Sexuality,
Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in William Blake’s Poems
Subhasish Guha
Subhasish Guha is, at present, a Guest faculty in
the Department of English, Pritilata Waddedar Mahavidyalaya (University of Kalyani),
Nadia.
Abstract
The following paper looks to
explore the ideas of sexuality, selfhood and self-annihilation in William
Blake’s poetry. The discussion has been
formulated by analyses of (or in some cases, parts of it) of poems which are
thought to be fit for the topic. A fair share has been allotted to both the
widely read short poems and the dense/obscure ‘Prophetic Books’ so that the
poems selected can be taken to be representative of Blake’s oeuvre. The
inspiration for the topic of this paper stems from Blake’s acute insight and
portrayal of the human psyche- something remarkably radical and ahead of its
time. The paper first deals with the complex portrayal of sexuality or sexual
development- a development which is warped and twisted by adult interference.
The poems deal with issues like personal honesty, courage and how people allow
themselves to be bullied by prudish and puritan attitudes towards sexuality- a
phenomenon which ends up driving sex into secrecy. The final result of all this
is darkness, secrecy and hypocrisy that lead to destruction and sinister,
negative forms of ‘love’. The analyses deal with the psychological truths of
hidden hostility and repressed emotion. The poems taken together show that one
of the root causes for all the evil complexities, as far sexuality and selfhood
is concerned, is fear and selfishness- which leads the original descent into
dishonesty- resulting in hardening a part of oneself against the natural flow
of self-expression. With radical insight Blake exposes how a variety of human
behaviours originate in fear ultimately coalesce into a unified concept and
lead to tyranny. The heroic struggle every individual must undertake to break
the shackles of all this is to destroy the self in a moment of inspired courage.
The creative conflict of ‘Contraries’ must be embraced rather than shunned out
of fear or shame. The individual must continually destroy and re-destroy the
hardening self by seeking moments of vision and inspiration.
Keywords:
Repressed emotion, self- expression, contraries, tyranny, puritan.
The process of building false
‘selves’ and attempting to fix a ‘self’ beyond the reach of natural change is
seen at work throughout Blake’s poetry. It seems to spring from a variety of
reasons, principle among them being fear. Fear of energy, fear of change, fear
of sex, selfish fear of others, and fear of freedom: all develop fixed
delusions which close the personality away from infinity, vision and truth.
Blake repeatedly emphasizes natural impulse, honesty and freedom in love. He shows
us that these fears are everywhere and in everyone. Although he conveys deep
sympathy with the fearful feelings of his characters, he castigates them for
failing to confront and overcome the intimidating appearance of things, for
giving into that fear and allowing that fear to rule their lives. The
individual has to force himself out of this vicious cycle of fear, selfishness,
dishonesty and tyranny. What follows is an exploration of individual
consciousness in his works.
The first two poems under
consideration are a pair- The Blossom
from Innocence and The Sick Rose from Experience. The Blossom is a beautiful pattern of
words and sound. There is much repetition, typical of Songs of Innocence. It is evident that this is a very simple song
playing on a very limited range of language. The colour green carries an echo
which emphasizes the colour of youth and innocence. References to a sparrow, a
robin and a blossom; a rose and a worm in a storm make it intriguing to find
out the core of the poem. There are clues in the fact that the sparrow has been
likened to an arrow, seeking a cradle narrow near the speaker’s bosom.
Similarly, in The Sick Rose, the
traditional phallic symbol of a snake or worm has dark secret love while the
rose herself is on a ‘bed of crimson joy’. Although some critics have attempted
to build unlikely meanings about ‘souls bodies and birth and earth’ (Hirsch
181-84), the stories are clear enough that it can be safely said that the poems
are on physical/sexual consummation.
A brief analysis of the poem The Blossom within the context of
Blake’s system of contraries will serve our purpose. The poem is an account of joyous and natural
sex. ‘Blossom’ and ‘under leaves so green’ firmly establishes the benevolent,
pastoral mode of Innocence, mildly evoking the backdrop of The Lamb. However, the anxieties evoked by the apparent paradox of
‘merry’ and ‘sobbing’ should be modified by the reminiscence of the extremities
of fear and joy yoked together at the creation of The Tyger and the extreme emotions it generates – ‘Did he who made
the Lamb make thee?’. One of the Proverbs
of Hell specifically reminds that Blake felt extremes of emotional
experience as combining together - a combination (of two extremes) producing a
heightened state of wonder and ecstasy- ‘Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy
weeps’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). All this makes it
easier to understand why the robin in The
Blossom is sobbing with joy.
There is a fundamental difference
between The Blossom and The Sick Rose, a poem which describes
the sexual act in more explicit and more conventional symbols. There is a
strong contrast between these two poems. The phallic bird, the ‘sparrow’
compared to an ‘arrow’, is transformed into something foul and sinister. The
worm of the Experience is invisible and flies in darkness. The phrase ‘found
out’ might be safely taken to imply that the worm tries to seek satisfaction
against the will of the woman who unsuccessfully attempts to hide from it. The
fact that the woman in this poem is the one who hides her ‘bed of crimson joy’ -
essentially meaning that she hides her own desires, is highly significant. Many
critics have been more specific than this when they have suggested that the
rose is a traditional symbol of female genitalia- so her bed of crimson joy
refers to masturbation (Paglia 277). The basic argument is that whether
the rose’s sexuality is hidden, or masturbatory or both, does not matter-
either way, she denies and refuses her natural desires, or her pleasure is
self-enclosed, exclusive. The ‘howling storm’ through which the worm flies
stands for the materialistic world of experience. Dishonesty is repeatedly
emphasized in his ‘dark secret’ love. The
Sick Rose is then densely packed with sinister, disgusting, and dishonest
sexuality. Following this line of argument, it can be said that the poem gives
an account of selfish male aggression and unwilling female hypocrisy. The
effect of this kind of love (making) – that it ‘does thy life destroy’, is
summed up by the final words of the poem.
Locating these two poems in the
context of other Songs would be
highly revealing. There have been frequent references to the idea of natural,
uninhibited sexual development, both as a possibility in the world of Innocence and as prevented by adult
interference. In the development of the second plate of The Echoing Green, boys are handing down bunches of grapes to girls,
but ‘old John with white hair’ leads some reluctant children away from their
games. This can be related with Lyca’s experience- who, despite her parent’s
fears is not frightened of the lion’s masculine mane or ashamed of her nakedness
in The Little Girl Lost. Blake’s
outrage at puritan attitudes to sex has been repeatedly and powerfully
expressed. In the Garden of Love also
where the speaker used to play on the green, there was the Earth’s complaint
about ‘That free Love with bondage bound’ and the deadening effect of ‘Thou
shalt not’. The criticism is directed at how prudish attitudes are binding joys
and desires. In A Little Girl Lost
(Experience), the opening stanza acts as a kind of sentence or moral and
expresses Blake’s outrage at the denial and perversion of natural sexuality in
a clear campaigning call:
Children
of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page;
Know that in a former time,
Love! sweet Love! Was thought a
crime. (Songs of Innocence and Experience
51)
So, it is quite evident that there is a clear
message about personal relationships to be taken from these poems. Natural
sexuality- free from interference by adult prudery, materialism and hypocrisy
and unfettered by oppressive laws, is positive, possible and fruitful and is an
intense form of ecstasy (‘sobbing sobbing…near my Bosom’). It is not sex
itself, but darkness, secrecy and hypocrisy that lead to destruction and
sinister, negative forms of love. The Songs
thus reveal a world where religious and social laws imprisoned natural
desire, and express Blake’s indignation at this state of affairs. The social
consequences of driving sex into secrecy are spelled out in ‘London’:
But
most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts
the new-born Infants tear
And
blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
(Songs of Innocence and Experience
46)
The personal consequences of dishonesty in
relationships and with one’s self are spelled out in the final lines of The Angel, with their evocation of a
wasted life:
For
the time of youth was fled
And
grey hairs were on my head. (Songs of
Innocence and Experience 41)
Blake provides us with two pictures of infancy to
underline the contrasting consequences of natural and perverted sexual
relationships, and to indicate how the latter can blight a society as well as
an individual- Infant Joy in Innocence and Infant Sorrow in Experience.
This poem, in its sweetness and
simplicity of vision is reminiscent of The
Lamb. What is significant is that although Blake is imitating a child’s
simplicity of language yet the adult adopts simplicity when addressing the
child. The poem is simple, repetitive and childish. The poem does express a
‘happy’ situation, however limited it might be. The infant is ‘happy’, joy is
‘sweet’; the two speakers do ‘smile’ and ‘sing’; and perhaps most significantly
the adult does accept the infant’s own choice of name and wish for its
happiness to continue: (‘Sweet joy befall thee’). It is widely known that in
Blake’s Innocence, clouds on the
horizon may exist by implication, but they are still elsewhere, and hardly
impinge on this poem’s simple ‘joy’. ‘Infant Sorrow’, however is a very
different matter.
The contrast is obvious between
Innocence’s benevolent adult and these parents who ‘groand’ and ‘wept’ at the
birth of their infant who is ‘Like a fiend’. Moreover, there is only a
‘dangerous joy’ in place of the ‘sweet joy’, and the infant is immediately
caught up in a struggle against its father. The child is newborn ‘Helpless,
naked, piping loud’; but then confusingly and ominously described as ‘Like a
fiend hid in a cloud’. What follows is the struggle against ‘swadling bands’.
These were tight cloth wrappings wound around babies to prevent them from
moving, because it was believed that it would help them to grow straight legs.
Blake depicts the ‘swadling bands’ as a
form of imprisonment where the father fights against and binds the child; and
this in turn implies that the description ‘Like a fiend hid in a cloud’ tells
us how fearfully the parents view their offspring. Terrified and miserable
(‘groand, wept’) they are impelled to tie up the baby as soon as it is born,
when in reality it is ‘Helpless, naked’.
The parents’ misery and fear is
crucial to interpreting this poem. This birth is not the natural and desired
outcome of ‘free love’, like the birth in Infant
Joy. Here, a feared and unwanted child is the product of some ‘dark secret’
or perverted sexuality such as that evoked in The Sick Rose. The father feels threatened by his child, and fights
to control it. Just as the parents contrast, similar is the case with the
infant. The infant of this poem is very different from its counterpart in the Innocence. This child is not ‘happy’,
but is immediately caught and bound by its father. Obviously, the infant cannot
match its father’s strength: ‘Bound and weary’, it is defeated. However, this
infant has learned a lesson. With chilling deliberateness, it decides to feed itself
(‘To sulk upon my mothers breast’) to gain strength, so that it can overthrow
its father –enemy at some future time. The implication is clear. Eventually the
child will become a youth and the father will grow old. It is inevitable that
the child will overthrow its father, sooner or later. Acquaintance with Blake’s
oeuvre will make it clear that the frightened and aggressive patriarch is a
form of the figure called Urizen. The infant, only just born and garnering strength
for a violent rebellion is already becoming the revolutionary figure called
‘Orc’. So, Infant Sorrow describes
part of what can be called the Orc Cycle- the first fight between father and
son, and the implication of the violent rebellion to come. This broadens our
understanding of the themes that concern Blake- that attitudes towards
sexuality are important for the individual- from what we have come to know from
The Angel and The Sick Rose, that shame, secrecy and perversions will bring fear,
horror and misery. Infant Sorrow
suggests, in addition, that a cleaning of attitudes to sexuality is also vital
for the whole of society. In this poem Blake suggests that the pointless and
repetitive wars of an ‘Orc cycle’, where each generation becomes its own Urizen,
will continue until ‘Love, sweet Love’ is no longer ‘thought a crime’. Just as
in the final three lines of London,
the consequences of false attitudes to sexuality are shown to be a fundamental
failure of society.
Before moving on to Blake’s other
poems to elaborate the theme at hand, it is worth remarking Blake’s acute and
prophetic psychological insight. The relationships between infant, father and
mother depicted in this poem are uncannily predictive of the theory of
psychosexual development and the ‘Oedipus Complex’, put forward by Freud more
than a century later. Blake’s portrayal shows that his intuitive formulation of
family relationships was extraordinarily ahead of its time. The four small poems, taken together, then,
define Blake’s understanding of sex very clearly. But it is important to be
cautious about being conditioned in reading them, about not equating our modern
paradigms to equate this with promiscuity. Blake is clearly in favour of what
Earth calls ‘free Love’. The one contrast Blake repeatedly makes is highly
significant. On the one hand there is the ‘dark secret’ perverted sex which is
almost pornographic (the harlot in London),
dishonest (the ‘maiden Queen, who hides her ‘heart’s delight’ and is then
‘armd…with ten thousand shields and spears’ in The Angel), and wastes our ‘winter and night’ in ‘disguise’ (Nurse’s Song). Whereas natural and open
love can bring ‘joy’, the ‘dark secret’ kind with its unwanted and threatening
infant, is a harbinger of future violence and destruction.
The next poem up for analysis is A Poison Tree from Experience – a poem which focuses on honesty in personal
relationships, something that it straightforwardly recommends. Whatever our
feelings towards others they should be expressed. Hidden feelings and dishonest
behavior breeds poison and destruction. The imagery is typical of Blake, where
the abstract performs concrete actions. So ‘tears’ water the tree and ‘smiles’
sun it, while the tree itself is a concrete manifestation of hidden, growing
‘wrath’. Adding this poem to analogous imagery in other Songs, and parallel narratives in his poems will enrich the
understanding of this poem and will express how the Songs act together to
express a complex, and fully integrated analysis of human behavior.
It is quite evident that this poem
is about hidden hostility and disguised murder. But what makes things
interesting is the fact that the tempting apple and a special tree, in a garden
prove lethal to the speaker’s ‘foe’. The reference to Eden and the Fall is too
obvious to be missed. The figure variously described as the ‘Holy Word’ walking
in the Garden of Eden and the ‘Selfish father of men’ is used by Blake to
propose a subversive and radical reinterpretation of the Bible. This figure is
the type of Urizen. He is hypocritically sad (‘Weeping in the evening dew’) and
overwhelmed by ‘Cruel jealous selfish fear’. As a result, this Old Testament
God oppresses man and woman with vicious punishments and imprisons them in
chains of fear. He is the origin of the dictatorship of ‘Thou shalt not’- those
rigid and unnatural laws that bind ‘free Love’ and ‘joys and desires’, and
responsible for ‘every ban’ which forges the ‘mind forg’d manacles’ of tyranny.
Any exploration into trying to decipher the identity of the nature and role of
god in A Poison Tree is illuminating because it takes Blake’s analysis of tyranny
much further. The speaker of the poem owns both garden and apple; and the
victim is both tempted by the fruit (‘my foe beheld it shine’) and knows whose
possession it is (‘he knew that it was mine’). The poem’s speaker is also
responsible for punishing the thief, having poisoned the apple himself- just as
God was responsible for the curses heaped upon Adam and Eve, and binding Earth
in ‘this heavy chain/ That does freeze my bones around’, in Earth’s Answer.
The poem adds two further shocking
implications to Blake’s analysis which is radically suggestive. First, it
suggests that God’s hypocritically hidden hostility to man carries the blame
for the entire story of the Fall. It was God who set the first ban and demanded
the first obedience to law. It was God who placed the forbidden apple in the
garden. The logical conclusion which is unavoidable is that, it was God who
tempted mankind. What could have been the motive behind all this? To work out hostility
he felt but denied all along. But even more radically- the image of a poison
tree implies that God knew what the outcome would be: he poisoned the tree in
advance. What Blake suggests in short is that the jealous, Urizenic God of the
Old Testament set a deceptive trap for mankind, and anticipated the
satisfaction of issuing punishment and feeling self-righteous. Moreover, he
always wanted to use eternal human guilt as a leverage to manipulate future
generations.
The second point relates to how
this poem fills out a psychological story. Unspoken emotion and unacted feeling
is the villain of this piece. Here, Blake, like the true visionary that he was
anticipates a dynamic truism of modern psychology- that suppressed emotion does
not go away: instead the more it is suppressed or prevented from expressing
itself, the more it grows and seeks another outlet. The apple image conveys
another truism of modern psychology- the analysis that repressed urges, when
they do show themselves, often come out in deceptive clothes, pretending to be
something different- often the opposite from what they actually are. Blake is categorical
in this statement- the negative wrath has transformed in appearance into a
tempting, ‘bright’ apple containing the hidden poison of hostility which
ultimately allows wrath to fester and infect. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake calls for the ‘cherub with his
flaming sword to leave his guard at the tree of life’. He argues that this will
lead to an ‘improvement of sensual enjoyment’ and will melt ‘apparent surfaces
away’. Here again Blake attacks jealousy, possessiveness and hypocrisy. The
passage from the Marriage also
reminds us of what should actually be in the place of the poison of selfish
hypocrisy. A friendship, rather than being ‘finite and corrupt’ should be
‘infinite and holy’. The evil of repression is again emphasized when he asserts
that ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of
his cavern’. It is well known that Blake blamed the idea of the separate body
and soul for much of the oppression he saw around him and for the psychological
prisons people fashion for themselves. A
Poison Tree highlights another internal division in operation- repression
divides people internally, preventing their natural emotions from finding an
outlet. The speaker’s natural wrath in A
Poison Tree and other natural urges and desires are called ‘Energy’, while
the agent of repression is called ‘Reason’. In the Marriage Blake goes on to say that ‘Good is the passive that obeys
Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy’. The following two Proverbs of Hell further reinforce the
importance Blake attaches to emotional honesty and the danger he sees in its
opposite:
He
who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. (The Complete Writings of William Blake 151)
Sooner
murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. (Ibid. 152)
The bright and poisonous apple which is the final
outcome of a character – process in the speaker has a variety of qualities. It
is lethally destructive, tempting, and attractive and selfish. Blake uses the
apple as a symbol of what the character’s original dishonesty has made. The
process which grew the tree and its apple is also clearly given. It is watered
with ‘fears’ and sunned by ‘soft deceitful wiles’.
Let us now take up parts of the
Prophetic Books for discussion to examine how they can illuminate the issues
being explored in this paper. The Book of
Thel, a Prophetic poem is a study in fear of life. The speaker Thel is an
unborn soul overwhelmed by thoughts of her future death, and the mutability of
things. To place her in a discourse on Blake and use a familiar context to the
one that is being developed - Thel lives in an undeveloped world of Innocence,
the kind of ironically limited paradise of The
Lamb and The Echoing Green. She fears experience and is unwilling to leave.
There is a subtle irony in her refusal to accept experience. Blake manages to
portray Thel, at the same time appealingly as sympathetic and slightly
nauseating. The irony lies in the passage’s hints at Thel’s underlying
obstinacy. The happiness Thel feels and refuses to part with is infantile and
so is her pointless complaint which only rejects life without making any
attempt to understand. The range of emotions she chooses for herself- rainbow,
cloud, reflection, shadows, dreams and so on, are significantly restrictive. They
are all vague, evanescent and soft. There is an absence of solidity: of rocks,
mountains and beasts - of solid earth itself.
At the end of the poem Thel is
allowed to visit the physical world into which she refuses to be born. In the
interval, Thel has consulted a lily, a cloud, a worm and a clod of clay; and
all of them have advised her. Each of their accounts of life is limited but
they have faith and accept their lot. Although gentle, Blake’s satire
highlights the hard core of selfishness and isolation in his weeping character. This part of the poem is a reminder that she
cannot see clearly in ‘valleys dark’. Ironically, it seems as if what Thel sees
and hears in the real world is only a reflection of her own lamentation: a
shadowed reiteration of her own insubstantial complaint. At the end, Thel is
further terrified by the natural senses which are open to life and its terrors.
With increasingly intense irony, the poem reiterates her rejecting question
‘why?” before she runs back to her infantile state ‘with a shriek’.
The
Book of Thel is a sensitive portrayal of fear
of life, then. It is profoundly revealing because it reveals the origins of
Urizenic tyranny and personal hypocrisy. As Thel looks around her she realizes
that all the beauties she sees are in the same state- doomed to non- existence-
and this reinforces her first impulse, to reject. Rejection is a fundamentally
selfish act. It asserts the supreme importance of preserving ‘I’, and to do so
it attempts to isolate ‘I’ and insulate itself from all challenge or attack. Subtly
enough, the fixed self is unwilling to develop because it wants to protect its
dream of permanence. In Thel, the
fixed self only runs; but her alliance with the God of Genesis reveals the
vicious potential that lies in such a fixed self. Urizen is also a fixed self,
fighting to survive unchanged. He tyrannically imposes his own dream of
permanence upon the world around him. This poem thus reveals that the infantile
attitude of fear and rejection unnaturally survives childhood. In Blake’s picture
of personality development, the driving motive behind adult cruelty and error
is this self-preserving fear- an impulse of rejection which can begin at the
beginning of life. This analysis reveals Blake foreshadowing psychoanalytical
theory, in that it suggests that the imbalance and destructiveness of adult
personality is caused by a failure to cope in infancy. Thus the poem explores a
story about the early genesis, in infancy, of the hardened self-protective
delusion Blake came to call the ‘Selfhood’. The poem narrates an early phase in
its development, when the heroine fails to overcome her fears, and chooses to
run away.
In The First Book of Urizen, the Selfhood is portrayed in a more
violent phase, creating itself in hostility and striking out against life. This
paper will deal with the formation and rise of the Selfhood and Urizen’s first
promulgation of the terrible ‘One law’. The opening section gives a clear indication
of Urizen’s state of mind- ‘dark solitude’ and ‘set apart’ reveal his self-
concerned separation from life. The corollary of such isolation is ‘Hidden’
implying that for all his boastfulness and ‘stern’ counsels, he hides from fear
and failure. The vicious self-righteousness which is characteristic of Urizen
is suggested by ‘holiness’. Just like what we saw in Thel, the tyrant’s delusion is as facile and equally self-evidently
wrong. He searches for ‘a joy without
pain’ and ‘a solid without fluctuation’,
both of which are false dreams in a world in which progress comes through a
dialectical struggle of contraries and
where movement and change are principle governing forces of life. Urizen utters
the same pathetic and plaintive question as Thel- ‘Why will you die, O
Eternals?’ This section thus reveals
that Urizen’s error is the same as the infantile Thel’s.
Blake hints that Urizen’s ‘void
immense’ which is a ‘deep world within’ is not the enemy Urizen believes it to
be, when it is described as ‘Nature’s wide womb’. Far from being his enemy, it
is Urizen’s own imaginative potential that he battles to destroy as he tries to
make reason supreme. This of course is an error and carries further errors in
its wake. Finally Urizen promulgates his law. The passage clearly presents the
birth of tyranny, and we recognize the Urizenic character easily. This is the
oppressor who supports Albion’s angel in Europe,
A Prophecy. What we have discovered here is that Urizen should not be
dismissed as a mere hate-figure. He is characterized with subtle psychological
depth. His cruelties are firmly rooted in fear and error and Blake’s satire
acknowledges that we can identify with these. The final poem up for discussion
is one of the three longer prophetic poems, Milton,
A Poem. Blake sees the seventeenth century poet returning to earth to
correct his mistakes and renew his inspiration. When he descends to earth into
Blake’s cottage garden, Milton still carries his own errors within himself. A
cursory knowledge about the futile battles of Orc and Urizen and the constant
re-creation of a negative, hard shell called the ‘Selfhood’ is well-known in
the realm of Blake studies. As he descends to earth, Milton still carries all
these negative struggles and errors with him in the form of a figure that
represents his Selfhood, which is here called his Spectre, or Satan. When
Milton addresses this Spectre or Satan, he describes the futile struggle between
Orc and Urizen- the destruction of a ‘Selfhood’ by a new ’Selfhood’. This process,
just like the ‘Orc cycle’’ is eternally pointless and brings no change. So,
Milton describes it as continuity: each apparent change is merely Satan under a
new covering. He then proposes something different: a real change and a
solution to the endless conflict, which
he calls ‘Self Annihilation’ Milton’s proposed self-annihilation goes beyond
the laws of Urizen/Satan’s ‘false heav’ns’. In this passage self-annihilation
seems to consist of sheer courage: it is to ‘despise death’ in ‘fearless’ majesty,
and laughing scorn to all the laws and terrors of Urizen. Milton’s speech
reveals the task each individual must undertake- to destroy the self in a
moment of inspired courage.
This inspiration, imagination and
vision occur outside the restrictions of time. So Blake developed the concept
of a ‘moment in which vision occurs and truth is revealed; and he contrasted
this with the limited structure of time itself. In an inspired moment ‘all’ can
be seen in a flash; within time, on the other hand , only little parts of the
whole can be seen, each in turn. To use the words of Northrop Frye, such
‘moments’ can help us achieve ‘fulfilled desire and unbounded freedom’ (Frye,
26-7). The following lines from Milton beautifully express this concept:
Every
Time than a pulsation of the artery
Is
equal in its period and value to Six Thousand Years,
For
in this Period the Poet’s Work is Done, and all the Great
Events
of Time start forth and are conceiv’d in such a Period,
Within
a Moment, a Pulsation of the Artery. (The
Complete Writings of William Blake 528)
Milton describes his purpose as to go on, in
fearless majesty annihilating the self. He talks about the selfhood which must
be put off and annihilated away- a painful and agonizing process which will
cleanse his spirit by self-examination. The point is that self-annihilation
cannot be a one and done event. The selfhood constantly rebuilds and re-creates
itself. So constant self-examination and self-annihilation is necessary.
Having arrived at the end of our
quest we have discussed the origin, growth and anatomy of what Blake called the
‘Selfhood’, and identified this as essentially the same hardening process
within a society, or within the personality, that can be variously called
Urizen, Satan or Spectre. Blake calls for a renewal within each individual, and
suggests a solution to obstructions, blindness and divisions within the
personality. His philosophy as a whole applies to individual consciousness, and
urges a renewal on psychological, spiritual and imaginative levels- a ringing
assertion of idealism.
Works Cited
Blake, William. Songs
of Innocence and Experience. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Rupert
Hart- Davis, 1967. Print.
---.The
Complete Writings of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London: Oxford
UP, 1966. Print.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful
Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1947. Print.
Hirsch, E.D. Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to
Blake. London:
Yale UP, 1964. Print.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual
Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Print.