NELSON HILTON

 First posed August 2023

Title - Blake An Illustrated Quarterly - 1999

Article - www.english.uga.edu/wblake

by Nelson Hilton

"The 'Blake Digital Text Project' (http://www.english.uga.edu/wblake) originated in 1994 with the desire to create an electronic, online, interactive, enhanced version of the long out-of-print 1967 Concordance to the Writings of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman."

[ An online Concordance to Blake is available now at:

http://victorian-studies.net/concordance/blake/         ]

When Nelson Hilton was Professor of English at the University of Georgia he worked at making Erdman's The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake accessible in digitized form. He indexed Blake's works and linked each item with the file containing the contents. Unlike Erdman's book he included line numbers for easy referencing. Page numbers from the book were on each line.

When Hilton left the University of Georgia, the Blake digitizing project migrated to the University of Arizona with which Hilton became associated. 

Each section of Erdman's book is easily located in this listing of the contents. It is convenient to click on any listing and read the selection that interests you. 

Contents, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

https://blake.lib.asu.edu/html/home.html

In Hilton's CONTENTS here is text from America:

America, Plate 3, (E 51)

Am1.1; E51    "The shadowy daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc.
Am1.2; E51    When fourteen suns had faintly journey'd o'er his dark abode;
Am1.3; E51    His food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in cups of iron;
Am1.4; E51    Crown'd with a helmet & dark hair the nameless female stood;
Am1.5; E51    A quiver with its burning stores, a bow like that of night,
Am1.6; E51    When pestilence is shot from heaven; no other arms she need:
Am1.7; E51    Invulnerable tho' naked, save where clouds roll round her loins,
Am1.8; E51    Their awful folds in the dark air; silent she stood as night;
Am1.9; E51    For never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise;
Am1.10; E51  But dumb till that dread day when Orc assay'd his fierce                                    embrace.   

Am1.11; E51  Dark virgin; said the hairy youth, thy father stern abhorr'd;
Am1.12; E51  Rivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars;
Am1.13; E51  Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion,
Am1.14; E51  Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash
Am1.15; E51  The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding

Am1.16; E51  Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,
Am1.17; E51  On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds.
Am1.18; E51  For chaind beneath I rend these caverns; when thou bringest food
Am1.19; E51  I howl my joy! and my red eyes seek to behold thy face
Am1.20; E51  In vain! these clouds roll to & fro, & hide thee from my sight."

Wikipedia Commons

America

Plate 3

 

Los (Time) and Enitharmon (Space) children of Enion and Urthona (Nature and Spirit) become themselves the parents of Orc (the spirit of change or revolution.)  

So Blake announces that he will write about things happening in the natural word but clothed in symbols which will hide and reveal reality as befits his myth of  creation, fall, redemption and apocalypse.

We find the daughter of Urthona - a manifestation of Urthona in the Natural World - providing the food of dissension to Orc who is approaching maturity. She is armed with a supply of ideas and the means to direct them, but it takes the awakening of the revolutionary spirit to give them voice. Incidents that demand change repeatedly occur but a clear view of a way forward is not in sight.

Four Zoas, Night VII, Page 79, (E 355)

"Urizen answerd Read my books explore my Constellations 
Enquire of my Sons & they shall teach thee how to War
Enquire of my Daughters who accursd in the dark depths
Knead bread of Sorrow by my stern command for I am God
Of all this dreadful ruin   Rise O daughters at my Stern command

Rending the Rocks Eleth & Uveth rose & Ona rose       
Terrific with their iron vessels driving them across
In the dim air they took the book of iron & placd above
On clouds of death & sang their songs Kneading the bread of Orc
Orc listend to the song compelld hungring on the cold wind
That swaggd heavy with the accursed dough. the hoar frost ragd   
Thro Onas sieve   the torrent rain pourd from the iron pail
Of Eleth & the icy hands of Uveth kneaded the bread
The heavens bow with terror underneath their iron hands
Singing at their dire work the words of Urizens book of iron
While the enormous scrolls rolld dreadful in the heavens above   
And still the burden of their song in tears was poured forth
The bread is Kneaded let us rest O cruel father of children
But Urizen remitted not their labours upon his rock" 

 

Events of Fall

  Previously posted Nov 2018 

Yale Center for British Art
Jerusalem
Plate 19  

 

Always fiercely eclectic, Blake has gathered his symbols here from a number of sources into a new creation: sleeping man equals fallen man living in darkness; this most general symbol fills the New Testament. For example, "Awake thou that sleepest, and Christ shall give thee light". We live by the light of reason (not always Christ's light!). Urizen, the Sun God, must be asleep to allow Luvah, like the Greek adolescent, Phaethon, to seize his Horses of Light and rise into the Chariot of Day. Zeus struck Phaethon down with a thunderbolt in the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Blake used Ovid as a primary source for his borrowings from Greek mythology.

In Night ii we will find Urizen casting Luvah into the furnaces of affliction, where there is much heat but no light. What was once eternal delight has become unmitigated hell.

Luvah and Vala personify the masculine and feminine dimensions of feeling, and séparated from Luvah, Vala becomes the goddess of fallen nature. Luvah's seizure of the sun and Vala's dalliance on the pillow express in different ways the same event. The Prince of Love is bound to get his wings scorched, and the sleeping Albion is rather foolish to allow this to happen; he has lost his head over a part of himself.

Blake used this double event to say many things to us at many levels. Fundamentally Blake is saying that Man has lost his heavenly wholeness (which he calls the Divine Image) and begun to worship the material, a relatively insignificant part of himself. He turns his back upon the Divine Vision in his dream of Vala. The former is Eternal Life and the latter Eternal Death. The dalliance of Albion with Vala leads to the Eternal Death (fallenness) that we read about in the first six nights. Blake described it symbolically, in many ways, for example, "to converse in the wilds of Newton and Locke". We find here Blake's primary dialectic, between eternal vision and fallen materialism.

Other accounts of this decisive event occur at various places throughout the Four Zoas. The most definitive is that of Ahania. Her dream relates the central event, the primary fall, to an idolatrous worship; just so Blake evaluated organized religion. Albion's worship of his shadow has two immediate consequences: he breaks out with the boils of Job, a biblical symbol of the Fall of Mankind, and he exiles Luvah and Vala from their rightful place in the psychic economy.

__________________________

There are at least six occurrences of the story which I call the central event of the Fall:

K=Keynes, E=Erdman

Enitharmon's Song of Death      Night i. 261-80 K 271-2 --- (E 305)

Ambassadors from Beulah                     i. 484-559 K277-9 --- (E 311)

Ahania's vision                                       iii. 42-102 K 292-4 --- (E 326)

The Spectre of Urthona (first)              iv. 84-110 K 299-300 --- (E 334)

The Shadow of Enitharmon                 vii. 239-64 K 326 --- (E 358)

The Spectre of Urthona (second)        vii. 277-98 K 327 --- (E 359)

See Summary

Primer - Myth

British Museum
Illustration of the Prodigal Son.

Blake Archive
The Prodigal Son's return to his father.


Fitzwilliam Museum
The father's reception of his son.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Plate 45, (E 26)

"And God like a father rejoicing to see,

His children as pleasant and happy as he:

Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel

But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel."

Myth -This passage is from Larry Clayton's book, Chapter Nine:

"Many people have called William Blake unique among English poets as the creator of a complete mythology. In a standard dictionary "without foundation in fact"  appears as the fifth meaning of 'mythical', but this is probably what the term conveys in common parlance. Therefore we must begin our study of Blake's myth by raising our consciousness of the word. 'Logos', 'myth', 'epic'--these three words have a common root. In literary and theological language myths are statements about the non-material ultimate . Some people of course avoid the non-material, considering it to be without foundation in fact; it's doubtful that any such reader has endured to his point of our study.

Blake considered the non-material to be the real; his art centered around the  endeavour to express the reality of the non-material. The meaning of his entire  artistic enterprise we may call his myth. His object was to fit all of experience into a total framework of meaning that will inform life. Our object is to grasp that total  framework; once we do that, we have a myth of meaning.

The diagram below schematically represents the shape of Blake's myth. All his  poetic and artistic work fits into this scheme of cosmic/psychic meaning. 

Only four of an infinite number of possible examples are included. The first is a general statement of Blake's scheme. Second with his story of the Prodigal Son in which Jesus gave us a personal paradigm of the history of the Chosen People and of the Human Race. Third is the career of alcoholism's progressive deterioration until the sufferer hits bottom, followed by recovery, providing a striking modern analogy, although not Blakean per se. Blake did use as a recurring motif the story of Lazarus found in the Gospel of John. But the primary paradigm of this myth is the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ. However Blake did not express this, probably did not fully realize it, until 1800 when he experiened an awakening.

This chapter illustrates the application of this fundamental myth in Blake's major poetic works. The development of Blake's epic will be traced through the various stages of his spiritual journey. In essence it's the same journey we all take; you could call it the history of Man. Blake called it the Circle of Destiny."

LIFE AS METAPHOR

First Posted March 2015

Few people who read Blake would deny that he is attempting to make his reader change the way he perceives his world. Our minds have been trained to see separate entities which are clearly differentiated. We have learned that things are either one thing or another. We measure and define, explain and rationalize. 

But what if words were pointers to ideas which were too big to be contained in words. What if each word opened the mind to ever expanding vistas of movement and activity. What if there were gates through which you could pass to enter unknown worlds. What if the world to which imagination can take us were all around us and inside us as well. What if we traveled through images of reality in a body which belongs to Eternity. Such a world would be the environs in which William Blake lived.

Blake's life can be thought of as a metaphor which he was using to describe the world which senses cannot access. He lived the joy and woe which permeates his poetic and visual images. He lived the death and the resurrection, and the journey of experience which connects the two. It was not enough to him to portray the Eternal, Infinite, Invisible world, he wanted to give access to that world to the brotherhood of man.

You are given the opportunity of viewing your own life as metaphor. You can become conscious that what we call reality is a mask which covers an "an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five". Your imagination will be expanded as was Blake's by exercising your "immortal Eyes ... inward into the Worlds of Thought".

Jerusalem, Plate 5, (E 147)
"Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination        
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!"

Four Zoas, Night VIII, Page 114, (E 385)
"he [Man] rises to the Sun
And to the Planets of the Night & to the stars that gild
The Zodiac & the stars that sullen stand to north & south
He touches the remotest pole & in the Center weeps
That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget & return
To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew
In pain he sighs in pain he labours in his universe
Screaming in birds over the deep & howling in the Wolf
Over the slain & moaning in the cattle & in the winds
And weeping over Orc & Urizen in clouds & flaming fires  
And in the cries of birth & in the groans of death his voice 
Is heard throughout the Universe whereever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds   The Eternal Man is seen is heard   is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss

Such are the words of Ahania & Enion. Los hears & weeps  
And Los & Enitharmon took the Body of the Lamb 
Down from the Cross & placd it in a Sepulcher which Los had hewn
For himself in the Rock of Eternity trembling & in despair 
Jerusalem wept over the Sepulcher two thousand Years"

Songs of Innocence & of Experience, Plate 9, (E 9)
"And we are put on earth a little space, 
we may learn to bear the beams of love,
...
SONGS 10  
For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."