Blake's Tyger

3

The Internal Pattern and Christian Tradition

Now - in addition to the two passages already noted, Eliot's and Smart's - we may attempt a survey of Christian tradition and set forth correspondences to the "Minute Particulars" of The Tyger's symbolism as well as to the lyric's "Vision" as "a perfect Whole" into which they are "Organized".

We have found Christ emerging from the internal pattern of the poem as the maker of the Tyger. The very attribution of creativeness to him rather than to God is in complete consonance with Christian doctrine. Christ there is known as the Word of God: he answers to the Greek Logos, the Indian Shabda Brahman, the Creative Vibration of the Divine Consciousness. The Father begets the Son, but the Son begets everything else - or, if we like, the Father begets everything through the Son who is essentially no other than the Father. This complex doctrine is all there at the commencement of St. John's Gospel:¹ "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made... He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew it not... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." We hear practically the same from St. Paul² who calls Christ "the first-born of every creature" and "...by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth..."

Both St. Paul and St. John may be cited also for a hint on

1.I: 1, 2, 10, 14.

2.Colossians I: 15, 16.

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what we have termed the lack of personal outline in Blake's reference to the primary divinity of God the Father as distinguished from God the Son - the heavenly hiddenness of the former in ultimate light. St. John³ not only says, "God is light", but also lays down: "No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." St. Paul⁴ has the phrase about Christ: "the image of the invisible God."

In passing, we may note that the sentences from St. John as well as St. Paul have the small h about Christ and God. In fact, the whole Bible has no capital H for either. Blake's non-capitalization for them is nothing to be wondered at. It is in the highest Christian tradition.

And Christian tradition, we may point out, can quite justify the figuring of a Tyger Christ. Blake's poem merely depicts with a mythopoeic vision and with an emotion of fascinated religious terror the war which Christian tradition tells us to have been waged in Heaven. The last book in the Bible, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, has the passage: "And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death."⁵ A lot of things seem mixed up here, including post-Crucifixion issues; but the traditional picture of the defeat of Satan in

3.First Epistle, I: 5; Gospel, I: 16.

4.Op. cit.,

5.XII: 7-11.

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Heaven and of his expulsion from there draws its life from the first half of the passage. C. McColley, referring to it in his study of Milton,⁶ states that, while early theologians interpreted it as naming Michael as the conqueror of Satan, some altered the punctuation so that Christ could be regarded as intervening after Michael and Satan had waged an indecisive fight. McColley⁷ has also noted that the second version is not really unorthodox since the De Victoria Verbi Dei of the Catholic bishop Rupertus Tutiensus has used it. Then there is a third version brought to our notice by B. Rajan in his Milton-study:⁸ commentators in the seventeenth century identified Michael with Christ, and Milton himself, while distinguishing them and portraying Christ as the victor, admits in the De Doctrina Christiana the authority of this version when he writes, "... it is generally supposed that Michael is Christ". So the wrathful Christ, Tyger-dreadful in his attack on Satan and his hosts, whom we have elicited from Blake's poem, is far from being foreign to Christian tradition.

In the passage from The Revelation we have not only mention of "the power of Christ" come as a result of the war in Heaven: we have also the phrase, "the blood of the Lamb". No doubt, the Lamb here is centrally a symbol of saviour self-sacrifice, Christ's innocent death on the Cross for the redemption of humanity. It is not expressly a symbol of divine gentleness and peacefulness to be set as complementary to a symbol of divinity's fierce strength. But behind the saviour's self-sacrifice there is surely a gentleness and peacefulness so extreme as to allow their own immolation rather than let humanity be grievously hurt by Satan's insidious attacks and God's retributive visitation. The Lamb-symbol, in Christian tradition, cannot ever be divorced from these qualities.

And it is not from just the passage quoted that, side by side,

6.Paradise Lost (Chicago), 1940, p. 22.

7."Milton's Battle in Heaven and Rupert of St. Herbert", Speculum, XVI (941), pp. 230-235.

8.Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (London), 1947, pp. 48, 146-147, Note 20.

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the Lamb in Christ and the power and wrath of him have figured in Christian tradition. Some other places also in The Revelation can suggest that both the Lamb and the Tyger are in Christ or, rather, that the Tyger is implicit in the One who is like the Lamb. For instance, there is the vision of Christ: "I saw... one like unto the Son of Man... His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as flame of fire; and his feet like fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace... and out of his mouth went a two-edged sword; and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength."⁹ A furnace-forged Tygerish divineness, fire-eyed and burning bright, seems to be here, topped with a Lamb-like purity.

Again, The Revelation mentions a book sealed with seven seals. It is in the right hand of God who is sitting on a throne in Heaven. None among the priests and the cherubim present is found worthy to open it. Suddenly there appears in their midst a Lamb having seven horns and seven eyes: the Lamb takes the book and starts breaking the seals. But before this event the writer says: "And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look therein. And one of the elders saith unto me, weep not: behold, the Lion of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof."¹⁰ And it is after these words have been spoken that the strange Lamb comes forward. The Lamb and the Lion (of Juda) are identical, as is clear too from what Christ says much later: "I am the root and the offspring of David..."¹¹

A further point to remark in The Revelation is what happens when the sixth seal is broken. The vaults of the sky are shaken with an earthquake which moves mountains and islands. Then kings and captains and mighty men hide themselves and cry to the mountains and rocks: "Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of wrath is come; and who shall be able

9. I: 13-16.

10.V: 4-5.

11.XXII: 16.

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to stand?"¹² "The wrath of the Lamb" - there we have in the Lamb the Tyger implicit.

And Christian tradition, including the Old Testament no less than the New, may be said to contain also a hint of the wrath of Divinity leaping like a bright-burning beast of prey against dense forests as if they were its enemy. We read in Isaiah: "Therefore shall the Lord...send among his fat ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning like the burning of a fire...and his Holy One for a flame: and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day; And shall consume the glory of his forest..."¹³

In the Old Testament Blake's image of the stars for the Angels is present too. Job gives us: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy"¹⁴ - a phrase which inspired one of the finest water-colour drawings by Blake. Isaiah shows us the image in a more apposite setting - a setting which has repeatedly been taken by Christians to refer to the revolt and fall of Satan and his Angels. "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!... For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High."¹⁵ Here, of course, the faithful Angels no less than the rebellious are "stars", but the star of stars is the leader of the latter, Lucifer, son of the morning, who by his infamous insurrection becomes a perverted brilliance, a power of the night, and leads his own starry hosts to do the same.

The New Testament also has the star-image and very pointedly applies it to the followers of Satan no less than to the Angels in general. A little before the passage on "the war in heaven" in which Satan is called a dragon, we find about him the words: "And there appeared another wonder in heaven;

12.VI: 12-17.

13.X: 16-18.

14.XXXVIII: 7.

15.XIV: 12-14.

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and behold a great red dragon... And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven..."¹⁶

The Isaiah-passage on Lucifer presents us with a general prototype also of Blake's "distant deeps or skies" which form the empyrean of the ultimate Godhead. The passage puts "the Most High" "above the stars of God...above the heights of the clouds..."

Next, we may ask whether Christian tradition suggests a winged Christ. The answer cannot be a uniform "yes", yet such a Christ is not excluded. And the immediate argument for non-exclusion could derive from the discussion of the passage dealing with the dragon that is Satan. We have cited Milton's remark: "...it is generally supposed that Michael is Christ." If Christ acts in the form of Michael against Satan, then wings are most natural for him: all the Angels in Christian tradition are winged, just as the Cherubim and Seraphim are. And we may observe that the fusion of Christ with Angel or Cherub or Seraph (often interchangeable terms) is not quite exceptional in this tradition. We may remember the account by Brother Matthew of Castiglione Aventino, on the third of October, 1282, relating to the Stigmata of St. Francis. Brother Matthew reports seeing a vision of the Saint in which the latter says about his own experience: "And while I was praying, there came down through the air from Heaven with great rapidity a crucified Young Man in the form of a Seraph, with six wings... He who appeared to me then was not an angel but was my Lord Jesus Christ in the form of a Seraph..."¹⁷

In poetic vision too a Christ with wings has occurred. Vaughan, a part contemporary of Milton and a near predecessor of Blake, has a poem, That Night, addressed to Jesus and

16.XII: 3-4.

17.The Little Flowers of St. Francis, translated from the original Latin and Italian by Raphael Brown (Image Books, New York), 1958, p. 208. The same incident is reported also by St. Bonaventure. See pp. 730 and 821 of St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies - English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, translated by several hands and edited by Marion A. Habig (Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago). I owe this information to my friend Ms Sonia Dyne of Singapore.

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referring to Nicodemus's secret visit to him and so to rebirth of the flesh by the spirit- a theme taken from St. John's Gospel.¹⁸ The second verse of the poem runs:

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long-expected healing wings could see

When thou didst rise!

And what can never more be done,

Did at midnight speak with the Son!

Amidst the "metaphysical" punning of the poem - e.g. "Son" (Sun) - the picture-idea of Christ rising at midnight to meet Nicodemus prompts not only the suggestion of his resurrection from the darkness of the tomb but also that of ascendant wings of his heavenly uplifting presence. Even if the motive be a profound religious wit, the fact remains that a pre-Blake Christian poet has explicitly endowed Christ with wings.

Then there are the Biblical passages where too the poetry gives wings to divinity. David rhapsodises: "Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice"¹⁹ - "He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust"²⁰ - "And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea he did fly upon the wings of the wind".²¹ The last passage joins up with those²² in which the heavens are opened and Ezekiel sees visions of God. Out of the midst of a bright fire came four living creatures who had the likeness of a man and who moved with wheels within wheels. "And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings... And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it..." Thus goes "the glory of the Lord" in an ensemble wheeled and winged. When Christ is worshipped as

18.III.

19.The Psalms of David, 63: 7.

20.Ibid., 91: 4.

21.Ibid., 18: 10.

22.Ezekiel, I, 4-28.

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the Lord, he must naturally be considered to be moving not only on wheels within wheels but also with a multitude of wings as part of his full glory of throned supremacy above the four living creatures.

Perhaps the most directly apt poetic reference for our purpose is in Bishop Synesius, a contemporary of St. Athanasius (c.295-373). He has a beautiful hymn on the Ascension of Jesus, picturing Jesus' passage through several levels and having towards the end of the composition the lines:

But thou, with spreading wings,

Broke through the azure dome

And rested in the spheres

Of pure Intelligence.²³

Even on a deeper level - the level of fundamental doctrine -the wingedness of Christ in one particular sense can be argued for. Christ in his own distinct individuality has no wings, just as God the Father has none; but the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, is always winged, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins's

...the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright

wings,²⁴

and it is the Holy Ghost that is called the Spirit of God considered as the creative divine force no less than the divine force mediating, in-dwelling, enthusing, grace-giving, salvation-bringing. The Holy Ghost is also called the Spirit of Christ. And in early Christological speculation Christ and the Holy Spirit were often put together. Thinkers like Irenaeus unite the Son and the Holy Spirit with God as "His Hands" by which He created the world.²⁵ Still earlier, "the Spirit, viewed as a divine

23.Hymn 8 quoted by Jocelyn Godwin in "The Golden Chain of Orpheus: A Survey of Musical Esotericisms in the West", in Temenos: A Review devoted to the Arts of the Imagination, edited by Kathleen Raine (London, 1 983), No. 4, p. 16.

24.Gerard Manley Hopkins (Penguin , Harmondsworth ) . 1 953, p. 27 .

25.Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by J . Hastings (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh) , 1 934. Vol. X I , p. 797.

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essence was frequently identified with the Son".²⁶

One may then say in general that Divinity in its creative function is winged in Christian tradition and that Christ may even be directly seen as this Divinity and that it would be poetically legitimate as well as not really unChristian to endow with wings the Christ who frames the Tyger.

Finally, there is the question of Christ aspiring. If Blake's "aspire" connotes more than merely soaring or mounting up, does Christian tradition support the idea of Christ in Heaven having to aspire for anything? But we must bear in mind that Blake does not stop with the Tyger's maker aspiring on wings to "distant deeps or skies" for the Tyger's eye-fire: he makes the aspirant seize it - as by right. A dual relationship is there with the ultimate empyrean. Could we not trace this relationship in the doctrine that distinguishes Christ as the Son from God as the Father - the doctrine in which Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity and God the First? Although essentially one, may not the two Persons have a difference of degree in practical functioning? Do not the words of the incarnate Jesus of the Bible imply the essential unity and yet this difference again and again? Let us listen to some of his sayings.

"I and my Father are one"²⁷ - "thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee"²⁸ - "All things that the Father hath are mine".²⁹ There we have the essential unity beyond all controversy. But the difference of degree in practical functioning would seem to be equally incontrovertible. "My father is greater than I"³⁰ - "the Father gave me commandment, even so do I"³¹ - "I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me"³² - "I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I by myself, but he sent me."³³ We should observe that

26.Ibid., p. 796.

27.St. John's Gospel, X: 30.

28.Ibid., XVII: 21.

29.Ibid., XVI: 15.

30.Ibid., XIV: 29.

31.Ibid., XIV: 30.

32.Ibid., VI: 38. 33. Ibid., VIII: 42.

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the references to a secondary position are not confined to the role played by Christ on earth as a God-Man for a certain period of time: some of them extend to affairs in Heaven where the decision to send him to earth was. taken and the commandment of earth-ministry was given. Indeed, the very dogma, which we touched upon at the start, that God creates everything in Heaven and earth through Christ presents the latter in the light of an instrument carrying delegated powers. And, for all the essential identity with the Father, such a Christ could very well be poetically figured as aspiring to the Father to receive powers which the Father wills for him - though the reception is not of anything foreign to the Son but of something over which he too has basic authority.

Thus the whole structure of The Tyger as viewed by us may be founded in Christian tradition. And if its Christology is in relation to a dynamic drama of the Divine and the Diabolic in Heaven, it should send us scrutinizing the greatest literary portrayal of this drama, the most fully developed and explicit poetization of it - those portions of Milton's Paradise Lost that roll out in mighty verse the battle under God's seat, with Christ the clear-cut figure personally victorious over Satan's armies. Here was a vision immediately apt to Blake's purposes. If our interpretation is correct, we should find many affinities of idea and even language. Conversely, if we discover many affinities, our thesis on the central symbolism will get its own confirmation and a new perspective be set up for a critical appreciation of the poem's origin and progression, general vision and pictorial particularities. The most important treatment, therefore, of our poem's internal pattern in regard to Christian tradition must lie in a minute exposition of a Miltonic basis to it.

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