PLATE 7
In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work, Sit on a bank and draw the pleasures of this free born joy.
"The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys
In the secret shadows of her chamber; the youth shut up from The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.5
4. Oothoon contrasts the natural, innocent sen- the Rights of Woman, is "merely a respect for the suality of an infant to the sort of modesty charac- opinion of the world." terizing the adult virgin, a false modesty that, Mary 5. Blake is describing masturbation. Wollstonecraft had observed in her Vindication of
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VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION / 109
Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence? The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost seek religion? Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude, Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?
"Father of Jealousy,6 be thou accursed from the earth! Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing? Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darken'd and cast out, A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity.
"I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind! Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water? That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day, To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary! dark! Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight. Such is self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.
"But silken nets and traps of adamant7 will Oothoon spread, And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious gold; I'll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon: Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam, Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e'er with jealous cloud Come in the heaven of generous love; nor selfish blightings bring.
"Does the sun walk in glorious raiment on the secret floor
PLATE 8
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!"8
Thus every morning wails Oothoon, but Theotormon sits Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs.
1791-93 1793
6. I.e., Urizen (5.3), the God who prohibits the diamond.) satisfaction of human desires. 8. This last phrase is also the concluding line of 7. A legendary stone believed to be unbreakable. "A Song of Liberty," appended to The Marriage of (The name is derived from the Greek word for Heaven and Hell.
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110 / WILLIAM BLAKE
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell This, the most immediately accessible of Blake's longer works, is a vigorous, deliberately outrageous, and at times comic onslaught against timidly conventional and self-righteous members of society as well as against stock opinions of orthodox Christian piety and morality. The seeming simplicity of Blake's satiric attitude, however, is deceptive.
Initially, Blake accepts the terminology of standard Christian morality ("what the religious call Good & Evil") but reverses its values. In this conventional use Evil, which is manifested by the class of beings called Devils and which consigns wrongdoers to the orthodox Hell, is everything associated with the body and its desires and consists essentially of energy, abundance, actions, and freedom. Conventional Good, which is manifested by Angels and guarantees its adherents a place in the orthodox Heaven, is associated with the Soul (regarded as entirely separate from the body) and consists of the contrary qualities of reason, restraint, passivity, and prohibition. Blandly adopting these conventional oppositions, Blake elects to assume the diabolic persona�what he calls "the voice of the Devil"�and to utter "Proverbs of Hell."
But this stance is only a first stage in Blake's complex irony, designed to startle the reader into recognizing the inadequacy of conventional moral categories. As he also says in the opening summary, "Without Contraries is no progression," and "Reason and Energy" are both "necessary to Human existence." It turns out that Blake subordinates his reversal of conventional values under a more inclusive point of view, according to which the real Good, as distinguished from the merely ironic Good, is not abandonment of all restraints but a "marriage," or union of the contraries, of desire and restraint, energy and reason, the promptings of Hell and the denials of Heaven�or as Blake calls these contraries in plate 16, "the Prolific" and "the Devouring." These two classes, he adds, "should be enemies," and "whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence." Implicit in Blake's satire is the view that the good and abundant life consists in the sustained tension, without victory or suppression, of co-present oppositions.
When Blake composed this unique work in the early 1790s, his city of London was teeming with religious mystics, astrologers, and sometimes bawdy freethinkers who were determined to challenge the Established Church's monopoly on spirituality and who were reviving the link, created in the seventeenth century, between enthusiasm in religion and political revolution. The work is also a response to the writings of the visionary Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Blake had at first admired but then had come to recognize as a conventional Angel in the disguise of a radical Devil. In plate 3 the writings of Swedenborg are described as the winding clothes Blake discards as he is resurrected from the tomb of his past self, as a poet-prophet who heralds the apocalyptic promise of his age. Blake shared the expectations of a number of radical English writers, including the young poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, that the French Revolution was the violent stage that, as the biblical prophets foresaw, immediately preceded the millennium. The double role of The Marriage as both satire and revolutionary prophecy is made explicit in A Song of Liberty, which Blake etched in 1792 and added as a coda.