Hello and welcome to the Discourse. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the Prophetic works by William Blake in which he imitated the Biblical prophecy while expressing his own mythical elements and intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary ideas. Blake experimented with relief etching for this book. It is an illuminated prose poem, the text, decoration, and drawings of which were etched by Blake on copper plates. His wife Catherine helped in coloring and printing the etched plates on paper. The short book in verse was published in 1789. The book is divided into ten sections that can be considered as chapters:
1) "The Argument" 2)“The Voice of the Devil" 3)"A Memorable Fancy" (1)
4) “Proverbs of Hell" 5)"A Memorable Fancy" (2) 6)"A Memorable Fancy" (3)
7) "A Memorable Fancy" (4) 8) "A Memorable Fancy" (5) 9) "A Song of Liberty"
10) "Chorus"
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an Illuminated Prose Poem with many illustrations and proverbs written in Free Verse style with no patterned rhythm.
The main idea of the book is to blur the lines of difference between heaven and hell, good and evil, and presenting them as contraries necessary for each other. On Plate 1, Blake etched the Book Cover which depicts the earth with heaven above it and hell below the earth. Two naked figures embrace in flame while human spirits are depicted moving upwards in the sky.
William Blake used Symbolism to present his ideas in this book. The flames of hell, traditionally used to symbolize evil and eternal suffering, seem to give rise to trees and living human beings. At the same time, angels, who typically symbolize the divine and are god's messengers or helpers for humanity, are depicted as closed-minded, insolent, and inactive. Blake also used Animal symbolism throughout the book. One of the most notable is in the Proverbs of Hell where he mentioned The "tigers of wrath" and the "horses of instruction." The raw energy of the tiger is opposed to the relentless forward-plodding of the horse. The proverbs state that the tiger is the wiser of the two. Blake used metaphor to compare angels with horses of instruction and devils as tygers of wrath, suggesting that Evil is creative energy while good is passive reason and obedience.
Summary of The Marriage Heaven and Hell:
The book begins with ‘The Argument’ etched in Plates 2-3. It constitutes a poem whose first line is "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air". A character named Rintrah is not happy. He's raging out, while a "just man" keeps walking along the "Vale of Death." Rintrah stands for righteous wrath and presages revolution. The poems assert the theme of the book. The poet expresses the necessity of contraries in existence, particularly in the case of reason and energy. The righteous (the Angels) declare that reason is good and is associated with Heaven and the soul, and energy is evil and is associated with Hell and the body.
The poet states that “Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate” are the cause of progression and are necessary for human existence. The poet then redefines good and evil suggesting, “Good” is “the passive that obeys reason,” and “Evil” is only “the active springing from Energy”.
The Voice of the Devil: Plates 4-6
The second chapter is written in prose. In The Voice of the Devil, Blake suggests that all religions and all the conventional angels have committed an error by dividing body and soul and associating evil with bodily energy and good with reason and the soul. The poet corrects this historical wrong and declares that the life-promoting energies that emerge through natural and imaginative desire are the true sources of joy. Body and soul are not two separate entities, and desire should not be restrained by reason. Blake also mentioned John Milton and Paradise Lost in this chapter declaring “Milton was a true poet” who was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake does so because, in Paradise Lost, Satan is portrayed as more energetic and appealing than God and the other angels. Chapter 2 ends halfway down the 6th plate.
A Memorable Fancy (1): Plate 6-7
This chapter can be seen as a ground for the upcoming chapter Proverbs of Hell. In this, the poet depicts one of his fancies. He was “walking among the fires of Hell,” when he collected some “Proverbs of Hell” to demonstrate Hell’s wisdom to the earthly people. As he returns back, he sees a Devil etching some words on a rock which says –
“How do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way,
is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?”
Proverbs of Hell Plate 7-11
It is the most popular part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The chapter contains 70 proverbs that the poet claims he collected during his visit to Hell. Obviously, these are aphorisms of William Blake. Many of these aphorisms extol the life of energy and natural instinct over reason. In addition, Blake also added a paragraph about the nature of poetry and religion. It is again an imitation of the Bible which is supposedly the the best-known collection of proverbs.
Some of the interesting Proverbs of Hell are –
* “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
* “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."
* “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.”
* “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unattended desires."
* “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
* “The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”
After these 70 proverbs, Blake added a paragraph offering his ideas about organized religion. He says that ancient religion (Paganism) began as a kind of poetry, in which each object in the natural world was turned into a “natural deity” based on what their “enlarged and numerous senses” could perceive. Over time, people began to abstract these deities from the real objects in the world that they were intended to describe. So began priesthood and organized religion, leading people to forget that “All deities reside in the human breast” and giving churches and their administrators power over others. Gradually, people forgot that all those gods actually live in the human imagination.
A Memorable Fancy (2) Plates 12-14
In this fancy, the poet converses with Biblical Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. The poet questions how the prophets know that God is speaking the truth. The prophets' answer, “a firm persuasion that a thing is so” makes it true. They also suggest that “Poetic Genius” is the most important way of accessing the truth. The speaker then prophesizes that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years” and that will change this ‘corrupt and finite’ world into ‘infinite and holy’. The poet again stresses that the prophets must correct the inadvertent mistakes they committed like separating body and soul. He exhorts people to widen their thoughts and says –
* “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."
A Memorable Fancy (3) Plate 15-17
The poet fancies visiting a printing house in Hell that has 66 chambers.
Each chamber contains different creatures: dragons, vipers, eagles, lions, and eventually men. These represent the progressive improvement of humankind’s ability to perceive the world. This chapter is illustrated with a picture of five sad-looking men huddled together on the floor. The text begins as
* “Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence.”
The poet then divides people into two categories, one is ‘Prolific’ or creators, or producers, and the other is ‘Devourers’ or consumers. He states that these two kinds are enemies by nature but religion tries to bring them together. If you have read Ayn Rand’s novella ‘Anthem,’ or her novel ‘The Fountainhead’ or her magnum opus ‘Atlas Shrugged’, you may find a similarity between Blake’s ideas and Rand’s Objectivism.
A Memorable Fancy (4) Plates 17-22
An angel appears and warns the poet that they are doomed to a “hot burning dungeon.” The poet requests the angel to show him his fate. The angel takes him to a stable, to a church, to a tomb, to a mill, and finally into an Abyss. Leviathan, a monstrous sea creature appears right then and the angel is scared away. As soon as the angel goes away, the Abyss vanishes too and the poet finds himself standing at the bank of a calm river. He listens to a man singing a song on the bank,
* “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.”
The poet realizes that the Abyss was just a creation of the angel. He seeks and catches him and accuses him of threatening him. He then shows the angel his fate by taking him to a site where monkey-like creatures are fighting among themselves and devouring each other. The poet runs away from the scene with a skull in his hands. He then checks the skull and finds a book of Aristotle. He embraces it while dismissing the Angel as a useless philosopher. The poet then criticizes Emanuel Swedenborg and claims that his writings only rely on unoriginal discussions with the angels while he never tried to talk with the devils. He claims that the writings of Dante and Shakespeare are better.
A Memorable Fancy (5) Plates 22-24
The poet imagines an argument between an angel and a devil. The devil claims –
* “The worship of God is Honouring his gifts in other men."
The angel opposes him and says that Christ alone should be worshiped, but the devil points out that Christ himself broke all of the Ten Commandments in one way or another. Struggling to answer, the angel agrees. It is then revealed that the angel chose to be a devil himself and became a friend of the poet. The angel and the poet now read the Bible of Hell together.
A Song of Liberty: Plates 25-27
It is a short poem in which the poet extols his triumphant declaration of the superiority of devils over angels. He turns it into a political discourse and links the devils with the French and American Revolutions, stating that –
* “Empire is no more and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease."
Chorus: Plate 27;
After the song of liberty, the chorus adjoins while targeting the religious authorities and blaming them for being the institutions of oppression.
The book ends with the declaration –
* “For every thing that lives is Holy."
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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