SONG OF LIBERTY

Blake Archive

Original in Fitzwilliam Museum

Copy H, Plate 24

 Thanks to Geoffrey Keynes for his introduction and commentary in William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Introduction - commentary by Keynes

 "On the third plate he had stated the doctrine of contraries - Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate. Without these contraries there could be no progression, that is, human thought and life need the stimulus of active and opposing ofrces to give them creative movement. In the light of this principle Blake gave the qualities, Good and Evil, meanings opposite to their their usual acceptation, and in the fourth plate announced in plain terms how the wrong interpretation had arisen, stemming from conventional moral codes. To him passive acceptance was evil, active opposition was good. This is the key to the paradoxes and inversions of which the whole work consists. Angels and Devils change places. Good is Evil. Heaven is Hell. Through freely using satire and paradox, Blake gives this book some of the most explicit statements of his mental attitudes, which he elaborated in the later Prophetic Books and restated more clearly in the phrases of the Laocoon plate in 1820. Page xi

"It is important to remember while reading the book that there are two primary features throughout - satire and personal philosophy. Blake is neither being flippant no too serious; the Marriage has much wit and good humor mingled with the expression of deeply felt personal convictions." Page xi

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 24, (E  44)

"One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

Plate 25

Song of Liberty
1.  The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth:
2.  Albions coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!
3  Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers
and mutter across the ocean! France rend down thy dungeon;  
4.  Golden Spain burst the barriers of old Rome;
5.  Cast thy keys O Rome into the deep down falling, even to
eternity down falling, 
6.  And weep! 
7.  In her trembling hands she took the new, born terror howling;
8.  On those infinite mountains of light now barr'd out by the
atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king! 
9.  Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages the
jealous wings wav'd over the deep.
10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield,
forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and 
[PL 26] hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night.
11. The fire, the fire, is falling!
12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London. enlarge thy
countenance; O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and
wine; O African! black African! (go. winged thought widen his
forehead.) 
13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun
into the western sea.
14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary, element roaring
fled away:
15. Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his
grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans,
among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants:
banners, castles, slings and rocks,
16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's
dens.
17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded
emerge round the gloomy king,
18. With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the
waste wilderness [PL 27] he promulgates his ten commands,
glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the
morning plumes her golden breast,
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony
law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night,
crying

  Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.

          Chorus

  Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly
black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy.  Nor his accepted
brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the
roof.  Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that
wishes but acts not!
  For every thing that lives is Holy"
 ____________________

Chorus - Paraphrase

Liberty requires the removal of restraints which prevent the expression of joy. Accepting the designation of free when the tryrant is restricting freedom with political and religious restraints would set limits to liberty. Pretense which hides desire behind deceit destroys liberty no matter what the name.

It is life expressed through physical action and mental imagination that impart the divine to all creation. 

________________

Out of the destruction of the old system came the new. Song of Liberty began with a birth whose cry was 'heard over all the Earth.' It ended with the commandments being stomped to dust by the revolutionary force which released the energy of a new age. Liberty was not to be attained until the opposition to it had been removed. Blake systematically enumerated, in poetic language, aspects of the society in which he lived which kept him and his contempories in chains.

_____________

A Song of Liberty - Plates 25-27, commentary by Keynes

"In the sixteeenth sentence of the Song Blake added to the Rintrah of 'The Argument' one more of his personifications of abstract ideas by the name 'Urthona'. This is one of the 'Four Zoas' of Blake's conception of  Man's nature: Tharmas, his body; Urizen, his reason; Luvah, his emotions; Urthona, his imagination, All of these are explained only in later writings, yet Blake was content to throw in one of the Zoas, unexplained, among the consequences of Revolution, perhaps because it must have been the most important result of all. Urthona concerned Art and the Divinity of Man and worked darkly in the 'dens' of the subconscious mind, but would be liberated by the collapse of Tyranny."