6
(a)
The last stage of our study of The Tyger brings us into the midst of Blake's work in general. We have to support our identification of his beast of prey by whatever links up with our poem from outside it in the context of this work . We shall draw on outside expression to define the various aspects of the poem more clearly or to put our minds in the proper frame to appreciate them. And, weaving everything together, we shall see also what enrichment of detail comes about by taking Blake as a whole. But we shall do so by glancing first at some points from Blake put forward by C. M . Bowra.
Bowra is far from developing any concept like ours of Christ the Tyger at war with a supernatural night holding both forests and stars. His reading appears to be a subtilization and transfiguration of the elementary symbolism criticized by us. But in a certain way he does associate Christ with the entire poem and therefore his Blakean points, on being pressed to their final implication, are likely to terminate in our own concept.
Bowra probes the poem with an eye to what to him is the central idea in Blake's book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and several passages in other writings of his. This central idea is that perfection is attainable by a meeting of contraries. Both Innocence and Experience have to be fused in order to produce true wisdom or, as B lake put it, the life of the Imagination. But how are they to be fused and how, once Innocence is lost, is perfection to be attained? Bowra1 has some interesting words
1. The Romantic Imagination (Oxford), 1957, pp. 46-47, 48.
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on the matter:
Blake knows that man's consummation will not come simply from good-will or pious aspirations and that the life of the imagination is possible only through passion and energy. That is why he sometimes stresses the great forces which lie hidden in man and may be terrifying - but are none the less necessary if anything worth while is to happen. He sees that the creative activity of the imagination and the transformation of experience through it are possible only through the release and exercise of awful powers. He chooses his symbols for these powers in violent and destructive things, as when in his Proverbs of Hell he says, 'The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God,' or 'The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.' It was in such elemental forces that Blake put his trust for the redemption of mankind, and he contrasted them favourably with the poor efforts of the human intelligence: 'The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' The wrath which Blake found in Christ, his symbol of the divine spirit which will not tolerate restrictions but asserts itself against established rules, was the means by which he hoped to unite innocence and experience in some tremendous synthesis.
The poetry of this desire and of what it meant to Blake can be seen in 'The Tyger'. Here, too, enraptured song conveys in essential vision some themes which Blake presents elsewhere in more detail. This is the pure poetry of his trust in cosmic forces. The images of 'The Tyger' recur in the prophetic books, but in the poem, detached from any very specific context, they have a special strength and freedom. The tiger is Blake's symbol for the fierce forces in the soul which are needed to break the bonds of experience. The 'forests of the night', in which the tiger lurks, are ignorance, repression, and superstition. It has been fashioned by unknown, supernatural spirits, like Blake's mythical heroes, Orc and Los, prodigious smiths who beat out living worlds with their hammers; and this happened when 'the stars threw down their spears,' that is, in some enormous crisis when the universe turned round in its course and began to move
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from light to darkness - as Urizen says in The Four Zoas, when he finds that passion and natural joy have withered under his rule and the power of the spirit has been weakened:
I went not forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath: I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark; The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.
I went not forth:
I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath:
I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils
dark;
The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.
If we wish to illustrate 'The Tyger' from Blake's other works, it is easy to do so, and it adds much to our understanding of its background and its place in Blake's development. But it is first and last a poem. The images are so compelling that for most purposes they explain themselves, and we have an immediate, overwhelming impression of an awful power lurking in the darkness of being and forcing on us questions which pierce to the heart of life... The lamb and the tiger are symbols for two different states of the human soul. When the lamb is destroyed by experience, the tiger is needed to restore the world.
In the Songs of Innocence and Experience there are only hints of the final consummation which shall restore men to the fullness of joy. The poems are concerned with an earlier stage in the struggle and treat it from a purely poetical standpoint. What Blake gives is the essence of his imaginative thought about this crisis in himself and in all men. When he completed his whole book in its two parts, he knew that the state of innocence is not enough, but he had not found his full answer to his doubts and questions. From this uncertainty he wrote his miraculous poetry.
Bowra is excellent in several respects, but his account goes quite astray at one place and it suffers from an all-round shortcoming in that it pitches the Christ-significance of the Tyger too low. The place at which he loses his way is where he speaks of the Tyger's having been fashioned when, as a result of the stars throwing down their spears during "some enormous cosmic crisis", "the universe... began to move from light to darkness". According to him, the star-catastrophe preceded
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the creation of the Tyger and marked the defeat not of darkness but of light. Bowra would seem to go by the traditional poetic suggestion of "stars". Our interpretation grants that this suggestion is partly there since the stars who are for us rebels against the light were originally angels, but inasmuch as they are fallen we take the crisis suffered by them as that of Heaven's enemies, not of Heaven itself. This point we shall clarify from Blake's own writings, including the passage which Bowra quotes from The Four Zoas. At the moment we shall dwell on the all-round shortcoming of Bowra's account and pass through it to those writings.
No doubt, the Lamb and the Tyger in the context of human life symbolize states of the soul and the latter stands for fierce elemental passion, power, energy which to Blake is more effective than the moralizing rational intelligence and which in an enlightened form he finds in the anti-conventional wrath of Jesus. But Blake was no mere psychologist or humanist: he was, as we already indicated, a visionary of the supernatural. This point we may briefly clinch apropos of our own interpretation of the word "art" in our poem. We said: " 'Art' connotes skill of execution directed to an end. But what is the end here? As with all that can be called art, the end is ostensibly the making of a significant form, but ultimately the particularized expression of a creative delight arising from some illuminative 'inwardness' of being and driven by a sense of perfection. And because art is such a delight it is always associated with beauty. But beauty is not to be understood in conventional terms: its patterns can be strange, they can even be fearful and twisted." Blake's unconventional idea of beauty may be caught from his pithy definition: "Exuberance is Beauty."2 With it we may couple his other succinct assertion: "Energy is Eternal Delight."3 The epithet "Eternal", however, would supply a new direction - towards a source which is hinted by our phrase: "some illuminative 'inwardness' of being and... a sense of
2.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 152 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Proverbs of Hell, PL 10, 5).
3.Ibid., p. 149 (ibid., Pl. 4; The Voice of the Devil).
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perfection." This source is evidently what Blake himself included in his artistic credo: "The Man who never in his Mind & Thoughts travel'd to Heaven Is No Artist."4 In short, the artist, in some manner or other, has to visit Supernature. And Blake meant the connection with Supernature in a literal sense. From Supernature he believed himself to be receiving direct messages no less than experiences. About a prophetic book of his -most probably The Four Zoas5 - he wrote to Butts on July 6, 1803: "I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary; the Authors are in Eternity."6 Bowra himself speaks of "supernatural spirits, like Blake's mythical heroes, Orc and Los, prodigious smiths who beat out living worlds with their hammers" and he speaks also of "some enormous cosmic crisis" in connection with which he mentions Urizen, one of the main figures in Blake's prophetic books, among the earliest of which the most important was The Four Zoas (1795-1804). If we are to understand Blake's total meaning we must see how his psychology widens out into the supernatural.
A look at the "mythical" figures he named Zoas will be for us a very apt starting-point, since, as Bowra's quotation shows, the exact phrase about the stars in The Tyger recurs in The Four Zoas.7
The Four Zoas are Los (or Urthona), Urizen, Luvah (or Orc) and Tharmas. Blake regarded them as basic aspects of man's psychology. These aspects have been taken by many Blake-students as corresponding to the psychological divisions proposed by Jung.8 Los represents the Jungian Intuition. Urizen is the Jungian Thought, though we must be careful to
4.Ibid., p. 458 (Annotations to Reynolds).
5.John Sampson, Blake's Poetical Works (Oxford), 1904, pp. xlii-xliii.
6.Keynes, ed. cit. p. 825 (The Letters 26).
7."Zoa" is the Greek for "living creatures", commonly rendered as "animals" or "beasts". The plural Greek form is treated by Blake in English as singular -quite justifiably because its termination is singular-sounding to the English ear. Adopting the literal meaning, he uses in certain contexts the expression "Living Creatures" for his Zoas.
8.Vide W. P. Witcutt's "William Blake and Modern Psychology" in John O'London's Weekly, April 4, 1947, pp. 317-318.
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note that Blake himself used "Thought" in different ways and not invariably as a synonym for what he calls "the Reasoning Power in Man" which, properly speaking, is his Urizen. Luvah represents the Feeling à la Jung. Tharmas is Blake's body-consciousness or bodily instincts and impulses, and corresponds to Jung's Sensation.
But let us remember that to Blake his Zoas were no mental constructs of his own, personifying psychological faculties, and that he did not confine them to man's ordinary life, no matter how well-developed, and that he did not hold them to be functioning in this life as they should. Even for Jung the ultimate human being is not the ordinary consciousness we daily know, with its jangles and clashes, nor just the same level reduced to some order: we deepen and widen into the "Collective Unconscious" ("Unconscious" because our ordinary being is not able to keep its consciousness in it) - a mystery in which all men through all time share and have one life beyond the small surface existence and full of strange ageless "archetypes". Blake always claimed a direct insight into ultra-human realities - the huge recesses of a Supernature. And his Zoas are rather complicated figures. Even as psychological faculties they are at present aberrant:
Urizen cold & scientific, Luvah pitying & weeping, Tharmas indolent & sullen, Urthona doubting & despairing, Victims to one another & dreadfully plotting against each other...9
Urizen cold & scientific, Luvah pitying & weeping,
Tharmas indolent & sullen, Urthona doubting &
despairing,
Victims to one another & dreadfully plotting against each
other...9
Besides being psychological faculties, they are "the Four Eternal Senses of Man"10 and have each a station in an organ of sense: Urthona in the ears, Urizen in the eyes, Luvah in the nostrils and Tharmas in the tongue. But these organs are said by Blake to be narrow and diminished in their functions:
9. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 671 (Jerusalem, 2, 43, 1 1 .2-4).
1 0. Ibid., p. 663 (ibid. , 36, 1 .3 1 ) .
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The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, clos'd up & dark, Scarcely beholding the Great Light, conversing with the ground: The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out True Harmonies & comprehending great as very small: The Nostrils, bent down to the earth & clos'd with senseless flesh That odours cannot them expand, nor joy on them exult: The Tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys, A little sound it utters, & its cries are faintly heard.11
The Eye of Man, a little narrow orb, clos'd up & dark, Scarcely beholding the Great Light, conversing with the
ground:
The Ear, a little shell, in small volutions shutting out
True Harmonies & comprehending great as very small:
The Nostrils, bent down to the earth & clos'd with
senseless flesh
That odours cannot them expand, nor joy on them exult:
The Tongue, a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys,
A little sound it utters, & its cries are faintly heard.11
The Zoas in us, therefore, are not in their full form but are fallen from an original status far greater than ourselves. Blake further tells us that the Four Senses became the Four Elements.12 But, as is evident from the description of the diminished sense-functions, the Elements too cannot be fully realized in our world by the Zoas. They are said to separate from the limbs of man in his present condition13 and to be "in contrarious / And cruel opposition, Element against Element".14 It is in some dimension of existence greater than what is known to us that truly Urthona is Earth, Urizen Fire, Luvah Air and Tharmas Water. About Los, Blake says:
Urthona was his name In Eden;15
Urthona was his name
In Eden;15
and adds that Urthona propagated his "Emanations" in "the Auricular Nerves" which are "the Earth of Eden".16 But here a complication must be registered. Los is associated with the sun in several lines of Blake's as is to be expected about one who is called "the Spirit of Prophecy".17 It is even believed that his name is the reverse of the Latin word "sol" for "sun", just as
11.Ibid., p. 680 (ibid., 49, 11.34-41).
12.ibid., p. 663 (ibid., 36, 11.31-32).
13.Ibid.
14.Ibid., p. 520 (Milton, II, 31, 11.23-24).
15.Ibid., p. 264 (Vala, or the Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.16-17).
16.Ibid.
17.Ibid., p. 510 (Milton, I, 24, 1.71).
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"Orc" is resolved into an anagram of the Latin "cor" meaning "heart", "Luvah" is considered a play on "love" or "lover" and "Urizen" surmized to suggest "your reason".18
There is in Blake still another representation of the activities of the Zoas. Each organ of sense is connected with one of the directions:
...the Eyes are the South, & the Nostrils are the East, And the Tongue is the West, and the Ear is the North.19
...the Eyes are the South, & the Nostrils are the East,
And the Tongue is the West, and the Ear is the North.19
However, in our common world "the Four Zoas clouded rage" and "they change their situations".20 Their activities get into wrong quarters:
But in eternal times the Seat of Urizen is in the South, Urthona in the North, Luvah in the East, Tharmas in the West.21
But in eternal times the Seat of Urizen is in the South,
Urthona in the North, Luvah in the East, Tharmas in the
West.21
The culminative impression we get is that both in depth and in extension, in quality as well as in function, the Four Zoas exceed our habitual psychology. And expressions like "eternal times", "Eden", "the Great Light", point us to the real character of the Zoas. This character stands out in Blake's lines:
18.The learned derivation for "Urizen" is Dorothy Plowman's from the Greek "ourizein" = "to bound or limit", and of "Orc" (regarded as referring to the sexual aspect of Luvah) is the Greek "orkhis" = "testicle" or (if the reference is taken as being to Luvah's fallen state) the Latin "Orcus" = "hell" or "underworld". But a double or even triple intention in Blake's terms is quite possible: it is indeed in keeping with the general ingenuity of his mind. Even about "Lyca" of The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, whose source Kathleen Raine (in The Divine Vision, p. 26, fn. 1) opines to be the Greek root "luke" ("light") or "leukos" ("light, bright, white") I should claim that it is also an anagram of "Clay". Raine herself says, apropos of the pair of stanzas prefacing the first of the two poems, that the sleeper in this poem is Lyca and yet it is "earth" who will be "awake" and that this in some sense identifies Lyca as the Earth of the poem Earth's Answer (op. cit., p. 26). "Clay" as a synonym for "Earth" could well serve Blake's point. And indeed as early as 1789, in The Book of Thel, he names Earth "matron Clay" (Keynes, op. cit., p. 130, pl. 5, 1.14).
19.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 632 (Jerusalem, I, 12, 11.59-60).
20.Ibid., p. 663 (ibid., II, 36, 11.25-26).
21.Ibid., p. 319 (Night the Sixth, 11.279-280).
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Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity Cannot Exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, The Universal Man, To Whom be Glory Evermore. Amen. What are the Natures of those Living Creatures the Heav'nly Father only Knoweth. No Individual knoweth, nor can know in all Eternity.22
Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity
Cannot Exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of
Eden,
The Universal Man, To Whom be Glory Evermore.
Amen.
What are the Natures of those Living Creatures the
Heav'nly Father only
Knoweth. No Individual knoweth, nor can know in all
Eternity.22
We may cite also:
four Wonders of the Almighty, Incomprehensible, pervading all, amidst & round about, Fourfold, each in the other reflected; they are named Life's - in Eternity - Four Starry Universes going forward from Eternity to Eternity.23
four Wonders of the Almighty,
Incomprehensible, pervading all, amidst & round about,
Fourfold, each in the other reflected; they are named
Life's - in Eternity -
Four Starry Universes going forward from Eternity to
Eternity.23
The Zoas are super-personalities older than earth's history, and that is why Blake often terms them "Eternals"24 and each individually "the Immortal"25 and at times all of them collectively "the Immortal Four"26 or "the Four Immortals".27 They are, as it were, the Four Faces of the ultimate Reality which Blake designates "the Universal Man", also "the Eternal Man". And in Biblical language apt to the supernatural he calls them "the Cherubim".28
In speaking of the "Man" who is "Universal" and "Eternal", Blake goes to the very core of his mysticism and connects us as we are to the huge recesses of Supernature. According to him, these recesses not only hold the true and complete existence but are also explorable by an inward look on our part, a plunge
22.Ibid., p. 264 (ibid., Night the First, 11. 9-13).
23.Ibid., p. 364 (ibid., Night the Ninth, 11.281-284).
24.Ibid., pp. 222-223 (The First Book of Urizen, pl. 3, ch. 1, 11.5, 23).
25.Ibid., p. 257 (The Book of Los, Ch. I, pl. 4, 1.7).
26.Ibid., p. 534 (Milton, II, 42, 1.18).
27.Ibid., p. 524 (ibid., 34, 1.45).
28.Ibid., p. 696 (Jerusalem 3, 63, 1.44).
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into our own depths, and by an extension of our consciousness from inside outwards to break its present limits. He writes:
I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity For ever expanding in the Bosom of God...29
I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
For ever expanding in the Bosom of God...29
God "exists in us and we in him":30 Supernature is, in the deepest connotation of the word, Human, it is the Divine Humanity. If we may use a term of Indian Yoga, the Primal and Perfect Being is our own supreme "Self" which is also a single infinite Spiritual Body. Blake usually speaks of Selfhood as the restricting and dividing consciousness of man which is to be annihilated in order to cleanse the face of the Spirit,31 but in one place32 he has the phrase "real and immortal Self" and in another33 he tells us that man "requires a new Selfhood continually". Blackstone34 sees Blake's essential meaning and writes that he wanted us to have "consciousness of that larger Self which lies behind the fretful individual self, and in which all men share". As we have noted in our first chapter, Kathleen Raine35 recognizes too in Blake's Divine Humanity "the Self of the Upanishads known to mystics both Platonic and Christian as existing beyond the conscious self..." It is interesting to know that even Jung, as Raine36 reminds us, calls our ordinary selfhood the "ego" and our basic unrealised being the "Self" which is the whole, with the ego a part budded from it.
To Blake, with his ultimate in the "larger Self" and its infinite Spiritual Body, even the so-called non-human world is at bottom dishumanized Humanity, our own supreme being in
29.Ibid., p. 623 (Jerusalem, I, 5, 11. 17-20).
30.Ibid., p. 775 (Annotation to Berkeley's "Siris").
31.Ibid., p. 533 (Milton, II, 40, 11.36-37).
32.Ibid., p. 4% (ibid., I, 15, 1.11).
33.Ibid., p. 682 (Jerusalem, III, 52).
34.Op. cit., p. 384.
35.William Blake (Published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans Green & Co., London, New York, Toronto), 1951, p. 25.
36.In The Divine Vision, p. 48, fn. 1.
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a delusive mode before us, not only Vegetative as opposed to Eternal but also unlike our own Vegetative condition which at least hints, however distortedly, at the Universal and Eternal Man. Not that the non-human world dissolves its particulars when we have the experience of Eternity: Eternity contains all kinds of shapes and yet they partake of the Spirit of Humanity:
For all are Man in Eternity, Rivers, Mountains, Cities,
Villages,
All are Human & when you enter into their Bosoms you
walk
In Heavens & Earths, as in your Bosom you bear your
Heaven
And Earth & all you behold; tho' it appears Without, it is
Within...37
The world within - which is a reality of spiritual sensation, perception, intuition - is designated by Blake, in a special usage, the Imagination or the Human Imagination, and he could declare that the Without is Within
In your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is
but a Shadow.38
That Blake's term "Imagination" as a synonym for Eternity is a special usage is overlooked by some of his students who fasten on statements like
there is no other
God than that God who is the Intellectual fountain of
Humanity.39
They try to make out that Blake merely apotheosized human virtue and the higher intellectual and visionary mind of man as he is, rather than that he asserted a condition transcending our life-experience. But these interpreters might remember that Imagination is put over against the World of Mortality and
37.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 709 (Jerusalem, III, 71, 11.15-18).
38.Ibid.
39.Ibid., p. 738 (ibid., IV, 91, 11.10-11).
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must therefore point beyond our life-experience. They might also attend to what Blake writes in the prose introduction to the fourth part of Jerusalem. There he nearly repeats the phrase about the shadowiness of the Mortal World as compared to the Imagination and leaves us in no doubt as to his supernatural drift: "...Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetative Universe is but a faint Shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetative Bodies are no more."40 And this expression occurs in a passage where occurs also a repetition of almost the very phrase on which the non-mystical Blake-scholars fasten. Blake says: "What is the Divine Spirit? is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain?"41 What we can submit is not that Blake was couching in mystical language a purely humanist message, but that the supernatural Imagination has no discontinuity with our own and hence the latter is our most precious, most divine possession, the one thing worth following in order to reach and realize the former. And this is precisely the implication of Blake himself when in the same passage he says just before the phrase on Imagination: "I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination..."42 He speaks too of "Mental Studies & Performances"43 and exhorts us "to Labour in Knowledge"44 if we would be true Christians. The key to his question whether the Holy Ghost is any other than an Intellectual Fountain comes in the questions he asks soon after: "Is God a Spirit who must be worshipped in Spirit & Truth, & are not the Gifts of the Spirit Every-thing to Man? What is the Life of Man but Art & Science? is it Meat & Drink?"45 Blake wishes to emphasize the intellect-part, the soul-side of our being, through which we can progress into the supreme Mind and Spirit of God, our true Self who is the
40.Ibid., p. 717 (ibid., 77).
41.Ibid. (ibid.).
42.Ibid., pp. 716-717 (ibid.).
43.Ibid., p. 717 (ibid.).
44.Ibid., (ibid.).
45.Ibid., (ibid.).
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Intellectual Fountain of Humanity. The Divine Arts of Imagination which are perfect in Eternity have to be pursued by each of us here and now as best we can. Something of the supernatural Imagination we can always have through our mental ability to create and commingle, to be artist and lover, to enter sympathetically into modes of life outside us and to aspire to an ideal.
But our powers are weak and fallible. A division has occurred in us, shutting out the limitless fullness that we really are and giving us a world of finites within and without. What causes the division is the Urizenic faculty in us in a distorted form, the faculty of Reason which measures out and distinguishes and diversifies. The distorted form is often dubbed by Blake "the Spectre":
the Reasoning Spectre
Stands between the Vegetative Man and his Immortal
Imagination.46
As a result of the Reasoning Spectre our very senses are cramped. We cannot say about ourselves what Blake says of Los and his emanation Enitharmon - that they
walk'd forth on the dewy Earth
Contracting or expanding their all flexible senses
At will to murmur in the flowers small as the honey bee,
At will to stretch across the heavens & step from star to
star...47
One who lives in "Imagination, the Divine Humanity",48 can so expand as to unify all things and so contract as to be one thing among many.
But, even contracted, he does not lose the sight of all things under their spiritual forms and even what now to us are animals and objects are both alive and vocal to him: they are not as we find them at present -
46.Ibid., p. 663 (Jerusalem 2, 36, 11.23-24).
47.Ibid., p. 228 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Second, 11.293-298).
48.Ibid., p. 709 (Jerusalem 3, 70, 11.19-20).
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a Rock, a Cloud, a Mountain
[Are] now not Vocal as in Climes of happy Eternity
Where the lamb replies to the infant voice, & the lion
to the man of years
Giving them sweet instructions; where the Cloud,
the River & the Field
Talk with the husbandman & shepherd.49
In those "Climes", there is, as Blackstone50 tells us, a constant interchange between Man and that part of his being which, when he pleases, he sees as exterior to himself:
the Bodies in which all Animals & Vegetations, the Earth
& Heaven
[Are] contain'd in the All Glorious Imagination.51
Nor are those "Climes" devoid of adventure: a wonderful seeking and conquest go on, ever new achievements of Exuberance and Energy are there. Blake52 speaks symbolically of the two Sources of Life in Eternity, Hunting and War, which, perverted, can become
the Sources of dark & bitter Death & of corroding Hell.
We also read:
Lo, the Eternal Great Humanity,
To whom be Glory & Dominion Evermore, Amen,
Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face:
As the breath of the Almighty such are the words of man
to man
In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Imagination,
To build the Universe stupendous, Mental Forms
Creating.53
49.Ibid., p. 315 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth, 11.134-138).
50.Op. cit., p. 62.
51.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 678 (Jerusalem 2, 11.13-14).
52.Ibid., p. 672 (ibid., 43, 11.31, 32).
53.Ibid., p. 519 (Milton, II, 30, 11.15-20).
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There is a tension, there is a dynamism, there is a constant creating of forms in Eternity: not only everlasting existence, not only everlasting energy, but also everlasting invention and novelty seem to be a mode of Eternal Life. Something to the same effect appears to be suggested in one of the final passages of Jerusalem, where "the Four Living Creatures, Chariots of Humanity Divine Incomprehensible" are said to be "fronting the Four Cardinal Points of Heaven" and "going forward, forward irresistible from Eternity to Eternity":
And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic
which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in
Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of
Intellect,
Creating Space, Creating Time, according to the wonders
Divine
Of Human Imagination...54
The creative tension no less than the beatific harmony of the Eternal Being is again finely characterized by Blake when he makes that Being's own voice say:
"...our wars are wars of life and wounds of love "With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought. "Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing "We live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses "We behold multitudes, or expanding, we behold as one, "As One Man all the universal Family, and that One Man "We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him "Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life, "Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other's trespasses."55
"...our wars are wars of life and wounds of love
"With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought.
"Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing
"We live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses
"We behold multitudes, or expanding, we behold as one,
"As One Man all the universal Family, and that One Man
"We call Jesus the Christ; and he in us, and we in him
"Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life,
"Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other's trespasses."55
In this last passage we have not only Blake's insight into Supernature summed up but also the heart of his intuition of Christ. Christ is to him not simply a marvellous spiritual figure
54.Ibid., p. 746 (Jerusalem 4, 98, 11.28-32).
55.Ibid., pp. 664-665 (ibid., 2, 38, 11.14-22).
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in history and in the natural world: his ultimate reality is transcendental. His transcendental character comes out very clearly in relation to the things of history and Nature when we read A Vision of the Last Judgment, where the "World of Imagination", which is "the World of Eternity" and into whose "Divine bosom we shall all go after the death of the Vegetable body", is contrasted as "Infinite & Eternal" to "the world of Generation or Vegetation" described as "finite & Temporal".56 We learn: "There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature. All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination..."57
The concluding words, equating Christ and "The Human Imagination", emphasize how central to Blake's mythology of Supernature is Christ. Elsewhere we find the phrase:
the Human Imagination,
Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for
ever.58
And when we remember the equivalence of "Imagination" to "Divine Humanity" and how "the Eternal Great Humanity,... / Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face" just as, when the senses are expanded, "all the universal Family" is "One Man" - "Jesus the Christ" - beheld by the Eternals, we realise that it is Christ who is described in
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine surrounded by His Cherubim & Seraphim in ever happy Eternity.59
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine surrounded by
His Cherubim & Seraphim in ever happy Eternity.59
There are also the words: "Jesus / The Eternal"60 and "the Divine Lamb, even Jesus, who is the Divine Vision"61 and
56.Ibid., p. 605 (A Vision of the Last Judgment pp. 69-70).
57.Ibid., pp. 605-606 (ibid.).
58.Ibid., p. 482 (Milton I, 3, 77.3-4).
59.Ibid., p. 531 (Milton II, 39, 11.27-28).
60.Ibid., p. 519 ((ibid., 30, 11.30-31).
61.Ibid., p. 287 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Second, 1.261).
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...the Human Imagination, which is the Divine Vision &
Fruition
In which Man liveth eternally.62
Blake's Christ, the same Jesus who appears in history and Nature, is shown everywhere to be essentially the transcendental Unity of Divine Supernature.
He is this Unity in two ways. The first, of course, is when all the Eternals are seen as a single all-comprehending reality. The second is when in each of them this whole is, as it were, reflected, and every individual Eternal stands as a multiplication of the Divine Vision that is Christ: the same Jesus innumerably existing. This second aspect of the Unity, already suggested by a turn like "seen in every face", is explicitly presented to us in the passage where another basic truth of the eternal Transcendence symbolized by Blake as "Jerusalem" is spoken of:
In Great Eternity every particular Form gives forth &
Emanates
Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision
And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every
man,
A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male &
Female Clothings.
Jerusalem is called Liberty among the children of
Albion.63
Jerusalem too has several aspects. As "Liberty", she is that in all particular Christ-multiplying Forms which allows their meeting and communication, the going forth of each being out of itself towards the rest, their freedom with one another. When the Eternal Man as "Albion" falls from Eternity and struggles to recover his divine status, his children are all of us in the temporal world and Jerusalem as "Liberty" is then whatever in us is not blocked into an obscuring selfhood. This
62.Ibid., p. 521 (Milton II, 32, 11. 19-20).
63.Ibid., p. 684 (Jerusalem 3, 54, 11.1-5).
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character of Jerusalem is pictured in its universal play in the line with which Blake ends the apocalyptic scene where all things awake "in the Life of Immortality":
And I heard the Name of their Emanations: they are
named Jerusalem.64
The precise work of Emanative Jerusalem is brought out in the lines:
Man is adjoin'd to Man by his Emanative portion
Who is Jerusalem in every individual Man and her
Shadow is Vala, builded by the Reasoning power in Man.
O search & see: turn your eyes inward; open, O thou
World
Of Love & harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely
Gates!65
Thus Jerusalem's work is to accord and interrelate all details into a divine whole. And she is not only the light and liberty that, issuing from each Eternal Man, weaves together all the members of Eternity: she is also the transcendental "World of Love & Harmony" constituting the multitudes woven together. Just as Christ is the Unity of Supernature, she is Supernature's Collectivity or, to cite Blackstone,66 "the Pleroma or aggregate of the minute particulars" of Eternity.
And her relationship here with Christ is put by Blake in three modes. He writes about Christ in continuation of the passage on the universal Family:
he is all in all
In Eden, in the garden of God, and in heavenly
Jerusalem.67
But Blake does not identify Jerusalem with Eden only. He calls her also the Universal Female,68 one
64.Ibid., p. 747 (ibid., 4, 99, 1.5).
65.Ibid., p. 675 (ibid., 2, 44, 11.38-42). 66. Op. cit., p. 63.
67.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 665 (Jerusalem 2, 38, 1.25).
68.Ibid., pp. 345-346 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth, 11.199, 190).
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in whose bosom the Lamb of God Is seen,69
in whose bosom the Lamb of God
Is seen,69
and
happy Jerusalem, The Bride and Wife of the Lamb.70
happy Jerusalem,
The Bride and Wife of the Lamb.70
We have quoted from Blake's prophetic books running over twenty-five years - Vala, or The Four Zoas (1795-1804), Milton (1804-1809), Jerusalem (1804-1820) - in order to hint the richness, the many-sidedness of his Supernaturalism. But actually everything, in one shape or another, is contained in The Four Zoas and almost in the very first of the "Nine Nights" into which the book is divided. In "Night the First" which is close in time to The Tyger we have even the bulk of our Jerusalem-passage which sums up Blake on Supernature and on Christ. We are also told71 how
Terrific rag'd the Eternal wheels of intellect, terrific rag'd
The living creatures of the wheels, in the Wars of Eternal
life,
in contrast to the perverted movements
back revers'd
Downwards & outwards, consuming in the wars of
Eternal Death.
(b)
Now we have the broad background, passing far beyond mere psychology and humanism, against which to place Bow-ra's suggestions about our lyric, and bring Christ and the Tyger into rapport. The rapport is along three lines of thought drawn from Bowra.
First, there is the phrase he brings from Blake about "the
69.Ibid., p. 362 (ibid., Night the Ninth, 11.205-206).
70.Ibid., p. 676 (Jerusalem 3, 46, 11.27-28).
71.Ibid., p. 280, 11.571-574.
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roaring of lions" and "the destructive sword" being "portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man". Secondly, there are the phrases "the wrath of the lion" and "the tygers of wrath." Thirdly, there is the Christ in whom, as Bowra says, Blake saw the anger of the Divine Spirit which will tolerate no restrictions and asserts its truth against established rules. When we combine these three lines of thought and refer to our background, there should hardly be a doubt about what the poet's beast of prey could signify in the deepest or highest terms such as the poem itself offers with its "distant deeps or skies". On the strength of that background, the Tyger, whatever relevance it may have outside the poem to physical or psychological facts, would be - within the milieu which the poem itself mentions, namely, "the forests of the night" and the "heaven" of the "stars" - the wrath of Christ brought forth destructively in Eternity, in an occult Beyond, as the complement-contrary of the supernatural Lamb-Christ's gentleness, and the object of this transcendental wrath would be the spear-bearing stars that are pictured as defeated and distressed, and these stars would be offending angels who wanted to impose ignorant restrictions and establish deadening rules.
Nor does the mystical background stop in its elucidating effect with making the poem reveal through Bowra's clues the meaning we have extracted from it. It provides extra clues of its own to render this meaning plausible. For, it does not only show Christ as much more than a high state of man's soul as we normally are aware of it in earth-life: it does not only show him as a truth of Eternity, either - Eternity which was for Blake an occult existence and experience. It also shows the Lamb and the Lion to be forms already present in Supernature and expressive of the Divine Vision. In addition, it shows war and wrath to be intrinsic activities of Eternity and a new creation of "Mental Forms" "bright" and of "thunderous majesty" to be a constant part of Eternity's "Great Wars" and of the Divine Humanity's "going forward, forward irresistible" in His "Chariots" fronting "the Four Cardinal Points of Heaven". Of course, according to our sketch of the mystical background, in
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the original "Climes" of "Eden" which is Blake's synonym for the eternal, the Lion no less than the Lamb is "vocal" of "sweet instructions", and the wounds of the wrathful "War" are those of the give-and-take of illumined mind or heart in contrapuntal dynamic. But if the beast of prey and the warring "wrath" are already there, and if bright thunderous majestic forms are newly created there to meet warlike or other occasions, then with a possible disturbance of the blissful unity-in-multiplicity that is Christ and of the loving harmony-in-difference that is Jerusalem a beast of prey could come in bright-burning anger, fashioned by the poetic "fury" of the "immortal Imagination", the One Divine Vision, to fight in earnest against those members of the Heavenly Family who, revolting, might have turned enemies of the living light and liberty of Supernature.
The decisive question now is: Does Blake's supernatural mythology accept a bright-burning anger making war in Heaven against Heaven's enemies? Like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, are readers of Blake to prepare themselves to hear of
things to their thought So unimaginable as hate in heav'n, And war so near the peace of God in bliss, With such confusion...72?
things to their thought
So unimaginable as hate in heav'n,
And war so near the peace of God in bliss,
With such confusion...72?
Of course, everybody admits that Blake has the myth of a Fall of heavenly beings. The action of the Fall is presented in several ways and Blackstone73 remarks that Blake is not always consistent in his presentation, but, as Blackstone74 himself recognizes, a certain element is clear-cut in its centrality during the early period covering The Tyger and persists as a component through all later qualifications or complications and does not lose its inherent strength and momentousness. This element is dubbed by Blake, as Bateson75 tells us, "the State
72.Paradise Lost, Bk. VII, 11.53-56.
73.Op. cit., p. 66.
74.Ibid., pp. 67, 136.
75.Op. cit., p. 134.
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call'd Satan" and it plays in his mythology the role that is the Devil's in Milton's story. The point, however, is whether there is for Blake a war upon his Satan before that "State" goes out of Eternity.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which belongs to the same period as The Tyger gives an answer clear enough. Although in that book Blake topsyturvies Milton and makes a Satan of his Messiah and vice versa, the essential Miltonic vision is retained. In terms of this vision Blake sees how Desire, restrained by Reason, becomes passive and shadowy:
"The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah...
"It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss."76
Here, in addition to the explicit acceptance of the "history" in Paradise Lost, the critical turn for us is: "was cast out." This means an attack in Supernature before the fall from it and before the formation of another world by the fallen one. Blake's mythology in the time of The Tyger accepts the battle between Desire, the true Messiah, and Reason, the real Devil, in the Hell that is the original Heaven or Eternity - Desire whose battling could most appropriately be pictured as a Tyger.
In this heavenly Hell we have "corrosives, which... are salutary & medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, & displaying the infinite which was hid",77 and we have "Lions of flaming fire, raging around & melting the metals into living fluids".78 Again, to repeat in another manner what we already know, "portions" of this "Eternity" of "Energy" and "Exuberance" are "the roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, & the destructive sword".79 Why are they portions of Eternity? Because in Eternity there are, for Blake, the archetypal "tygers of wrath" which are "wiser than
76.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 150 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 5-6).
77.Ibid., p. 154 (ibid., 14).
78.Ibid., p. 155 (ibid., 15-17).
79.Ibid., p. 151 (ibid., 7).
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the horses of instruction"80 and whose destructive divine fire went forth against the Satan of Reason and cast him out.
In another work, The First Book of Urizen (1794), overlapping with The Tyger, we have in explicit terms the story of Blake's Satan and of the Fall in Eternity. The fall began with the disruption of the primeval unity-in-diversity within which the Four Zoas were living. Blackstone81 explains: "One of the Four living Creatures, the rational principle to which Blake gives the name of Urizen, was not content: he wished to usurp all power and conform all things to his own image. As a result he brought about a division in Eternity, was cast out by his indignant peers and organized the material world where reason should reign supreme."
Blackstone uses exactly the words Blake has employed in The Marriage: "...was cast out." And a fight in Heaven leading to Urizen's expulsion is definitely implied in the very first four lines of the "Praeludium" to The Book of Urizen:
Of the primeval Priest's assum'd power, When Eternals spurn'd back his religion And gave him a place in the north, Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.82
Of the primeval Priest's assum'd power,
When Eternals spurn'd back his religion
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.82
There are three steps here, with a fourth implied: 1) Urizen's assumption of priest-power, 2) the spurning of his religion by the Eternals, 3) their giving him a place in the north, where his separate and dark creation begins. In this context the critical words for us are: "spurn'd back." It suggests an assault by Urizen and a repulse of him from the Eternals' side precedent to the isolation within which he organizes the material world. And the mode of the repulse, the spurning back, is hinted in a line of the passage where Urizen says:
"Why will you die, O Eternals? "Why live in unquenchable burnings?
"Why will you die, O Eternals?
"Why live in unquenchable burnings?
80.Ibid., p. 152 (ibid., 9).
81.Op. cit., p. 66.
82.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 222 (The First Book of Urizen, 2, 11.1-4).
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"First I fought with the fire, consum'd "Inwards into a deep world within: "A void immense, wild, dark, & deep, "Where nothing was: Nature's wide womb."83
"First I fought with the fire, consum'd
"Inwards into a deep world within:
"A void immense, wild, dark, & deep,
"Where nothing was: Nature's wide womb."83
Mark the phrase: "First I fought with the fire..." The "fire" is evidently the "unquenchable burnings" in which the Eternals live the life which seems like death to Urizen. A little later also we have a reference to this fire, when Urizen attempts to cool
The eternal fires, beating without From Eternals,84
The eternal fires, beating without
From Eternals,84
and then brings about this new creation:
like a black Globe, View'd by sons of Eternity... The vast world of Urizen appear'd.85
like a black Globe,
View'd by sons of Eternity...
The vast world of Urizen appear'd.85
Urizen's fight with the fire of the Eternals precedes his getting "consum'd inwards into a deep world within", which is the "void immense", the space constituting the first form of the natural world. Perhaps the fight is implied too in the phrase where a rebellion by Urizen is indicated in the midst of eternal life before any universe of death was created:
Earth was not: nor globes of attraction; The will of the Immortal expanded Or contracted his all flexible senses; Death was not, but eternal life sprung. The sound of a trumpet the heavens Awoke...86
Earth was not: nor globes of attraction;
The will of the Immortal expanded
Or contracted his all flexible senses;
Death was not, but eternal life sprung.
The sound of a trumpet the heavens
Awoke...86
And a counter-movement occurring on the part of the Eternals is implied when Los is said to "keep watch" for them
83. Ibid., p. 224 (ibid., 4, 11 . 12-17).
84. Ibid., p. 226 (ibid., Ch. III, 5, 11.32-33).
85. Ibid., p. 226 (ibid., 11 . 33-34, 37).
86. Ibid., p. 223 (ibid., Ch. II, 11 .36-41 ) .
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to confine
The obscure separation alone...87
In these words we have the same thing as the Eternals' spurning back Urizen and setting him in the north, "obscure, shadowy, void, solitary".
Thus a bright-burning anger making war in Heaven against rebels and bringing about their defeat and expulsion is undeniably accepted by Blake's early supernatural mythology.
Such a war, starting in Eden and continuing after on the part of loyal Eternals, is also mentioned by some lines Blake inserted into the earliest section of The Four Zoas. In words reminding us of Urizen's reference to the "unquenchable burnings" of eternal life where "the sons of Eternity" seem to him as good as dying, Urizen tells Los after his own Fall from Eternity:
"Why should the Divine Vision compell the sons of Eden "To forego each his own delight, to war against his spectre? "The Spectre is the Man. The rest is delusion & Fancy."88
"Why should the Divine Vision compell the sons of Eden
"To forego each his own delight, to war against his
spectre?
"The Spectre is the Man. The rest is delusion & Fancy."88
Blackstone89 comments: "In these words Urizen lays bare the motive which has led him to rebel against the unity of Eden. The Divine Vision will not allow Man to identify himself with his Spectre (i.e. his naked reasoning power), but insists that every element in the human totality must be respected." Blackstone explains here a constant movement in Eternity against the isolation of Urizen in any of the Eternals - a standing action to counter and restrain the tendency which the reasoning power harbours to separate itself and dominate the other powers. But surely something more is present in Blake's passage? When Urizen actually rebelled in Eden and the reasoning power's tendency was realized, the standing action was bound to become a direct dynamic opposition, a war to overcome and expel
87.Ibid., p. 226 (ibid., Ch. III, 11.39-40).
88.Ibid., p. 273 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.339-341).
89.Op. cit., pp. 82-83.
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the Spectre. And what is of special interest to us is that the war here against the Urizenic faculty breaking or broken loose is prompted by the Divine Vision which is Christ.
So The Tyger's drama may legitimately be pitched in Heaven and interpreted as the going forth of the Divine Fire in a destructive symbol-form expressive of Christ, the heavenly unity-in-multiplicity, to quell Satan-Urizen and his partners in revolt. Our essentially Miltonic reading of the poem gets certainly a general support in Blake's other writings.
Do these writings support also our seeing of Satan and his company in the "spear"-bearing "stars" of the poem and our linking up of the "stars" to the "night" in the opening and closing stanzas? When we treated the poem as a self-contained whole, we considered whether a metaphorical naturalism would suffice, in which the throwing down of the spears by the stars would be just a poetic mode of saying that the material stars shed their rays on earth. We may grant that Blake has locutions likening rays to spears:
... the sunny rays that point their spears on Udanadan,90
Or where the Comets of the night or stars of asterial day Have shot their arrows or long beamed spears in wrath & fury.9
Or where the Comets of the night or stars of asterial
day
Have shot their arrows or long beamed spears in wrath
& fury.9
But even here have we nothing except a metaphorical naturalism of a kind that any poet might occasionally indulge in? "Udanadan" is surely on no map of earth as we know it, and the "wrath & fury" suggest personification. In either case, symbolism seems to peep out. But, even otherwise, we should be free to reject such naturalism here if Blake has non-naturalistic passages too and if they relate more specifically to our Tyger-lines.
The quotation which Bowra has made from The Four Zoas
90. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 485 (Milton. Book the First. 5, 1 .29).
91. Ibid. , p. 358 ( Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, 11.40-4 1 ) .
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and which we have noticed more than once in other contexts should really be enough to indicate - all the more if a couple of words immediately after it are added - that the followers of Urizen, the speaker of the phrases, are those stars and that they belong to the night of our lyric:
"I went not forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath: "I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark; "The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away. "We fell."9
"I went not forth: I hid myself in black clouds of my
wrath:
"I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils
"The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away.
"We fell."9
In confirmation of Blake's use here of "stars" as well as "night" in connection with Urizen who is his Satan we may draw several instances from his poetry. The epithet "starry" is on a few occasions employed in a general way in connection with all the Zoas; but the star-association in a particular way is confined to Urizen. The earliest open occurrence of it is in America (etched 1793), already a year before The Songs of Experience was etched - and it goes together with the night-association. Here Orc, who is called the "Terror" and is the genius of revolt against the spirit of mere rationality and brings liberation from that spirit's moralized religion, declares himself defiantly:
"The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning 'gins to break; "The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands, "What night he led the starry host thro' the wide wilderness, "That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad "To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves..."93
"The times are ended; shadows pass, the morning 'gins to
break;
"The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
"What night he led the starry host thro' the wide
wilderness,
"That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion
abroad
"To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the
leaves..."93
From the same poem's cancelled plates we get the line -
92. Ibid., p. 3 1 1 ( Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fifth, 1 1 .222-225) .
93 . Ibid ., p . 198 (America, 8 , 1 1 .2-6) .
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In that dread night when Urizen call'd the stars round his feet"9
In that dread night when Urizen call'd the stars round his
feet"9
which anticipates the phrase preceding in The Four Zoas the one about the stars' flight after throwing down their spears. In Europe (1794) we read of "the stars of Urizen"95 and, in The Four Zoas, "the stars of Urizen in Power".96 Again, in the latter we find Urizen saying to Los - just a few lines before those in which he talks about the Divine Vision compelling the Sons of Eden to war against the Spectre:
"Lo, these starry hosts, " They are thy servants if thou wilt obey my awful Law."97
"Lo, these starry hosts, "
They are thy servants if thou wilt obey my awful Law."97
Then there is in the same poem the passage which is even more pertinent to our lyric, because it pictures Urizen and his hosts going to war:
Thus Urizen in self deceit, his warlike preparations fabricated; And when all things were finish'd, sudden wav'd among the stars, His hurtling hand gave the dire signal...98
Thus Urizen in self deceit, his warlike preparations
fabricated;
And when all things were finish'd, sudden wav'd among
the stars,
His hurtling hand gave the dire signal...98
Most pertinent of all are the lines in a long context which is concerned with the deeds of Urizen's followers:
loud the Stars Shout in the night of battle, & their spears grow to their hands...99
loud the Stars
Shout in the night of battle, & their spears grow to their
hands...99
The extreme pertinence comes from the fact that here Urizen's stars are not only battling in the night but also doing it with spears.
94.Ibid., p. 204 (ibid., pl. b, 1.5).
95.Ibid., p. 244 (Europe, 14, 1. 33).
96.Ibid., p. 338 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh, b, 1.216).
97.Ibid., p. 273 (ibid., Night the First, 11.327-328).
98.Ibid., p. 342 (ibid., Night the Eighth, 11.86-88).
99.Ibid., p. 704 (Jerusalem 3, 67, 11.31-32).
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And we may remark that the use of spears by Urizen's followers is exactly what we may expect from the frequent association of Urizen himself with the spear. In The Four Zoas we meet with the pouring of
The spears of Urizen from the Chariots round the Eternal tent.100
The spears of Urizen from the Chariots round the Eternal
tent.100
Again, we note that
... Urizen arose, & leaning on his spear explor'd his dens.101
... Urizen arose, & leaning on his spear explor'd his
dens.101
In another place he "rais'd his spear"102 and, later,
Darken'd his brows with his cold helmet, & his gloomy spear Darken'd before him.103
Darken'd his brows with his cold helmet, & his gloomy
spear
Darken'd before him.103
Now what about the "forests" which Blake explicitly gives to the night but which we have made him imply for the stars as well? If our Miltonic reading of the poem is correct, Blake should be found mentioning forests in combination with Urizen and his comrades no less than with a night-suggestion in some shape or other. We do not have far to seek. In The Book of Urizen forests combine with darkness in a description of Urizen's revolt in Eternity:
Dark, revolving in silent activity: Unseen, in tormenting passions: An activity unknown and horrible, A self-contemplating shadow, In enormous labours occupied. But Eternals beheld his vast forests...104
Dark, revolving in silent activity:
Unseen, in tormenting passions:
An activity unknown and horrible,
A self-contemplating shadow,
In enormous labours occupied.
But Eternals beheld his vast forests...104
100.Ibid., p. 306 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fifth, 1.44).
101.Ibid., p. 311 (ibid., Night the Sixth, 1.1).
102.Ibid., p. 312 (ibid., 1.20).
103.Ibid., p. 313 (ibid., 11.52-53).
104.Ibid., p. 223 (The First Book of Urizen, Ch. I, 11.18-22).
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In The Book of Ahania (etched 1795) we hear of Urizen's "dark solitude" and his lying "obscur'd in his forests";105 we also get the phrase about him:
"I see thy dark clouds ascend, "I see thy black forests..."106
"I see thy dark clouds ascend,
"I see thy black forests..."106
Even in direct combination with night we get "forests" in Blake's Europe which brings along with them Urizen and stellar bodies. There Urizen is pictured as established arbiter of man's destiny, lord of the Ten Commandments, with his religion of "serpent-form'd" temple spread over the earth, a religion which perverted godhead and alienated man from it in the time when the physical universe was organized, so that
...man fled from its face and hid In forests of night: then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space... Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions...107
...man fled from its face and hid
In forests of night: then all the eternal forests were divided
Into earths rolling in circles of space...
Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions...107
These "forests of night" are Urizen's and their division by him opens a cosmic prospect - stellar bodies seen moving in their fixed orbits through darkness. And what the prospect signifies is the shutting up of the Infinite in the limited movements of these bodies. As an "image" of this change, says Blake, the serpent temple was formed. And within that temple, as we are told in the passage immediately preceding the one from which we have quoted, "stones precious"
give light in the opake Plac'd in the order of the stars...108
give light in the opake
Plac'd in the order of the stars...108
Thus we have the complete ensemble we need: stars and night-forests combined with the story of Urizen's defection from the true Infinite.
105.Ibid., p. 250 (The Book of Ahania, Ch. II, 11.5, 6).
106.Ibid., p. 254 (ibid., Ch. V, 11.57-58).
107.Ibid., p. 241 (Europe, 10, 11.17-19, 21-22).
108.Ibid., p. 241 (ibid., 11.9-10).
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When, side by side with the pointer to a fiery war of the Divine Vision against rebellious Urizen in Eternity's Eden, we put all the lines telling us of stars and night and spears and forests, the fate that overtook Urizen and his fellow-stars in Heaven after their revolt against Christ seems most definitely the subject of Blake's "star"-lines in The Tyger. And then the fearful animal itself seems with equal definiteness a visitation of divine anger in Eternity on this Satanic Zoa and his companions.
Beginning with Bowra's clues we have passed far beyond him to found firmly our supernatural reading.
(c)
Yes, our reading is firmly founded. But certain details remain to be seen in clear concreteness. Two in particular must be thrown into relief from Blake's writings. First, "the forests of the night" where we have placed the rebel-stars and against which we have pitted the bright-burning Tyger-Christ were Urizen's habitat in very Heaven the moment he rebelled. Second, the Tyger-symbol stands for an anti-Urizen wrath. Of course, these details follow logically from all that we have said. But we shall not rest satisfied with mere implication, however unescapable. To make our case proof against every possible objection we must deal with the details on their own, bring them into focus independently of what we have said, show them to be direct suggestions for our poem from Blake's other writings.
Here we come up against the most accomplished of Blake-students - Kathleen Raine, some of whose views we have already glanced at from a certain standpoint. She has given The Tyger itself the subtlest and most comprehensive treatment possible within the framework of a general Blake-interpretation according to Blake's affinities with the sources in the Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Cabbalistic and Alchemical traditions. She has explored these traditions with admirable thoroughness and is the first to bring many of them to
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bear revealingly on Blake's writings. Interpreted by her, his writings stand out in a splendid unity, clear in spite of being complex. The only criticism one can make in her own field is that certain small shades of conception and vision she has missed because she has not taken into total account his Miltonic affinities and sources. This shortcoming can perhaps be best pin-pointed by examining in brief her whole many-sided reading109 of The Tyger before concentrating on the two details we have mentioned as conflicting with her views.
Raine finds several passages in Blake from which the Tyger would seem an embodiment of evil and a corruption of the true divine character of humanity. In The Four Zoas we are told that in the natural creation, in the universe fashioned by Urizen, "the Human form is no more", and what opposes the divine character of Humanity is suggested in the phrase:
The Tyger fierce Laughs at the Human form...110
The Tyger fierce
Laughs at the Human form...110
Like "Lions" and "Wolves", "Tygers" are said to be "the monsters of the Elements"111 and we may take the beast of prey in our poem to symbolize the all-perverting natural creation by Urizen just as the sweet and gentle animal of The Lamb may be regarded as symbolizing the true eternal creation by Christ. Symbolically, the two are "states" of contrasting Experience and Innocence, the Vegetative World corresponding to the former state and the Land of Life or Eden to the latter.
The relation between the symbolic Tyger and the forests of the night as well as the fire from which it is made may be gathered from a passage in Europe where Nature who is designated "the Shadowy Female" cries:
"Unwilling I look up to heaven, unwilling count the stars: "Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine "I sieze their burning power
"Unwilling I look up to heaven, unwilling count the stars:
"Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine
"I sieze their burning power
109. "Blake's Debt to Antiquity", The Sewanee Review, Summer 1963, Vol. LXXI, No. 3, pp. 424-436. In Bollingen Paperback (Princeton 1977), pp. 75-87.
110.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 275 (Vala, or The Four Zoas. Night the First, 11.402-403).
111. Ibid., p. 344 (ibid., Night the Eighth, 1.120).
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"And bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings, "Devouring & Devoured, roaming on hard and desolate mountains, "In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees. "Ah mother Enitharmon! "Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fires! "I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames..."11
"And bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery
kings,
"Devouring & Devoured, roaming on hard and desolate
mountains,
"In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.
"Ah mother Enitharmon!
"Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fires!
"I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of
flames..."11
Burning Tygers created from the fire of the night-sky are evidently among the terrible howling devourers that roam in "forests of eternal death". And, to strengthen Raine's case, we may add from the same poem Europe the later lines overlooked by her, in which the very phrase of The Tyger about forests is matched but in conjunction with another not yet quoted by us, which renders the whole passage extremely pertinent to her arguments:
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: then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space..."113
Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent, that which
pitieth
To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid
Into earths rolling in circles of space..."113
Here The Tyger's "forests of night" are linked with "a devouring flame" which links up with the earlier lines' "all devouring fiery kings" and "forests of eternal death". The two passages prove that the night-forests could be the habitat of a burning Tyger-power of Urizen and that, like this power, they could symbolize the world of Nature cut off from the Divine Existence, the Infinite.
Raine informs us that forests are the classical symbol of natural existence and their night is the night of the Hades of the temporal world. According to her, forests in Blake's symbolic landscape are invariably evil and can have no place in the
112.Ibid., p. 238 (Europe, 2, 11.1-9).
113.Ibid., p. 24 1 (ibid., 10, 11 . 16-19).
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landscape of eternity. Also, since they are a state separated from eternity's light, there could never be day in a forest. And so we find everywhere in Blake the combination of darkness, forests and beasts of prey. But the forests of Nature are to him the multiplication of the one tree which he calls "The Tree of Mystery" and associates always with the fallen Zoa Urizen and his perverse creation. And there goes with this ramifying tree or the resulting forests the image of "smoke" or "fire", and that image again brings in lions and tygers. Thus his lions and tygers "roam in the redounding smoke, in forests of affliction".114 All these manifold combinations Raine traces principally to Paracelsus's Philosophia ad Athenienses, the Alchemical book whose theme is the "mystery" of Nature. Paracelsus likens Nature, "the great mystery", to a forest burning as it grows, issuing from nothing and returning to nothing once more, "as a forest which the fire burneth into a little heap of ashes...such is the beginning, such is the end of the creatures". Paracelsus further writes: "all bodies shall pass away and vanish into nothing but smoke, they shall all end in a fume." Blake too speaks of "the fire of Generation or Vegetation", which is "an Eternal Consummation".115 Thus the Tyger burning bright is the denizen of Nature's night-forests which are themselves fire: the bright-burning of the Tyger is but this animal's participation in that natural world which is for ever kindling and consuming.
As to Urizen, maker of both the Tyger and night-forests, Raine relates him to the "Demiurge" of the Gnostic philosophies, the "Workman Mind" of the Hermetica and the "Mortal God" of Paracelsus - the universe's creator who is not the supreme God but a power descended from the latter. The only difference is that Blake's Urizen, though ultimately redeemable, is more markedly evil and, whatever grandeur may be in this work of his that is the temporal world, he is to Blake "a very cruel being". The Gnostic Demiurge or the Hermetic Workman Mind is not so much evil as ambiguous: in spite of
114.Ibid., p. 320 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh, 11.9-10).
115.Ibid., p. 609 (A Vision of the Last Judgment).
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being fallen he retains something of the supreme light from which he fell. Raine perceives this ambiguity as conveyed in The Tyger and, together with the ambiguity, a suggestion of the Alchemical doctrine of the identity of opposites. She refers to one of the early drafts -
Burnt in distant deeps or skies The cruel fire of thine eyes? Could heart descend or wings aspire?
Burnt in distant deeps or skies
The cruel fire of thine eyes?
Could heart descend or wings aspire?
Here the deeps and the skies are contrasted and it is left ambiguous whether the Workman drew forth his Tyger from above or beneath. In the final draft -
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? -
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire? -
Blake implied an identity of the deeps and skies, intending the paradox that Heaven and Hell may be aspects of the One Thing.
In consonance with this implication are two facts pointed out by Raine. She believes that The Tyger was written under the immediate excitement and delight which Blake felt on reading Everard's translation of the Hermetica, particularly a passage in The Fifth Book, entitled That God is not manifest and yet most manifest. The book as a whole is in praise of God as creator and the passage which Raine emphasizes describes the cunning of the Workman who frames man in the womb: "Who circumscribed and marked out his eyes? Who bored his nostrils and ears? Who opened his mouth, who stretched out and tied together his sinews? Who channelled the veins? Who hardened and made strong the bones? Who clothed the flesh with skin? Who divided the fingers and the joints? Who flatted and made broad the soles of the feet? Who digged the pores? Who stretched out the spleen, who made the heart like a Pyramis?" The rhetorical question-form in The Tyger as well as the details of the imagery, especially in the stanza -
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And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet -
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet -
leave Raine in no doubt that Blake had the Hermetica's passage in mind.
The next fact Raine points out is: the Workman of The Tyger is not only a blacksmith but, as the early drafts about "clay" and "mould" show, also a potter and this potter-blacksmith suggests the Zoa Los of the Prophetic Books, with his hammer, anvil and chain as well as his furnace which in one passage is called "the Potter's Furnace".116 True, Los is said to take over his furnaces originally from Urizen who had ruined at the beginning of creation the divine powers:
Then Los with terrible hands siez'd on the Ruin'd Furnaces Of Urizen: Enormous work, he builded them anew, Labour of Ages...117
Then Los with terrible hands siez'd on the Ruin'd
Furnaces
Of Urizen: Enormous work, he builded them anew,
Labour of Ages...117
But throughout Blake's writings it is Los who is predominantly the lord of the smithy and his "enormous work" is to help the fallen world to recover. Thus the Workman of The Tyger foreshadows not only the Urizen of the later poetry: he foreshadows also the later Los and, in doing so, involves an anti-Urizen force, a touch of what Urizen has rebelled against.
But both Los and Urizen are demiurgic: even the former cannot be equated to the supreme divinity. The poem relates the Los-Urizen maker of the Tyger to the Shadowy Female: it gives us the same creative Nature in a male form. Besides, the lines -
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? -
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire? -
suggest one who in order to create must possess himself of fires
116.Ibid., p. 684 (Jerusalem 3, 53, 11.28).
117.Ibid., p. 301, (Vala, or the Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 11.165-167).
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not his own: aspiring to them and seizing them, he is a rebel and a thief. In thus stealing the fire he is like Prometheus. Blake must have been familiar with the Prometheus-theme: there is that daring aspirer, Satan or the false Messiah, who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell "formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss".118 The Abyss here, like most things in The Marriage, reminds us of a conception of that Alchemical mystic, Jacob Boehme, who greatly influenced Blake and is, with Paracelsus, actually mentioned in The Marriage under his Englished name Behmen: Boehme associates the Abyss with God the Father's flaming fires. We have also Orc and Luvah saying to Urizen in The Four Zoas:
"I well remember how I stole thy light & it became fire "Consuming."119
"I well remember how I stole thy light & it became fire
"Consuming."119
So the "he" of The Tyger is, to Raine, undoubtedly a demiurgic thief and not Jesus the Logos, God the Son.
Apropos of the double Demiurge or Workman, Los-Urizen, Raine considers the "stars" of the poem. The furnaces of Los are seven in number, and so are Boehme's qualifying spirits or creative fountains which Lucifer corrupted when he fell just as Urizen ruined the furnaces. Indeed, Blake's furnaces are identical with Boehme's fountains, for when at the end of the time-process Blake saw their purity as restored,
the Furnaces became Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity Divine.120
the Furnaces became
Fountains of Living Waters flowing from the Humanity
Divine.120
But the seven fountain-spirits are also the seven planetary principles of the old mystical tradition and, in the Hermetica, the Workman governs these principles and the furnaces of Los have a strange affinity with the planetary spheres, and the "starry wheels" of Blake's Prophetic Books are related to those furnaces:
118.Ibid., p. 150 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 5-6).
119.Ibid., pp. 323-324 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh, 11.147-148).
120.Ibid., p. 744 (Jerusalem 4, 96, 11.36-37).
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Los roll'd furious His thunderous wheels from furnace to furnace...121 Then wondrously the Starry Wheels felt the divine Hand... And Los beheld the hand of God over his furnaces...122
Los roll'd furious
His thunderous wheels from furnace to furnace...121
Then wondrously the Starry Wheels felt the divine
Hand...
And Los beheld the hand of God over his furnaces...122
But, like the furnaces, the starry wheels are originally Urizen's and, as Satan, he is called "prince of the starry wheels" - the wheels being the orbits of the planets over whom he rules from the eighth sphere which is that of the fixed stars of the firmament enclosing the universe. In this he resembles Boehme's God the Father who is also described as the ruler of the stars. Referring to Urizen as the "starry jealousy" of Blake's poem Earth's Answer and the "starry king" of his Song of Liberty, Raine says that Blake never writes of the stars without intending us to think not of the landscape of the sky but of the rulers of destiny within a spiritual darkness. What then, she asks, of the action described in
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Raine alludes to the passage in The Four Zoas where occurs the throwing down of the spears by the stars and she identifies the action there with the action here. She quotes in full, as we have clearly seen, the next three lines of Urizen's speech:
We fell, I siez'd thee, dark Urthona. In my left hand falling I siez'd thee, beauteous Luvah; thou art faded like a flower And like a lilly is thy wife Vala wither'd by winds.123
We fell, I siez'd thee, dark Urthona. In my left hand
falling
I siez'd thee, beauteous Luvah; thou art faded like a
flower
And like a lilly is thy wife Vala wither'd by winds.123
Drawing attention to the names here, Raine informs us that the stars of The Tyger are the Zoas who fell with Demiurge Urizen:
121.Ibid., p. 302 (Vala. or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 11. 175-176).
122.Ibid., p. 305 (ibid., 11.275-278).
123.Ibid., p. 311 (ibid., Night the Fifth, 1 1 .225-227).
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Urizen drew down with him the planetary spirits whom he governs, and with their fall the creation of the temporal world comes to pass and the Tyger is created in the dark forests of Nature. Then Raine brings her comment to a head: " 'Did he smile?' He may have done so; for Urizen's fall was a voluntary 'descent'; but from the long lament from which the above lines are quoted we know that remorse followed."
Raine is also aware of the Miltonic echo in the "star"-lines. She even points out the lines in Milton where Christ's "pernicious fire" shooting among Satan's hosts
wither'd all their strength, And of their wonted vigour left them drain'd, Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n,124
wither'd all their strength,
And of their wonted vigour left them drain'd,
Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fall'n,124
and remarks that Blake, in his description of Luvah and Vala as "faded" and "wither'd", echoes Milton's "wither'd" and "exhausted" Seraphim. She further asserts that Blake was certainly thinking of the fall of Milton's Rebel Angels as one and the same event as the fall of his own Demiurge and the planetary governers. But she does not see Christ as reducing through a Tyger-wrath the stars of Blake to defeated distress before their being flung out of Heaven. Night, forests and the Tyger are to her unequivocally symbolic in Blake of the temporal world: they could never precede this world's creation.
She moves on to her final resolution of Blake's question to the Tyger:
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Her comment is already known to us in gist. Let us now follow it in some detail. We may answer "Yes" if we think of the God of the Alchemist, who is beyond good and evil and unites contraries. As Boehme lays down: "the God of the holy World and the God of the dark World are not two Gods; there is but one only God." This God is the "Father" of Boehme with His creative "wrath-fires" without whose energy there cannot be
124. Paradise Lost. Bk. VI, 11.850-852.
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any life and to which the "Proverbs of Hell" in Blake's Marriage - that eminently Boehmesque book - seems to relate the Tyger: "the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." The Platonic answer to Blake's question will be "No": there are two worlds and the Tyger, unlike the Lamb, belongs to the time-world where, otherwise than in the Lamb's Eternity, the principle of selfhood preys upon other lives. The Gnostics and the Hermetica draw also a line between the pure eternal creation by the Supreme and the imperfect creation by the Demiurge, the Workman. Yet on the deepest level all these traditions converge, for the Demiurge's creation of the time-world, with its clash of opposites, exists only by the permission of the Supreme. Blake leaves his question unanswered precisely because there is a complex play of No and Yes on various levels. He presents his problem in Gnostic, Hermetic and Alchemical terms and goes beyond the dualism of the eighteenth-century English churches to open up the profound perspectives that make possible the contemplation simultaneously of the perfect eternal world and an imperfect temporal one, as two modes of being within one harmonious whole.
We have also remarked that a piece of magnificent literary insight pointing towards such contemplation is contained in Raine's comment almost at the end: "Nor must we overlook, in analyzing the meaning of the text, all that is conveyed by the powerful exaltation of the metre, by the fiery grandeur of the images. If the discoverable meaning of the poem suggests that the Tyger is the work of a creator ambiguous or evil, the emotive force of metre and image is all affirmation, praising the fiery might, the energy and the intelligence of the Mortal God. The Tyger is preparing the way for the Marriage with its vindication of 'Hell or Energy': 'The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy seas, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.'"
We may start our comment on Raine's fascinating treatment of the poem by comparing this piece of insight with our interpretation. We too have marked, on integral evidence, a tension
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between "all affirmation" - the sense of the undeniably divine as well as deathless - and a haunting doubt in the heart, a resisting tremor in the nerves about one who could let loose such dreadful wrath upon creatures. Our sole difference from the terms accepted by Raine is, in the first place, that the Tyger's maker is not any "Mortal God", any Demiurge ambiguous or evil, who creates mortal things, but the Supreme Himself and, in the second place, that the creatures against whom the wrath burns bright are explicitly not denizens of the temporal world but Angels rebellious in Heaven itself. At the same time we agree with Raine that the Tyger's maker is an intermediate divinity: even though he is not a Demiurge of the Gnostic and Hermetic kind, he is the Supreme's second and not first aspect, the Son and not the Father of the Christian theological vision. Again, inasmuch as we see the Son as out-Sataning Satan, so to speak, in his angry blazing forth against the revolted stars we are essentially at one with Raine's view of The Tyger in relation to the "Hell or Energy" of The Marriage.
Are we justified in our "sole difference" or has Raine brought anything to show that the intermediate divinity cannot be the Son and that the Tyger in the night-forests is not his work in Eternity but the destructive force of the natural creation cut off from the true light?
Raine is sure that Blake's "sieze" means "steal" and must indicate a rebel and a thief. But the equation depends entirely on our assuming already on other grounds that Urizen is involved in the seizing act. For, nowhere in Blake does "sieze" explicitly or incontrovertibly connote "steal". Only along one line is it possible to suggest that seizing does duty for stealing. The phrase quoted by Raine about Orc or Luvah stealing Urizen's light which became consuming fire may be put side by side with the other in which Urizen was sleeping
"And Luvah siez'd the Horses of Light & rose into the Chariot of Day."125
"And Luvah siez'd the Horses of Light & rose into the
Chariot of Day."125
125. Keynes, ed. cit.. p. 271 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 1.264).
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But it is curious that the very next phrase after this runs:
"Sweet laughter siez'd me in my sleep; silent & close I laugh'd..."126
"Sweet laughter siez'd me in my sleep; silent & close I
laugh'd..."126
There is no question of "stealing" here in spite of the "sleep"; the sense is "to take strong hold of" - and the same sense would be equally appropriate to the seizing in the just preceding sentence. To assume stealing is not only incongruous in the context from the purely literary viewpoint, the viewpoint of comparative expression: it is also superfluous and unnecessary according to the demands of meaning in the story. And if we ask how then the story of Luvah and Urizen's light could permit the word "steal" to appear elsewhere, the simple answer is: "Blake has several versions of the story and it is arbitrary to transfer meanings from one to another in a very precise manner." Thus, in a passage already cited by us we get Urizen telling Luvah:
"In silent of this night "I will infold the Eternal tents in clouds opake, while thou, "Siezing the chariots of the morning, Go, outfleeting ride "Afar into the Zenith high..."127
"In silent of this night
"I will infold the Eternal tents in clouds opake, while
thou,
"Siezing the chariots of the morning, Go, outfleeting
ride
"Afar into the Zenith high..."127
In this passage Urizen is not at all taken advantage of, without his knowledge or against his will: nothing is stolen from him, and again "sieze" in the sense of taking strong hold of a thing is all that is required. Other passages too can be drawn upon to show not the slightest soupcon of stealing:
"When Urizen gave the horses of Light into the hands of Luvah..." 128
"When Urizen gave the horses of Light into the hands of
Luvah..." 128
126. Ibid., p. 271 (ibid., 1 .265) .
127. Ibid., p. 278 (ibid. , 11.492-495) .
128. Ibid., p. 300 (ibid. , Night the Fourth, 1 . 113).
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"Why didst thou listen to the voice of Luvah that dread morn "To give the immortal steeds of light to his deceitful hands?"129
"Why didst thou listen to the voice of Luvah that dread
morn
"To give the immortal steeds of light to his deceitful
hands?"129
Even a mere two or three pages after the mention of stealing, we get the line:
"But Luvah close conferr'd with Urizen in darksome night..."130
"But Luvah close conferr'd with Urizen in darksome
night..."130
The same idea comes in:
"But Urizen awoke, & Luvah woke, & they conferr'd..."131
In one place Urizen says to Luvah:
"Because thou gavest Urizen the wine of the Almighty "For Steeds of Light, that they might run in thy golden chariot of pride, "I gave to thee the Steeds, I pour'd the stolen wine "And drunken with the immortal draught fell from my throne sublime."132
"Because thou gavest Urizen the wine of the Almighty
"For Steeds of Light, that they might run in thy golden
chariot of pride,
"I gave to thee the Steeds, I pour'd the stolen wine
"And drunken with the immortal draught fell from my
throne sublime."132
Looking at all these statements, one does not know how seriously or literally one should take the matter of stealing Urizen's horses: Urizen's connivance or co-operation, deliberate or deceived, seems to have been there. But it is pretty certain that nowhere is "siezing" a synonym for "stealing".
Besides, when Orc or Luvah is said to steal, it is not fire but light that he steals, and this light becomes fire only when it is stolen, whereas the fire that is Blake's beast of prey burns from the beginning in the distant deeps or skies: it is fire even before it is seized. Again, the light stolen by Orc is Urizen's and not the Supreme God's - a most crucial point which spoils the whole analogy with The Tyger. Finally, what is the impression
129.Ibid., p. 292 (ibid., Night the Third, 11.31-32).
130.Ibid., p. 363 (ibid.. Night the Seventh, 1.255).
131.Ibid., p. 277 (ibid., Night the First, 1.487).
132.Ibid., p. 311 (ibid., Night the Fifth, 11.234-237).
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we get from "sieze" when it occurs as an action of Urizen whom Raine makes the seizer in our poem? She has herself quoted the lines spoken by him:
"...I siez'd thee, dark Urthona. In my left hand falling "I siez'd thee, beauteous Luvah..."133
"...I siez'd thee, dark Urthona. In my left hand falling
"I siez'd thee, beauteous Luvah..."133
Then there are the instances:
"... Rushing back, redd'ning with rage, the Mighty Father "Siez'd his bright sheephook studded with gems and gold..."134 "...his strong right hand came forth "To cast Ahania to the Earth: he siez'd her by the hair...135 "...Then a lion he would sieze "By the fierce mane, staying his howling course...136 "But still his books he bore in his strong hand, & his iron pen, "For when he died they lay beside his grave, & when he rose "He siez'd them with a gloomy smile...137 "... he strove to sieze the shadow in vain..."138
"... Rushing back, redd'ning with rage, the Mighty Father
"Siez'd his bright sheephook studded with gems and
gold..."134
"...his strong right hand came forth
"To cast Ahania to the Earth: he siez'd her by the hair...135
"...Then a lion he would sieze
"By the fierce mane, staying his howling course...136
"But still his books he bore in his strong hand, & his
iron pen,
"For when he died they lay beside his grave, &
when he rose
"He siez'd them with a gloomy smile...137
"... he strove to sieze the shadow in vain..."138
Nowhere shall we find Urizen do anything except grip forcibly. Thus there are grave difficulties all round in the way of interpreting from anywhere in Blake the seizing in our poem as stealing.
Even in the passage from Europe in which the action of the Shadowy Female seems to come nearest to what is done in The Tyger -
133. Ibid., p. 311 (ibid., Night the Fifth, 11 . 225-226).
134. Ibid., p. 275 (ibid., Night the First, 11 . 13-14).
135. Ibid., p. 294 (ibid., Night the Third, 11 . 110-111).
136. Ibid., p. 3 1 5 (ibid., Night the Sixth, 11 . 132-133).
137. Ibid., p. 316 (ibid., Night the Sixth, 11 . 167-169).
138. Ibid., p. 352 (ibid., Night the Eighth , 1 .427).
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"And bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings" -
kings" -
in this very passage there appears to be no question of stealing since the Shadowy Female is sitting in her abyss and looking up to heaven and does not go to the stars to do anything to them: in fact, the lines immediately preceding the passage suggest an effluence to her from the stars instead of any theft by her from them - a free coming down of their burning power to produce in her the creative travail, the pains of labour:
"I wrap my turban of thick clouds about my lab'ring head, "And fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs; "Yet the red sun and moon "And all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains."139
"I wrap my turban of thick clouds about my lab'ring head,
"And fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs;
"Yet the red sun and moon
"And all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains."139
We may also remark that though the seizing act occurs both here and in The Tyger and though the act is in relation to a burning power, the power seized in The Tyger cannot at all be of the stars as in this passage: the stars there are defeated and distressed, whether by the Tyger as we hold or in consequence of the Demiurge's fall as Raine believes, and are certainly not the sources to which the Tyger's maker could aspire in order to seize from them the fire he needs: they are Urizen's own companions existing on the same level as he and equally fallen.
When we come to Satan or the false Messiah of The Marriage who steals from the Abyss, we have a conception drawn, as Raine tells us, from Boehme who speaks of Lucifer exalting himself and corrupting the fountains of creation, the life-principle's flaming fires belonging to God the Father. A genuine case of some sort of theft is here, but can we be sure that the aspiring and seizing which The Tyger recounts has anything to do with it? It may very well be a totally different episode: no sense of stealing or corrupting of the fire seized by the winged aspirant stands out of our poem. The fire of the Tyger is not said to be in any respect different from the fire burning in the distant deeps or skies: the Tyger burning bright manifests perfectly the power and the beauty, the terror and the glory
139. Ibid., p. 238 (Europe, pl. 1, 11 . 12-15).
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which may be read in that doubly designated region above to which the animal's maker flies: the fearful symmetry which is set ablaze from this ultimate region belongs to a kind that is unlike the flawed handiwork of any Demiurge.
What lends greater strength to the possibility that a totally different episode is here is the fact that Boehme himself cannot be said to exclude the very episode of battle in Heaven which we have read in The Tyger. In the same sentence where the false Messiah's stealing from the Abyss is mentioned we have the words already quoted about the Fall from Heaven: "It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out..." If The Marriage is fundamentally Boehmesque, we may legitimately conjecture Boehme to have believed in Christ's attack in Supernature on Satan, as leading to the latter's banishment from Eternity. Indeed, such a belief should be inevitable to Boehme as it would be to anyone who amalgamates the Hermetic or any other tradition and Christianity. Raine contends that in Boehme the wrath-fire operates only in Hell and what is wrath there is nothing save love in Heaven: according to her reading, Boehme cannot have a Christ-Tyger blazing wrathfully in Heaven against rebellious Satan and then throwing him into Hell. But let us look at some passages in Boehme's Signatura Rerum. First "... the elected throne of God in the royal office, from which Lucifer was taken, and thrust into the darkness."140 Next: "And thus hell is even an enemy of the devil, for he is a strange guest therein, viz. a perjured fiend cast out of heaven..."141 A violent retribution meted out to Satan in God's kingdom is clear in the first quotation. The last seven words of the second signify unmistakably that the devil's perjury occurred in Heaven and that because of it he was expelled. And we may note that the exact Blakean phrase - "cast out" - is found in Boehme. The whole Christian tradition - of Lucifer's revolt and God's war (wrath-fire) against him and God's ultimate
140.Signatura Rerum and Other Discourses (Everyman's Library, London), p. III, Ch. X, 14 (from the translation of Boehme's works by William Law, first published in 4 vols., 1764-1781).
141.Ibid., p. 215 (Ch. XIV, 23).
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expulsion of him from Heaven - is implicit here.
And when Boehme says that God's "love-fire... is a poison, and a fire of anger to the devils and to hell",142 we must understand that the love-fire becoming the wrath-fire is not confined to hell but applies also to the battle in Heaven terminating in the casting out of Satan and his company ("the devils"). But, of course, the wrath-fire of that battle is not an established part of Heaven: it is an incident of heavenly history and what burnt forth then became a permanent action of fire in the form of hell. In one sense, however, all heaven is eternally a wrath-fire; for, as Boehme puts it: "heaven is evil to the hellish creatures, for it is their poison and death, an eternal dying, and an eternal captivity. Therefore, there is an eternal enmity, and God is only called God according to the light of his love; he is indeed himself all, but according to the darkness he saith, T am an angry jealous God, and a consuming fire.' "143
All in all, Boehme is essentially Christian-Miltonic no less than Alchemical-Hermetic. Hence a reading of Milton (theologically topsyturvied) in The Tyger is entirely in tune with the Boehmesque turn of Blake's vision.
Thus far we can find no reason in Raine to doubt this reading: quite the contrary. But what about Raine's central evidence against our taking Christ to be the Tyger's maker and setting the whole Tyger-drama in Heaven - namely, her demonstration that the forests of the night in which the Tyger is ablaze are exclusively the natural world and can have no place in Eternity?
It would be futile on our part to flout Blake's repeated description of the natural world as either night or forests. The forests of the night are certainly symbolic of Urizen's temporal creation which is shut off from the divine illumination. But can they be fixed down to symbolizing nothing else? Can we not regard the temporal creation as an established form of what was foreshadowed in Eternity when Urizen-Satan revolted there? Can they not be the symbolic ambience, so to speak, of
142. Ibid., p.214, ibid. , 19.
143. Ibid., p.215 , ibid., 20, 21 .
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the revolting spirit in Heaven itself and then transferred into terms of Nature on this spirit's expulsion from Supernature? Can they not symbolize the Fall in Heaven as well as the Fall from Heaven? To Raine there is for Blake only one event: Urizen's revolt, his abandonment of Heaven and his creation of Nature are the same thing in various aspects or phases and all of them come under the designation of created Nature: "the forests of the night." Blake does have passages which may suggest such a view: for example, in The Book of Urizen -
But Eternals beheld his vast forests; Ages on ages he lay, clos'd, unknown, Brooding, shut in the deep; all avoid The petrific, abominable chaos.144
But Eternals beheld his vast forests;
Ages on ages he lay, clos'd, unknown,
Brooding, shut in the deep; all avoid
The petrific, abominable chaos.144
But we have already shown how in the same poem there is a fiery spurning back of Urizen's assumption of power and giving by the Eternals to him of "a place in the north, / Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary". So, logically, the night-forests, before they became Nature, should be Urizen's state as attacked by the divine fire with which he is said to have first fought. Yes, logic demands prototypal night-forests in Heaven as Urizen's psychological habitat before their conversion into Nature. But can we prove Blake to have borne out this logic in his very expression?
To begin with, night has not invariably an evil connotation in Blake. Nor is it always associated with a Urizen-mood - even when stars, the rulers of destiny, are spoken of in the same breath with it. There is hardly a suggestion of spiritual darkness pricked out with ominous presences in phrases like:
Silent, Silent Night Quench the holy light Of thy torches bright145 -
Silent, Silent Night
Quench the holy light
Of thy torches bright145 -
or,
144.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 223 (The First Book of Urizen, pl. 3, Ch. I,
145.Ibid., p. 168 (Poems from the Note-book 1793, 14, 11.1-3).
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The moon like a flower In heaven's high bower, With silent delight Sits and smiles on the night.146
The moon like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.146
And what about that superb passage:
Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & wonderous Night: They rise in order & continue their immortal courses Upon the mountains & in vales with harp & heavenly song, With flute & clarion, with cups & measures filled with foaming wine. Glitt'ring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude, And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths his awful waves...147
Thou seest the Constellations in the deep & wonderous
Night:
They rise in order & continue their immortal courses
Upon the mountains & in vales with harp & heavenly song,
With flute & clarion, with cups & measures filled with
foaming wine.
Glitt'ring the streams reflect the Vision of beatitude,
And the calm Ocean joys beneath & smooths his awful
waves...147
Are not the lines intended to evoke an image like Wordsworth's beautiful and serene "waters on a starry night" or the rapture of Hopkins's "Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!"?
The very stars by themselves figure once in a simile to correspond to the Eternals as against Urizen and his created Nature when the former seek to confine his "obscure separation alone":
For Eternity stood wide apart, As the stars are apart from the earth.148
For Eternity stood wide apart,
As the stars are apart from the earth.148
It would seem that even in Nature the constellated night-sky could bring Blake a non-Urizenic suggestion as if something of a divine reality hung out through it, as if there were in Eternity itself a counterpart of night which Nature held mostly in a perverted form but occasionally manifested in a pure glimpse.
And in fact Blake unequivocally shows us such a counterpart. Just as in Paradise Lost Heaven has its own night in the course of its daily existence, so also Blake's Eternity of unfallen being has its phases of day and night. After speaking of the
146.Ibid., p. 118 (Songs of Innocence, Night, 11.5-8).
147.Ibid., p. 511 (Milton I, 25, 11.66-71).
148.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 226 (The First Book of Urizen, Ch. III,pls. 5,6,11.41-42).
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Four Zoas in general, Blake mentions Los in particular:
Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth Of a bright Universe, Empery attended day & night, Days & nights of revolving joy. Urthona was his name In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human Life, Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations propagated...149
Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth
Of a bright Universe, Empery attended day & night,
Days & nights of revolving joy. Urthona was his name
In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human Life,
Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations
propagated...149
The reference is to Eden, the Land of Life, Eternity and to the divine analogue in it of the Earth-element and to the Auricular Nerves which are constituted by it in the Divine Humanity and in which Los has his special function. Unmistakably a joyous revolution of day and night in Heaven is declared.
Again, if such a revolution were not there, Tharmas in his fallen condition would hardly be able to talk of Eternity and tell about his emanation Enion:
"A portion of my Life "That in Eternal fields in comfort wander'd with my flocks "At noon & laid her head upon my wearied bosom at night, "She is divided."150
"A portion of my Life
"That in Eternal fields in comfort wander'd with my flocks
"At noon & laid her head upon my wearied bosom at
night,
"She is divided."150
Nor would Urizen himself in his lament about his Fall be able to recollect his former happy condition in Supernature thus:
"Then in my ivory pavilions I slumber'd in the noon "And walked in the silent night among sweet smelling flowers..."151
"Then in my ivory pavilions I slumber'd in the noon
"And walked in the silent night among sweet smelling
flowers..."151
Now, if there is a blissful night in Eternity we do not have to posit created Nature in order to account for the night-symbolism of Urizen's Satan-state. Night as spiritual obscurity can be true of this state wherever Urizen in a revolted condition may be. Supernature itself may house a perversion of its blissful night: it would be as if the experience of this night in Urizen got
149.Ibid., p. 264 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.14-18).
150.Ibid., p. 301 (ibid., Night the Fourth, 11. 137-140).
151.Ibid., p. 310 (ibid., Night the Fifth, 11.202-203).
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changed and the first consequence were not the creation of the natural world but a new unheavenly state of his own being, an anti-divine obscurity, prior to that creation and existing in Eternity, the symbol of a Fall in Heaven before the Fall from Heaven, exactly as in Milton's epic Satan and his crew are called "Sons of Darkness"152 even when they have not yet been driven out from "all Heav'n's bounds".
Of course, in Paradise Lost the designation "Sons of Darkness" gets a subtle support and rationale from the fact that Satan's conspiracy of revolt occurs when "ambrosial Night, with clouds exhal'd",153 has come over the bright face of Heaven:
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...154
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...154
The theme of night-revolt is further pursued when Satan, whispering to "his next subordinate", says:
"Assemble thou Of all these myriads which we lead the chief; Tell them that, by command, ere yet dim night Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste, And all who under me their banners wave, Homeward with flying march where we possess The quarters of the North..."155
"Assemble thou
Of all these myriads which we lead the chief;
Tell them that, by command, ere yet dim night
Her shadowy cloud withdraws, I am to haste,
And all who under me their banners wave,
Homeward with flying march where we possess
The quarters of the North..."155
We may remember too the association of Satan with night in Heaven in the line:
His potentates to council call'd by night...156
Have we any corresponding night in Blake's story of Urizen's Fall, a night definitely preceding and therefore differing from
152.Paradise Lost, Bk. VI, 1.715.
153.Ibid., Bk. V, 1.643.
154.Ibid., 11.667-670.
155.Ibid., 11.683-689.
156.Ibid., Bk. VI, 1.416.
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the departure from Heaven which we may identify with the natural creation cut off from Eternity's light?
Yes, and even its Miltonic character is beyond dispute. Let us listen to the news brought - about "Albion", "the Eternal Man" - by messengers to "those in Great Eternity" who are one in "Jesus the Christ". Before "the Council of God", met "as One Man" to receive them, they declare:
"The Eternal Man wept in the holy tent: Our Brother in Eternity, "Even Albion whom thou lovest, wept in pain; his family "Slept round on hills & valleys in the regions of his love. "But Urizen awoke, & Luvah woke, & they conferr'd: " 'Thou Luvah,' said the Prince of Light, 'behold our sons & daughters "'Repos'd on beds; let them sleep on; do thou alone depart " 'Into thy wished Kingdom where in Majesty & Power " 'We may erect a throne; deep in the North I place my lot, " 'Thou in the South; listen attentive. In silent of this night "I will infold the Eternal tent in clouds opaque, while thou " 'Siezing the chariots of the morning, Go, outfleeting ride "Afar into the Zenith high, bending thy furious course " 'Southward, with half the tents of men inclos'd in clouds " 'Of Tharmas & Urthona. I, remaining in porches of the brain, " 'Will lay my scepter on Jerusalem, the Emanation, " 'On all her sons, & on thy sons, O Luvah, & mine " 'Till dawn was wont to wake them; then my trumpet sounding loud, " 'Ravish'd away in night; my strong command shall be obey'd "'For I have plac'd my centinels in stations; each tenth man
"The Eternal Man wept in the holy tent: Our Brother in
Eternity,
"Even Albion whom thou lovest, wept in pain; his family
"Slept round on hills & valleys in the regions of his love.
"But Urizen awoke, & Luvah woke, & they conferr'd:
" 'Thou Luvah,' said the Prince of Light, 'behold our sons
& daughters
"'Repos'd on beds; let them sleep on; do thou alone
depart
" 'Into thy wished Kingdom where in Majesty & Power
" 'We may erect a throne; deep in the North I place
my lot,
" 'Thou in the South; listen attentive. In silent of this night
"I will infold the Eternal tent in clouds opaque,
while thou
" 'Siezing the chariots of the morning, Go, outfleeting ride
"Afar into the Zenith high, bending thy furious course
" 'Southward, with half the tents of men inclos'd in clouds
" 'Of Tharmas & Urthona. I, remaining in porches of the
brain,
" 'Will lay my scepter on Jerusalem, the Emanation,
" 'On all her sons, & on thy sons, O Luvah, & mine
" 'Till dawn was wont to wake them; then my trumpet
sounding loud,
" 'Ravish'd away in night; my strong command shall be
obey'd
"'For I have plac'd my centinels in stations; each tenth
man
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" 'Is bought & sold, & in dim night my word shall be their law.'"157
" 'Is bought & sold, & in dim night my word shall be
their law.'"157
Then a report is given of Luvah's answer to Urizen and of Urizen's action following it and of what happened to Urthona. Lastly, there is the account:
"But Urizen, with darkness overspreading all the armies, "Sent round his heralds secretly commanding to depart "Into the north. Sudden with thunder's sound his multitudes "Retreat from the fierce conflict, all the sons of Urizen at once "Must'ring together in thick clouds, leaving the rage of Luvah "To pour its fury on himself & on the Eternal Man. "Sudden down fell they all together into an unknown Space, "Deep, horrible, without End, separated from Beulah, far beneath. "The Man's exteriors are become indefinite, open'd to pain "In a fierce hungry void, & none can visit his regions."158
"But Urizen, with darkness overspreading all the armies,
"Sent round his heralds secretly commanding to depart
"Into the north. Sudden with thunder's sound his
multitudes
"Retreat from the fierce conflict, all the sons of Urizen
at once
"Must'ring together in thick clouds, leaving the rage
of Luvah
"To pour its fury on himself & on the Eternal Man.
"Sudden down fell they all together into an unknown
Space,
"Deep, horrible, without End, separated from Beulah, far
beneath.
"The Man's exteriors are become indefinite, open'd to
pain
"In a fierce hungry void, & none can visit his regions."158
There is a very significant sequence of states and events made clear by these two passages. We begin with the time of night in Eternity. Urizen and Luvah awake and confer "in silent of this night" while all are asleep, just as Milton's Satan and "His next subordinate" do in midnight's "dusky hour / Friendliest to sleep and silence". Urizen tells Luvah that taking advantage of the sleep all around he "will infold the Eternal tent in clouds opake" and he again refers to "night" and "dim night" as well as to "clouds". This reminds us of Satan's reference to "dim night" and "her shadowy cloud" under
157.Keynes, ed. cit., pp. 277-278 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.484-503).
158.Ibid., p.279(ibid., 11.535-544).
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which his plans are to be carried out. Urizen says that his "strong command", like Satan's "command", shall be obeyed. Like Satan, he mentions also the North for himself, and before that he speaks of erecting a throne: his words are reminiscent of the phrases Milton puts into the mouth of God the Father telling his Son about Satan:
"such a foe Is rising, who intends to erect his throne Equal to ours, throughout the spacious North..."159
"such a foe
Is rising, who intends to erect his throne
Equal to ours, throughout the spacious North..."159
Then we hear of Urizen "with darkness overspreading all his armies" and soon there is a "fierce conflict", and "with thunder's sound his multitudes / Retreat". Several separated phrases of Milton's float into our mind. We are told of Night "over Heaven / Including darkness"160 and how at that time
Satan with his rebellious disappear'd, Far in the dark dislodg'd161
Satan with his rebellious disappear'd,
Far in the dark dislodg'd161
and also how at another time, "dire was the noise / Of conflict"162 and, earlier, God seeing
what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high decree...163
what multitudes
Were banded to oppose his high decree...163
Finally, we remember Christ in his chariot rushing "with whirl-wind sound"164 and driving his enemies "before him thunder-struck" to the bounds of Heaven where the walls, rolling inward, "a spacious gap disclos'd / Into the wastful Deep":165 the enemies shrank back at "the monstrous sight" but, urged by far worse from behind,
headlong themselves they threw
159.Paradise Lost, Bk. V, 11.724-726.
160.Ibid., Bk. VI, 11.406-407.
161.Ibid., 11.414-415.
162.Ibid., 11.211-212.
163.Ibid., Bk. V, 11.716-717.
164.Ibid., Bk. VI, 1.749.
165.Ibid., 11.858, 861-862.
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Down from the verge of Heaven166
into "the bottomless pit".167 This brings us to the close of Blake's second passage where Urizen and his associates "down fell... into an unknown Space, / Deep, horrible, without End."
Yes, there is a good deal of Miltonism variously running through Blake's sequence of states and events. But the most important point about the sequence is not verbal Miltonic resemblance. The point of extreme momentousness is that the falling down into the "unknown Space" which is Urizen's obscure state of Chaos preceding and preparing the physical world created by him comes after the night in which there occur the conspiracy, the battle, the defeat of Urizen. If this night comes before the very first form in which Nature exists -namely, the "unknown Space" - then the night that is Nature has to be distinguished from a night in Supernature and regarded as a later development. The night-symbol in an anti-divine sense must stand first for the Fall in Heaven - Urizen's rebellion in Eternity - and secondly for the Fall from Heaven -his creation of the natural universe. The anti-divine night must primarily be considered a perversion in Heaven itself of the happy and holy night which is part of Heaven's manifold phases.
It is significant that the "silent night" in which Urizen walked "among sweet smelling flowers" before his rebellion is met with again in "the silent of this night" when the rebellion takes place. But, when the night of rebellion is designated, we get not only "dim night" but also, later, the lines:
"that deadly night "When Urizen gave the horses of Light into the hands of Luvah."168
"that deadly night
Luvah."168
And in the same context as "the silent night" and "sweet
166.Ibid., 11.864-865.
167.Ibid., 1.866.
168.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 300 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 11.112-113).
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smelling flowers" we have the phrases which we have quoted several times and which Raine too has cited:
"...I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath; "I call'd the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark; "The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away. "We fell."
"...I hid myself in black clouds of my wrath;
"We fell."
Evidently, "the night of councils dark" is the perversion of "the silent night among sweet smelling flowers" - and, viewed in the light of the two passages analysed by us, the former no less than the latter precedes the Fall from Heaven whose consequence is Chaos and the temporal world shaped within it.
Even without those passages, the precedence by both is strongly suggested. For, the falling from Heaven takes place after the calling of the stars in the night of councils dark: in fact, between the two events there is even another - "The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away." The series follows in a compressed way the very one we find in Milton:
Satan with his rebellious disappear'd, Far in the dark dislodg'd, and, void of rest, His potentates to council call'd by night...169 ...They, astonish'd, all resistance lost, All courage; down their idle weapons dropt... ...headlong themselves they threw Down from the verge of Heav'n... Nine days they fell...170
Far in the dark dislodg'd, and, void of rest,
His potentates to council call'd by night...169
...They, astonish'd, all resistance lost,
All courage; down their idle weapons dropt...
...headlong themselves they threw
Down from the verge of Heav'n...
Nine days they fell...170
Raine's contention that we cannot separate the night of revolt from the Fall from Heaven which is the night of the natural universe is contradicted by detailed Blake-analysis: such analysis brings the two into line with the Miltonic vision.
Raine is similarly mistaken about the forest-symbol. Logically, once we grant a Urizenic night in Supernature distinct from the Nature-night, this symbol must have a double bearing. And
169.Paradise Lost, Bk. VI, 11.414-416.
170.Ibid., 11.838-839, 864-865, 871.
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detailed Blake-analysis confirms the theoretical conclusion. We may demonstrate the confirmation by a two-pronged approach.
Raine has shown "smoke" to be a symbol for generative Nature and to be another name for Nature's forests. But "smoke" connects up straight with the cloud-symbol through lines like the following from Jerusalem:
Jerusalem is scatter'd abroad like a cloud of smoke thro' non-entity...171 Attracted by the revolution of those Wheels, the Cloud of smoke Immense and Jerusalem & Vala weeping in the Cloud Wander away into the Chaotic Void...172
Jerusalem is scatter'd abroad like a cloud of smoke thro'
non-entity...171
Attracted by the revolution of those Wheels, the Cloud
of smoke
Immense and Jerusalem & Vala weeping in the Cloud
Wander away into the Chaotic Void...172
In the Hermetica itself, after the creation by the Logos of divine "light", "a certain moist cloud... like smoke" appears, the beginning of the natural creation. Hence the "black clouds of my wrath" and the "clouds opake" which Urizen speaks of and which we have found to be part of the night of revolt must imply forests as a state of Urizen in Heaven before the creation of the physical universe. And just as this night is the perversion in Supernature of a divine darkness, so these forests must be the perversion of a divine wood-depth.
That the cloud-symbol could serve for divine things is clear from lines like
A Rock, a Cloud, a Mountain Were now not Vocal as in Climes of happy Eternity173
A Rock, a Cloud, a Mountain
Were now not Vocal as in Climes of happy Eternity173
or
"Thy Clouds of Blessing, thy Cherubim of Tender-mercy"174
171.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 623 (Jerusalem 1, pl. 5, 1.13).
172.Ibid., p. 624 (ibid., 11.61-63).
173.Ibid., p. 315 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth, 11.134-135).
174.Ibid., p. 647 (Jerusalem 1, pl. 24, 1.21).
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"Yet thou wast lovely as the summer cloud upon my hills "When Jerusalem was thy heart's desire in times of youth & love."175
"Yet thou wast lovely as the summer cloud upon my hills
"When Jerusalem was thy heart's desire in times of youth
& love."175
or - at the very start of The Songs of Innocence -
On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: "Pipe a song about a Lamb!"176
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb!"176
Indeed, all of Blake's symbols are flexible. We have already seen the simile in which "stars" - a repeated pointer to Urizen's followers - represent Eternity. And even the Oak-symbol which is so frequent in Blake as a substitute - e.g., Urizen's "dark rooted Oak"177 - for the Tree-symbol of obscured Nature has been used by him in opposition to it:
"As the Mistletoe grows on the Oak, so Albion's Tree on Eternity."178
"As the Mistletoe grows on the Oak, so Albion's Tree on
Eternity."178
Here Eternity is equated to the usually Satanic Oak.
We can go still further to direct statements putting trees and oaks and forests in Heaven as divine elements. Urizen laments in the midst of Chaos:
O what a world is here, unlike those climes of bliss "Where my sons gather'd round my knees! O thou poor ruin'd world! "Thou horrible ruin! once like me thou wast glorious, "And now like me partaking desolate thy master's lot. "Art thou, O ruin, the once glorious heaven? are these thy rocks "Where joy sang on the trees and pleasure sported in the rivers, "And laughter sat beneath the Oaks, & innocence sported round
O what a world is here, unlike those climes of bliss
"Where my sons gather'd round my knees! O thou poor
ruin'd world!
"Thou horrible ruin! once like me thou wast glorious,
"And now like me partaking desolate thy master's lot.
"Art thou, O ruin, the once glorious heaven? are these
thy rocks
"Where joy sang on the trees and pleasure sported in the
rivers,
"And laughter sat beneath the Oaks, & innocence sported
round
175.Ibid., p. 647 (ibid.. 11.36-37).
176.Ibid., p. 111 (Songs of Innocence, Introduction, 11.3-5).
177.Ibid., p. 250 (The Book of Ahania, pl. 3, Ch. IId, 1.16).
178.Ibid., p. 703 (Jerusalem 3, pl. 66, 1.55).
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"Upon the green plains...?179
We may observe that here Blake mentions "climes of bliss" and "glorious heaven": they are the very "Climes of Happy Eternity" where a Rock, a Cloud, a Mountain are vocal unlike their state in present times and in the natural world - they are the original state from which Urizen has lapsed and must be distinguished from any future condition when the physical cosmos will be redeemed and the phenomenon will not disappear but persist in a transfigured form as "one continu'd vision of Eternity". So trees and Oaks exist in the divine original creation, they were growing before the phenomenal world came into existence and, if a transfiguration of Nature will occur at the end of time, there will then be trees and Oaks in Eternity not as something new which was never known before but as a reappearance, under certain novel conditions, of what is native to Heaven. And it is not only Urizen's lament that makes it impossible to doubt this: we also read elsewhere—
"The Oak is cut down by the Axe, the Lamb falls by the Knife, "But their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever..."180
"The Oak is cut down by the Axe, the Lamb falls by the
Knife,
"But their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever..."180
Most interestingly, these lines put together two objects which Blake often uses as symbols of two opposing realities: the Lamb symbolizes the Eternal World, the Oak the temporal. Now both are said to exist in both Time and Eternity -perishable things in the former, everlasting Forms in the latter.
Trees in general and Oaks in particular as part of "glorious Heaven" must imply forests in Eternity, the divine counterpart of "Albion's Forests of Oaks"181 mentioned by Blake as covering the earth. In connection with Albion we get even an open naming of forests existing in the divine world which Albion lost. Blake holds that in the divine world Man contained all
179.Ibid., p. 317 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth, 11.208-215).
180.Ibid., p. 522 (Milton II, 32, 11.37-38).
181.Ibid., p. 735 (Jerusalem 4, 89, 1 .23).
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things in his infinite body, but the all-comprehending consciousness and being were lost: Albion believed that there was a physical external universe outside him and thus he broke apart his own soul, reducing himself to a small entity and emptying of spiritual life what he conceived as other than himself. Blake describes this "disease" of Albion as either the shrinking of man or the wandering away of creatures and things. Thus he speaks of Albion:
His inward eyes closing from the Divine Vision, & all His children wandering outside, from his bosom fleeing away.182
His inward eyes closing from the Divine Vision, & all
His children wandering outside, from his bosom fleeing
away.182
And Albion himself is made to speak:
"First fled my Sons & then my Daughters, then my Wild Animations, "My Cattle next, last ev'n the Dog of my Gate; the Forests fled, "The Corn-fields & the breathing Gardens outside separated, "The Sea, the Stars, the Sun, the Moon, driv'n forth by my disease."183
"First fled my Sons & then my Daughters, then my Wild
Animations,
"My Cattle next, last ev'n the Dog of my Gate; the
Forests fled,
"The Corn-fields & the breathing Gardens outside
separated,
"The Sea, the Stars, the Sun, the Moon, driv'n forth by
my disease."183
Mark the phrase: "the Forests fled." It proves that unfallen Albion, the Eternal Man, contained in his divine existence the very forests which come to symbolize the temporal world split from the light of the All.
Now, if forests no less than night are a phase or aspect of Heaven, surely we should put forests of the night in Eternity. They would first be a divine depth and afterwards, with the revolted Urizen and his hosts, "black clouds" in which they hide themselves, a secrecy of "councils dark", the prototype in Supernature of what becomes the labyrinthine obscurity of Nature after the rebels' "assum'd power" has been "spurn'd back" by the Eternals with whose "fire" they have "fought" and under whose attack "the stars threw down their spears"
182.Ibid., p. 279 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.558-559).
183.Ibid., p. 643 (Jerusalem 1, 21, 11.7-10).
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and "down fell they all together" from Heaven.
Thus our interpretation of The Tyger takes the chief hurdle Raine's reading sets up. Doubtless, Blake mostly telescopes the two Falls and concentrates the world of Nature in his "night" and "forests". When one approaches him - as Raine with good reason does-Neoplatonically, Gnostically, Hermetically, Cab-balistically, Alchemically, one can hardly be blamed for missing the fine distinctions we have drawn. But the disinctions are legitimate in the ultimate scrutiny, become even inevitable on one's approaching him Miltonically and justify themselves in full in an appreciation of The Tyger's "minute particulars" both independently and from a Christian-Miltonic viewpoint.
(d)
As to the carnivore addressed in our poem, have we in Blake's writings a recognizable support to interpret it as an anti-Urizen force? In other words, is the Tyger-symbol a part - open or oblique - of an anti-Urizen context anywhere in Blake?
In the very Abyss where Urizen has plunged himself and where
...he beheld the forms of tygers & of Lions, dishumanized men,184
...he beheld the forms of tygers & of Lions, dishumanized
men,184
and stood questioning a fierce scorpion and a fierce-maned lion185 he is attacked:
these attack'd him sore, Siezing upon his feet, & rending the sinews, that in Caves He has to recure his obstructed powers with rest & oblivion.186
these attack'd him sore,
Siezing upon his feet, & rending the sinews, that in Caves
He has to recure his obstructed powers with rest &
oblivion.186
The attack is said to be quite contrary to what used to happen "in climes of Happy Eternity" - that is, before he had broken away from the Divine Harmony. Of course the beasts that have
184.Ibid., p. 116 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth, 1.116).
185.Ibid., p. 315 (ibid., 11.131-134).
186.Ibid., p. 315 (ibid., 11.138-140).
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seized upon his feet and rent his sinews are themselves creatures fallen because of Urizen's Fall, but their violent action upon a fallen Urizen is a highly suggestive picture in relation to our reading of The Tyger. A Urizen set upon by a Tyger after his Fall is a possibility quite within Blake's vision.
Perhaps more pertinent to our purpose are lines in The Book of Ahania. There we have tygers associated with an attack on Urizen by a supernatural being and some elements are present which, though combined not exactly as in The Tyger, recall the singularities of that poem. Here Urizen's enemy is Fuzon who represents passion indignant with the former's laws of repression. His attack is thus described:
Fuzon on a chariot iron-wing'd On spiked flames rose; his hot visage Flam'd furious; sparkles his hair & beard Shot down his wide bosom and shoulders. On clouds of smoke rages his chariot And his right hand burns red in its cloud Moulding into a vast Globe his wrath... So he spoke in a fiery flame, On Urizen frowning indignant, The Globe of wrath shaking on high; Roaring with fury he threw The howling Globe; burning it flew Length'ning into a hungry beam...187
Fuzon on a chariot iron-wing'd
On spiked flames rose; his hot visage
Flam'd furious; sparkles his hair & beard
Shot down his wide bosom and shoulders.
On clouds of smoke rages his chariot
And his right hand burns red in its cloud
Moulding into a vast Globe his wrath...
So he spoke in a fiery flame,
On Urizen frowning indignant,
The Globe of wrath shaking on high;
Roaring with fury he threw
The howling Globe; burning it flew
Length'ning into a hungry beam...187
This description gives us almost the Tyger's maker, with his wings, hand, shoulders: Fuzon's right hand burning red and moulding into a vast globe his wrath is nearly a counterpart of that maker's dread grasp with the deadly terrors of the Tyger's furnace-forged brain held in it, and Fuzon's globe howls and burns and is a long hungry beam, quite like a Tyger burning bright and streaking towards its quarry.
What makes our comparison more relevant is the fact that the fiery wrath-globe is, as it were, expressive of an ensemble
187. Ibid., p. 249 (Ch. I, 11. 1-7, 14-19).
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composed not only of indignant Fuzon but also of his raging chariot and the beasts of prey mentioned later as belonging to him and serving evidently to pull his chariot fiercely against Urizen:
...Fuzon, his tygers unloosing, Thought Urizen slain by his wrath.188
...Fuzon, his tygers unloosing,
Thought Urizen slain by his wrath.188
And we have here an indication of what the "chain" in The Tyger must signify beyond something with which to tug at the bellows or even to control the material during its shaping. Fuzon's act of unloosing his tygers implies both their being joined to the chariot as if by a chain and their being held on a chain-like rein to be set moving against any foe.
Nor is this all that the picture has in store for us. Blake tells us that Urizen shot a poisoned rock at Fuzon while he was unloosing his beasts of prey under the impression that his "exulting flam'd beam"189 had torn fatally through "the cold loins of Urizen".190 The result of Urizen's counterattack was that Fuzon's beautiful visage and luminous tresses
Were smitten with darkness, deform'd And outstretch'd on the edge of the forest.191
Were smitten with darkness, deform'd
And outstretch'd on the edge of the forest.191
Whose forest? Near the beginning of the same Chapter Urizen is spoken of as a being "obscur'd in his forests"192 and later too his "black forests"193 are mentioned. Then he is also said to be "high roofed over with trees"194 caused by himself. No one else in the poem is connected with forests or brings about the growth of trees. So it must be on the edge of Urizen's forest that Fuzon's beauty and luminosity lay smitten and outstretched. This means that the rein-held tygers drawing Fuzon's charioted anger, ready with its burning "Globe of wrath", had been
188.Ibid., p. 251 (Ch. II,
189.Ibid., p. 249 (Ch. I. 1.20).
190.Ibid., p. 249 (ibid., 1.29).
191.Ibid., p. 251 (Ch. II,
192.Ibid., p. 250 (ibid., 1.6).
193.Ibid., p. 254 (Ch. V, 1.4, 1.58).
194.Ibid., p. 252 (Ch. III, 1.3. 1.70).
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rushed against the dark forest-habitat of Urizen.
We have only to transpose the situation into an overtly Christian framework and turn the offensive into a direct Tyger-attack, to get our poem's action: Christ, the fashioner of the Lamb, fashioning the Tyger of his divine dreadfulness, keeping it afterwards chain-held for an offensive and then setting it upon Satan and his hosts within the forests of the night.
Even a picture directly put by Blake himself in a semi-Christian frame and including tygers under control is provided us in Jerusalem. There we are vouchsafed a vision of "those who disregard all Mortal Things", the companies of Eternity among whom "the Eternal Man Walketh". They decide to come down and see certain "changes":
...Others said, "If you do so, prepare "For being driven from our fields; what have we to do with the Dead?..." But others said: "Let us to him who only Is & who "Walketh among us, give decision: bring forth all your fires!" So saying, an eternal deed was done: in fiery flames The Universal Concave raged such thunderous sounds as never Were sounded from a mortal cloud, nor on Mount Sinai old,... And they elected Seven, call'd the Seven Eyes of God, Lucifer, Moloch, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah, Jesus. They nam'd the eighth: he came not, he hid in Albion's Forests. But first they said: (& their Words stood in Chariots in array Curbing their Tygers with golden bits & bridles of silver & ivory) "Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect Integrity...
...Others said, "If you do so, prepare
"For being driven from our fields; what have we to do
with the Dead?..."
But others said: "Let us to him who only Is & who
"Walketh among us, give decision: bring forth all your
fires!"
So saying, an eternal deed was done: in fiery flames
The Universal Concave raged such thunderous sounds as
never
Were sounded from a mortal cloud, nor on Mount Sinai
old,...
And they elected Seven, call'd the Seven Eyes of God,
Lucifer, Moloch, Elohim, Shaddai, Pahad, Jehovah,
Jesus.
They nam'd the eighth: he came not, he hid in Albion's
Forests.
But first they said: (& their Words stood in Chariots in
array
Curbing their Tygers with golden bits & bridles of silver &
ivory)
"Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect
Integrity...
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"Every one knows we are One Family, One Man blessed for ever."195
"Every one knows we are One Family, One Man blessed
for ever."195
Here too there are Tygers held by supernatural beings and they represent the martial power of these beings' charioted "Words" - though the holding is again not directly on a chain but by reins and a harness. And the term used with the reins and harness - "curbing" - is apt to the implication we have read in The Tyger that the Christ-animal was restrained from expressing its full fury against the stars. The mention of the name "Jesus" and the reference to the Eternal Man, of One Man and his One Family, relate the picture very suggestively to that which we have built up from The Tyger. And an extremely interesting curiosity in the picture is the occurrence of "Forests", as if certain associations remained dominant in Blake's mind ever since the composition of the early poem.
In the later Blake we have even three lines not only associating Christ with a supernatural carnivore but also suggesting a merger of the two, a sort of Tyger-Christ, a Divine Beast of Prey. In The Everlasting Gospel (c. 1818) we read how Jesus is a fury of fire and how his voice is loud as thunder when he defies Satan and refuses to worship him:
Thunders & lightnings broke around, And Jesus' voice in thunders' sound: "Thus I sieze the Spiritual Prey, "Ye smiters with disease, make way. "I come your King & God to sieze..."196
Thunders & lightnings broke around,
And Jesus' voice in thunders' sound:
"Thus I sieze the Spiritual Prey,
"Ye smiters with disease, make way.
"I come your King & God to sieze..."196
Satan, the "King & God" of the "smiters with disease", is called "the Spiritual Prey" of Jesus who comes with a thundering voice to "sieze" him. No doubt, the word "Prey" is also employed in this poem for other things than those that Jesus would destroy; but a non-restricted employment of the word does not cancel the fact of its use in relation to Jesus' own activity. And such Tyger-activity on his part is brought out in
195.Ibid., p. 686 (Jerusalem 3, Plate 55, 11.5-6, 17-21, 31-36, 46).
196.Ibid., p. 749 (The Everlasting Gospel, b. 11.25-29).
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more than one pointed line. In the section which asks "Was Jesus Humble...?", Blake equates conventional humility to the virtue of the false religion of the Synagogues and the Elders and Priests, a Satanic virtue proper to the Serpent, the lover of Dust and Clay, that Satan is. Blake tells us that if Christ had been "Creeping Jesus", he would have
Gone sneaking into Synagogues And not us'd Elders & Priests like dogs, But Humble as a Lamb or Ass Obey'd himself to Caiaphas.197
Gone sneaking into Synagogues
And not us'd Elders & Priests like dogs,
But Humble as a Lamb or Ass
Obey'd himself to Caiaphas.197
Here on the one side we are told what animal Jesus was not like: he was not like a "creeping" snake, he was not "as a Lamb or Ass". On the other side he was as one who held "dogs" in contempt. Evidently he is likened to or identified with a haughty and predacious animal - a Lion or a Tyger. And we get about him in this very context the phrase - "his wrath began to burn"198 which is reminiscent of The Tyger.
Divinity embodied as a beast of prey - a lion - is also suggested in Blake's America. Albion's Angel who is a representative of Urizen's religion which falsely claims to be that of Christ denounces Orc as Antichrist, Orc who comes to restore
"The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,"199
"The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten
commands,"199
and is really the spirit of Christ. The freedom-giving and falsehood-fighting forms which Orc can take are listed by him when he unites with "the shadowy daughter of Urthona" lying dumb up to this moment:
"Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion "Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale, I lash "The raging fathomless abyss; anon a serpent folding
"Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a
lion
"Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale, I
lash
"The raging fathomless abyss; anon a serpent folding
197. Ibid ., p. 752 (ibid ., d, 11. 61 -64) .
198. Ibid ., p. 752 (ibid ., 1.56).
199. Ibid ., p. 198 (America, pl. 8, 1.3) .
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"Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs..."200
"Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark
limbs..."200
Nature recognizes Orc's liberating divinity - "the shadowy daughter of Urthona" cries to him:
"I know thee, I have found thee, & will not let thee go: "Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa, "And thou art fall'n to give me life in regions of dark death."201
"I know thee, I have found thee, & will not let thee go:
"Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of
Africa,
"And thou art fall'n to give me life in regions of dark
death."201
It is also notable that in America Blake, speaking of Ore, brings in verbal turns that send us twice back to the stars' mishap in The Tyger and in The Four Zoas, as well as to the furnace in the former. There are two lines describing Orc:
Intense! naked! a Human fire, fierce glowing, as the wedge Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were fire...202
Intense! naked! a Human fire, fierce glowing, as the
wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace: his terrible limbs were
fire...202
In this description we seem to be before a new version of the Tyger "burning bright" and with eyes of fire, with deadly terrors, with limbs hammered out as if hot iron and with a brain from a furnace. Again, we are told how "the Demon red" who is Orc "burnt... rejoicing in its terrors,... & gath'ring thick / In flames as of a furnace..."203 On the other hand, we learn that Ore's enemies
sent up a howl Of anguish, threw their swords & muskets to the earth & ran From their encampments and dark castles, seeking where to hide From the grim flames, and from the visions of Orc...204
sent up a howl
Of anguish, threw their swords & muskets to the earth &
ran
From their encampments and dark castles, seeking where
to hide
From the grim flames, and from the visions of Orc...204
200.Ibid., p. 196 (ibid., pl. 1, 11.13-16).
201.Ibid., p. 196 (ibid., pl. 2, 11.7-9).
202.Ibid., p. 197 (ibid., pl. 4, 11.8-9).
203.Ibid., p. 201 (ibid., pl. 12, 11.9. 10, 11, 12).
204.Ibid., p. 201 (ibid., pl. 13, 11.6-8).
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Once more, there is the picture of other enemies of Orc:
The millions sent up a howl of anguish and threw off their hammer'd mail, And cast their swords & spears to earth, & stood a naked multitude...205
The millions sent up a howl of anguish and threw off their
hammer'd mail,
And cast their swords & spears to earth, & stood a naked
multitude...205
We are reminded not only of The Tyger's stars throwing down their spears and weeping in heaven: we are reminded too of the line in The Four Zoas:
"The stars threw down their spears & fled naked away."
Talking of Orc's divine avatarhood in America, we may add that in the companion piece, Europe, where he is the son of Los and the spirit of revolution, Los invokes him against Urizen in the words:
"Arise, O Orc, from thy deep den!"206 -
Further, we hear of the "flames of Orc" and find that Orc, whose arising is desired by Los in order to stop the teeming of "howling horrors" that derive from Urizen, is identified with Christ. Blackstone,207 after speaking of the lament of Nature on being compelled to bring forth so many strange forms in such vast suffering, continues his explanation: "Only the prophetic vision of a birth which will compass the infinite, the birth of Christ (identified with Orc), is able to console her. The Pro-phecy208 itself begins with a passage imitative in matter and manner of Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity."209
205.Ibid., p. 202 (ibid., pl. 15, 11.4-5).
206.Ibid., p. 239 (Europe, pl. 3, 7.24).
207.Op. cit., p. 57.
208.As distinguished from the Preludium (K. D. S.)
209.Cf. Milton -
It was the winter wild
While the heaven-born child
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies -
and Blake:
The deep of winter came,
What time the secret child
Descended thro' the orient gates of the eternal day...
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A beast of prey as an anti-Urizen symbol is found in Europe in connection also with the supernatural being named Rintrah, another son of Los and Enitharmon. Enitharmon addresses him:
"Arise! O Rintrah, eldest born, second to none but Orc! "O lion Rintrah, raise the fury from thy forest black!.... "Arise, my son! bring all thy brethren, O thou king of fire..."210
"Arise! O Rintrah, eldest born, second to none but Orc!
"O lion Rintrah, raise the fury from thy forest black!....
"Arise, my son! bring all thy brethren, O thou king of
fire..."210
Bateson,211 apropos of annotating the phrase "forests of the night" in The Tyger, recalls the second line with its "forests black" in this passage: "Rintrah, the symbol of primitive energy, is addressed in similar terms by his mother Enitharmon in Europe..."
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell too has Rintrah in addition to another shade of the carnivore-symbolism. It starts with the line:
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air.212
We hark back at once to the Tyger and are soon confirmed in our impression by the verse which is part of the same initial "Argument" and which is followed by the same line as the first:
Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air...213
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air...213
Bateson's comment214 on the whole "Argument" runs: "The contrast is between primitive Christianity, when the just man could be meek, and the eighteenth century, when (owing to the corruption of Christianity) humility has become the mark of the
210.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 240 (Europe, pl. 8, 11.1-2, 8).
211.Op. cit., p. 118.
212.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 148 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 2, 7.1).
213.Ibid., p. 149 (ibid., 11.17-21).
214.Op. cit., p. 130.
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'sneaking serpent' (the time-serving clergy) and the just man must be filled with a righteous, destructive anger." On Rintrah Bateson215 has the note: "an important figure in Blake's mythological system, which was still embryonic at this date; like the Tyger, he stands for the natural energies such as those liberated by the American and French Revolutions."
So, whether we agree or not with Bateson's interpretation of our poem's carnivore as being no more than primitive or natural energy, we may point out that if it is Blakean to figure "the just man" or the supernatural Rintrah as a Lion our Tyger could well stand for the Lord of Supernature, Christ, in a drastic movement of energy in Heaven against Urizen, the revolted unrighteous rationality.
Thus we have, in Blake's writings, a sufficiently broad support to our interpretation. No doubt, we have been able to demonstrate Urizen's perversion in Supernature itself of a heavenly night and forests: we have not similarly demonstrated by straight quotation from Blake a fiery Tyger-form attacking Urizen in Supernature. Yet an attack as such on him there, no less than the fieriness of it, has been demonstrated, and so too has been the presence there not only of night and forests but of Lions and Tygers. Finally, we have demonstrated a persistent play of wrath and fury and a constant creation of bright, majestic, thunderous forms. In view of the wide ground prepared, the Tyger-form of Christ contra Urizen in Supernature itself, rather than in Nature where Blake's other writings project it at times as an anti-Urizen symbol, may well be allowed, without cavil, as a small novelty peculiar to our poem.
(e)
Especially may we allow the novelty vis-a-vis Blake's various Lamb-references. Take the earlier piece, The Lamb in The Songs of Innocence, which The Tyger in The Songs of Experience appears to counterbalance. The counterbalancing becomes as good as explicit when we have in the later poem that
215. Ibid.
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juxtaposition of the Tyger and the Lamb:
This is the most momentous question in the lyric, and part of its wording is undoubtedly affined to that portion of the earlier one which indicates Jesus to be the maker of the animal spoken of and which too has a small h wherever the pronoun does not begin a line:
Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?... Little Lamb, I'll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb.216
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?...
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.216
Here a double point is first to be noted. Christ is not only the Lamb's maker but is himself symbolized by the Lamb and designated a Lamb. And there is a further implication: not only the made Lamb but also the maker Lamb, that is Christ, owes its existence to Christ's creativity, for it is he who gives himself the name "Lamb" and is known by that name because he has taken it by his own choice. Then comes the last suggestion: as the Divine Creator he belongs to Heaven and it is in Heaven itself that he the Maker is the self-made Divine Lamb. Analogously, The Tyger's "he who made the Lamb" is Christ who is himself the Lamb of Heaven - and then, if the Tyger also is Christ, the Christ-Tyger who is an anti-Urizen force belongs not merely to Nature but as well to Supernature.
That the Lamb-Christ pertains originally to Eternity is quite clear from the mentions of him in Blake's later poetry. Thus:
There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest Nam'd Beulah,... Eternally created by the Lamb of God...217
There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest
Nam'd Beulah,...
Eternally created by the Lamb of God...217
In Supernature surely the Lamb of God functions as the creator of Beulah. Again, when Urizen's natural world - "wondrous
216.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 115, 11.9-10, 12-14 (Songs of Innocence).
217.Ibid., p. 266 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.94-95, 97).
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work" - is seen to "flow forth like visible out of the invisible", Blake comments:
For the Divine Lamb, Even Jesus who is the Divine Vision, Permitted all...218
For the Divine Lamb, Even Jesus who is the Divine
Vision,
Permitted all...218
The permission could come only from Eternity, Supernature -and it is as the Divine Lamb there that Jesus gave it. One more quotation - the words of Los to Enitharmon:
"behold! take comfort! "Turn inwardly thine Eyes & there behold the Lamb of God "Cloth'd in Luvah's robes of blood descending to redeem."219
"behold! take comfort!
"Turn inwardly thine Eyes & there behold the Lamb of
God
"Cloth'd in Luvah's robes of blood descending to
redeem."219
If "Jesus, / The Lamb of God, blessed for ever", as we read elsewhere,220 descends to redeem, it must be from above, from Supernature.
Hence the complement of Heaven's Lamb-Christ - the Tyger-Christ - can most legitimately act contra Urizen in Supernature itself.
(f)
One point, however, we have to discuss in order to fix the precise shape and function of our anti-Urizen Tyger and its maker. This point is forced on us by a certain aspect of Raine's interpretation: she has seen Los together with Urizen in the maker of the animal and, inasmuch as a supernatural smith is undeniable in our poem, we have to assimilate Los into our Christ while rejecting Urizen. A grateful task, indeed, for us: Raine's vision of Los actually brings us a gift of the anti-Urizen power which our reading requires. Yet, from its place in her overall Urizenic view, it lays five demands upon us if our
218.Ibid., p. 287 (ibid.. Night the Second, 11.281-82).
219.Ibid., p. 330 [ibid.. Night the Seventh, 11.414-16).
220.Ibid., p. 279 (ibid.. Night the First, 11.555-56).
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reading is to be totally convincing.
First, we have to refute Raine's argument not only that primacy with the furnaces lies with Urizen and that Los becomes the master smith by seizing on Urizen's furnaces but also that Urizen who is the chief Demiurge must have a major hand in the Tyger's making since there is a strong parallel in some of the Hermetica's phrases about the Demiurge to those that leap to us in some of Blake's questions. Secondly, we have to show that in Blake's other writings Los may be figured as a born smith even beyond and before Nature. Thirdly, we have to draw upon them for figuring him as a fighter against Urizen in Heaven. Fourthly, we have to prove Los to be such in those writings that he can be conceived in our poem as fused with Christ and as appropriately serving for a frontal aspect of Christ's Tyger-creativeness against Urizen in Supernature. Fifthly, we have to exhibit Los in an anti-Urizen creativeness comparable in general to the making of the bright-burning carnivore in our poem.
As regards the Hermetica's phrases, could not Blake have transferred them to the activities of Los, whom too Raine calls demiurgic, because the language struck him as suiting the occasion? Further, if the Hermetica's Demiurge is ambiguous rather than evil, there would be a Los-side to him blended with a Urizen-side and the Hermetica's verbal turns could be applicable to him by right. So far as these turns are concerned, there seems no reason why the Tyger's smith-creator should not be Los alone. Nor, we may add, would they in themselves pin Los or any other demiurgic power down to activity only in Nature. Their sheer bearing would be on form-creativeness whether in Nature or elsewhere, for, we have already quoted Blake as referring to movements in Eternity "Mental forms Creating".221 Raine's argument for Urizen from the description of the Demiurge's moulding of form tan be - to say the least - completely neutralized.
But, of course, Los must be shown to be a smith primarily and not by furnace-transference from Urizen, as well as a smith
221. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 519 (Milton II, 30, 11.15-20).
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in very Supernature and not simply in the Vegetative Universe. The context of the lines Raine has quoted about Los seizing on the ruined furnaces of Urizen to build the natural creation anew is itself a help to us. Almost immediately before the seizure Tharmas says to Los:
"Take thou the hammer of Urthona: rebuild these furnaces..."222
"Take thou the hammer of Urthona: rebuild these
furnaces..."222
The furnaces to be seized on are Urizen's but Los as Urthona is already possessed of a hammer: so he is a smith before the seizure. And actually Los declares himself a smith a little earlier. Some 37 lines previous to the verse about the hammer we have those about the "deadly night / When Urizen gave the horses of Light into the hands of Luvah", and in the passage prior to them Los, "the spectre of Urthona", refers to the same time and event and relates to Tharmas what happened to that Zoa as well as to himself:
"...I well remember the Day, "The day of terror & abhorrence... "When fleeing from the battle, thou fleeting like the raven "Of dawn, outstretching an expanse where ne'er expanse had been, "Drew'st all the Sons of Beulah into thy dread vortex, following "Thy Eddying Spirit down the hills of Beulah. All my sons "Stood round me at the anvil, where, new heated, the wedge "Of iron glow'd furious, prepar'd for spades & mattocks. "Hearing the symphonies of war loud sounding, All my sons "Fled from my side; then pangs smote me unknown before..."223
"...I well remember the Day,
"The day of terror & abhorrence...
"When fleeing from the battle, thou fleeting like the raven
"Of dawn, outstretching an expanse where ne'er expanse
had been,
"Drew'st all the Sons of Beulah into thy dread vortex,
following
"Thy Eddying Spirit down the hills of Beulah. All my sons
"Stood round me at the anvil, where, new heated, the
"Of iron glow'd furious, prepar'd for spades & mattocks.
"Hearing the symphonies of war loud sounding, All my
sons
"Fled from my side; then pangs smote me unknown
before..."223
Here we have not only the mention of a battle in Heaven but
222.Ibid., p. 301 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 1.149).
223.Ibid., pp. 299-300 (ibid., 11.84-93).
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also a clear description of Los as a smith, precedent to the division of his "sons" comparable to Albion's "disease" - and a fortiori precedent to his seizing on Urizen's ruined furnaces. Thus Los is a smith primarily and not by furnace-transference from Urizen; also, he is a smith in Eternity, one with anvil and glowing iron when yet the pangs that mark the Fall are unknown.
This conclusion is suggested too by some lines still earlier, anticipating the division of Los's sons. In between the two passages which we have submitted as proving a night in Heaven distinguishable from Nature's night, we come across the verses:
"Beside his anvil stood dark Urthona; a mass of iron "Glow'd furious on the anvil prepar'd for spades & coulters. All "His sons fled from his side to join the conflict; pale he heard "The Eternal voice; he stood, the sweat chill'd on his mighty limbs. "He drop'd his hammer; dividing from his aking bosom fled "A portion of his life... "Urthona stood in terror, but not long; his spectre fled "To Enion, & his body fell..."224
"Beside his anvil stood dark Urthona; a mass of iron
"Glow'd furious on the anvil prepar'd for spades &
coulters. All
"His sons fled from his side to join the conflict; pale he
heard
"The Eternal voice; he stood, the sweat chill'd on his
mighty limbs.
"He drop'd his hammer; dividing from his aking bosom
fled
"A portion of his life...
"Urthona stood in terror, but not long; his spectre fled
"To Enion, & his body fell..."224
Here is Los becoming or being made a participant in the change of consciousness brought about by Urizen and Luvah: the very adjective "dark" at the beginning indicates the participation. But the fall occurs a little later and links up with the fall of Urizen and others "into an unknown Space". What is to be noted is that Los is already a smith, with not only anvil and iron glowing but also hammer: evidently he has furnaces too of his own from the start, his possession by right and by function in Supernature.
He could very well be the sole smith-creator of a Tyger that gives no sign of any flawed handiwork such as would be
224. Ibid., pp. 278, 279 (ibid.. Night the First. 11.519-524, 530-531).
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unavoidable under the conditions of Nature. "Sole", of course, in relation to Urizen but not to Christ the Son and Logos who is the basic, the ultimate, creator of everything divine in Eternity. A perfect heavenly Tyger fashioned to be set upon rebellious angels may be imagined as created by Christ employing in fusion with himself Los the divine smith for a frontal aspect of action.
Such a frontal aspect would be eminently in tune with what we know explicitly from Blake of Los's role in the entire incident of Urizen's revolt. In one sense Los falls with Urizen; in another he is the counter-agent not only in Time but also in Eternity. We may dwell awhile on Los's role and on its relation to Christ's activity in general.
We may remember how, in The First Book of Urizen, Urizen fought with the fire of the Eternals, whose unquenchable burnings seemed to him a living death, and how when he formed like a black globe his own world he tried to cool
The eternal fires, beating without From Eternals...225
From Eternals...225
Immediately after the appearance of Urizen's world we are told:
And Los, round the dark globe of Urizen, Kept watch for Eternals to confine The obscure separation alone...226
And Los, round the dark globe of Urizen,
Kept watch for Eternals to confine
The obscure separation alone...226
Blackstone227 comments: "it is appropriate that this task should be entrusted to Los, for in Eden he and Urizen were ultimately connected, as reason should always be with inspiration and vision." Blake himself says about Los:
Urizen was rent from his side...228
So Los is implied to be the main being against whom a wrong
225.Ibid., p. 226 (The First Book of Urizen, Ch. III, pl. 5, 11.32-33).
226.Ibid., p. 226 (ibid., 11.38-40).
227.Op. cit., p. 73.
228.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 226 (The First Book of Urizen, Ch. III, pl. 6, 1.4).
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was committed by Urizen, and the Eternals' fire which the latter fought with may be understood as mainly Los's. At least the only Eternal other than the revolted Urizen to be associated by name with fire in any state is he: "Los rouz'd his fires..."229
If one asks why Blake has not openly mentioned Los as attacking Urizen's "assum'd power", the answer is: Blake's theme is the creation of the physical universe by Urizen, as the first lines of Chapter I say:
Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific, Self-clos'd, all-repelling: what Demon Hath form'd this abominable void, This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?...230
Lo, a shadow of horror is risen
In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific,
Self-clos'd, all-repelling: what Demon
Hath form'd this abominable void,
This soul-shudd'ring vacuum?...230
Whatever goes before it, including the spurning back of Urizen by the Eternals, is packed into the short "Preludium". And we may affirm that Blake's theme in his longer poems is, in different garbs, the same as in The First Book of Urizen -essentially the combating of the Bacon-Locke-Newton philosophy of a mechanical universe outside Mind, independent of Mind, instead of being organic part of it within an infinitude of Universal Divine Humanity. The Christian-Miltonic antecedents to the story of Urizen's rational-scientific lapse from the original Oneness of spiritual life are brought in almost incidentally, by summary suggestion. Their presence plays an openly symbolic and significant role only in The Tyger. So we must not look for a precise correspondence to The Tyger's drama in other works of Blake. If the elements of this drama are found elsewhere, we have all that is necessary to read it in those works and bring them into harmony with our poem. This need not seem odd, for, on any interpretation the poem stands out by itself in several respects "and does not at all join to Blake's concern with the rational-scientific materialism of Bacon,
229.Ibid., p. 226 (ibid., pl. 7, 1 .8).
230.Ibid., p. 222 (ibid., pl. 3, Ch. I, 11.1-5).
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Locke and Newton. Even Raine's reading does not bring in that concern: it centres upon the problem of evil in the world or, in broader terms, the relation of the ambiguous time-world to the luminous world of Eternity.
Yes, it is nothing odd that the anti-Urizen Los-movement which we see reflected in The Tyger through the smith-actions before Urizen's Fall from Heaven should be unique to the poem and have no full-fledged counterparts elsewhere. But, of course, it would be everything odd if the rest of Blake did not reflect in idea, image and even word, variously employed, that very movement under different circumstances. Let us note the reflections both in general and in particular.
"Los," writes Blackstone,231 "takes pity on the world of generation as it is created, and enters it along with Urizen... The course of history now takes the shape of a struggle between these two great opponents; imagination for ever attempting to define error so that, when it is understood, it may be cast out: preparing a way for man to return to Eternity" out of the Vegetative Universe, "the order of law which is death"232 and out of Vala, the Shadow-Nature that is "opaque to the Divine Vision".233 Also, "Los stands creating the glorious Sun"234 -"'twas outward a Sun, inward Los in his might"235 - "Los stood in that fierce glowing fire"236 - he is the Poetic and Prophetic Sun-spirit who makes any soul, possessed by his "terrors", arise "in fury & strength".237 In the natural order he is Time which "is the mercy of Eternity", for "without Time's swiftness... all were eternal torment"238 in a world built by Urizen the "Schoolmaster of souls, great opposer of change".239 At one point of the world's history he could even say, "both Time &
231.Op. cit., p. 71.
232.Ibid., p. 84.
233.Ibid., p. 216.
234.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 517 (Milton I, 29, 1.41).
235.Ibid., p. 818 (The Letters, 24, 1.58).
236.Ibid., p. 505 (Milton, I, 22, 1.8).
237.Ibid.
238.Ibid., p. 510 (ibid., 24, 11.72-73).
239.Ibid., p. 360 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, 1.131).
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Space obey my will."240 In his eternal station he "was Urthona, keeper of the gates of heaven".241 Once he is made to announce that actually, even here below, he retains his station in secret:
"I know I am Urthona, keeper of the Gates of Heaven, "And that I can at will expatiate in the Gardens of bliss..."242
"I know I am Urthona, keeper of the Gates of Heaven,
"And that I can at will expatiate in the Gardens of
bliss..."242
He means that not from necessity but through love he has entered the world of Generation. That is why he says also:
"I am inspired. I act not for myself; for Albion's sake "I now am what I am!"243
"I am inspired. I act not for myself; for Albion's sake
"I now am what I am!"243
But, whatever his voluntary fall, he is able to compel his Spectre, as Blackstone244 states, "to help him at his work in the furnaces, in the building of Golgonooza" in the midst of the stricken universe. "His city of art, which is also a citadel of forgiveness where the rhythm of Eternity may be made real and preserved in this world":245 this is Golgonooza. There Los is acknowledged by his Spectre as "the sole, uncontroll'd Lord of the Furnaces"246 - furnaces that play in Blake's mythology a multiple role: afflictive, retributive, destructive, formative, redemptive, transmutative. Los, again, though only one of the Four Zoas, is the most potent; for, though the other two, Luvah and Tharmas, are also perpetually in revolt against Urizen, "they would be powerless without the aid of Los".247 Eternity, as a spirit of illumining Unity and Blissful Harmony, is thus chiefly embodied in him and he therefore approximates to the Divine Humanity, the One Man, who is Christ. How else indeed could he help it when, as Raine grants, his job is precisely to restore what was lost in the beginning?
240.Ibid., p. 505 (Milton I, 22, 1.17).
241.Ibid., p. 298 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 1.42).
242.Ibid., 727 (Jerusalem 4, 82,11.81-82).
243.Ibid., p. 627 (ibid., 1, 8, 11.17-18).
244.Op. cit., p. 161.
245.Ibid.
246.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 627 (Jerusalem 1, 8, 7.26).
247.Blackstone, op. cit., p. 200.
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In a certain matter of great importance to universal history we hear of "the Divine Saviour" acting formatively "by Los's Mathematic power".248 Los also strives to draw Christ into "a mortal form" and declares his birth a certainty in the fullness of time,249 and "he kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble":250 he is delegated to "watch... till Jesus shall appear".251 At one place Blake writes: "the Divine Vision appear'd with Los"252 -and at another: "the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los".253 So Los gets assimilated into Christ. And elsewhere too, when Blake refers, without giving names, to Tharmas as the Strong Man, Luvah as the Beautiful Man and Urizen as the Ugly Man, he says: "They were originally one man, who was fourfold;... and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God."254 The identification of Los with Christ is suggested in full when we hear of "the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord"255 -
the Poetic Genius Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity256 -
the Poetic Genius
Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity256 -
"the Poetic Genius, which is everywhere call'd the Spirit of Prophecy",257 and when we come to read about Los: "he is the Spirit of Prophecy".258 Christ shades off into Los the Sun-spirit also when Christ is named not only "the Lord of Love" but "the God of Fire".259
From all these facets of Blake's vision we may reconstruct the Tyger's maker - the "he" - as Christ incorporating in one anonymous avatar a quintessential Los and hammering out in
248.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 517 (Milton I, 29, 11.37-38).
249.Ibid., p. 272 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.293-294).
250.Ibid., p. 656 (Jerusalem 2, 30, 1.15).
251.Ibid., p. 674 (ibid., 44, 11.29-30).
252.Ibid., p. 655 (ibid., 30, 1.19).
253.Ibid., p. 743 (ibid., 4, 96, 1.7).
254.Ibid., p. 578 (A Descriptive Catalogue).
255.Ibid., p. 90 (Annotation to Swedenborg's Divine Love, p. 10).
256.Ibid., p. 495 (Milton I, 14, 11.1-2).
257.Ibid., p. 98 (All Religions Are One, Principle 5th).
258.Ibid., p. 510 (Milton I, 24, 1.71).
259.Ibid., p. 621 (Jerusalem 1, 3).
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his furnace and on his anvil the Wrath-form of himself - Christ the Tyger - that should attack and expel Urizen and his "myriads" who have revolted in Heaven. Christ, to Blake, is essentially the Divine Being who, on the one side, is mildness and mercy and, on the other, the fiery anger against that portion of Supernatural life, the Zoa Urizen, when this Zoa rebels in Supernature or when he and all that derives from him in Nature and history grow predominant with their "restrictions" and "established rules" - the fiery anger breaking from the Vision of the Whole and acting especially through the Zoa Los.
The Los who could be Christ's frontal aspect in the working out of the Tyger's "fearful symmetry" is he who is addressed by Enitharmon, his "Emanation", in terms like:
"O Lovely terrible Los, wonder of Eternity, O Los, my defence & guide, "Thy works are all my joy & in thy fires my soul delights; "If mild they burn in just proportion, & in secret night "And silence build their day in shadow of soft cloud & dews, "Then I can sigh forth on the winds of Golgonooza piteous forms "That vanish again into my bosom; but if thou, my Los, "Wilt in sweet moderated fury fabricate forms sublime, "Such as the piteous spectres may assimilate themselves into, "They shall be ransom for our Souls that we may live."260
"O Lovely terrible Los, wonder of Eternity, O Los, my
defence & guide,
"Thy works are all my joy & in thy fires my soul delights;
"If mild they burn in just proportion, & in secret night
"And silence build their day in shadow of soft cloud &
dews,
"Then I can sigh forth on the winds of Golgonooza
piteous forms
"That vanish again into my bosom; but if thou, my Los,
"Wilt in sweet moderated fury fabricate forms sublime,
"Such as the piteous spectres may assimilate themselves
into,
"They shall be ransom for our Souls that we may live."260
And the Los who could be working at one of the "forms sublime" - the Tyger - with "sweet moderated fury" (like our poem's combined "shoulder" and "art") is he who is described further in the lines just following the above:
So Enitharmon spoke, & Los, his hands divine inspir'd, began To Modulate his fires; studious the loud roaring flames
So Enitharmon spoke, & Los, his hands divine inspir'd,
began
To Modulate his fires; studious the loud roaring flames
260. Ibid., p. 331 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh, a, 447-455).
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He vanquish'd with his strength of Art, bending their iron points And drawing them forth delighted upon the winds of Golgonooza From out the ranks of Urizen's war...261
He vanquish'd with his strength of Art, bending their iron
points
And drawing them forth delighted upon the winds of
Golgonooza
From out the ranks of Urizen's war...261
The Los of The Tyger flashes upon us most directly when we read the concluding part of The Book of Los etched in 1795. Although the theme is not quite the same, there is Los not only acting against Urizen but also making a bright-burning instrument with the help of a smithy:
Then Light first began: from the fires, Beams, conducted by fluid so pure, Flow'd around the Immense. Los beheld Forthwith, writhing upon the dark void, The Black bone of Urizen appear Hurtling upon the wind Like a serpent!... Upfolding his Fibres together To a Form of impregnable strength, Los, astonish'd and terrified, built Furnaces; he form'd an Anvil, A Hammer of adamant: then began The binding of Urizen day and night. Circling round the dark Demon with howlings, Dismay & sharp blightings, the Prophet Of Eternity beat on his iron links. And first from those infinite fires, The light that flow'd down on the winds He siez'd, beating incessant, condensing The subtil particles in an Orb. Roaring indignant, the bright sparks Endur'd the vast Hammer; but unwearied Los beat on the Anvil, till glorious
Then Light first began: from the fires,
Beams, conducted by fluid so pure,
Flow'd around the Immense. Los beheld
Forthwith, writhing upon the dark void,
The Black bone of Urizen appear
Hurtling upon the wind
Like a serpent!...
Upfolding his Fibres together
To a Form of impregnable strength,
Los, astonish'd and terrified, built
Furnaces; he form'd an Anvil,
A Hammer of adamant: then began
The binding of Urizen day and night.
Circling round the dark Demon with howlings,
Dismay & sharp blightings, the Prophet
Of Eternity beat on his iron links.
And first from those infinite fires,
The light that flow'd down on the winds
He siez'd, beating incessant, condensing
The subtil particles in an Orb.
Roaring indignant, the bright sparks
Endur'd the vast Hammer; but unwearied
Los beat on the Anvil, till glorious
261. Ibid., p. 331 (ibid., 11.456-461).
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An immense Orb of fire he fram'd. Oft he quench'd it beneath in the Deeps, Then survey'd the all bright mass, Again Siezing fires from the terrible Orbs, He heated the round Globe, then beat While, roaring, his Furnaces endur'd The chain'd Orb in their infinite wombs. Nine ages completed their circles When Los heated the glowing mass, casting It down into the Deeps: the Deeps fled Away in redounding smoke: the Sun Stood self-balanc'd. And Los smil'd with joy. He the vast Spine of Urizen siez'd, And bound down to the glowing illusion.262
An immense Orb of fire he fram'd.
Oft he quench'd it beneath in the Deeps,
Then survey'd the all bright mass, Again
Siezing fires from the terrible Orbs,
He heated the round Globe, then beat
While, roaring, his Furnaces endur'd
The chain'd Orb in their infinite wombs.
Nine ages completed their circles
When Los heated the glowing mass, casting
It down into the Deeps: the Deeps fled
Away in redounding smoke: the Sun
Stood self-balanc'd. And Los smil'd with joy.
He the vast Spine of Urizen siez'd,
And bound down to the glowing illusion.262
Of course, some differences are evident. The Deeps here are obviously liquid and are below and have nothing to do with the origin of the Orb fashioned by Los. Los himself is in a mood somewhat at variance with that of the Tyger's fashioner: at least, being terrified or dismayed could have no place in the latter. The serpent-like black bone of Urizen too has no parallel in The Tyger. But all else is remarkably reminiscent in a transposed manner. We begin with a light and fire set over against a vast darkness. Then there is the suggestion of limbs of a close-knit grandiose strength at labour, with hammer and anvil and chain and furnace, to frame a glowing form. The fire and light of this form come originally from above, they flow down to Los and he seizes them to condense the subtle stuff into an Orb, a Sun, which may be likened to a flaming eye or heart or brain of terrific power, at once intense in heat and gloriously bright. In the end, after the flowing mass is ready for the Prophet of Eternity to use against the dark Demon, the maker is associated with a smile at the sight of it. So much basic correspondence, both in idea and word, could hardly be accidental.
262. Ibid., pp. 259-260 ( The Book of Los, Ch. IV, 11 . 16, 18-47).
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What is said about the chain is of special interest. For it partly elucidates a point which we were left to guess in The Tyger. the function of the chain. Now the function is suggested to be control over the material while it is being heated and moulded. We may remember that, just as here the hammer-beating and the Furnace-heating accompany the mention of the "chain'd Orb", we have in The Tyger the statement effecting a similar quadruple combination:
What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
The "brain" here appears to answer to the "Orb" there, and we have also likened the "Orb" to a flaming eye or heart such as The Tyger deals with. But we may add that the "chain'd Orb" would not be far away in Blake's mind from the whole bright-burning Tyger held with a chain. In a longer poem of his, Blake again speaks of Los's Sun. He tells of how "the Sun that glow'd o'er Los" is taken by priests and priestesses and put into Urizen's temple to give light to the Abyss. And the phrase used about "the terrible Orb / Compell'd" is:
...The Sun, redd'ning like a fierce lion in his chains...
Yes, Los creating the anti-Urizen Sun can be very strikingly seen as harking back to the smith-creator of the Tyger. And if the Sun made by him suggests "a fierce lion" we may recollect from the opposite side what we have said apropos of the creation of Blake's Tyger and the creation of the sun in Milton's Paradise Lost. In passing, we may mark also the Miltonic touches in the account of Los's sun-creation. Milton starts with
Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure...263
Light
Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure...263
Blake starts with:
263. Paradise Lost. Bk. VII, 11.243-244.
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Beams, conducted by fluid so pure...
Milton continues about Christ's creative process:
For, of celestial bodies, first the Sun A mighty sphere he fram'd...264 Of light by far the greater part he took, Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and plac'd In the Sun's orb...265
For, of celestial bodies, first the Sun
A mighty sphere he fram'd...264
Of light by far the greater part he took,
Transplanted from her cloudy shrine, and plac'd
In the Sun's orb...265
Blake continues:
And first from those infinite fires, The light that flow'd down on the winds He seiz'd... ...till glorious An immense Orb of fire he fram'd.
He seiz'd...
...till glorious
Milton makes the general statement about the creation of the heavenly bodies:
God saw. Surveying his great work, that it was good.266
God saw.
Surveying his great work, that it was good.266
Blake writes that Los, having created the Sun-Orb,
Then survey'd the all bright mass... ...And Los smil'd with joy.
Then survey'd the all bright mass...
...And Los smil'd with joy.
These Miltonic touches of Blake's join Los's Sun-creation all the more to the Tyger-creation in our poem in view of the affinity we have found between the latter and Milton's description but the main point with which we are concerned is the converse of Blake's comparison of Los's Sun to a blazing beast of prey: the fiery carnivore of our poem, whose "fearful symmetry" like the "mighty... Sun's orb" of Milton was framed from fire obtained by a going up to a mass of light burning on high, could figure in a parable of sunrise. A burning brightness
264.Ibid., 11.354-355.
265.Ibid., 11.359-361.
266.Ibid., 11.352-353.
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breaking into a depth of night, like a Tyger into a dense forest, and overwhelming the stars which were a-glitter like spear-tips and which had remained undispelled by the white fleece-like lustre of a Lamb-mild moon - such indeed might be a sub-symbolism read on a superficial level in The Tyger. Then Los's creation of the "fierce lion" of the anti-Urizen Sun would most aptly echo the creation of our bright-burning Tyger by a supernatural smith.
Thus everything converges on our idea of a Los-incorporating Christ as the maker of a heavenly Tyger. Perhaps a last plea for Urizen's being the ultimate maker of a Nature-symbolizing carnivore may be based on the word "work" in Blake's lyric. We may be told: "Blake calls Urizen 'the great Work master'267 and therefore he should be considered the author of the 'work' that is the Tyger!" Admittedly Blake's Urizen corresponds predominantly to the Workman of the old traditions about the Demiurge; but, even apart from the fact that Los is the master smith in Blake, the single word "work" is hardly enough to form a direct link with Urizen's role as "the great Work master": it can just as appositely be brought into relation with Blake's use of "work" in various non-Urizenic contexts. We can neutralize the connection of this term with Urizen by quoting a number of lines. There is the one about Luvah:
The workmanship of Luvah's hands in times of everlasting...268
The workmanship of Luvah's hands in times of
everlasting...268
Raine herself has referred to the "Enormous work" of Los in building anew the "Ruin'd Furnaces" of Urizen. We have drawn upon Enitharmon's phrases to Los, including the line:
"Thy works are all my joy & in thy fires my soul delights..."
"Thy works are all my joy & in thy fires my soul
delights..."
Now we may add:
267. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 280 ( Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Second, 11 .22).
268. Ibid. , p. 282 (ibid. , 1.82).
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Enormous works Los contemplated inspir'd by the holy Spirit...269
Enormous works Los contemplated inspir'd by the holy
Spirit...269
the immortal works Of Los...270
the immortal works
Of Los...270
What is most pertinent in our poem, we have even those lines on Christ himself, "my Lord", as Urizen calls him in the self-censuring lament about his own closing up to the Light and his subsequent fall:
"O Fool! to think I could hide from his all piercing eyes "The gold & silver & costly stones, his holy workmanship!...."271
"O Fool! to think I could hide from his all piercing eyes
"The gold & silver & costly stones, his holy
workmanship!...."271
No, the Tyger of our poem need not be Urizen's work on any score.
We have now finished dealing with Raine's interpretation, enriching ourselves with its perspicacities, exceeding the range of its application, discerning what is defective in it. Our scrutiny of it has fundamentally cleared our own way of all obstacles: we have now only a few minor features of The Tyger to examine in the light of Blake's other writings.
(g)
Our idea of Los incorporated in Christ may account to some extent for Christ's wingedness in The Tyger. Rather we may say that the incorporation renders it all the more natural for Blake to give Christ the wings which either by identification with the Angel Michael during the war in Heaven or through rising in an ensemble with the Cherubim or as the creative divinity one in action with the Holy Spirit or for any other reason doctrinal or poetic the Son of God would tend to acquire in Christological
269.Ibid., p. 343 (ibid., Night the Eighth, 1.108).
270.Ibid., p. 332 (ibid., Night the Seventh, 11.473-474).
271.Ibid., p. 310 (ibid., Night the Fifth, 77.214-125).
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thought. Before we look at Los's contribution we may see what factors Blake openly shows to be influencing him towards a winged Christ.
Blake clearly implies the winged Holy Ghost to be the Spirit of Christ in one of his longest "Prophecies", Jerusalem. There are some passages where he speaks of the inspiration he draws for his poem. In two of them he mentions Jesus directly:
...I see the Saviour over me Spreading his beams of love & dictating the words of this mild song...272 O Saviour, pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love! Annihilate the Selfhood in me: be thou all my life! Guide thou my hand, which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages, While I write...273
...I see the Saviour over me
Spreading his beams of love & dictating the words of this
mild song...272
O Saviour, pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love!
Annihilate the Selfhood in me: be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand, which trembles exceedingly upon
the rock of ages,
While I write...273
In a third passage Blake invokes for his poetic and prophetic mission the help of a winged divineness -
...O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings...274
If Jesus dictates the song and is asked to be all the poet's life and to guide the writing hand, then his Spirit which he is invoked to pour upon the poet must be the same as the Divine Spirit whose wings are sought for sustenance. This conclusion is borne out by another phrase combining the latter with Christ:
Teach me, O Holy Spirit, the Testimony of Jesus! let me Comprehend wonderous things out of the Divine Law!275
Teach me, O Holy Spirit, the Testimony of Jesus! let me
Comprehend wonderous things out of the Divine Law!275
So it is almost as if Blake were addressing a winged Christ to grant him grace for artistic and spiritual creativity.
We may add that a symbolic association of wings with divinity is found also in a design of Blake's for Jerusalem. The fallen condition of "Albion" who represents the race of man is
272. Ibid., p. 622 (Jerusalem, 1 , 4, l l .4-5).
273. Ibid., p. 623 (ibid. , 1, 5 , 11 .21-24).
274. Ibid., p. 635 (ibid. , 1, 15, 1 .9) .
275. Ibid., p. 714 (ibid. , 3, 74, 11. 14-15).
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shown below an emblem in which man upheld by Christ the Divine Humanity is resting on a winged disk. The winged disk, illustrated both in Bryant's Mythology and in Stukeley's Ave-bury and Stonehenge, represents God the Father. If even God the Father could thus be associated with wings, the analogy to a winged Christ should not be difficult in case the poetic situation called for such a figure.
Now for Los. To conceive Los as winged is not only consistent with Blake's particular images of the other Zoas: it is also directly prompted by certain passages on the Zoas collectively. Even otherwise we should be forced to give wings to all the Zoas, for Blake speaks of them as "the Four Living Creatures, the Cherubim"276 and speaks elsewhere of "Wings of Cherubim"277 and "Cherubim of Tender-Mercy / Stretching their Wings sublime".278 In a scene concerned with Urizen's fallen state we have "his shudd'ring waving wings"279 and in his final transfigured state he rises on "wings of tenfold joy" and claps "his radiant wings".280 Tharmas flies with "wing'd speed" and stretches his "wings".281 As for Luvah or Orc, Witcutt282 tells us about "the mighty winged figure of Orc" in the picture which forms the frontispiece of America (1793). And if three out of the four Zoas carry wings, it is logical to believe that Los does the same. Indeed, all of them are on a par in regard to wingedness in the passages about whose action Blackstone283 writes: "Los, who 'was the friend of Albion who most lov'd him', and the other Zoas are also willing to sacrifice themselves; and when it is found that the Fallen Man rejects their counsel and love, they try to bear him back on their wings 'against his will thro' Los's Gate to Eden'. But this they cannot do..." The actual verses, while repeatedly showing the four
276.Ibid., p. 696 (ibid., 3, 63,1.44).
277.Ibid., p. 645 (ibid., 1, 22, 1.36).
278.Ibid., p. 647 (ibid., 1, 24, 11.22-23).
279.Ibid., p. 248 (The Song of Los, Asia, 7, 1.10).
280.Ibid., p. 366 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, 1.248).
281.Ibid., p. 380 (ibid., Additional Fragments, 11.14, 16).
282.Blake: A Psychological Study (London, 1946), p. 38.
283.Op. cit. p. 166.
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Zoas as winged, clinch our point about their being winged because they are Cherubim:
With one accord in love sublime, &, as on Cherubs' wings, They Albion surround with kindest violence to bear him back Against his will thro' Los's Gate to Eden. Fourfold, loud, Their Wings waving over the bottomless Immense, to bear Their awful charge back to his native home...284 the immortal Wings labour'd against Cliff after cliff & over Valleys of despair & death.285
With one accord in love sublime, &, as on Cherubs' wings,
They Albion surround with kindest violence to bear him
back
Against his will thro' Los's Gate to Eden. Fourfold, loud,
Their Wings waving over the bottomless Immense, to bear
Their awful charge back to his native home...284
the immortal Wings labour'd against
Cliff after cliff & over Valleys of despair & death.285
Thus Los can contribute to make Christ fly on wings in The Tyger - Christ who, in the mythology including both him and Los, gets, as we have mentioned, completely identified at times with this Zoa.
In connection with Los we get too a sidelight on winged-ness as part of a supernatural power in creative activity. Blake has spoken of "Los, who is of the Elohim"286 and mentioned "Elohim, who created Adam".287 Now, Bateson288 writes: "Blake's fine colour-print known as 'The Elohim Creating Adam' (1795) depicts the creator as a majestic winged human figure hovering in the air immediately above the newly created Adam." Christ as the Tyger's creator would most appropriately be winged because of his fusion with Los.
The Los-element in the Tyger's creator may also add to the aspiring we have attributed to the Christ of the poem. No theological problem could arise from the idea of Los the Zoa desiring earnestly to gain the fire of the topmost empyrean: indeed such desiring is precisely what we should expect. Aspiration in the sense of mounting up is also what a Zoa would be expected to do on his wings or in any other way. Both the senses of the word can be traced in Blake. We hear Los saying:
284.Keynes, ed. cit. p. 674 (Jerusalem 2, 44, 11.1-5).
285.Ibid., p. 674 (ibid., 2, 11.12-13).
286.Ibid., p. 713 (ibid., 3, 73, 1.26).
287.Ibid., 351 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth. 1.401).
288.Op. cit., p. 118.
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"We therefore, for whose sake all things aspire to be & live, "Will so receive the Divine Image..."289
"We therefore, for whose sake all things aspire to be &
live,
"Will so receive the Divine Image..."289
And we hear about Urizen as a Dragon:
his folding tail aspires Among the stars.290
his folding tail aspires
Among the stars.290
In the shorter poems we get, as in The Tyger, the word so used as simultaneously to admit of both the meanings. There is "that sweet golden clime"
Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow Arise from their graves, and aspire Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.291
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.291
A fragment has the line:
And there to Eternity aspire...292
Even without bringing in the Zoa Los we may draw from Blake support for our picture of Christ aspiring, as the Son may to the Father in the dynamics of divinity although essentially they may be one and equal. We have already quoted the line in which the incarnate Christ says:
"I am doing my Father's business..."293
A mission received is here, and the relationship of difference-in-identity which permits it on earth need not debar it in Heaven. And if a mission can be received as by the Godhead's Second Person from the First, it can also be sought from the latter by the former. Actually we have a passage where the
289.Keynes, ed. cit. p. 272 (Vaia, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.296-297).
290.Ibid., p. 352 {ibid.. Night the Eighth, 11.447-448).
291.Ibid., p. 215 (Songs of Experience, Ah! Sun-flower, II.5-8).
292.Ibid., p. 421 (Poems and Fragments from the Note-book, 1800-1803,8, 7.5).
293.Ibid., p. 750 (The Everlasting Gospel, c, 1.8).
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seeking is suggested. Terrified by the events of the Fall of Albion, the "Daughters of Beulah" who are the emanations of Eternity, address the Divine Vision, the Saviour:
"Lord Saviour, if thou hadst been here our brother had not died, "And now we know that whatsoever thou wilt ask of God "He will give it thee..."294
"Lord Saviour, if thou hadst been here our brother had
not died,
"And now we know that whatsoever thou wilt ask of
"He will give it thee..."294
At this point some general remarks will be in order about Blake's attitude to God the Father and God the Son. We may be told: "Blake's final system holds Christ as the supreme divinity and there is no explicit place for God the Father, even in the shape of an ultimate empyrean higher in some sense than the power of Christ though in another sense his own domain. Blake has even a strong animus against the father-concept: fatherhood, kinghood, priesthood - all these meant to him repression and hypocrisy. And, as Blackstone295 notes, it is "Urizen to whom, most commonly, he applies the title 'father': 'Father of jealousies', 'cruel Father of men'. Further, as is well known, 'Urizen is Blake's version of the Jehovah of the Old Testament, the creator of this world, a mistaken demon not to be worshipped... At times, indeed, he sets Jesus up in contrast to Jehovah."296 Would we then not be wise to suspect an interpretation which openly makes Christ the secondary Godhead?
The answer is that the Christian tradition with its theology of Father and Son was really never submerged in Blake's system at any stage. Nor was the title "father" debarred from applying to the highest spiritual being. What are we to make of "the Heav'nly Father" in the lines about the "Four Mighty Ones", the "Living Creatures" at the beginning of The Four Zoas (begun 1795)?297 Surely there is no question in them of Urizen
294.Ibid., p. 304 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fourth, 11.253-255).
295.Op. cit., p. 367.
296.Ibid., pp. 66, 36.8.
297.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 264 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the First, 11.9-13).
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being "the Heav'nly Father" who exceeds the Zoas and is the sole Being who can know their "Natures". In the same poem we hear the Eternals announcing the truth:
"Not for ourselves, but for the Eternal Family we live. "Man liveth not by Self alone, but in his brother's face "Each shall behold the Eternal Father & love & joy abound."298
"Not for ourselves, but for the Eternal Family we live.
"Man liveth not by Self alone, but in his brother's face
"Each shall behold the Eternal Father & love & joy
abound."298
The verses, sent in a letter to the sculptor Flaxman on 12th September 1800, commence:
I bless thee, O Father of Heaven & Earth! that ever I saw Flaxman's face....299
I bless thee, O Father of Heaven & Earth! that ever I
saw Flaxman's face....299
In a letter to Flaxman of October 19, 1801, Blake expresses the faith that, with the peace concluded with Napoleon, the millennium itself is dawning: "The Kingdoms of this World are now become the Kingdoms of God & his Christ..."300 Here Christ is spoken of in distinction from God to whom, as if Son to Father, he belongs. In a letter to Butts, April 25, 1803, Blake writes: "I see the face of my heavenly Father; he lays his Hand upon my Head & gives a blessing to all my works."301 Again, in Milton (begun 1804), when speaking of the divine inwardness of things like even "the little winged fly" that has "a brain open to heaven & hell, / Withinside wondrous & expansive", he has the words to "Mortal man":
Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies, There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old.302
Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies,
There Chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old.302
In Jerusalem (begun a little later in the same year), there are the lines:
For not one sparrow can suffer & the whole Universe not suffer also
For not one sparrow can suffer & the whole Universe not
suffer also
298. Ibid., p. 374 (ibid., Night the Ninth, 11 .640-642).
299. Ibid., p. 799 ( The Letters , 11 , 1 . i).
300. Ibid., p. 810 (ibid., 21 ) .
301. Ibid., p. 823 (ibid., 26).
302. Ibid., p. 502 (Milton I. 20, 11 .32-33).
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In all its Regions & its Father & Saviour not pity and weep.303
In all its Regions & its Father & Saviour not pity and
weep.303
To make the Heavenly Father an aspect of Christ instead of the latter being an aspect of the former or both essentially identical co-members of a Trinity does not erase the Father-sense. And what except that sense leads Blake to call Christ "the Eternal Father",304 "the Universal Father"?305 It would seem that even though God the Father had no explicit place side by side with Christ in Blake's final religio-mythological scheme He was not quite absent from Blake's own mind. And when he spoke of Christ within some sort of traditional framework he did not hesitate to bring in God the Father at even a very late stage. Thus The Everlasting Gospel, with the phrase "I am doing my Father's business" dates to 1818. In one place, at the very beginning of Milton, we have a phrase whose implication is God who is not only the Father as distinguished from the Son but also the Deity differing from Christ by being hidden away from sight, such as we have put in the "distant deeps or skies" of our lyric. The phrase is: "Jesus, the image of the Invisible God."306 A similar phrase about Jesus is in Jerusalem: "the Divine Similitude"307 - an echo from the traditional nomenclature in Paradise Lost:
Begotten son. Divine Similitude...308
The other phrase throws our minds back at once to the Christian tradition expressed in the lines of Milton just following the above -
In whose conspicuous count'nance without cloud Made visible, the Almighty Father shines -
In whose conspicuous count'nance without cloud
Made visible, the Almighty Father shines -
and derived from St. Paul's phrase about Christ: "the image of
303. Ibid. , p. 648 (Jerusalem I , 25. 11 .8-9 ) .
304. Ibid. . p. 374 ( Vala, o r The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth. 1 . 642 ) .
305. Ibid. , p. 744 (Jerusalem 4. 97. 1 . 6 ) .
306. Ibid. , p. 481 ( Milton 1. 2 .1. 12 ) .
307. Ibid. , p. 664 (Jerusalem 2 . 38, 1 . II ) .
308. Paradise Lost. Bk . II . 1 . 383.
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the invisible God"309 - as well as from the saying in The Gospel of St. John: "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him."310 So, taking a comprehensive view, we need not be surprised at tracing in The Tyger a traditional Christian tinge in the midst of the theme of Christ-Los versus Urizen.
Here perhaps another point may be raised in connection with our reading of Los and Urizen in The Tyger. It may be objected: "The Tyger is too early a poem to permit the alignment of its symbolism with Blake's mythology." We may first remark that Raine herself is not averse to talking about both Urizen and Los in discussing our poem. And we may justify her as well as ourselves by laying out a certain pattern of facts. Although it is not unlikely that The Tyger was written between the summer or autumn of 1791 and November or December of 1792,311 the sole certainty about the terminus ad quem is that the poem was written before October 1793 when Blake announced in a "Prospectus" or sale catalogue of his engravings The Songs of Experience to which the poem belonged.312 Prior to its composition the name "Luvah" appeared in The Book of Thel (etched 1789).313 Also, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (etching completed by about 1793) was mostly written:314 it was begun as far back as 1790, the date which in Butts' copy Blake put against an opening passage which has a chronological reference.315 Now, in "The Argument" which precedes even this passage we twice have Rintrah roaring and shaking his fires316 - Rintrah who is an important figure in Blake's mythology and who openly functions as a part of it only in Europe (etched about 1794).317 And in "A Song of Liberty"318 with
309. Colossians, I:15. 310. I:16.
311.Bateson, op. cit., p. 108.
312.Ibid., p. 104.
313.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 128, (The Book of Thel, 3, II, 1.8).
314.Bateson, op. cit., p. 128.
315.Ibid.
316.Keynes, ed. cit., pp. 148-149 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2, 11.1, 21).
317.Ibid., pp. 240, 242 (Europe, 12, 1.24; 5, 1.4; 8, 1.5).
318.Ibid., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27:16).
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which The Marriage ends "we have the first mention of Urthona, the noblest of the Four Zoas, while Urizen, Tharmas, Vala and the revolutionary Orc are referred to in unmistakable terms."319 This "Song" also says320 about its nameless Urizen: "the jealous wings wav'd over the deep" and "Down rush'd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king..." In the body itself of The Marriage Satan is already implied to be "Ratio", the rational principle. So, besides some other mythological ideas, the essential Zoa-conception, though not the whole Zoa-nomenclature, antedates The Tyger. In The Songs of Experience itself, the second poem Earth's Answer dating to 1791321 has the expressions "Starry Jealousy"322 and
"Selfish father of men! "Cruel, jealous, selfish fear!"323
"Selfish father of men!
"Cruel, jealous, selfish fear!"323
which at once join up with "the jealous king" as well as "the starry king"324 of "A Song of Liberty" and thus undeniably bring in Urizen. Another poem The Human Abstract,325 mentioning the Tree of Mystery and a personification of Cruelty, can be proved in the light of subsequent writings to have Urizen for its theme. Hence at least one of the Zoas definitely figures twice in the very series that contains The Tyger. And Urizen is present even by name in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (etched in 1793).326 He is also called "Creator of men"327 and "Father of Jealousy',328 as if to clinch the reading of his presence in "A Song of Liberty" and in Earth's Answer.
Further, it is somewhat tricky to limit a vision or conception of Blake's to the date when it gets expressed for the first time. In Europe (1794) Urizen is already established on the earth
319.Blackstone, op. cit., p. 52.
320.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27:9, 15).
321.Bateson, op. cit., pp. 112, 109.
322.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 211 (Songs of Experience, Earth's Answer, 1.7).
323.Ibid., p. 211 (ibid., 11.11-12).
324.Ibid., p. 159 (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 25-27, 15, 10).
325.Ibid., p. 217 (Songs of Experience, The Human Abstract, 77.7-8, 16, 22).
326.Ibid., p. 192 (The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 5, 1.3).
327.Ibid., p.
328.Ibid., p. 194 (ibid., 7, 1.12).
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with his false religion,329 and Los, whose name first occurs here,330 figures as "the prophetic genius... attempting to restore Urizen to his place in the South (to restore, that is, reason to its right sphere, the intellect)."331 But the original defection of Urizen from the heavenly unity and his getting a place in the North, creating a material universe, being chained by Los and then getting free are recounted in The First Book of Urizen which followed Europe in the same year. Los's own entry into the material universe, the entry which is a fact in Europe, is pictured not before 1795 when The Book of Los is produced. The Song of Los, which belongs also to 1795, "is clearly anterior in its action to the two earlier books Europe and America."332 Again, America, dated 1793, assumes events that are recorded a full year later: "the symbolic action of the poem is puzzling to those who read Blake chronologically, for the vision of Orc in chains with which it begins is only comprehensible when we are acquainted with the events in The Book of Urizen (1794)."333 Blake's visions or conceptions are not always to be dated according to the time-sequence of his books. Things might exist in his mind at one time and get recorded at another, and we have no chronological gauge in some matters of his inner life in "Eternity".
Considering all this, we need not hesitate to align in fundamental spirit Blake's later mythology with The Tyger.
(h)
We may now make a few comments on The Tyger in connection with the lines on Christ which, though written nearly twenty-five years later, bring again the temper and imaginative movement and even a few word-turns of the early lyric to our minds:
And bursting forth, his furious ire
329. Ibid. , p. 241 (Europe, 10, 11 . 1-31).
330. Ibid. , p. 239 (ibid., 4, 1 .7) .
331. Blackstone, op. cit. , p. 57.
332. Ibid. , p. 76.
333. Ibid., p. 55.
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Became a chariot of fire... And Satan in his Spiritual War Drag'd at his Chariot wheels:... And in his hand the Scourge-shone bright;... And thus with wrath he did subdue The Serpent Bulk of Nature's dross...334
Became a chariot of fire...
And Satan in his Spiritual War
Drag'd at his Chariot wheels:...
And in his hand the Scourge-shone bright;...
And thus with wrath he did subdue
The Serpent Bulk of Nature's dross...334
The first two lines present us with a projection of "ire" into a concrete shape moving, as it were, apart from though under the control of the one whose state of being is expressed by it. The projected and expressive shape which here is the "chariot of fire" makes a perfect analogue to the Tyger in our poem. And the analogue is all the more perfect because, just as here it is Christ's "ire" that becomes "a chariot of fire", it is Christ's dreadfulness that in our reading becomes a fire-eyed bright-burning carnivore. The imaginative movement we have seen in The Tyger gets full support.
Then there is the turn: "shone bright". It is akin to our poem's "burning bright". Applied to the Scourge of Christ, it suggests a pointed association of not only intense heat but also keen light with the Divine, and imports into the kindred expression of our poem a presence of divinity.
We catch a similar gloss on that expression from what we read in Jerusalem about the regeneration of the fallen universal manhood of Albion the Giant into the Divine Humanity:
The Breath Divine went forth over the morning hills. Albion rose In anger, the wrath of God breaking, bright flaming on all sides around His awful limbs; into the Heavens he walked, clothed in flames, Loud thund'ring, with broad flashes of flaming lightning & pillars Of fire, speaking the Words of Eternity in Human Forms in direful
The Breath Divine went forth over the morning hills.
Albion rose
In anger, the wrath of God breaking, bright flaming on all
sides around
His awful limbs; into the Heavens he walked, clothed in
flames,
Loud thund'ring, with broad flashes of flaming lightning
& pillars
Of fire, speaking the Words of Eternity in Human Forms
in direful
334. Keynes, ed. cit., p. 749 (The Everlasting Gospel, b, 77.33-34, 42-43, 52-53).
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Revolutions of Action & Passion, thro' the Four Elements on all sides Surrounding his awful Members.335
Revolutions of Action & Passion, thro' the Four Elements
on all sides
Surrounding his awful Members.335
There is nothing to distinguish this wrath of God, bright-flaming on all sides around limbs, loud-thundering in the Heavens, from the Tyger as we have viewed it. To burn or flame or shine bright is for Blake an essentially divine act - just as to be like the Sun is. In The Four Zoas the Divine Countenance is seen as "the bright Light" and in it "a Human Form" which is known to be "the Saviour, Even Jesus".336 In the same poem Blake speaks of "the bright visions of Eternity" in which, at the time of the universal regeneration, all limbs will be bathed by "flames of mental fire".337
A letter to Butts on October 2, 1800, contains a poem whose vision gives the apprehension of Christ as the unity of all things, "One Man", and we get the lines:
Soft consum'd in delight In his bosom Sun bright I remain'd.338
Soft consum'd in delight
In his bosom Sun bright
I remain'd.338
This poem has also the phrase:
Heavenly Men beaming bright...339
And the identical phrase in a transposed shape we get when we hear of the disunited Zoas coming together in a regenerated Albion: even Urizen resumes his divinity in the Fourfold Vision and then he is "bright beaming Urizen".340 Elsewhere Blake tells us what the fallen Gods have to do: the first thing is -
"...in stern repentance They must renew their brightness..."341
"...in stern repentance
They must renew their brightness..."341
335.Ibid., p. 742 (Jerusalem 4, 95, 11.2-11).
336.Ibid., p. 342 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth, 11.43-44).
337.Ibid., p. 359 (ibid., Night the Ninth, 11.89-90).
338.Ibid., p. 805 (The Letters, 16, 11.57-59).
339.Ibid., p. 805 (ibid., 1.50).
340.Ibid., p. 744 (Jerusalem 4, 97, 1.7).
341.Ibid., p. 366 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, 11.370-371).
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And the divine character of burning, flaming, shining, beaming bright or, in some way or other, manifesting brightness and of being like the Sun is indicated negatively, so to speak, from Blake's references to False Religion. He says that Satan has been "permitted... to imitate / The Eternal Great Humanity Divine": hence this False God's advent
from midst of a bright Paved-work Of precious stones by Cherubim surrounded...342
from midst of a bright Paved-work
Of precious stones by Cherubim surrounded...342
Nor is it an accident that Blake writes how "Rahab Babylon" -the delusive and cruel Religion of Rational Morality - appeared:
Glorious as the midday Sun in Satan's bosom glowing, A Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War, Nam'd Moral Virtue, cruel two-fold Monster shining bright, A Dragon red & hidden Harlot which John in Patmos saw,343
Glorious as the midday Sun in Satan's bosom glowing,
A Female hidden in a Male, Religion hidden in War,
Nam'd Moral Virtue, cruel two-fold Monster shining
bright,
A Dragon red & hidden Harlot which John in Patmos
saw,343
Being like the Sun in glory and shining bright are an imitation here, and indeed it is by parading in the appearance of Truth that the false Religion can impose itself and get followed -Truth whose Eternity alone has brightness for its inherent manifestation.
Our notion of a divine Tyger as a work of Christ expressive of his anger is in tune with the movement of Blake's poetic vision.
Quite relevant here is a fine piece of intuitive interpretation by Sir Geoffrey Keynes while discussing the idea embodied in that masterpiece of Blake as Painter - the Illustrations of the Book of Job. What Keynes says can be adduced as one more point to persuade us that Blake could never have intended Urizen to be the Tyger's maker and that this maker could be none else than Christ (with Los incorporated). In the course of explaining "the argument of the spiritual drama of Job as seen
342.Ibid., p. 531 (Milton II, 39, 11.24-25).
343.Ibid., p. 532 (Milton II, 40, 77.19-22).
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by Blake", Keynes remarks: "Blake's God is Divine Humanity (which he sometimes identifies as the Poetic Genius)..."344 After completing his explanation Keynes writes: "Below a pencil sketch of the supreme design of 'When the Morning Stars sang together' Blake has put a 'symbolic' signature - the words done by followed by a series of symbols (1) a straight line, the simplest figure with natural limit, i.e. immortality; (2) a hand; (3) a B, i.e. Blake; (4) an eye; (5) a circle, i.e. symmetry. This indicates Blake's belief that this drawing, the climax of a supreme effort, was created by the Poetic Genius in his own person. It was about 1794 that Blake had written in his poem 'The Tyger' the lines:
What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Twenty-five years later it was his own mortal hand and eye that dared the impossible - and succeeded. The inspired symmetry of this design and of the whole Job series could only have been carried through by the breath of God, that is, of the Poetic Genius, or Imagination."345
If Keynes's reading is right, the "immortal hand or eye" of The Tyger must be Christ's. And an extra consideration in Keynes's favour is that this particular Job-design is such as naturally to recall to Blake's mind The Tyger and prompt a reference in his "symbolic" signature to the creator in the poem. For, the full text illustrated by his picture runs: "When the Morning Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy." The text cannot but join up by way of contrast with the poem's
When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears...
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears...
Indeed, according to Raine, it is these same fallen stars, described as "faded" and "wither'd" in the parallel passage of The
344.Blake Studies (London, 1949), p. 147.
345.Ibid., pp.. 148-149.
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Four Zoas, who in the Job-design are shown as risen again in their brightness.
(i)
Two last touches remain to be added to the commentary which we have constructed from Blake's writings to confirm, clarify and complete our interpretation of The Tyger.
But before we add them we may complete the support we have sought in Blake's works for the meanings we have read in individual turns of language in the poem taken as a self-sufficient unit. Our reading of "deeps" has to be directly supported, though several discussions of ours may have already borne it out in their own course. We have said the "deeps" can truly contrast to the "skies" as hell would to heaven, something abysmal and infernal to something empyreal and glorious. Yet we have added: "if the Tyger is the enemy of the forests of the night, a real depth of hell, a real abysmal existence cannot be put into our 'deeps': the infernal and abysmal would go... with those forests rather than with their opponent... Moreover,... anything lower than the skies is out of place when we have the line -
On what wings dare he aspire?"
We may take a cue from a description346 - outside The Tyger - of a "glorious heaven" turned a "horrible ruin" of "burning dungeons" and "burning wastes" and "fiery cities" and several other frightful or desolating things. There, among "serpents" and "worms" "drawn out from deep to deep", are beheld "the forms of tygers and of Lions". In such a "Chaos" the beings refuse to return to the experience of "Eternity", the possible
golden ascent winding round to the heavens of heavens Within the dark horrors of the Abysses, lion or tiger or scorpion.347
golden ascent winding round to the heavens of heavens
Within the dark horrors of the Abysses, lion or tiger or
scorpion.347
346.Keynes, ed. cit., pp. 313-319 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth).
347.Ibid., p. 318 (ibid., 11.250).
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It is the "Abysses", the "nether world" with its "monsters of the deeps", that alone can be suggested as an alternative to the "skies" or "heavens of heavens" for the origin of the eye-fire of Blake's Tyger. Else this alternative would be a mere poeticism, a rhetorical superficiality: the "deeps" would lack depth.
And the general usage of Blakean poetry allows the needed profundity - a paradox of the godlike which would deserve to be called the glare of a hellish heaven or the sheen of a heavenly hell. For, in this poetry the nouns "deeps" and "deep", which are frequent and completely convertible terms, carry shifting significances. Their convertibleness, already de-ducible from the mention of "monsters of the deeps" and of "serpents" and "worms" "drawn out from deep to deep", can be clinched from the phrases:
Tharmas threw his impetuous flight thro' the deeps of immensity...348 Above, beneath, on all sides round in the vast deep of immensity...349
Tharmas threw his impetuous flight thro' the deeps of
immensity...348
Above, beneath, on all sides round in the vast deep of
immensity...349
The significance required by us is, in general, approached closest in a very early poem of Blake's, To Summer -
when noon upon his fervid car Rode o'er the deep of heaven350 -
when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o'er the deep of heaven350 -
as well as in A Little Girl Lost which is contained in the same series as The Tyger -
When the silent sleep Waves o'er heaven's deep...351
When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven's deep...351
Here we have the ethereal sense which could put our "deeps" essentially on a par with "skies" and lead to the profundity we have particularized.
348.Ibid., p. 320 (ibid., Night the Seventh, 1.3).
349.Ibid., p. 318 (ibid., Night the Sixth, 1.275).
350.Ibid., p. 2 (Poetical Sketches, To Summer, 11.8-9).
351.Ibid., p. 219 (Songs of Experience, A Little Girl Lost, 11.22-23).
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(j)
Now for the two last touches - the "finishing" ones, as it were.
The first elucidates the character of the whole antagonist activity of Urizen-Satan which evoked from Los-Christ the forging of a supernatural Tyger-wrath in the furnace of a celestial smithy out of the flames of a topmost Empyrean whose two aspects of fierce fathomless burning and beautiful limitless brightness are described as "deeps" and "skies". This activity which is of warriors symbolized as stars glittering in forests of the night may be figured forth in terms of what Blake in The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem has dubbed "Entuthon Beni-thon", (sometimes spelt "Benython"), a name seeming to mean - from the Greek "Entuthein" and "Benthos" - "thenceforth in the depths" and matching in diabolical power the one we meet with in the description of Chaos in Paradise Lost:
the dreaded name Of Demogorgon.352
the dreaded name
Of Demogorgon.352
Entuthon Benithon represents the really hellish deeps whose "terrors"353 are, as it were, outdone in a heavenly way by the "deeps" from which Los-Christ fetches the Tyger's eye-fire. The divine harmony disrupted in this hostile state of "Gloom"354 is pictured by Blake:
Mourning for fear of the warriors in the Vale of Entuthon- Benython Jerusalem is scattered abroad like a cloud of smoke thro' non-entity... Till the cloud reaches afar outstretch'd among the Starry Wheels Which revolve heavily in the mighty Void...355
Mourning for fear of the warriors in the Vale of Entuthon-
Benython
Jerusalem is scattered abroad like a cloud of smoke thro'
non-entity...
Till the cloud reaches afar outstretch'd among the Starry
Wheels
Which revolve heavily in the mighty Void...355
These Wheels are of Satan who is called
352.Paradise Lost, Bk. II, 11.964-965.
353.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 623 (Jerusalem 1, 1.24).
354.Ibid., p. 309 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Fifth, 1.149).
355.Ibid., pp. 623-24 (Jerusalem, 5. 11.52-53).
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Prince of the Starry Hosts And of the Wheels of Heaven...356
Prince of the Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven...356
We are also told:
the abstract Voids between the Stars are the Satanic Wheels.357
the abstract Voids between the Stars are the Satanic
Wheels.357
In these Voids Blake places various symbols of Error:
There is the Cave, the Rock, the Tree, the Lake of Udan Adan, The Forest and the Marsh...358
There is the Cave, the Rock, the Tree, the Lake of Udan
Adan,
The Forest and the Marsh...358
In connection with Udan Adan we hear of
Spectrous cloudy sails which drive their immense Constellations over the deadly deeps of indefinite Udan-Adan359
Spectrous cloudy sails which drive their immense
Constellations over the deadly deeps of indefinite
Udan-Adan359
and again:
The Lake of Udan-Adan, Entuthon Benithon, a Lake not of Waters but of Spaces, Perturb'd, black & deadly...360
The Lake of Udan-Adan,
Entuthon Benithon, a Lake not of Waters but of Spaces,
Perturb'd, black & deadly...360
as well as:
The Lake of Udan-Adan in the Forests of Entuthon Benython.361
The Lake of Udan-Adan in the Forests of Entuthon
Benython.361
So Entuthon Benithon, with its Forests, is closely related to, if not even identical with, those "abstract Voids", holding the stars. To define it further we may quote the phrases: "Entuthon of Urizen"362 and
Entuthon Benithon,
356.Ibid., p. 483 (Milton I,
357.Ibid., p. 633 (Jerusalem 1,-13,1.37).
358.Ibid., p. 634 (ibid., 11.38-39).
359.Ibid., p. 625 (ibid., 7, 11.21-22).
360.Ibid., p. 346 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth, 11.224-226).
361.Ibid., p. 512 (Milton, I,
362.Ibid., p. 734 (Jerusalem 4, 88, 1.48).
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A world of deep darkness where all things in horrors are rooted...363
A world of deep darkness where all things in horrors are
rooted...363
Now we come to the cumulative expression about the star-populated, warrior-infested forest-world of spacious gloom belonging to Urizen, and with that expression we return to our starting-point, Jerusalem:
the deeps of Entuthon Benython, A dark and unknown night, indefinite, unmeasurable, without end, Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against Imagination (Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for ever), And there Jerusalem wanders...364
the deeps of Entuthon Benython,
A dark and unknown night, indefinite, unmeasurable,
without end,
Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against
Imagination
(Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed for
ever),
And there Jerusalem wanders...364
Here we have the central theme of our lyric as read by us: it is stated at once symbolically and explicitly, with regard to both sides of the supreme conflict. Only, the statement bears here on the cosmos which is now the scene of the battle between the supernatural opponents. But may we not discern in the very name "Entuthon Benithon" with its suggestion of "thenceforth in the depths" the pointer to a fallen condition in conflict with "the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus" before the cosmos comes into being, a condition marking the stage after which that "dark and unknown night", Urizen's mind of "Abstract Philosophy", can be described as existing "thenceforth" in a cosmic form as distinguished from a previous form in Heaven
When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears?
And water'd heaven with their tears?
As for Los in combination with Christ against Urizen and Entuthon Benithon, we find in the very context of the "dark and unknown night" where "Jerusalem wanders" the presence
363.Ibid., p. 296 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Third, 11. 180-181).
364.Ibid., p. 624 (Jerusalem 1, 5, 11.56-60).
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of Los. There are "the Furnaces of Los"365 and "the Starry Wheels" revolving over them and drawing away Jerusalem.366 Then
Los heard her lamentations in the deeps afar!...367
And we see him fighting with his own "Spectre" -
the Reasoning Power, An Abstract objecting power that Negatives every thing. This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power, And in its Holiness is clos'd the Abomination of Desolation...368
the Reasoning Power,
An Abstract objecting power that Negatives every thing.
This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy Reasoning Power,
And in its Holiness is clos'd the Abomination of
Desolation...368
About this Spectre we read elsewhere in the same poem Jerusalem:
The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.369
The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when
separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws &
Moralities
To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms
& Wars.369
Against this "Spectre" - linking up with the earlier phrase "spectrous clouds" in the lines about Udan-Adan, just as Urizen links up with the "constellations" in those lines through the phrase "the Constellations of Urizen" in The Four Zoas370-against this "Spectre" we may drive part of the speech of Los beginning with "O Spectre" and continuing:
"I know thy deceit & thy revenges, and unless thou desist "I will certainly create an eternal Hell for thee. Listen!
365.Ibid., p. 624 (ibid., 1.50).
366.Ibid., p. 624 (ibid., 11.46-47).
367.Ibid., p. 624 (ibid., 1.66).
368.Ibid., p. 629 (ibid., 10, 11.
369.Ibid., p. 714 (ibid., 3, 74, 11.10-13).
370.Ibid., p. 342 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth, 1.68).
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"Be attentive! be obedient! Lo, the Furnaces are ready to receive thee! "I will break thee into shivers & melt thee in the furnaces of death... "I am inspired. I act not for myself..."371
"Be attentive! be obedient! Lo, the Furnaces are ready to
receive thee!
"I will break thee into shivers & melt thee in the furnaces
of death...
"I am inspired. I act not for myself..."371
"The furnaces of death" here may be taken as a counterpart to the Tyger that in our poem embodies destructive furnace-heat. And we may observe that
Los beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the Furnaces372
Los beheld the Divine Vision among the flames of the
Furnaces372
and that
within the Furnaces the Divine Vision appear'd On Albion's hills, often walking from the Furnaces in clouds And flames among the Druid Temples & the Starry Wheels, Gather'd Jerusalem's Children in his arms & bore them like A Shepherd in the night of Albion which overspread all the Earth.373
within the Furnaces the Divine Vision appear'd
On Albion's hills, often walking from the Furnaces in
clouds
And flames among the Druid Temples & the Starry
Wheels,
Gather'd Jerusalem's Children in his arms & bore them
like
A Shepherd in the night of Albion which overspread all
the Earth.373
As the closing stroke of our picture we may take the verses that follow soon on the contention of Los with the Spectre:
So Los in fury & strength, in indignation & burning wrath. Shudd'ring the Spectre howls, his howlings terrify the night...374
So Los in fury & strength, in indignation & burning wrath.
Shudd'ring the Spectre howls, his howlings terrify the
night...374
So we return to the theme not only of Jerusalem and the Starry Wheels and the night but also of the defeated and distressed power of Urizen under the action of Christ-Los.
There we have the whole drama of The Tyger. The symbols
371.Ibid., p. 627 (Jerusalem 1, 8, 11.7-10, 17).
372.Ibid., p. 696 (ibid., 3, 62, 1.35).
373.Ibid., p. 692 (ibid., 11.5-9).
374.Ibid., p. 629 (ibid., 1, 10, 11.22-23).
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are different in places and the constituent elements of the story do not all hail from the same sources, but all the moods of our lyric clustering round the central theme are repeated - except that our lyric sets its stage in Heaven, not earth, and that there is one mood unique to it: the poet's anxiety and half-doubt at the simultaneous contemplation of Christ the Tyger and Christ the Lamb.
(k)
Finally, the second of the last two touches from Blake's writings. An enriching side-light on the sense in our poem, in distinction from the poet's mood of anxiety and half-doubt, is thrown by an entire lyric of Blake's, which, next to our poem, is his most famous. This lyric is of especial interest to us because it brings out further the Miltonic background and basis of that poem. It is made up of the four stanzas Blake prefixed, very suggestively from our Miltonic standpoint, to his own Milton:
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here? Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold: Bring me my Chariot of fire. I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant Land.375
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here?
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant Land.375
375. Ibid., p. 480-481 (Milton I, Preface).
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Before we attempt, within a milieu of Milton, a rapport between these stanzas and The Tyger, it may not be out of place to touch on a point often discussed: "Whose feet are spoken of in the opening line?"
Bateson376 writes: "A poem that needs to be read in its historical context. Like its two sequels in Jerusalem it follows and clinches symbolically a passage of prose commentary - in this case the 'Preface' to Milton (1804) - in which Blake had expounded aspects of his general theme in more or less non-mythological language. The three lyrics are semi-mythological, the public allegory of the 'mental fight' - a positive pacifism like that preached by Boehme ('fighting must be the watchword, not with tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit') -merging into the private symbols of Albion (the giant who represents mankind as well as England), Jerusalem (the Holy City that is also Albion's 'Emanation' or spiritual counterpart), and Satan (who symbolises at this stage in the mythology the human Reason divorced from Imagination)... the feet of 1.1 are generally taken to be those of Christ (the 'Lamb of God'), but the logic of the poem's structure - a pattern, similar to that in London, of four parallel instances, each two lines long - will not permit this interpretation. The feet are presumably those of Albion who had walked England's mountains in the same period of prelapsarian Innocence when Jerusalem had been built in England. In that case the structural pattern is: (i) human (Albion), (ii) divine (Christ), (iii) 'the Countenance Divine' (God), (iv) human (Jerusalem). A similar interpretation has been proposed by Denis Seurat, Blake and Modern Thought, 1926, p. 85."
It seems to me that Albion has nothing to do with line 1. Nor is Christ there. The simplest and most logical procedure would be to see in the first stanza the same pair as in the second. "The Countenance Divine" of the latter is "the Holy Lamb" of the former and the Jerusalem of the second stanza is the one whose "feet" occur in the first. This uniform interpretation becomes
376. Op. cit., pp. 133-134.
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inevitable as soon as we take the two other lyrics377 which Bateson calls the sequels of our stanzas. They are not only affined in spirit to them but have even some turns of speech in common. The one beginning "The fields from Islington to Marybone" says in its second stanza:
Her little-ones ran on the fields,
The Lamb of God among them seen,
And fair Jerusalem his Bride
Among the little meadows green,378
And the fifth tells us:
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side,
And every English child is seen
Children of Jesus & his Bride.379
The other lyric also refers to Jerusalem who is called England's Sister. England is told in the second stanza:
Thy hills & valleys felt her feet380
and the lyric closes:
And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult, & London's towers
Recieve the Lamb of God to dwell
In England's green & pleasant bowers.381
It is clear that Christ and Jerusalem are the walkers side by side in both the lyrics: Jerusalem's "feet" in the second are on England's "hills & valleys", and she in the first "walks" upon England's "meadows green". The indications appear to be positive that the "feet" which walk together with "the holy Lamb of God" in the Milton-poem are none else than Jerusalem. Moreover, there are phrases in the body of Blake's
377.Keynes, ed. cit., pp. 649-652 (Jerusalem 27), p. 718 (ibid., 11.5-8).
378.L1.7.5-8.
379.L1.16-20.
380.L.5.
381.L1.9-12.
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Jerusalem itself that show "England's mountains" in the lyric to be walked upon by her "in ancient time" and prove Albion or even Christ impossible as the possessor of the lyric's "feet". We find not only Jerusalem saying:
"Albion gave me to the whole Earth to walk up & down, to pour "Joy upon every mountain..."382
"Albion gave me to the whole Earth to walk up & down,
to pour
"Joy upon every mountain..."382
We find also the words:
"Goshen hath follow'd Philistea. Gilead hath join'd with Og. "They are become narrow places in a little and dark land, "How distant far from Albion! his hills & his valleys no more "Receive the feet of Jerusalem..."383
"Goshen hath follow'd Philistea. Gilead hath join'd
with Og.
"They are become narrow places in a little and dark land,
"How distant far from Albion! his hills & his valleys
no more
"Receive the feet of Jerusalem..."383
Finally, we find Jerusalem asked to "overspread all Nations as in Ancient time".384
If it is objected in connection with the Milton-poem that Jerusalem is a city in stanza 2 and cannot have feet, we may point to the fact that in the lyric about the fields from Islington to Marybone "Jerusalem's pillars"385 are mentioned without Jerusalem's being prevented from pairing with Christ and walking with him and even bearing him children. (Surely, nobody would suggest that the "pillars" are her two legs?) In Jerusalem too she is many things, a multiple symbol, and in The Four Zoas she is "a City, yet a Woman".386
There should be no doubt at all that the Milton-poem is about Christ and Jerusalem and their disappearance from England and the ideal of restoring them. This ideal comes into play in the form of "Mental Fight" to be carried on by the speaker, the "I" who is the hero of the piece, against an enemy whose nature is concentrated in a symbol of mechanism. At first sight,
382.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 720 (Jerusalem 4, 79, 11.36-37).
383.Ibid., p. 720 (ibid., 11.13-15).
384.Ibid., p. 744 (ibid., 97, 1.2).
385.Ibid., p. 649 (ibid., 27, 1.2).
386.Ibid., p. 362 (Vala, or The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth, 1.222).
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the hero is the poet or else Blake fused with the author of Paradise Lost returned and regenerate, into whose mouth Blake in Milton puts the lines:
"I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration, "To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour, "To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration, "To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion's covering, "To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination... "These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the murderers "Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal life..."387
"I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of
Inspiration,
"To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the
Saviour,
"To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration,
"To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion's
covering,
"To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with
Imagination...
"These are the destroyers of Jerusalem, these are the
murderers
"Of Jesus, who deny the Faith & mock at Eternal life..."387
At first glance the scene of the battle in the lyric is industrial England of the early nineteenth century. But the mechanism symbolized by the general phrase "These dark Satanic Mills" can hardly be confined to the conditions of a local industrial exploitation in Blake's day; and then the poem's hero can be no single person but must be the Blakean temper in anybody or, to be more Blakean in our terms, this temper in the giant Albion representing mankind no less than the English race. In Jerusalem we meet the regenerate Albion not only
In anger, the wrath of God breaking, bright flaming on all sides around His awful limbs...388
His awful limbs...388
We meet him also using arms and gathering war-cars:
And he Clothed himself in Bow & Arrows, in awful state Fourfold, In the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities, each with his Bow breathing.
And he Clothed himself in Bow & Arrows, in awful state
Fourfold,
In the midst of his Twenty-eight Cities, each with his Bow
breathing.
387.Ibid., p. 533 (Milton II, 41, 11.2-6. 21-22).
388.Ibid., p. 742 (Jerusalem 4, 95, 11.6-7).
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Then each an Arrow flaming from his Quiver fitted carefully... ... & at the clangour of the Arrows of Intellect The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appear'd in Heaven...389
Then each an Arrow flaming from his Quiver fitted
carefully...
... & at the clangour of the Arrows of Intellect
The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appear'd in
Heaven...389
And there is a simile about Albion when he arises in anger:
Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds Struggling to rise above the Mountains; in his burning hand He takes his Bow, then chooses out his arrows of flaming gold...390
Thou seest the Sun in heavy clouds
Struggling to rise above the Mountains; in his burning
hand
He takes his Bow, then chooses out his arrows of flaming
gold...390
In addition we hear Albion calling:
"Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion, "Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient time; "For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day "Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come away!"391
"Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of
Albion,
"Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient time;
"For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day
"Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come
away!"391
However, we cannot stop at this layer of understanding. In Albion was "the wrath of God" and, with "Bow & Arrows", his state was "Fourfold". What is more, just before his cry to Jerusalem we read:
...Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds Of Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in Eternity392
...Then Albion stood before Jesus in the Clouds
Of Heaven, Fourfold among the Visions of God in
Eternity392
- and just after that cry we read:
So spake the Vision of Albion, & in him so spake in my hearing The Universal Father.393
So spake the Vision of Albion, & in him so spake in my
hearing
The Universal Father.393
389. Ibid. , p. 744 (ibid. , 97, l l . 16- 17 ; 98 , 1 . 1 ; p. 745, 98, 11 .7-8).
390. Ibid. , p. 742 (ibid. , 95, 11 . 11 - 1 3 ) .
391. Ibid. , p. 744 (ibid. , 97, l l . l-4).
392. Ibid. , p. 744 (ibid. , 96, J J .43-44).
393. Ibid. , p. 744 (ibid. , 97, l l .5-6).
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What is still more, the "dark Satanic Mills" in the poem itself point us to a yet deeper layer. Bateson394 has well remarked on these "Mills": "a recurrent symbol in the later Prophecies of the mechanical and merely analytical rationalism that Blake described as 'the state called Satan'. The mills are sometimes water-mills, occasionally windmills, usually handmills worked by slave labour, but the symbolic core is always their 'dark Satanic wheels' (Jerusalem, f. 1 2)." To grasp this core we have to mark again from Jerusalem the expression -
And the abstract Voids between the Stars are the Satanic Wheels395
And the abstract Voids between the Stars are the Satanic
Wheels395
and add another from the same work -
...the space of the terrible starry wheels396 -
and reiterate one from Milton:
"O Satan, ... art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts "And of the Wheels of Heaven...?"397
"O Satan, ... art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts
"And of the Wheels of Heaven...?"397
At once the "starry King" Urizen and his opponent Los-Christ are evoked and the atmosphere of The Tyger is essentially around us. The hero of the Milton-lyric deepens from BlakeMilton and the Blakean-tempered Albion to the presence of Los-Christ up in arms against Urizen-Satan in the physical universe and against the outlook which he engenders in the scientific-philosophical mind and to which Blake refers when he writes of
...the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of Creation.398
...the Newtonian Voids between the Substances of
Creation.398
The sole difference between this lyric and The Tyger is that, in
394.Op, cit., p. 134.
395.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 633 (Jerusalem 1, 13, 1.37).
396.Ibid., p. 632 (ibid., 12, 1.51).
397.Ibid., p. 483 (Milton I, 4, 11.9-10).
398.Ibid., p. 528 (ibid., II, 37, 1.46).
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the latter, Los-Christ in direct person is at war in Heaven with the defecting star-angels of Urizen-Satan and with the night in which they are entrenched. But fundamentally the theme in the Milton-lyric is the same as there, and even its "Mental Fight" by means of "Spear" and "Arrows" of inner inspiration echoes the "wars" that are part of "Eden, the land of life"
"With intellectual Spears, & long winged arrows of thought!"399
"With intellectual Spears, & long winged arrows of
thought!"399
Indeed all this is what we may expect from the words in Blake's prose "Preface", which stand immediately before and after the lyric. As if to hint at the sort of activity which the poem would want of us, the immediately preceding words make the exhortation to be "just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in JESUS OUR LORD." And, as if to clarify the nature of the activity expressed in the poem, the immediately succeeding words are the Biblical quotation: " 'Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.' NUMBERS, xi. ch. 29 v." This is a prayer that cannot but recall to our mind Los, "the Spirit of Prophecy",400 "the Eternal Prophet".401
Yes, the air of The Tyger's Supernature touches the terrestrial breath of the later lyric and we feel through all the differences the basic affinity of the two compositions. The Milton-poem starts with a mention of Christ the Lamb and his collective divine manifestation - the Pleroma, the perfect world, Jerusalem. It goes on to the Satanic subversion of this manifestation in our world whose concentrated symbol is England. It continues with an assertion of a bright-burning wrath, the Tyger-spirit, against that subversion, in order to restore the spiritual wholeness of being and life. Separated from the astonished awe, the religious puzzlement of the earlier poem, Blake's vision here gives us, though without the actual Tyger-image, the sense of Christ's Tyger-spirit openly as the com-
399. Ibid . , p. 644 (Jerusalem 2, 38, 1 . 1 5 ) .
400. Ibid . , p. 510 (Milton I , 24, 1 . 7 1 ) .
401. Ibid . , p. 230 (The First Book of Urizen, 13, C h . V , 1 .35).
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plement and champion of his Lamb-spirit.
In this respect the poem re-creates, in its own terms, The Tyger in a more directly Miltonic mood. And the imagery too is more directly Miltonic. Put beside
Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my Arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire,
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire,
and beside
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
a few expressions from Book VI of Paradise Lost, several of which are in passages we have already pressed into service. Commence with God's words to Christ:
"...bring forth all my war: My bow and thunder, my almighty arms, Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh..."402
"...bring forth all my war:
My bow and thunder, my almighty arms,
Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh..."402
Follow up with phrases on Christ's martial expedition against the "godless":
Forth rushed with whirlwind sound The chariot of Paternal Deity, Flashing thick flames...403 He, in celestial panoply, all arm'd... Ascended;... ...beside him hung his bow And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stor'd... He onward came; far off his coming shone...404 Under his burning wheels The steadfast Empyrean shook throughout... Full soon
Forth rushed with whirlwind sound
The chariot of Paternal Deity,
Flashing thick flames...403
He, in celestial panoply, all arm'd...
Ascended;...
...beside him hung his bow
And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stor'd...
He onward came; far off his coming shone...404
Under his burning wheels
The steadfast Empyrean shook throughout...
Full soon
402.Paradise Lost, Bk. VI, 11.712-714.
403.Ibid., 11.749-751.
404.Ibid., 11.760, 762, 763-764, 768.
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Among them he arriv'd, in his right hand Grasping ten thousand thunders,...405 Drove them before him thunderstruck pursu'd With terrors and with furies...406 eternal wrath Burnt after them...407
Among them he arriv'd, in his right hand
Grasping ten thousand thunders,...405
Drove them before him thunderstruck pursu'd
With terrors and with furies...406
eternal wrath
Burnt after them...407
Milton's warrior Christ of Heaven stands behind Blake's Mental Fighter of earth. And the explicit clue to their intimate relationship may be offered from the language of The Everlasting Gospel, which in part we have already related to The Tyger. There we have not only stray phrases on Christ militant, which are in both Milton's Book VI and Blake's Miltonic poem:
his wrath began to burn In Miracles throughout the Land,408
his wrath began to burn
In Miracles throughout the Land,408
"Awake, arise to Spiritual Strife "And thy Revenge abroad display "In terrors at the Last Judgment day..."409
"Awake, arise to Spiritual Strife
"And thy Revenge abroad display
"In terrors at the Last Judgment day..."409
We have also a sustained passage mediating between Milton and Blake and Christologizing the latter's anti-Satanic "Chariot of fire", its darkness-piercing and day-releasing "O clouds unfold!", its Satan-subduing "Mental Fight", its smiting weapons' "burning gold" and its wrathful sleepless "hand":
He bound Old Satan in his Chain, And bursting forth, his furious ire Became a chariot of fire... Where'er his Chariot took its way, These Gates of death let in the day, Broke down from every Chain & Bar;
He bound Old Satan in his Chain,
Where'er his Chariot took its way,
These Gates of death let in the day,
Broke down from every Chain & Bar;
405.Ibid., 11.832-836.
406.Ibid., 11.858-859.
407.Ibid., 11.865-866.
408.Keynes, ed. cit., p. 752 (The Everlasting Gospel, d, 11.56-57).
409.Ibid., p. 753 (ibid., 11.78-80).
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And Satan in his Spiritual War 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...410
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...410
Certain themes are fundamental in Blake's mind and, with varying attitudes and within different frameworks, they keep recurring. Christ contra Satan, Los versus Urizen are two of them, and on occasion they merge either explicitly or implicitly. We can recognize them at all times by their common essentials which often show themselves in identical or similar or analogous verbal movements. These movements are unusually apparent in lines from the Milton-lyric and the expressions quoted from The Everlasting Gospel, and they go back in both to Book VI of Paradise Lost. At the same time they draw us subtly into The Tyger which, even more than they, is basically affined to the War in Heaven in Milton's epic. As between the expressions from The Everlasting Gospel and the lyric prefixed to Blake's Milton, the latter is obviously a more clearly defined re-creation of the Miltonic theme, with the earth-scene under an English guise substituted for the battlefield in the Empyrean. As such, it is organically linked through Milton with The Tyger and illuminates its sense. Suppose the sense were conveyed in the Miltonic imagery of Christ's battle, yet were transposed ostensibly to the human and psychological key. Suppose it were changed from the context of a spiritual "quiz" to the straightforward one of an idealistic manifesto, and a symbol of dark mechanism replaced the warrior stars and that of hill-cloudedness the forests of the night. Then the sense of The Tyger, as we have read it, can be caught in a new and less enigmatic form which also shows with a compact vision from Blake's own works the Miltonic basis of our poem.
410. Ibid., p. 749 (ibid., b, 11.32-34, 39-47).
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