4
(a)
Paradise Lost is called by Bernard Blackstone1 "a poem which influenced Blake more than anything outside the Bible itself."2 And critics have noted three kinds of influence by Milton's epic on The Tyger. We may take these as our starting-point. But before we do so a few words will be in place on how the poem of one writer may be related to that of another.
The relation between them, no matter how vital, is not always open and full-figured: it is often subtle and embryonic. Not only do basic ideas, images and locutions pass from the earlier writer to the later in a straightforward or an oblique manner: there occur also certain combinations and permutations. If two ideas or images, though in the same context, stand separately in the earlier writer, they may get attached or fused in the later: an attribute not belonging to an object but to another which is mentioned along with it in the same or the next or a closely succeeding line may cling to it instead when that object emerges through a new poet's imagination. We must not always expect accurate correspondence. Provided the most important motifs do have altogether or almost an accurate correspondence and thereby establish the inner influence beyond doubt, we should not dismiss as fanciful a comparison if what is said about a thing by a later poet is said by the earlier about something else which accompanies the same or an analo-
1.English Blake (Cambridge), l949, p. 140.
2.Cf. S. Foster Damon: "...the works of Milton influenced Blake more than any other book except the Bible" ("Blake and Milton" in The Divine Vision, Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto [London], 1957, p. 95). Also Northrop Frye: "Blake...was brought upon the Bible and on Milton" ("Blake After Two Centuries", op. cit., p. 62).
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gous subject. A poetic influence is not like a scene memory-mirrored either clearly or dimly or distortedly or with a fresh colouring: it is as if that scene were passed through a thrilled idiosyncrasy of imaginative understanding and enjoyment, so that while many features get reproduced with just a personal novelty several get shuffled and rearranged and new-married and yet others undergo intuitive development or intuitive alteration. On the whole a creation de novo results, which includes old motifs recognizable in a modified psychological light and original motifs appearing out of combined and permuted elements of the anterior creation.
Now for Paradise Lost and The Tyger. A general background influence is well expressed by Bateson.3 He tells us that the Rossetti MS., in which many of the "Songs of Experience" including our poem were originally composed, was first used as a sketch-book for scenes in or suggested by Paradise Lost -"Satan exulting over Eve", "Satan defying God the Father, the Son interceding", "The Trinity", "Adam and Eve", etc. Normally, the even-numbered pages have these drawings while, with the book reversed, the odd-numbered contain the poems, but the revision of two poems - Earth's Answer and The Tyger - actually spill over on to the illustrations. Bateson tells us: "Blake cannot have been unaware...of the sketches for Paradise Lost. As he looked up from the first verse of Earth's Answer the contorted figure of Satan shrieking his defiance of God the Father would have met his eyes. And even when there could be no specific influence the drawings would at least tend to confirm and reinforce the background of Genesis myth in the poems. The symbolism of Experience draws heavily on the Fall of Man, the Fall of the Angels, the forbidden fruit, the serpent-tempter, and similar themes. The fact that Blake had recently been illustrating Genesis episodes and that the illustrations were often before his eyes as he worked out their poetic equivalents is one that needs to be remembered in reading them."
A more particular influence has been observed in two ways
3. Op. cit.. p. 106.
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in connection with the lines opening Blake's fifth stanza:
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears...
We may quote Bateson again. First, in the course of annotating The Tyger he4 writes: "1.17 is repeated in The Four Zoas, Night V (c. 1 797) , 1 .224 ('the stars threw down their spears and fled naked away') , in a passage that is obviously based on Milton's account of the Fall of the Angels (Paradise Lost, Book VI) , the stars being Urizen (Satan) and his associates. " Later, there is Bateson's remark5 on the fifth stanza: "In the Rossetti MS. this stanza faces the first draft of the rest of the poem on the opposite page . It has been written over the edge of a swirling sketch of a figure with bent knees and upraised hands who seems to be falling through the air (Satan?) ."
But Bateson misses to drive home that not only the passage in The Four Zoas, in which The Tyger's line about the stars is repeated, but this very line is an obvious echo of Milton. And the next line too is essentially a Miltonic reminiscence. There is a direct correspondence between Blake's couplet and Milton's picture of the rebel Angels at the onset of Christ's chariot:
They, astonish'd, all resistance lost,
All courage; down their idle weapons dropt;
O'er shields, and helms, and helmed heads he rode
Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate...6
The attack
wither'd all their strength,
And of their wonted vigour left them drain'd,
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n.7
The precise parallel between the throwing down of the spears and the dropping down of the weapons needs no comment. But
4.Ibid.,
5.Ibid.,
6.Paradise Lost,
7.Ibid., 11 .
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we may offer a few remarks on other matters. Psychologically, the profuse shedding of tears in Blake answers to the condition in Milton of being afflicted at the same time as being exhausted, spiritless and fallen. The very sense of tears by the vanquished could have arisen in Blake through a phrase which Milton makes the seraph Abdiel utter in a warning to Satan about the punishment he will receive. Satan has refused to accept Christ as Lord and Creator. Abdiel, anticipating the revolted Archangel's defeat, tells him:
"Then who created thee lamenting learn
When who can uncreate thee thou shalt know."8
We may go beyond the implication of "tears" in "lamenting" and see their direct association with it through some lines on Adam:
Adam was all in tears, and to his guide
Lamenting turn'd full sad...9
Tears themselves may also be seen as coming to Blake in a direct association with Satan through a Miltonic reference: there are the lines on Satan facing his crew in Hell after the defeat in Heaven, whose memory Milton has evoked before writing:
Thrice he essay'd, and thrice, in spite of scorn,
Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth: at last
Words interwove with sighs found out their way.10
As to the special phrase about watering Heaven with tears, Milton has a passage which may have served excellently as a spur to Blake to adapt some words of it to his own purpose -words which draw particular attention since Milton repeats them a few lines later. Christ is part of the context and a grievous error is concerned. After Christ has come to the Garden of Eden to pass judgement on Adam and Eve for their
8.Bk. V, 11 .1094-1095.
9.Bk. XI, 11.674-675.
10. Bk. I, 11.619-621.
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transgression of God's Will and after he has done what was needed, the erring pair have a talk which ends with Adam's saying in reference to the spot at which Christ has stood:
"What better can we do than, to the place
Repairing where he judg'd us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent and there, confess
Humbly our faults and pardon beg, with tears
Wat'ring the ground...?11
From watering the ground of the earthly heaven, Eden, with tears it is but one imaginative step to watering Heaven itself with them. And the step is all the easier when not only is Christ retributive in both the situations but also, corresponding to Milton's picture of the prostrate falling of Adam and Eve in the one passage, is Milton's picture of "Seraphim prostrate" and "fall'n" in the other on which Blake built his own lines about the catastrophe to the stars.
Blake's knowledge of Milton's phrase cannot be doubted. In the lyric The Human Abstract which is in the same collection Songs of Experience where The Tyger is found and which, without naming him, is distantly about Urizen who is Blake's Satan and is here called "Cruelty", we have the lines:
He sits down with holy fears,
And waters the ground with tears...12
We may also note in passing that in The Tyger as well as in this poem "tears" forms the line-ending and that in the Milton-passage too "tears" ends a line. Even when Milton repeats his phrase a little later the word has the identical position: "...and pardon begg'd, with tears."13
We may next mark that in a passage in Milton about Christ's attack the locution "threw down" which Blake employs in regard to Satan's army and its "spears" and which is followed by the lines mentioning "heaven", is present with a mention of
11.Bk. X, 11 .1086-1090.
12.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 217, 11.9-10.
13.Bk. X, 1,1101.
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the same word though there is nothing about "tears":
headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of Heav'n...14
Earlier in the same Book we have the phrase - "Their arms away they threw"15 - in the context of God's armies plucking up mountains and hurling them at the rebels instead of fighting them in the usual mode. In another Book also we read in the address to Christ as God's Similitude -
He Heav'n of Heav'ns and all the Powers therein
By thee created, and by thee threw down
Th' aspiring Dominations...16
The locution we are discussing in its association with Satan's defeat is a thoroughly Miltonic one. Blake could easily have written "cast down" or "flung down" or "hurl'd down". In fact, about Satan as treated by God, Milton himself uses "cast out from Heav'n" and "hurl'd... from th'ethereal sky... down" in Book I,17 but there is no open reference there to Christ's action. Blake's choice of a substitute Miltonic turn of phrase occurring twice in a Christ-context appears to be no coincidence.
Even Blake's association of Satan and his armies in Heaven with stars is not wanting in Milton. Here Milton cannot be considered a pre-eminent source of Blake, for his star-imagery comes in more as simile than as symbol; but his repeated employment of it must have strengthened the symbolic movement in Blake under the Biblical influence which he and Milton had in common. When Milton speaks of all the Angels together near God's throne he has the expression:
About him all the Sanctities of Heav'n
Stood thick as stars...18
14.Bk. VI, 11.864-865.
15.Ibid., 1. 639.
16.Bk. III, 11.390-394.
17.Bk. I, yy.37, 48.
18.Bk. III, 11.60-61.
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And when in Book V Satan is described as gathering supporters for himself against God and Christ, Milton writes:
His count'nance, as the morning star that guides
The starry flock, allur'd them, and with lies
Drew after him the third part of Heav'n's host...19
Here Milton must have been aware of the way in which Blake was later to employ the star-image, for the last line is based on the Biblical passage where Satan is called a dragon about whom we are told: "And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven."20
Again, immediately after Christ has spoken of quelling the pride of the rebels, Milton says:
But Satan with his powers
Far was advanc't on winged speed, an host
Innumerable as the stars of night...21
Finally, in Book VII Milton dwells a moment on Satan's original name Lucifer:
Lucifer from Heav'n
(So call him, brighter once amidst the host
Of Angels than that star the stars among)
Fell with his flaming legions...22
Now remains only the word "spears" in Blake's couplet to be seen Miltonically. No doubt, if "spears" were absent, the rhyme with "tears" would be impossible. But Blake could surely have written something like:
When star on star threw down his sword,
And all their tears in heaven pour'd...
The association of a sword with a star-angel is hardly unnatural to Blake, as the couplet - which brings in the word "tear" as well - proves:
19.Bk. V , 11 . 708-7 1 0 .
20.The Revelation, XII, 3.
21.Bk. V , 11 . 743-745.
22.Bk. VII, 11. 131-134
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For a Tear is an Intellectual thing,
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King...23
To match "star on star" we have in Blake turns like "times on times"24 and "eternity on eternity":25 there is also "From star to star" beginning a line.26 As for "tears pour'd", we have Blake's: "his tears poured down / His immortal cheeks".27 So we should trace the "spears" of The Tyger not only to the rhyme-need. The fact is that these weapons are prominent in Milton's pictures of Satan's army. Thus they are the first to be named when for the first time the armies of God's faithful beheld Satan's hosts: the latter
Bristl'd with upright beams innumerable
Of rigid spears, and helmets throng'd, and shields...28
In another place also the spears stand out: there is the description - from which we have already culled the final phrase - of Satan's troops remarshalled in Hell's everlasting night:
All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand banners rise into the air,
With orient colours waving: with them rose
A forest huge of spears...29
The concluding phrase is indeed striking for its combination of spears with a forest. It seems to make explicit one of the imaginative links we have divined between Blake's forests of the night and his spear-bearing stars: Milton appears to supply a straight clue to Blake's composite picture of the Tyger's enemies and to show himself as the matrix of the later poet's vision of the rebel Angels. And it may be marked that the
23.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 683 (Jerusalem, ch. 3, pl. 52, 11.25-26).
24.Ibid., p. 222 (The Book of Urizen, pl. 3, ch. I, 1.9).
25.Ibid., p. 230 (ibid., pl. 13, ch. V, 1.54).
26.Ibid., p. 539 (Milton, II, 37, 1.52).
27.Ibid., p. 711 (Jerusalem, ch. 3, p1. 71, 11.56-57).
28.Bk. VI, 11.82-83.
29.Bk. I, 11.544-547.
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spears being thrown down in that vision answers in exact reverse to the earlier poet's vision of them either as rising or as upright beams.
Milton's "forest huge of spears", by its relevance to the internal pattern of The Tyger, suggests that Milton is involved not only in Blake's couplet about the stars but also - and most probably in an equally thorough fashion - in the entire lyric. He may be conceived as present in all that precedes and follows this couplet and providing by his emergence into instant view here a master-clue to the whole poem's meaning.
As soon as we peer a little beyond the couplet new Miltonic connections get disclosed. Immediately before it the Tyger is asked about its furnace-forged brain:
what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
In Milton immediately before the lines corresponding to Blake's about throwing down the spears and weeping, we read of Christ amidst Satan's armies:
Full soon
Among them he arriv'd, in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infix'd
Plagues.30
The Tyger-creator's dreadfulness of grasp using the Tyger's deadliness of terrors is unmistakably here. And a few lines earlier31 we have the actual word "terror" in reference to Christ's face and a few lines later32 we have Christ pursuing his enemies with "terrors". In regard to Blake's verses immediately after the star-couplet -
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
we have no immediate Miltonic parallel in thought and phrase
30.Bk. VI, 11.834-838.
31.Ibid., 11 .824-825.
32.Ibid., 11.858-859.
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after the lines about the rebels dropping down their weapons and falling exhausted and afflicted. But the parallel springs into view the moment we look into Milton a little more widely.
What is the word he has for Christ's devastation of the rebels? When Christ comes in his chariot among God's armies he tells "to all his host on either hand" to rest from battle on that day, for not they in their myriads but he alone has been appointed to wreak vengeance:
"Number to this day's work is not ordain'd,
Nor multitude; stand only and behold
God's indignation on these godless pour'd
By me..."33
Here we have Blake's own term "work" to connote Christ's destructive attack, his pouring of God's indignation on the godless, which Milton describes soon after. We have even an order to Christ's company to "behold" this "work", thus serving as a suggestion for Blake's phrase: "his work to see." And when Christ has made his attack we get repeated reference to the seeing of it or of its consequences. When Satan's crew is driven to the verge of Heaven and "headlong themselves they threw / Down" and "eternal wrath / Burnt after them",
Hell saw
Heav'n ruining from Heav'n...34
Again, after the fight, Christ's Saints
who silent stood
Eye-witnesses of his almighty acts,
With jubilee advanc't...35
There we get not only seeing but also an equivalent of smiling. And the general "jubilee" at Satan's defeat and expulsion is also expressed in the phrase:
33.Bk. VI, 11 .809-812.
34.Ibid., 11.867-868.
35.Ibid., 11.882-884.
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Disburden'd Heav'n rejoic'd...36
While we are about Christ's "work" we may observe that Milton has not only spoken of it, as in Christ's speech to his men, in a sense analogous to one of the alternatives we read in Blake - namely, the sense of "thing done" or "deed". Milton has also spoken of "work" in relation to Christ in the other sense: "thing made." Before Christ goes into battle we are told of his accepting God's "almighty arms" and chariot and we are given the description:
He, in celestial panoply all arm'd
Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought...37
The term "work" about the celestial armour set with scintillating brilliances ("radiant Urim") answers precisely to Blake's possible use of it for the bright-burning Tyger as a creation from empyrean-fire, and Milton's expression "divinely wrought" in reference to the armour implies the furnace and hammer and anvil of a supernatural smithy where the "work" was forged and shaped just as Blake's Tyger was fashioned by a supernatural smith.
There is another Miltonic point to be appreciated in considering Blake's "work". The question,
has evidently a resemblance to the formula after each day's creation in the first chapter of Genesis: "and God saw that it was good." But nowhere in Genesis do we find God's seeing and approving of any "work": the term "work" occurs only after everything has been created - "And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made" - and then there is no repetition of "God saw that it was good". The case is quite otherwise with Milton. He explicitly uses "work" or "works" in speaking of the objects created in the six days. Thus, when Light was made and divided from Darkness and the first Day
36.Ibid., 1.878.
37.Ibid., 11.760-761.
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and Night happened, the "celestial quire...prais'd God and all his works".38 On the termination of the fifth day when Man is still uncreated we are told: "There wanted yet the master-work...39 What is most pertinent to our thesis, there is, when the sun and moon and stars were created, the Miltonic sentence:
God saw,
Surveying his great work that it was good.40
This is a direct anticipation of Blake - the bringing together of divine seeing and work and approval - except that Blake casts his line into the form of a query with an undertone of doubt. Milton, not the Bible, is Blake's source. And a more specific Miltonic colour is perceived on our remembering that in Paradise Lost God as Christ the Son is the Creator:41 Christ's seeing and work and approval are collocated just as in our reading of The Tyger.
Blake's presentation of the idea of approval by means of the act of smiling has also an anticipation in Milton. The anticipation is not in the account either of the battle in Heaven or of world-creation. But still it has to do with Christ's victory over Satan: Milton, picturing the divine termination of the world-drama, makes Christ say to God the Father:
"I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of Darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleas'd, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile..."42
Seeing and smiling are brought together in relation to Satan's defeat by Christ.
At this place, with Milton quoted about Christ showing "the powers of Darkness bound", it will not be inappropriate to go back to the subject of a supernatural smithy, which is implicit in
38.Bk. VII, 1.259.
39.Ibid., 1.555.
40.Ibid., 11.352-353.
41.E.g., Bk. V, 11.835-837.
42.Bk. III, 11.254-257.
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Milton and explicit in Blake where the question about the dread grasp is preceded by the phrases:
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil?
The purpose of our going back is to glance Miltonically at the "chain" among the smith-paraphernalia of the Tyger's maker. Blake mentions the chain immediately before the furnace. In Milton we have the collocations: "adamantine chains and penal fire"43 - "Chain'd on the burning lake".44 If we could fuse the notions of "penal fire" and "burning lake" with that of something like a blazing furnace, we should have a sequence exactly as in Blake. And, actually, a few lines after "penal fire" and after a subsequent description of Satan "with his horrid crew... rolling in the fiery gulf",45 Milton gives us the whole environ of the vanquished rebels in Hell in the statement:
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
As one great furnace flam'd...46
Milton even puts openly a chain in Christ's hand in a passage redepicting the scene of Christ showing the powers of Darkness bound: the passage tells us that at the world's end Christ shall "drag in chains"47 a surprised Satan. Although the chain here has a different function from the one it has in Christ's hand in The Tyger, the mere juxtaposition of a chain and this hand is worth remembering. Blake himself remembered it when he wrote elsewhere, setting to the chain the same Miltonic function:
He bound Old Satan in his Chain,
And bursting forth, his furious ire
Became a Chariot of fire...
43.Bk. I, 1.48.
44.Ibid., 1.210.
45.Ibid., 1.52.
46.Ibid., 11.61-62.
47.Bk. XII, 11.454.
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And Satan in his Spiritual War
Drag'd at his Chariot wheels...48
It is interesting that here Blake, while putting a chain in Christ's hand to bind and drag Satan, explicitly recalls the Miltonic "Chariot of Paternal Deity / Flashing thick flames,"49 in which the Christ of Paradise Lost moves forth against Satan. And we have in addition a very important link between Milton and The Tyger: just as in Blake's lyric we have seen Christ's wrath taking the shape of a fiery Tyger we find "his furious ire" taking the shape of a fiery chariot, so that a correspondence is suggested between Blake's Tyger as Christ's vehicle of anger and Milton's chariot as the same vehicle. But, of course, Christ's chain in Blake's lyric is not for binding Satan: it is related directly to the Tyger itself and, if Milton's chariot no less than "almighty arms" and other God-provided means of destruction answers to this animal of Blake, we should discover in the account of Christ's attack a suggestion of the role Blake gives to the chain.
We have discussed that role and marked it to be in particular to control the Tyger while being made and afterwards to keep it in a line of action from its maker, whether for setting it upon enemies or for restraining it if necessary. We found the Tyger not only set upon the rebel stars but also restrained from destroying them. The same gesture of defeating and distressing without destroying is discernible in Milton's story of Christ's assault on Satan's troops. After the line about them -
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n -
Milton continues about Christ:
Yet half his strength he put not forth, but check'd
His thunder in mid volley, for he meant
Not to destroy, but root them out of Heav'n:
The overthrown he rais'd, and as a herd
Of goats or timorous flock together throng'd,
48.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 749 (The Everlasting Gospel, b, 11.32-34, 42-43).
49.Bk. VI, 1.750-751.
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Drove them before him thunderstruck, pursu'd
With terrors and with furies to the bounds
And crystal wall of Heav'n...50
There we have the clear background to Blake's chain by which the Christ-Tyger - corresponding in Milton to Christ's "strength" and "thunder" - is checked. Here, instead of complete destruction, a dreadful chase is afoot.
And it is most interesting to observe that Milton talks of Christ driving the armies of Satan as if they were "a herd / Of goats or timorous flock together throng'd": such a picture of animals in frightened flight could easily conjure up the image of a tiger in pursuit with thunders and terrors and furies.
The words "timorous flock" need a special scrutiny. Obviously they stand for "sheep" and, when sheep are pictured as fleeing from a tigerish pursuit, we get a foreshadowing as of Blake's contraposed Lamb and Tyger:
Paradoxically, with Christ becoming the Tyger, it is Satan who becomes the Lamb, driven helplessly and hopelessly as he is: Christ in his Tyger-aspect is, as it were, opposed to his own Lamb-aspect and his victim grows Lamblike. And it is just this transposition no less than contraposition that creates the angst of Blake's poem, the deep note of anxiety and half-doubt and near-bafflement in the nervous heart despite the steady mind's vision of the divinity of the Tyger and of its maker, a divinity equal to that of the Lamb's maker and of the Lamb.
This vision, no less than the disturbing many-sided paradox, may be traced again to Milton. Listen to the words of Christ to God:
"But whom thou hat'st I hate, and can put on
Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on,
Image of thee in all things: and shall soon
50. Bk. VI, 11.853-860.
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Arm'd with thy might, rid Heav'n of these rebell'd.
To their prepar'd ill mansion driven down..."51
There we have both the aspects of Christ indicated: Christ who is mild and Christ who is terrible, Christ the Lamb and Christ the Tyger. The latter meets us once more in the lines already quoted as part of Christ's speech to his own men:
"...behold
By me..."52
The Tyger-aspect comes out in still another passage: it is after the above speech has been concluded:
So spoke the Son, and into terror chang'd
His count'nance, too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies...53
What this wrath could do we have already seen. The end of its action on its enemies may be summed up:
eternal wrath
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit...54
Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire
Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain.55
The passion and power that the creator in Blake's poem put into his creation, the Tyger, and set burning bright against night's forests and against the stars whose milieu of darkness they were is indeed present in Milton's Christ. And when we realize that by this passion and power there was inflicted on the rebellious Archangel
His punishment, eternal misery,56
51.Bk. VI, 11.734-738.
52.Ibid., 11.810-812.
53.Ibid., 11.824-826.
54.Ibid., 11.865-866.
55.Ibid., 11.876-877.
56.Bk. VI, 1.905.
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we get the proper background for Blake's mood in his poem's fifth stanza. The stern and unrelenting sentence of permanent banishment of Satan and his followers from Heaven Milton the Puritan could view calmly: Blake, though no less a champion of "prophetic wrath", was a more sensitive soul and, while revealing in his poem the divinity of Christ the Tyger to the full, he could not help being shaken by the extremism of punishment to which that fiery manifestation was instrumental. The later Blake, persistent to the end in combating the forces of evil, had yet a vision of ultimate regeneration in which even Satan would recover his lost divineness. But at the time of writing The Tyger he stood steeped in Miltonic Christology without the Miltonic Puritanism. Hence - and hence alone - those two poignant and searching interrogations after the concentrated sublimity and pathos of the clearly Miltonic lines about the fate of the stars.
We have now shown not only these lines but also those just preceding and succeeding them to be coloured through and through with Miltonism and we have read from all of them indications of Miltonism as the basis of the whole lyric. We may then consider ourselves justified on a close and detailed examination of Milton vis-a-vis all the parts of Blake's Tyger.
But before doing so we may touch on one simple characteristic and two complexities relevant to the Blake-Milton comparison. In all the lines we have culled from Paradise Lost, where God figures, there is no capital H except at the commencement of a line; and all the references to Christ have also a small h. Just as in the whole Bible and very nearly the whole of Blake's poetry, Paradise Lost - save at a few places for a special purpose - has no capital H for either God or Christ. The three h's in The Tyger would be natural for Christ if Blake were practising the Miltonic tradition, and all the more natural if the creator of the poem's beast of prey were the Miltonic Christ at war with Satan.
So much for the simple characteristic. The two complexities arise precisely apropos of the bearing of this characteristic on the "he" of The Tyger. For, the first complexity is the fact known to all Blake-scholars that, though steeped in Milton's
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poetry, Blake topsyturvied Milton's hero and villain.57 He considered Milton's Christ or Messiah to be Reason, the res-trainer of Desire which in his eyes is Milton's Devil or Satan. He believed that Reason divorced from Desire is the real Devil and that what was originally cast out from Heaven was the spirit of rationality which had revolted against the many-sided fullness of Divine Being. In that fullness there is room for the Energy that to Blake is Eternal Delight and for the Exuberance that to him is Beauty. This fullness is "the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord",58 or - as he puts it in his long prophetic poem Milton (1804-1808) where he makes the older poet return to correct some of his errors -
the Poetic Genius,
Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity.59
Blake also terms it in the same poem again using the designation "human" in an archetypal sense -
the Human Imagination,
Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed
forever60 -
Jesus whom in this very poem he Miltonically calls "the image of the Invisible God"61 and elsewhere62 distinguishes as "all Virtue" because, in the sense of a supreme spontaneity, he "acted from impulse, not rules".
But if to Blake his own Satan is Milton's Messiah how can The Tyger's "he" be the Miltonic Christ? Here comes the second complexity. Without reverting to the essential characters which, according to Blake, Milton has given his Messiah and Satan, Blake partly turns his own topsyturvying of them upside down and remains Miltonic when he is face to face with
57. Keynes, ed. cit. , pp. 1 49- 1 50 ( The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pls. 3. 4, 5-6)
58. Ibid. , p. 90 (Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love).
59. Ibid. , p . 495 ( Milton, I, 14, 11 . 1 -2 ) .
60. Ibid. , p . 482 (ibid . . I, 3, 11 .3-4).
61 . Ibid. , p . 48 1 (ibid. , I , 2 , 1 . 12 ) . cf. Paradise Lost, Bk. III . 11 . 384-187, Bk. V I .
11 .68 1 -682.
62. Ibid . , p. 1 58 ( The Marriage, A Memorable Fancy. pls. 22-24) .
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Milton's description of Christ's martial expedition against the rebellious Archangel. In that expedition the Messiah, the res-trainer of elemental energies and of the principle of fire and desire, assumes an energism and an outleaping fieriness which exceed anything possible in the opposite camp. Blake's Christ in The Tyger is not Reason trying to repel the claims of Intuition, Emotion and Sensation, yet is he the Christ of Milton's Book VI, Christ the Reason grown a scorching splendour. Blake's Christ in The Tyger is Milton's Messiah insofar as the latter is drawn by that poet in the war-scenes.
A similar identification is found in some passages in The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818) from which we have already picked out a few lines. Blake writes:
Thunders and lightnings broke around,
And Jesus' voice in thunder's sound...63
Where'er his Chariot took its way,
There Gates of Death let in the day,
Broke down from every Chain & Bar;
Drag'd at his Chariot wheels: loud howl'd
The God of this World: louder roll'd
The Chariot Wheels, & louder still
His voice was heard from Zion's hill,
And in his hand the Scourge shone bright...64
Here too Christ in battle with Satan is etched out in flame and it is done with Christ appearing in his own person and not anonymously as in our poem; his wrath too, instead of being depicted under the Tyger-symbol, is openly his at the same time that it takes the symbolic form of "a Chariot of Fire". The Christ warring with Satan, "the God of this World", in The Everlasting Gospel is the same burning brightness that the Messiah is in Milton's Book VI. So it is no freakish and unlikely
63.Ibid.,
64.Ibid.,
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identification that we are submitting of that Messiah and the Christ in our lyric both in the role of the Tyger's maker and in that of the Tyger itself.
Of course, the identification is solely in respect of the gloriously terrible dynamism manifested: Blake would have denied that the essential character - Ratio, as he names it - which manifests this dynamism in Milton is the same as what does so in either The Tyger or The Everlasting Gospel. Perhaps he would have thought it inconsistent that a Messiah who is Reason should be portrayed as so genuinely bright-burning, so divine in his intensity of power - the very model of the "fearful symmetry" going out all ablaze with the empyrean's fire against the Satanism of rationality.
But, consistent or no, this Christ of Milton is also Blake's and we should expect The Tyger to catch many of the movements and verbal turns connected with him. At the same time we must not forget the general inversion by Blake of Milton's Christ and Satan: so we should expect too the Christ of The Tyger to recreate in himself many lines of activity that are Satan's in Paradise Lost, and phrases going with Satan in the epic would naturally get shifted on to Christ in the lyric. A constant interplay of the two characters in a new unity is what we have principally to deal with in a Milton-Blake comparison. This interplay must be well kept in view so that no impression of inconsistency may arise.
Now we may proceed to an extension of our study which would enable us, so far as The Tyger is concerned, to alter Blackstone's dictum and call Paradise Lost a poem which influenced Blake more than any other writing, the Bible included.
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(b)
According to a critic, Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven must have been born from a phrase flashed out by St. Augustine nearly fifteen centuries earlier in his Confessions:65 "Et ecce tu, imminens dorso fugitivorum, Deus ultionis et fons misericordium simul, qui convertis nos ad te variis modis" -"And lo, Thou pressing at the heel of those who are fleeing from Thee, God of Vengeance and yet Fountain of Pity, who turnest us back to Thee in various ways."
Similarly, one could say that the germ of Blake's Tyger - a poem which also is about a God of Vengeance who is yet a Fountain of Pity - is in a phrase of Milton's towards the end of Book V of Paradise Lost. The second half of this Book describes the course of Satan's revolt in Heaven prior to the actual battle. Part of the course is his success in persuading his legions to rebel with him - all except Abdiel, a seraph, who in argument dissuades and opposes him, then forsakes him. Before he goes, Satan tells him his decision to challenge "th' Almighty throne" and adds:
"...this report,
These tidings carry to th' Anointed King;
And fly, ere evil intercept thy flight."66
In Abdiel's bold answer occur the lines:
"henceforth
No more be troubl'd how to quit the yoke
Of God's Messiah; those indulgent laws
Will not be now vouchsaf't, other decrees
Against thee are gone forth without recall;
That golden sceptre which thou didst reject
Is now an iron rod to bruise and break
Thy disobedience. Well didst thou advise,
Yet not for thy advice or threats I fly
These wicked tents devoted, lest the wrath
65.Bk. IV, Ch. 4.
66.Bk. V. 11.869-871.
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Impendent, raging into sudden flame,
Distinguish not: for soon expect to feel
His thunder on thy head, devouring fire..."67
In the powerful phrase -
Thy disobedience. -
and in the yet intenser turn of language -
...the wrath
Impendent, raging into sudden flame....
His thunder on thy head, devouring fire -
the terrible Christ-Tyger wrought with furnace and hammer and anvil to a fearful symmetry, bright-burning, fire-eyed, full of deadly terrors is present in all but open image. I say "all but open image", because the image in essence is certainly there in the two words: "devouring fire."
These words, more than anything else, are the germinal inspiration of The Tyger. And we can easily demonstrate that they stuck in Blake's mind over years. In his Europe (1794) he has written of his Satan-Urizen's serpent religion established on earth by erring "thought" and bringing out in place of the aspect of pity a face of the Divine that frightens man. Here Blake combines a recollection of the original "indulgent laws" mentioned by Abdiel with a recollection of the "devouring fire" and a recollection of his own image about the dark regions in which he had put his luminous Tyger hunting for its prey:
Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent, that which
pitieth
To a devouring flame, and man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night...68
No doubt, here the general posture of the poetic ideas is not
67.Ibid., 11. 881-893
68.Keynes, ed. cit. p. 241, pl. 10, 11.16-18.
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identical with that in the earlier Tyger. we have in some respects a reversal which we shall study when we put The Tyger against the general background of Blake's work. But the three recollections seem enough to indicate that the passion of the first line of The Tyger as well as the wonder in the phrase -
Did he who made the Lamb make thee? -
has come from a Miltonic inspiration to share a common context with the forest-image.
In Blake's Jerusalem (1804-1820) we have not even the slight variation from "fire" to "flame": the exact phrase from Milton is reproduced and again in relation to a paraphrase for "those indulgent laws". The line is:
"At enmity with the Merciful & fill'd with devouring
fire..."69
Nor is it just a very plausible conjecture that Blake took Milton's words to denote a carnivore like a tiger. It is a certainty. No question can remain after the expression in Europe itself:
"...howling terrors, all devouring fiery Kings, "Devouring & devoured, roaming on dark and desolate
mountains,
"In forests of eternal death..."70
The only discrepancy between this expression and the significance of The Tyger is that here the beast of prey is diabolic and there it is divine.
We may go a step further about Blake's derivation from Milton. His association, in Europe, of that Miltonic phrase with a diabolic carnivore is itself a piece of semi-Miltonism. For, Milton associates both the lion and the tiger with his Satan in one place. In Book IV he pictures Satan as assuming their shapes in the Garden of Eden in order to move around Adam and Eve, "unespied", and learn of their state:
69.Ibid., p. 667 (Ch. 2, 40, 1.33).
70.Ibid., p.238, pl. 2, 11.4-6.
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A lion now he stalks with fiery glare,
Then as a tiger, who by chance hath spied
In some purlieu two gentle fawns at play,
Straight couches close, then rising changes oft
His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground
Whence rushing he might surest seize them both,
Grip't in each paw...71
Blake must surely have noted Milton's elaborate dwelling on the tiger: his poem turns the tables, as it were, on Satan and makes him the prey - a change most natural and itself absolutely Miltonic if his poem springs from Abdiel's speech where the victim of the "devouring fire" is indeed meant to be Satan. His poem also fuses the two carnivores of Milton, and the very picture of the stalking lion by the epic poet becomes that of the Tyger in Blake. The "fiery glare" grows "the fire of thine eyes", and the body-movement at once stately and stealthily ominous, visualized by Milton, recrystallizes as "fearful symmetry". Perhaps we should note too that the rising, seizing and gripping which Milton speaks of in connection with his tiger's movement and with its use of "each paw" get adapted to what the artificer of Blake's Tyger does: the artificer aspires, seizes with his hand, brings a dread grasp in connection with the making of the Tyger.
Once Blake had visioned his destructively luminous animal and focused in it the theme of his poem, the rest of his piece found itself sparked off by various passages in Paradise Lost -mostly those in Books III, V and VI which tell of the revolt of Satan and his defeat at Christ's hands, but also a few elsewhere related directly or indirectly to Satan.
We may commence with lines coming pretty close on the heels of the germinal phrase, and trace suggestions vital to the poem. Abdiel, moving all through the night in which Satan had collected his crew, reached those parts of Heaven where the faithful abode. "Morn" has now come forth:
from before her vanish'd Night,
71. L1. 402-408
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Shot through with orient beams; when all the plain
Cover'd with thick embattl'd squadrons bright,
Chariots, and flaming arms, and fiery steeds,
Reflecting blaze on blaze, first met his view.
War he perceiv'd, war in procinct...72
The whole symbolic posture of The Tyger's start may be seen prefigured : victorious Light opposed to Night - God's bright forces, including fiery animals, poised for war against Satan's horde. And there is even the arresting rhyme of "Night" and "bright" in the middle of the blank verse, a rhyme anticipating in just the right place the most marked sound-effect in Blake's opening couplet.
Blake's bright-burning Tyger derives its fire from "distant deeps or skies". If we may expect a Miltonic clue to the derivation we should turn to "the sacred hill",73 "the seat supreme"74 of God to which Abdiel was led by members of the "squadrons bright". Out of this altitude was heard "a voice / From midst a golden cloud",75 ordering - among other things -an assault "with fire and hostile arms"76 on the rebels. And about this supreme seat itself we get some descriptive lines in the very series of passages to which the phrase we have called germinal is almost the termination. God's appointment of Christ as Lord of all, which Satan resented, is
Amidst as from a flaming mount whose top
Brightness had made invisible...77
Have we not here, clearly indicated, the origin of Blake's "distant deeps or skies", the blinding heavenly secrecy, the dazzling heavenly magnificence, where the fire of the Tyger's eyes had burnt before it was brought down and the whole Tyger set burning bright? A similar source is in the corresponding
72.Bk. VI, 11
73.Ibid., 1.25.
74.Ibid., 1.21.
75.Ibid., 11
76.Ibid., 1
77.Bk. V, 11
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passage of Book III: God is apostrophized -
Fountain of light, thyself invisible Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st Thron'd inaccessible...78
Fountain of light, thyself invisible
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sit'st
Thron'd inaccessible...78
Here the distances of the ultimate deeps or skies is thrust into prominence by the adverbial epithet "inaccessible", and again the noun "brightness" moves our mind from the primal fire to Blake's burning embodiment of it within a night thick with Satanic growths. Even the word "bright", though not as an adjectival adverb but as an adjectival noun, follows four lines later in the phrase: "dark with excessive bright.":79 and in that "dark" we have a hint of the skies that are also deeps, the heaven that has also a power as of hell to meet the forces of night with an intensity even more ruthless than theirs. As for the burning that goes with the brightness of Blake's Tyger, we have, interestingly enough, in conjunction with the very mount whose brightness has been spoken of in Book V as well as in Book III, the locution "burn" also, and it occurs in conjunction with the idea of an eye up there no less than the idea of night and of Satan's revolt - though the conjoinings do not stand quite as we find them in Blake -
...th' Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns Abstrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount, And from within the golden lamps that burn Nightly before him, saw without their light Rebellion rising - saw in whom, how spread Among the Sons of Morn, what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high decree...80
...th' Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns
Abstrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising - saw in whom, how spread
Among the Sons of Morn, what multitudes
Were banded to oppose his high decree...80
We may observe that Satan's rebellion is spoken of as "rising", "spread" and "banded" in "multitudes" in the night against God's "high decree" - an indirect picture as of what we have
78.L1.375-377.
79.L..380.
80.L1.711-717.
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called "a night thick with Satanic growths", Blake's "forests of the night".
That Blake carried this passage in his mind and even linked it with the mount's "brightness" which is elsewhere in Milton is obvious from the lines which in Vala or The Four Zoas refer to the Zoas in general and, in particular, to Urizen in his unfallen state within the Heaven of Eternal Humanity:
"Tho' this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain "Where Urizen and all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps..."81
"Tho' this bright world of all our joy is in the Human
Brain
"Where Urizen and all his Hosts hang their immortal
lamps..."81
It is hardly illogical for us to relate Milton's lines to The Tyger and fix attention on their "Eternal Eye".
Evidently this Eye is self-luminous - archetype, as it were, of the eye-fire of Blake's Tyger - and this same Eye is seen explicitly in far-off ultimate "deeps or skies" in Book III in a passage about matters that just precede those pertaining to our subject:
Nor had th' Almighty Father from above, From the pure empyrean where he sits High thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye His own works and their works at once to view...82
Nor had th' Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High thron'd above all highth, bent down his eye
His own works and their works at once to view...82
What recommends the passage all the more as relevant is that it connects the divine viewing with "works", as in the query which we have considered to be applied to Christ in our poem -
While we are on the topic of the Eternal Eye in the empyrean, the empyrean which originally held the fire contained by the Blakean Tyger's eyes, we may remark on Milton's combination of "fire" and "eye" in Book VI. Christ's chariot, when he went against Satan, was convoyed by "four Cherubic Shapes", and their bodies and wings were all "set with eyes" and
81.Keynes, ed. cit.,p. 272 (Vala or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.302-303).
82.L1.56-57.
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every eye Glar'd lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire Against th'accurs'd...83
every eye
Glar'd lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire
Against th'accurs'd...83
Now for line 2 of Blake:
In the forests of the night.
We have noted an oblique implication of its idea in some phrases of Milton's. We may proceed to mark more direct suggestions. First we may study briefly the role of night in Milton's story. To Milton
God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity..."84
God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity..."84
To Milton the areas of existence outside Heaven are Chaos and Night. But
There is a cave Within the Mount of God, fast by his throne, Where Light and Darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns - which make through Heav'n Grateful vicissitude, like day and night..."85
There is a cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his throne,
Where Light and Darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns - which make through
Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like day and night..."85
In this night of Heaven, called "ambrosial"86 in another place, Satan's revolt first occurs. The precise night is of the day on which God declares Christ to be His vicegerent: Satan, resenting the vicegerency, seduces "the third part of Heav'n's host"87 into rebellion. He and his company thus become enemies of God who is light and they get their proper designation when God asks Christ to go into battle against them with His light and might:
83.Ibid., 11.847-849.
84.Bk. III, 11.3-5.
85.Bk. VI, 11.4-8.
86.Bk. V, 1.643.
87.Ibid., 1.710.
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"Pursue these Sons of Darkness, drive them out From all Heav'n's bounds..."88
"Pursue these Sons of Darkness, drive them out
From all Heav'n's bounds..."88
So a diabolical night, essentially an inner obscurity, comes into play under the shadow of the "ambrosial night", as if it were a perversion of the latter - the kind of night whose forests, according to our interpretation of Blake's lyric, environ the Tyger-Christ with Satanic hostility.
Here we may remember Blake's phrase in The Four Zoas about his Satan's "night of councils dark", the phrase we have already quoted en passant to throw on the "stars" mentioned in The Tyger some illumination because of its link-up with "stars" and for the repetition following it of the very words in The Tyger: "the stars threw down their spears." We may now point out that Satan's "night of councils dark" in Blake is itself the echo of a line in Milton on Satan's doings on another night before the battle with Christ: Satan
His potentates to council call'd by night.89
The night of The Tyger has obviously its original in Paradise Lost. But not only in night - both literal and symbolic - does the revolt of Milton's Satan occur: it occurs also in a context where the presence of forests is hinted. That there are forests in Milton's Heaven is, of course, a certainty. We read about the "bright legions" of God and His Messiah:
On they move, Indissolubly firm; nor obvious hill, Nor straitening vale, nor wood, nor stream, divides Their perfect ranks; for high above the ground Their march was, and the passive air upbore Their nimble tread.90
On they move,
Indissolubly firm; nor obvious hill,
Nor straitening vale, nor wood, nor stream, divides
Their perfect ranks; for high above the ground
Their march was, and the passive air upbore
Their nimble tread.90
Now, some part of the wood spoken of in line 3 is surely in the
88. Bk. VI, 11.715-716.
89.Ibid.. 1. 416
90.Ibid.. 11. 68-73
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passage telling us of Satan's first movement of "pride" and "malice" and "disdain":
th' Angelic throng, Dispers'd in bands and files, their camps extend By living streams among the trees of life - Pavilions numberless and sudden rear'd, Celestial tabernacles, where they slept, Fann'd with cool winds; save those who, in their course, Melodious hymns about the sovran throne Alternate all night long. But not so wak'd Satan... Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd With all his legions to dislodge, and leave Unworshipp'd, unobey'd, the Throne supreme...91
th' Angelic throng,
Dispers'd in bands and files, their camps extend
By living streams among the trees of life -
Pavilions numberless and sudden rear'd,
Celestial tabernacles, where they slept,
Fann'd with cool winds; save those who, in their course,
Melodious hymns about the sovran throne
Alternate all night long. But not so wak'd
Satan...
Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour
Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolv'd
With all his legions to dislodge, and leave
Unworshipp'd, unobey'd, the Throne supreme...91
What are "the trees of life", among which flow "living streams", except bits of divine forests? No doubt, there is no straight association here of this suggestion of forests with Satan's resolve at midnight, but the presence of those trees could provide a background, if not a basis, to Blake's symbolic combination of night and forests - especially when influences from elsewhere in Milton would appear to support this combination. At least two such influences, bringing the image of "forests" into relation with the doings of the Sons of Darkness, can be clearly shown.
A celebrated simile, the one in Book I that pictures Satan's followers as standing faithful to him in spite of their withered glory, runs:
As when Heaven's fire Hath scath'd the forest oaks or mountain pines, With singed tops their stately growth, though bare, Stands on the blasted heath.92
As when Heaven's fire
Hath scath'd the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singed tops their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.92
91.Bk. V, 11.643-649, 667-670.
92.Bk. I, 11.612-615.
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Mark that the very word "forest" is collocated with "Heaven's fire" in mutual opposition just as the heavenly Tyger of our interpretation opposes its fire to the night-forests. Then there is the interesting fact to be remembered that Blake associated his Satan, Urizen, with Druidism, and the oaks became, as Black-stone93 says, a permanent symbol of diabolic cruelty and tyranny in his verse. He has even the expression "Forest of Oaks" when he speaks of Albion and of "Albion's Druid Sons" in a context that brings them together with "the Antichrist accursed". Milton's whole phrase "forest oaks" looks thus like an anticipation of Blake's Satan-symbolism.
The word "forest" is also used by Milton in the same Book in the lines94 we have already cited for their depiction of Satan's army in Hell as "a forest huge of spears" seen rising "through the gloom" - a phrase which we have regarded as of capital importance for the explicit imaginative link it provides between Blake's "forests of the night" and his spear-bearing stars. We noted too how Milton's vision of the rising spears is the exact reverse of Blake's vision of spears thrown down, as if suggestively preparing Blake's mind.
One more point about forests we shall make when we reach the night-implying "star"-lines and the last stanza's night-forests.
Our next concern is:
What immortal hand or eye...?
"Immortal...eye" puts us at once in mind of Milton's "Eternal Eye". In Blake we have made Christ the possessor of it, but the transference is perfectly just even according to Milton's story. For, a few lines later than the mention of "th' Eternal Eye", God addresses His Son:
"Son, thou in whom my glory I behold In full resplendence, heir of all my might"95 -
"Son, thou in whom my glory I behold
In full resplendence, heir of all my might"95 -
93.Op. cit., p. 204.
94.Bk. I, 11. 544-547.
95.Bk. V, 11.719-720.
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a statement which recalls an analogous one about Christ in Book III:
"Begotten Son, Divine Similitude, In whose conspicuous count'nance, without cloud Made visible, th' Almighty Father shines, Whom else no creature can behold..."96
"Begotten Son, Divine Similitude,
In whose conspicuous count'nance, without cloud
Made visible, th' Almighty Father shines,
Whom else no creature can behold..."96
"Th' Eternal Eye" is surely implicit in these lines by virtue not only of "Divine Similitude" but also of the "conspicuous count'nance" full of the Almighty Father's light. And that Blake's sense of Christ was not in general without a Miltonic affinity is evident from not only the phrase already quoted from his Milton but also his line in Jerusalem on Jesus:
...the Eternal Vision, the Divine Similitude...97
Also, just as the epithet "eternal" is here used by Blake for Christ, the epithet "immortal" is present in Milton about God a little above the lines beginning "Begotten Son, Divine Similitude" and becomes transferable to God's likeness:
Immutable, immortal, infinite...98
And the association, in Blake's poetic consciousness, of what is eternal with eyes that are immortal, is shown in his famous declaration of his "great task":
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity...99
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity...99
Here is even an immediate association of "immortal Eyes" with inmost "Thought", that curiously reminds us of "th' Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns / Abstrusest thoughts". But the most striking link between the "immortal eye" in The Tyger and Milton's "Eternal Eye" is the figure of speech constituted by
96.Bk. III, 11.384-387.
97.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 664 (Jerusalem, Ch. 2, 38, 1.11).
98.Bk. III, 1.373.
99.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 623 (Jerusalem, Ch. 1, 5, 11.18-19).
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the latter and the reference back to it in the passage where it occurs. It represents God by a synecdoche, a part doing duty for the whole, and in the very next line we have the word "his" referring back to it and in the fourth line "him" with the same function. The rhetorical structure is precisely like what we find in Blake: the synecdoche of "immortal eye" (as well as "immortal hand") in line 3, followed by "he" in line 7. All in all, it can hardly be far-fetched to look Miltonically at Christ's "Immortal Eye" in Blake.
And our Miltonic gaze grows more full as well as more apt when from Book VI we take God's first speech to Christ. It is a speech resembling those we have quoted from Books III and V, and it suggests not only Christ's "immortal eye" in a general way but also his "immortal hand" in a particular manner. God says:
"Effulgence of my glory, Son belov'd, Son in whose face invisible is beheld Visibly, what by Deity I am, And in whose hand what by decree I do, Second Omnipotence..."100
"Effulgence of my glory, Son belov'd,
Son in whose face invisible is beheld
Visibly, what by Deity I am,
And in whose hand what by decree I do,
Second Omnipotence..."100
Here is presented in both its essence-visioning and its form-executive aspects - the aspects of eye and hand - the Divine Power which expresses itself in the bright-burning Tyger with the help of the glory drawn by its Sonhood from the Supreme Fatherhood above.
Then there is Christ's command to his own armies to stand still and let him fight and finish the enemies, because, though they have been faithful to God in their welfare,
"of this cursed crew The punishment to other hand belongs: Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints."101
"of this cursed crew
The punishment to other hand belongs:
Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints."101
Christ's hand, one with God's by being God-appointed, is made prominent for dealing out punishment and vengeance -
100.Bk. VI, 11.680-684.
101.Bk. VI, 11.680-684.
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for sending out a Tyger-fury, as it were, against the godless.
An extremely relevant passage at this point is the early part of the dialogue between Abdiel and Satan in Book V. There Abdiel emphasizes to Satan the notion of Christ being in the forefront of action and God doing everything through Christ,
"begotten Son, by whom, As by his Word, the mighty Father made All things, even thee, and all the Spirits of Heav'n By him created in their bright degrees..."102
"begotten Son, by whom,
As by his Word, the mighty Father made
All things, even thee, and all the Spirits of Heav'n
By him created in their bright degrees..."102
Satan replies:
"That we were form'd then, sayst thou? and the work Of secondary hands, by task transferr'd From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!"103
"That we were form'd then, sayst thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferr'd
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!"103
The "hands" of the Son at creative "work" with God's power in them stand out. The "immortal hand" which we have made Christ employ in framing the Tyger after seizing with it God's fire on high is explicitly prefigured in a general fashion. And the epithet "bright" applied by Abdiel to "all the Spirits of Heav'n" that are the work of Christ's hands introduces a further touch of explicitness in relation to the Tyger.
Not that a poet would be incapable of writing "immortal hand or eye" without having read such passages as Milton's. Blake's phrase could very well have been an independent composition. But words which in theory could be independently written need not have been so in practice. To determine whether they were born under an influence or no, we have to go to the actual historical situation and not to a bare calculus of possibilities.
Now for line 4. Its main phrase - "fearful symmetry" - about which we have already said a little has no open counterpart in Milton bearing directly on Christ's wrath; but, like the Tyger-image, its essence is there unmistakably. We shall take it for consideration together with the "deadly terrors" of the Tyger's
102.Ibid., 11.806-808.
103.Ibid., 11.853-855.
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brain and with the "dread hands", "dread feet" and "dread grasp" of the animal's maker. Even the earlier description of Christ's battle - that of Book III - has a line directed to Christ, from which an echo seems caught in the thrice repeated "dread" of Blake:
Thou that day Thy Father's dreadful thunder didst not spare...104
Thou that day
Thy Father's dreadful thunder didst not spare...104
The first two "dread"'s in Blake come in connection with a kind of thunder, the beating of the fiery Tyger's heart:
And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hands? & what dread feet?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hands? & what dread feet?
Blake's third "dread" - the one in "dread grasp" - is almost immediately followed by the line:
When the stars threw down their spears...
In Milton too the turn "threw down" is combined with "dreadful" and this turn has to do with Christ's attack on the rebel Angels. Immediately before the phrase in which "dreadful" occurs, Milton, addressing Christ and referring to "th' Almighty Father", says: "He"
by thee threw down Th' aspiring Dominations."105
by thee threw down
Th' aspiring Dominations."105
When we go to Book VI we have more extended correspondences in idea, and the precise meaning of "fearful symmetry" no less than of the Tyger's burning as an embodiment of Divine Wrath becomes as clear as in the germinal "devouring fire". We may recollect how Christ tells God:
"But whom thou hat'st I hate, and can put on Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on..."106
Thy terrors, as I put thy mildness on..."106
We may recollect too his asking his armies to behold him
104.Bk. III, 11.392-393.
105.Bk. III, 11.391-392.
106.Bk. VI, 11.734-735.
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pouring "God's indignation" on the godless,"107 and finally his countenance changing into "terror" and bent "full of wrath" on his enemies.108 Moreover, when he goes to war in God's chariot we read not only of that vehicle's "flashing thick flames"109 and of "fierce effusions" rolling about him
Of smoke and bick'ring flame and sparkles dire."110
We read also of the accompanying Cherubim's wings "spread out... / With dreadful shade contiguous"111 and of his own driving upon his foes right onward "Gloomy as Night"112 - a description bringing home to us (with a Homeric phrase) how by putting on God's terrors the Lord of Light and Love could yet out-Satan Satan, the chief Son of Darkness, as if by a "fearful symmetry" exceeding the awesomeness of "forests of the night". And towards the end of Milton's account we have a climactic picture of Christ Tygerishly "burning bright" with "deadly terrors" against the rebels. He
Drove them before him thunderstruck, pursu'd With terrors and with furies...113 eternal wrath Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.114
With terrors and with furies...113
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.114
(c)
The opening couplet of the second stanza -
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
has already received some comment apropos of Milton. The
107.Ibid., 11.810-812
108.Ibid., 11.824-826.
109.Ibid., 1.751
110.Ibid., 1.766
111.Ibid., 1.829
112.Ibid., 1.832
113.Ibid., 11.858-859.
114.Ibid., 11 .865-866.
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sense of fathomless and forbidding brilliance we have read in "deeps" has been found by us to be an echo of what Milton says about God's throne. God, "high thron'd above all highth" in "the pure Empyrean", is invisible amidst His own brightness. This invisibility is also responsible for what we have called the lack of personal outline about God the Father in Blake and the figuring of Him as merely an ultimate empyrean-blaze. Now we may show in Milton correspondence to the very form of Blake's expression, as well as dwell Miltonically a little further on the word "deeps". The couplet before us seems to bear, for all its distinct individuality, a marked resemblance to the phrase:
this Heav'n which we behold Distant so high, with moving fires adorn'd..."11
this Heav'n which we behold
Distant so high, with moving fires adorn'd..."11
Even Blake's word "eyes", which is not explicitly anticipated here, is yet present by implication in "behold".
In passing, we may shed light, with the help of Milton's phrase, on the question: Are the deeps or skies distant from the poet stationed on earth and visioning things farthest above in Supernature or from the winged creator in his station in mid-Heaven at the moment when he wants to make the Tyger? Milton's phrase is spoken by Adam standing in his earthly paradise. So perhaps the first alternative may be favoured.
Now for some Miltonic light on the word "deeps". In Paradise Lost we often meet with the "Deep". The vocable connotes Chaos whose lowest depth is Hell. God asks Christ to drive the Sons of Darkness "into the utter Deep"11
115.Bk. VII. 11.85-86.
116.Bk. VI, 1.716.
117.Ibid.. 11.861-862.
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seems to out-devil the Devil could be the God of Love we worship and symbolize as the Divine Lamb. Blake has made a bold inversion of the usual Miltonic meaning - but the inversion too has a Miltonic sanction. The sanction in summary-form is there, as we hinted, in the phrase about God's presence: "dark with excessive bright." It appears in clear elaboration when in Book II Mammon, one of Satan's followers, speaks at some length in the assembly in Hell:
"...This deep world Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst Thick clouds and dark doth Heav'n's all-ruling Sire Choose to reside, his glory unobscur'd, And with the majesty of darkness round Covers his throne, from whence deep thunders roar, Must'ring their rage, and Heav'n resembles Hell! As he our darkness, cannot we his light Imitate when we please?..."11
"...This deep world
Of darkness do we dread? How oft amidst
Thick clouds and dark doth Heav'n's all-ruling Sire
Choose to reside, his glory unobscur'd,
And with the majesty of darkness round
Covers his throne, from whence deep thunders roar,
Must'ring their rage, and Heav'n resembles Hell!
As he our darkness, cannot we his light
Imitate when we please?..."11
The adjective "deep" occurs twice here, the first time in a Hell-context and the second in a Heaven-context. The noun "darkness" too occurs in either context and there is a straight statement: "Heav'n resembles Hell." The suggestion of a heavenly hell or a hellish heaven in Blake's "deeps" can be derived directly and openly from Milton's conception and expression.
Milton has even used the noun "Deep" at one place in a curious connection with Heaven. On the second day of the battle between Satan's armies and those led by Michael and Gabriel, Satan in desperation gets the idea of making gunpowder and surprising his foes. He opens his comrades' eyes to the new possibility thus:
"Which of us who beholds the bright surface Of this ethereous mould whereon we stand - This continent of spacious Heav'n adorn'd With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold -
"Which of us who beholds the bright surface
Of this ethereous mould whereon we stand -
This continent of spacious Heav'n adorn'd
With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold -
118. Bk. II, 11
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Whose eye so superficially surveys These things as not to mind from whence they grow Deep under ground: materials dark and crude, Of spiritous and fiery spume, till, touch'd With Heaven's ray, and temper'd, they shoot forth So beauteous, op'ning to the ambient light? These in their dark nativity the Deep Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal fire..."119
Whose eye so superficially surveys
These things as not to mind from whence they grow
Deep under ground: materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fiery spume, till, touch'd
With Heaven's ray, and temper'd, they shoot forth
So beauteous, op'ning to the ambient light?
These in their dark nativity the Deep
Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal fire..."119
In line 7 "deep" is still an adjective; but in the penultimate it is a noun, and this "Deep" is reached when, as a later line says, Satan's associates "up turn'd / Wide the celestial soil..."120 Most probably what is reached is the level where Heaven shades off, as it were, into the Chaos below. But the impression on the mind is of Heaven itself possessing a Deep of its own, with "infernal" incendiary possibilities. We should not be surprised if it quickened Blake all the more to couple "skies" with "deeps" in the same divine domain.
Here it would be relevant to remark that, Miltonically speaking, Blake has continued his "deeps" of heavenly hell or hellish heaven in the furnace where the Tyger is moulded. For in Book I Milton describes Satan as discovering in the deeps below that
A dungeon horrible on all sides round As one great furnace flam'd...121
A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flam'd...121
Blake, in giving us a celestial smithy, seems to have inverted Milton so far as overt expression is concerned: covertly, as we have seen already, Milton himself implies such a smithy, rendering Blake's quickening from him in this matter complete.
The connection, in Blake, between his "deeps" and his "furnace" would have been almost obvious if part of the original draft of The Tyger had remained in the final version. On the line -
What dread hand? & what dread feet? -
119.L1.472-483.
120.L1.509-510.
121.L1.61-62.
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Bateson122 has the annotation: "The original draft in the Ros-setti MS. shows that 'hand' and 'feet' were at that stage the subjects of a main verb in the next stanza, which then began: 'Could fetch it from the furnace deep.'" The epithet "deep" makes us hark back immediately to the empyrean where the fire of the Tyger's eyes burnt before being embodied. (By the way, the adjectival allusion to those "deeps" high up, linking them to an apparatus for producing intense heat, would show their distinction from "skies" as that of heat from light.)
Apropos of "the fire of thine eyes" of the second line in our couplet we have quoted Milton on the fire-shooting eyes with which were set the bodies and wings of the four-faced Cherubim who convoyed Christ's chariot. We may also note that in Milton these eyes are primarily linked with bodies and wings and that Blake, as soon as he has spoken of the Tyger's eye-fire, has the line about the animal's maker:
On what wings dare he aspire?
Moreover, the wings mentioned by Milton are ultimately linked with Christ whose chariot the Cherubim convoy:
He on the wings of Cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire thron'd - Illustrious far and wide...123
He on the wings of Cherub rode sublime
On the crystalline sky, in sapphire thron'd -
Illustrious far and wide...123
There is also Satan's reference to Christ in a speech to Gabriel:
"...though Heaven's King Ride on thy wings...124
"...though Heaven's King
Ride on thy wings...124
And when Christ goes on his world-creative mission he is described as
on the wings of Cherubim Uplifted...125
on the wings of Cherubim
Uplifted...125
122.Op. cit., p. 118.
123.Bk. VI, 11.771-773.
124.Bk. IV, 11. 973-974.
125.Bk. VII, 11.218-219
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But Milton links up wings with Christ more directly too. Once his mind seems to fuse the entire manifold of Christ's charioted Cherubim-convoyed movement into the single figure of him: the image of a winged Christ is there when in Book VI the angel Michael asks Satan not to risk a fight but go on his own to the infernal regions prepared for him,
"Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom, Or some more sudden vengeance, wing'd from God, Precipitate thee with augmented pain..."126
"Ere this avenging sword begin thy doom,
Or some more sudden vengeance, wing'd from God,
Precipitate thee with augmented pain..."126
True, when Michael says this, he is not aware that his fight with Satan would be indecisive and that God has reserved victory for Christ. But above Michael, to whom Satan is equal, there is none except Christ to wage God's war; so "some more sudden vengeance" which would be "wing'd from God" upon Satan could only be Christ's attack. And actually it is Christ who, augmenting Satan's pain, precipitates him into Hell. Also, God's decisive "vengeance" on His foes through Christ alone is more than once explicitly declared. Milton apostrophizes Christ:
Son of thy Father's might, To execute fierce vengeance on his foes.127
Son of thy Father's might,
To execute fierce vengeance on his foes.127
And Christ tells his own army standing opposite Satan's:
"...this day from battle rest... Faithful hath been your warfare, and of God Accepted, fearless in his righteous cause; ...But of this cursed crew The punishment to other hand belongs; Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints... ...Not you, but me they have despis'd,... Therefore to me their doom he hath assign'd..."128
"...this day from battle rest...
Faithful hath been your warfare, and of God
Accepted, fearless in his righteous cause;
...But of this cursed crew
The punishment to other hand belongs;
Vengeance is his, or whose he sole appoints...
...Not you, but me they have despis'd,...
Therefore to me their doom he hath assign'd..."128
126.L1 .278-280.
127.Bk. III, 11.398-399.
128.Bk. VI, 11.802-804, 806-808, 812-815.
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Thus the wings of vengeance are linked - even if metaphorically - with Christ and no one else.
And we may point out that in another way also the sense comes to us from Milton of a divine wingedness one with Christ whenever he acts on God's behalf. We have to read a number of passages together. Consider the lines to Christ vis-a-vis God in Book III:
on thee Impress'd th' effulgence of his glory abides; Transfus'd on thee his ample Spirit rests. He Heav'n of Heav'ns, and all the Powers therein, By thee created; and by thee threw down Th' aspiring Dominations.129
on thee
Impress'd th' effulgence of his glory abides;
Transfus'd on thee his ample Spirit rests.
He Heav'n of Heav'ns, and all the Powers therein,
By thee created; and by thee threw down
Th' aspiring Dominations.129
God's Spirit and glory grow Christ's both when he creates all things and when he vanquishes Satan. The double occasion is suggested also by verbal correspondences between God's words to Christ before the decisive battle with Satan -
"...Into thee such virtue and grace Immense I have transfus'd, that all may know In Heav'n and Hell thy power above compare... Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might"130
"...Into thee such virtue and grace
Immense I have transfus'd, that all may know
In Heav'n and Hell thy power above compare...
Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might"130
and, on the one hand, the lines quoted from Book III about God's spirit and glory and, on the other, those in which God sends Christ on the world-creative mission -
"...my Word, begotten Son, by thee This I perform; speak thou, and be it done! My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee I send along"
"...my Word, begotten Son, by thee
This I perform; speak thou, and be it done!
My overshadowing Spirit and might with thee
I send along"
the world-creative mission which is performed when
on the wat'ry calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
on the wat'ry calm
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
129.Bk. III, 11.387-392.
130.Bk. VI, 11.703-705, 710.
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And vital virtue infus'd, and vital warmth...131
But, as is clear from the last citation, the Spirit of God - ample, glorious, mighty, full of virtue and grace and warmth - that is transfused on and into Christ has wings in Milton as in all Christian tradition , wings which meet us from the very beginning of Paradise Lost in the poet's invocation to this Spirit to instruct him since its creative power was present "from the first . . . with mighty wings outspread" .132
Blake's poetic consciousness, absorbing Milton, would find itself spurred to do all the more what his own sense of Christ creative might incite - namely, to endow him with wings in The Tyger. And in making Christ ascend on wings it would get encouragement from a phrase of Milton's like
Down he descended straight; the speed of Gods Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes wing'd,133
Down he descended straight; the speed of Gods
Time counts not, though with swiftest minutes wing'd,133
where the descending Christ is not himself explicitly said to have wings but wings that are not his are so collocated with him that he seems to be moving on swifter pinions.
Further, we have in Book III "eyes" and "wings" together with "the glorious brightness" where God sits "thron'd inaccessible". God is addressed in His utter altitude whose "full blaze", even on His shading it, dazzles Heaven, with the result that
brightest Seraphim Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.134
brightest Seraphim
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes.134
But Christ is not debarred from the supreme Presence: on the contrary, he is said to receive the full blaze and in his face shines forth what none else could see.135 From this picture of Seraphim-wings unable to reach the Highest and of Seraphim-
131.Ibid.. 11.234-236.
132.Bk. I, 11.19, 20.
133.Bk. X, 11.90-91.
134.Bk. III. 11.381-382.
135.Ibid., 11.385-387.
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eyes failing to view Him, even when the light is self-subdued, the idea could easily arise in Blake of Christ alone having the kind of wings that can carry one to God's empyrean of fire and Christ alone having the sort of eye that can behold there, as well as the sort of hand that can seize there, what is required for the eyes of the Tyger.
The question, however, would still stand: Does Milton show any need for Christ, who is himself a member of the Divine Trinity, to "aspire"? No doubt, Milton presents us with a Christ whom God Himself is made to describe as
thron'd in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition,136
thron'd in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition,136
and Milton writes of Christ after a colloquy with God:
Thus saying, from his radiant seat he rose, Of high collateral glory,137
Thus saying, from his radiant seat he rose,
Of high collateral glory,137
and the poet, besides giving us about the Angels the phrase -
lowly reverent Towards either throne they bow138 -
lowly reverent
Towards either throne they bow138 -
speaks in his own person:
never shall my harp thy praise Forget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin!139
never shall my harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin!139
But we get also the lines on Christ in an apostrophe to God:
the bliss wherein he sat Second to thee...140
the bliss wherein he sat
Second to thee...140
And when the Angels touched their harps to "sacred song" -
Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent,
136.Ibid., 11.305-307.
137.Bk. X, 1.85-86.
138.Bk. III, 11.349-350.
139.Ibid., 11.414-415.
140.Ibid., 77.408-409.
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Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, Eternal King; thee, Author of all being,...141 Thee next they sang, of all creation first, Begotten Son, Divine Similitude...142
Immutable, Immortal, Infinite,
Eternal King; thee, Author of all being,...141
Thee next they sang, of all creation first,
Begotten Son, Divine Similitude...142
And it is always God in reference to whom Christ's position in Heaven is indicated, never vice versa:
the Father Infinite, By whom in bliss embosom'd sat the Son...143 On his right The radiant image of his glory sat, His only Son...144 So spoke the Father; and, unfolding bright Towards the right hand his glory, on the Son Blazed forth unclouded deity...145
the Father Infinite,
By whom in bliss embosom'd sat the Son...143
On his right
The radiant image of his glory sat, His only Son...144
So spoke the Father; and, unfolding bright
Towards the right hand his glory, on the Son
Blazed forth unclouded deity...145
And the key to the meaning of the relative positions of God and Christ appears in God's declaration to the heavenly host that Christ is His only Son: "I," says God,
"Him have anointed, whom ye now behold At my right hand; your head I him appoint...146
"Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your head I him appoint...146
In the midst of their equality of level God and Christ have yet a difference of shade in status and function: there is a subtle sense in which the former is primary and the latter secondary or, if we regard them as two aspects of a single Reality, God is Christ's own self as source of power while Christ is God's own self as manifestation of power: the former originates, the latter expresses. The whole relationship is well brought out in a passage which may be taken as linking the opposite sets of lines we have cited, for its beginning belongs to one set and its end to the other:
141.Ibid., 11.372-374.
142.Ibid., 11.383-384.
143.Bk. V, 11.596-597.
144.Bk. III, 11.62-64.
145.Bk. X, 11.63-65.
146.Bk. V, 11.605-606.
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So spake the Father; and, unfolding bright Toward the right hand his glory, on the Son Blaz'd forth unclouded deity. He full Resplendent all his Father manifest Express'd, and thus divinely answer'd mild:- "Father Eternal, thine is to decree; Mine both in Heav'n and Earth to do thy will Supreme, that thou in me, thy Son belov'd, May'st ever rest well pleas'd..." Thus saying, from his radiant seat he rose, Of high collateral glory.147
So spake the Father; and, unfolding bright
Toward the right hand his glory, on the Son
Blaz'd forth unclouded deity. He full
Resplendent all his Father manifest
Express'd, and thus divinely answer'd mild:-
"Father Eternal, thine is to decree;
Mine both in Heav'n and Earth to do thy will
Supreme, that thou in me, thy Son belov'd,
May'st ever rest well pleas'd..."
Of high collateral glory.147
The same idea of God decreeing and Christ carrying out the decree not only where matters of Earth are concerned but also where matters of Heaven are involved meets us when Christ addresses his Father before going out to battle with Satan:
"O Father, O Supreme of Heav'nly Thrones, First, Highest, Holiest, Best, thou always seek'st To glorify thy Son; I always thee, As is most just. This I my glory account, My exaltation, and my whole delight, That thou in me, well pleas'd, declar'st thy will Fulfill'd, which to fulfil is all my bliss. Sceptre and power, thy giving I assume..."148
"O Father, O Supreme of Heav'nly Thrones,
First, Highest, Holiest, Best, thou always seek'st
To glorify thy Son; I always thee,
As is most just. This I my glory account,
My exaltation, and my whole delight,
That thou in me, well pleas'd, declar'st thy will
Fulfill'd, which to fulfil is all my bliss.
Sceptre and power, thy giving I assume..."148
The last line repeats in essence what Christ is made to say earlier:
"...all regal power Giv'n me to quell their pride..."149
"...all regal power
Giv'n me to quell their pride..."149
Thus there are not only various levels of Heaven, with God on the highest throne: there is, on the very same level of God and Christ, a variation. Seated beside and not below God, Christ has outwardly not to "aspire" for God's light and might,
147.Bk. X, 11.63-71, 85-86.
148.Bk. VI, 11.723-730.
149.Bk. V, 11.739-740.
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yet inwardly he is the receiver and God the giver, and this variation which is implied in his throne being called "second" to God's is not merely shown as an attitude on Christ's part to glorify his Father just as the Father always glorifies His Son: it is also recognized by Milton on his own when he portrays Christ's gesture after the latter has replied to God's gift to him of might and light:
So said, he, o'er his sceptre bowing, rose From the right hand of glory where he sate...150
So said, he, o'er his sceptre bowing, rose
From the right hand of glory where he sate...150
And here we may read a subtle suggestion for Blake of Christ's actual aspiration from his inward status of secondness to God. The bowing renders vividly concrete this status and, when it is immediately followed by the rising, we get an upward movement, an aspiring, which symbolizes in a bodily act the result of a psychological need.
Mark for another subtle suggestion the word "exaltation" in the speech which has preceded the bowing and rising gesture. Literally the word means "raising, lifting up", though it is usually used figuratively; it also stands for "elation, rapturous emotion; intensification". The verb-form of it, "exalt", when figuratively meaning "praise, extol", goes often to make the phrase: "exalt to the skies"- rather a curious coincidence in view of the "deeps or skies" to which the Tyger's creator is said to "aspire". And it is also as curious a coincidence that "exalt" in the sense of "raise, place high in rank, power, etc." is used by Milton in close proximity to and connection with "aspire": Satan soliloquizes in the Garden of Eden about God's command to Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge:
"I will excite their minds With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with design To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt Equal with Gods. Aspiring to be such, They taste and die..."151
"I will excite their minds
With more desire to know, and to reject
Envious commands, invented with design
To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt
Equal with Gods. Aspiring to be such,
They taste and die..."151
150. Bk. VI, 11.746-747. 151. Bk. IV, 11.522-527.
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What is of further interest is that these lines are part of the very first utterance by Satan after he had moved round Adam and Eve in the form of a "tiger" such as might be preparing to "seize" his prey.152 Thus many of the ideas and expressions associated in Blake's lines go with "exalt" in Milton; and not only "exaltation" but "exalt" itself goes with Christ and precisely with reference to the supreme empyrean where his own throne stands with God's. It is in the context of Christ's offer to sacrifice himself in order to save fallen Man: God says -
"Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt With thee thy manhood also to this throne..."153
"Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne..."153
And a few lines later God, anticipating Christ's words quoted by us from two places, declares:
"All power I give thee..."154
"All power
I give thee..."154
So we circle back to the passage where Christ, just prior to assuming "sceptre and power" by God's "giving", speaks of his own "exaltation", but we circle back with a number of Blakean anticipations clinging to this term.
Unquestionably the words of the Miltonic Christ look up to God's throne as if he had need to "aspire" in spite of his own high position beside God. This up-look of speech comes out also when he tells God what the Faithful would do after he, "arm'd with thy might", has driven out the rebels: "Then shall thy Saints...
Unfeign'd halleluiahs to thee sing, Hymns of high praise, and I among them chief."155
Unfeign'd halleluiahs to thee sing,
Hymns of high praise, and I among them chief."155
But here a certain doctrinal problem must be touched upon. Reading Milton's theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, which came to light at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
152.Ibid., 11.403,407.
153.Bk. III. 11.313-314.
154.Ibid., 11.317-318.
155.Bk. VI, 11.744-745.
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we realize that Milton subscribed to the heresy known as Arianism. Arianism considers Christ a distinctly lower member of the Trinity than God - not a divinity co-essential or co-eternal with God but one who was created by God and who, for all the power with which he is endowed, is subordinate, a kind of super-demigod at best. Now, if Arianism can be shown to be part of the theological structure of Paradise Lost, Milton's Christ cannot in any sense inspire Blake's, and whatever need to "aspire" he may evince in the epic will be out of tune with the aspiration we have attributed to him in the lyric, for Blake never subscribed to Arianism.
Maurice Kelley156 has conclusively demonstrated that when Paradise Lost is collated with De Doctrina Christiana it stands in no contradiction to this treatise. But the crucial point is whether it openly asserts Arianism and whether, without the help of the treatise, we could take Milton to have made it Arian in its theology rather than such as would appeal to the whole Christendom of his day. As Rajan157 puts the situation: "To say that the epic is consistent with Milton's heterodox theology is very different from saying that it implies it." Sir Herbert Grierson158 has reached the conclusion: "... Milton's Arianism which is fully developed in the 'De Doctrina' is not so clearly adumbrated in the poem." Rajan159 has tried to prove that the poem does not imply Milton's heterodoxy and was not intended to do so for a reader unacquainted with the De Doctrina. He160 writes: "Milton's mind is too fixed for him to succeed entirely. He cannot make his heresy irrelevant. But he tries very hard to make it incidental. He makes no denial of co-essentiality. He makes only one statement that is explicitly Arian [Bk. VIII, 11.419-421] and even that has been deviously interpreted. For the rest, he confounds would-be exegetes with a series of allusions which can be manipulated as evidence of Trinitarian-ism, Anti-Trinitarianism, a Trinity of modes or one of mani-
156.The Great Argument (Princeton), 1941.
157.Op. cit., p. 12.
158.Milton and Wordsworth (Cambridge) 1938, p. 98.
159.Op. cit.. pp. 22-38.
160.Ibid., pp. 25, 26.
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festations. But he does not wish his dogma to obtrude. It did not obtrude with Newton, or with Todd, or with that long tradition of eighteenth century imitation which took Milton as its matrix in sentiment and style. If it obtrudes on us it is because of our excessive concern with possible connections between Milton's prose and his poetry. Yet surely Paradise Lost should be sufficient unto itself... Milton's treatment of the Trinity in Paradise Lost is therefore entirely consistent with his unorthodox views in the Treatise. But his presentation on his heresy is sufficiently subdued to involve no challenge to the beliefs of the orthodox." J. H. Hanford161 also, while declaring Milton's Anti-Trinitarianism discernible enough in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in the light of the elaborate discussions in the Christian Doctrine, says that in the former epic he conceals or modifies them. C. S. Lewis162 surveying all the relevant phrases disposes of the contention that they must be interpreted a la Arius. Apropos of the last of them, which has occurred in one of our own quotations, he writes: "The expression 'of all Creation first' applied to the Son in III, 383, is a translation of St. Paul's
163 (Col. I,15). A writer anxious to avoid the Arian heresy might indeed have avoided Milton's translation; but we should not from this passage, nor from any passage in the whole poem, have discovered the poet's Arianism without the aid of external evidence."
Hence whatever need to "aspire" is seen in the Christ of Milton's epic must be understood independently of Arianism: it must have its ground in a poetic presentation of beliefs substantially held "always and everywhere and by all". The need must be understood basically in nothing except the framework of the Son-Father relationship between Christ and God. It goes no further than what the Divine Son might do vis-à-vis the Divine Father. And it involves no more inferiority in Christ to God
161.A Milton Handbook (Fourth Edition, New York), 1946, p. 231.
162.A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford Paperback), 1960, pp. 86-87.
163."The firstborn of every creature".
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than is in the line Blake himself puts into Jesus's mouth in The Everlasting Gospel (1818):
I am doing my Father's business.164
To carry out God's work, whether in Earth or Heaven - to be on God's mission - not only to do His Father's business but also to want to do it - all this is part of Divine Sonhood, even if the Son be co-essential and co-eternal with the Divine Father. The up-look of the Miltonic Christ's speech to God has no unBla-kean association and could easily have got more vividly concretized in Blake's picture of aspiring.
The up-look is shared by Milton's rebels in their own way, and it is extremely significant to find Milton using repeatedly in reference to Satan's ambition to capture the supreme height of God's dazzling throne the verbal turn "aspire". Thus twice in Book VI, before Christ has received God's wrath-power and let it loose in battle, the usage meets us. "The banded Powers of Satan" thought
That self-same day, by fight or by surprise, To win the Mount of God, and on his throne To set the envier of his state, the proud Aspirer.165
That self-same day, by fight or by surprise,
To win the Mount of God, and on his throne
To set the envier of his state, the proud
Aspirer.165
A little later, Abdiel cries to Satan
"Proud, art thou met? Thy hope was to have reach'd The highth of thy aspiring unoppos'd - The throne of God unguarded..."166
"Proud, art thou met? Thy hope was to have reach'd
The highth of thy aspiring unoppos'd -
The throne of God unguarded..."166
In Blake's poem too, as we have read it, the aspiring comes in the part preparatory to the Tyger's creation by Christ from empyrean-fire and the letting loose of the dread power in battle. But, of course, there we have made Christ and not Satan aspire - a difference on whose rationale in the Milton-context we shall soon touch. And, of course, Milton's usage is primarily
164.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 750 (The Everlasting Gospel, c, 1. 8).
165.Bk. VI, 11.87-90.
166.Ibid., 11.131-133.
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psychological, connoting the inner movement of pride, envy, ambition, whereas Blake's in collocation with "wings" is principally equivalent to "soar, mount up" literally as a result of earnest desire. But let us not forget that Satan and his host were all winged beings and that to reach God's throne which was the top of Heaven they would have also to aspire bodily. And once the very notion of soaring or winging high is indirectly suggested immediately after Satan has spoken of his own "essence... / That to the highth of deity aspir'd!" - for, Satan says:
But what will not ambition and revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he soar'd...167
But what will not ambition and revenge
Descend to? Who aspires must down as low
As high he soar'd...167
Blake's mind has received the Miltonic "aspire" as a seed of double suggestion and re-creatively transferred, to the "exaltation" of which Christ speaks before the battle, the aspiring of the rebels and set him winging upward. (Milton, as we shall soon see, has similarly transferred to Christ the word "ascend" which the Bible employs for Satan where Milton writes "aspire". Thus Isaiah168 to Lucifer, as already cited by us: "For thou hast said in thy heart, ' I will ascend unto heaven, . . . I will sit upon the mount of the congregation, . . . I will ascend above the heights of the clouds: I will be like the Most High . ' ")
Further, as a number of passages either imply or make explicit, Milton pictures Christ as leaving God's seat on his destructive or creative mission and then rising back to it. A compact phrase showing God above and Christ mounting to Him is:
To him with swift ascent he up return'd.169
Again, we have Christ moving to God's "distant deeps or skies":
167.Bk. IX. 11.168-170
168.XIV, 12.
169.Bk. X, 1.224.
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Then to the Heav'n of Heav'ns he shall ascend...170
Hence, even outwardly, in one sense, Christ does "aspire".
But the most important context in regard to ascension (equivalent to aspiring or mounting up) by Christ is God's speech and its sequel, in Book VI. God says to Christ:
"Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might; Ascend my chariot..."171
"Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might;
Ascend my chariot..."171
And Christ, we are told, "ascended"172 this "Chariot of Paternal Deity" which is described as "flashing thick flames" and rushing "with whirlwind sound". In addition, immediately after being told that Christ "ascended", we get the phrase:
at his right hand victory Sat eagle-wing'd...173
at his right hand victory
Sat eagle-wing'd...173
Thus apropos of Christ's obtaining his Father's fire and thunder, the suggestions of ascending bodily and of wings as well as of hand come together, even as they do, though with a recreated combination, in Blake. And it is to be noted that Christ's bodily ascension of the Chariot equipping him with God's fire and thunder takes him to "a crystal firmament" which is over the heads of the Cherubs convoying the Chariot and on which his throne is set.174 When he ascends there and the Chariot moves we get the picture already noted:
He on the wings of Cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire thron'd - Illustrious far and wide...175
Illustrious far and wide...175
There we have even the Blakean word "sky" to mark the level to which Christ "ascended", over and above the conjunction of "wings" with his "sublime" (uplifted) position and the impres-
170.Bk. XII, 1.451.
171.Bk. VI, 11.710-711.
172.Ibid., 1.762
173.Ibid., 11.762-763.
174.Ibid., 1.757.
175.Ibid., 11.771-773.
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sion of the winged enskied movement burning and shining across great distances ("illustrious far and wide"). A complete background or basis for Blake's re-creation is essentially before us.
What perhaps reinforces the background or basis is that the passage is the very one whose commencement is the gesture by Christ already commented on:
So said, he, o'er his sceptre bowing, rose From the right hand of glory where he sate...176
From the right hand of glory where he sate...176
The act of Christ's rising - in answer to God's call - with a sense of lowliness from his seat, which is second to God's, sets the stage most fittingly for his subsequent ascension of "the crystalline sky" of God's Chariot. In fact, this ascension may be looked upon as completing what that significant rising has begun: the two constitute one emphatic whole which could not but serve to kindle Blake's imagination in the form in which we find it.
Here, since Blake knew his Milton backwards and forwards, it would not be whimsical to make a remark on the mere words "ascend" and "wings" as they must have played in Blake's memory from Milton. Once in Paradise Lost they occur together in the very way to serve as a starting-point for Blake's line. Their togetherness is with reference to Adam and Eve when Raphael tells Adam that the bodies of man and woman may at last
turn all to spirit, Improv'd by tract of time, and wing'd ascend Ethereal...177
turn all to spirit,
Improv'd by tract of time, and wing'd ascend
Ethereal...177
But, as the word "ascend" has gone so often with Christ in Milton, the togetherness may not unnaturally raise in Blake the vision of a winged Christ.
While we are about words as such and their floating from Milton into Blake, it should also not look fanciful to add one
176.Ibid., 11.746-747.
177.Bk. V, 11.497-499.
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more example of the older poet's employment of "aspire" and suggest how Blake may have been influenced by it to figure forth a Christ aspiring. We have observed the linking of the words "exalt" and "exaltation" with Christ in relation to God and His empyrean, as well as the linking of "exalt" with "aspire" in relation to a godlike status held as a lure before Adam and Eve. We may note that when "exaltation" is linked with Christ it is in a context mentioning Christ as God's "Son",178 and when "exalt" occurs the context runs, in God's speech:
"Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt With thee thy manhood also to this throne: Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man..."179
With thee thy manhood also to this throne:
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man..."179
"Aspire" thus gets linked not only with reaching up to God's empyrean but also with expressions referring to God's "Son" and "Son both of God and Man". And as if to clinch the connection by an open statement, though in terms of execration rather than admiration, there is for Blake in Milton the lines about a son of Man - Nimrod, builder of the sky-climbing Babel-tower, as viewed in prophetic vision by Adam:
"O execrable son, so to aspire Above his brethren, to himself assuming Authority usurpt, from God not giv'n!... to God his tower intends Siege and defiance."180
"O execrable son, so to aspire
Above his brethren, to himself assuming
Authority usurpt, from God not giv'n!...
to God his tower intends
Siege and defiance."180
A re-creative transposition would provide Blake with a Miltonic stimulus for his own vision of Christ daringly aspiring above the heavenly brotherhood to his Father's dreadful Power and receiving it as at once a gift and a right.
A re-creative transposition of these lines, as well as of those where Satan comes in as the aspirer, would be facilitated by a
178.Bk. VI, 1.725.
179.Bk. III, 11.313-316.
180.Bk. XII, 11.64-66, 73-74.
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suggestion emanating verbally from Milton himself, though from Paradise Regained and not Paradise Lost. This suggestion would fuse the aspiring Satan and the aspiring Nimrod with Christ, "Son both of God and Man". The scene is in Jerusalem, and Satan is the speaker. After telling Jesus that he among the rest has heard Jesus pronounced by a voice from Heaven "the Son of God belov'd" at the ford of Jordan where people had flocked to John the Baptist, Satan says:
"Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view And narrower scrutiny, that I might learn In what degree or meaning thou art call'd The Son of God, which bears no single sense. The Son of God I also am, or was; And, if I was, I am; relation stands; All men are Sons of God..."181
"Thenceforth I thought thee worth my nearer view
And narrower scrutiny, that I might learn
In what degree or meaning thou art call'd
The Son of God, which bears no single sense.
The Son of God I also am, or was;
And, if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are Sons of God..."181
Of course, what in general would encourage and fulfil all trends in a Miltonized Blake to send his Christ aspiring on wings is some influence of the fact we discussed at almost the outset - namely, that apart from the fiery character displayed in the battle-context Milton's Christ is Blake's Satan and Milton's Satan Blake's Christ. If the Satan of Paradise Lost conveys to Blake the fire and desire, the energy and exuberance, proper to the divinity manifest in the Messiah, the aspiring to God's height which Milton frequently attributed to Satan and to his followers ("Th' aspiring Dominations"182) - together with the wings required to accomplish his aim - might get not unnaturally shifted in a reconstituted and divinized form on to Blake's Christ.
Now a brief summing up will be appropriate of what exactly corresponds in Milton to the empyrean-fire whither Blake's creative "he" aspires on wings to seize it with his hand. The correspondence is a composite one and we shall get the full sense of it in a compact way if we read the beginning and the close of the great speech in which
181.Paradise Regained, Bk. IV, 11.514-520.
182.Paradise Lost, Bk. III, 1.392.
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th' Almighty Father, where he sits Shrin'd in his sanctuary of Heav'n secure,183
th' Almighty Father, where he sits
Shrin'd in his sanctuary of Heav'n secure,183
wishes
To honour his Anointed Son, aveng'd Upon his enemies, and to declare All power on him transferr'd.184
To honour his Anointed Son, aveng'd
Upon his enemies, and to declare
All power on him transferr'd.184
He starts with the lines on which we have already drawn:
"Effulgence of my glory, Son belov'd, Son, in whose face invisible is beheld Visibly, what by Deity I am, And in whose hand what by decree I do, Second Omnipotence!..."185
"Effulgence of my glory,
Son belov'd, Son, in whose face invisible is beheld
Second Omnipotence!..."185
Then he says that He has ordained for His Son to end the war between His Angels and the rebels, and thus far "suffer'd" it
"that the glory be thine..."186
Then He adds:
"Into thee such virtue and grace Immense I have transfus'd, that all may know In Heav'n and Hell thy power above compare... Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might; Ascend my chariot; guide the rapid wheels That shake Heav'n's basis; bring forth all my war; My bow and thunder, my almighty arms, Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh; Pursue these Sons of Darkness, drive them out From all Heav'n's bounds..."187
"Into thee such virtue and grace
Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might;
Ascend my chariot; guide the rapid wheels
That shake Heav'n's basis; bring forth all my war;
My bow and thunder, my almighty arms,
Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh;
Pursue these Sons of Darkness, drive them out
From all Heav'n's bounds..."187
The glory of God's face, the omnipotence of God's hand, shrined in the sanctuary of Heaven - all the supernal absolutes
183.Bk. VI, 11.671-672.
184.Ibid., 11.676-678.
185.Ibid., 11.680-684.
186.Ibid., 1.701.
187.Ibid., 11.703-705, 710-716.
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"dark with excessive bright" in their empyrean - are transfused in their full grace and virtue into Christ who, as it were, rises to the occasion of receiving them and stands high over all existence, "above compare". The glory and the omnipotence residing in Heaven's sanctuary are more dynamically represented by God's chariot and all that goes with it, bringing forth God's war: bow and thunder, almighty arms, sword. More details about this chariot we get when we learn that, as we noted, it rushes with a whirlwind sound and flashes thick flames. It has also "burning wheels"188 and is convoyed by four Cherubic Shapes, each four-faced and many-winged, who carry it aloft and whose "bodies all / And wings were set with eyes"189 which
Glar'd lightning, and shot forth pernicious fire190
among the accursed, the "Sons of Darkness". An extra detail, explaining the almighty arms, is the radiant panoply, "work divinely wrought". And when the Messiah comes with God's war, "far off his coming shone".191. It should be evident that the fiery "distant deeps or skies" of Blake to which the creative "he" aspires are the many-featured chariot which the Messiah ascended in answer to the Father's call, as much as they are what is transfused into Christ before this more dynamic representation of it appears.
But it should be evident too that just as Milton has a composite correspondence to Blake's empyrean of fire Blake has a composite correspondence to Milton's many-featured chariot. The chariot, besides being this empyrean, is the destructive four-footed beast of fearful symmetry and fiery eyes, the "work" of burning brightness which the aspiring creative "he" has wrought to embody the glory and omnipotence from on high; and the chariot is also, by virtue of the wings carrying it aloft, the winged creator himself in his response to the celestial fire no less than in his capacity to loose out an
188.Ibid., 1.832.
189.Ibid., 11.754-755.
190.Ibid., 1.849.
191.Ibid., 1.768.
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expression of his divine dreadfulness against the night and its forests and its perverted stars. Now for the Miltonic stimulus of the last line of stanza 3:
What the hand dare seize the fire?
In Blake's "seize" we have read not only audacity in handling the fire that is the original of the Tyger's eyes but also authority in relation to the distant deeps or skies, as if the divinity that has something still beyond it and is therefore secondary had yet a right equal to what the primary possesses in its ultimate altitude. "Seize" counterbalances the "aspire" of the preceding line. There is a similar counterbalancing in the unquoted part of the great speech of God where God confers His glory and omnipotence on Christ and asks him to "ascend" His chariot. This part follows the lines about God's self-transfusion into His Son that all may know him incomparable,
"And this perverse commotion govern'd thus, To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir Of all things - to be Heir, and to be King By sacred unction, thy deserved right. Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might..."192
"And this perverse commotion govern'd thus,
To manifest thee worthiest to be Heir
Of all things - to be Heir, and to be King
By sacred unction, thy deserved right.
Go, then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might..."192
Here we have the clear indication of the creative "he"'s authority: God, in appointing Christ His own Heir and Heaven's King, speaks of Christ's "deserved right". And the indication comes just a little before the phrases "Ascend my chariot" and "bring forth all my war", and in logical relation to them through the word "then" in "Go, then, thou Mightiest..." It also joins up with the reference to Christ's "hand" of "Second Omnipotence". So we seem to hear Christ being asked to aspire to what is not only God's but also Christ's own and to seize with his hand for manifestation what too is his privilege by his essential oneness with his Father.
The word "seize" occurs in Paradise Lost many times and in diverse ways. We have marked its suggestive occurrence in
192. Ibid., 11.707-710.
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connection with a tiger. We further read: "Admiration seiz'd / All Heav'n"193 -
The Princely Hierarch In their bright stand there left his Powers to seize Possession of the Garden194 -
The Princely Hierarch
In their bright stand there left his Powers to seize
Possession of the Garden194 -
"At last they seize / The sceptre"195 - "Seiz'd on by force".196 The most relevant forms for us are three others. One is in God's reference to Satan in a speech to the Son:
"This inaccessible high strength, the seat Of Deity supreme, us dispossess'd, He trusted to have seiz'd..."197
"This inaccessible high strength, the seat
Of Deity supreme, us dispossess'd,
He trusted to have seiz'd..."197
A situation in general such as we have seen in The Tyger is here. Only, instead of the Son seizing the fire of the Father's "strength" at the latter's call, we have the Adversary attempting to capture His seat by main force. But Blake's reversal is in accordance with his reversal of the notion of aspiring: once this motion, in a reconstituted form, is transferred from Satan and his crew to the creator of the animal which defeats and distresses the rebel stars under Satan, we should expect in relation to God's glory the motion of seizing to be also reconstituted and transferred to this creator whom we have identified with Christ. And indeed in Milton we find even a Father-Son context for the word "seize", though here too the celestial situation is of enmity, taken as it is from Greek mythology:
Titan, Heav'n's first-born, With his enormous brood, and birthright seiz'd By younger Saturn; he from mightier Jove , His own and Rhea's son, like measure found, So Jove usurping reign'd . . . 198
Titan, Heav'n's first-born,
With his enormous brood, and birthright seiz'd
By younger Saturn; he from mightier Jove ,
His own and Rhea's son, like measure found,
So Jove usurping reign'd . . . 198
193.Bk. III, 11.211-212.
194.Bk. XI, 11.220-222.
195.Bk. XII, 11.356-357.
196.Ibid., 1.412.
197.Bk. VII, 11.141-143.
198.Bk. I, 11.510-514.
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In trying to understand how ideas and word-turns moving from one poet to another pass often with dramatic changes, we may observe apropos of these lines that birthright, sonhood and reign recur together when God speaks to Christ on the sacrifice which the latter has offered to give for man's sake: "Because... thou hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,... Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign..."199
By merit more than birthright Son of God,...
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign..."199
A fusion of the Titan-and-Saturn-and-Jove picture with this God and Christ under a new motive is prompted by what God says almost immediately after. Christ is told:
"All power I give thee; reign for ever, and assume Thy merits... "200
I give thee; reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits... "200
In the command to Christ to assume his merits we hear from God's side all that we have read for Christ in Blake's word "seize". Even this very expression is not far from the above sentence. For, it is when Christ has offered his self-sacrifice, and God is about to express His appreciation, that we get the phrase already cited:
Admiration seiz'd All Heav'n...201
Admiration seiz'd
All Heav'n...201
In this context, however, there is no association everywhere of "seize" and "hand" as in Blake's "What the hand dare seize...?" But Milton is not devoid of this association. In the vision of the future the Archangel Michael shows Adam, there is a scene in which, within an attacked city defended with "sulphurous fire"202 and other means, rose one who in the midst of "factious opposition" spoke much of "right and wrong... and judgment from above", and whom both old and young
199.Bk. III, 11.305, 308-309, 315.
200.Ibid., 11.317-318.
201.Ibid., 11.211-212.
202.Bk. XI, 1.658.
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had seiz'd with violent hands Had not a cloud descending snatched him thence...203
had seiz'd with violent hands
Had not a cloud descending snatched him thence...203
Yes, Blake's precise collocation is in Milton and, what is most amazing, Milton's Michael, soon elaborating on the incident, describes to Adam the righteous man concerned as "daring single to be just",204 and continues:
him the Most High, Rapt in a balmy cloud, with winged steeds, Did, as thou saw'st, receive to walk with God High in salvation and the climes of bliss...205
him the Most High,
Rapt in a balmy cloud, with winged steeds,
Did, as thou saw'st, receive to walk with God
High in salvation and the climes of bliss...205
When we put everything together we get not only "fire" and "seiz'd with hands" but also "daring" and "winged" and being "snatch'd" up "to walk with God / High...in the climes of bliss". Have we not all the rough materials and the general scheme-suggestion of
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?
Now for a brief Miltonic scrutiny of the creation-process indicated for the bright-burning Tyger by these lines of Blake's together with the couplet preceding them:
The process may be stated: there is a mass of light burning above, there is a going up to it to bring its fire in order to enkindle the Tyger's fire-eyed body, to "frame" its "fearful symmetry". Milton, recounting the acts of creation performed by Christ with the transfusion of God's winged Spirit into him, speaks how
203.Bk. XI, 11.669-670.
204.Ibid., 1.703.
205.Ibid., 11.705-708.
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Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the Deep...206
Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,
Sprung from the Deep...206
The Light is "sphered in a radiant cloud".207 The Sun was not yet. And when the Sun came to be, we hear about this creation of Christ's:
For, of celestial bodies, first the Sun A mighty sphere he fram'd, unlightsome first, Though of ethereal mould...208
For, of celestial bodies, first the Sun
A mighty sphere he fram'd, unlightsome first,
Though of ethereal mould...208
Then we are referred back to the original Light:
Of light by far the greater part he took, Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and plac'd In the Sun's orb, made porous to receive And drink the liquid light, firm to retain Her gather'd beams, great palace now of Light... First in his east the glorious lamp was seen, Regent of day, and all the horizon round Invested with bright rays...209
Of light by far the greater part he took,
Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and plac'd
In the Sun's orb, made porous to receive
And drink the liquid light, firm to retain
Her gather'd beams, great palace now of Light...
First in his east the glorious lamp was seen,
Regent of day, and all the horizon round
Invested with bright rays...209
A process analogous in general to the Tyger's creation is depicted, and we have not only the words "Deep" and "bright" to summon up even verbal anticipations but also the Blakean word "fram'd" rather than "form'd" which is used soon after about the Moon.210 Finally, just after the creation of the Sun, as well as of the Moon and stars, is mentioned in broad terms and just before it is described in detail, beginning with the lines we have quoted above, there meets us the phrase about Christ we have culled in commenting on "Did he smile his work to see?" -
God saw, Surveying his great work, that it was good.211
Surveying his great work, that it was good.211
206.Bk. VII, 11.243-245.
207.Ibid., 11.247.
208.Ibid., 11.354-356.
209.Ibid., 11.359-363.
210.Ibid., 1.356.
211.Ibid., 11.352-353.
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This phrase is the sole one in the whole of Milton's account of creation where the creator is said to see specifically his "work" while approving of it. If Blake drew from Milton the inspiration for his vision of the making of the work that was the Tyger the place where we find that phrase of Milton's is the precise one we should expect.
And indeed it is apt that the Miltonic making of the sun should spark off in Blake the making of his animal. For, after all, what are the terms contraposed in the lyric? The Tyger ablaze and the night's forests. If we suppress the figures of the Tyger and the forests, we are left with burning and brightness on the one side and with the night on the other - the former breaking upon the latter just as the sun's fire might upon a world of darkness. We have already seen the Blakean rhyme -the very initial one in the lyric - of "bright" with "night" in a Milton-passage212 on Morn vanquishing Night in Heaven and disclosing God's bright embattled squadrons with their chariots and flaming weapons and fiery animals. At a superficial level, one may even read the lyric as a parable of dawn-burst; the defeated and distressed stars would be quite in keeping with the symbolled story. And, when the Tyger represents the sun, the Lamb would stand for the moon, the mild light which for all its splendour does not dispel the stars. The suggestion itself of the different fate of the stars on facing the sun and on facing the moon is Miltonic in a most explicit fashion. Milton writes that the moon
her reign With thousand lesser lights dividual holds, With thousand thousand stars...213
her reign
With thousand lesser lights dividual holds,
With thousand thousand stars...213
But his sun, "with surpassing glory crown'd", is a luminary
at whose sight all the stars Hide their diminish'd heads...214
at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads...214
212.Bk. VI, 11.14-19.
213.Bk. VII, 11.381-383.
214.Bk. IV, 11.34-35.
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And it is most striking that the phrase about the sun occurs in an apostrophe to it by Satan and that in this apostrophe there is a reference to the battle in Heaven in close connection with the phrase concerned. Immediately after that phrase we get the lines:
"to thee I call But with no friendly voice, and add thy name, OSun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state Ifell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down, Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King!"215
"to thee I call
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
OSun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
Ifell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King!"215
A Miltonized mind like Blake is bound to have been variously impregnated by seed within seed of diversely fused suggestions from Paradise Lost, and a sub-symbolism of sun and moon - with their contrary relations to stars - may well be thought of as running from Milton in The Tyger. The sub-symbolism may even be conceived as complete in its own place by an influence from Milton. For if the star-diminishing sun and the star-accepting moon came under the heads "Tyger" and "Lamb", the Light from which they are made and of which they form two opposite yet complementary aspects and which, as we saw, is called
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure
is addressed in one of Milton's finest passages:
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born! Or of the Eternal coeternal beam May 1 express thee unblam'd? since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity - dwelt then in thee. Bright effluence of bright essence increate!216
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav'n first-born!
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May 1 express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
Dwelt from eternity - dwelt then in thee.
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!216
215.Ibid., 11
216.Bk. III, 11
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To Blake's ears the passage could easily have conjured up and mixed with the other where, after recounting how the Angels sang first the Father as "Eternal King" and "Author of all being" and "Fountain of light" sitting inaccessible amidst "glorious brightness",217 Milton hails Christ and says:
Thee next they sang, of all creation first, Begotten Son, Divine Similitude, In whose conspicuous count'nance, without cloud Made visible, th' Almighty Father shines, Whom else no creature can behold: on thee Impress'd the effulgence of his glory abides...218
Begotten Son, Divine Similitude,
Whom else no creature can behold: on thee
Impress'd the effulgence of his glory abides...218
In Blake's sub-symbolic scheme, Christ would be the "holy light", the "first-born" in whom dwells the God who is light eternal and unapproached, and, when this "bright effluence" comes down, the Tyger-sun gets framed to rout the denizens of night, the stars. Such a scheme would render it the most natural process of poetic re-creation that Blake should catch fire from Milton's making of the sun for his own making of the Tyger.
(d)
The third stanza is our next problem of comparative study. Its opening phrase -
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? -
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? -
sends us first looking for Milton's use of the word "shoulder". Two instances stand out. One refers to Beelzebub, "than whom, / Satan except, none higher sat":219
Sage he stood, With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
217.Ibid., 11.374-377.
218.Ibid., 11.383-388.
219.Bk. II, 11.305-306.
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The weight of mightiest monarchies...220
There we have a declaration of immense strength such as Blake's "shoulder" also conveys with its ability to shape those mighty heart-sinews. The next instance refers to Uriel, the Angel posted in the Sun, one of the seven who are nearest God's throne and are His eyes running through all the Heavens.221 Milton describes him as seen by Satan:
His back was turn'd, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar Circled his head, nor less his locks behind Illustrious on his shoulder fledge with wings Lay waving round...222
His back was turn'd, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulder fledge with wings
Lay waving round...222
The association here of shoulders and wings in the midst of brightness is notable, for we have a somewhat similar though more general association in Blake's
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art...
And what shoulder, & what art...
But the most striking Miltonic correspondence to the first line of Blake's third stanza when preceded by the last two of his second is in a passage about Satan. In the three lines of Blake the questions introduced by the "what" 's are broadly about competence for a difficult, almost impossible-seeming, job: the poet asks what wings, hand, shoulder, art would suffice for it. Just this problem is posed by Milton with analogous components when Satan's followers discuss the job of someone making the extremely arduous and perilous journey from Hell through Chaos to the earth:
whom shall we find Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet The dark, unbottom'd, infinite Abyss,
whom shall we find
Sufficient? who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottom'd, infinite Abyss,
220.Ibid., 11.311-313.
221.Bk. III, 11.622-623, 648-651.
222.Ibid., 11.624-628.
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And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight, Upborne with indefatigable wings Over the vast Abrupt, ere he arrive The happy Isle? What strength, what art, can then Suffice...?223
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight,
Upborne with indefatigable wings
Over the vast Abrupt, ere he arrive
The happy Isle? What strength, what art, can then
Suffice...?223
The phrase "what strength, what art" is the exact counterpart of
since "strength" can be perfectly equated to "shoulder" when "art" is its contrary-complement. And not only is it in the identical context of competence or sufficiency, but also preceded at one line's remove by
exactly as Blake's phrase is preceded with one line's interval by
And if it can be of any interest for associative psychology we may add that the very first sentence of Satan's reply to the discussion of his followers contains the Blakean word "seize" and suggests a rising up to luminous regions:
"O Progeny of Heav'n! Empyreal Thrones! With reason hath deep silence and demur Seiz'd us, though undismay'd. Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light."224
"O Progeny of Heav'n! Empyreal Thrones!
With reason hath deep silence and demur
Seiz'd us, though undismay'd. Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light."224
We have also the word "deep" here no less than a mention of "Heav'n" and the next four lines give us both "fire" and "burning":
"Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire, Outrageous to devour, immures us round
"Our prison strong, this huge convex of fire,
Outrageous to devour, immures us round
223.Bk. II, 11.403-411.
224.Ibid., 11.430-433.
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Ninefold; and gates of burning adamant, Barr'd over us, prohibit all egress."225
Ninefold; and gates of burning adamant,
Barr'd over us, prohibit all egress."225
Would it be irrational on our part to be reminded not only of
but also of
Thus the opening line of Blake's third stanza discovers in Milton both its own significant affinity and, in connection with that, an affinity, significant or verbal, of the whole of Blake's second stanza.
The second line of the third stanza has no direct correspondence in Milton, but the sense it gives of a massive growing force answering as moulded effect to the cause operative in god-like shoulder-art can be compared to the impression we may imaginatively gather if, fastening on the common and connective word "strength", we juxtapose
what strength, what art, can then Suffice
what strength, what art, can then
Suffice
with those lines about Satan:
And now his heart Distends with pride, and, hardening in his strength, Glories...226
And now his heart
Distends with pride, and, hardening in his strength,
Glories...226
The next couplet -
And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hands? & what dread feet? -
What dread hands? & what dread feet? -
has already come in for comment. We have recalled Milton's phrase to Christ:
225.Ibid., 11.434-437.
226.Bk. I, 11.571-573.
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Thou that day Thy Father's dreadful thunder didst not spare...227
Thy Father's dreadful thunder didst not spare...227
Here we have a combination of thunder and dreadfulness, as of a giant heart's beating. A combination of such thunder with a dreadful hand occurs in the other phrase about the same occasion - namely, Christ's progression towards Satan's army:
...in his right hand Grasping ten thousand thunders...228
...in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand thunders...228
The sense of dreadful feet combined with Christ's thunderous attack may be felt in what Milton says about the chariot in which Christ was moving. We have already noted that it "forth rush'd with whirlwind sound".229 Also,
the orbs Of his fierce chariot roll'd, as with the sound Of torrent floods, or of a numerous host.230
the orbs
Of his fierce chariot roll'd, as with the sound
Of torrent floods, or of a numerous host.230
Even a direct presence of dreadful feet in connection both with Christ and with thunder is to be guessed from a treading-down power anticipated when Satan asks his army fallen in Hell whether it would lie abject under the gaze of Christ from above
"till anon His swift pursuers from Heav'n-gate discern The advantage, and, descending, tread us down Thus drooping, or with linked thunderbolts Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf?"231
"till anon
His swift pursuers from Heav'n-gate discern
The advantage, and, descending, tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linked thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf?"231
A general association of Supreme Puissance and Divine Wrath with Christ's limbs - answering to "shoulder" and
227.Bk. III, 11.392-393.
228.Bk. VI, 11.835-836.
229.Ibid., 1.749.
230.Ibid., 11.828-830.
231.Bk. I, 11.325-329.
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"hand" and "feet" of Blake's third stanza - may be seen if we take from the speech in which God asks Christ to go in his Father's might the four lines232 referring to his ascending the chariot, guiding its wheels, bringing forth bow and thunder, girding the almighty arms and wearing the sword upon his thigh.
The next stanza we have commented on to a considerable extent while passing backward and forward a little beyond the lines about the stars. We have viewed Miltonically its closing phrase about the Tyger's brain -
What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? -
What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp? -
by quoting the lines233 in which thunders grasped by Christ are not only brought against Satan's hosts but also infix plagues in their souls. We quoted, in addition, the verses234 where Christ's countenance changes into terror as well as those235 where Christ drives these hosts "thunderstruck, pursued / With terrors and with furies".
In treating the opening words -
What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? -
In what furnace was thy brain? -
we paralleled, with Milton's phrase about Christ's restraining his wrath from utterly destroying his enemies, one of the main significances we had read of the chain in Blake's poem. We glanced too at the Miltonic alliance between chain and furnace, no less than at the several collocations of the chain and Christ's hand.
We may now touch on some other points of comparison. The hammer, besides being part of the paraphernalia of a smithy such as is implied by Milton's "work divinely wrought" about Christ's armour, may be considered as present in the striking
232.Bk. VI, 11.711-714.
233.Ibid., 11.835-838.
234.Ibid., 11.823-824.
235.Ibid., 11.858-859.
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power of the Tyger which it has helped to frame. Then we may discern an anticipation of it in Abdiel's words to Satan:
"That golden sceptre which thou didst reject Is now an iron rod to bruise and break Thy disobedience."236
"That golden sceptre which thou didst reject
Thy disobedience."236
Similarly, the chain, one of whose purposes according to us is to keep in position the formidable Tyger-mass during its shaping, may be taken to be active within the shaped Tyger itself as a power to hold fixed the victim. Then we may perceive in Milton a pointer for Blake when immediately after the suggestion of dread feet in the words "tread us down / Thus drooping" we get the phrase:
or with linked thunderbolts Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf.237
or with linked thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf.237
Have we not here Christ's wrath capable of acting like a chain made up of his thunderbolts linked together?
A suggestive prefiguring of the Tyger's brain ablaze in a furnace may be spotted in the lines spoken to Satan by Sin who originally was "shining heav'nly fair, a goddess arm'd" sprung out of his head:238
thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth...239
thy head flames thick and fast
Threw forth...239
And it hardly seems a pure coincidence that, just as the stanza in which Blake's
appears is followed at once by the stanza about the defeat and distress of the rebels in Heaven, the Miltonic words about the head throwing forth flames thick and fast are soon followed by the lines from Sin:
236.Bk. V . 11 . 886-888.
237.Bk. I , 11 .328-329.
238.Bk. I I , 1 .757.
239.Ibid., 11.754-755.
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Meanwhile war arose, And fields were fought in Heav'n: wherein remain'd (For what could else?) to our Almighty Foe Clear victory; to our part loss and rout Through all the Empyrean.240
Meanwhile war arose,
And fields were fought in Heav'n: wherein remain'd
(For what could else?) to our Almighty Foe
Clear victory; to our part loss and rout
Through all the Empyrean.240
About the next stanza - the fifth - we have said enough. What remains to be said apropos of it is in relation to the one after it, the last in the poem. Miltonism here may be discovered by a look at some of the words Milton uses as a grand finale to his account of Christ's doings with his routed enemies. The grand finale opens with:
he meant Not to destroy but root them out of Heav'n241
he meant
Not to destroy but root them out of Heav'n241
and terminates with:
eternal wrath Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.242
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.242
Blake, after writing of the catastrophe to the stars and asking whether the Tyger's maker smiled at his own work, ends the stanza with a direct reference again to the Tyger:
and, as if remembering the expulsive angry hellward pursuit of the Sons of Darkness by Milton's Christ, winds up his lyric:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
We have considered this repetition of the first stanza a profound artistic necessity in order to underline the "star"-phrase's implication of night and merge the habitat of the stars
240.Ibid., 11.767-771.
241.Bk. VI, 11.854-855.
242.Ibid., 11.865-866.
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with the night's forests. But the necessity may have been rendered especially clear by a recollection of Milton. For, it is indubitable that Blake's grand finale, by its repetition, answers in a general way very closely to Milton's in a splendid intensity of formidableness and catches exactly his two main suggestions of dealing drastically with what is rooted and carrying against it a burning wrath divinely projected.
A matter of further interest is that Milton's grand finale points beyond Heaven to Hell, "the bottomless pit",243 and the passages which follow bring in the human world as a conceivable victim to Satan's wiles. Raphael, immediately after speaking of the "war in Heav'n" and its result to the companions of Satan, tells Adam about that fallen Archangel:
"he who envies now thy state, Who now is plotting how he may seduce Thee also from obedience, that, with him Bereav'd of happiness, thou may'st partake His punishment, eternal misery..."244
"he who envies now thy state,
Who now is plotting how he may seduce
Thee also from obedience, that, with him
Bereav'd of happiness, thou may'st partake
His punishment, eternal misery..."244
Milton thus indicates the possible application of Christ's wrath to man's concerns, just as the last stanza of our lyric, coming as it does after the lines about the punishment and misery of Satan's companions, extends the opposition of the Tyger and the forests of the night beyond the war in Heaven.
(e)
The whole of Blake's poem seems composed with a background - nay, with a basis - in Books V and VI of Milton's epic as well as strong reminiscences here and there of some other Books, particularly Book III. And it appears to be best explicable in its details by a reference to the epic. That does not diminish its own poetic creativity, its own imaginative originality, any more than J. Livingstone Lowe's tracing of innumerable details of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan in a
243.Ibid.
244.Ibid., 11.900-904.
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variety of books by others lessens the supreme and unique inspiration of these works of Coleridge's in their finally realized form. However, there is one difference. Coleridge's "story" is not clarified by echoes from his varied reading: they do not really anticipate that story, for it is entirely new and arises from the way these echoes hang together as the originals never did. Blake too stands on his own with a number of vivid images that poetically change the overall aspect of the things he has drawn from his reading, yet his story - apart from the attitude of the Tyger-Lamb contraposition - runs broadly parallel to Miltonic matter. The essential meaning of the story shines a little distantly in Blake - as, no doubt, it was intended to do, the poem being a precursor of latter-day Symbolism. When we bring its visions into liaison with Milton, this meaning emerges fully into the foreground, and the emergence completes the clarification brought by a close analysis of the poem itself and sets the stage perfectly for a clarificatory liaison of those visions with passages in Blake's other compositions.
Not that clarification adds anything to the art-quality of the piece: the very nature of this piece is to be somewhat unclear. It would be a mistake to say that without Milton Blake's Tyger is like a glorious body haunted by a still discarnate soul: the poem qua poem is body and soul one flame. But the flame cuts a puzzling shape to the intellect; and intellectually, as distinguished from artistically, the reference to Milton makes the shape totally traceable. Although we cannot say that without Milton Blake's Tyger does no more than prowl splendidly hungry for meaning through our minds, surely with Milton it stands magnificently gorged with significance. So far as intelligibility is concerned, perhaps the best manner of stating the situation is that if we take Blake's poem by itself we have to press his sense out of it, while if we take it in company with Milton the sense Blake has put into it presses upon us on its own.
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