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PHILOSOPHY and MYTHOLOGY
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Blake argued against rationalist philosophy and defended the supremacy of fantasy, which alone enables a person to see the infinity. Blake’s religion was rather unorthodox, as well as his philosophy and moral opinions. Some of his works are highly original interpretations of the Bible. For example, The Everlasting Gospel (1818) – an incomplete work, a rather extravagant interpretation of Christ’s life and personality, in which Blake attacks the conventional version of the meek and humble Christ (“creeping Jesus”), and stresses his rebellious nature.
In his so-called ‘ Prophetic Books’ (America. A Prophecy; Europe. A Prophecy; The Book of Urizen; the Book of Los; the Four Zoas; The Daughters of Albion and others) Blake developed a series of cosmic myths, parallel to those of the Bible; in fact, a complete mythology. His mythological system is excessively complicated, highly mystic, and full of cryptic prophecies about the world and human nature.
With a certain degree of simplification, his mythology can be described as follows. Blake’s mythical premise is the ‘Universal Man’ who himself is God and who incorporates cosmos as well. He describes his founding image as “The Human Form Divine” and names him “Albion”. The fall in this myth is not of man from God but a falling apart of a primal man, a fall into divisions. Blake calls this event of original sin “selfhood”, it is in effect an attempt of an isolated part to be self-sufficient. Universal man divides first into the “Four Mighty Ones”, which are the Zoas, or chief powers and component aspects of man, and these in turn divide sexually into male Spectres and female Emanations. The fallen world moves through the cycles of its history, until it will culminate in an apocalypse, which is a return to the original, undivided condition, “resurrection to Unity”.
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Blake’s greatness as one of the leading poets of English Romanticism is best expressed in his ‘illuminated books’ – Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience – which he reprinted several times.
Songs of Innocence were engraved and published in 1789 (the first year of the French Revolution). In 1794 (the time of Jacobean terror) Blake added supplementary poems and afterwards always published them together – The Songs of Innocence and Experience.
The two groups of poems (constituting a poetic cycle) represent the world as it is envisioned by what he called “two contrary sides of the human soul”.
A characteristic feature of Blake’s poetry is to see the world in terms of opposites. In his most celebrated works some poems are also written in pairs, contrasting states of human innocence and experience.
The central concept of the cycle is the paradoxical but unbreakable ties that connect Dream and Reality, Childhood and Maturity, Innocence and Knowledge. The poems are noted by tender lyricism and bold originality.
In the introduction to the first group of poems a child asks the Poet “to pipe a song about a Lamb”, and the poet writes cheerful happy songs: “I wrote my happy songs//Every child may joy to hear”. Most of the poems are about childhood, some are written with apparent simplicity, as if by children.
Infant Joy
| “I have no name, I am but two days old.” What shall I call thee? “I happy am, Joy is my name.” Sweet joy befall thee! | Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile, I sing the while – Sweet joy befall thee. |
Not all the poems depict an innocent and happy world; many incorporate injustice, evil, and suffering. However, these aspects of the fallen world are represented as they appear to the state of innocence and expressed in a simple pastoral language. The central symbol in the first group of poems is the Lamb, which becomes a metaphor and symbol of Christ.
The vision of the same world, as it appears to the contrary state of the soul – ‘experience" – is a tense, ugly and terrifying one of poverty, disease, war, repression.
Though each stands as an independent poem, a number of songs of innocence have a matched counterpart, or ‘contrary’ in the songs of experience. (The Chimney Sweeper; Nurse’s Song; The Infant Joy is paired with Infant Sorrow; The Flower with The Sick Rose, etc.) The contrary states” help to see the balance and harmony of the world, which is a central theme in Romanticism. (см., например, Coleridge. Biographia …)
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.
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