The Portable William Blake Read Free Page B

of the American and French Revolutions. Blake is against everything that submits, mortifies, constricts and denies. Mystics are absent-minded reactionaries; they accept indifferently everything in the world except the barriers that physical existence presents to the soul’s inner quest. Blake is a revolutionary. He ceased to be a revolutionary in the political sense after England went to war with France and tried to destroy the revolution in Europe. That was less out of prudent cowardice—though like every other radical and free-thinker of the time he lived under a Tory reign of terror—than because he had lost faith in political action as a means to human happiness. Even in politics, however, his libertarian thought became a challenge to all the foundations of society in his time. Blake is not only unmystical in the prime sense of being against the mystic’s immediate concerns and loyalties; he is against all accepted Christianity. He is against the churches,
    Remove away that black’ning church:
Remove away that marriage hearse:
Remove away that place of blood:
You’ll quite remove the ancient curse.
    Against priesthood:
    And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
    Against the “moral law.” He denies that man is born with any innate sense of morality—all moral codes are born of education—and thinks education a training in conformity. He is against all belief in sin; to him the tree in Eden is the gallows on which freedom-seeking man is hanged by dead-souled priests. He savagely parodied a Dr. Thornton’s new version of the Lord’s Prayer:
    Our Father Augustus Caesar, who art in these thy Substantial Astronomical Telescopic Heavens, Holiness to Thy Name or Title, & reverence to thy Shadow.... Give us day by day our Real Taxed Substantial Money bought bread, deliver from the Holy Ghost whatever cannot be taxed...
     
    He is against every conception of God as an omnipotent person, as a body, as a Lord who sets in train any lordship over man:
    Thou art a Man, God is no more,
Thine own humanity learn to adore.
    He believes that all restraint in obedience to a moral code is against the spirit of life:
    Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair,
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits & beauty there.
    Blake is against all theological casuistry that excuses pain and admits evil; against sanctimonious apologies for injustice and the attempt to buy bliss in another world with self-deprivation in this one. The altar is a place on which the serpent has vomited out its poison; the priest is a blind old man with shears in his hand, to cut the fleece off human sheep. Sex is life, and no one can be superior to it or honestly content with less than true gratification:
    What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women in men do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
    Restraint, in fact, follows from the organized injustice and domination in society:
    The harvest shall flourish in wintry weather
When two virginities meet together:
     
    The King & the Priest must be tied in a tether
Before two virgins can meet together.
    He is against all forms of human exploitation, and all rationalizations of it in human prejudice:
    And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
    Against war, especially holy ones; against armies, and in pity for soldiers; against the factory system, the labor of children, the evaluation of anything by money.
    In “London,” one of his simplest and greatest poems, Blake paints the modem city under the sign of man’s slavery, the agony of children, the suffering Soldier and the Whore:
    I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
     
    In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every