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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.
Background
Authorial Context: William Blake, Revolution, and Liberation
One of the sources of the rebellious energy, both individual and social, that surges through The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was the outbreak of the French Revolution. William Blake was a Republican with no love of kings, and he supported the revolution as soon as news of it reached London in the summer of 1789. Enthusiastically embracing the revolutionary ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” Blake expected that a new age of liberty was about to dawn. The revolution’s precipitating event was the fall of the Bastille, an old fortress and prison in Paris. Blake mentions it in the “Song of Liberty” at the end of The Marriage, in the command “France, rend down thy dungeon!” (Verse 3).
Blake made no secret of his support of the revolutionary cause. His first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writes:
He courageously wore the famous symbol of liberty and equality—the bonnet rouge—in open day, and philosophically walked the streets with the same on his head. He is said to be the only one of the set who had the courage to make that public profession of faith (Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake. 1863. Reprinted, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1942, p. 81).
The bonnet rouge was a red cap worn by the French revolutionaries, and “the set” was a coterie of liberal sympathizers, republicans, and progressive thinkers who gathered at the shop and home of the London bookseller Joseph Johnson. Johnson employed Blake as an engraver and also took an interest in his poetry. The courage that Gilchrist mentions refers to the fact that conservative opinion in England opposed (and was afraid of) the French Revolution, and anyone who publicly showed support for it ran the risk of having “a Church-and-King mob at their heels” (Gilchrist, p. 81). In spite of that significant body of conservative opinion and power, Blake was not alone in his radical beliefs; the revolution garnered quite wide support among the artisan class in London, as well as from those who belonged to various Protestant sects and were known as Dissenters.
Blake viewed the French Revolution as another stage in the explosion of liberty that had begun with the American Revolutionary War, which is briefly evoked in the “Song of Liberty” in The Marriage. Blake was a patriot who loved England (he once referred to himself as “English Blake”), but he also hated tyranny and was unequivocally on the side of the colonists, as his poem America: A Prophecy (1793) shows.
Other ideas that Blake presents in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can also be found in works that he produced around the same time. The philosophical tractate titled There Is No Natural Religion (1788), for example, rejects the prevailing ideas associated with the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who believed that man has no innate knowledge but learns only through the senses and the faculty of reason. Against this, Blake argues that the mind is not a blank state, the senses are not the only perceptual mechanism, and reason is a limited faculty since it can “only compare and judge” from what has already been perceived.
Blake always seems to have had some special, indwelling imaginative quality, which he refers to in Natural Religion as the “Poetic or Prophetic character,” that he believed enabled him to directly experience a more expanded level of truth. In this respect, the Poetic character functions in conjunction with human desire, to which Blake ascribes a very important function. The final two propositions in the tractate are “The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite, & himself Infinite” (no. VII), and “He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God” (“Application”) (The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition, edited by David V. Erdman, University of California Press, p. 2). These propositions are demonstrated or asserted in a variety of ways in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, with the “Poetic Genius” becoming Blake’s preferred term for the Poetic or Prophetic character in There Is No Natural Religion.
Blake was also writing other poetry at this time that called for the liberation of desire—that leitmotif of The Marriage—from the restraints placed on it by conventional sexual morality. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), the female character Oothoon is in love with Theotormon, but she is raped by Bromion. They are then bound to each other back-to-back in a loveless partnership. Theotormon is jealous and refuses to marry Oothoon, even though she still loves him, because he considers her to be defiled. Oothoon affirms her own purity and denounces Urizen (the faculty of reason when it falsely claims dominion over all other human faculties) as a “mistaken Demon of heaven” (Plate 5).
Oothoon celebrates “the moment of desire” (Plate 7) and speaks out her truth: “I cry Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind” (Plate 7), concluding with an exuberant call to “Arise and drink your bliss, for every thing that lives is holy!” (Plate 8). The second part of this line also occurs in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as the last line of the Chorus. Indeed, Visions of the Daughters of Albion serves as a fleshed-out dramatic situation of what The Marriage warns, through the Proverbs of Hell, may happen if the free flow of innocent love and desire is obstructed by a rigid, moralistic society. One of those proverbs might even be used as a motto for Visions, or even for Blake himself: “The soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d” (Plate 9).
Literary Context: The Romantic Era
Blake is associated with the English Romantic era, a significant period in English literature. In addition to Blake, there were five major English Romantic poets. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) were the other two first-generation Romantics, with George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and John Keats (1795-1821) making up the second generation. Romanticism came to prominence when the 18th-century Age of Reason, also known as the Enlightenment or the Neoclassical period in literature, began to lose its hold on intellectual and literary discourse, and rapid social and political change helped to stimulate a new kind of poetry.
The beginning of English Romanticism is usually dated 1798, with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. However, Romantic poems were published before that date, especially by Blake. Even though his work was not generally known during the 1790s (or for some decades after that), Blake is often considered the first of the English Romantics.
There are several elements in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that mark it as part of an emerging movement, the first of which is Blake’s sympathy with the French Revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge felt the same way. In his long autobiographical poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth proclaimed, “Europe at that time was filled with joy, / France standing on the top of golden hours / And human nature seeming born again” (Book VI, Lines 339-41). Both Blake and Wordsworth, however, later became disillusioned when France turned to wars of conquest and Napoleon rose to power. Wordsworth became a political conservative, but Blake continued to oppose repression in England. Of the second-generation Romantics, Shelley and Byron were also sympathetic to revolutionary social change.
The Marriage also demonstrates Blake’s belief in the power of the creative imagination (which at that time he called the Poetic Genius) and the exalted role of the poet as seer, visionary, and prophet. Blake would continue to insist on these ideas and develop them throughout his poetic career. Wordsworth also believed in the power of the imagination to access the deeper levels of life and reveal an infinite consciousness permeating all the phenomena of nature. He likely never saw Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but he would not have disagreed with the statement that “[i]f the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Plate 14). Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley shared similar beliefs about the imagination and the role of the poet, each in his own way. Shelley famously declared in his prose work “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Another element that Blake shared with the Romantics was his belief in childhood as a state of innocence, joy, and natural, innate goodness. This was in contrast to the notion embraced at the time by Christianity that children were born into original sin and must be instructed in the virtues of hard work, obedience, duty, and religion, or they might go to Hell. Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience gives ample evidence of his very different vision of childhood. Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially the former, held similar views.
Blake’s interest in myth and myth-making (the bones of which are apparent in “A Song of Liberty,” and later greatly expanded), and his interest in supernatural and occult systems of thought, was also characteristic of the Romantic age.
The end of the English Romantic age is usually dated 1832. At that time, most of the Romantics were dead or were no longer writing Romantic poetry, and the passing of the Great Reform Act ushered in a new political era for Great Britain. Within five years, a new monarch, Queen Victoria, was on the throne, and the Victorian age began.
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