<I>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</I>: Romantic
Blake's attempt at reconciliation between good and evil
The Romantic period produced more poets who, at one time or another, aspired to become philosophers than in any other period in English literature. The Romantic poets felt a need for a metaphysical structure that would, conceptually, make explicit the mind set that had emerged from am era of revolutionary change in art, politics, and society. William Blake is one the philosophical poets of the era whose works attempt to get at philosophical truth through imaginative means. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake attempts a reconciliation between good and evil through his awareness that the moral codes of society limit creative freedom.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell opens with an ?Argument?, which describes how the ?just man? has been driven from his original state in Eden to become an outcast wandering in the wilderness. The ?just man? represents the meek peasant coming out from under the feudal shadow into the ?wilderness?, the first stage of the Revolution. In the first lines of the reader is told that ?Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep?, thus introducing an abstract personification. Rintrah may be understood to be a voice of the poet chastising society and welcoming the era of revolutionary change occurring in Europe, or as Hal Saunders-White writes,?Rintrah may be taken as the spokesperson for Blake?s honest indignation?(18).
Blake?s apparent enemy in ?The Argument? is any confining state upon society and the individual. Blake recognizes that the tensions involved in the formation of culture are abstracted by society into morality:
Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is heaven; Evil is hell.
Freud supports this as, for him, id impulses are designated as evil by society because their indulgence would retard the "process of sublimination by which culture achieves its end"(Rickman 215). "Energy" is the id and "the passive that obeys reason" is the conservative trend in culture. In Blake?s view, these trends work as obstacles to the creative flow he believes to be within every man.
In "The Voice of the Devil", Blake analyzes the religious mind's attitude towards the contraries of ?attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate?:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
1. That man has two real existing principles, viz. a body and a soul.
2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body, and that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. That God will torment man in eternity for following his energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:
1. Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses (the chief inlets of soul in this age).
2. Energy is the only life and is from the body, and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
3. Energy is eternal delight.
These contraries, as Blake writes, are ?necessary to human existence?. Blake believes that man must be allowed to fully experience all that life has to offer in order to reach his full potential. "Energy is eternal delight": man should express his emotions with utter freedom. But, Blake knows that society (reason) can control man's freedom "till it is only the shadow of desire".
In the "Proverbs of Hell", Blake calls readers to recognize the value of creativity and the enslavement of it by society: "In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom": Blake feels that the revolution and the "process of rehumanization" (Keynes 149) are manifestations of the liberation of human creativity that has been repressed by society's rigid morality. Blake tells readers to "Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth" emphasizing the emotional sterility and lack of creativeness that marks monarchy. Blake prefers passion to reason: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction" thus supporting revolution in order to gain creative freedom. The "Proverbs of Hell"(87-8) are Blake's commentary on the inadequacy of society: "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". Blake asserts that the world can only be fully opened through the free, unrestricted use of creativity.
All nature is human for Blake. When he looks at nature he sees man and man's creative ability: "Where man is not, nature is barren". The "Proverbs of Hell" contain Blake?s message that restrictive moral laws, oppression in any form, perception that objectifies, and a reliance on pure rational and analytical thought all restrain man's creativity and energy.
The second "Memorable Fancy" concerns the process of perception. In this section, Blake has a conversation with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Blake believes that every man can reach the visionary power of the prophets if he chooses: "For the cherub with his flaming sword is herby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt". Blake's attitude towards life was "corrosive to all fixed patterns affecting human freedom"(Waffle 611).
The fourth "Memorable Fancy" is a visit to hell reached by means of a path through "a stable, and through a church, and down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill". The church and church vault are symbols of the rigid morals placed on society by religion. The stable and mill are symbols of self-enclosure. Blake's vision of hell is a replica of his society filled with threatening objects: a "Leviathan" whose "forehead was divided into streaks . . . like those on a tiger [sic]" that intimidates "with all the fury of a spiritual existence". The subhuman nature of hell's inhabitants stands as a reminder of what strict moral codes does to creativity.
In "Opposition is true friendship", Blake cries out against "systematic reasoning":"I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." He tells readers that creativity reaches out for discovery of something new for ?he only holds a candle in sunshine?.
In the last ?Memorable Fancy?, Blake writes that man must be allowed to reach freely into the depths of himself to find creativity. Herbert Marcuse writes that the artsist is originally a man who turns from reality "because he cannot come to terms with the demand for renunciation of instinctual satisfaction as it is first made and who then in fantasy allows full play to his ambitious wishes"(159): ?The worship of God is honouring Leslie 5 [sic] his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God".
A "Song of Liberty" is meant to be a reminder of the significance of the French Revolution as a representation of the growth of creativity. Blake tells readers that nature itself was shaken by the revolution: "the Eternal Female groaned" and that political change was to be seen as possible: "It was heard over all the earth: Albion's coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint!". The "Song of Liberty? at the end of the work celebrates the casting out of the French monarchy.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell teaches that the essence of humanity lies in creative thought. Blake points out in a language that is understood by all that society?s strictness and tendency to label things as good or evil work only to oppress the never ending flow of creativity that is inside every man. He shows that the revolution was not only a revolt against monarchy but a revolt against the rigid moral codes set down on them by society.
Works Cited
Keynes, Geoffrey. The Complete Writings of William Blake. London: Oxford UP, 1966.
Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.
Rickman, John. A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.
Waffle, T.P. ?The Blakean Intellect?. The Hudson Review 20(1967-8): 610-14.
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