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The Death and Resurrection of Milton According to the Gospel of Blake

1977; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 3; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1977.0040

1913-4835

Ross Woodman,

Moravian Church and William Blake

T H E D E A T H A N D R E S U R R E C T I O N OF M I L T O N A C C O R D I N G T O T H E G O S P E L OF B L A K E ROSS WOODMAN University of Western Ontario In 1757, the year of Blake's birth, Swedenborg witnessed the Last Judgement in a vision and accordingly inaugurated the New Jerusalem Church to acknow­ ledge the Second Coming. On 13 April 1789, Blake in London attended an open Swedenborgian Conference and signed a declaration affirming that everything Swedenborg had written was true.1 Invitations to join the church, however, he resisted, largely because he saw in it a tendency to interpret the workings of the spirit according to the legalized dictates of the letter. Swedenborg had been one of the leading scientists of his generation and in becoming a prophet at the age of fifty-seven he was unable to leave the natural philosopher behind. Despite Swedenborg's rationalism, there was much in his writings that Blake genuinely agreed with, though by 1790 he knew he would rather create a system of his own than be enslaved by another man's. But, having created a system, how could he avoid the trap into which Swedenborg had fallen? How could he avoid the tyranny lurking within system itself? Blake's answer, at least in his Mar­ riage of Heaven and Hell, was to accommodate system to the obvious foolish­ ness of the enterprise. He would declare himself a prophet in the guise of a clown. He would come on seriously playing the fool. It is now, he writes, thirty-three years since Swedenborg announced the Second Coming. And what had happened? Swedenborg had remained at the tomb attending the cast-off linen. He would therefore himself arise, now in his thirty-third year, and ironically prove Swedenborg right. Wearing the apoc­ alypse like the mask of a clown, Blake suggests amid accounts of dinner with Ezekial and Isaiah (Ezekial complaining that he had to eat dung) that he was indeed the promised one. For those unwilling to believe that "Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise".2he suggests a reading of Isaiah, chapters thirty-four and thirty-five. All of this, he implies, had come to pass in the person of a lower middle-class Londoner who clearly knew the popular street ballads, the broad-sides, the more scurrilous cartoons, who was tough minded, outrageous, ribald and gay, who hated religion, loved sex, conversed with devils, tormented angels, and moved in radical circles the way Chaucer moved among the pilgrims. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell at once establishes Blake's eccentric apocalyptic stance and, though it would grow English Studies in Canada, iii, 4 , W in te r 1 9 7 7 417 progressively darker and more grim as the years passed and the epic took shape, it nevertheless remained, like Chaplin at his best, outrageously human, satiric, and gay. Being by rational or Deistical standards mad, Blake, like Lear's fool, was determined in his Marriage to enjoy the privileges of the insane. He would both play the fool and persist in his folly, as indeed the true Christian must. And he would do it in a Bedlam of his own, his “ Printing house in Hell" (Plate 15), where, walking among its fires, enjoying its torments and insanity, he would etch his own diabolical scripture "in the infernal method, by corrosives" (Plate 14). This method, melting away everything that is apparent, obvious and superficial, would raise and support "the infinite which was hid" (Plate 14). Not only Swedenborg, but Milton and the Bible itself would be subjected to the same acid bath in his own corrosive brain. Blake's method of relief etching by corrosives, a method which he said his dead brother had revealed to him in a dream, becomes in his poetry an image of his own creative imagination engaged in the ceaseless mental fight to build Jerusalem. Using an image similar to one later used by Keats, Blake, in...