Blake's Tyger

Appendix

A Letter from Kathleen Raine

47 Paultons Square, London S.W.3. 5DT.

Feb. 4th, 1979

Dear Mr. Sethna,

Please forgive my long delay in replying to your letter and acknowledging your Tyger manuscript. It has been a pleasure to pick up again the threads of our old exchange of ideas, and to see what you have now made of the poem. You may of course be right in seeing the Tyger as the form taken by Jesus the Imagination in the world of Experience. This could very well be so.

I liked best of all your first chapter, in which you so minutely and beautifully go through the poem before you begin to look at sources. It is a finely argued reading of the text and imaginatively true to Blake's thought in essence. I do not wish to argue my way with you through the rest of the book - all that ground we covered before - and I am bound to say that your Milton quotations richly illustrate the extent to which Blake's mind and thought was filled with Miltonic mythology and Miltonic language. A good point, too - Bateson's, I think - about the pages of the Notebook being filled with thumbnail sketches of Miltonic themes. I only differ from you in thinking that Milton was by no means the only source of Blake's ideas and symbols at the time of his writing the Songs of Experience. No poet ever draws exclusively upon a single source. But you have enriched our realisation of the immense debt to Milton, both in the Tyger and in other poems you quote.

I still think the book needs much cutting. There are repetitions, and in some cases you weaken your general argument by almost too many quotations. The last chapter, too, is in many ways a recapitulation. But all lovers of the Tyger must thank you for your illuminating reading.

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I think some problems which continue to exist between us would be resolved (for myself as for you) by a clearer understanding of the fact that there are four "worlds" or levels in play in Blake. In the world of generation (created by the demiurge Urizen) the "fallen" Zoas or "starry ones" including Urizen himself have one aspect; in the "eternal" world not only Los but all four are the four "faces" of the Eternal Man. Jesus the Imagination is the universal transcendent spirit, and united to the humanity of Albion through the soul - Jerusalem. And so oh. Each world has its own symbolic landscape (this is Swedenborgian) which as in dreams comes into existence as a "correspondence" of the state of mind which produces the symbol; so that it is vain to argue that the "forests of the night" existed "before" the symbolic situation in which they appear, since they are part of that situation and exist only as its symbolic form. So with other symbols.

I don't accept what you write about Jesus "aspiring" to the Father. This may be Milton's view of Jesus (though to me you have not proved it) but it is certainly not Blake's, for whom Jesus is the Imagination of God in man. "Jesus is God." As to seizing, it may not necessarily be a "theft" but it is certainly a "taking possession" of something with a prior existence, which cannot be attributed to the creation of God or in and by Jesus the Imagination. These are my main points of difference. But that does not lessen the pleasure with which I read your thoughts on the poem you and I both love and have studied perhaps more carefully than anyone else living in the present world of generation.

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A Comment by K. D. Sethna based on his

reply on 10.2. 1 979.

Naturally I was delighted to hear from Miss Raine and thankful to her for going through the final form of the book which had been instrumental in bringing us together. Once again, she had read my exposition with an attitude at once deeply sympathetic and critically alert. She is right in holding that "Milton was by no means the only source of Blake's ideas and symbols at the time of writing the Songs of Experience". Her monumental study, Blake and Tradition, amply proves her point. I do not dispute it. What I must be taken to imply by my thesis is simply that Milton was the predominant source for The Tyger and therefore might justifiably be concentrated upon to the practical exclusion of the other sources.

These sources may have lent some minor shades or else emphasized certain modes of expression (like the detailed dwelling on the various parts of the animal's anatomy), but can they be said to have contributed vitally to the myth and the symbol which for me are affined to Milton? Do they in any manner deflect the Miltonic line of vision I trace throughout the poem? If, as Miss Raine frankly concedes, Blake's mind and thought was to a substantial extent "filled with Miltonic mythology and Miltonic language" and he owed an "immense debt" to Milton in The Tyger as well as elsewhere, this line of vision may legitimately stand without serious alteration by the Alchemical-Hermetic lore she has disclosed in Blake. Being antithetical, either Miltonism or that lore must be seen as determining the central theme. In my view, a full-fledged hybrid is not feasible. Blake's animal must be, in the main, one thing or the other. Only small secondary interminglings can be admitted.

As for "much cutting" being still needed, I myself had the sense here and there that to consider a theme so minutely was to consider it too curiously. Yet I could not help pouring out the whole store of my discoveries so as to leave nothing relevant unsaid - even if such a procedure entailed fatiguing the

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reader at places. Perhaps the impression that my general argument gets weakened in some cases is due to the reader's fatigue rather than to any fault in the citations themselves? In my Preface I have already warned the reader against this possible strain on his attention by the long chapter on the Miltonic basis. If the quotations there are taken not in one gulp but in a series of sips, I may be better served.

In regard to the recapitulation in the last chapter, I incline to believe that, while a sharp and rich mind like Miss Raine's in the Blakean field would not require any repetition, however skilfully framed, the average Blake-student who too is expected to turn my pages would appreciate some return in brief to the central vision at the end of the lengthy and multi-directioned journey.

I am afraid the problems which continue to exist between Miss Raine and me would not be so easily resolved as she thinks by what she calls "a clearer understanding of the fact that there are always four 'worlds' or levels in play in Blake" and that "each world has its symbolic landscape... which as in dreams comes into existence as a 'correspondence' of the state of mind which produces the symbol". From this statement I am supposed to realise that the "forests of the night" could never have been a reality of "heaven" before the world of generation came into being, the world in which are the "fallen" Zoas or "starry ones", since these forests are part of the situation of the "fall" and are only its symbolic form. But my very point is that, although there is a "fallen" world of generation and there is an "eternal" world where the Four Zoas are the united aspects of the Fourfold Divine Humanity, the Blakean "fall" is a la Milton for whom a revolt and fall in heaven precede the fall from heaven which is for Blake the world of generation. The Miltonic strain of Blake's mythology modifies the symbolism derived from the Alchemical-Hermetic tradition. Hence we cannot explain away in terms of the latter the explicit mention I have shown in Blake of night and forests not only in the world of generation but also in the eternal world, Blake's heaven or Eden. As Miltonism is almost omnipresent in Blake and as

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Miss Raine herself speaks of "Miltonic mythology" no less than "Miltonic language" as filling Blake's "mind and thought", it should surely not be "vain to argue that the 'forests of the night' existed 'before' the situation" she characterises as the "fallen" world of generation. Can there be any doubt of their pre-existence in a mythology deep-rooted in Milton? They are divine prototypes whose perversion by Urizen marks his revolt in Eternity and is reproduced in Nature when he is driven out of Supernature¹.

Miss Raine's perspective of the problem concerning Jesus and God seems somewhat mixed-up. Milton, the avowed Arian of De Doctrina Christiana, would have no scruple in making Jesus "aspire" to the Father as to a superior. No proof is required there. But the poet of Paradise Lost is not recognizably a follower of Arius and I never attempt to prove him to be one. Escaping any formulable charge of Arianism, his theology can easily be matched with Blake's. Whatever qualified sense of Jesus' aspiring can be read in Paradise Lost in a general Christian fashion will not go against the grain of Blake's concept of Jesus. To him, as Miss Raine urges, "Jesus is God", and yet this "God" can say:

"I am doing my Father's business"²

and Blake can write of "the kingdoms of God & his Christ".³

From the subtlety of the aspiring by Jesus we can derive the subtle seizing which allows the sense of "a 'taking possession' of something with a prior existence" - a prior existence implied by the relationship of "Jesus the Imagination" to God the Father, in which he is secondary in function while being equal in essence. Through that delicately poised secondariness the "fire" seized can be seen as clearly there even though the equality in essence renders the secondary status a kind of mirror in which this fire itself is as if rightfully held.

One would think that the phrase "Divine Similitude" for

1.See in particular my pp. 192-197.

2.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 750 (The Everlasting Gospel, c, 1.8).

3.Ibid., p. 810 (The Letters, 21).

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Jesus, common to both Milton and Blake,⁴ should suffice to permit all the play of difference-in-sameness and unity-in-duality that could be read in God the Son aspiring and seizing God-the-Father's fire which ultimately is his own.

Lastly, I should like to put in a word on the remark Miss Raine makes almost at the beginning of her letter. She concedes that I "may of course be right in seeing the Tyger as the form taken by Jesus the Imagination...This could well be so." But after "Imagination" she adds the qualifying phrase: "in the world of Experience" - to round off her concession. Is this rounding-off inevitable? According to Miss Raine's own reading, the "he" who manifests himself in the Tyger is not the Supreme Divinity but a Demiurge who, if not an evil being, is at least an ambiguous one. He can hardly be Jesus the Imagination, the Logos, God the Son, a genuine facet of the Supreme Divinity, whom it would be an error to dub demiurgic in any definite sense or to look upon as at all ambiguous, leave aside evil. To introduce Jesus into The Tyger in whatever manner and even go so far as to say, as Miss Raine did to Sir Geoffrey (January 21, 1961) at her first contact with my central Jesus-thesis: "I think he has found a profound truth not seen by any of us hitherto" - to incline to grant my fundamental point and then try to adapt it to "the world of Experience" which is integral to her interpretation of the poem is a risky no less than dubious venture. It at once breaks open a possible path into Milton, where Jesus wars against the anti-God rebels in Heaven itself.

I cannot be grateful enough to Miss Raine for giving me a generous hearing and the opportunity of attending constructively to whatever a Blake-expert might regard in the final reckoning as joints in my armour.

4. Ibid., p. 664 (Jerusalem, ch. 2. 38. 1.11).

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