The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Blake · an illuminated book of prose argument, proverbs, visions and a song · twenty-seven relief-etched plates in the usual complement, A Song of Liberty on the last three · c. 1790, the plates etched about 1790 to 1793 · printed by Blake in a handful of copies, colour printed or coloured by hand · scored as words and designs together, on what all the copies share; read from knowledge, English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Illuminated satire and prophecy; prose argument, aphorism, satiric vision and revolutionary song in one book, word and design etched on one plate
Mythos
Heaven and Hell, Angel and Devil, Messiah and Satan turned load-bearing the other way; the Prolific and the Devourer; Rintrah and the new-born fire, the first persons of Blake’s own myth
Phase
Thirty-three years counted from 1757, the year of Swedenborg’s Last Judgment and of Blake’s birth; etched about 1790 to 1793, in the first years of the French Revolution
Presentation
Twenty-seven relief-etched plates in the usual complement, printed by Blake himself in a handful of copies, colour printed or coloured by hand as the copy goes; A Song of Liberty on plates 25 to 27
Register
From the proposition and the proverb to the comic vision and the apocalyptic song; the Devil’s voice set against the Angel’s, satire more often than transport
Scale
A short book: Blake in his shop, an Angel and an abyss, a dinner with two prophets, and France, Spain, Rome and London under a new-born fire
Governing Proposition
An engraver who bites his words into copper with acid takes the inherited map of Heaven and Hell and reads it backwards: the Devil speaks, Milton is shown to be of his party, the Proverbs of Hell set desire above restraint, and an Angel’s vision of the abyss vanishes the moment the Angel leaves. The wager of the book is that what a culture calls good and evil are its names for the passive and the active, that both are needed, and that the world appears as perception makes it, so that the book itself, words and designs raised from the metal by corrosion, is offered as a perception cleansed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book carries no date. Its year is read from its own opening, on plate 3, where Blake writes that “it is now thirty-three years since its advent”. The count runs from 1757, the year in which Emanuel Swedenborg dated the Last Judgment, and the year of Blake’s own birth. Thirty-three years on is 1790. Swedenborg is on the same plate, as “the Angel sitting at the tomb”, and the whole book is written against him. The title answers his Heaven and Hell. The plates were etched over the next few years, about 1790 to 1793, while the Revolution in France ran its first course.
Blake made the book himself. Words and designs were etched together in relief on copper, by a process of his own devising, so that text and picture printed from one plate, and the sheets were colour printed or coloured by hand, differently from copy to copy. He printed it in a handful of copies, and in his lifetime it was scarcely read. Its usual complement is twenty-seven plates, and A Song of Liberty, on the last three, is the close Blake etched for it. What is taken here is that book, words and designs as one work, judged on what all its copies share and on no single copy’s colouring.
The plan joins four kinds of writing that had not been joined. The Argument, on plate 2, opens with Rintrah, the first of the persons of Blake’s own myth. Plate 3 sets out the law in prose: “Without Contraries is no progression”. Then come the voice of the Devil, prose on restraint, five Memorable Fancies (comic visions that parody the Memorable Relations of Swedenborg), the Proverbs of Hell, more prose between the visions, and the song. The designs carry their own weight from the start: lovers drift across the title page, and on plate 3 a figure stands wrapped in flame.
Movement II
Plate 3 names the contraries and then names the names. Without contraries there is no progression, and out of the contraries a culture makes what it calls good and evil: “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy”. The sentence does not simply reverse the moral order. It exposes the order as a naming, the passive that obeys called good and the active that will not called evil. On plate 4 the voice of the Devil speaks, and its proposition is the book’s most quoted stance: “Energy is Eternal Delight”.
Plates 5 and 6 turn to restraint, and to the poem in which English Christianity had told its story of Heaven and Hell. In the Devil’s account of Paradise Lost and of the Book of Job, Satan and the Messiah exchange names: the names change sides according to who tells the story. Then comes the note that has outlived almost everything else in the book. Milton wrote at liberty when he wrote of devils and hell “because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”.
Behind the book stand Milton, re-read against his own theology; the Hebrew prophets, who appear in it in person; Swedenborg, parodied and then repudiated; and the eighteenth-century satire of Swift. The stake was everything a book can stake. A heterodox work, leaning toward sedition in the years of the Revolution, by an engraver with no public, printed by his own hand in a few copies, and left nearly unread for seventy years: there was no reader for whom it was safe, and no reader at all for most of a lifetime.
Movement III
The first Memorable Fancy, on plate 6, brings Blake back from Hell with its sayings. The Proverbs of Hell follow on plates 7 to 10, and they are the centre of gravity of the book. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” “The cut worm forgives the plow.” Each is a complete argument, and each sharpens against the others.
The proverbs are made in several ways. Some are balanced pairs, “Damn braces: Bless relaxes”. Some take the extreme case to shock the reader into the claim: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”. Some are three words, “Exuberance is Beauty”. Some are social diagnoses, “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”, and some are theology in a line: “The nakedness of woman is the work of God”. One states the book’s own wager on the imagination: “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d”. Not every proverb carries its weight; perhaps a fifth are slack beside the rest. The best have entered the language.
Plate 11 is the book’s argument at its most exact, a genealogy of religion. The ancient poets animated the world with gods. A system formed, and a priesthood codified it, “Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales”, until “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”. Half a century before Feuerbach, the gods are traced to the mind that made them and to the institution that kept them. The second Fancy, on plates 12 and 13, sets Blake at dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel, the prophets of the Bible made his companions at table.
Movement IV
Plate 14 turns the argument on the reader’s own eyes. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Then Blake names the means of the cleansing, and it is his own trade: printing “in the infernal method, by corrosives”, melting “apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”. The claim about perception and the account of a workshop practice are made on the same plate, in the same breath.
The method is the one by which the plate itself was made. Acid eats the copper round the letters and the designs, and what is left standing prints. The cleansing of the doors of perception and the biting of the plate are one act, and the reader holds its result. The third Fancy, on plate 15, goes into a printing house in Hell. The book shows its own production in the act of making its argument, art and labour in one room, and the work of the engraver becomes the figure for the work of the mind.
Plates 16 and 17 give the book a cosmology in a paragraph. There are two classes of being, the Prolific and the Devourer, and the Prolific needs the Devourer as much as the Devourer needs the Prolific. It is a new pair, made by Blake and not inherited, and here the book keeps its own law most strictly: both contraries stand, and neither is to be done away with. Elsewhere it speaks mostly for one of them, and the Devil’s voice carries further than the Angel’s. The book that says contraries are both necessary is, on most of its plates, a partisan.
Movement V
The fourth Fancy, on plates 17 to 20, is the book’s demonstration. An Angel offers to show Blake his eternal lot, and takes him to the abyss. There are spiders, a black and white sun, and a serpent, Leviathan, rising from the deep “with all the fury of a spiritual existence”. When the Angel leaves, the vision goes with him, and Blake finds himself sitting “on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light”. He tells the Angel the plain truth: “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics”. The Angel has no answer, and Blake dismisses him: “it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics”. The doors of perception of plate 14 are here put to the test in a story, and the book states its law in one line: “Opposition is true Friendship”.
On plates 21 and 22 Blake turns on his master: “Swedenborg has not written one new truth”. It is the opening’s point again at a lower heat, from a man who had annotated Swedenborg closely. The fifth Fancy, on plates 22 to 24, ends with an Angel who becomes a Devil and stays, in Blake’s words, “my particular friend”, and with the Bible, which the two of them read “in its infernal or diabolical sense”. The opposition is a friendship after all. Plate 24 closes the prose with “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”, above a design of Nebuchadnezzar on all fours.
A Song of Liberty closes the book on plates 25 to 27. “The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth”: a new-born fire is hurled down by a jealous king, and France, Spain, Rome and London stand in the light of the Revolution. “Empire is no more!” The song ends on the blessing the whole book has argued for: “For every thing that lives is Holy”. The book waited seventy years for readers. Gilchrist’s Life of 1863 and Swinburne’s essay of 1868 brought it out; Yeats edited it with Ellis in 1893; Frye’s Fearful Symmetry followed in 1947; and in 1954 Huxley took a title from plate 14, through which the doors of perception passed into the counterculture. Most of its readers since have met it in type, without the designs, and its Proverbs are in common use.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see. The opening three plates cannot go: the Argument, the plate of contraries and the voice of the Devil give the rest its law. The Proverbs of Hell are the book’s centre of gravity, and the Leviathan fancy its demonstration: when the Angel who showed Blake the abyss goes, the vision goes with him, and Blake sits “on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light”, because “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics”. What holds the axis down is the looseness of the anatomy. The five Memorable Fancies are of unequal necessity: the dinner with Isaiah and Ezekiel and the printing house in Hell overlap in what they claim; the attack on Swedenborg repeats the opening’s point at a lower heat; A Song of Liberty could be lifted off and read in places as a separate poem; and perhaps a fifth of the Proverbs are slack beside the rest.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. What a culture calls good and evil is its name for the passive that obeys and the active that will not: “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy”. Repression makes what it forbids: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion”. Gods are the mind’s own projections, codified by a priesthood: plate 11 follows the ancient poets’ animation of the world into a system, until “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast”, a genealogy of religion half a century before Feuerbach. And perception makes the world: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”. Held below the top because the book argues by provocation as much as by disclosure, and some of its truths, “Energy is Eternal Delight” among them, are stances that hold only inside its dialectic.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The height is real and frequent, but much of it is the height of wit. The Proverbs strike again and again: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, “The cut worm forgives the plow”. The dreadful sublime comes in the Leviathan fancy, with its spiders, its black and white sun, and the monster rising from the deep “with all the fury of a spiritual existence”. A Song of Liberty reaches for apocalyptic grandeur: “The Eternal Female groand! it was heard over all the Earth”. The designs carry the lift where the words are comic: the figure wrapped in flame on plate 3, the lovers drifting across the title page. Held where it stands because the register is mostly satiric, the transport arrives in flashes, and the Song’s elevation is partly stated rather than achieved.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, and built by inversion. The book takes the inherited structure of Heaven and Hell, Angel and Devil, Messiah and Satan, and turns it load-bearing in the other direction: in the Devil’s account of Paradise Lost and the Book of Job (plates 5 and 6), Satan and the Messiah exchange names, an archetype re-read rather than alluded to. The Prolific and the Devourer are a new pair of the deepest kind, a cosmology in a paragraph. Rintrah, who opens the book, and the new-born fire of A Song of Liberty, the son a jealous king hurls down, are the first persons of Blake’s own myth, which the prophecies would build. The particular stays particular: Blake in Lambeth, dining with prophets, walking with an Angel, a printer in his shop. Held below the top because the inverted myth is sometimes allegory with its labels showing, and the new myth is still embryonic here.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is Swedenborg, whose Memorable Relations the Fancies parody and whose Heaven and Hell the title answers; Milton, re-read against his own theology; the Hebrew prophets; and the satire of Swift. The turn runs every way at once. A form with no precedent: prose argument, aphorism, satiric vision and revolutionary song joined in one book made by hand, image and word on the same plate, by a process Blake devised. A theology inverted: the Devil’s party, desire before restraint, the Bible to be read “in its infernal or diabolical sense”. A master repudiated: “Swedenborg has not written one new truth”, from a man who had annotated him closely. The stake was total: a heterodox book, leaning toward sedition, by an engraver with no public, printed in a few copies and unread for seventy years. Held a little below the top only because the vision form and the anatomy were not themselves new.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The book argues that the world appears as perception makes it, and the book is a perception made by hand. On plate 14 Blake names his own process, printing “in the infernal method, by corrosives”, which melt “apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”: the acid that bites the copper to raise the letters is the cleansing of the doors of perception, and the reader holds the result. The mixed form is the contraries in practice, the Devil’s voice against the Angel’s, aphorism against vision, prose against song, each correcting the other, so that “Opposition is true Friendship” is a law of the form as well as a saying. Typeset as a treatise the book would be a manifesto; set as verse it would lose the satire. Held off the top by the loose sequence of the middle plates.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. The note on Milton, that he wrote at liberty of devils and hell “because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”, has kept Milton criticism arguing ever since. The book has been read as a manifesto of energy; as a dialectic in which the Devil is as partial as the Angel, since the Prolific needs the Devourer and the Angel who becomes a Devil is “my particular friend”; as the revolutionary politics of 1789 to 1793; as a satire on Swedenborgian sectarianism; as the seed of the prophecies. The readings of Swinburne, Yeats, Frye, Erdman and Bloom differ in kind, not only in emphasis, and the Proverbs are re-quoted without end, each read against the others. Held below the top by size: twenty-seven plates, some of whose aphorisms give their whole meaning at the first reading.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is English literature of the late eighteenth century, with the European reception of Milton and Swedenborg behind it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the book set the moral worth of energy and desire against restraint, inverted the polarity of good and evil inside Christian myth, and made the reading of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost a thesis, a position the Romantic reading of Milton would take up. It also made the illuminated book a form in which the poet controls every stage of the made object. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: scarcely read until Gilchrist’s Life (1863) and Swinburne’s essay (1868); Yeats and Ellis’s edition (1893); Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947); Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), titled from plate 14, through which the phrase passed into the counterculture; and Ginsberg, who by his own account dated his vocation to a vision of Blake.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then on presence. Form: the text survives whole, and the work survives in its copies, each a complete realisation of the book; nothing that carried meaning is lost. But the unit is words and designs together, and most readers have met the book typeset, without the designs, so the form in which it is most present is not the whole form: a small charge on form. Presence: some two hundred and thirty-five years, of which the first seventy were near silence, a handful of copies seen by a handful of people. That long neglect is charged. Since the 1860s the book has been continuously printed, taught and quoted, its Proverbs are in common use, and the doors of perception have become a phrase of the language. The breadth of the present stands against the silence of the start, less the charge for a presence that is mostly typeset.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of two media at once. The prose is the sharpest in English of its decade: the plate of contraries is a run of propositions with no wasted word, and the Proverbs are as finely made as any aphorisms in the language, the balanced pair (“Damn braces: Bless relaxes”), the shock of the extreme case (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”), the three words (“Exuberance is Beauty”). The comic timing of the Fancies is exact. The making of the plates, word and design etched together, is load-bearing: it is the condition of the argument. Charged: the diction of A Song of Liberty is clotted, the spelling and pointing are erratic in ways that are not all design, and some of the interlinear designs are slight and roughly cut.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the Angel and Blake over the abyss in the Leviathan fancy, which ends with the Angel unable to answer, and the revolutionary apocalypse of the Song, “Empire is no more!” One law governs both: contraries are necessary, restraint passes itself off as reason, and the energy it forbids returns as revelation or revolution. The saying of plate 24, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression”, and the theology of the Prolific and the Devourer obey the same law, across a wide range: aphorism, satire, cosmology, politics. Charged because the book proclaims that both contraries must stand and then speaks mostly for one of them. The Prolific and the Devourer reconcile the two, but not every plate keeps that balance, and the Song reads from a slightly different law, that of the prophecies to come.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what so short a book holds. The sacred stands at the centre: the Bible, Milton, Swedenborg, the prophets, the genealogy of religion. The body and desire: “The nakedness of woman is the work of God”. Perception and mind. The state and history, in A Song of Liberty, with France, Spain, Rome and London in the light of the Revolution. Art and labour, in the printing house in Hell, where the book shows its own making. The natural order, in the beasts and birds of the Proverbs. They are integrated by one dialectic, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage: consciousness is held as doctrine rather than as a life; the family, ordinary social life and the work of most people are absent; history comes as apocalypse rather than as an order. A low mark on a short form describes the form.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.3, then The Imperishable at 9.0, with The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Made at 8.9. A form without precedent, argument, proverb, vision and song in one book made by hand, with a theology inverted and a master repudiated, at the cost of seventy years unread; a text that survives whole and a set of proverbs in common use; disclosures of the naming of good and evil, of the gods in the human breast and of perception that makes the world; a book whose method of making is its argument; and prose and aphorism made with no word wasted.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8, held by the vantage of a short form: the sacred, desire, perception, the state, labour and the natural order joined by one dialectic, but consciousness held as doctrine, the family and ordinary social life absent, and history an apocalypse rather than an order. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.2: five Fancies of unequal necessity, an attack on Swedenborg that repeats the opening, a song that can be lifted off, and proverbs slack beside the rest. Then The Sublime at 8.5: height mostly of wit, transport in flashes, and the song’s grandeur stated more than achieved.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone: the twelve sum to 104.5, short of the 107.4 the upper tier requires, and the work stands at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as William Blake etched it, words and designs together: an illuminated book in relief etching on copper, in its usual complement of twenty-seven plates, with A Song of Liberty (plates 25 to 27) taken as the close Blake etched for it. The words are known closely, from the standard modern text, Erdman’s edition of the complete poetry and prose, and from facsimile; the principal designs are known (the title page, the Argument, the figure in flames on plate 3, Nebuchadnezzar at the foot of plate 24), not every interlinear design, so the designs are described only where they are principal. The copies were printed and coloured at different dates, and the work is scored on what all of them share; no judgment rests on the colouring of any one copy. Plate numbers count the twenty-seven plates in the book’s usual order. No text of the book was in hand and nothing was measured on a text; English is quoted only where its words are certain, and Blake’s spelling and pointing, which vary between copies and editions, are not vouched for. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of recorded copies and their dates, any difference of plate order between copies, the count of the Proverbs and of the verses of A Song of Liberty, the length of the book in words and its musical settings, are not given.