WILLIAM BLAKE’S THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL A FORMAL ANALYSIS
Author: Kathleen D. Hester Publisher: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=28027 Publish Date: Review Date: Status:📚
Annotations
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To Blake man is the center and controller of the universe, and his own role as poet is to awaken in every man the sense of that freedom belonging to him as a human being. In the Marriage two sections in paticular embody these convitions, “the arguement” and “the song of liberty.” Within these two poems Blake presents a full cycle, showing in the “Arguement” the growing restlessness of the just man subdued by tyrants an in the “Song” the just mans successful rebellion. It is in this sense that the two poems are essentially related: events in the “Arguement” cause those in the “Song.” After examining the two parts closely Blake’s intentions become clear.
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The opening and closing couplets of the poem are the same, conveying a mood of foreboding and seething unrest: “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air. Hungry clouds swag on the deep.” The closely controlled language produces a terse and ominous sense of something about to burst with relentless fury. There is also a sense of terror in the “hungry clouds” that “swag on the deep” and seem ot threaten the world over which they hover.
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Any particular interpertation is one-sided and only partially correct because Blake’s purpose in the whole work is to include the recurring pattern of all history as well as the particular manifestation in his own age. He goes to the Bible for the “Arguement’s” pattern and in particular to Isaiah: xxxiv and xxxv
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the “Arguement” can essentially be reduced quite simply to this: the just man follows his life on earth, but grows meek in its undisturbed pattern. Life becomes ritual instead of action; his domestication produced bees in barren places and roses in places where thorns naturally grow. HIs creativity finally “plants” the perilous path of life which becomes almost a paradise with its rivers and springs producing even the birth of life form what was red clay and bleached bones. Finally the villian seeing the ease and fertility of the path drives the just man out and inhabits the “garden” himself. Adopting the habits of the just man this usurping “serpent walks in mild humility,” and the just man rages lion-like in the wilds.
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The “Arguement” parellels the tale of the unjust while the “Song” shows the final triumph of the just.
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Further necessity for such a “paean of liberty” as Flowman calls the ” Song” is pointed out in a Master’s thesis submitted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by David Passler. The paper is titled “Visual Meaning in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and makes theis point: If the “Song” is left out “the Marriage ends on a seemingly bleak note: at the bottom of plate Twenty-Four is a picture of a naked man, terrified and crawling on all fours beneath the trunks of two twisted trees. The identification of the man is definitely Nebuchadnezzar bevause Blake made a larger print of the same design in 1795, in which the man is named. Prassler goes on to say that for Blake this king is an emblem not only of the primal man but also the man who denies the validity of true vision and chooses to worship false gods. The picture is described more fully in Daniel 4:33, the source for Blake’s drawing: “he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his hairs were grown like eagle’s feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.” It is, as Prassler points out, a terrifying picture of materialism. Such pessimism is not in line with Blake’s view of man’s future which can be found instead in the final chorus of the “Song”: Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, whom tyrant, he calls free: lay the bound or build the roof Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not! For every thing that lives is Holy. The Final line especially sums up all that Blake propounds in the “Body” of the Marriage itself and is the fit ending for the whole work
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In the “Song” their is a continuation of the imagery introduced in the “Arguement.” The smoke of Rinttrah has burst into actual flames. The child born of the “Eternal Female” (probabaly a symbol of the earth) is called “the newborn fire.” As the tyrant kind hurls him through the night the description is of fire: “the fiery limbs, the flaming hair, show like the sinking sun into the western sea.” Fire is also used to describe this child in other passages.
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Another image continued form the “Arguement” is that of the just man unjustly subdued. Here it is found in the new hope of all nations paralyzed by some form of tyranny.
- … France, rend down thy dungeon!
- Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome!
- Cast thy keys, O Rome, intoo the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling,
- And weep. (K. 159)
The final victory of the newboirn babe over law is a triumph for the just men, a fitting sequal to the “Argument.” The message of the “Song” is about birth and triumph of the spirit of liberty.
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All subjugated lands hear and wait; prophecies and hopes of liberation run through each. When the infant is brought before the king, the jealous ruler flings him through the night and into the western sea. The sea however flees from the child, and the kind and his followers unable to stay in command fall into the wilderness left where the sea once was. In a last attempt to retain power the ruler “promulgates his ten commands” while his son of fire stamps all law to dust and frees the world from empire declaring “every thing that lives is Holy” (K. 160).
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The most impprotant theme in the “Song” is the revolt against all orthodox law. As its prototype Blake uses the “ten commands” or “stony law,” representing all law and his particualr condemnation of the Ten Commandments, the fierce, all-just laws of thw Old Testament God.