of wholeness of natural presence, where sky is reflected in water, as seen, for instance, in “lake” and sky in Wordsworth’s “There was a boy” (24-25), but here enlarged into “firmament” and “sea”, and incorporating “the space between”, the “unknown” that lies “beyond the human”: Be still a symbol of immensity, A firmament reflected in a sea, An element filling the space between, An unknown—but no more! (1.299-302)

Yet that “but no more!”, which would limit the reach of the “unknown”, insists on the divine mediation with humanity that lies in daemonic gifting, made clear by the words which follow: We humbly screen With uplift hands our foreheads, lowly bending, And giving out a shout most heaven-rending, Conjure thee to receive our humble paean, Upon thy Mount Lycean! (1.302-306)

Pan, the embodied consciousness of nature, must extend human capacities; indirectly, those of the present poet, who, as much as his hero recently bereft

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of Cynthia, the very goddess of the moon, is also aware of the fundamental nourishment of the imagination derived from sleep: O magic sleep! O comfortable bird, That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind Till it is hushed and smooth! (1.453-455)

The Miltonic reference of the “brooding” bird—drawn from both the “Nativity Ode”, with its “Birds of Calm brooding on the charmèd wave” (l.68), and Book 1 of Paradise Lost, with the Creator, “Dove-like, brooding on the vast Abyss” (l.21)—links sleep with the most potent expressions of the imagination, but also tells of the therapeutic effect of creativity, its ability to restore a sense of psychological wholeness, part of the burden of Endymion.6 The paradoxical exclamations which follow—“O unconfined / Restraint! Imprisoned liberty!”—are to an extent performative (“unconfined” facing the open space at the end of the line, “Restraint!” found at the confined beginning of the next), and help dramatize the tug between material constraint and imaginative freedom. The subsequent expressions of the imagination, if laced by clichéd elements of fairy-tale and the Gothic, convey its wondrous strength, its ability to release the mind, and, indeed, “renovate” it: O unconfined Restraint! Imprisoned liberty! Great key To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy, Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, Echoing grottoes, full of tumbling waves And moonlight—aye, to all the mazy world Of silvery enchantment! Who, upfurled Beneath thy drowsy wing of triple hour, But renovates and lives? (1.455-463)

Endymion, and Keats himself, one suspects, are afforded such renovation.7 There is a suggestion (through references to “moonlight” and “silvery 6

Miriam Allott, for instance, says “the poem obviously focuses some of Keats’s central ideas in 1817 concerning the poetic nature and its conception of ideal happiness” (in KCP 118). 7 Robert Harrison (with reference to Joseph Campbell and Jung) argues that the poem reflects the restorative archetypal “cyclical myth”: “The basic movements in this eccentric circle are: the Call to the Quest, . . . Acceptance and Descent into the Underworld (time of trials), Fulfilment of the Quest, and Return, often apotheosized by some sort of sacred marriage”. See Robert Harrison, “Symbolism of the Cyclical Myth in Endymion”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1, no.4 (1960): 540.

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enchantment”) that Endymion is hereby mentally fortified to confront the otherwise impassable barriers between mortality and immortality in his pursuit of the goddess of the moon. Modulated into terms suited to the poet, to draw on Keats’s letter to Tom, quoted above, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”. If Cynthia is an embodiment of the “sense of Beauty” which “obliterates all consideration”, she is not unrelated to the hero’s dream vision in Shelley’s Alastor, as A. C. Bradley pointed out over a century ago, though Endymion does interact with the world around him, and “gives himself up to love for what seems to be a mere woman”, even if “she is found to be the goddess herself”.8 Allott, too, sees Keats’s poem as a “reply” to Shelley; the comparison highlights a fundamental distinction between Shelley and Keats, centred in apprehension of daemonic beauty. For Shelley’s hero the pursuit is relentless and single-minded; Keats’s hero, although he longs for the object of his passion, is open to the influences from the world around him, through which he eventually finds fulfilment, and realizes that seemingly fleeting, transcendent beauty is in fact settled and immanent, a state of apprehension perceived by but never granted Shelley, for whom Intellectual Beauty is transient, and for whom “Naught may endure but Mutability” (SPW 523: “Mutability”, line 16). Endymion’s encounter with his daemon is heralded by his awareness of posthuman lunar beauty: “The loveliest moon, that ever silvered o’er / A shell of Neptune’s goblet”, makes his “dazzled soul” “commingle” and “roll” with “her argent spheres”, even when she is obscured in “a dark and vapoury tent” of clouds (1.591-599). Natural vision is at first displaced by a brief experience of what is indefinable, “a bright something”, which makes him “quickly veil my eyes and face” (1.602-603). His perception soon settles, and he has an instantaneous impression of perfect beauty, before taking cognizance of any details: Again I looked, and, O ye deities Who from Olympus watch our destinies! Whence that completed form of all completeness? Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness? (1.604-607)

The abstract terms gain life from the questioning form of the exclamations, which put imaginative speculation on the alert. Roused, though, such speculation is challenged by the inadequacy attending any simile within earthly ken (while, of course, incorporating its elements):

8

A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London: Macmillan (1909), 241.

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Speak, stubborn earth, and tell me where, oh where, Hast thou a symbol of her golden hair? Not oat-sheaves drooping in the western sun; (1.608-610)

In the presence of his sister, Peona, he suddenly breaks off from what could become a predictable list of similes (as satirized in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”): Not—thy soft hand, fair sister, let me shun Such follying before thee! (1.611-612)

In the light of this awareness, his subsequent praise of his subject, with her “locks bright enough to make me mad”, her “pearl-round ears, white neck, and orbèd brow”, and her “paradise of lips and eyes”, verges on a parody of his own susceptibility, perhaps reflecting his helplessness in the face of his passion. That he does, at the end of the passage, like Shelley’s hero, suffer from the return to mundane experience, as “the stings” of ordinary human life “envenom all” (1.621-622), also tells of his extreme state. The return, however, is not void of human commerce, as the presence of his sister indicates. That is, unlike Shelley’s hero, his idealism, though clearly present, is not excessive. Though at first, in his bitterness, he “did curse” his lot in not being cast “down some monstrous precipice” (as extreme as any response in Shelley), the passage of “Time, that agèd nurse” brings relief, and, with his “Sweet sister” “helps to stem the ebbing sea / Of weary life” (1.705710). Having recovered from his ecstatic visionary experience and its shattering consequences, he seems better able to probe the subtle reaches of refined perception, with its “fellowship divine”, which will enable him to be “Full alchemized, and free of space” (1.777-780). When the mind is able to “feel”, through natural agency (“the free winds”), in sympathy with the crafted words and significant sounds of the past (“old songs”, “Ghosts of melodious prophesyings”, “Bronze clarions”, an Orphean “lullaby”), then, That moment have we stepped Into a sort of oneness, and our state Is like a floating spirit’s. (1.795-797)

The sense of unity is intensified through what appear to be greater degrees of loss of ego, Blake’s self-annihilation, what Keats calls that which is “selfdestroying”, leading to the experience of friendship and love: But there are Richer entanglements, enthralments far More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,

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Friendship is of the “bulkier” sort of love: All its more ponderous and bulky worth Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth A steady splendour; (1.803-805)

“Love” per se, so to speak, is at the apex, and this must be the transformative love experienced by Endymion: but at the tip-top There hangs by unseen film an orbèd drop Of light, and that is love. Its influence, Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense, At which we start and fret, till in the end, Melting into its radiance, we blend, Mingle, and so become a part of it— Nor with aught else can our souls interknit So wingedly. (1.805-813)

The “drop” of “light” is in delicate counterpoint to “ponderous” friendship, but its size belies its power to make us “start and fret” in discomfort, before, ultimately, we “melt into its radiance”, “and so become a part of it”. If this love involves the “interknitting” of “souls”, it could well presuppose dimensions of being “beyond the human”, anticipating Endymion’s declaration of his love for a goddess. But before that moment, Endymion speculates on the posthuman resonances of love. Just as the song of the nightingale, though specifically for “her love”, gives pleasure to others throughout the expanse of night (which “holds back her dark-grey hood” to enable this), so love “might bless / The world with benefits unknowingly” (1.826-831). Endymion counters the prescriptions of rational determinism—love is “the mere commingling of passionate breath” (1.833)—with a sense of its universally inspiriting force: What I know not, but who, of men, can tell That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,

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If human souls did never kiss and greet? (1.835-842)

Underlying material expressions of love, at the level of “soul”,9 love may (from a unified field of Platonic potentiality, as it were) inform all of existence, from flowers and fruit, to fish, “river, wood, and vale”, and even musical vibrations. Such vibrations, indeed, demonstrate the non-material influence of love, allied in this (if in rather “ponderous” terms) with “soul”. Endymion’s actual encounter with the goddess begins with the appearance of a daemonic forerunner, as he gazes at reflections of the clouds in the waters of a well, thereby figuratively dissolving the barrier between the realm of watery generation and spiritual existence,10 as if through the “melting” of a “mirror”. A cloud “Cupid” appears, emerging, thus, from natural substance, materiality acting in concert with the spiritual (KCP 159): I sat contemplating the figures wild Of o’er-head clouds melting the mirror through. Upon a day, while thus I watched, by flew A cloudy Cupid with his bow and quiver, So plainly charactered no breeze would shiver The happy chance; (1.886-891)

Before he can follow the “cloudy Cupid”, he is surprised by the “bright face” of the goddess, shining in the “clear well” (1.896). Though the visitation is momentary, it rejuvenates through material means, as he feels on his face “Dew-drops and dewy buds and leaves and flowers”, which bathe his “spirit in a new delight”, a “breathless honey-feel of bliss” which “Alone” preserves him from the “abyss” of “death” when he realizes “the fair form had gone again” (1.896-905). Unlike the similarly haunted Poet in Alastor, Endymion recovers from the sense of near-inexpressible deprivation, though, again, he is initially aware of “clinging” “pain”, “weary days”, “unslumberous nights”, and “deadly yellow spleen” (1.906-917). Bolstered 9

Benjamin Bailey disregarded Keats’s emphasis on “soul”, when he wrote of Endymion’s “inclination to that abominable principle of Shelley’s—that Sensual Love is the principle of things. Of this I believe him to be unconscious, and can see how by a process of the imagination he might arrive at so false, delusive, and dangerous conclusion” (in KCP 157n). We recall Fritjof Capra’s words, from The Hidden Connections: by regarding “how life has evolved for billions of years by using again and again the same basic patterns and processes, we realize how tightly we are connected with the entire fabric of life” (Hidden Connections, 69). Keats’s intuitive awareness of such connections should not be trivialised. 10 Another possible hint at Keats’s acquaintance with certain Neoplatonic doctrine. However, water (as of the earth) and cloud (of the heavens), together serve the same overall function, without recourse to any doctrine.

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by a sense of “hope” derived from a type of self-communing, figured in the voice of “Echo”, and though, frankly, beset by melancholy, Endymion will not, as does the Poet in Alastor, spurn the world and human community. Near the end of Book 1 he declares: No more will I count over, link by link, My chain of grief, no longer strive to find A half-forgetfulness in mountain wind Blustering about my ears. Aye, thou shalt see, Dearest of sisters, what my life shall be, What a calm round of hours shall make my days. (1.978-983)

His acceptance of the toils and tribulations of human existence is more clearly expressed in Book 2 (KCP 169), where the hardships of life, “war”, “disappointment”, “anxiety”, “Imagination’s struggles”, all “bear in themselves this good”, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence, and to show How quiet death is. (2.153-159)

Yet this knowledge (what he will later call “soul making”)11 does not bring him peace; in his continuing pursuit of the goddess, he descends into rich caverns, analogous to an internalization process leading to the “goal of consciousness” (as in the “cyclical myth”), but of an extreme, solipsistic sort. Such knowledge, based on the superficial level of “mystery and awe”, only leads to “weariness” on the brink of “wild uncertainty” (2.269-273). Superficial stimulation past, he is forced to face his everyday, mundane nature, yet “how crude and sore / The journey homeward to habitual self!” (2.275-276). In effect refuting the Poet of Alastor, he undercuts “the Spirit of Solitude” reflected in that poem’s subtitle. He tells of the cause of his “misery”, even though he has attained the “goal of consciousness”: Ah, ’tis the thought, The deadly feel of solitude; for lo! He cannot see the heavens, nor the flow Of rivers, nor hill-flowers running wild In pink and purple chequer, nor, up-piled, The cloudy rack slow journeying in the west, Like herded elephants. (2.283-289)

11

Letters, 249-251.

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In short, to be cordoned off from the world, in his own “consciousness”, is to be deprived of material nature. Cynthia herself, he understands, shares his own delight in nature, and heightens its experience through her investiture; he prays to her as one who “finds in our green earth sweet contents” (2.313). Though his appeal is met with silence, he thereafter soon finds his way out of the caverns of solipsistic consciousness,12 and re-enters a world of “flowers, and wreaths, and ready myrtle”, as if thus gifted by the goddess (2.342). His next encounter with the goddess is physical, indeed, but tells of more than can be expected of mortal experience, as when Endymion questions her in paradoxical terms, which temper his human expectations with the reality of her transcendent immortality. She is a “known Unknown”, a proximate otherness, who provides “Such darling essence” to his “being” (2.739-740). His daemonic longing is matched by her love for him, but the impossibility of their predicament seems clear to them at this stage. It draws from the speaker of the poem an excursus on the otherness of posthuman expression which somehow finds its way into human terms (KCP 197): Ye who have yearned With too much passion will here stay and pity For the mere sake of truth, as ’tis a ditty Not of these days, but long ago ’twas told By a cavern wind unto a forest old; And then the forest told it in a dream To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam A poet caught as he was journeying To Phoebus’ shrine; and in it he did fling His weary limbs, bathing an hour’s space, And after, straight, in that inspirèd place He sang the story up into the air, Giving it universal freedom. There Has it been ever sounding for those ears Whose tips are glowing hot. (2.827-841)

The premise, once more, is that of unity amongst the elements of the earth, to the extent where “voices” from a “cavern wind” and “forest old”, can be 12 McGilchrist relates postmodern solipsistic nihilism (where rational consciousness alone adjudicates on our conception of reality) to Louis Sass’s insights: “if reality is a construct without any objective existence, and if words have no referent, we are all absolutely impotent to say or do anything that has meaning” (Master and Emissary, 423; McGilchrist refers to Sass’s essay, “Time, Space, and Symbol”, 76). Endymion’s experience of consciousness is similarly limiting, though put in terms of usurpation rather than making void.

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received, through visionary “dream”, by a “sleeping lake” and transferred into the human consciousness of a “poet”. That is, elemental experience resonates with human experience—there is an empathic communion between them. Such empathy is also an expression of the goddess’s benignity, as we see, briefly, in Book 3, where “oldest trees” feel the influence of the moon, and “lisp forth a holier din” (3.52-55). The beauty of her light would seem to give “life” to inanimate objects, “dead things”, and even touch with “divine” beauty the “dreams” of beasts; the very height of “mountains” is determined by their need to feel the moonlight on their peaks (3.56-60). And, as in Blake and Shelley, even the most marginal beings are touched by divinity: And yet thy benediction passeth not One obscure hiding-place, one little spot Where pleasure may be sent. The nested wren Has thy fair face within its tranquil ken, And from beneath a sheltering ivy leaf Takes glimpses of thee. (3.61-66)

Even a basic bivalve mollusc is included: Thou art a relief To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps Within its pearly house. (3.66-68)

The speaker then ranges back to the magnitude of her influence, through her effect on the tides: The mighty deeps, The monstrous sea is thine—the myriad sea! O Moon! Far-spooming Ocean bows to thee, And Tellus feels his forehead’s cumbrous load. (3.68-71)

What Keats indicates (in accord with Shelley) is the presence of the wonderful in what is natural; even if considered in the most blatant of material terms, the moon does exert the power of a higher force over life on earth. Keats’s use of Greek mythology throughout Endymion (which is in a sense a latter-day compendium of such mythology), is an acknowledgement of the extraordinary arrangement of material elements (including moon and sun—Keats bears an especial allegiance to Apollo) that have led to, and that govern, life on earth. “Beyond the human”, they are yet essential to humanity, and Endymion’s striving for the moon is a metaphorical expression

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of this fact. As James Boulger notes, “for Keats it was a quest of a special kind to create a symbolic world in which the qualities of the spirit modify harsh facts of nature, yet where the colors, sounds and attitudes of the natural world are the realities of the poetic vision”.13 Thus, when Endymion, through his love for the goddess, is eventually “spiritualized” (4.993), he is not separated from the natural world, but closely involved in it; first, an actual woman is seen to be the goddess (4.982-987), who then guarantees his continuing involvement in the natural world, through his sister, Peona, and through the forests sacred to the goddess (4.988-996). If this sudden change seems somewhat precipitate, the conclusion which follows is perhaps a trifle too clipped,14 but has come after many trials and tribulations, not least for Keats himself, who had set himself such a task, and who had paced himself in his writing, day by day. Karen Swann points to the qualified “self-commodification” attending the task (the distasteful implications of which were so irritating to the early critics), through which protagonist and poet are each involved in the other’s creation: Keats’s project of self-commodification exposes the image of the poet as a commodity like any other. Yet what is a commodity that sees through its own hollowness, that recognizes its own pathos, that shows its own hand, but Genius? Thus the Cockney rhymester reflecting on his own image is only a turn away from the Keatsian “poetical Character”—that supremely indifferent locus of not-thereness, that charged empty place around which an entire culture revolves.15

From such a perspective Keats as daemon-inspired poet will emerge from these albeit abrupt concluding lines to provide, from now on, considerable poetic substance: Next Cynthia bright Peona kissed and blessed with fair good night. Her brother kissed her too and knelt adown Before his goddess in a blissful swoon. She gave her fair hands to him, and, behold, 13

See James Boulger, “Keats’s Symbolism”, ELH 28, no.3 (1961): 244. The inimitable Bailey wrote to John Taylor, Keats’s publisher: “The 4th book, which I at first thought inferior, I now think . . . perhaps finer than any. . . . Nor do I think the abrupt conclusion so bad—it is rather, but not much too abrupt”. Keats would certainly have appreciated his final remark: “It is like the conclusion of Paradise Regained” (in KCP 284n.). 15 See Karen Swann, “Endymion’s Beautiful Dreamers”, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35. 14

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Yet even though the poem as a whole is uneven, it contains powerful expressions of Keats’s daemonic posthumanism, so attuned to the unity of existence of the earth and its creatures, and their reciprocity, yet also alert to the inspiriting of material substance by a force other than a material one. *** In the Shakespearean sonnet, “When I have fears that I may cease to be” (KCP 296), Keats’s sense of impersonal self-annihilation, objective, unsentimental, stems—in the octave—from his anxiety about not being able to fulfil his inherent poetic promise (underlined by his awareness of daemonic intervention in the writing process): When I have fears that I may cease to Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; (1-8)

His “fears” are fuelled by his awareness that his “brain” is “teeming” with poetic matter, conveyed in the appropriately figurative terms of fields of “grain”, to be “gleaned” and, “full ripened”, held in the “rich garners” or granaries of “high-pilèd books” (an image of bountiful cultivated nature, which will appear again in the “Ode to Autumn”). But the intermingling of nature and imagination is conveyed more potently by the “cloudy symbols” of the second quatrain (hearkening back to the “cloudy Cupid” imagery used in Endymion), here telling of a potential “high romance”, the imaginative basis of what the poet might “trace”, powered by a force beyond his own, the daemonic “magic hand of chance”. Richard Woodhouse, the reader of Keats’s publisher, recorded the poet’s awareness of this phenomenon: “He has said, that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought until after he has composed and written it down—It has then struck him with astonishment—and seemed rather the production of another person than his own” (KCP 297n). In the sestet he fears not being able to experience the satisfaction of “unreflecting love” (underlined by his awareness of transience):

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And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the fairy power Of unreflecting love; then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. (9-14)

Such love exudes a “fairy power”, allied in this with imaginative transport “beyond the human”, and so of prime significance for Keats, emotionally and creatively. In an early instance of his being “teased out of thought” by the enormity of what lies beyond normal thinking,16 he surrenders to a type of obliviousness that is not coloured by despair, but rather acceptance of the emptying of the claims of self-centredness registered in “love and fame”. In “To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.” (KCP 320), after a light-hearted beginning, Keats faces again the reality of an existence from which he is sheltered at times by his imagination. His acknowledgement of the fact validates, in a way, his perception of the importance of beauty and the imagination—not in terms of shelter, but as a resource with which to face circumscriptions and so overcome the mental lassitude that follows from what Wordsworth saw as the world’s being “too much with us” (Poetical Works, 206). Keats is candid about his own penchant for beauty (KCP 323): Oh, that our dreamings all of sleep or wake Would all their colours from the sunset take, From something of material sublime, Rather than shadow our own soul’s daytime In the dark void of night. (67-71)

He is, of course, not opposed to materiality, but it must be irradiated by the “material sublime”, such as found in the “colours” of “the sunset”; problematic for him is if the “dark void of night” (involving dark imaginings and dreams) “shadows” a “soul’s daytime”—human consciousness needs a respite.

16 Most famously, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (KCP 532), but, before this, in the 1818 poem, “To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.”, as is evident in the ensuing discussion (KCP 320): “Things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought” (7677). Allott feels, however, that Keats “is chiefly concerned here with the limits of his own intellectual powers” (KCP 324n). The lines, says Allott, are “closer” “in thought and feeling” to a passage we considered in Endymion, where thought “dodges” “Conception to the very bourne of heaven” (1.294-295). Already, in my view, Keats writes of a general human incapacity in the face of “mysteries, uncertainties and doubts”, and is not as purely self-reflective as Allott makes out.

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Philosophizing on such matters, though (à la Wordsworth), is beyond him, a fact he dramatizes in his lines with a sudden break: For in the world We jostle . . . but my flag is not unfurled On the admiral staff—and to philosophize I dare not yet. Oh, never will the prize, High reason and the lore of good and ill, Be my award. (71-76)

That is, he is as aware of his own incapacities as of his own penchants, and, again, accepts the situation. Keats never skirts reality, and part of doing so is to realize the inadequacy of the “will” in the face of the greater areas of experience: Things cannot to the will Be settled, but they tease us out of thought. Or is it that imagination brought Beyond its proper bound, yet still confined, Lost in a sort of Purgatory blind, Cannot refer to any standard law Of either earth or heaven? (76-82)

Or, perhaps, trying to come to terms with the exigencies of experience, a poet who has “brought” imagination “Beyond its proper bound”, is in a type of “Purgatory” middle-ground; he cannot access the “standard laws” of either a figurative “earth” or “heaven”. As in Shelley’s “Skylark” poem, Keats sees the “flaw” in human consciousness which always looks beyond the present moment; he is not, here, as Allott would suggest, concerned with his own “immaturity” (KCP 324n): It is a flaw In happiness to see beyond our bourn— It forces us in summer skies to mourn; It spoils the singing of the nightingale. (82-85)

Certainly, in his letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, he is aware of a lack: An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people—it takes away the heat and fever; and helps by widening speculation, to ease the Burden of the Mystery. . . . The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to me this—in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings . . . in the former

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case, our shoulders are fledged, and we go through the same air and space without fear. (Letters, 92)

Yet in this very same letter he can write, “it is impossible to know how far knowledge will console us for the death of a friend”, and, famously, “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses” (Letters, 92, 93). It is not wise to take quotations out of context, but the instances in this particular letter, which will lead to the “Chambers” of thought passage, have to do with the burden of knowledge in the face of experience; as does the poem, which continues from the point left off with a description of the sea shore “read” from the book of nature—subject and text are one; Keats at first seems immersed in the experience, at unity with what he perceives: Dear Reynolds, I have a mysterious tale And cannot speak it. The first page I read Upon a lampit rock of green sea weed Among the breakers. ’Twas a quiet eve; The rocks were silent; the wide sea did weave An untumultuous fringe of silver foam Along the flat brown sand. (86-92)

But then his consciousness “forces” him to reach for knowledge “beyond” his immediate “bourn”: I was at home, And should have been most happy, but I saw Too far into the sea—where every maw The greater on the less feeds evermore . . . But I saw too distinct into the core Of an eternal fierce destruction, And so from happiness I far was gone. (92-98)

Despite the loss of “happiness”, it is clear that Keats cannot rest content with experience centred in ignorance of the realities of existence. In the letter to Reynolds, this point brings him to his famous “simile of human life”, based on the “Mansion” image: I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me—The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think—We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it: but are at length

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This is the limit of the “Chamber” to which many readers, to this day, consign Keats.17 But he continues: However among the effects of this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man—of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heratbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that state. (Letters, 95)18

This is a far cry from Endymion’s winning the moon-goddess as his lover; and yet Endymion was not free of misery and heartbreak. The point is, I believe, that the Keatsian daemonic imagination must make allowances for the darker aspects of the Chamber of Maiden Thought in order to mediate a fully-fledged account of our relation to existence. His need to elevate passion to the extremes of human devotion through moon imagery boosted by reference to the religious mind-sets of millennia since (and hence, a type of psychic inheritance), must be rooted, for Keats, in emotionally and materially tangible experience. ***

17

A new slant on this, as Daniela Garofalo points out, is provided by a critical emphasis on “commodity culture”, which depicts Keats, according to Ayumi Mizukoshi, as “remaining a poet of sensuous pleasure until the end of his days”. Quoted in Daniela Garofalo, “‘Give me that voice again . . . Those look immortal’: Gaze and Voice in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes”, Studies in Romanticism 49, no.3 (2010): 353. Garofalo also lists among such critics, for instance, Kelvin Everest, Porscha Fermanis, Proma Tagore and Karen Swann. Robert Graves, before the influence of Laura Riding’s more instrumental imperatives on his judgement, appreciated Keatsian sensuality with all the understanding, at least, of a fellow poet: “Keats’s imagery is sensuous, intimate, and, to me, unforgettable”. See Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry 1922-1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 19. 18 As in the case of Blake, I do not use “sic” to indicate obvious errors.

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When it comes to his further treatment of classical material, in the first Hyperion fragment, Keats requires a different effect to achieve this same rooting in tangible experience, making his task more difficult. As he wrote to B. R. Haydon, on 23 January 1818, his aim was to treat the matter of the fall of the Titans, in a “more naked Grecian manner”, more austere, perhaps, in its dealing with emotion than the “deep and sentimental cast” of Endymion. Nevertheless, in Hyperion “the march of passion and endeavour will be undeviating” (Letters, 51). This is certainly true of the completed fragment of the first Hyperion. The scale of the characters and action is Blakean, if one thinks of the Zoas, because the imagination, as in Blake, embraces cosmic parameters. If Blake relies on the strength of his imaginative energy to drive his vision (even as he subsumes various influences), Keats seems more aware of the intellectual resources at his disposal, from Paradise Lost to Hesiod’s Theogony and Chapman’s Homer.19 He has also, though, absorbed his sources, is not at their mercy. And unlike Blake, his figures are not engaged in the toils of struggle, but are trying to come to terms with a world where the struggle has already been lost. They are statuesque, tremendous in their post-struggle near stasis, while embodying, at the same time, the consequences of “the law of progress”.20 The scale of the characters and mood of the poem are evident in Keats’s depiction of Saturn, father of the Titans, and Thea, one of his “kin”, near the commencement of Book 1 of the poem (KCP 398): It seemed no force could wake him from his place; But there came one, who with a kindred hand Touched his wide shoulders, after bending low With reverence, though to one who knew it not. She was a goddess of the infant world, By her in stature the tall Amazon Had stood a pigmy’s height; she would have ta’en Achilles by the hair and bent his neck, Or with a finger stayed Ixion’s wheel. (1.22-30)

Saturn is immobile, made so by the shock of defeat, which isolates him from present experience; this last point is illustrated by his not noticing Thea’s bow of “reverence” (made “to one who knew it not”), an observation which sheds light on both their present dispositions and their relation to each other. That is, Keats imbues an almost frozen tableau with human meaning. Thea’s suprahuman potency, however, is conveyed by her size and through various allusions: she would have dwarfed a “tall Amazon”, and rivalled Athene in 19 20

Allott, Introduction to Hyperion, in KCP 395, and 396n. Allott, Introduction to Hyperion, in KCP 395.

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halting Achilles in his tracks.21 As Allott points out, there is also a reference to Book 1 of Paradise Lost: They but now who seem’d In bigness to surpass Earth’s Giant Sons Throng numberless, like that Pigmean Race. (Paradise Lost 1.777-781)

The potency of scale, then, is supplemented by mythological and literary resonances, which help enliven the world Keats is building, but which also enfold it in what already exists, establishing a continuum of human experience that provides a degree of authority and continuing currency to his thought. Daemonic posthuman scale is underwritten by what is familiar, adding strength, while, again, not taming the matter at hand—thanks to Keats’s own particular verve. Consider, for instance, his sensitivity to sound, as in his comments on the word “vale”, from Paradise Lost 1.321 (“To slumber here, as in the vales of heaven”): “There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the . . . affection and yearning of a great Poet”. The word “yearning” is interesting, conveying Keats’s deep need to breech the gap between himself and the signified / signifier combination, to inhabit or possess his very words and their associations. He is alert too, to the value of indirection suggested by sound, which he images as a mystifying Delphic riddle, enhanced in beauty by its stimulative power. The allusiveness of words makes them overbrim themselves: “vale” “is a sort of Delphic Abstraction—a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a mist”. And Bailey noted Keats’s “theory of melody in verse”, “particularly in the management of open and close vowels . . . which should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony” (KCP 396n).22 Keats’s account of Thea speaking to Saturn, in its subdued manner, presents through distinction the posthuman otherness that his subject matter broaches (KCP 399): 21

See, Homer, The Iliad, trans. by Peter Green (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 1.193-214. 22 Line 29 of the present poem provides a random example, where the letters in bold indicate longer vowel sounds, even when followed by consonants, and those in italics indicate shorter vowel sounds: “Achilles by the hair and bent his neck”. Also notable is the assonance of “Ach-” and “and”, “chill” and “his”, and “bent” and “neck”, and the consonance of “Ach-” and “neck”, and “bent” and “neck”. Keats had a fine ear for the nuances of sound. John Minahan points out that Keats had advanced musical abilities. See Word Like a Bell: John Keats, Music and the Romantic Poet (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992), 117.

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Leaning with parted lips some words she spake In solemn tenor and deep organ tone— Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue Would come in these like accents (Oh how frail To that large utterance of the early gods!): (1.46-51)

The bracketing of the human dimension underscores its abject status in relation to “the early gods”. Allott notes the influence of King Lear in what follows, suggested by “poor old King”, a phrase which conveys the temporal and political displacement of majesty suffered by Lear and Saturn, and how this fact is shared in the sympathetic consciousness of others, adding to the poignancy: “Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King? I have no comfort for thee, no, not one: I cannot say, ‘Oh, wherefore sleepest thou?’ For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God; And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, Has from thy sceptre passed; and all the air Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.” (1.52-59)

Her sombre reportage, in the manner of classical tragedy, conveys the devastation endured, and also reflects on the Titans’ psychological state, working in a similar manner to the storm scene in King Lear 3.4, but extending the hurt to the whole race of early gods. The scale of suffering might certainly reflect on the historical shifts of Keats’s own era, as world views in Europe changed at the rapid rate they did following the French Revolution: “Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house; And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain. O aching time! O moments big as years! All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs That unbelief has not a space to breathe.” (1.60-67)

The implication is that history itself can be seen as actor in an allegorical drama, which folds into itself both Keats’s reverence for classical Greece and his keen awareness of the oppressive nature of reality. His elevation of

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beauty is thus not divorced from the darker aspects of the Chamber of Maiden Thought. A Homeric simile underlines, in natural terms, how “beyond the human” the present scene is (KCP 400), while yet incorporating a sense of shared existence through the empathetic “dream” of natural process, or (as noted of a similar passage in Endymion) life continuing to unfold, albeit in the settled silence of a type of sleep. First, Thea feels Saturn should “sleep on, while at thy feet I weep!” The speaker then introduces the simile: As when, upon a trancèd summer night, Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmèd by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir, Save from one gradual solitary gust Which comes upon the silence, and dies off, As if the ebbing air had but one wave; So came these words and went, the while in tears She touched her fair large forehead to the ground, Just where her falling hair might be outspread A soft and silken mat for Saturn’s feet. (1.72-82)

The simile emphasises the deep silence engulfing the tableau, broken only by Thea’s words, as if no more than “one gradual solitary gust” in its midst, but also implies the change taking place in that ancient silence, as suggested by the aged “oaks”, which are yet living and growing. They are “greenrobed senators”, and therefore still in possession of their natural sovereignty, as are the “earnest stars”; the backdrop of imperturbable nature serves as witness to the changes of fortune in what one might call (with the irony fully in view) the vehicles of higher consciousness.23 Thus, prompted by change, out of the silence emerge expressions of Titanic energy, as Saturn speaks (KCP 404): “But cannot I create? Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth Another world, another universe, To overbear and crumble this to naught? Where is another chaos? Where?” That word Found way unto Olympus, and made quake 23 “In the opening scene of Hyperion, more than anywhere else in the two [Hyperion] poems, Keats ‘negates’ the human, the personal, and the subjective. The setting is far away, beyond realms known to man”. See Judith Humphrey, “The Poet Against Himself: A Reexamination of Keats’s Hyperions”, Modern Language Studies 8, no.1 (1977-1978): 40-47.

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The rebel three. (1.141-147)

The expression of energy is powerful enough to rouse fear in the hearts of the new gods, though no action will take place. The closest the poem comes to depicting action anything like on a Blakean scale is when the enraged sun god, Hyperion, calls out (KCP 410):24 “Even here, into my centre of repose, The shady visions come to domineer, Insult, and blind, and stifle my pomp. Fall? No, by Tellus and her briny robes! Over the fiery frontier of my realms I will advance a terrible right arm Shall scare the infant thunderer, rebel Jove, And bid old Saturn take his throne again.” (1.243-250)

But he too is subject to epochal “change” (KCP 412): Fain would he have commanded, fain took throne And bid the day begin, if but for change. He might not. No, though a primeval God, The sacred seasons might not be disturbed. Therefore the operations of the dawn Stayed in their birth, even as here ’tis told. (1.290-295)

There is a degree of resistance in non-acceptance of the situation, which generates the tension of suppressed action; Coelus, for instance, “from the universal space” of the heavens, urges combat, though his life “is but the life of winds and tides” and he “No more than winds and tides can . . . avail” (1.341-342). So while urging action he nevertheless undermines posthuman potency, thus inadvertently reinforcing the sense of an old order shaken to its roots. Even as Hyperion, approaching his fellow Titans on earth, emits “a splendour, like the morn”, it is clear that his time has passed: His hands contemplative He pressed together, and in silence stood. Despondence seized again the fallen Gods At sight of the dejected King of Day, And many hid their faces from the light. (2.377-380) 24 See Paul Sherwin, “Dying into Life: Keats’s Struggle with Milton in Hyperion”, PMLA 93, no.3 (1978): 387: “There is, in fact, no movement or action on a grand scale in Hyperion, only static moments of reflection or passion. An epic less Miltonic in spirit would be difficult to imagine”. Or less Blakean in spirit.

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Earlier in this same book, Oceanus, to be usurped by Neptune, gives a clear account of “the law of progress”, centred in what Shelley would call necessity, urging acceptance of inevitable process, as a type of “balm” (KCP 429). The reality of which he speaks tempers what can be seen, again, as a dark aspect of the Chamber of Maiden Thought, and provides evidence of the sense of existential “balance” Keats felt he was missing in his letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818. This larger perspective is necessarily posthuman in its reaches, in that it extends beyond the imperatives of any individual life (KCP 426): My voice is not a bellows unto ire. Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I bring proof How ye, perforce, must be content to stoop; And in the proof much comfort will I give, If ye will take that comfort in its truth. (2.176-180)

Oceanus shifts attention from a specific contest resulting in loss, to the “course of Nature’s law”, or inevitable natural process: We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove. Great Saturn, thou Hast sifted well the atom-universe; But for this reason, that thou art the King, And only blind from sheer supremacy, One avenue was shaded from thine eyes, Through which I wandered to eternal truth. (2.181-187)

He implies that though Saturn has familiarized himself with most aspects of universal existence, his complacent sense of “supremacy” led to a blindness to the “eternal truth”. After the initial “light”, which issues from “chaos and parental darkness”, and inspirits the foundations of existence, all other creation must be secondary, and what is secondary cannot itself be eternally foundational: And first, as thou wast not the first of powers, So art thou not the last; it cannot be. Thou art not the beginning nor the end. From chaos and parental darkness came Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, And with it light, and light, engendering Upon its own producer, forthwith touched

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The whole enormous matter into life. (2.188-197)

Oceanus’s logic regarding “progress” is inexorable, if “beauty” is our standard—where beauty for Keats already (before “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) encompasses the claims of truth, of selfless perception recognizing that the forms of existence are in perfect accord with their function. First come the primeval “beauteous realms” ruled over by the Titans: Upon that very hour, our parentage, The heavens and the earth, were manifest; Then thou first-born, and we the giant race, Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms. (2.198-201)

Then comes the painful “truth” of succession, knowledge of which requires the stoic forbearance of true “sovereignty”: Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ’tis pain— O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! (2.202-205)

Oceanus points to the specific facts, of which the Titans are all aware—if heaven and earth are fairer than chaos, the Titans “show” a fairness, a “purer life” “beyond” heaven and earth: As heaven and earth are fairer, fairer far Than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that heaven and earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; (2.206-211)

It is time for the Titans to acknowledge that which “shows beyond” them: So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old darkness. (2.212-215)

Oceanus, referring to “the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might” (2, 228-229), offers his own subjection to Neptune as an example: Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas, My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face? Have ye beheld his chariot, foamed along

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The “fresh perfection” of Neptune, consonant with the needs of the present time, and thus with present “truth”, requires that he “be first in might” in administering to the needs of the ocean.25 In Book 3, though left in fragmentary form, it is clear that Apollo, who will replace Hyperion, must follow the same imperative (KCP 440). His ascension to the status of god is premised on his comprehension of the range of human knowledge and experience, imbibed through Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses and an embodiment of the power of memory; most important, for Keats, is Apollo’s strength as poet to create beauty and truth out of such knowledge. Keats’s allegiance to Apollo is expressed here, but also much earlier in his 1815 “Ode to Apollo”, his 1817 “To Apollo”, in Endymion 3.957-959, for example, and, also in 1818, the slight “Apollo to the Graces”. That Apollo will otherwise fulfil the same tutelary function as Hyperion, indicates fundamental natural continuity, despite the advancement in “beauty” (and the changes in consciousness and perception that this implies). For Apollo, to possess essential “knowledge” of existence is correlative with divinity: “Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.” (3.113-120)

Though he lists objects of knowledge along with deeper experiences (“agonies, / Creations and destroyings”), all he absorbs is transformative, working on his very being: they “deify me”. The figurative “elixir” is a distillation of all human experience, the “drinking” of which makes his 25 Paul Sherwin says of this last passage, that it “becomes more telling if we recognize that the excitement of [Oceanus’s] esthetic response is in fact Keats’s own as he glories in the foretaste of a ‘power for making’ that will enable him to dispossess his precursors”, Milton and Wordsworth (Sherwin, “Dying into Life”, 385). Sherwin writes, not without pertinence, under the influence of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence.

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perception posthuman. The poetic vocation in general, Keats is aware, parallels that of Apollo. Despite Keats’s admiration of classical Greece, there is not much evidence to associate him with any deep interest in Platonism. Aileen Ward does note that the poet, during his long stay with Bailey in Oxford, discussed Plato and Aristotle with his friend. What could be of note regarding the influence of these conversations, is the fact that soon after Keats’s visit Bailey wrote to John Taylor, asking for translations of Plato’s work, pointing out that he had only “a patchwork collection of his works—Greek & English. I have Taylor’s Translation of 4 dialogues—and 2 little volumes from the French London 1749 of a few dialogues”. Might Keats’s lively participation in discussions (revealing gaps in Bailey’s knowledge) have inspired this request? There is at least a suggestion, then, that Keats was familiar with some of the work of Thomas Taylor.26 From this perspective, the passage concluding this fragment, when Apollo undergoes his transubstantiation, is suggestive. Apollo “dies into life”, in an echo of the Neoplatonic sense that temporal existence is death, and that true life is experienced beyond its bounds, in the immortal sphere of the soul (Porphyry, Cave of the Nymphs, 39-40). Keeping his eyes on Mnemosyne, Apollo undergoes the transformation: Soon wild commotions shook him, and made flush All the immortal fairness of his limbs— Most like the struggle at the gate of death; Or liker still to one who should take leave Of pale immortal death, and with a pang As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse Die into life. (3.124-130)

It may be that the death of his brother, Tom, helps inform the passage, though Keats as a medical student and licenced apothecary-surgeon, working in primitive conditions, must have experienced a number of deaths at first hand.27 Whatever the case may be, apparent personal experience here 26

See Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), 127. The quotation from Bailey’s letter to John Taylor is to be found in Joseph C. Sitterson, ‘“Platonic Shades’ in Keats’s Lamia”, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83, no.2 (1984): 204. See also, Thomas C. Kennedy, “Platonism in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”, Philological Quarterly 75, no.1 (1996): 85-107, for an account of Keats’s possible modification of the Platonic ascension towards Truth. 27 Tom Keats died on 1 December 1818; the poem was abandoned in April 1819 (Allott, Introduction to Hyperion, KCP 394). Robert Wagner refers to “Middleton

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is reinforced by doctrine, doctrine that is presumably of comfort to the poet.28 The transformation of Apollo thus assumes a personal significance for Keats, satisfying, but perhaps also restrictive in its proximity to the bitterness of experience, and so contributing to his abandoning the poem. Humphrey connects Keats’s abandoning the poem with the sense of his having attained a certain stage in poetic development: “The protagonist [Apollo] has experienced the ‘shedding of the self’ which is so necessary for disinterested vision. Now the poet / god is ready to begin creating. Having struggled through various alter egos, and through the preliminary steps of epic-making, Keats broke off this first draft and made tentative plans for a revised Hyperion” (“Poet Against Himself”, 42). Yohei Igarashi (referring to a current interest in “the idea of media in Romantic studies”) offers the disjunction between two communicative models, rapid and slow, as the reason: “the Hyperion poems each act out scenes of nearly instantaneous communicative transfer” that are “finally dissonant with his commitment to the laborious ways of reading, and render further composition impossible”. 29 *** Removed from such experience, and the classical realm, is the medievaltoned Eve of St. Agnes, of 1819 (KCP 450). Keats originally feared it suffered from the same “sentimentalism” as Isabella, but later changed his mind. Calling Isabella “sentimental”, Keats was being hard on himself. The transgressive elements in Isabella, for instance, as in the kissing of a decomposing, exhumed head, are far more shocking than anything in The Eve of St. Agnes, tempering any gentler expressions of sentiment. Stephen Coote sees Isabella as a reaction against Leigh Hunt’s techniques: “A soft, adjectival diction is stiffened with consonants and verbs. Hunt had

Murry’s suggestion that the Miltonic abstractness” of the poem “represented a kind of protective shell for Keats against the sufferings” of Tom. See Robert D. Wagner, “Keats: ‘Ode to Psyche’ and the Second Hyperion”, Keats-Shelley Journal 13 (1964): 35. See also Vincent Newey, “Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions”, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 76. 28 Doctrine—whether specifically studied or simply current in Keats’s circle at the time. 29 See Yohei Igarashi, “Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion”, Studies in Romanticism 53, no.2 (2014): 178.

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disparaged antithesis and repetition; Keats deliberately used them”. Coote adds, “sometimes to excess”, but this is a subjective qualification.30 St. Agnes’s paradoxically spiritual eroticism, conveyed through technically challenging Spenserian stanzas (more demanding than the ottava rima of Isabella), while innocent-seeming, carries a related charge of transgression to that conveyed by one of Keats’s models, Coleridge’s “Christabel” (Complete Poetical Work, 213-236). More than this, the significance of the eve lies in its purported power of acquiring the daemonic mediation of St. Agnes herself in obtaining the lover of one’s choice. And behind St. Agnes is the weight of her legend, centred in her martyrdom, which followed numerous attempts of rape (sanctioned by the terms of her sentence), and which led to her ascension to Heaven attended by angels and a pure white lamb (KCP 452-453). Her legend too, then, is a melding of the profane and sacred, an intimation of an area beyond the limitations of both, but which acknowledges their presence. The poem’s erotic moments— mildly transgressive through their voyeurism on the part of the hero, Porphyro,31 and through the somewhat guileless attempt to conjure on the part of the heroine, Madeline—are presented in full view of the legend, thus facing it on its own terms, to an extent; but the merely erotic is transformed into an expression of true love, underwritten by the sacrality of the eve. The families of the two lovers, echoing the strife between Montagues and Capulets, hate each other. Madeline, in her home castle, is trying to extricate herself from the ball on St. Agnes’ Eve so that she can dream of her beloved, while Porphyro makes his way towards the castle, hoping, at first, simply to catch a glimpse of her (KCP 458): So, purposing each moment to retire, She lingered still. Meantime, across the moors, 30 Allott, Introduction to The Eve of St. Agnes (KCP 451). See Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 147. Also, consider Susan Wolfson’s argument about how Keats uses digressions to modernise “old Romance”: “Isabella is still a ‘romance’, but only so at the expense of exposing and reforming the economy of pleasure implicated in the conventions, attitudes, and values the genre traditionally promotes”. See her “Keats’s Isabella and the ‘Digressions’ of ‘Romance’”, Criticism 27, no.1 (1985): 251. 31 Allott sees the name Porphyro as perhaps derived by Keats from Burton’s reference to the author of The Cave of the Nymphs in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, a Keatsian source for the St. Agnes poem (KCP 458n). But as Marcia Gilbreath notes, other possible sources are Lemprière, Spence’s Polymetis, and Banier’s The Mythology and Fables of the Ancients. See Marcia Gilbreath, “The Etymology of Porphyro’s Name in Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes”, Keats-Shelley Journal 37 (1988): 20-25.

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Chapter Six Had come young Porphyro, with heart on fire For Madeline. Beside the portal doors, Buttressed from moonlight, stands he and implores All saints to give him sight of Madeline But for one moment in the tedious hours, That he might gaze and worship all unseen; Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—in sooth such things have been. (73-81)

Their transgressive intentions are expressed: she would “retire” to conjure up her beloved in a dream; he would “gaze and worship all unseen”. The “transgressions” are somewhat modified, again, by the sacrality bestowed on dreams by St. Agnes, and by the fact that Porphyro would rather have physical contact (“speak, kneel, touch, kiss”) than rest content with “gazing”. The sense of the forbidden is still present, however, and colours our reception of ensuing events. It is evident in Angela, the old nurse’s words: “St. Agnes? Ah! It is St. Agnes’ Eve— Yet men will murder upon holy days: Thou must hold water in a witch’s sieve, And be liege-lord of all the elves and fays, To venture so.” (118-122)

Addressed to Porphyro, the words underline “murder”, even on “holy days”, and mastery of the supernatural. And when he learns of Madeline’s purpose, he scarce could brook Tears at the thought of those enchantments cold, And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old. (133-135)

“Madeline asleep in lap of legends old” at once links her to his own spurious otherness (bestowed by Angela), as “liege-lord of all the elves and fays”, and makes of her experience something remote and otherworldly. This romance-inspired colouring shadows his wish to “gaze” on her, which is, at first, “A stratagem that makes the beldame start” (139) and refer to “wicked men like thee” (143). If she is soon persuaded otherwise by Porphyro’s expressions of virtuous love, this dubious colouring remains as we learn of his purpose; Angela must lead him, in close secrecy, Even to Madeline’s chamber, and there hide Him in a closet, of such privacy That he might see her beauty unespied, And win perhaps that night a peerless bride, While legioned fairies paced the coverlet

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And pale enchantment held her sleepy-eyed. Never on such a night have lovers met Since Merlin paid his Demon all the monstrous debt. (163-171)

Thus, his very material presence, “in a closet”, is not distinct from the tenebrous, virtual presence of the “legioned fairies” who “paced the coverlet”; and his desiring gaze is in danger of seeming to prey on her, in her helpless “sleepy-eyed” state of “pale enchantment”, just as Merlin’s “Demon”, perhaps the Lady of the Lake, preyed on him (KCP 464n).32 These expressions of intent are soon replaced by actions, as Madeline approaches her chamber, yet still the presence of a different dimension is apparent, touched by the sound of her passion (“she panted”): She closed the door, she panted, all akin To spirits of the air, and visions wide— (201-202)

The “casement” in which she prays, though sporting earthly motifs, exudes the rich otherness of the realm of romance (KCP 466): A casement high and triple-arched there was, All garlanded with carven imageries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings; And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings. (208-216)

Within this rich setting, a carved paradise of earthly fruits infused with unearthly, spiritual light, Madeline prays, her pure presence again faintly touched by the erotic (the “stained” “panes” of glass turn her “fair breast” into the colour of “warm gules”) (KCP 467): Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon; Rose-Bloom fell on her hands, together pressed, And on her silver cross soft amethyst, 32

Porphyro “appears just as charmed or enchanted as Madeline”, being lured to a supremely dangerous castle by her beauty. Karen Harvey thus draws a parallel between Porphyro and Merlin; she makes the case that Merlin was enchanted by the fairy, Vivien. See Karen J. Harvey, “The Trouble about Merlin: The Theme of Enchantment in The Eve of St. Agnes”, Keats-Shelley Journal 34 (1985): 89-90.

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Chapter Six And on her hair a glory, like a saint. She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed, Save wings, for Heaven. Porphyro grew faint; She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint. (217-225)

Porphyro “grew faint” in the presence of the conflation of the sacred and profane in the person of Madeline. He is overcome by an intimation of the power of the physical when it is permeated by spirit. Madeline at this moment, in provoking such awareness, is “beyond the human”, she is daemonic. As she unclothes herself for bed, the erotic element is raised a notch: Of all her wreathèd pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmèd jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. (227-230)

Freed from the spell of his initial impression, Porphyro expresses his passion through an abundance of sensuous objects, almost a doubling of the aesthetic objects in the casement (in a sense bringing to life that which is frozen in art), which he places before her sleeping figure, as if on an altar dedicated to the love she inspires (KCP 470-471): Soft he set A table and, half anguished, threw thereon A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet. (254-256)

He then lays on the table the objects, so richly evoked as to be, surely, objective correlatives of the pleasures of sensuous love:33 33

I thus disagree with Magdalena Ostas, in her albeit finely argued essay, that “while poetic investment is clearly expended on the meal, the feast is immediately abandoned altogether by the poem. . . . The meal is precisely uninstrumental with regard to the meeting between the two lovers”. See “Keats’s Voice”, Studies in Romanticism 50, no.2 (2011): 345. See also Proma Tagore, “Keats in an Age of Consumption: The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’”, Keats-Shelley Journal 49 (2000): 71, who urges that “feasting cannot simply be read as a metaphor for sexuality or for other types of consumption”, as it is overwhelming in this passage “exceeding” a symbolic function. But blissful excess is at the heart of sexual experience. A sense of the significance of images can too easily be abandoned in the pursuit of overarching theory. Garofalo, placing this scene in the context of the poem as a whole, detects a powerful critique of commodity capitalism: “Keats develops his critique by opposing the promise of fulfilment proffered by luxury objects with a form of romantic love that depends on lack”. Her argument is compelling, and certainly chimes with the conclusion of the poem: “The lovers come to recognize

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he from forth the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Manna and dates, in argosy transferred From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon. (264-270)

As he sings to the sleeping Madeline, a strange moment occurs, when Madeline’s dream blends with her waking state; but her waking image of Porphyro is a disturbing reflection of the dream image. She calls out, halfimmersed in her dream state (KCP 473): “Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear, Made tuneable with every sweetest vow, And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear. How changed thou art! How pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go.” (307-315)

It is as if vision trumps reality momentarily, before the power of love, so to speak, makes reality correlate with vision. The distinction between dream and reality in Madeline’s perception centres on the traditional one between immortal spirit and mortal body (again, perhaps through a Neoplatonic source), as Porphyro’s “spiritual and clear” eyes are displaced by his present “pallid” state, which Madeline links, significantly, with death: “if thou diest”, she fears. Porphyro’s delighted response to this dreamy, unwitting admission of love, however, is to “melt” “into her dream”, as if material bodies and dream presences can be conflated through the act of love (KCP 475): Beyond a mortal man impassioned far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose the insufficiency of the beloved and the failure of courtly love fantasies. By discovering an erotic love that recognizes lack and mortality, the lovers come to reject their dependence on the promise of plenitude that keeps them in thrall to a system of competition and hierarchy” (“Gaze and Voice”, 354).

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A type of shift in dimensions occurs, “beyond the human”, yet reflective of the power of vision to influence reality, to the point of transforming it. Porphyro himself becomes daemonic, “Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star”. But this period of epiphanic transformation is momentary; the “frostwind” of reality “blows” outside this enchanted chamber: —meantime the frost-wind blows Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes; St. Agnes’ moon hath set. (322-324)

“St. Agnes’ moon hath set”: the period of enchantment is over. In more mundane terms, the bleak dawn, with all that it portends of harsh circumstance, has broken. Yet, boosted by their intense feelings of love for each other, they can make of material circumstance a gift, “a boon”, from the realm of romance. Porphyro cries out to Madeline (KCP 477), “Hark! ’Tis an elfin-storm from fairy land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed. Arise—arise! The morning is at hand; The bloated wassailers will never heed.” (343-346)

And so the lovers escape over “the southern moors”, to a palpably material shelter, Porphyro’s “home” for his bride (351). If the poem, in its medievalism, bears all the qualities of romance, the sense of reality which Keats introduces moderates the quality of escapism associated with romance. What might even be seen as anti-sentiment colours the poem’s final stanza (Angela dies with her face “deformed” by “palsy”, the “Beadsman” dies alone, not missed by anyone), which shifts the reader from being immersed in the story to being distanced from it by a disclosure of its present artifice, but also by the distance in time of the events which took place (KCP 479): And they are gone—aye, ages long ago These lovers fled away into the story. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form Of witch and demon, and large coffin-worm, Were long be-nightmared. Angela the old Died palsy-twitched, with meagre face deform; The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

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For ay unsought for slept among his ashes cold. (370-378)

But this last sense of events having taken place “ages long ago”, creates its own interest. That is, if a romance, the poem also bears an historical valency: as in the chamber scene, then, vision and reality are conflated— Angela and the Beadsman die miserable deaths in the real world of the poem, but “witch and demon” also have a role to play, albeit in nightmares. The personal significance of this fact is that however oppressed Keats felt by his circumstances at this time, strength could yet be drawn from awareness of the power of the imagination to create something other, and implement a balance between this recourse to otherness and acceptance of what prevails.34 *** A daemonic poem of a different order is “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (KCP 500). Madeline’s conjuration on St. Agnes’ Eve seems innocent indeed compared with the erotic enchantment of the “lady on the meads”, a figure from romance, who emerges from “beyond the human” to captivate but then abandon her lovers.35 The knight of the poem explains to the speaker the reason for his “haggard and . . . woe-begone” appearance: I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a fairy’s child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. (13-16)

A “fairy’s child”, she is either from another order of existence to the human, or seems to be so in the knight’s view, because of her appearance, through which she partakes of the carefree and seemingly effortless “wildness” of posthuman nature, with her “long” “hair”, “light” footfall and “wild” “eyes”. 34 James Wilson notes (in metapoetic terms) that “the union of Porphyro and Madeline represents the culmination of the aesthetic process”, where “the dichotomy” between reason (Porphyro) and imagination (Madeline) “achieves synthesis”. See James D. Wilson, “John Keats’s Self-reflexive Narrative: The Eve of St. Agnes, South Central Review 1, no.4 (1984): 50. 35 “The lady resembles enchantresses known to Keats from The Faerie Queene and from various ballads and poems in the ballad tradition” (Allott, in KCP 503n). See a more extensive list of possible influences in Francis Lee Utley’s “The Infernos of Lucretius and of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’”, ELH 25, no.2 (1958): 105. Later in her article, Utley refers to the Indicator “corrections” (where, for instance, “knight-at-arms” is changed to “wretched wight”) as being “destructive to the poem’s demonic magic” (115), a judgement with which one can heartily agree.

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He bedecks her in a natural manner, suiting her appearance, showing in this at once an ambiguous acceptance of who she is, and the need to possess her through the gifts he creates, almost in the manner of Porphyro gifting Madeline. He is at once the idealizing lover and possessive male, and the poem might be seen as holding a mirror up to these equally limiting qualities: I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. (17-20)

She at first responds to his attentions in a predictable way, seeming to show “love”, and making the “sweet moans” of love. But although he bears her on his “pacing steed”, as if in possession of her, she then takes the initiative. The shift in power relations, according to Mary Anne Myers, is Petrarchan: “Petrarch’s masculine speaker [in the Rime sparse] assumes a stereotypically feminine posture by ostensibly subordinating his will to his sensibility as he puts his fate in Laura’s hands, professing that his existence depends on her elusive recognition of him. Keats replicates this pattern of power-shifting between male and female characters in Endymion, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, and Lamia”:36 She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew; And sure in language strange she said, “I love thee true.” (25-28)

Yet her hold over him is not without a possible intimation of her own sorrow at the apparent role allotted to her (by fate? By the nature of things?); her tears could be a maidenly means of eliciting tender pity (in key with the complacent prejudice of the knight’s initial account of her), or they could indicate her reluctance to participate in what she knows will ensue. In either case, she is imbricated in the inevitability of this particular course of life and love: She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. (29-32) 36 See Myers, “Keats and the Hands of Petrarch and Laura”, Keats-Shelley Journal 62 (2013): 102-103.

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He still feels himself to be the protective male, the “knight-at-arms”, portioning out a measure of love and compassion in the precisely measured “kisses four”. His being “lullèd” “asleep” thereafter (l.33), which could intimate post-coital languor, places him in the vulnerable position of the spent male. And it is while he is asleep and dreaming, ironically, that his eyes are opened to his predicament, that of being caught in the toils of an impossible infatuation, in which many men, it is implied, are caught: I saw pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La belle Dame sans merci Thee hath in thrall!” (37-40)

Not exactly maleficent, in the mould of Circe, she is destructive of complacent psychological well-being; she offers no promise of settling down as a bride in a home across the moors. She is wild, unpredictable, and ultimately unobtainable. She thus inhabits the darker chambers of the realm of vision, where beauty is conjoined with inevitable disappointment. If the poem is touched by a sense of the finality of loss in matters of the heart, it also points to the seductive side of vision, and the cost of betrayal by that vision. In other words, the experience of beauty is painful, but this can be a “truth” in itself, which it is necessary to face when the accommodation of a sense of the wholeness of experience is at issue. In his biography, Coote continuously emphasises the poet’s desire for wholeness of experience after the writing of Endymion: “The pain in Endymion, the pain which the poem itself had failed satisfactorily to answer, had to be faced. ‘An exquisite sense of the luxurious’ was no longer enough. Something altogether more strenuous was required” (Keats: A Life, 123).37 *** At the centre of Keats’s achievements, lie the great odes of 1819: “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode on Indolence” and, later in the year, “To Autumn”. Containing both celebrations of otherness through odal hymns, as well as philosophical questionings regarding individual relations with this otherness, the odes permitted Keats the conceptual extent and extended form to explore what I called above “the wholeness of experience”. For instance, as Walter Jackson Bate has pointed out, Keats, in drawing on the 37 The embedded quotation is from Keats’s letter to John Taylor, 24 April 1818 (Letters, 88).

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story of Psyche from Apuleius, uses myth to express allegorically the union of Love and mind: “Love—hitherto mischievous and vagrant—has been won over to the mind or soul: Eros or Cupid, sent to make Psyche infatuated with the vilest . . . of objects, has himself fallen in love with her”. “Mind”, though, is not “soul” until it has united with “heart”, to form “identity”, as accounted for in “the vale of Soul-making” passage in the journal-letter under 21 April 1819, to George and Georgiana Keats, to be discussed in more detail below (Letters, 249-251).38 The speaker of the “Ode to Psyche” situates himself in the myth, highlighting its contemporary validity for himself regarding psychological archetypes. Wordsworth might comment, whether condescendingly or not, on the “Very pretty piece of Paganism” from Endymion, recited by Keats at a social gathering,39 but, for both poets, pagan natural piety and rooted understanding of the human condition were important. The ode, then, is not an escape from the present into a Greek idyll; it has a present significance in terms of reaching a stage of emotional maturity. Allott feels that Keats’s “interest in the legend of Psyche” should be associated with his view of the world “as a ‘vale of Soul-making’”, adverted to above (in KCP 515). Considering its account of spiritual mediation, what I elsewhere term the daemonic, it is worth looking at this view in detail. Keats notes, first, “that Man is originally ‘a poor forked creature’ subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other”. Material conditions may be improved, but “annoyances”—“the Poles”, “the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes”—all continue to be “native to the world”. The world is called “the vale of tears” by “the misguided and superstitious”, who hope “to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven”. Keats calls this “a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!” He goes on to expound his own notion of “the vale of Soul-making”, as a “consideration”, not a settled doctrine (again, I make no adjustments by way of punctuation 38 Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 489. Allott feels that Keats’s “account of Psyche” in the journal-letter “suggests that he consulted Lemprière: ‘The word signifies the soul, and this personification of Psyche first mentioned by Apuleius is thus posterior to the Augustan age, though it is connected with ancient mythology’”. Keats had referred to Apuleius as “the Platonist who lived after the Augustan age”, again indicating his awareness, at least, of Platonism (in KCP 514-515n). 39 Commenting on Haydon’s report about this remark, that Keats felt it deeply and “never forgave” Wordsworth, Coote says, “Nothing in Keats’s letters or his maturing view of Wordsworth indicates that this was so, and there is evidence to suggest that Wordsworth’s customary use of the word ‘pretty’ was not derogatory” (Keats: A Life, 109).

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or spelling to what Gittings calls the “generally impeccable” transcription of the original by the Formans):40 I say “Soul making” Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence—There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. I[n]telligences are atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God—how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this. . . . [It] is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years—These three Materials are the Intelligence—the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.

In terms of the poem, the conjoining of “Cupid” (love) and “Psyche” (as mind), produce “soul”, or “intelligence” which possesses wholeness of being, “identity”. Such wholeness is “effected by three grand materials”— “Intelligence”, “the human heart” and “the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart”—“acting the one upon the other for a series of years”. In noting that the Christian scheme of salvation (in the light of which his “Soul-making”, he feels, “does not affront our reason and humanity”) has in all likelihood “been coppied from the ancient persian and greek Philosophers”, he also wonders about divine mediation. However, drawing on syncretic mythology in an almost Shelleyan manner, he sees such mediation as a simplification of the doctrine of salvation, making “this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension”. “Mediators and Personages” are introduced “in the same manner as in the hethen mythology abstractions are personified”: Seriously I think it probable that this System of Soul-making—may have been the Parent of all the more palpable and personal Schemes of Redemption, among the Zoroastrians the Christians and the Hindoos. For as one part of the human species must have their carved Jupiter; so another part must have the palpable and named Mediator and saviour, their Christ their Oromanes and their Vishnu.

40

Preface to the Letters, page 11.

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The daemonic “Mediators”, even if abstractions personified through imagination (such as Cupid and Psyche),41 serve a function that is psychologically satisfying: in the present case they enact an archetypal drama of unification which reflects the attainment of “identity”, or “Soul” in its rounded sense (as opposed to “mind” in isolation).42 Hence the significance of Psyche for Keats. But even if an abstraction made “palpable”, she is indeed alive in the poem, through its insistence on the inspiriting nature of belief.43 Himself acting within the poem, the speaker in a way disregards the distinction between vision and reality, underlining how the two border on each other, and so influence each other, perhaps to the point where sufficiently “palpable” vision can so entrance the beholder, whether author or reader, that its unificatory intent can be felt: Surely I dreamt today, or did I see The wingèd Psyche with awakened eyes? I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two fair creatures, couchèd side by side In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran A brooklet, scarce espied. (5-12)

The natural forest setting is not, as Bate claims, part of “little more than filler” (Keats, 491).44 Its strongly felt presence gives credence to the presence of the “two fair creatures” from the realm of myth, who seem an 41

We recall that for Diotima, in Plato’s Symposium, Cupid, or Eros, is a “great daemon”: “The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love” (in Notopoulos, Platonism of Shelley, 442). 42 Lionel Trilling notes that there is no contradiction between negative capability and a sense of identity: “Only the self that is certain of its existence, of its identity, can do without the armor of systematic certainties. To remain content with halfknowledge is to remain content with contradictory knowledges”. The Opposing Self (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), 37. 43 “Keats will often use an unanswered question as a bridge between fantasy and reality. . . . The purpose of the question in the ‘Ode to Psyche’ is to dispel doubts and . . . is designed to facilitate, rather than to conclude, a flight of the imagination. It tries to induce trust that the goddess actually appeared”. Leon Waldoff, “The Theme of Mutability in the ‘Ode to Psyche’”, PMLA 92, no.3 (1977): 413. 44 And Wagner feels that the language here “is pictorial rather than dramatic, and unless we look very closely at the entire poem, we can hardly understand why the stanzas are there” (“Keats: ‘Ode to Psyche’”, 34).

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extension of the natural scene. They are a single element within a picture dominated by “deepest grass”, the “leaves and trembled blossoms” which form a “whispering roof” over them, and the implied sound of the “brooklet”, which, “scarce espied”, is itself a signifier of visual indistinction (and thus broad-based immersion in the scene). Even when the speaker does begin to distinguish the details of the lovers, they are in the midst of lush flowers, signifiers of beauty which encases its own fertility. This is important, because the “fair” lovers bear this same significance in human terms, and are thus, in a natural sense, continuous with the flowers. Keats is not simply engaged in description; he is embodying the wholeness resulting from sensual expressions of love: ’Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed, Blue, silver-white and budded Tyrian, They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass; Their arms embracèd, and their pinions too; Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu, As if disjoinèd by soft-handed slumber, And ready still past kisses to outnumber At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love. (13-20)

The passion of sensual love has not been spent; the two are suspended in the continuing present of love, “calm-breathing”, embracing, with proximate lips ready to carry on kissing, and closed eyelids anticipating the “tender eye-dawn of aurorean love”, where first looking into each other’s eyes on awakening will bear for individual subjectivity the same perceptual and existential importance as a gentle morning sunrise. Identifying Psyche, the speaker notes the belatedness of the recognition accorded to her,45 and this in the context of a sense of piety already relegated to the distant past: “all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!” (25): 45 Possibly there is a sense of identification with the goddess here, as Andrew Motion, in his biography, states: “Keats sees himself, like the goddess, as a kind of arriviste, struggling to find a place in the ‘hierarchy’ of poetry without the ‘privileges of birth and education’, as Coleridge called them”. See Andrew Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): 387. But see also Homer Brown’s observation that Psyche, before Keats’s time, had been “much reborn”, both in the Renaissance and eighteenth century: “What is claimed as personal and private had already been absorbed or assimilated and naturalized and had become almost a cultural commonplace”. Homer Brown, “Creations and Destroying: Keats’s Protestant Hymn, the ‘Ode to Psyche’”, Diacritics 6, no.4 (1976): 50. This fact does not prevent Keats from claiming Psyche in a personal way.

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Chapter Six O brightest, though too late for antique vows! Too, too late for the fond believing lyre, When holy were the haunted forest boughs, Holy the air, the water and the fire. (36-39)

He, realizing the daemonic mediation involved in the establishment of “identity”, would champion her continuing significance: Yet even in these days so far retired From happy pieties, thy lucent fans, Fluttering among the faint Olympians, I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. (40-43)

He is “inspired” through the “eyes” of vision, or imagination, which makes palpable the archetypal drama evidenced in his journal-letter. In the slight piece, “Fancy” (KCP 441), Keats had reaffirmed the importance of imagination because of the comfort it can offer, despite the “annoyances” of life: Fancy—high commissioned send her! She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost. She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather. (27-32)

In the present case, however, imagination works in concert with what is actually present, is involved in “Soul-making”, not to compensate for what is “lost” (though there is the nostalgia induced by vanished ancient pieties, he would translate such into an understanding applicable to the present): Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane In some untrodden region of my mind, Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: (50-53)

The “pleasant pain” expresses, perhaps, a developed sense of the “balance of good and evil” Keats felt he had not attained in his letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, or an awareness of the completing influence of the “annoyances” of life, themselves present in “both the work involved in poetic composition and the intense experience which stimulates it” (Allott in KCP 519n). The speaker is clear that an internal theatre is the focus of his concerns, “some untrodden region of my mind”; it is “untrodden”, a potentiality coming into being. And so he approaches it, his imagination accepting natural images (“zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees”) and

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supernatural ones (“Dryads”, which in their essence, though, reflect the mind’s permeation of nature):46 Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees Fledge the wild-ridgèd mountains steep by steep; And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees, The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep; (54-57)

This mental space with its particular atmosphere will be conducive to the work he must carry out:47 And in the midst of this wide quietness A rosy sanctuary will I dress With the wreathed trellis of a working brain, With buds, and bells, and stars without a name, With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, Who breeding flowers will never breed the same: (58-63)

The “working brain” is always active, always engaged in creation, and, as a “trellis”, is supportive of its creations, the imaginative extensions of fruitfulness, of fecundity, inherent in all life: “buds, and bells, and stars without a name”. Active creation is apparent in “stars without a name”, bred by a capacity of the mind—the “gardener Fancy”—always to create anew: “Who breeding flowers will never breed the same”. An environment “all soft delight” is conducive to the union of Cupid and Psyche, or the heart and intelligence, and the “Soul-making” and emergence of “identity”, fully-rounded consciousness, that will ensue: And there shall be for thee all soft delight That shadowy thought can win, A bright torch, and a casement ope at night, 46

Sarah Hutchinson (proving herself, as usual, unworthy of Coleridge’s devotion to her) “wondered that ‘anybody should take such subjects [as Greek mythology] nowa-days’” (Coote, Life, 120). She was referring to Endymion, but even for that poem, Keats’s intentions were, for the sensitive reader, existentially instructive, and so were of contemporary significance. 47 “With Psyche’s presence within, when leaves are thoughts, the mind opens out from subjective center to objective landscape without circumference. It is a picture of the animating power of the mind as depicted in the mind which opens out to embrace all of nature as thought. Figure and ground, or internal vision and external landscape, are interchangeable. This metaphoric transformation of subjective mind to animated landscape extends to the end of the poem”. See James H. Bunn, “Keats’s ‘Ode to Psyche’ and the Transformation of Mental Landscape”, ELH 37, no.4 (1970): 584.

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“Thought”, in its obscure workings, may be “shadowy”, but it can create “brightness”, it can, as focal point of the “three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years”—mind, heart and world—enable the union. Keats’s “consideration” of “Soul-making”, expressed by him in the journal-letter in abstract terms, is here dressed in human trappings through the daemonic intercession of heart and mind transformed into soul, elevated to her proper place, as Psyche. Though the position of poems “in the sequence of Keats’s odes is conjectural”, “the metrical evidence” (as Allott notes in the introduction to the poem) suggests that “Ode to a Nightingale” follows the “Ode to Psyche” (KCP 523).48 This ode is likewise in part concerned with the mind and heart acting upon each other and the “Elemental space” around them in the process of “Soul-making”. The mental exhaustion, the “pained” “sense”, of the first stanza is reflective of this fact: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drain One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk. (1-4)

The source of such exhaustion, however, an over-abundance of happiness in hearing the nightingale’s song, seems strange, as if self, medium-like, has been emptied of its own vitality by a daemonic spirit control. This notion has its own Keatsian resonance, in a famous epistolary formulation to Richard Woodhouse, of 27 October 1818 (Letters, 157): As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself— it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet.

Perhaps most pertinent to present concerns is the following:

48 Though “the regular ten-line stanza, consisting of one quatrain from a Shakespearian sonnet followed by the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet, is used again in the remaining ‘Spring’ odes”, they do not contain “the shortened line which was a feature of the irregular strophes in the ‘Ode to Psyche’” (introduction to the poem, KCP 523).

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A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures.

“Identity” here does not refer to that “sense of Identity” of “Soul-making”, formed by continuing interaction of “Soul or Intelligence” with the world.49 Although the operation of daemonic visitation therefore seems reversed— the poet “fills some other Body”—the effect is no different: the other body also fills the poet, to the point of exhausting him with its life force. The nightingale is exactly a “poetical” “creature of impulse”, which has “about [it] an unchangeable attribute”, along with the power to rouse the poet’s own sense of “gusto”, or what William Hazlitt had defined as “the great artist’s ability so to penetrate the ‘power or passion defining any object’ that he can render it back in all its living actuality” (in Coote, Keats, 113). In the present instance the bird, displacing “self”, seems a mediator between mind and natural intensity (the voice of “the World or Elemental space” beyond the reach of ordinary human capability):50 ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness— That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. (5-10)

Indeed, the song of the bird embraces classical lore (“Dryad of the trees”) and the woodlands themselves (a “beechen green” “melodious plot”, with its “shadows numberless”), as if a distillation of both a now lost (but

49 We recall Trilling’s observation that there is no contradiction between negative capability and a sense of identity: “Only the self that is certain of its existence, of its identity, can do without the armor of systematic certainties”. Trilling, The Opposing Self, 37. 50 Allen Grossman, referring to Philomela, in “one of the founding stories of poetic discourse” drawn on by Keats, calls her, metamorphosed into a nightingale who must remind herself of her terrible experience by leaning on a thorn, “a power for the world”—in my terms, a daemon who transcends temporal limits. See Allen Grossman, “Orpheus / Philomela: Subjection and Mastery in the Founding Stories of Poetic Production and in the Logic of Our Practice”, in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World, eds. Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 121.

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sympathetic) human interpenetration of nature, and an impregnable space emptied of human intervention (hence the “full-throated ease” of the bird).51 Though he does not “envy” the bird, the poet would be with it, in a type of Mediterranean idyll, the components of which he can also feel on his pulses: Oh, for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth, That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim— (11-20)

The desired “Cooled” “vintage” is itself a vehicle of things other: “the country green”, “Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth”, “the warm South”. With the references to “Flora” and “the blushful Hippocrene” this otherness must also include the classical past, although, in the act of drinking, its presence is “palpable”: With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth.

This evocation of another place and time, its being variously inhabited by the poet himself and its own components (the poet imbibes a vividly imagined, non-present wine, itself a distillation of the non-present components of the “warm South”, set in a time of “Flora” and the “Hippocrene” spring of the muses), is the poetic equivalent of the desired distancing from the present affected by alcohol: That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim—

What the bird offers through its mediation is posthuman indifference (implicit in “leaving the world unseen” without a thought for those left behind) and shelter from the human condition (“with thee fade away into the forest dim”). 51 Keats’s musical abilities would have made him keenly appreciative of the quality of the bird’s song (John Minahan, Word Like a Bell, 117).

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The third stanza makes it clear that the pressures of the “vale of Soulmaking” are at times unbearable: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; (21-24)

It is the complete otherness of the bird’s range of experience that offers the attraction of an alternative way of interacting with existence: “What thou among the leaves hast never known”. But this is all but unobtainable considering the catalogue of woes (“The weariness, the fever, and the fret”), which continues: Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow. (25-30)

This is indeed a despairing account of the human condition, subject to sickness, age, premature death (with Tom’s recent death in mind), the burden of consciousness, and the transience of beauty and love.52 The extremity of the situation, however, fuels the intensity evident in the response, and the attainment of a measure of relief.53 Identity with otherness (and hence extension of consciousness) is obtainable through “Poesy”, whatever the oppressive weight of quotidian thought: Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, 52

Though Allen Tate feels the “personification” here is somewhat bloodless, lacking Pope’s “genuine feeling, or at any rate an elegance and vigor which would have carried them”, and Blake’s “imaginative power”, the emphatic anaphoric sequence of lines beginning with “Where” bears its own force. What Keats conveys through his measured use of language is far from bloodless. See Allen Tate, On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays 1928-1948, New York: Swallow Press (1948), 174, 176. 53 “The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and commonsense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream”. Richard Harter Fogle, “Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale’”, PMLA 68, no.1 (1953): 211.

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Chapter Six Though the dull brain perplexes and retards. (31-34)

Though the “vintage” of “Bacchus and his pards” is declined as a means of imaginative transport,54 the god’s realm of romance yet suffuses the descriptions of nature which follow, made concrete by the imagination of the poet, which “Already” inhabits its space:55 Already with thee! Tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Clustered around by all her starry fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. (35-40)

The “Queen-Moon” reference hearkens back to Endymion, but, combined with “all her starry fays”, alludes more strongly to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, more obliquely as the stanza progresses, to Shakespeare’s ability to fibrillate his romances with the stuff of life as it is lived.56 The “Tender” “night” is felt, and the “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” are so thickly evoked in the sounds and cadence of the words as to be physically experienced, a thickness added to by the realistic detail of leaves shifted by “breezes” to allow an occasional gleam of moonlight to penetrate the forest. Aspects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are also evident in the following fifth stanza, where material sight, because of the “darkness”, must give way to a richly imagined world that is yet rooted in the material one: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows 54 “Bacchus was a god not only of inspiration but also of the wildest passions. The pards drawing his car, beautiful but terrifying in their savagery, symbolized the disorderly and sometimes violent manifestations of human sexuality. Hence in turning away from the pard-drawn chariot, Keats rejects the dangerous aspects of eros”. Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Sub-text of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’”, KeatsShelley Journal 33 (1984): 76. 55 Fogle notes, “the intuitive speed of imagination is dramatized by ‘Already with thee!” (“Keats’s ‘Nightingale’”, 215). 56 As Allott notes in a footnote to Lamia 1, “the association of the fairies of English folk-lore with figures of classical mythology was common in Elizabethan and seventeenth century literature”. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is a case in point (KCP 616n).

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The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild— (41-45)

Even the “darkness” is felt, being “embalmèd” with the “soft incense” of “flowers”, “grass”, “thicket” and “fruit-tree”. When he gives specific names, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is clearly evoked, suggesting, in Harold Bloom’s terms, authorial daemonic “influence”.57 Here is the passage from Shakespeare: I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine. (2.1.249-252)

And here are Keats’s lines, rendered as if Shakespeare and nature were the same, to borrow from Pope’s praise of Homer:58 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. (46-50)

The effect of the echo is to validate the potency of imagination, whose images reverberate over time, or are so embedded in perception as to colour our present world.59 If this is the case, then flight on the “viewless wings of Poesy” is a viable means of experiencing existence, rather than escaping from it. The sixth stanza, shadowing to an extent Hamlet’s musing on death, enables the poet to process his own relation to the thought of death, at first continuous with the perfection of the bird’s song, but then abruptly checked by the awareness of existence cut short, while the song will continue: Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 57

For instance, consider the following from the Preface to The Anxiety of Influence: “To say that Shakespeare and poetic influence are nearly identical is not very different from observing that Shakespeare is the western literary canon”. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), xxviii. 58 See An Essay on Criticism, lines 130-135. Alexander Pope, Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), 61. 59 “More specifically, [these flowers] have a long history of use as symbols of love” (Wentersdorf, “Sub-text of ‘Nightingale’”, 78).

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While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy. (55-58)

Then comes the sobering check: Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. (59-60)

The daemonic nature of the bird is made clear in what follows in stanza seven; it is a “poetical creature of impulse”, which has about it “an unchangeable attribute”, that of its species over countless generations—like the poet’s song, reverberating over time. In this very real sense, then, it “was not born for death”: Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown; (61-64)

Fogle notes that “To Keats’s apprehension physical nature is immediately absolute and permanent”, as “he arrests change in mid-motion by contemplation apotheosized, which fixes the temporal object within a timeless frame”. Though “nature is always dying”, it is “always alive, forever changing but always the same. With the nightingale Keats fixes his imagination upon sameness and life” (“Keats’s ‘Nightingale’”, 221). Seventy years after Fogle’s essay appeared, we can no longer feel with Keats that “physical nature is immediately absolute and permanent”, though we can still appreciate the bird’s relation to the temporal scale the poet evokes. We can also appreciate its psychological significance, as stated by Elizabeth A. Lawrence: “By demonstrating the impact of a bird upon the poet, and by taking into account the enduring value of the masterpiece that resulted from that encounter, the aesthetic significance of natural phenomena such as birdsong to the human psyche—an idea that is not often appreciated—receives emphasis”.60 60 See Elizabeth A. Lawrence, “Melodious Truth: Keats, a Nightingale, and the Human / Nature Boundary”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 6, no.2 (1999): 21. However, we in the twenty-first century must also heed Stacy Alaimo’s advice: “Recognizing that the ‘permanent is ebbing’ and the ‘unknown future’ will need ‘repair’ may discourage us from taking refuge in the idea that we can fix the world out there in such a way as to ensure ‘it’ will keep providing for ‘us’”. We need “to formulate more complex epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political perspectives in which the human can no longer retreat into separation and denial or proceed as if it were possible to secure an inert, discrete, externalized

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This “timeless frame” also involves the haunting image of a lonely and alienated Ruth: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; (65-67)

If the biblical figure of Ruth stands before us through Keats’s evocation (which also involves the literal resonance of her name), so do the “magic casements” and “perilous seas” of the realm of romance appear before us, in an assertive formulation, without qualification as to the reality of what is presented: The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn. (68-70)

The “fairy lands” might be understood as indicating a past so remote as to be indistinguishable from the fragile imaginative evocations of it; or Keats might be claiming the validity of autonomous “magic” vision, even more remote and lost (“forlorn”) than the ancient pieties of the classical past.61 The point is, the song of the bird, in its paradoxical timelessness, permeates historical time, legend and imaginative vision, an extent of influence that adds enormously to its potential to enrich the mind, to alleviate its depression. But the lost world of the past signified in the final word of stanza seven, “forlorn”, occasions a repetition with a different, contemporary sense—“left desolate”; identity with the bird and its resonances is shattered, as the poet faces the same self that was overcome by the human condition, and which now doubts what it has recently created and gained: Forlorn! The very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. (71-74)

Imagination “cheats” and “deceives”. And yet the image of being “tolled” “back” into this skeptical awareness asserts, with its appropriate waking alarm “bell”, the continuing strength of “fancy”. The strength is even more this or that”. See Stacy Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures”, PMLA 127, no.3 (2012): 563. 61 And with its “perilous seas” it is not immune from the dangers which attend any other experience of life.

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evident in the following lines, which trace with an acute sense of the presence of its components the ever-retreating sound of the bird (even as far as line-shape is concerned), into the distant depths of the landscape:62 Adieu! adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: (75-78)

The skeptical self of the beginning of the stanza is overtaken by an awareness of the indeterminate nature of the visitation, in the midst of a natural setting, yet immersing the poet in images and thoughts not confined to the present space and time: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music . . . Do I wake or sleep? (79-80)

Discomposed, the everyday self questions its hold on experience, with the implication that “vision” or “waking dream” have as much purchase on it as ordinary waking consciousness. Boulger asserts of the conclusion, that “in order to become a part of nature, to be with the bird in any real sense, the poet must relinquish his distinctive feature, consciousness”, making “the poem end in a mood of sadness, and on a revival of the essential paradox of human existence, the duality of human experience” (“Keats’s Symbolism”, 247-248). I would rather direct attention to the idea of the expanded awareness inherent in vision, experienced through the nightingale, and now embodied in the poem, not lost. To an extent, what Paul Fry calls “ostension” is operative here, in that “the rule of consciousness” is disrupted, opening awareness to “something that may be more primary or even essentially other to it”.63 62

Regarding the “plaintive anthem” of the bird, which chimes with this sceptical opening, Lawrence notes: “The nightingale’s song is characterized as a rich, extraordinarily vigorous virtuoso performance that includes mournful, almost sobbing notes. Indeed the bird has long been associated with sadness and pain as well as joy” (“Melodious Truth”, 22). 63 See the reference to Fry in Sean Dempsey, “‘Blank Splendour’: Keats, Romantic Visuality, and Wonder”, Studies in Romanticism 52, no.1 (2013): 89. See Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3: “I claim that poetry (literature, expressive communication), unlike other forms of discourse that exhaust themselves shaping or making sense of things, is that characteristic utterance, defined as ‘ostension’ in the ensuing chapters, which temporarily releases consciousness from its dependence on the signifying process”. Stephen Gurney evokes Heidegger’s “finite transcendence”, the sense of

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Andrew Motion writes of the title, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “an ode ‘on’ rather than ‘to’ a Grecian urn suggests that Keats’s ‘first hypothesis about aesthetic experience . . . is that art tells us a story’” (Keats, 389).64 The “story” in this case, however, is as indeterminate as the effect of the nightingale’s visitation, being based on the poet’s questioning as to what its images convey (where traces of narrative emerge), but more importantly, and leaving traditional “story” behind, “on” how the vase itself relates to human experience. And, in fact, the ode is “to” the urn, which is addressed from the start; in its being spoken “to”, thoughts “on” it emerge: Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme! (1-4)

Mediating between past, present, and posthuman “silence and slow time”, it is daemonic. Wedded to it, yet still virginal (and always to be so, if we consider the archaic sense of “still”), the vase is imbued with “quietness” yet remains its own entity. The creation of a specific artist long since dead, it has been adopted by “silence and slow time”, to exist in their posthuman state. Displaying various images from the distant past, it is, in a sense, a “historian” who focusses on pastoral, on “Sylvan” motifs, the images of which, rendered with the perfection of classical art, can “express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme!”65 And yet some of the sweetness seems to lie in the involvement of the mind of the poet, as he attempts to wrestle meaning from the otherness of an age long past: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? (5-7)

perpetually seeking to outdo the present to realise future potential. From this perspective, “the transcendence to which the nightingale witnesses . . . does not constitute an evasion of responsibility but a direction which enables the poet to authenticate his existence”. See Stephen Gurney, “‘Finite Transcendence’ in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’”, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 66, no.1 (1983): 47. 64 The embedded quotation is from Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 118. 65 Coote quotes Haydon: “Phidias and Raphael have one great decided beauty in their works:—their figures, whether in action or expression, always look as the unconscious agents of an impulsion they cannot help. . . . Their heads, hands, feet, and bodies, immediately put themselves into positions the best adapted to execute the intentions wanted” (in Keats: A Life, 243).

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There is no settled meaning, the images are suggestive, prompting the poet to rehearse his own classical knowledge, and so acting upon his imagination in an engaging way, the full significance of which will tie in with the “unheard” “melodies” of the second stanza: What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (8-10)

More than just “sweetness” is expressed. The “mad pursuit” of “maidens loth” and “struggle to escape” convey a fragmentary narrative of sexual violence, certainly not alien to Grecian myth and history, and tempering the notion of “beauty” with experience from the darker chambers of human experience and “Soul-making”.66 The second stanza reveals the importance of imaginative interposition in creating greater pleasure from what is presented: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone. (11-14)

Imagined music, not limited by a single structure, is more compelling than music already circumscribed by its form. Such imagined “melodies”, though “of no tone”, are nevertheless heard (because imagined), a paradox relegated to the dimension of “spirit”, where, it is assumed, refined senses obtain. An aesthetics of absence with a difference has a positive role to play for the lovers depicted on the urn, for if “spirit” can appreciate “ditties of no tone”, these figures’ inability to consummate their passion assures its continuing fire, and the anticipation associated with it: Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; 66 Geraldine Friedman extends this notion into the realm of hermeneutics, writing of these lines: “As the first of several erotic scenes, this orgiastic pursuit is framed from the beginning by the speaker’s desire to know the urn. . . . It could be said that the speaker’s eagerness to read the ‘leaf-fring’d legend’ en-genders a story about gender, where interpretation is figured as a male subject’s sexual pursuit of a female object of desire”. She sees “the figure of interpretation as erotic conversation” as a “key figure in hermeneutics”. See Geraldine Friedman, “The Erotics of Interpretation in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: Pursuing the Feminine”, Studies in Romanticism 32, no.2 (1993): 226.

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Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet do not grieve: She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (15-20)

Here is an eternal moment, loaded with its own riches, elaborated upon in the following stanza: Ah, happy, happy boughs, that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearièd, For ever piping songs for ever new! (21-24)

“Spring” is eternal, but the imagined music, again, is not thus suspended; not materially depicted, it frees the “melodist” (even if he cannot leave his song) to “pipe songs for ever new”. There is a sense, then, that this suspended world is nevertheless underlain by a liveliness of expression, apparent to the “spirit” as “ditties of no tone” and “songs for ever new”. But surely this liveliness is also true of the figures depicted, whose emotions are so evident? The pulsations of life override art’s apparently marmoreal expression, and inform it: More happy love, more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting, and for ever young— All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (25-30)

Love, transient in human life, is here present, expressed in its unchanging essence in the language of images. It is, in this sense, “far above” “All breathing human passion”, though it excludes the “Soul-making” of human process, the “heart high-sorrowful and cloyed”, the “burning forehead” and “parching tongue”. The fourth stanza presents a different narrative, a religious one, but its focus is not on ancient pieties, rather on the sealed-off nature of its images. It clearly depicts a sacrificial procession, but its human details and significance are irretrievable. No human feelings are depicted, apart from the outward show of devotion: Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? (31-34)

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In other words, here the art-work turns inwards, so to speak, eliciting a different response than the earlier images, in which the poet can only ask unanswerable questions and accept the ensuing silence. This is not a criticism of the urn, or art in general; it is another way of responding to it, which inspires different feelings to those previously expressed, melancholy feelings associated with the incommensurability of individual life and the vast stretches of historical time. The deserted town which maintains the secret of its emptiness is something of a correlative of these feelings: What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate can e’er return. (35-40)

The word “desolate” stands in sharp contrast to “happy, happy love!” Its archaic sense of an “abandoned” state combines with other senses: “bleak emptiness”; “unhappy loneliness”. Thus, the imagery provokes a shift in awareness, from the idyllic pastoral to, once more, something darker, expressive of the human condition in a different register. Also incommensurable are individual human life and the urn itself, as art object. We recognize its images but are silenced by its overall ineffable being: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed— Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. Cold pastoral! (41-45)

Its “silent”, eternal moment of “marble men and maidens” is as ineffable as posthuman “eternity” itself. Hence it is “Cold”. Robert Mitchell, referring to John Hunter’s remarkable eighteenth-century work on suspended animation, noted that the surgeon and experimentalist (parodied in Blake’s Island in the Moon, as we might recall), used “extreme cold to suspend all organic actions without producing death”. Mitchell notes in connection with “Cold pastoral”, “Though the suspensions produced by Keats’s verse differed from those produced by Hunter’s experiments, for both Keats and Hunter becoming cold meant bringing to the surface a vitality that liberated sensation from its usual subordination to action”. Hunter distinguished between “practical life” “manifested in actions”, and a state of “simple life”,

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which “implied that practical life was grounded in a more fundamental mode of vitality”.67 Thus “men and maidens”, albeit of “marble”, ensure its “pastoral” elements. This paradoxical conflation in part “teases us out of thought”, as proximate human life is transformed into the images on a “silent form” that exists at an immeasurable distance beyond the limits of such proximity: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man (46-48)

And yet its continuing presence, with its “Fair attitude”, will, as it does for the present generation, counter the “woe” of future generations. It is, above all, “a friend to man”. A compact nexus of beauty, love, joy, and darker aspects, associated with sexual violence, our reliance on other creatures in order to exist (implicit in the sacrificial victim), and desolateness, it offers the balance of existential forces Keats sought in his letter to Reynolds, the “truth” of the nature of existence. The famous final lines of the poem, in the voice of the urn,68 indicate the accommodation of such “truth” within the “beauty” of its “form”; the urn is a friend to man, to whom thou say’st “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (48-50)

The notion that beauty encompasses the distasteful is (to court controversy) fundamentally Aristotelian. Aristotle claimed that “inborn in all of us is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation. What happens in actual experience is evidence of this; for we enjoy looking at the most accurate representations of things which in themselves we find painful to see”.69 More controversial is the link with the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Platonism. Shaftesbury actually

67

See Robert Mitchell, “Suspended Animation”, 109-110, 113. I am in agreement with Jean-Claude Sallé on this matter. He points to the “convenient summary” of the issue by Allott in KCP 537-538. See Jean-Claude Sallé, “The Pious Frauds of Art: A Reading of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”, Studies in Romanticism 11, no.2 (1972): 80. 69 Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 35. As already noted, Aileen Ward points out that when Keats lodged with Bailey in Oxford, topics of conversation included “Plato and Aristotle” (Keats: Making of a Poet, 127). 68

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declared, “all beauty is truth”.70 A critic who supports the theory that Keats knew at least some of Shaftesbury, Harry Solomon, notes further, that, for Shaftesbury, urns illustrate “those symmetries which silently express a reigning order, peace, harmony, and beauty!”71 However, I would rather sidestep controversies regarding external sources at this stage, and note that Keats himself, on 22 November 1817, nearly two years prior to the writing of this ode, had written to Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty” (Letters, 36-37). If imagination is true and deals in truth, Keats implies that its annulment of self through a “camelion Poet” type of immersion in the other, enables it to witness the unadorned nature of reality, stripped of any inauthenticity fabricated by ego.72 This is linked to Oceanus’s selfless acceptance of the overthrow of the Titans in Hyperion, premised on the “eternal truth” that the forms of existence are in perfect accord with their function, and when they are not, they are displaced. At the heart of this “perfection” is “beauty”: on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old darkness. (2.212-215)

There is, though, no chance that the beauty on and of the urn will be displaced. The old Titans and Gods are engaged in life, however “beyond the human” they might be. The urn is suspended, apart, “beyond the human” in a different sense, a mediatory, daemonic sense, which is why it can “remain” “a friend to man”. 70

Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 94. 71 Harry Solomon, “Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and the Conclusion of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’”, Keats-Shelley Journal 24 (1975): 97. I was alerted to both Shaftesbury’s thought and Solomon’s article by E. Douka Kabitoglou’s, “Adapting Philosophy to Literature: The Case of John Keats”, Studies in Philology 89, no.1 (1992): 115-136. 72 Here I diverge from Sallé; he sees a “mute dialogue” in the poem between poet and Urn, with “the Urn expressing what the imaginative experience, within its own limits, allows man to believe, and that of the lyric speaker stating what can be believed in the world of ordinary experience”. The urn consoles us, he feels, through the “pious fraud” of art (“Pious Frauds”, 91).

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The “Ode on Melancholy” (KCP 538) is perhaps a reply, Allott suggests, to Burton’s account “of the melancholy that leads to suicide in The Anatomy of Melancholy 1.4.1”. Burton writes, for instance, of the melancholy man:73 In such sort doth the torture and extremity of his misery torment him, that he can take no pleasure in his life, but is in manner enforced to offer violence unto himself, to be freed from his present insufferable pains. So some (saith Fracastorious) “in fury, but most in despair, sorrow, fear, and out of the anguish and vexation of their souls, offer violence to themselves: for their life is unhappy and miserable. They can take no rest in the night, nor sleep, or if they do slumber, fearful dreams astonish them”. In the day-time they are affrighted still by some terrible object, and torn in pieces with suspicion, fear, sorrow, discontents, cares, shame, anguish, etc., as so many wild horses, that they cannot be quiet an hour, a minute of time, but even against their wills they are intent, and still thinking of it, they cannot forget it, it grinds their souls day and night, they are perpetually tormented, a burden to themselves, as Job was, they can neither eat, drink, nor sleep.

Keats, perhaps buttressed by his awareness of what is involved in “Soulmaking”, faces melancholy in different terms, reflective in their rhetoric of the first elegy of Ovid’s Tristia:74 No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; (1-4)

As the list continues, with its number of classical allusions, it becomes evident that the speaker, in denying its elements, has certainly thought about them:75 Make not your rosary of yew-berries, 73 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: The First Partition, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Folio Society, 2004), 466. 74 See Anselm Haverkamp, “Mourning Becomes Melancholia. A Muse Deconstructed: Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’”, New Literary History 21, no.3 (1990), 699. Haverkamp quotes “a late nineteenth-century translation which keeps prosaically to its seventeenth-century model, Saltonstall’s Tristia”. The quoted passage begins: “Let not the hyacinth array you in its purple tints; . . . Let not your title be inscribed in vermilion, nor let your leaves be prepared with the oil of the cedar”. 75 Haverkamp feels that Keats’s “enumeration” of “Burton’s commonplaces” “hides an urgent anxiety about suicide under the ironic surface of parody” (“Mourning Becomes”, 699). I remain sceptical about hidden “urgent anxieties” exposed by speculation.

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The grotesque inversion of the lovely Psyche, with her traditional butterfly displaced by a “death-moth”, is a measure of the extent of what is being rejected. The reason for the rejection, in the final two lines of the stanza, might come as something of a surprise: For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. (9-10)

The substances and creatures, that is, will create an unwanted drowsiness, a freedom from what Burton (quoting Fracastorius) calls “the anguish and vexation of their souls”. The speaker here, on the contrary, would not “drown the wakeful anguish of the soul”. His response is fully to imbibe the “melancholy fit”: But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; (11-14)

The dreary-seeming simile of the “weeping cloud” carries, true to the nature of a cloud, the means for rejuvenation. It “fosters” drooping “flowers”, and if its mist seems a burial “shroud”, it certainly benefits the “green hill”, which radiates life rather than death. Then the figures of simile are transmogrified into literal presences: Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globèd peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (15-20)

The rain in itself, like melancholy, need not be dwelt on. “Rose” and “peony” can be enjoyed even more in the rain, the “rainbows” of glinting moisture on the strand appear to best advantage. Even a mistress’s “anger” can be “rich”, reflected in “her peerless eyes”, which, in their beauty and expressive energy, offer “deep” sustenance, rather than hurt. Susan Wolfson is understandably skeptical: “The odist takes this aesthetic [of “glutting” and “feeding” on objects of transience] to erotic extravagance (in his dreams!), feeding on a spectacle of female anger . . . (her peerless eyes are

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nonpareil, but no window to her soul)”. Haverkamp refers to “the splenetic rather than serene outcome which ‘projects’ its own raving desire onto the desired beloved—a projection that is almost the opposite of ‘empathic’ experience” (“Mourning Becomes”, 700). Both critics, however, are too serious, refusing to give credit to the playfulness of Keats’s irony. His letters are often marked by humour, not always (from our point of view) politically correct. Think of his delighted transcription from Burton of the different types of beloved, which goes in (small) part: “Every Lover admires his Mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tann’d, tallow-fac’d, have a swoln juglers platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face”, and so on and so on.76 The final stanza lists the causes of melancholy, which correspond with those in “Ode to a Nightingale”: She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. (21-24)

The conceit of “Pleasure” “Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips”— the nectar which makes honey also feeds the poison glands of the bee— locates the merging of the opposites of existence deep within the heart of natural regeneration.77 The sestet, with its unabashedly sexual imagery, expresses openly the sense of depletion after the intense joy of orgasm. It touches the “soul”, so deep are its repercussions; the implication here is that the very act of generation merges joy and melancholy at a deep level that must reverberate outwards into all human existence: Aye, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. (25-30) 76

See Wolfson’s “Romanticism & Gender & Melancholy”, Studies in Romanticism 53, no.3 (2014): 440. For Keats’s transcription from Burton, see his journal-letter to the George Keatses, 17-27 September 1819 (Letters, 310). 77 Hugh Roberts, however, sees a contrast here between bee and spider, as in Thomas Wyatt’s “How by a kiss”: “one makes honey and the other poison from the same plants. . . . We see a typical example of the topos in Thomas Wyatt, in a poem which Keats must have known”. See “‘A Buzzing in his Head’: Keats, Romance, and Lamia’s Noisy World”, Keats-Shelley Journal 67 (2018): 58.

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The “bursting” of “Joy’s grape” is all but commensurate with experience of “the sadness” of melancholy’s “might”. But her “cloudy trophies” touch on the regenerative “weeping cloud” from the second stanza. The soul, though a trophy, or symbol of Melancholy’s victory, also brings life; from another point of view, it is insubstantial as a cloud, not the permanent record of Melancholy’s absolute triumph—“Joy”, too, will always exist. Melancholy is a daemonic preceptor, a visiting state of consciousness, which helps to teach acceptance of the inevitable circumscriptions of life. However, as Barbara Hernnstein Smith argues, we cannot assume the poet’s “reconciliation” with mutability: the “description” of melancholy “is developed through a device that takes the form of an ironic mock-didacticism”, but we need to take into account Keats’s “complex responses to a world of process”, where “acceptance” need not imply “reconciliation”.78 The “Ode on Indolence” (KCP 541) contains three daemonic figures, one of them identified as such: “my demon Poesy” (30).79 The others are “Love” and “Ambition”. They too are preceptors, even though presently neglected, in helping define for the poet the importance of his present state of awareness, committed to indolence. Allott considers the poem “stylistically inferior to the other odes” (introduction to the poem, KCP 542), but, in displaying a candour related to that of the “Ode on Melancholy” (Motion, Keats, 405), it has its own particular power. Part of its power lies in its ability to give concrete form to its daemons, three figures in classical attire,80 making of them figures in a drama centred in consciousness: “In placid sandals, and in white robes graced” (4). They slowly turn before his eyes, as if figures on a revolving urn. In the second stanza, they, at first “Shadows” themselves, emerge (in a natural sequence) from the shadows of the mind into clearer definition, where they can even be addressed: How is it, Shadows, that I knew ye not? How came ye muffled in so hush a masque? Was it a silent deep-disguisèd plot

78 See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “‘Sorrow’s Mysteries’: Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 6, no.4 (1966): 690. 79 As Patterson notes of the word “daemon”, “When Keats used the word, and that was seldom, he spelled it demon while invariably expressing non-Christian meanings” (Daemonic in Keats, 1n2). 80 In the entry for 19 March 1819 in the February-May journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law, Keats writes of “Poetry”, “Ambition” and “Love” seeming like “three figures on a Greek vase—a Man and two women” (Letters, 228). Their “placid sandals” and “white robes” within the poem would suggest, rather, three women.

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To steal away, and leave without a task My idle days? (11-15)

Being “left without a task” is the end he, luxuriously indolent, actually desires: Ripe was the drowsy hour; The blissful cloud of summer indolence Benumbed my eyes; my pulse grew less and less; Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower: (15-18)

But the very presence of the “Shadows” demands an act of attention and closer consideration: Oh, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?

As they pass again, they become distinct, and provoke in him an “aching” response to act, such is the hold they still have: A third time passed they by, and, passing, turned Each one the face a moment whiles to me; Then faded, and to follow them I burned And ached for wings because I knew the three; (21-24)

In naming them he also describes them, but in terms of his own relationship with the predilections and impulses within him that these allegorical figures represent: The first was a fair maid, and Love her name; The second was Ambition, pale of cheek, And ever watchful with fatiguèd eye; The last, whom I love more, the more of blame Is heaped upon her, maiden most unmeek, I knew to be my demon Poesy. (25-30)

“Love” as a blank idealization, “a fair maid”, suggests the unrealistic simplification of womankind of a young man, but the other two are more engaging. “Ambition” bears the signs of wakeful absorption in the desire for fame, a “pale” “cheek” and “ever watchful” “fatiguèd eyes”. More personal in its resonances is Keats’s revelation of what “Poesy” means to him, “loved more” the more his work is criticized. In her energy and persistence, she is a “maiden most unmeek”, not a bland idealization. Hence

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his sense of a personal, daemonic connection with her: he “knew” her “to be my demon Poesy”. After his initial desire to fly after their “faded” forms (which prompt a keen awareness of what he has lost), he thinks this a “folly”, and dismisses each, one by one: if Love is a featureless “fair maid”, he might well ask, “What is Love? And where is it?” (32). “Ambition” is to be pitied, it is “poor”, linked to ego and its feverish obsession with existential trivia: “a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit” (33-34). Even “Poesy”, she has not a joy— At least for me—so sweet as drowsy noons, And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence. (35-37)

“Poesy”, dismissed, is yet manifest in this reference to “sweet” “drowsy noons”, “And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence”, which anticipates the praise of the posthuman world (felt in his “soul”) in the following stanza. His final wish for “shelter” (38) from the pressures of life is counter to his belief in “Soul-making”, rather seems the whimsical urge of a moment, and thus is as baseless as his desire to dismiss the motivating forces of his life. Stanza five expresses an unwitting continuity between vision and actual nature, with Keats again creating poetry just as he bids it farewell;81 he cannot help himself: My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams. (43-44)

This early morning scene in the garden of the “soul”, of vision, blends effortlessly with what appears to be natural description, which, he must feel, displaces the artifice of “poesy”: The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Though in her lids hung the sweet tears of May; The open casement pressed a new-leaved vine, Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay; (45-48)

Though “no shower fell” at present, as in an ideal picture, “the sweet tears of May”, dew or incipient drizzle, are discernible, suggesting the contingencies 81 “The refusal of Keats’s speaker to expend [his tears] is ironically belated, however, as the ‘Ode on Indolence’ nears its end after five-and-a-half stanzas” (Myers, “Keats and Hands”, 112). And see William F. Zak: “If the narrator has dismissed ‘Poesy’, we cannot ignore the fact that the Ode is itself poetry”. See Zak’s “The Confirmation of Keats’s Belief in Negative Capability: The ‘Ode on Indolence’”, Keats-Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 56.

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of real life, where outcomes are not pre-determined (the “tears” may or may not fall). Also closely observed are the “new-leaved vine” “pressed” against the open window, which admits new, “budding warmth” (which also assists the development of buds) after the cold of the night, and the song of the “throstle”, previously unheard because of the blocking “casement”. Immersed in such a world, the poet feels he can now “bid farewell” to his personal daemons: O Shadows, ’twas a time to bid farewell! Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine. (49-50)

Yet the verse belies the thought, detracting from the poem’s too evident intention. “His identity had prevailed”, as Motion puts the matter; there is an “evaporation of negative capability” (Keats, 405). Keats is too blatant, and too obviously wrong. As a “poem of banishment” (Motion, Keats, 405), it undermines the poetic resources inherent in indolence (previously praised in a letter to Reynolds of 19 February 1818),82 and concludes in melodramatic manner by turning against what he deems to be the inauthentic nature of everything he has produced thus far, and which has condemned him to an image of himself which must have galled, that of Leigh Hunt’s “amiable but infatuated bardling”:83 So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass; For I would not be dieted with praise, A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce! (51-54)

The attraction of this easy step of banishment is obvious, but daemons cannot be exorcised so easily: Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn. Farewell! I yet have visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store. 82 “When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual

passage serves him as a starting post towards all ‘the two-and thirty Pallaces’ [of Buddhist doctrine] How happy is such a ‘voyage of conception’, what delicious diligent Indolence! A doze upon a Sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon Clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings” (Letters, 65). 83 In Coote, Keats, 156. The quotation comes from Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1818, page 197, the arrogantly contemptuous “Letter from Z to Leigh Hunt”. “Z” was a compound of the critics John Lockhart and Christopher North.

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Perhaps Keats (in a poem that is curiously inattentive) misses the irony in the presence of these “clouds”, images not only of obscurity, but, as elsewhere in the poem, of regeneration. The poem is not without its champions, however. Consider the fine appreciation by Margaret Yeates Robertson. Yet even she can conclude her article with the observation: “The poet’s success in evoking an indolent, indecisive mood in his audience could contribute to a lack of enthusiasm for the poem while adding to its value as a work of art”. Jack Stillinger concedes that though “the poet refuses to engage in any serious conflict with Love, Ambition, and Poesy”, “the poem probably genuinely reflects the indolence that is its subject”.84 Regarding the conclusion, Zak argues that the last lines of the final stanza, far from being “disillusioned or full of regret”, “seem quietly triumphant and contentedly self-reposed, as if, with the narrator of the ‘Ode to May’, the narrator’s ‘song’ here ‘should die away / Content as theirs, / Rich in the simple worship of a day’” (“Confirmation of Belief”, 56). If Keats is unaware of the suggestiveness of the “clouds” in the final line of the poem, his “Ode to Autumn”, at least, for many readers the best-loved poem in his canon,85 is prefaced by its cloudy, nourishing “mists”. *** First, however, we turn from the odes to look at Lamia (KCP 613), with its daemonic subject. Bruce Clarke feels that “Lamia is a daemonic romance tracing the placings and displacings involved in the bargains by which consciences are constructed, the furtive relations holding between the sexual and the spiritual for the shaping of gender identities”. He also writes: “Participation turns daemonic when one of the participating agents is possessed or dispossessed by another”. While the construction of consciences and shaping of gender identities certainly obtain in one reading of the poem, as does the more obvious theme of possession and dispossession, these are tangential to my concerns as far as my understanding of the daemonic goes. Simply, Lamia is daemonic because “beyond the human” in her very 84

Margaret Yeates Robertson, “The Consistency of Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’”, Style 4, no.2 (1970): 133-143. And see Jack Stillinger, “The Text of Keats’s ‘Ode on Indolence’”, Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 258. 85 Stanley Plumly asks, rhetorically, of “To Autumn”: “Can a lyric poem of thirtythree lines achieve the awe and spaciousness of the sublime?” See his “The Odes for Their Own Sake”, Kenyon Review 33, no.4 (2011): 165.

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essence, a creature of the imagination (and the refinement of consciousness Keatsian imagination implies) with a profound impact on the human world.86 As Keats himself notes, his principal source is again, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The relevant passage, from “Partition 3, section 2”, is one instance of a number involving daemonic beings: For if those stories be true that are written of incubus and succubus, of nymphs, lascivious fauns, satyrs, and those heathen gods which were devils, those lascivious Telchines, of whom the Platonists tell so many fables, or those familiar meetings in our days, and company of witches and devils, there is some probability for it. . . . Hector Boethius, in his Scottish History, hath three or four such examples . . . of such as have had familiar company many years with them, and that in the habit of men and women.

His portrayal of the Lamia, or serpent woman, derived from Philostratus, “in his fourth book de vita Apollonii”, is not hostile: “she being fair and lovely would live and die” with Menippus Lycius. At their wedding she was confronted by one Apollonius, who “found her out to be a serpent, a lamia”. “When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant” (Anatomy 3.51-52). Keats, far from not being hostile, is overtly sympathetic towards his Lamia. Even as a serpent, she is beautiful in her daemonic otherness: She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barred; (1.47-50)

The description, so closely observed, is not merely of static (if rich) surfaces; the patterns on her skin change as she breathes in and out, creating a moving, living image; her shape is full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolved, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—

86 Bruce Clarke, “Fabulous Monsters of Conscience: Anthropomorphosis in Keats’s Lamia”, Studies in Romanticism 23, no.4 (1984): 555-556, 560.

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The similes define her otherness in terms of what is “beyond the human”: she “seemed” an “elf”, consort of a “demon”, or even a “demon” herself:87 So rainbow-sided, touched with miseries, She seemed, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. (1.51-56)

Keats focusses on her sorrow, immediately making her a more sympathetic figure than Burton’s “incubus and succubus”, and “nymphs, lascivious fauns, satyrs, and those heathen gods which were devils”. She is lovelorn, but makes a deal with Hermes, promising to reveal to him his otherwise invisible beloved, if he will return her to her original “woman’s form”, that she might meet with “a youth of Corinth”, Lycius (1.117-119). The revelation and transmutation that take place are fully in accord with the realm of romance, underlining the deep traditional and literary roots of such conceptual otherness. Yet Keats is able “to make it new”, empowering vision with concrete presence. He flirts with the indistinction of vision and reality, an authorial voice within the narrative, saying of the sudden appearance of Hermes’s beloved, It was no dream; or say a dream it was, Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in a long immortal dream. (1.126-128)

The remarkable passage on Lamia’s metamorphosis (the name of a type is now personalized as a given name) illustrates Keats’s creative ability.88 An impossible metamorphosis is rendered in believable terms; if the poet’s negative capability had “evaporated” with the last few odes, it has returned now: Left to herself, the serpent now began To change; her elfin blood in madness ran, 87 Garrett Stewart says of these lines, “The disjunctive series places the inclusive ‘at once’ at logical odds with the contrastive ‘or’, as if to remind us of the failure of consecutive or categorical reasoning in the face of such a wonder”. See Garrett Stewart, “Lamia and the Language of Metamorphosis”, Studies in Romanticism 15, no.1 (1976): 12. 88 And as Stewart notes, her metamorphosis is one of “the major nodes of transition” in the poem, the others being Lycius’s transformation from introvert to extrovert, the lovers’ dwelling turning into a luxuriously bedecked bridal hall, Apollonius’s exposure of Lamia, Lycius’s death, and Lamia’s final disappearance (inversely paralleling the shift to visibility of Hermes’s previously invisible nymph) (“Language of Metamorphosis”, 4-5).

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Her mouth foamed, and the grass, therewith besprent, Withered at dew so sweet and virulent; (1.146-149)

The “dew” from her foaming mouth, “so sweet and virulent”, which “withers” the grass, surprises at first, but (not at all sentimental in its details) points to the admixture of fair woman and serpent. Her pain is all too evident in what follows: Her eyes in torture fixed and anguish drear, Hot, glazed, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flashed phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. (1.150-152)

The inability of her “eyes” to produce a “cooling tear” also indicates her serpent nature, with the suggestion that this is inherent, despite the outer transformation. Also suggested, though, is the necessary pain experienced in becoming human. The climax of the pain is then described, as all the sumptuous beauty of her strange otherness is destroyed: The colours all inflamed throughout her train, She writhed about, convulsed with scarlet pain. A deep volcanian yellow took the place Of all her milder-moonèd body’s grace; And, as the lava ravishes the mead, Spoilt all her silver mail, and golden brede; Made gloom of all her frecklings, streaks and bars, Eclipsed her crescents, and licked up her stars, So that, in moments few, she was undressed Of all her sapphire, greens, and amethyst, And rubious-argent; of all these bereft, Nothing but pain and ugliness were left. (1.153-164)

“Scarlet” and “deep volcanian yellow” displace her previous “golden, green and blue” colours and “her milder-moonèd body’s grace”. The simile which follows takes its cue from this sulphurous colour, wherein a soft green “mead” “ravished” by boiling “lava” images the spoilation of “all her silver mail, and golden brede”. The act of ravishment is like a great, thirsting creature, which “licked up her stars”, suggesting, too, that she is being consumed in an almost nonchalant, effortless way. “Nothing but pain and ugliness were left”: a “thing of beauty” is thus deliberately destroyed, anticipating the final destruction of Lamia, but also demonstrating, on Keats’s part, an ability to confront the negative extremes of experience in unsentimental terms, and transform them into highly imaginative art. And though the remainder of the poem is a love story, it has, along with its tragic conclusion, moments that do not turn aside from the more sombre

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aspects of human life. Though Lamia, as a woman, has a “sciential brain” that can “unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain”, this apparently inevitable coupling of opposites is yet acknowledged (1.191-192). This reference looks forward to an early passage in Book 2, which reflects (not without some knowing, worldly humour, Byronic in tone)89 on the fragility and transience of passionate love: Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast. (2.1-4)

Even though the present experience of love might seem to contradict such cynicism, yet its truth remains, and Keats, in line 10, expresses spousal dissatisfaction with some intensity: Had Lycius lived to hand his story down, He might have given the moral a fresh frown, Or clenched it quite; but too short was their bliss To breed distrust and hate, that make the soft voice hiss. (2.7-10)

In turn, the cynicism reflects on the conclusion of the poem, which might be read as allegorical of what happens in human relationships: the light of reason, or the quotidian (with a serpent “hiss”), banishes the elements of romance that keep couples together. Though Lycius might “have given” the cynical “moral” “a fresh frown”, he nevertheless first displays the restlessness that signals the end of the total enchantment of love.90 The sound of “trumpets” “from the slope side of a suburb hill” prompts this restlessness:91 For the first time, since first he harboured in 89

Frederic S. Colwell writes of the “cavalier Byronic mockery, evident in the opening lines of the second part of Lamia”. See his “Shelley’s ‘Witch of Atlas’ and the Mythic Geography of the Nile”, ELH 45, no.1 (1978): 72. 90 “Once Lycius is enraptured by passion, Lamia must shut the windows of his imagination, for power to see beyond one’s bourne will spoil the pleasures of all sensations—even the singing of the nightingale”. See Donald H. Reiman, “Keats and the Humanist Paradox: Mythological History in Lamia”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11, no.4 (1971): 666. 91 For Roberts, sound betokens boundaries: “Noise is, for Keats, intimately connected with boundaries: Hermes’s special territory” (“Lamia’s Noisy World”, 61). Immersed in each other, the lovers have no boundaries. For Lycius, noise breaks the spell of love’s unboundedness.

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That purple-linèd palace of sweet sin, His spirit passed beyond its golden bourn Into the noisy world almost forsworn. (2.30-33)

The marriage-ceremony and feast which he desires, will enable him to engage once more with the world, and display Lamia’s beauty before others. When she objects, the first signs of a lover’s quarrel become evident, and the “cruel” underside of his “passion” emerges in Lycius’s enjoyment of her pain: Against his better self, he took delight Luxurious in her sorrows, soft and new. His passion, cruel grown, took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous as ’twas possible In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell. (2.73-77)

A simile proleptic of the conclusion follows, bearing within itself a blatant reference to the danger attending Lycius’s importunity: Fine was the mitigated fury, like Apollo’s presence when in act to strike The serpent—ha, the serpent! Certes, she Was none. (2.78-81)

The denial might be reflective of a newly implanted need within her (prompted by Lycius’s nagging) to prove to herself her distance from her old self. She consents to his demands. He, seemingly restored to a complacent equanimity, is in a suitable frame of consciousness to detect her daemonic nature, though in his own terms, centred in the clichés of belief: “Sure some sweet name thou hast, though, by my truth, I have not asked it, ever thinking thee Not mortal, but of heavenly progeny, As still I do. Hast any mortal name, Fit appellation for this dazzling frame?” (2.85-89)

“Knowing surely she could never win / His foolish heart from its mad pompousness”, after he has “gone to summon all his kin” (2.112-114), she proves this daemonic nature in her terms, by, Prospero-like, with the aid of “subtle servitors”, decking out the “banquet-room”: ’tis doubftul how and whence Came, and who were her subtle servitors.

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Concrete details give credence to the supernatural catering event: Fresh-carvèd cedar, mimicking a glade Of palm and plantain, met from either side, High in the midst, in honour of the bride; Two palms and then two plantains, and so on, From either side their stems branched one to one All down the aislèd place; and beneath all There ran a stream of lamps straight on from wall to wall. (2.125-131)

All this time our sympathy remains with the lady, whose magic, daemonic nature and its creations are connate with the imagination and its power to create. This favouring of her comes to a head when she is threatened by “austere” Apollonius, with his sophistic power of ratiocination. Sitterson argues that Keats, in calling Apollonius a “sophist” (2.172 and 2.299), was familiar with Plato’s distinction between the true philosopher (Socrates) and the sophist: Keats “is suggesting that Apollonius’s pretension to complete knowledge is no more than a pretense”. Socrates and Plato “are consistently critical of the Sophists’ pretension to certain knowledge where certainty is not possible”. Further, “as the Sophists mistakenly believe they understand the mystery of the poets, so Apollonius mistakenly believes he has solved the mystery of Lamia” (“Platonic Shades”, 203-204). Apollonius’s mistake is centred in the fact that “instead of turning into a serpent—his answer for her identity—Lamia disappears” (202). In the meanwhile, the confidence associated with Apollonius’s assumed rationalist potency is even discernible in the way he walks “with calm-planted steps”. something too he laughed, As though some knotty problem that had daffed His patient thought had now begun to thaw, And solve and melt—’twas just as he foresaw. (2.158-162)

Despite his presence, imagination spreads its abundance before us, as if in contrast to his “austerity” and the “wrong” that he tells Lycius he has done in coming uninvited (and, it is implied, the wrong he still must do). The banquet-room is Filled with pervading brilliance and perfume: Before each ludic panel fuming stood A censer fed with myrrh and spicèd wood,

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Each by a sacred tripod held aloft, Whose slender feet wide-swerved upon the soft Wool-woofèd carpets; fifty wreaths of smoke From fifty censers their light voyage took To the high roof, still mimicked as they rose Along the mirrored walls by twin-clouds odorous. (2.174-182)

And so the description continues; the sumptuousness is as much an expression of Lamia’s love for Lycius as was the feast spread by Porphyro for Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes. Stewart, however, refers to the “cool lucidity” of Lamia compared to the “often fevered immediacy” of the odes, and thus detects “an ironic palinode” in this decking out of the feast: “In fact, when we encounter in the later narrative that verbal luxury which the Odes remind us to expect from Keats, we are likely to find the familiar insidiously revised, suspect now, lapsed into planned blatancy” (Stewart, “Language of Metamorphosis”, 5). This observation is ingenious, but I do not think Keats would use the feelings of Lamia to convey his own ironic intention; he is too sympathetic towards the lady. D. S. Neff convincingly argues that the influence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, 43.125-126, is present here, where the fairy, Manto, saved by Adonio when in “the person of a snake”, creates a magic palace of alabaster “filled with riches”, sumptuously described.92 Even more notable is the living effect of the celebration on the guests; on them “the wine has done its rosy deed”, freeing “from human trammels” each guest (2.209-210). Their state is a manifestation of Bacchus (one material means of accounting for what is “beyond the human”): Soon was God Bacchus at meridian height; Flushed were their cheeks, and bright eyes double bright. (2.213-214)

Each guest chooses a garland which “Might fancy-fit his brows”, while he remains “silk-pillowed at his ease” (2.220). Then comes the check, heralding the inevitable close of the tale, as the word “garland” is replaced by the ominous word “wreath”: What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius? What for the sage, old Apollonius? 92 See D. S. Neff, “The Flower and the Bee: Keats, Imitatio, and the Orlando Furioso”, South Atlantic Review 67, no.1 (2002): 45-46. Keatsian imitatio accords with his sense of the “truth” embedded in “beauty”, expansive, not confined. Morris Dickstein notes, though, with some acuteness, “There is nothing insubstantial about her love, but in its public form it is no longer love”, See Morris Dickstein, Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 239.

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The narrator indicates his presence by imposing in the imperative mood (denoting the authority of what must come to pass through the agency of his imagination) what is figuratively appropriate for Lamia: Upon her aching forehead be there hung The leaves of willow and of adder’s tongue; (2.223-224)

The doomed Lycius is dealt with in similar fashion (the “thyrsus” of Bacchus, with its spell of drunken “forgetfulness”), as is the philosopher (“spear-grass” and “spiteful thistle”): And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage, Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage War on his temples. (2.225-229)

Stewart calls the supplying of these wreaths “the dispensation of poetic justice” (“Language of Metamorphosis”, 30). The narrator’s allegiance is clear, however, as the crux of what Apollonius signifies comes to the fore in a definitive statement regarding the poem’s allegorical message: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? (2.230-231)

From this circumscriptive perspective, even the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature (associated with biblical miracles) become commonplace, subject to “rule and line”: There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.

Blake would insist on a cleansing of the doors of perception; for Keats the conclusion (for the present, at least) is inexorable (and, surprisingly perhaps, evokes Blake’s illustration of “Aged Ignorance” about to clip the wings of a cherub):93 93 We recall that Mary Lynn Johnson feels that Blake may have derived the image from an emblematic motif used by seventeenth century artists, Otho Vaenius and Robert Quarles (“Emblem and Symbol in Blake”, 156-157). It may thus have a general, popular currency, as the quotation from Hazlitt would seem to affirm. Hazlitt’s insight would also confirm McGilchrist’s notion that left hemisphere of the brain dominance correlates with the flourishing of Enlightenment rationalism and

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Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade. (2.234-238)

Allott quotes from Hazlitt’s 1818 lecture, “On Poetry in General”, pointing to a possible source for what is here expressed, but also indicating the generally shared nature of the concern: “It cannot be concealed . . . that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry” (in KCP 645n). That science and its associated industry will prevail (to consider the matter in the light of Hazlitt’s contemporary perspective), is evident in the demise of Lamia, daemonic signifier of the imagination and true love, and the death of Lycius, her lover and lover of what she represents: The sophist’s eye, Like a sharp spear, went through her utterly, Keen, cruel, perceant, stinging. She, as well As her weak hand could any meaning tell, Motioned him to be silent; vainly so, He looked and looked again a level No! “A serpent!” echoed he; no sooner said, Than with a frightful scream she vanishèd. (2.299-306)

Clarke, referring to Dickstein (Keats and His Poetry, 234), writes that “some notion of ‘philosophic acumen and virtue’ is not sufficient to account for Apollonius’s recognition and the virulence of his power. Apollonius’s humanity is at least as questionable as Lamia’s daemonic status”. He also notes: Apollonius partakes of the fabulous ferocity of the Basilisk, a mythical serpent, a male Medusa, in x-raying and evaporating the presence of his mythical counterpart the Lamia. Lamia’s serpent form was all along a mark placed on her by Apollonius, a mark rendered decipherable only at the very end of the poem when Apollonius unleashes his “demon eyes” and thus mechanism: “Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings” (Master and Emissary, 118; the Locke quotation is from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 370).

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It is satisfying to think of Apollonius as a “Basilisk” who had “all along” placed his mark of a “serpent form” on Lamia, but his association with blinkered rationalist philosophy is strong; as Sitterson notes, his mere sophistry is evident in his mistaken “revelation” of Lamia’s identity—she does not turn into a serpent, but vanishes (“Platonic Shades”, 202).94 And what is the cost of his exorcism of beauty and imagination, dramatized in the unequal contest between lovely woman and emotionally hardened old man? The death of loving human nature: And Lycius’ arms were empty of delight, As were his limbs of life, from that same night. On the high couch he lay—his friends came round— Supported him—no pulse, or breath they found, And, in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound. (2.307-311)

That “heavy” tells of a dead weight, the weight of human materiality devoid of the finer tones of existence, mediated by the imagination. Though this bleak picture is presented in strikingly imaginative terms, its literally extended social truth becomes manifest, in large degree, in the decades which follow Keats’s death.95 *** For Keats Lamia was certainly important, being the “opening poem” of his new volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. Allott points to the care he took “over its composition” (Introduction to the poem, KCP 615). She refers to his letter to Reynolds, 11 July 1819 (Letters, 268). Keats says he has proceeded pretty well with Lamia, finishing the 1st part which consists of about 400 lines. I have great hopes of success, because I make use of my Judgment more deliberately than I yet have done; but in Case of failure with the world, I shall find my content. 94

Though her vanishing is in accord with the source in Philostratus. It is difficult to credit Reiman’s dismissal of the imagination: “Who is to blame? . . . Not Lamia, merely a mythic product of the human imagination. Not Apollonius, merely looking with an objective eye at the facts of the physical world and human experience. Indeed, the narrator of the poem takes the same analytical view of his story and understands the situation much in the way that Apollonius himself does” (“Keats and the Humanist Paradox”, 668). 95

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His confidence in his own worth is well-founded, based on his own valuation of the quality of what he has produced and a careful self-scrutiny, which has freed him from the ambiguous indifference apparent in the “Ode on Indolence”: And here (as I know you have my good at heart as much as a Brother), I can only repeat to you what I have said to George—that however I shod like to enjoy what the competences of life procure, I am in no wise dashed at a different prospect. I have spent too many thoughtful days & moralized thro’ too many nights for that, and fruitless wod they be indeed, if they did not by degrees make me look upon the affairs of the world with a healthy deliberation.

His acceptance of the world and his place in it is marked by the imagery he uses, humble and wholesome, “sublunary legs” to aid him rather than “wings”, in a foreshadowing of the mood made manifest in his next enterprise of note, the ode “To Autumn”: I have of late been moulting: not for fresh feathers & wings: they are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs. I have altered, not from a Chrysalis into a butterfly, but the Contrary, having two little loopholes, whence I may look out into the stage of the world: and that world on our coming here I almost forgot.

The maturing of consciousness finds a correlative in the natural world, the ripened “corn”; even “if it had only took to ripening yesterday”, it is ready to be harvested: The first time I sat down to write, I cod scarcely believe in the necessity of so doing. It struck me as a great oddity—Yet the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market.

Keats’s lyric masterpiece is surely this ode, “To Autumn” (KCP 650), locus of a slow-moving but giant daemonic energy, that of a full potential reached, enjoyed, and stored.96 It is a disinterested energy, immersed in and submitting to mutability and transience. In its acceptance of change, it is stable, non-changing, as if sounding an underlying ground-bass of existence 96 It is important, though, to consider Reiman’s qualification: “Keats’s odes, sonnets, and other lyrics are true to the traditional function of lyric poetry. None is intended to present a rounded vision” (“Keats and the Humanist Paradox”, 661). The observation does not exclude the presence of a “rounded vision” in any one lyric, however.

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(as does, though in very different terms, Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”). Robert Mitchell, in noting that “the rhythm of its lines seems to stem from the seasonal suspension of animation they describe”, relates the poem to John Hunter’s previously mentioned distinction between “practical life” “manifested in actions”, and a state of “simple life”, which “implied that practical life was grounded in a more fundamental mode of vitality” (my emphasis). “A queer vitality persists in ‘To Autumn’s ‘stubble plains’ and ‘soft-dying day’, for both are linked to the simple life of the ‘store’ of granary seed, which remains in suspended animation during the winter” (Mitchell, “Suspended Animation”, 112). The letter to Reynolds of 21 September 1819 (Letters, 291-292) conveys something of the mood (in its absorbed appreciation—even of the “stubble plain”), but nothing of the power of the poem: How beautiful the season is now—How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather—Dian skies—I never lik’d stubble fields so much as now—Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm—in the same way that some pictures look warm—this struck me so much in my sunday’s walk that I composed upon it.

The poem itself, replete with the natural substances it both celebrates and embodies, is daemonic; but three daemonic presences are also at work within it. First, certain of its power resides in the way language is used; Keats continues in this same letter to Reynolds: I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn. He is the purest writer in the English Language. He has no French idiom, or particles like Chaucer—’tis genuine English Idiom in English words.

Keats implies, then, that such language is fully ripe, like the season. Perhaps Chatterton is the daemonic interlocuter who guides the course of the poem, and leaves his imprint upon it: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom friend of the maturing sun, Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run: (1-4)

Another Keatsian daemon is “the maturing sun”, Apollo, but not presented in the classical terms of Hyperion; he is engaged in the English countryside, his “maturing” heat moderated by “mists” and the “mellowness” of the “season”—a softness of influence hinted at in the gentle hum of the “m”

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sound in the alliteration, a sound which permeates the stanza, down to the “o’er-brimmed” “clammy cells” of the bees (11).97 Natural process is selfgenerated, all the elements working together, in what seems to be an inevitable posthuman harmony: To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core. To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells. (5-11)

This is a world of the benign production of garden produce, as it were, far removed from the consuming “maw” in Keats’s poem to Reynolds, where “The greater on the less feeds evermore” (101). Yet it is no less reflective of life generating more life; its truth, centred in “apples”, “gourds”, “hazels” with their “sweet kernels”, and honey, is as valid. It is, as Keats might have intended, in “balance” with the fact of sustenance derived from the consumption of other beings. The third daemonic figure I detect in the poem is the personification of Autumn, in the second stanza. It is at complete ease with itself and its activities: Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; (12-15)

The figure is identified in immersive terms, as both separate from the corn (“sitting”, “amid thy store”, “on a granary floor”), and at one with the corn, as her “hair” is “soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”. In the personification is “a slight suggestion of the classical figure of Ceres”, according to Ian Jack: “Keats’s portrayal of Autumn seated among the grain has also 97 A markedly Anglo-Saxon device, alliteration creates a tenuous link with Chatterton. This is just one example of the alliteration found throughout the poem (apart from the internally binding quality of its assonance and consonance). More significant, perhaps, are the sensuous images from Chatterton’s own daemonically inspired Aella: “Whanne Autumne blake and sonne-brente doe appere, / With hys goulde honde guylteynge the falleynge lefe, / Bryngeynge oppe Wynterr to folfylle the yere, / Beerynge uponne hys backe the riped shefe” (178-181); “Whann the fayre apple, rudde as even skie, / Do bende the tree unto the fructyle grounde” (184-185). Plumly relates the “autumnal Aella” to this ode (“Odes for Own Sake”, 164).

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something in common with such paintings as . . . the figure of Ceres in a landscape by Vouet”.98 If an appropriate classical embodiment of the season, she, like the Apollonian sun, is made particularly English by her context; as a harvester, she takes her midday rest in the corn-fields—the detail of the “spared” “swath” and its “twinèd flowers” adding a closelyobserved human touch, and the sense of the quotidian patterns created (poppies left untouched at various intervals) and followed (taking one’s rest) during a working day: Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers; (16-18)

Other activities are those of the “gleaner”, “keeping steady” her “laden head across a brook” (19-20),99 and the “cyder-press” worker, “patiently” witnessing the slow emergence of the cider, with its thickly realized “oozings” (21-22). The third stanza makes a point of dwelling in the present, Autumn being sufficient unto itself (like Keats’s nightingale)—despite the anticipation of a future season associated with song and renewal: Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too— While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue. (23-26)

The day is “soft-dying” (like the year itself), and “stubble-plains” replace the fully-grown wheat, and yet this day is beautified by the “bloom” of the “soft-barrèd” “clouds”, as are the “stubble-plains”, which are made “rosy”. The “choir” of “small gnats”, is hardly a “thing of beauty”, is almost insignificant, yet has its role to play in this moment of Autumn, “mourning” the “soft-dying day” with its “wailful” sound. An anthropomorphism, its presence is yet appropriate; and appropriate for the gnats themselves, who lead short lives: Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 98 Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 236. 99 As F. R. Leavis famously noted, “In the step from the rime-word ‘keep’, across (so to speak) the pause enforced by the line-division, to ‘Steady’ the balancing movement of the gleaner is enacted”. See F. R. Leavis, “Keats”, in English Critical Texts, ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 329.

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Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; (27-29)

The shifting movement of a community of gnats aloft is wedded to the intermittent presence of “the light wind”, a perfectly realized objective description. The wind itself is imbued with life or its absence (“lives or dies”), participating in the processes of the present. More sounds of nature are amassed in the final lines of the poem, again, appropriate to the season. The very final line, of course, is witness to the imminent change of season, and yet what it presents is also part of Autumn’s own moment: And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. (30-33)

The moment is passing, but is still present in the present-tense of the stanza, and in the audibly evoked presences of its creatures. The music of Autumn, not the “full-throated” song of spring’s nightingale, is nevertheless subtle and varied, the thin “wail” of the ephemeral gnats contrasting with the “loud bleating” of lambs (emphasised by the repeated “l” and “b” sounds), the cheerful and penetrating “singing” of “Hedge-crickets”, and the quieter “treble soft” “whistle” of the robin. The light, tremulous sounds associated with the word “twitter”, parallel the movements of the excited swallows, as they “gather” for migration. That “skies” rhymes with “dies”, provides an indirect suggestion of continuity in the face of endings: the skies are infinite and eternal, a backdrop to all the beginnings and endings on earth, but intimating in their continuity future beginnings and endings. *** The Fall of Hyperion (KCP 655) contains, in Moneta, mother of the Muses and goddess of memory,100 Keats’s most impressive daemon figure. Embodying existential disinterestedness, she yet insists on the poet’s role to alleviate the misery of the world, though this be second in importance to

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She is Mnemosyne in Hyperion.

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working in the world to do so.101 Before meeting her, the narrator passes through a veritable paradise, reminiscent of Eden:102 Methought I stood where trees of every clime, Palm, myrtle, oak, and sycamore, and beech, With plantain, and spice-blossoms, made a screen— In neighbourhood of fountains, by the noise Soft-showering in my ears, and, by the touch Of scent, not far from roses. (1.19-24)

This approach suggests the sacrality of the abundance of the earth, but it also—as the narrator feeds on “a feast of summer fruits” (1.29) within it and falls into a deep sleep—signals a turning point: I ate deliciously; And, after not long, thirsted, for thereby Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice, Sipped by the wandered bee, the which I took (1.40-43)

In “the cloudy swoon” which follows, he “sinks”, “Like a Silenus on an antique vase” (1.55-56), establishing, before the meeting with Moneta, the classical credentials of the narrative. When he wakes, he finds himself before a high “sanctuary”, among the abandoned finery of the inhabitants of Saturn’s shattered kingdom, depicted in Hyperion. What Keats had presented in that poem, was a first-hand account experienced by its characters. Here, he traverses the same ground, but, inspired more by Dante than Milton, does so through his own “vision”:103 I looked around upon the carvèd sides Of an old sanctuary with roof august, Builded so high it seemed that filmèd clouds Might spread beneath, as o’er the stars of heaven. 101

Coote calls the poem, “the unfinished epic of the vale of soul-making . . . which reaches into the heart of Keats’s mature philosophy to reinterpret his whole career” (Keats, 277). 102 Robert Graves provides a similarly sensuous vision of Eden from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, typical, Graves feels, of visionary accounts of Paradise. See his Oxford Addresses on Poetry (London: Cassell, 1962), 112. 103 Andrew Motion, Keats, 440. See also, Allott, introduction to the poem, KCP 656: “Traces of Milton’s influence are frequently apparent in the poem, but its reconstruction in the form of a vision, the cadence in a number of passages, and various incidental details are strongly affected . . . by Keats’s reading of Dante’s Divina Commedia”.

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So old the place was, I remembered none The like upon the earth. (1.61-66)

The sombre nature of the sight betokens an experience far different from the realm of sensuous enjoyment recently experienced, as if Keats were about to question an early maxim—“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”:104 I raised My eyes to fathom the space every way— The embossed roof, the silent massy range Of columns north and south, ending in mist Of nothing, then to eastward, where black gates Were shut against the sunrise evermore. (1.81-86)

It is now that he sees Moneta, “An image, huge of feature as a cloud” (1, l.88). She is implacably direct, showing the indifference of an immortal to human weakness, but at the same time testing the narrator’s commitment to his search for what Coote calls, “some spiritual understanding of the nature of suffering and the role of the poet in exploring and trying to heal this” (Keats, 277). Her words are directed at the narrator: “If thou canst not ascend These steps, die on that marble where thou art. Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust, Will parch for lack of nutriment—thy bones Will wither in a few years, and vanish so That not the quickest eye could find a grain Of what thou now art on that pavement cold.” (1.107-113)

Her account of death and the insubstantial nature of human remains is a stage in the annihilation of his selfhood. He must next undergo a physical challenge, that of mounting the steps leading up to her presence: “The sands of thy short life are spent this hour, And no hand in the universe can turn Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.” (1.114-117)

She refers to the “leaves” of incense trees, burning in her honour. Keats thus indirectly refers to pre-Jovian or Saturnian worship, as he had learned from Potter’s Antiquities that “broken Fruits, Leaves, or Acorns” were “the only 104

Letter to Bailey, 22 November 1817 (Letters, 37).

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Sacrifices of the Ancients . . . the most primitive Offerings were only ȤȜȠĮȚ, green Herbs”.105 Though “Prodigious seemed the toil” (1.121), the narrator succeeds, and asks for clarity of understanding regarding life: “purge off” “my mind’s film” (1.145-146). Her response accords with Keats’s understanding of “the vale of Soul-making”: “None can usurp this height . . . But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest. All else who find a haven in the world, Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days, If by a chance into this fane they come, Rot on the pavement where thou rotted’st half.” (1.147-153)

A self half-rotted is not a very encouraging image, with its sense of worthlessness further intensified by Moneta’s distinction between those “Who love their fellows even to the death”, and “Labour for mortal good”, and those “dreaming things”, such as the narrator. The former are “No dreamers weak, They seek no wonder but the human face; No music but a happy-noted voice— They come not here, they have no thought to come— And thou art here, for thou art less than they.” (1.162-166)

Her criticism of poets is severe:106 “What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself. Think of the earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven?” (1.167-171)

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John Potter, Archaelogica Graeca: or, The Antiquities of Greece (London: G. Strahan, 1751), 213. 106 Hoagwood draws attention to these lines in writing of the force of social and historical issues conditioning the poet’s work, based on “external pressures” “to reach a reading public”, a “desire to treat public issues”, and “personal immediate experience of working in the public mode” through the political Otho the Great and King Stephen fragment. They contribute to the creation of the work as much as the poet’s individual notions (though these are also conditioned by the socio-political pressures of his times). See Terence Allan Hoagwood, “Keats and Social Context: Lamia”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29, no.4 (1989): 686-687.

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She again draws a contrast, first outlining the lot of people engaged in ordinary life: “Every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low— The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:” (1.171-174)

Moving on to the contrast, we see that it prefaces a backhanded concern for poets, by which they are afforded a measure of relief: “Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shared, Such things as thou art are admitted oft Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile, And suffered safe beneath this statue’s knees.” (1.175-181)

The poetic “dreamer” is granted his pleasant visions in recompense for the burden of his consciousness, which “Bears more woe than all his sins deserve”. Self-deprecating, the narrator is pleased to be “favoured for unworthiness” (1.182), but sees he has a “sickness not ignoble” (1.184): though “unworthy” in comparison with ordinary humankind, he has “insight into suffering”, as Allott puts it (KCP 669n). The exchange with Moneta lays bare Keats’s concerns about the value of the poet, but enables him to shift from almost disgusted disillusion to qualified regard, expressed in “sickness not ignoble”. However, in a passage which Woodhouse feels Keats “intended to erase” (KCP 669n), Moneta makes a further distinction: “The poet and the dreamer are distinct, Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes. The one pours out a balm upon the world, The other vexes it.” (1.199-202)

Her meaning is that the one offers comfort, while the other either offers the truth that involves the darker chambers of life, or points to a perfection beyond normal human attainment. Branded a “dreamer”, the narrator assumes “a Pythia’s spleen”, to excoriate poetic pretenders, showing another aspect of Keats’s determination to understand the value of his gift; his tutelary daemon can perhaps aid him in refining the distinction made by this still unknown giant figure: “Apollo! Faded, far-flown Apollo!

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Chapter Six Where is thy misty pestilence to creep Into the dwellings, through the door crannies, Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers And careless hectorers in proud bad verse.” (1.204-208)

The intensity of the final two lines of his outburst, marks it as somewhat adolescent, and best erased, but at least indicates the extent of his passion for his calling:107 Though I breathe death with them it will be life To see them sprawl before me into graves. (1.209-210)

“Death” bringing “life”—the Neoplatonic adage suffers a serious reduction here. With the passage erased, Keats creates a better context for introducing the identity of Moneta, placing her in Saturn’s world of Hyperion, as the last survivor of that world. His description of her marks her as a daemon supreme. She parts her veils: Then saw I a wan face, Not pined by human sorrows, but bright-blanched By an immortal sickness which kills not.

Her “immortal sickness” indicates a continuing presence, but in a declined state because the ancient pieties are not heeded, though the forces which once prompted them still exist. The narrator’s ruthlessly mediated selfscrutiny (a form of self-annihilation, though his ego certainly remains active) is evidence of this. Here, indeed, is a death-in-life that accumulates the “constant change” of the aura of death, as if whiter than white (having “passed” “The lily and the snow”), with no outcome: a terrible deathliness with no end in sight: It works a constant change, which happy death Can put no end to; deathwards progressing To no death was that visage; it had passed The lily and the snow; and beyond these I must not think now, though I saw that face— 107

“We can imagine him at a critical moment in his struggle towards self-definition, at an end but not quite at a beginning. He can reject the dream that corrodes reality but can find no place for the dream that refreshes it; he must lump the fanatic and the dreamer together. Keats is attacking romantic illusions without having liberated himself from romantic preconceptions; he is not distinguishing the poetry of the dream from the immortal longing it may inspire” (Wagner, “Keats: ‘Ode to Psyche’”, 41).

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But for her eyes I should have fled away. (1.256-264)

Only “her eyes” offer respite from the dread posthuman perspective of endlessly pining immortality. Though “benign”, the eyes do not see him. In what follows, her daemonic posthumanism becomes most apparent. Her eyes held me back, with a benignant light, Soft-mitigated by divinest lids Half-closed, and visionless entire they seemed Of all external things—they saw me not, But in blank splendour beamed like the mild moon, Who comforts those she sees not, who knows not What eyes are upward cast. (1.265-271)

This figurative “mild moon” is not the personal, enchanting moon of Endymion. Though the eyes “beam”, their “splendour” is “blank”, impersonal, giving “comfort” without regard for who exactly sees. Before the narrator experiences an influx of poetic power in similar terms to those experienced by Apollo in Hyperion, he addresses her in her relation to that god, Keats’s own patron divinity, god of poetry and healing: “By great Apollo, thy dear foster child” (1.286). Apollo in the earlier poem had said: “Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.” (Hyperion 3.113-120)

Now the narrator says: there grew A power within me of enormous ken To see as a god sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade. (1.302-306)

Has he assumed the mantle of Apollo? Only for as long as Moneta grants him the vision of a fallen race of gods; at the end of the Canto, he must:

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And his “daring” cannot take him much further; the fragment concludes after the sixty-one lines of Canto Two. The lesson, as it was in Hyperion, though, is clear: the poet is witness to the mutability of the world, where pain and suffering must be taken into account (and perhaps supplemented by action) as well as beauty, which only becomes fully manifest when this happens. Judith Humphrey’s approach is too dismissive; she overlooks what the poem achieves: “The Fall consists of a dream, a dream-within-a-dream, a heightened state of consciousness within the inner dream, and finally a reintroduction of the epic drama. The succession of mental states which leads up to the reappearance of the gods emphasizes Keats’s inner struggle to achieve epic vision” (“Poet Against Himself”, 43). Brittany Pladek is guided by the specifics of the poem itself: “The poem suggests that one reason art, and poetry in particular, is worthwhile is because it preserves suffering like Moneta’s. In this sense, poetry acts as a sort of permanent contagion, an ‘immortal sickness’ that can successively infect generations of readers with the ‘sickness not ignoble’ necessary for developing souls”.108 What is also clear, is that poet or dreamer need access to a greater power or force, the “high phrases” of what is “beyond the human”, the daemonic accent of a vast Muse-associated “memory” (and the comprehensiveness of knowledge it implies), in order to encompass all that is necessary in “the vale of Soul-making”. *** The final poem I want to look at, once thought to be Keats’s last, is the “Bright Star” sonnet (KCP 736), written in its completed form to Fanny Brawne in the period October to November, 1819. A Shakespearean sonnet, it thus embodies his continuous allegiance to the Bard. Though not his last poem, it was nevertheless written out for Severn “in his copy of Shakespeare’s poems” during his and Keats’s voyage to Italy in September and October 1820, a few months prior to the poet’s death, and hence was of obvious significance for him.109 It expresses a more direct and intimate need

108

See Brittany Pladek, “‘In sickness not ignoble’: Soul-making and the Pains of Identity in the Hyperion Poems”, Studies in Romanticism 54, no.3 (2015): 422. 109 See these details in Allott, Introduction to the poem (KCP 736-737). She notes, in particular, “Since 1924, when Keats’s journal-letter to Tom Keats of 25-27 June

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for daemonic intervention than the more abstract Fall of Hyperion, and is linked, obviously, to a personal relationship, rather than his relationship to his life and his craft. And yet the imaginative scale of this need is in contrast with the human modesty of his personal desire: Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors; (1-8)

This octave imagines and wants a posthuman “steadfastness”, but not posthuman embodiment: not the solitary watchfulness of the ever-constant Pole Star, with its “eternal lids apart”, observing the oceans below (also solitary, in their role as “nature’s patient, sleepless eremite”, involved in the perpetual “pure ablution” of the earth), or the white anonymity of “mountains” and “moors” covered with a “soft-fallen mask” of “snow”. The sestet, then, reveals a commitment to the human, but according to this posthuman “steadfastness”. As Susan Wolfson says, “the steadfast qualities of the stelar ideal are given a vital, sensuous relation to fair human love”:110 No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. (9-14)

The supernally-centred vision of the octave, gives way to the human sensuality of the sestet, openly erotic: “my fair love’s ripening breast”, “sweet unrest”, “swoon to death”. Posthuman “steadfastness”, however, requires eternal experience of the elements of temporal sensuality: one needs to “so live ever”, as if buoyed by a daemonic power which can relate to the human scale of things, though it would extend it eternally, rather than the impersonally cosmic, or even divine, as with Moneta. The alternative, 1818 was first published, the poem has been seen to parallel Keats’s description of Windermere in this letter”. 110 Susan Wolfson, “Late Lyrics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Susan J. Wolfson, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 115.

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to “swoon to death”, plays with the Elizabethan figure for an orgasm, but also acknowledges the inevitability of death—a “steadfast” fact of existence, of living in “the vale of Soul-making”. From this point of view, a daemonic transport yet takes place, making the end of life—loving and knowing that one is beloved—the experience of a type of ecstasy. From first to last in Keats, the daemonic cohabits with the human in intimate terms.

CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSION

Blake, Shelley and Keats, in their very different ways, express the energy of that which comes from “beyond the human”. First, each is aware of the potency of the figures and ideas stemming from poetic tradition, and is able to incorporate the authoritative resonances of this tradition in his work. Each does so because of his apprehension of a lack in our relation with existence, centred in the withdrawal of respectful piety from our interaction with the world. Piety is rooted in wonder at the manifestations of life, manifestations which are otherwise taken for granted because of the veil of familiarity which obscures our vision, and because of a mechanistic, rationalistic conception of life’s processes and creations. This natural piety is inherent in Neoplatonic understanding, where seemingly quotidian elements of existence provide the means to deep spiritual awareness. Second, as we have seen in the course of this book, the poets, if drawing at times on such an understanding in a general way, also express the inherent capacity in themselves to recognize and appreciate the finer aspects of existence, far richer in their conceptions than the bland label “spiritual” can express. To this end, all three are committed to what Blake terms self-annihilation and Keats self-destroying—a type of decommissioning of the ego, which enables the flow of selfless empathy on the level of shared Being. Blake, aware of the contemporary lack of piety from an early age, as seen in his poem “To the Muses”, advocates a cleansing of “the doors of perception” to liberate the five senses from the bondage of conformity and the regulatory perception of existence he embodies in Urizen. Driven to extraordinary lengths by the revolutionary currents of his age, he extends his quest for the liberation of human consciousness into both the far reaches of the cosmos and the human mind. His mythopoeic range of vision exceeds that of Milton, however learned that might be, to evoke far more than the spiritual and spatial dichotomy between the Heavenly and Hellish. The passions and actions of his giant forms are involved in realms or dimensions which touch the limits of human imaginative capability, to extend the mind and its capacities throughout the posthuman universe. At the same time, immensity of awareness, giving intimations of epochal change at the felt

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level of the “pulses”, as Keats might say, does not overlook supposedly marginal actors, worms and clods of clay, for instance, invested with profound existential significance. His liberatory vision also encompasses social justice, the plight of children, the poor, women, the hypocritical circumscriptions of religion and law. The injustices which plague human community are reflected in large by huge daemonic forms, in a way that suggests the magnitude of what is at stake in the cleansing of the doors of perception. What is also clear is that a single human mind is the key. An immensity of turmoil and confusion is overcome if a single human consciousness precipitates its own cleansing through “the Real Man, the Imagination” (BCW 878), whereby self-annihilation is achieved, the claims of the ego are jettisoned, perception is opened to inherently sacral infinity (a state of enlightened consciousness), and the Zoas of individual psychology—in their “fallen” state, cold reason, rage, limited imagination and weakened instinct—are purified as Wisdom, Love, Imagination and Instinct. In anticipation of this purification, Albion recants his curse on humankind, which has created an “Abyss of sorrow and torture” on earth (Jerusalem 1.23.38-39), paralleling Prometheus’s recantation of his curse on Jupiter (with its own blighting consequences), in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which heralds the beginning of a new age guided by universal love (1.303). The poets’ historical moment might inform this synchronicity, as the displacement of a past order on a giant scale is also seen in Keats’s Hyperion, where Apollo assumes Hyperion’s mantel, to champion the twin Keatsian causes of poetry and healing (or social duty in general, as expressed in The Fall of Hyperion). In the background of these visions of social transformation might be the Platonic tradition of a golden age. Raine, though, wonders if Shelley had seen some of Blake’s work, due to the older poet’s connection with Mary Wollstonecraft, and notes that “Blake’s Urizen and that God-simulating Satan whose image his Milton casts down is uncommonly like Shelley’s Jupiter” (Defending Ancient Springs, 147). Whatever the case, a continuity does exist. Blake’s Poetic Genius of the Imagination, however, is unique in being one with his conception of Jesus, the epitome of enlightened awareness for Blake. The coupling tells of the sacred nature of the Blakean Imagination, a daemonic instrument certainly not fully available to all of us, but, if heeded, at least able to probe beyond the “veil of familiarity” (Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Criticism, 155) and provide some intimation and appreciation of enlarged perception, which can extend outwards into a deep valuing of the earth, as in Blake’s central tenet: “every thing that lives is holy”. McGilchrist, indeed, quoting Shelley, underlines the importance of stripping “the veil of

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familiarity from the world” in order to foster a new perception of it and realize that “all that exists is more than we could ever be in a position fully to understand; that, far from being much less than we imagine, we are almost certainly far more than we can imagine” (Matter With Things, 76, 79). For Shelley, the Platonic cosmic vision of The Daemon of the World draws in part on contemporary astronomical knowledge to speculate upon what he will later come to call “the great miracle” of existence (“On Life”, Shelley’s Criticism, 53). As it does for William Drummond, for Shelley custom obscures the true nature of material things, leading to the privileging and adoption of false perspectives regarding practical life. Removing the film of custom reveals the wonder inherent in the various outer manifestations of life, a material bent that governs much of Shelley’s thought, but which does not exclude awareness of finer modes of perception. Ianthe’s excursus into the cosmos involves a type of astral projection of the imagination, and the ensuing extension of human thought into realms of posthuman vision, where, as the Defence of Poetry has it, the mind is “awakened and enlarged” by being “rendered the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought” (Shelley’s Criticism, 131). In Alastor, what is perceived through the mind and projected into the senses has a fatal impact on concrete experience, telling, in negative terms, of the interfusion of consciousness and matter. For Prometheus the same interfusion seems operative, but in a positive coupling, where his conscious awareness of the effects of his curse chimes with the material alleviation of those effects (as if in accord with an albeit destined moment). If the concluding vision in Prometheus Unbound seems an idealistic elevation of our capacity for good, that state has yet been arrived at through a carefully considered change of consciousness situated in the core embodiment of enlightened humankind, as in Blake. Calling it “idealistic” might reflect on the lack of foresight of our own still-manacled minds. Or it might reflect an inherent cynicism, which qualifies any sense of humanity’s future capacity for good. As Shelley wrote in the “Essay on Christianity”, “Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the wisdom of universal love” (Shelley’s Criticism, 109). “Casting aside” such chains—again, as in Blake—is the office of the imagination, as reason alone cannot overcome the myriad prejudices and checks associated with human existence. Thus, through the enlargement of perception encouraged by imagination, something of practical existential value is achieved, an awareness, indeed, of the “universal love” contingent upon Shelley’s version of stripped-down self-annihilation, where perception is not impaired by self-interest, and the

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wonder inherent in all manifestations of life is revealed. We find, in the Defence: “The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own”. He continues, offering an almost utilitarian regimen, as it were: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own”. Here are shades of Blake’s “Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love”, the agents of transformative social empathy; “imagining intensely”, through practise (“in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb”), can begin to change consciousness (Shelley’s Criticism, 131). Transcendent presence is apparent in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc”, but in both cases (although Shelley invests Beauty with a sense of the sacred) can be seen as involving the sensitivity of consciousness to the inherent operations of material existence. Nevertheless, the sense of something greater than and “beyond the human” in both poems is what is important, because of the respect for this “something greater” that is expressed (a form of piety, though no hint of religious doctrine is involved). The same is true of “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark”. Shelley has no need to evoke another dimension; his sense of wonder in the ordinary manifestations of life is enough: “Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing” (“On Life”, Shelley’s Criticism, 52). As with Blake, these manifestations range from the cosmic to the supposedly marginal, from the “interminable wilderness / Of worlds” to “the lightest leaf” and “the meanest worm” (Daemon of the World 1.175185). But, as in the case of that mingling of passive receptivity and active perception involved in the unpredictable (and hence possibly autonomous) visitations of Intellectual Beauty, he is sensitive not only to that within himself which comes from “beyond” his ordinary self through imaginative “exercise”, but also to a permeative “Power”, a “universal being”, with its own “will”: We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will. (“Essay on Christianity”, Shelley’s Criticism, 90, 91)

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This Power is also adverted to four years later in a passage from A Defence: “evanescent visitations of thought and feeling” are as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it. (Shelley’s Criticism, 154)

But if a “diviner”, daemonic nature “interpenetrates” “through our own”, Shelley qualifies the possibility (though he is well-acquainted with Platonic daemonology, as The Daemon of the World, for one, testifies). It is “as it were” (in the subjunctive) such an interpenetration, imaged as the indeterminate “footsteps” “of a wind over the sea”. What he evokes, though, is an experience of the mind participating in the mystery of its own functioning, correlative in its mysteriousness with the actual visitation of a “nature” not our own, and thus, in its own way, daemonic. Though in his “Essay on Christianity” he does write of a “Benignant Principle” centred in Love, he uses Christ as expounder of this idea—who thereby reflects “the loveliness and majesty of his own nature” (Shelley’s Criticism, 96-97). Perhaps intimations of a “diviner nature” are the closest Shelley can come to actual belief in divinity, for all his Platonism and for all his intellectual openness, a fact which does not limit his daemonic expressiveness or his posthumanist sensibility. Keats has a fluid sense of selfhood, which can absorb or extend into other beings or states of awareness. From Blake’s point of view, he is thus naturally imbued with a capacity for self-annihilation. The perceptual distance such traversing enables might cause him to experience unusual degrees of imaginative immersion, as dramatized by Endymion’s enchantment by Cynthia, a daemonic embodiment of posthuman beauty. This intense awareness of beauty in otherness, or empathy with the other, would prove alienating if not accompanied by a strong sense of actuality, as in Endymion’s not being overcome by his initial inability to retain Cynthia, and by his taking a seemingly earthly lover instead (an option denied by the daemon-enchanted Poet in Alastor). A humble sparrow or poor baited bear might equally empty Keats of human selfhood, but in the confines of the quotidian sphere of their own minutely realized concrete existence (Coote, Keats, 59). And yet his sensuous relation to felt experience, even when dealing with the demi-gods of Hyperion, can, as it can with Shelley, evoke a sense of transcendence which borders on spiritual experience. I think, for example, of our almost being teased out of thought by the haunting account of posthuman provenance in the “ditty” concerning Endymion’s loving encounter with Cynthia:

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Chapter Seven ’tis a ditty Not of these days, but long ago ’twas told By a cavern wind unto a forest old; And then the forest told it in a dream To a sleeping lake, whose cool and level gleam A poet caught as he was journeying To Phoebus’s shrine; and in it he did fling His weary limbs, bathing an hour’s space, And after, straight, in that inspirèd place He sang the story up into the air, Giving it universal freedom. (2.827-839)

The ditty comes from “beyond the human” but can communicate with human sensibility; it is daemonic in that sense. But its daemonism is associated with natural posthuman sources, a “cavern wind”, a “forest old”, a “sleeping lake”, all imbued with fellow-consciousness, with the capacity of interconnectivity. “Phoebus” is to remain Keats’s principal tutelary daemon, whose shrine is the object of the inspirited poet’s quest in the above lines, making him a fitting singer of the story, Keats’s own embedded doppelgänger. The “universal freedom” of the final line is an acknowledgement of the human and posthuman resonances of what is expressed in the song. It permeates Being. Keats here, and throughout his poetry, seems to intuit what Capra refers to as “the notion of the embodied mind” currently being “developed in cognitive science”, broached near the beginning of Chapter One, where the sense of unity of body and mind “transcends not only the separation of mind and body, but the separation of self and world”, as all of existence comprises a network of interacting components (Hidden Connections, 68-69). But more than this, if attuned to the unity of existence of the earth and its creatures, Keats is also alert to the inspiriting of material substance by a force other than a material one: there are “sparks of the divinity in millions”, and these sparks “are God”, fully realized when the millions acquire “Souls” through immersion in the forces of existence (Letters, 249-251). The three Romantics in this book are intensely aware of this force, and they devoted their lives to conveying its significance for the world. We are free not to benefit from the expressions and insights of their refined sensibilities, but we thereby turn our backs on a source of hope and inspiration that might otherwise help relieve present conditions on our earth, and, indeed, help lead to the transformative awareness urged by Iain McGilchrist:

Conclusion I believe we have systematically misunderstood the nature of reality, and chosen to ignore, or silence, the minority of voices that have intuited as much and consistently maintained that this is the case. Now we have reached the point where there is an urgent need to transform both how we think of the world and what we make of ourselves. (Matter With Things, 10)

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INDEX

Abelion linked to Apollo and Albion, 25 Achilles, 33-6, 345, 346 Ackroyd, Peter, 39, 48, 178, 179, 210, 424, 435 Adam Kadmon, 157, 195, 196 Aeolian lyre, 319, see also “Eolian harp” Aers, David, 78, 84-5, 424 Aeschylus, 225, 263-4, 268, 430 Prometheus Bound, 268 Aesop, 96 Agamemnon, 34-5, 225 Agnes, Saint, 355, 356, 360, 361 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, 6, 424 Ahasuerus, 256 Alaimo, Stacy, 376-7, 424 Alchemical “physics”, 150 Algonquin language, 194 Allott, Miriam, 3, 14, 328, 331-2, 341-2, 45-7, 353, 355, 361, 364, 368, 370, 374, 383, 385, 388, 401-2, 408, 411, 414, 432 American War of Independence, 84 Amos (book of Bible), 61 Anacreon, 323 Anacreontics, 323 Anima Mundi, 239 Ankarsjö, Magnus, 215 Antoinette, Marie, 134 Aphrodite, 36 as daimonic principle of sexual attraction, 36 Apollo, 25, 34-6, 45, 178, 217, 352, 354, 397, 404, 413, 418 as Keats’s tutelary daemon, 411 Apuleius, 6, 364 Ariel as type of daemon, 28

Ariosto Orlando Furioso, 399 Aristotle, 76, 302, 307, 353, 383, 424, 426 Analytics, 76 Arnould-Bloomfield, Elisabeth, 141, 424 astral projection, 226, 435 Athene, 29, 31, 33, 35, 345 as goddess of wisdom, 31 branching olive significance, 29 Bacchus, 373-374, 399, 400, See also “Dionysus”, Bacon, Francis, 24 Bailey, Benjamin, 335, 339, 346, 353, 383, 384, 409 owned Thomas Taylor’s translation of Homer when visited by Keats at Oxford, 353 Baker, Carlos, 226 Basire, James, 25, 112 Bate, Walter Jackson, 363-4, 366, 424, 427 Beelzebub, 65, 124 Bennington, Geoffrey, 127, 428 Berkeley, George, 299, 437 Berkeleyan, 298, 305 Best, Geoffrey, 111 bicameral mind, 7 Black Prince, 42 Blackwood’s Magazine, 391 Blake, Catherine (the poet's wife), 184 Blake, William (general) 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 13, 32, 34, 60, 74, 91, 98, 113, 136, 142, 151, 164, 165,

444 168, 193, 417, 424-5, 427-8, 4299, 441 Blakes’s personae, places and ideas Ability to admire and condemn almost simultaneously, 59 Ahania, 129,142-4, 148,163-4 Ahania (consort of Urizen), 148 Albion (country), 25, 78, 88, 148, 164, 166, 170, 173, 260, 418 Albion’s resemblance to current state of world, 192 Albion (character), 72, 81,130,148,156, 180 Blake link with Shelley, 260 Albion recants his curse, 192 Albion’s wrathful Prince, 130 Babylon, 169 Basire, Blake apprentice of, 25 Beulah, 150-69, 183,193,194,198 All Beulah laments fall of Jesus, 193 Bromion, 77-108,117 Cathedron’s Looms, 171 mortal fabric woven here, 171 Chariot of fire, 168 Caiaphas, 211 Children of Los, 175 Continual forgiveness of Sin, 186 Covering Cherub, 98,173,179,183 Christian beliefs, 31 Christian polytheism, 10 Corrosives, importance of 65 Dark Satanic Mills, 168 Daughters of Albion, 78,81-3, 86,89,95,105,110,129, 132,169 Daughters of Beulah, 179, 194 Daughters of Inspiration, 53, 183

Index Daughters of Memory (Muses), 53, 93, 183 Demonic Triad, 139 doors of perception cleansed, 66 double vision, 82 Druidism, 169-70,195, 203,214 Emanations (embodied female consorts of Zoas), 148 Enion, 148-51,157,175 Enion (consort of Tharmas), 148 Enitharmon, 131, 134-138, 141-2, 148-9, 152, 154-5, 160-63, 166, 169,170-71 Enitharmon (consort of Los), 148 Enitharmon as Space, 178 Eno, 150-51 Erin as character, 194, 201 Eternal moment, 150,215-16 Eternity in love with productions of time, 67, 254 Euclidian geometry, 43 Every thing that lives is holy 50,72,77,101,104,154, 167,173,230,418 Eye sees more than Heart knows, 79 Fool sees not same tree wise man sees, 68 Fool persisting in folly becomes wise, 68 Forgiveness, power of, 201 Four-fold London, 170 Fullness of moment in Time. See Eternal moment Fuzon, 138,141-2 Giants of Albion as Deists, 209 Golgonooza, 170, 173-4,190-1, 214 Hand as active agent of spiritual diminution, 189205 Hunt brothers as Hand, 182 Harvest & Vintage, 174,185

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human “I give you the end of a golden string” from “To the Christians” Jerusalem, 206 Hunter, John, 47, 382 Il Penseroso illustration shows Neoplatonic understanding, 45 Jerusalem (character in poem), 72,185,198-205 Jerusalem as Emanation of Jesus and Albion, 185 Jerusalem in every individual, 199 Jesus,169,171,180, 188, 195-6, 203, 210, 418 Jesus as Divine Delusion, 180 Jesus as epitome of enlightened awareness, 418 Jesus the Imagination, 195-6, 203 Jesus’s last words, 188 Jesus and Minute Particulars, 210 Jesus as reprobate, 169, 171 Lamb symbolic of divine incarnation, 106 Last Judgment, 65,146,148,170,183-5 Looking through, not with eye, 79 Los, 25, 125, 135, 138, 140-1, 144-55,160-73, 178,185,189,190-91, 202-3 “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s”, Los in Jerusalem 191 Los as Luvah in Eternity, 148 Los as Sol reversed, 25 Los as Time, 178 Spectre as pride and selfrighteousness of Los, 189 Luvah, 163,183,192-4,202

445

Mary, Christ’s mother, not a virgin, 204 Marygold-nymph as “a radically fluid entity”, 82 Mental Fight, 166,168 Messiah, 71,167,172 Milton of Devil’s party without knowing it, 72 Minute Particulars, 210 Minute Particulars as Men, 211 Nature is Imagination itself, 59 Nobodaddy, 139 Non Entity, 129,149 Non-literal nature of hell, 49 Ololon, emanation of Milton, 167,176-83 Oothoon, 77-108, 117-18, 122, 132-5, 143, 154, 164-5,169, 198-9, 203-4, 230 Orc, 130-42,148,156-9, 161,163,319 Poetic Genius, 55-6, 58, 67, 72-4, 76,90,106,110, 125,128-9, 171-72, 181-2, 191,201,297,418 Portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man (lions, wolves, raging sea, sword), 69 Printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, 66 Prisons built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion, 69 Prophet as keen observer of present events, 128 Rahab, 180 Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever 55 Reason as outward circumfrence of bodily energy, 70 Reprobate as Calvinist category ironized, 169

Index

446 Rintrah, 60, 61, 62, 63,85,112,134,185 Satan’s Grain of Sand in Lambeth, 198 Sea of Time and Space, 27 Self-annihilation, 168,185,187,213,224,417-18 Sin, continual forgiveness of, 186 Sipsop the Pythagorean, 48 Socrates, 211 Anytus, Melitus and Lycon as Socrates’s accusers, imaged by Blake, 211 Sons of Albion, 190,198 Sons of Los, 175 Spectre, 99,100,160-61,166, 168, 170,172,179,190,191,203, 209,214 Spectre as pride and selfrighteousness of Los, 189 Spirit and vision defined, 178 Stars as reductive rationalism, 165 “States” as temporary passages, 193 Taylor, Thomas, direct influence on Blake, 43 Tharmas, 148,151,161,163,166 Tharmas as Thaumas or Wonder, 148 Theotormon, 77-108,117, 163,203,205 Tirzah, 174 “To Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem”, Jersusalem 208 Tygers of wrath wiser than horses of instruction, 69,85 Udanadan, 170 Ulro as natural world of delusion, 79,176,190,194

Urizen, 41,67,83,95, 101,113,123,126,130-45, 151,158-63,166,170-72, 214 Ahania’s different perspective on a loving Urizen, 143 Urizen as Eternal Priest, 148 Urizen as manipulator of human psychology, 159 Vala, 60,146,148,155-7,163, 192-3,202 Vala (as consort of Orc), 148 Vegetable Memory, 176 Watch Fiends of Satan, 198 Without Contraries is no progression, 63 Zoas, 129,146-47,155,159163,166-67,187,192,418 Zoas and possible link to Bryant’s Zoan, 25 deliverance of Zoas, 192 joining of Four Zoas, 212 as “living creatures”, 166, 215 reconciliation of Zoa and Emanation parallel in Shelley, 251 Blake’s prose and dramatic writing All Religions Are One, 48, 55, 62, 67, 72, 95, 106, 125, 201, 297 An Island in the Moon, 45, 46, 71, 428 Mr Inflammable Gass, 47 phlogiston, 46 Quid, 47 Annotations to Bishop Watson’s Letters to Thomas Paine, 128 Annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, 48 Annotations to Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Concerning Divine Love, 48,51 “Contemplation”, 43, 44 Descriptive Catalogue, A, 178 King Edward the Third, 39, 42 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 11, 45, 47, 48, 49,51, 55-6, 59-77, 83, 131, 167, 169, 188, 218, 427, 435, 438 Devil and Angel imposing phantasies reciprocally, 75 “Proverbs of Hell”, 67, 124 “Memorable Fancy, A”, 64 There Is no Natural Religion, 48,53,67,201,297 “To the Christians”, 206 “To the Deists”, 200 “To the Jews", 194 “To the Public”, 186 “Vision of the Last Judgment, A”, 31, 43, 53, 79 Blake’s lyric poetry “Auguries of Innocence”, 60 “Blind Man’s Buff”, 39 “Chimney Sweeper, The” Innocence, 108 “Crystal Cabinet, The”, 153 “Divine Image, The”, 50 “Fair Elenor”, 39 “Gwin, King of Norway”, 39 “Holy Thursday” Experience, 118 “Holy Thursday” Innocence, 48,110, 113 “Human Abstract, The”, 160 “Imitation of Spenser, An”, 39 “Infant Sorrow” from the Songs of Experience, 44 “Introduction” Experience, 115 “Introduction” Innocence, 106 “Little Black Boy, The”, 113 “London”, 69, 97, 101, 120, 121 “Mad Song”, 44, 97 “Mary”, 81

447

“Poems from the Note-book 1793”, 139 “Poison Tree, A”, 199 Songs of Experience, 50, 69, 97, 105, 106, 115, 182 Songs of Innocence and Experience as single work, 105-127 “To Summer”, 41, 43 “To the Evening Star”, 40 “To the Muses”, 38,39, 41, 46, 56 “To Winter”, 40, 41 “Tyger, The”, 69, 115, 123, 129 Manichaean dualism, 69 Blake’s longer poems America, 128, 130-33, 136, 156 Book of Ahania, The, 67, 128, 129, 138, 142-4 Book of Los, The, 128, 138, 144-46 Europe, 122, 128, 133-35, 136 Everlasting Gospel, The, 204 First Book of Urizen, The, 128, 138-42 Four Zoas, The, 128, 129, 142, 145, 146-67, 168 Jerusalem, 128, 186-216 “To the Christians”, 206 “To the Deists”, 200 “To the Jews”, 194 “To the Public”, 186 Milton, 12, 60, 98, 117, 128, 129, 166-86 Albion begins to emerge, 172 atemporal simultaneity of events, 180 conjoining of Milton with his Emanation, 183 hermaphroditic Shadow, 172 Milton as “the Awakener”, 174

448 Milton descends into Blake’s garden, 179 Milton’s self-annihilation, 180 Spectre of Albion, 183 Spectre of Luvah, 183 Watch Fiends of Satan, 176 Wild Thyme and Lark as daemonic beings, 176 Poetical Sketches, 38 Song of Los, 128, 135-37 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 77-105 Blake, Robert (poet’s brother), 106 Blanco, Maria del Pilar, 2, 424 Bloom, Harold, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 43, 105, 108, 128, 130, 146, 186, 210, 212, 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 279, 329, 357, 375, 425 Bloom's anxiety of influence, 352 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 24, 431 Boehme, Jacob, 16, 53, 76, 127, 138, 147, 150, 197, 425 Mysterium Magnum, 53,125 Boethius, Hector (Boece, Scottish philosopher), 393 Bonnycastle, John Introduction to Mensuration and Practical Geometry, 43 Boulger, James, 339, 378, 425 Bowra, C. M., 277-8, 425 Bradley, A. C., 332, 425 Braidotti, Rosi, 5 Brennan, Joseph, 126, 425 Brent, Charlotte, 22 Briseis, 34 Brisman, Susan Hawk, 267, 268, 425 Broglio, Ron, 7 Bronowski, Jacob, 177, 178, 425 Brown, Homer, 367 Bruno, Giordano, 4 Brutus Trojan forefather of Britain, 42 Bryant, Ellen, 371

Index Bryant, Jacob, 25, 112, 184, 194, 221, 425, 436 reversal of divine names, 153 Zoan, 147 Buddhism, 3, 434 Bullard, Paddy, 5 Bunyan, John, 212 Burke, Edmund, 5, 156, 426, 428 Burkean Sublime, 5 Burton, Robert Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 355, 385-7, 393-4, 426 Burwick, Frederick, 20, 21, 426 Butts, Thomas (friend of Blake), 82 Byrne, Patrick Hugh, 76, 426 Byron, George Gordon 6th Baron, 14, 15, 18, 426, 434 Don Juan, 15 Cabala, 157, 128, 148, 195-6 Caesar, 6, 217, 438 Callari, Manuela, 313, 426 Cambridge Platonists, 5 Cameron, Kenneth Neil, 256, 260, 426 Campbell, Joseph, 299, 331, 424 Capra, Fritjof, 3, 335 Caracalla, Baths of, 264 Carrington, Hereward, 226, 435 Cartesian anxiety, 3 Castlereagh, Lord, 15 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart 2nd Marquess, 234 Catana, Leo, 24, 426 Ceres, 406 Chander, Manu Samriti, 252, 426 Chapman, George, 56, 345, 442 Chatterton, Thomas, 404-5, 426 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 12 (“Knightes Tale, The”, 13 Chickera, Ernst de, 406, 428, 433 Childers, Joseph, 24, 426 Christ archetype of higher consciousness in Western tradition, 315, 421 Chryseis, 34

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Chryses, 34 Chrysostom, Saint John, 6 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 264 Circe, 363 Clare, John, 9, 152 Clarke, Bruce, 2, 8, 70, 392, 393, 401, 425 Clarke, Michael, 207 Cneph (Egyptian serpent symbol of eternity), 225 Coetzee, J. M., 200, 427 Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, 23 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 21-2, 59, 92, 114, 160, 198, 207, 222, 250, 258, 266, 295, 307, 316, 318, 327, 355, 367, 369, 426, 427, 431, 433, 441 Biographia Literaria, 207, 427 “Christabel”, 18, 23 “Dejection”, 207 “ Eolian Harp, The”, 23, 198, 222, 329 “Frost at Midnight”, 59 “Kubla Khan”, 23, 250, 295 “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” (“Mont Blanc” link), 306 Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, 23, 37 Self-annihilation makes God self’s identity, 160 serpent as emblem of the daemonic imagination, 131 Thomas Taylor among “darling Studies”, 21 transnatural, 17 words as living powers, 266 Colwell, Frederic S., 396, 427 Coote, Stephen, 354, 355, 363-4, 369, 371, 379, 391, 408-9, 421, 427 Copleston, Frederick, 223, correspondences, doctrine of, 30 Cowper, William, 9 Crane, Hart, 4 Crécy, Battle of, 42

449

Cudworth, Ralph Cambridge Platonist, 25 Cupid, 335, 340, 364-6, 369 Curran, Stuart, 24, 25, 222, 225, 271, 272, 309, 311, 427, 441 cyborg, 2 Cyclops, 30 Daemon, 1-8, 11, 16-22, 25, 30, 33, 41, 54-5, 112, 125, 189, 191, 212, 223-4, 236, 246, 271, 274, 300, 316, 329, 332, 339, 366, 371, 388, 404, 407, 411-12, 421-2 as autonomous impersonal force, 8 daemonic awareness informed by both learning and enthusiasm, 8 Daemons who preside over body parts, plants, animals (Proclus), 188 equated with Blake’s Imagination, 55 indeterminacy, 18 infusion of exceptional personal imaginative enthusiasm, 8 Love a daemon in Symposium, 273 Platonic daemons, 19 Daimon (alternative spelling of daemon), 5, 6, 21, 22, 437 Dante Alighieri, 76, 232, 264, 408 dark matter, 60 Darwin, Erasmus, 273 Davis, David Brion, 90, 427 Dawson, Terence, 55-8, 67, 74, 76, 138, 427 De Antro Nympharum. See On the Cave of the Nymphs Deism, 153, 200, 201, 431 Deists, 193, 200-1 Delphic oracle, 217 demiurge, 69, 95, 101, 123 Demogorgon, 225 Dempsey, Sean, 378, 428

450 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 127, 141, 228, 428, 437-8 Descartes, René, 44 Devil as fable of institutional Christianity to gain power, 64 Dickinson, Emily, 4 Dickstein, Morris, 399, 401, 428 Dike, Donald, 71, 106, 109, 112-13, 115, 428 Dilke, Charles, 327 Dionysus, 175, 184 (see also “Bacchus” Dionysian, 289 Dobrée, Bonamy, 375, 437 doppelgänger, 160, 241, 248, 422 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 200 Drummond, William, 297, 319, 419 du Perron, Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil, 222, 271 Duerksen, Roland, 268-9, 428 Duff, David, 300, 306, 428, 434 Earth respect for, 1, 223, 420 sacrality of, 1, 32-3, 408 Ecclesiastes, 259 Ecocriticism, 3, 434 Eddas, The, 61, 428 eidetic imagery, 179 Elective Affinities, The, 20 Electron microscope, 178 Elijah, 60 Elijah (character in Blake), 77 Eliot, T. S., 4 Blake’s meanness of culture, 9 Elohim, 124, 171, 195 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 10 England, Martha W., 46 Enright, D. J., 406, 428, 433 Erdman, David, 13, 14, 74, 82 Erinyes, The, 135 Escher, M. C., 156 Essick, Robert N., 46, 428 eternal moment, 381, 382

Index Evans, James, 237, 241, 428 Examiner, The, 186 Exodus, 42, 142 Ezekiel, 42, 62, 74, 88, 137, 203, 205, 213, 215, 231 Faflak, Joel, 33, 428 Fairer, David, 111, 113, 428 Falon, David, 54, 428, 440 Fanon, Frantz, 86, 428 Fates, The Three, 31, 32 Faulkner, William, 4 Ferber, Michael, 120, 123, 252, 256, 429 Ferrara, Mark, 207, 215, 429 Ficino, Marsilio, 11 Fletcher, Angus, 33, 429 Fogle, Richard Harter, 373, 374, 376, 429 Foote, Samuel, 46 Forman, Harry and Maurice Buxton editors of Keats’s letters, 219, 241,365 Foucault, Michel, 30, 90, 429 Foxley, Rachel, 85 Fraistat, Neil, 219, 222, 240, 241, 243, 285, 287, 298, 301, 304, 312, 317, 323, 429, 439 Frankenstein, 2, 102, 438 French Revolution, 61, 81, 133-5, 260-1, 347 Friedman, Geraldine, 380, 429 Frost, Robert, 4 Fry, Paul ostension and otherness, 378, 429 Frye, Northrop, 47-8, 79, 128, 147, 153, 157, 167, 170, 182, 212, 429 Fulford, Tim, 252, 429, 433 Fuseli, Henry, 48, 74 Gaelic language, 194 Garcia, Humberto, 56, 113, 429 Gardner, Stanley, 106, 107, 110-11, 429 Garofalo, Daniela, 344, 358, 429 Genesis, 41, 69, 131, 138, 214, 425 Genii, 222, 267

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Genius, 6, 23, 55, 72, 75-6, 259, 260, 262, 264, 285, 307 daemonic, 19 George III, 130 Gibbon, Edward, 9, 200 Gilbert, Arthur N., 122 Gilbreath, Marcia, 355, 429 Gittings, Robert, 14, 328, 365, 433 Gleckner, Robert, 40, 41, 56, 79, 429 Gnosticism, 69 Godwin, William, 11, 25, 64, 218, 231, 240, 276, 430, 439 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, 6, 16-21, 33, 426, 430, 436 Elective Affinities, The, 20 “Erlkönig, Des”, 16 Faust II, 18, 20 Weimar Klassik, 19 Werther, 16, 18, 19, 20 Gold, Elise, 258, 263, 266, 430 Goslee, Nancy Moore, 77, 78, 80-1, 83, 85-7, 89, 94, 102, 430 Gothic, 18, 33, 39, 102, 220, 230, 310, 331, 428, 442 Grabo, Carl, 273, 430 Gramscian “oppositional formation”, 51 Graves, Robert, 25, 344, 408, 430 Gray, Thomas “Bard, The”, 178; “Favourite Cat”, 32 Greene, Thomas, 10, 16, 118, 182, 430 Griffin, Paul, 122, 430 Grossman, Allen, 371, 430 Grudin, Peter D., 18, 430 Gurney, Stephen, 378-9, 430 Hamann, Georg, 18 Hansen, Katelin, 44, 430 Haraway, Donna, 141 Harper, George Mills, 44, 79, 139, 434, 442

451

Harrison, Robert, 6, 331, 424, 430 Hartman, Geoffrey, 16-17, 37, 297, 430 Harvey, Karen J., 357, 431 Haverkamp, Anselm, 385, 387, 431 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4 Haydon, B. R., 345, 364, 379 Hayley, William, 210 Hazlitt, William, 371, 400, 401 gusto, 371 Hebrew prophecy, 10 Heffernan, James, 78, 87, 93, 96, 100, 102, 104-5, 431 Heidegger, Martin finite transcendence, 378 Hephaestus, 268 Heppner, Christopher, 244, 253, 431 Heraclitus, 6, 63, 116 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 18 Hermes, 13, 45, 431 Thrice Great Hermes, 11 Hermes and boundaries, 396 Hermes Trismegistus. See Thrice Great Hermes Hermetica, 9, 11, 13, 25, 195 Hermetic tradition, 13 power of the soul to travel wherever it will, 13 Hermeticism, 7 Herodotus, 9, 135 Herschel, William, 273 Hesiod Theogony, 138, 345 Higgs, John, 151, 431 Hill, Alan G., 24, 431, Hill, Romaine, 244, 439, 441 Hilton, Nelson, 77 Hinduism Siva (Shiva) and Vishnu, 311 Hitt, Christopher, 295, 301, 431 Hoagwood, Terence, 37, 410, 431 multidimensional forms of poetic art, 37 Hobson, J. Allan, 179 Hogarth, William, 47 Holbach, Baron, 230, 231

452 Holmes, Richard, 20, 22, 239, 248, 262, 427, 431, 438 Homer, 8, 26, 28, 29, 30-6, 46, 47, 60, 71, 74, 129, 157, 207, 221, 262, 278, 345, 346, 375, 425, 427, 431 Iliad, The, 33, 35, 36, 74, 158, 179, 346, 431 anger as ménis, not akhos, 35 Odyssey, The, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 179, 431, 437 Odyssey, The Book 13 and Book 5, 26 Hopps, Gavin, 291, 307, 308, 431 Howe, Anthony, 21, 297, 299, 308, 309, 424, 432, 436 Humankind, 2, 3, 4, 50, 232, 267, 283 biotic community, 3 idiotic men vs horses and elephants, 4 taken-for-granted centrality, 2 Hume, David, 200 Humean, 234, 295, 298 Hume, R. D., 111 Humphrey, Judith, 348, 354, 414, 432 Hunt, Leigh, 20, 328, 354, 391 Hunt, Robert (saw Blake as “unfortunate lunatic”), 182 Hunt, Tam, 182, 186, 223, 432 Hunter, John, 382, 404 Hunter, William, 11, 12, 432 Hutchings, Kevin, 82, 88, 90, 91, 103, 104, 432 Hutchinson, Sarah, 11, 13, 132, 219, 287, 369, 438, 442 Hypatia, 231 Iamblichus, 6, 7, 9, 188, 211, 236, 432 Igarashi, Yohei, 354, 432 industrial age, ills of, 1 Isaiah, 55, 69, 132, 150 Isaiah (character in Blake), 73 Isis, 184

Index Isomaki, Richard, 295, 307, 432 Jack, Ian, 109, 392, 406, 432, 440 Jacobin, 1 Jager, Colin, 262, 278, 432 James Webb Space Telescope, 129 James, Henry, 4 Jaynes, Julian, 7 Jeffrey, John, 327, 328 Jehovah, 72, 124, 171, 184, 186, 203, 213, 215, 311 Jerusalem, 121, 164, 166, 168, 170, 208, 418, 429 Jesus, 73, 106, 125, 149, 162, 165, 168, 169, 180, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 200, 201, 208, 210, 274, 275, 308, 315 as Divine Humanity, 148 forgiveness, 201 Job, Book of, 212 John the Baptist, 55 John, Saint (the apostle), 50 Johnson, Mary Lynn, 32, 47, 400, 424 Jones, Frederick L., 241, 242, 252, 255, 432 Judges (book of Bible), 63 Jung, Carl Gustav, 34, 49, 57, 124, 161, 174, 184, 225, 331, 427, 432 “shadow” archetype, 124, 161 collective unconscious archetypes, 34 individuation process, 49 post-Jungianism, 57 Jupiter, 45, 158-9, 178, 218, 224, 244, 264, 267, 268, 271-2, 365, 418 Kabitoglou, E. Douka, 384, 432 kakodaimon Alastor as, 246 succubus, 252 Kamuf, Peggy, 228, 428 Kant, Immanuel, 18 Kapstein, I. J., 230, 432 Keach, William, 278, 279

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Keats, George (brother of the poet), 327, 364 Keats, Georgiana (sister-in-law), 327, 364 Keats, John (general), 4, 7, 14, 17, 20-3, 26-7, 32, 36-7, 237, 241, 244, 252, 256, 257, 258, 277, 293, 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442 Apollo, allegiance to, 338 Apollo and poetic vocation parallel, 353 cannot rest content in ignorance of realities of life, 343 Cockney rhymester Genius, 339 daemon-inspired poet, 339 ear for nuances of sound, 346 identifying with sparrow, 257 might have discussed Thomas Taylor’s ideas with Benjamin, 353 musical abilities, 346 Self-annihilation, 340 shedding of self, 354 Soul-making, 365, 368-371, 380381, 385, 390, 437 voyage to Italy just prior to death, 414 Keats’s lyric poetry “Apollo to the Graces”, 352 “Bright Star”, 414 “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”, 328 “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, 361 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, 341, 351, 363, 379-84 “Ode on Indolence”, 363, 38892, 403 “Ode on Melancholy”, 363, 385-88 “Ode to a Nightingale”, 363, 370-78, 387 “Ode to Apollo”, 352

453

“Ode to Psyche”, 363, 364-70 “Sleep and Poetry”, 329 “To Apollo”, 352 “To Autumn”, 7, 310, 363, 392, 403-7 Keats’s longer poems Endymion, 327, 328, 329-340, 341, 344, 345, 348, 352, 362-4, 369, 374, 413, 421, 430, 440 Cynthia, 331-2, 337, 339, 421 Endymion’s striving for moon as metaphor for striving beyond human, 338 Hymn to Pan, 329 Peona, 333, 339, 340 self-destroying, 333, 417 wonder of natural life, 338 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 344, 354-61, 399, 402, 429, 431, 441 Madeline, 355-6, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 399 Porphyro, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 399, 429 link with Porphyry, 355 Fall of Hyperion, The, 17, 354, 407-14, 418 Moneta, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415 value of the poet laid bare, 411 Hyperion, 17, 327, 345-54, 384, 404, 408, 412-14, 418, 421, 432, 436, 437, 439, 441 Apollo as character, 352-3 Apollo dies into life (Neoplatonic idea), 353 Hyperion as character, 349, 352 Mnemosyne, 407 Oceanus, 350, 351, 352, 384

454 first in beauty, first in might, 351 Saturn, 271, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350 Thea, 345, 346, 348 Ixion’s wheel, 345 Lamia, 32, 353, 362, 374, 387, 392-402, 410, 426, 431, 4389 Apollonius, 393-4, 398, 399402 as a Basilisk, 401 as a sophist, 398 Hermes as character in Lamia, 394 Lamia, 397, 398, 399, 401, 402 Lycius, 393-4, 396-402 Isabella, 354, 355, 402, 442 “To J. H. Reynolds, Esq.”, 341-44 Keats’s Prose axioms proved upon our pulses, 343 camelion Poet, 384 Chamber of Maiden Thought, 344, 348, 350 vale of Soul-making, 364, 373, 410, 414, 416 Keats, Tom (brother of the poet), 353, 414 Kennedy, Thomas C., 353, 433 Keynes, Geoffrey, 10, 50, 51, 424 King, James, 43, 202, 347, 433 Kirchhoff, Frederick, 256, 433 Kitson, Peter J., 252, 429, 433 LaGrandeur, Kevin, 28, 433 Larrissy, Edward, 191, 433 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 67-9, 77, 103, 230 Lawrence, D. H., 151, 436 Lawrence, Elizabeth A., 151, 376, 378, 433

Index Leadbetter, Gregory, 13, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 92, 131, 160, 198, 207, 222, 266, 316, 433 Leask, Nigel, 251, 252, 433 Leavis, F. R., 406, 433 Leerssen, Joseph, 194, 433 Lefkowitz, Barbara, 59, 433 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 18 Leighton, Angela, 293, 433 Lemprière, John, 25, 355, 364 Leo Africanus, 7 Leopold, Aldo, 3, 4 Leucothea, 27, 31 Levellers and free-born Englishman, 85 Levinas, Emmanuel, 219, 433 Lewis, M. G. “Monk” 18 Liberal, The, 20 Light as an electromagnetic wave, 177 Lilburne, John, 85 Lindop, Grevel, 59, 433 Lister, Rebecca Crow, 44, 434 Locke, John, 67 Lockean, 99, 295 Lockhart, John, 391 Lokash, Jennifer, 257, 434 London Chronicle, 262 Lucan Pharsalia, 217, 219, 434 Lucretius, 361, 440 Lundeen, Kathleen, 65, 66, 67, 434 Lussier, Mark, 3 Lutheranism, 24 Macrobius, 28 Maenad, 312 Mallet, Paul Henri Northern Antiquities, 60 Malthus, Thomas, 159, 434 Manning, Peter, 236, 291, 442 Margoliouth, H. M., 55, 434 Marks, Cato, 55, 434 Martin, George Game of Thrones, 140 Matthew (book of the Bible), 162

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Matthews, G. M., 319, 434 Maxwell, James Clerk, 177 Mays, J. C. C., 20, 434 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 4 McClellan, Jane, 44, 79, 139, 434 McGann, Jerome, 11, 14, 15, 434 McGilchrist, Iain, 4, 8, 9, 53, 63, 68, 79, 95, 151, 156, 167, 176, 181, 199, 207, 239, 267, 269, 288, 327, 328, 337, 400, 418, 422, 434, 435 fragmented vision of mechanistic reasoning, 4 interdependence of right and left hemispheres of brain, 4 non-mechanistic ways of thinking about the world, 9 McKusick, James, 20, 426 McNeice, Gerald, 307, 434 Medea, 256 Meihuizen, Nicholas, 7 Mellor, Anne, 78, 79, 80, 88, 101, 114, 115, 435 Melville, Herman, 4 Mentz, Steve, 209, 435 Mercury, 45 Meredith Family (possible link between Taylor and Blake), 43 Merlin, 357, 431 Metternich, Klemens von, 234 Metzger, Lore, 17, 435 militarism, classical, 26 Mill, James (hostile reviewer of Thomas Taylor), 24 Miller, Arthur I., 66 Milton, John, 10, 11, 12, 33, 36, 45, 71, 99, 164, 327, 346, 408, 428, 432, 434, 435, 439, 441 daemonic energy, 10 Il Penseroso, 11, 12, 45, 177, 246, 289 inspirer of all British Romantics, 10 L’Allegro, 12, 177, 218, 246 Muse visitation, 56

455

of the Devil’s party, without knowing it, 10 Paradise Lost, 10, 12, 13, 14, 36, 39, 49, 61, 65, 71, 124, 140, 145, 184, 265, 331, 345, 346, 435 Book 7 of, 15 Book 9 of, 12 Keats’s praise of, 346 Satan as cormorant in, 13 Minahan, John, 346, 372, 435 Miner, Paul, 122, 124, 153, 435 Minerva, 45 Minotaur, 206 Mitchell, Robert, 293, 310, 382-83, 404, 435 Mithras, 271, 272 Mizukoshi, Ayumi, 344 Mlinko, Ange, 151, 435 Moore, James W., 8 Morgan, John (friend of Coleridge), 22 Morgan, Mary (friend of Coleridge), 22 Morris, David, 60, 67, 435 Mosaic code, 94, 131, 201 Moses, 42, 60, 131, 138, 425 Motion, Andrew, 367, 379, 388, 391, 408, 435 Muldoon, Sylvan, 226, 435 Murdoch, Iris, 104, 436 Murray, E. B., 20, 291, 436 Murry, Middleton, 354 Muses, 12, 24, 36, 41, 46, 245, 407, 417 as daughters of Memory, 36 Mnemosyne, mother of, 352 Myers, Mary Anne, 362, 390, 436 Naiades (as water nymphs involved in human generation), 27-8, 221 Native Americans, 74 Nebuchadnezzar, 132 Necessitarian, 218, 274 Necessity Shelley, 230 Shelley and Holbach, 230

456 Neff, D. S., 399, 436 Neoplatonism, 1, 7, 9, 12, 18, 31-4, 43, 45-6, 49-50, 54-5, 62, 91, 94, 112, 114, 116, 134, 137, 140, 148, 164, 174, 188, 223, 231, 253, 254, 271, 273, 335, 353, 359, 412, 417 Neoplatonists, 5, 9, 16, 33, 36, 232 Neptune, 332, 350, 351, 352 Newey, Vincent, 354, 436 Newton, Isaac, 136, 181, 273 light, 296 Newtonian universe, 66 Nicholls, Angus, 6, 16, 18-20, 22, 33, 436 Nicholson, William, 227 British Encyclopedia, 227 Nitzsche, Jane Chance, 6 North, Christopher, 391 North, Thomas, 6 Notopoulos, James, 271, 274, 276, 278, 366, 436 Notopoulos, James A., 7 Nurmi, Martin, 126, 127, 165, 185, 436 O’Neill, Michael, 21, 301, 312, 317, 318, 326, 424, 436 Odysseus, 26, 29, 30, 31, 45, 221 Old Testament, 10, 16, 41, 83, 101, 117, 182, 194, 195, 212 On the Cave of the Nymphs, 26, 157, 271, 437 Orphic mythology, 9 Orr, Gregory, 371, 430, 436 Orwell, George, 123 Osiris, 184 Ostas, Magdalena, 358, 436 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) Metamorphoses, 138 Tristia, 385 Paine, Thomas, 63 Palmerin of England, 329 Pan, 329 Paracelsus, 76, 147, 150

Index Pater, Walter, 5 Patterson, Charles I., 329, 388, 436 Pauline dualism, 94 Payne, Dianne, 25, 111, 112, 436 Peacock, Thomas Love, 246, 252, 278 Peeren, Esther, 2, 424, 425 Percy,, 60 Percy, Thomas, 60 perennial wisdom, 25 kept alive by poets, 26 Persian sacred initiation, 27 Peterfreund, Stuart, 41, 42, 45, 436 Petrarch, Francesco, 362, 436 Phelps, Jim, 151, 436 Phillips, Dana, 121, 167, 437, 440 Philo, 195, 197 Philostratus, 393, 402 Phoebus, 217, 337, 422 Phorcys, 30 Physics, 3, 150, 243 unfolding of complexity, 3 Pierce, John, 276, 277 Pladek, Brittany, 414, 437 Plato, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16-18, 23, 25, 44, 53, 60, 147, 166, 188, 221, 223, 227, 251, 273, 278, 302, 307, 353, 366, 383, 398, 437, 438, 440 Apology, The, 18 Gorgias, 116 influence of poetry, 278 Laws, The, 147 Phaedrus, 18, 20 Republic, The, 278 Symposium, 6, 11, 266, 273, 276, 282, 302, 308, 437 Diotima, 18, 366 Diotima, 6 Eros a great daemon, 366 Timaeus, 147 Platonism, 7, 17, 24, 26, 44, 230, 271, 274, 275, 276, 278, 353, 364, 366, 383, 421, 433, 436 linked to Necessity, 284 Pliny, 6

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Plotinus, 9, 24, 44 Plumly, Stanley, 392, 405, 437 Plutarch, 5, 6, 135, 136, 437 Pluto, gates of, 63 Poetic Genius, 151 Pope, Alexander An Essay on Criticism, 375, 437 Pope, Alexander, 373 Porphyry, 9, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 63, 157, 221, 271, 353, 437 Capricorn and Cancer as gates of numinous descent and ascent, 28 On the Cave of the Nymphs, 80 Posthumanist, 2, 3, 8, 70, 167, 230, 421 daemonic posthuman, 346 daemonic posthumanism, 340 posthumanism, 2, 3, 28, 227, 301, 413 Poston, Carol, 86 Potter, John, 409, 410 Poutiainen, Hannu, 6 Priam Trojan forefather of Britain, 214 Priestley, F. E. L., 11, 430 Priestley, Joseph, 64, 72 Proclus, 9, 150, 188, 211, 223, 224, 278 Prometheus, 11, 18, 24, 102, 138, 155, 158, 192, 217, 222, 225, 232, 234, 237, 242, 244, 248, 263-4, 267-74, 276-7, 280-89, 418, 419, 425, 428, 437, 438, 439 champion of enlightened humanity, 265 Proverbs (book of the Bible), 133 Psalms (book of the Bible), 88 Psyche, 63, 151, 354, 363-7, 36970, 386, 412, 425, 426, 436, 441 Punctum, 150, 216 as opening at centre to eternity, 198 Purcell, Henry “Mad Bess”, 44 Puritanism, 10

457

Pythagoreanism, 44 Quantum mechanics, 151 Quarles, Robert, 32, 400 Quarterly Review, 32, 46, 54, 55, 79, 111, 262, 265, 428, 432, 433, 434, 435, 440 Quillin, Jessica K., 318, 325, 437 Quinn, Mary, 217, 232, 233, 234, 240, 437 Raine, Kathleen, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 37, 39, 44, 53, 63, 69, 71, 76, 80-1, 83, 91, 100, 110, 113, 116, 124-6, 128, 131, 139, 146, 148, 150, 152-5, 158, 171-2, 195, 197, 211, 214-15, 218, 225, 248, 318, 418, 437 natural language of metaphysical thought, 10 Shelley as Blake’s spiritual successor, 158 Redfield, Marc, 4 Reiman, Donald H., 219, 222, 285, 287, 298, 301, 304, 312, 317, 323, 396, 402, 403, 438, 439 Restoration, The, 44 Revelation, Book of, 50, 131, 135, 147, 177, 185, 212, 213, 231 Reynolds, J. H. (friend of Keats), 14, 341, 342, 343, 350, 368, 383, 391, 402, 404, 405 Riding, Laura, 344 Rix, Robert, 56, 438 Roberts, David, 252, 426 Roberts, Hugh, 387, 396, 438 Robertson, Margaret Yeates, 392 Robinson, Crabb, 58, 74, 124 Rogers, Neville, 263, 264, 438 Rollinson, Philip, 34, 438 Romantic Hellenism, 26 Ross, Alexander, 24 Rossini, Manuela, 2, 8, 70, 425, 427 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16, 74, 136, 200 Rovelli, Carlo, 151

458 Ryan, Derek, 127, 438 Saint-Croix, Baron de, 24 Sallé, Jean-Claude, 383-384, 438 Sass, Louis, 337, 438 Satan, 10, 49, 51, 61, 71, 124, 140, 145, 169, 171-174, 176, 179-180, 183, 194-195, 200-201, 214, 218, 438 as Selfhood deadly, 183 Saul of Tarsus, 167 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 16, 18, 21 world-soul, 18 Schlegel, Augustus Wilhelm, 24 Schock, Peter, 51, 57, 61, 63, 64, 71, 72, 77, 438 Schuchard, Marsha Keith, 46, 101, 438 on Blake’s “virtuous cats”,, 46 Scrope Davies notebook, 301 Self-annihilation, 3-4, 160-161, 180-181, 257, 412, 421, 434 Keats and self-annihilation, 421 Septuagint, 6 Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of (Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 383-84, 427, 439 Shakespeare, William, 6, 14, 39, 47, 67, 71, 262, 264, 265, 304, 311, 327, 333, 375, 414, 437, 438, 440 Hamlet, 44 King Lear, 44, 347 Hyperion link, 347 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 374 “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (sonnet 130), 333 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (sonnet 18), 67 Shawcross, John, 230, 284, 291, 439 Shelley, Mary, 102, 218, 242, 277 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (general) 4, 7, 10-13, 18, 104, 132, 158, 192,

Index 338, 366, 418, 419, 420, 424, 426-34, 434, 436-40, 441-2 Aeolian harp, 222 Atheist signature furore, 262 Blake’s succesor, 318 contaminated transcendental abstractions, 291 contamination of the word, 285 daemonic potential of beauty, 282 daemonic utterance, 266 death of 1822 266 either / or scientific model of existence, 280 Genius Jesus, 316 Jupiter left hemisphere dominance, 267 light as dual particle and wave, 223 Milton as defender of Platonic doctrine of poetic inspiration, 13 participatory enactment, 266 Satan as “the Hero of Paradise Lost”, 10 Scrope Davies Notebook “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” adjustments, 287 skylark prototype in Blake, 12 version of stripped-down selfannihilation, 419 Shelley’s lyric poetry “Ode to the West Wind”, 30918 Dantean terza rima, 309 wind as seasonal daemon, 309 “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, 218, 222, 223, 234, 280, 28192, 309, 316, 420 Scrope Davies Notebook “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” adjustments, 287

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human “Mont Blanc”, 218, 223, 230, 234, 255, 256, 275, 280, 282, 284, 293-309, 420 “Ode to Heaven”, 240 “Ode to the West Wind”, 217218, 232, 235-236, 240, 245, 263, 280, 302, 309-18, 323, 328, 420 “Rome and Nature”, 318 “To a Skylark”, 12, 218, 280, 309, 318-26, 420 “Two Spirits, The”, 240 Shelley’s longer poems Adonais, 261 Alastor, 18, 217, 218, 222, 233, 240, 241-51, 252, 255, 256, 257, 263, 289, 316, 319, 332, 335, 336, 419, 421, Alastor as dream figure, 248 Preface, 241 Daemon of the World, The, 217, 218, 219-41, 273, 274, 280, 316, 419, 420, 421, 437 Ianthe, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226, 232, 233, 235, 238, 241, 419 as Surpassing Spirit, 235 Laon and Cythna, 240 Mask of Anarchy, The, 232, 278 Prince Athanase, 240 Prometheus Unbound, 11, 158, 217, 218, 219, 222, 224, 225, 234, 236, 242, 248, 263-79, 280, 284, 309, 320, 325, 418, 419, 425, 430, 439 Demogorgon (as character), 271, 272, 275, 276 hatred issuing from Prometheus himself felt in world, 268 Jupiter as limited operation of human mind, 269 phantasm of Jupiter, 270

459

Prometheus as caring foster parent of earth, 272 Queen Mab, 132, 219, 222, 223, 226, 273, 274 Notes to Queen Mab: atheism, 280 Nicholson on light, 296 Revolt of Islam, The, 20, 218, 240, 276, 297, 436 Triumph of Life, The, 21, 232, 242, 255 Shelley’s Prose “Critical Notices on Sculpture in the Florence Gallery”, 311 Defence of Poetry, A, 238, 241, 281, 288, 292, 308, 309, 325 “Essay on Christianity”, 222, 275, 282, 285, 287, 291, 293, 296, 297, 306, 316, 420, 421 wisdom of universal love, 419 Faust II translation, 20, 21 “On a Future State”, 226 “On Life”, 299, 303, 319, 419, 420 “On the Symposium", 227 Necessity of Atheism, 132, 431 Prometheus Unbound Preface, 237, 264, 278 Amphiaraus beneath the ground, 263-264 Queen Mab, Notes to: atheism, 280 Necessity of Atheism, 132, 431 “Three Fragments on Beauty” reflection more beautiful than actual objects, 313 Revolt of Islam, Preface, 258 Symposium translation, 6 Sherwin, Paul, 349, 352, 439 Simmons, Robert, 32, 439 Singer, June, 49 Sitterson, Joseph C., 353, 398, 402, 439 skylark, 13, 218, 319, 325

460 Slavery, 85-90, 427, 435 Smaragdine Table, 248 Smart, Christopher, 9 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 388, 439 Smith, Charlotte "Beachy Head", 301 Socrates, 11, 18, 212, 266, 271, 278, 398 Soderholm, James, 15, 434 Solomon, Harry, 60, 158, 384, 439 Somerset, James (black slave judged by Lord Mansfield), 78 Song of Solomon, 158 Southey, Robert, 15, 258, 260, 262 Spenser, Edmund Albion, 78 Faerie Queene, The, 25, 78, 361 Prothalamion, 89 Spenserian allegory, 46 Tears of the Muses, 46 Sperry, Stuart, 244, 439 Spinoza, Baruch, 18 Steck, Christopher, 2, 3 Steichan, Lilian, 267, 268 Steinman, Lisa M., 257, 439 Stempel, Daniel, 231, 280, 281, 282, 297 Stenberg, Theodore, 60, 439 Sterne, Laurence, 47 Stevens, Wallace, 4 Stewart, Garrett, 394, 399, 400, 439 Stillinger, Jack, 392, 440 Stoics, 11 Stovall, Floyd, 274, 440 Sturm und Drang, 19 Swann, Karen, 339, 344, 440 Swearingen, James, 85, 86, 88, 103, 104, 105, 440 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 48, 51-59, 63, 67-68, 70-71, 73, 75-77, 103, 107, 113, 152, 176, 214, 429 Asleep in body, awake in soul in Swedenborg and Wordsworth, 59 conservative English Swedenborgians, 56

Index Swedenborgian beliefs, 50 Swift, Jonathan, 47 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 104, 440 Syon House, 239 Tagore, Proma, 344, 358, 440 Tate, Allen, 373, 440 Taylor, Charles, 2 Taylor, John (Keats's publisher), 339 Taylor, Thomas, 6, 9, 18, 23, 26, 43, 44, 116, 147, 166, 175, 188, 212, 271, 278, 353, 426, 432, 433, 437, 438, 440 first translations of Plotinus 1787, 44 opposed to Christianising of Plato, 31 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 242 Theseus, 206 Thompson, E. P., 121 Thoösa, 30 Thrice Great Hermes, 432 Titan, 345, 347, 349, 351, 384 Toland, John Tetradymus, 231, 440 Tollet, Elizabeth, 231 Tomalin, Claire, 241, 440 Townshend, Dale, 33, 428, 442 Traherne, Thomas vision of Eden (Keats link), 408 transnatural, 17, 21, 22, 23 Trilling, Lionel, 366, 371, 440 Trusler, John, 56, 59 Tsai, Li-Hui, 54, 440 Turner, John, 24 Twain, Mark, 4 Uffizi Gallery, 311 Unitarianism, 21 Urania, 12, 15, 36, 45 uroboros, 225 Utley, Francis Lee, 361, 440 Vaenius, Otho, 32, 400

Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human Vallancey, Charles, 194 vampires, 17 Vaughan, Thomas, 113, 440 Vendler, Helen, 67, 311, 379, 440 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 5, 6, 73 Vesuvius, 319 Villinganus, Pictorius, 6 Vine, Steven, 59, 67, 161, 441 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) Virgilian pastoral, 43 volcano, 319 Voltaire, 136, 200 Vouet, Simon, 406 Wagner, Robert D., 353, 354, 366, 412, 441 Wahlverwandtschaften, Die. See Elective Affinities, The Wang, Orrin N. C., 1, 441 Ward, Aileen, 353, 383 Warner, Janet, 32, 439 Wasserman, Earl, 256, 441 Watson, Richard (Bishop, opposed by Blake), 74 Waxler, Robert P., 99, 103, 105, 441 Webb, Timothy, 25, 112, 158, 226, 238, 240, 438, 441 Weinberg, Alan, 244, 439, 441 Weiskel, Thomas, 5 The Romantic Sublime, 5 Weissman, Judith, 8 Welch, Dennis M., 10, 83, 88, 94, 99, 125, 441 Wellek, René, 16, 441 Wentersdorf, Karl P., 374, 375, 441 Whalley, Thomas Sedgwick Mont Blanc in royalist guise, 300 Wheeler, Kathleen, 9, 11, 266 not treating words like coins, 11 Whitman, Jon, 33-5 Whitman, Walt, 4 Williams, Raymond, 51 Wilson, James, 361, 441 Wit's Magazine “Expedition to the Moon”, 46

461

Wolfe, Cary, 2, 28, 307 Wolfson, Susan, 65, 66, 236, 291, 339, 354, 355, 386, 387, 415, 436, 442 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 64, 80, 81, 86, 88, 134, 164, 218, 231, 418, 435, 442 Woodhouse, Richard, 340 370, 411 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 22 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 24 Wordsworth, William, 9, 13, 15, 17, 59, 244, 254-255, 257-258, 293, 310, 318, 330, 341-342, 364, 428, 430, 431, 433, 434, 441, 442 “Danish Boy, The”, 16 “Intimations Ode”, 58 “London, 1802”, 13 “Tintern Abbey, Lines Composed a few Miles above”, 59 Excursion, The, 244 Keats’s very pretty piece of paganism, 364 Swedenborg, possible reference to, 58 Wright, Angela, 33, 428, 435, 442 Wu, Duncan, 9, 49, 50, 61, 62, 64, 246, 301, 442 Wyatt, Thomas, 387 Yahweh, 101 Yeats, W. B., 5, 7, 8, 56, 69, 195, 221, 235, 270, 435, 438, 442 “An Acre of Grass”, 69 “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry”, 221 Essays, 6, 221, 234, 270, 430, 440, 441, 442 Vision, A, 234 Zak, William F., 390, 392, 442 Zend-Avesta, 222, 271, 428 Iescht Farvardin, 271 Zeus, 29, 36, 264, 268 Zillman, Lawrence, 219, 263, 265, 439 Zion, 61 Zoroastrian “Fravashi”, 271