The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

So last time we were looking at the Enlightenment history leading up to the work of William Blake.

We looked at his two most famous works, The Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

We didn't give them a whole lot of justice, honestly.

Like, we definitely could have read deeper, we definitely could have talked about them more.

With Blake here, we're seeing a bit of a transformation.

Yeah.

As we saw in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake sees the role of the poet and the prophet as being essentially kind of the same.

As we saw with his sort of little, you know... scene with Ezekiel and Isaiah, he does not consider the poet to be in some way beholden to a vision of reality.

the pledge when love is bright and whole again i'll sing like the bee's weather i'll set my colors up again like the cock pheasant's feather i'll find a note to make me one with lyric birds that sing the sun i'll fill my songs with palmers buds and sprigs of thorn for whitsun day and they shall dance as willow rods and shine with garlands of the may i'll be a theme that takes the spring from bushes where the blackbirds sing i'll walk among my sheep again and turn my steps to numbers when love is bright and whole again and fear has gone to slumbers with wings again and flowers and stars to be my colored calendars nunc dimittis i have seen the plover's wing and the gray willow bough the sandy bubbling spring the hawk over the plough and now instructed so i am content to go songs of the lake and wood of water and wind i have heard and i have understood according to thy word what then is now to learn seeward o soul return though i shall walk again nor spring nor winter field yet surely in my brain are spring and winter sealed earth you have shown me all i am ready for the call Persuasion by John Drinkwater, read for LibriVox.org. Then I asked, Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so? He replied, All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains, but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.

Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1. at any moment love unheralded comes and is king then as with a fall of frost the buds upon the hawthorn spread are withered in untimely burial so love occasion gone his crown puts by and as a beggar walks unfriended ways with but remembered beauty to defy the frozen sorrows of unseptered days or in that later travelling he comes upon a bleak oblivion and tells himself again again forgotten tombs are all now that love was and blindly spells his royal state of old a glory cursed saying i have forgot and that's the worst two if we should part upon that one embrace and set far courses ever each from each with all our treasure but a fading face and little ghostly syllables of speech should beauty's moment never be renewed and moons on moons look out for us in vain and each but whisper from a solitude to hear but echoes of a lonely pain still in a world that fortune cannot change should walk those two that once were you and i those two that once when moon and stars were strange poets above us in an april sky heard a voice falling on the midnight sea mute and forever but for you and me three this nature this great flood of life this cheat that uses us as bubbles for her coat takes love that should be nothing but the beat of blood for its own beauty by the throat saying you are my servant and shall do my purposes or utter bitterness shall be your wage and nothing come to you but stammering tongues that never can confess undaunted then in answer here i cry you wanton that control the hand of him who masquerades as wisdom in a sky where holy holy sing the cherubim i will not pay one penny to your name though all my body crumble into shame four woman i once had whimpered at your hand saying that all the wisdom that i sought lay in your brain that you were as the sand should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought i should have read in you the character of oracles that quick a thousand lays looked in your eyes and seen accounted there solomon's legion for bewildered praise now have i learned love as love is i take your hand and with no inquisition learn all that your eyes can tell and that's to make a little reckoning and brief then turn away and in my heart i hear a call i love i love i love and that is all v when all the hungry pain of love i bear and in poor lightless thought but burn and burn and wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere yet can no word of revelation learn when endlessly the scales of yea and nay in dreadful motion fall and rise and fall when all my heart in sorrow i could pay until at last were left no tear at all then if with tame or subtle argument companions come and draw me to a place where words are but the tappings of content and life spreads all her garments with a grace i curse that ease and hunger in my heart back to my pain and lonely to depart six not anything you do can make you mine for enterprise with equal charity and duty as in love elect will shine the constant slave of mutability nor can your words for all their honey breath ousting the speech of many an older rhyme and though my ear deliver them from death one day or two it is so little time nor does your beauty in its excellence excel a thousand in the daily sun yet must i put a period to pretence and with my logic's catalogue have done for act and word and beauty are but keys to unlock the heart and you dear love are these seven never the heart of spring had trembled so as on that day when first in paradise we went afoot as novices to know for the first time what blue was in the skies what fresher green than any in the grass and how the sap goes beating to the sun and tell how on the clocks of beauty pass minute by minute till the last is done but not the new birds singing in the brake and not the buds of our discovery the deeper blue the wilder green the ache for beauty that we shadow as we see made heaven but we as love's occasion brings took these and made them paradisal things the lilacs offer beauty to the sun throbbing with wonder as eternally for sad and happy lovers they have done with the first bloom of summer in the sky yet they are newly spread in honour now because for every beam of beauty given out of that clustering heart back to the bough my love goes beating from a greater heaven so be my love for good or sorry luck bound it has virtue on this april eve that shall be there for ever when they pluck lilacs for love and though i come to grieve long at a frosty tomb there still shall be my happy lyric in the lilac tree nine when they make silly question of my love and speak to me of danger and disdain and look by fond old argument to move my wisdom to docility again when to my prouder heart they set the pride of custom and the gossip of the street and show me figures of myself beside a self diminished at their judgment seat then do i sit as in a drowsy pew to hear a priest expounding the heavenly will defiling wonder that he never knew with stolen words of measured good and ill for to the love that knows their counselling out of my love contempt alone i bring x not love of you is most that i can bring since what i am to love you is the test and should i love you more than anything you would but be of idle love possessed a mere love wandering in appetite counting your glories and yet bringing none finding in you occasions of delight a thief of payment for no service done but when of laboring life I make a song and bring it to you, as that were my reward, to let what most is me to you belong, then do I come of high possessions, Lord, and loving life more than my love of you, I give you love more excellently true.

11. what better tale could any lover tell when age or death his reckoning shall write than thus love taught me only to rebel against these things the thieving of delight without return the gospellers of fear who loving yet deny the truth they bear sad suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear the cloth of gold they would but dare not wear and love gave me great knowledge of the trees and singing birds and earth with all her flowers wisdom i knew and righteousness in these i lived in their atonement all my hours love taught me how to beauty's eye alone the secret of the lying heart is known this then at last we may be wiser far than love and put his folly to our measure yet shall we learn poor wizards that we are that love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure we bid him come and light an eager fire and he goes down the road without debating we cast him from the house of our desire and when at last we leave he will be waiting and in the end there is no folly but this to counsel love out of our little learning for still he knows where rotten timber is and where the boughs for the long winter burning and when life needs no more of us at all love's word will be the last that we recall End of Selected Poems of John Drinkwater

Here's golf legend John Daly.

Blake considers both part of a single whole, even if he will occasionally publish the Songs of Innocence without the Songs of Experience.

Meanwhile, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? was popular by Blake's standards, but was not nearly as popular as the Songs of Innocence.

So pay attention to what Blake considers valuable, how he marries heaven and hell, how he redefines and recontextualizes the God and the heaven that Milton has tried to stay faithful toward.

We're going to get a very different picture, and that picture is just going to get wilder the more Blake we read.

That's okay.

With our newest book that we have read thanks to you, Preacher.

You recommended it to us.

It is A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis.

Yeah, man.

Thank you so much for that.

I'm, I'm sorry in advance for recommending you reading this book.

I feel like it's kind of mean.