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William BlakeThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1789A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Revolution Has Come
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell begins and ends with evocations of the revolutionary spirit, inspired by the early days of the French Revolution and the American Revolutionary War. By 1790, the year Blake began writing The Marriage, the old order in France had fallen. Feudal rights and the nobility itself had been abolished, and France’s National Constituent Assembly had adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
As news of these developments reached London, Blake was on fire with enthusiasm. In “The Argument” at the beginning of The Marriage, Rintrah, who “roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air” (Plate 1) is an embodiment of the wrath of rebellion. Blake hoped the revolution would spread to England, where it had many sympathizers, and he returned to the topic at the end of his book, in “A Song of Liberty.” In this song, the old oppressive rulers try to destroy Orc, the spirit of revolution. They hurl him “thro’ the starry night” (Verse 10), but the fire he embodies is heading for London: “The fire, the fire, is falling! / Look up! Look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance!” (Verses 11-12).
For Blake, political revolution went hand in hand with spiritual revolution; they were two sides of the same coin. By alluding to events in France (and, in “A Song of Liberty,” to events earlier in time, in America) and using them as a framework for the book, Blake creates a structure that allows him to devote the main body of the work to exposing spiritual error and revealing the eternal truth of life, the result of which will be a revolution in religious thought.
Recognizing Error and Its Consequences
After Blake announces in Plate 3 of “The Argument” that a new age has come, he lays out what he believes are the essential principles of life. These are the “Contraries,” through which life moves forward. He first shows how religion has divided these two sets of principles into categories of good and evil. Thus “Good” is a passive quality that simply obeys reason; it is equated with Heaven. The opposite quality, energy, is active, as an expression of human desire and passion; the religious, however, declare it to be evil and equate it with Hell.
Blake is then quick, in Plate 4, to assert, through his ironic “Voice of the Devil,” that this is a catastrophic error. The main contraries of reason and energy have been misunderstood for centuries. They may be at the very core of existence, but that does not mean that life itself is dualistic. On the contrary, for Blake, life is a unity made up of a dynamic interplay between these contraries. Nothing, in fact, is either good or bad when the contraries are in correct balance with each other. The only reality is joy. It is foolish and pernicious to divide existence into two camps and declare one side to be good and the other evil. Blake’s Devil accuses not only the churches but “All Bibles or sacred codes” of such an error. The priests should know better, but they do not. Even the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who prided himself on being a new voice with a fresh understanding, is in reality just repeating all the old errors.
The result of all these errors of religion is a diminution and distortion of life, in which reason rules over and represses desire; this produces a moral code endorsed by the churches that holds sway over human life. Blake reserves one of his most bitter Proverbs of Hell for those who carry out this censuring of innocent desire: “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys” (Plate 9). The “sneaking serpent” in “The Argument,” who “walks / In mild humility” (Plate 1) may well also be a priest, his mild demeanor being a cloak for hypocrisy and cunning. “The weak in courage is strong in cunning” (Plates 9, 16) is a Proverb of Hell that Blake liked so much he used it twice. He associates cunning with “weak and tame minds which have the power to resist energy” (Plate 16), thus creating the tyranny of reason that Blake feels he must correct and defeat by means of his prophetic art.
Expanding the Senses and Experiencing the Infinite
Blake the seer and prophet urges his reader to awaken to their full potential, to shake off old, ingrained timidities inculcated by the reason-loving Church and lay claim to the ecstasy of being fully alive in the moment. The time is now, says Blake. There is no reason to delay. The new age has come, in which life is to be experienced as it really is. Joy, delight, energy, bliss—these are the ingredients of Blake’s universe, in which “every thing that lives is Holy” (Plate 27).
Blake challenges people to go beyond their mundane assumptions that are based on ignorance, on senses that have long been dulled by habit. He asks, “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (Plate 6). All it takes is a shift, an expansion of perception, and everything will appear different: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Plate 14). The word “infinite” occurs no less than six times in The Marriage in this exact context—experiencing the infinite in all things. This is Blake’s world of boundlessness, of no limits; it is not a faraway or abstract philosophical notion but a living experience. All it takes is the exercise of the Poetic Genius, or creative imagination, and a willingness to allow Energy to flow through one’s being. Energy, after all, “is eternal delight,” and the infinity of bliss permeates the universe.
Several of the designs suggest both the old and the new reality. The five Giants depicted in Plate 16 reveal a closed-up way of being. Even though they are the sources of life and the senses—Blake describes them as the Prolific (similar to Energy)—they have allowed themselves to become shadows of their former selves, resembling nothing but the Angels of conventional thought, narrow in mind, timid in body. They are slumped over, with their knees drawn up to their chests, a posture that always in Blake represents a restricted, diminished way of being. The figure on the left is burying their face in their hands, and all but the aged central figure are leaning in, turning their faces down or away as if they are trying to hide.
This design is in sharp contrast to the figure in the flaming fire in Plate 3. His limbs are spread out and he is reveling in the creative power of “hell” and experiencing it through his physical form. The same can be said for the naked man shown on Plate 21. His knee is on a skull, which is part of the skeleton identified in the previous “Memorable Fancy” as Aristotle’s Analytics, symbolizing the dead and useless philosophy of the Angels. Behind this naked figure, the sun is rising, symbolizing his awakening to a new life lit up by knowledge, the Poetic Genius, and the expanded senses. He looks upward, into the infinite sky. Here is the joy of being alive in the body, in the flesh, now, in contrast to the pitiful” enslaved Giants in Plate 16.
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