The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Blake · an illuminated epic in two books · title page dated 1804, the plates etched and printed in the years after · relief-etched on copper, printed by Blake and finished by hand · four copies of 45 to 50 plates, the fullest sequence followed and the Preface counted as part of the work · scored as words and designs together, read from knowledge; English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Illuminated epic; the English epic answered by its own author brought back, in long unrhymed lines with a prose preface and a lyric, word and design etched on one plate
Mythos
The descent to the underworld, the self-sacrifice of the redeemer and the reunion of the divided self; the selfhood that accuses as Satan; the emanation that follows the poet down
Phase
Two books of one moment, the first carrying the Bard’s Song and Milton’s descent, the second Beulah, the lark and Ololon’s descent; title page dated 1804, plates etched and printed in the years after
Presentation
Relief-etched plates printed by Blake and finished by hand, 45 to 50 by copy; four copies, differing in the number and order of plates, the Preface standing in two
Register
From the Bard’s refrain and the confession of the selfhood to the catalogues of counties and churches, the lark and the wild thyme; prose address, short-lined lyric, long line
Scale
Eternity and a cottage garden at Felpham; six thousand years in a pulsation of the artery, all space in a globule of blood; one dead poet, one living one
Governing Proposition
The poet of English Puritanism hears a song in Eternity, sees that his own selfhood is the accuser it describes, and goes down into death to put that self off, entering the left foot of a living engraver in a cottage at Felpham. The wager of the book is that the reformer becomes the accuser he opposes unless he annihilates his own selfhood, and that every moment of time, opened from within, holds the whole of history: so a poem of two books tells one instant, and its hero is the precursor himself.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title page of Milton a Poem is dated 1804, and it carries as its motto the words of the poet it is named for: “To Justify the Ways of God to Men”. It first announced twelve books. The figure was later reduced to two, and two is what the poem has, Book the First much the longer. The subject is the author of the epic the motto comes from, John Milton, dead for well over a century, brought back out of heaven into the poem. The inheritance the poem swerves from is also its hero.
Blake made the book by his own method. The words were lettered in reverse on the copper and the metal bitten away round them and round the designs, so that text and picture stood in relief together and printed from one plate. He printed the sheets himself, in colour, and finished them by hand. The trade that fed him was reproductive engraving, cutting other men’s pictures for other men’s books; this book was written, etched and printed by one hand, against that trade. It survives in four copies, of 45 to 50 plates. The copies differ, and the difference matters: plates were added and their order changed from copy to copy.
Two of the four copies open with a Preface. Its prose ends on a wish taken from Numbers: “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets”. Then comes the lyric, four quatrains of short lines, that cries “Bring me my Bow of burning gold”, vows “Mental Fight” and names the “dark Satanic Mills”. Blake etched and issued it as part of the work, and it is counted here, with the fullest sequence of plates for the body of the poem. That body is in long unrhymed lines of about seven stresses, fourteeners loosely kept, set against Milton’s blank verse.
Movement II
Book the First opens with a Bard singing in Eternity, and the song returns again and again to its refrain: “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation”. It is a fable of Eternity. Satan takes over the harrow that is Palamabron’s work, and the quarrel that follows is a quarrel over whose labour is whose. Satan’s seizing of the harrow is the error the whole poem will name: the selfhood that takes another’s place and then accuses.
The song is also a satire half veiled. Blake lived at Felpham, in Sussex, in a cottage under the patronage of William Hayley, and the quarrel of patron and engraver over commissions stands behind the quarrel over the harrow. How far the song is that quarrel and how far a cosmology is a question the poem leaves open. Its tone stands apart from the visionary close, and its persons, Satan, Palamabron, Rintrah, Leutha, Elynittria, are a private pantheon that the reader must learn before the fable can be followed. Yet the song cannot go. It is the passage most often called digressive, and it is the motive of everything after.
Milton hears it in Eternity. He sees in Satan his own selfhood, and he says so: “I in my Selfhood am that Satan”. The greatest poet of English Puritanism, the reformer who justified God to men, confesses himself the accuser he opposed. Then he rises: “I go to Eternal Death!” The poem’s disclosure is made in that turn. The righteous condemnation of others is Satan’s work, and a reformer who has not put off his selfhood becomes what he opposes. Milton goes down into death to put it off.
Movement III
Milton descends, and Blake sees him come as a falling star, “on my left foot falling on the tarsus”. At that moment all this vegetable world appears as a sandal on the foot, and the dead poet has entered the living one. The designs carry what the words withhold. Two full-page plates, one of William and one of Robert, Blake’s brother, each show a star falling toward the foot, and they mirror one another. The union of two poets, and of two brothers, is something seen on the page, not stated.
On the way down Milton meets Urizen on the banks of Arnon, and builds him flesh of red clay, walking round him as a sculptor walks round his image. It is one of the poem’s heights. Between the heights lie its plainest stretches: the catalogues of Los’s sons and daughters, of counties and churches, and the long exposition of the Mundane Shell and the Polypus in Book the First. Here the fourteener is stretched to carry a list, and the verse drops to inventory. About a fifth of the poem could go without loss to its argument, and these are the parts.
The poem tells its whole action as one moment, and says so: “Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery / Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years”. Every space larger than a red globule of blood is made by the hammer of Los. Time and space are made by the imagination, and the poet’s work is done in a pulsation. The two books are therefore not a sequence but a simultaneity, every event happening at once in the instant Milton descends and Blake is struck. Against “Bacon, Locke & Newton” the poem argues what reason does to perception: it fixes as law what the imagination makes.
Movement IV
Book the Second opens in Beulah: “There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True”. The descent of the first book is answered here by another. Ololon, Milton’s sixfold emanation, follows him down out of Eternity. By the usual gloss, which the poem supports and does not settle, her six are his three wives and three daughters, and his error toward them is the error he has come back to undo. The second half cannot go without the first, nor the first without the second.
The lark rises in this book, the messenger of Los, and the wild thyme and the flowers of the Felpham garden are given in passages among the most transporting in English verse. The lark is perception opened: what is seen depends on the state of the seer. The poem names the point at which that opening is made: “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”. The Bard’s quarrel over a harrow, told in Eternity, and the lark over a cottage garden are as far apart as anything in the book, and one law governs them both.
Ololon comes down into Blake’s garden and appears there as a virgin of twelve years. The poem’s moral is given as a rule: “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States”. The person is separated from the error, and the error is not punished in the person. That is the law the Bard’s Song broke, where Satan accused, and the law Milton has come down to keep. The meeting of Milton and Ololon in the garden is the reunion of the divided self, and the descent, the self-sacrifice and the reunion are not ornaments of the action. They are the action.
Movement V
Milton’s last speech is the poem’s answer to the Bard. He names what must be done, “Self-annihilation”, and sets out to cast off “the rotten rags of Memory”. The selfhood that accused is to be put off, not punished, and the poet who wrote the English epic is to be cleansed of what in it was the accuser’s. Here the verse is at its most commanding, and the doctrine is stated, not mooded: the reformer is saved from becoming his enemy only by giving up his self.
Then the vision closes. Blake falls on the garden path, his wife trembling beside him. The lions and tigers are made ready “for the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations”. The book that began with a song in Eternity ends with an engraver on the ground in Sussex, and the two are one moment. The twenty-seven heavens and Hayley’s commissions, the harrow and the lark, have been held within a single pulsation of the artery, which is what the poem said it would do.
The book was made against its time. Four copies were printed in Blake’s lifetime, and almost no one read them; no poet of the age learned from it, and for half a century after his death it was unknown as a poem. From the 1860s Gilchrist’s Life, then Swinburne, then the Ellis and Yeats edition brought it out, and through Yeats it entered a poet’s system; Frye built a criticism on it, and Bloom made it the model of a theory of poetic influence. It is read now mainly in the academy. Its Preface, set by Parry in 1916, became an English national hymn, sung by many who have never read the epic it opens. The poem it opens is still the one in which a poet brings his precursor back and lets him save himself.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. The Bard’s Song is the cause of everything after: Milton hears in it the quarrel of Satan and Palamabron over the harrow, sees that his own selfhood is that Satan, and rises, “I go to Eternal Death!” Without the song the descent has no motive. Ololon’s descent answers Milton’s, and the two meet in Blake’s garden; neither half can go. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the subtractive test removes. The catalogues of Los’s sons and daughters, of counties and churches, and the long exposition of the Mundane Shell and the Polypus in Book the First, about a fifth of the poem, could go without loss to its argument. And Blake reordered and added plates between copies: the order was not compelled.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the reformer becomes the accuser he opposes unless he annihilates his own selfhood, and the righteous condemnation of others is Satan’s work. Milton’s confession, “I in my Selfhood am that Satan”, makes the greatest poet of English Puritanism the case. Beside it stand a moral that separates the person from the error and refuses punishment, “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States”, and an account of perception in which time and space are made by the imagination. The polemic against “Bacon, Locke & Newton” is a claim about what reason does to perception, argued, not mooded. Held off the top because the disclosure is encoded in a private nomenclature that buries much of it from anyone who has not learned the system.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height is reached often and at the top. The Preface calls “Bring me my Bow of burning gold” against the “dark Satanic Mills”. Milton’s descent is seen by Blake as a falling star, “on my left foot falling on the tarsus”, and all this vegetable world appears as a sandal on that foot. Milton meets Urizen on the banks of Arnon and builds him flesh of red clay, walking round him as a sculptor round his image. The lark’s ascent and the wild thyme in Book the Second are among the most transporting passages in English verse, and the close makes all ready “for the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations”. Held below the top because between the heights lie long flat stretches of names and geography, where the verse drops to inventory.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, and built on particulars. A dead poet descends from Eternity into the left foot of a living engraver in a cottage at Felpham. His sixfold emanation, Ololon, follows him down and appears in the garden as a virgin of twelve years. The descent to the underworld, the self-sacrifice of the redeemer and the reunion of the divided self are load-bearing: the action is those patterns. And the particular stays particular: Blake’s patron, a quarrel over commissions, the lark, the garden path, his wife trembling beside him at the end. Held a step down because much of the machinery, Rintrah, Palamabron, Leutha, Elynittria, is a private pantheon that does not take on archetypal weight. For the reader it remains names.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the English epic, and Milton is that inheritance by name: the title page carries his own “To Justify the Ways of God to Men”. The swerve is total. The hero is the precursor himself, brought back from heaven to correct his own errors, and the crisis is the dead poet entering the living poet’s body. Milton’s blank verse is answered by fourteeners; the epic’s narrative time is replaced by a single moment opened from within. The book is not printed but etched by Blake’s own relief method, words and designs on one copper plate, against the trade of reproductive engraving that fed him. The stake was paid in full: four copies in his lifetime, almost no readers, and half a century after his death unknown as a poem. Held a fraction below the top because the composite method had been made in the earlier illuminated books; this one carries it to epic scale.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The poem holds that every space larger than a red globule of blood is made by the hammer of Los, and that the poet’s work is done in a pulsation; its structure is that claim, every event happening at once in the moment Milton descends and Blake is struck, told in two books that are not sequence but simultaneity. The designs carry what the words withhold: the paired full-page plates of William and Robert, each with a star falling toward the foot, mirror one another and make the union of two poets something seen. The illuminated page is the poem’s politics of vision, the hand against the press. Held below the top because the designs are often not tied to the text beside them, and because plates moved between copies: a form that could be reordered is in part a container.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is long and still growing: Gilchrist’s Life, Swinburne’s essay on Blake, the Ellis and Yeats edition, Damon, Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire, Bloom’s Blake’s Apocalypse and Wittreich’s Angel of Apocalypse, each reading the poem anew. The text holds its questions open: whether Milton’s descent redeems Milton or Blake; what Ololon is; how far the Bard’s Song is Blake’s quarrel with Hayley and how far a cosmology; how the designs answer the words. The copies themselves yield, since their order and colour differ. Held below the top because some of the yield is the work of decoding a system, which exhausts, rather than of meaning that deepens.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is English poetry of 1800 to 1830 and the Romantic long poem, The Prelude, Prometheus Unbound and the Hyperion poems among it, all wrestling Milton. The intrinsic force is high: the poem makes the struggle with the precursor the subject of the epic itself, and makes the illuminated book a form of epic, a reorganisation of what a long poem could be about and how it could be made. In its own century it moved almost no one: four copies, and no contemporary poet learned from it. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Gilchrist and the Ellis and Yeats edition to Yeats’s own system; through Frye to a whole criticism; through Bloom to a theory of poetic influence for which this poem is the model. The Preface, set by Parry in 1916, became an English national hymn, but that is four quatrains, not the poem.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole in four copies etched by the author, with variants of order and content between them and the Preface in two; nothing that carries meaning is lost, and the variance is the author’s, not damage. Presence: two centuries, but not continuous. The poem was all but unread until the 1860s, and since then it has been read mainly in the academy; both are charged. The Preface’s presence as a hymn is among the widest of any English verse and earns a tenth, but it is the presence of the lyric, not of the epic it opens. Fabric: the illuminated book is read by most in facsimile; the copies are in libraries and intact.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same standard as any book. The making of the object is of the highest order: relief etching of Blake’s own invention, colour printing and washes laid by hand, a page on which the line of verse and the line of design are one cut. The best verse is as commanding as any in the language: the Preface, the lark, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”, Milton’s last speech casting off “the rotten rags of Memory”. The charges: the fourteener is often slack, stretched to carry a list; the catalogues are made by accumulation, not by art; the pointing and spelling, Blake’s own and so the work’s, sometimes cloud the sense. At the top the making is load-bearing; across the whole it is uneven.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Bard’s Song, a cosmic quarrel over a harrow told as a fable of Eternity, and the lark rising over the Felpham garden in Book the Second. One law governs both: what is seen depends on the state of the seer, and the selfhood that accuses must be annihilated for vision to open. Satan’s seizing of the harrow is the selfhood’s error; the lark is the messenger of Los, perception opened. The range is very wide, from Hayley’s commissions to the twenty-seven heavens, and it is held more than not. Charged: the names and their relations are not stable from passage to passage, nor from this book to the other prophecies; the Bard’s Song, a satire half veiled, sits apart in tone from the visionary close; and the copies disagree about what belongs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders, held in one structure, which is a poet’s consciousness opened to the moment. Consciousness, in Blake and in Milton, two minds made one. The family: Milton’s error toward the women of his household, which the usual gloss finds in Ololon and which is the poem’s crux; Blake’s brother Robert in the paired design; his wife at the close. Labour: the harrow and the mills, Los’s furnaces, the engraver’s trade, the harvest. The state and history: Albion, the “dark Satanic Mills”, six thousand years set in a pulsation, the churches. The sacred throughout. The natural order: the lark, the wild thyme, the flowers of Book the Second, the globule of blood. Cosmology: how time and space are made. Held below the top because family and state are held mostly as allegory, not as lives.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.3, with The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9. A departure total in subject, verse, time and means, an epic whose hero is its own precursor, etched by one hand at the cost of nearly every reader; a yield that has sustained a century and a half of rereading; a text whole in its author’s own copies; and a myth of descent, sacrifice and reunion that is the action, not its dress.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.5, held by the catalogues of names, counties and churches and the long exposition of the Mundane Shell, about a fifth of the poem removable without loss, and by plates Blake himself added and reordered between copies. Above it, The Inner Law at 8.4 and The Made at 8.5: names that shift from passage to passage, a satire set apart in tone from the close, and a fourteener stretched slack to carry its lists.
The Necessity Cap is met exactly: The Inevitable at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.5, The Inevitable meeting it exactly) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 104.2, short of the 107.4 the upper tier requires, and the work stands at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Milton a Poem, William Blake’s illuminated book in two books, scored as words and designs together: relief-etched on copper, printed by Blake and finished by hand. The title page is dated 1804; the plates were etched and printed in the years after. Four copies survive, of 45 to 50 plates, and they differ in the number and order of their plates; the fullest sequence is followed for the body of the poem, and the Preface, which stands in two of the copies, is counted as part of the work, since Blake etched and issued it as such. The words are known closely in Erdman’s text, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake; the designs are known from facsimile reproduction and are described in general terms, the paired plates of William and Robert alone in particular. No text of the book was in hand and nothing was measured on a text. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in Blake’s spelling and pointing; passages are placed by book, not by plate. Facts that could not be verified, among them the dates of the first and last copies, the plates and the present home of each copy, which copies carry the Preface, the length in lines, the plate numbering, the plates of single episodes and the dates of the critical record, are not given. The reading of Ololon as Milton’s wives and daughters is given as a gloss.