The first rule to remember when approaching Blake's work is that his interest in the relationship between the "two contrary states of the human soul," the states of innocence and experience, begins and underlies his entire mythic universe, his entire vision of the human world. At the simplest level, the fall from innocence is indicated by the various ways in which people respond to a sense of unfairness we develop as we become aware that undeserved suffering exists in the world. Blake's chimney sweep for example has been forced in Songs of Experience to clean chimneys, which means that he lives most of his days confined within the narrow black walls of household chimneys, constantly breathing the soot of burnt soft coal. The boy deals with his innate sense of injustice by creating for himself an allegorical pastoral dream world where he and his dying companions will meet in joy after death. His innate sense of what his life should be derives from his sense of deprivation. He dreams of running with his companions in the sun because he has never been allowed to experience sun, joy and companionship. He cannot consciously confront the unfairness of his situation because he has no choices and no power to free himself from bondage. He therefore chooses the delusion of deferred fulfillment of desire. He can only face an existence without hope by creating for himself a delusional fantasy hope.

Blake's illuminated poems, the poems which form his mythic world, depict what happens when individuals, classes of people or entire nations suffer enslavement analogous to that of the chimney sweep. Some groups turn to organized religion which in Blake's view is often encouraged by the class of oppressors and which offers the same "allegorical" deferred heaven that comforts the chimney sweep. Other groups revolt violently against their oppressors. In developing his mythic universe Blake was working toward the creation of a psychological model of the human world which would metaphorically apply to three levels of human existence. The forces he saw shaping human experience in the personal realm he also saw influencing historical processes in the social realm, and ultimately humankind's relation to the universe in the metaphysical realm. These forces which he perceived to underlie the human condition can be described as the dynamics of desire and hindrance at the personal level, the historical cycles of revolution and rule at the social level, and the paradoxical human cycles of birth, divine aspirations and death at the metaphysical level.

The sense of absolute unfairness we as readers feel about the experience of the chimney sweep or about the experience of any enslaved class reflects and becomes an analog for a more generalized sense of unfairness people tend to feel about our mortal condition. The knowledge of death, like the awareness of cruelty or unfairness, must be learned through experience. For a child to learn of death, to learn that the self, which can seem so permanent and so absolute, does not continue forever constitutes another fall from innocence into experience. The fact that people feel themselves immortal and yet live under an absolute death sentence is the irony of the human condition. The fact that we have divine aspirations and yet know we are made of deteriorating clay instills in us the ultimate sense of metaphysical unfairness.

To allow himself the latitude to express the sense of unfairness in the human condition and the hope for creative solutions to the human condition at three levels of human existence within a unified poetic structure, Blake created a mythic universe which follows an historic cycle of the Fall and Redemption. In his vision, everything temporal or eternal, dead or living, is seen in relation to the Fall. Every human or natural condition is judged by the degree to which it indicates a movement toward either a pre-Genesis Eden in one direction or dead matter in the other. (Damon 114-15, 416). Between these extremes exist the two intermediate realms of Beulah and Generation. Beulah exists ethereally between the pre-fallen Eden and Generation. It is a state of inspiration to those living in the realm of Generation, but also a state fallen from the original Eden (Damon 43, 150). Because Beulah exists between the unfallen state and the physical world it is a place of both pristine beauty and dissatisfaction. Inhabitants of Beulah (Thel in The Book of Thel, for example) tend to pine for physical existence. Although the world of Generation is sighed after by those who inhabit Beulah, it is nevertheless a state fallen from Beulah. Souls pass from Beulah into Generation through physical birth. To pass from Beulah into Generation is tantamount to passing from the idyllic realm of innocence into the realm of experience.

Generation is the realm we know as physical existence. It is a world of continually recurring life and death, a world of constant pain and suffering. Because the inhabitants of the world of Generation have existed in spiritual form previously in Beulah, Beulah is our place of seed. This relation between Beulah and Generation is pictured in the Preludium to Europe as an inverted tree which has its roots "brandished in the heavens," and brings its fruits forth into the solid ground (Europe 1.8). To be born into physical existence is to fall into life. To live in Generation is to live in conflict and pain, with our eternal parts (our energy and imagination) burning to exceed the limits of our mortal bodies, with our limitless souls connected to the eternal world only through our five limited senses.

Although Beulah and Generation exist separately within the mythic structure, when the myth operates on a personal level the distinction between the two is not always clear. Because Blake created Beulah and Generation to distinguish innocence from experience, physical humans who by definition inhabit Generation can seem to simultaneously inhabit Beulah. Thel for example, in The Book of Thel, is already a physical human when allowed to pass from the Vales of Har (Beulah) into the House of Clay (Generation). The existence of a physical human in the pristine and beautiful realm of innocence can indicate a refusal to acknowledge some of the cruel truths of the human experience. As the chimney sweep denies the unfairness of his plight, so we will see that Thel as a human inhabitant of Beulah does not wish to acknowledge some fearful aspects of human life.

All of Blake's mythic poetry predating the epic vision of Milton (1796) deals primarily with the movement of living beings within and between these realms of Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Death. Every poem can be seen as a working out of conflicts between energy, reason, and imagination (Bloom 4), each of which tends to move the universe toward one of the two poles of Eden and Death. In the mythical world of the minor prophecies the figure of Orc embodies the principle of energy, Urizen embodies reason, and Los embodies imagination. Generally speaking, Orc tends to work to push existence back toward the unfallen state of paradise, and Urizen tends to try to keep existence in a fallen state. Although Los has a closer link to Orc than to Urizen, his power can be used by either principle, and is in fact used more often in Blake's poems as an oppressive force than as a liberating force. In the societal realm Orc expresses itself as the force of revolution, Urizen as the controlling force of law, and Los as art or imaginative action.

The interaction between the forces of Orc, Urizen, and Los is not always simple or straightforward, and becomes more complex as Blake's poetry matures. If a particular successful revolution does not bring the universe to a state of final apocalypse (a return to the unfallen state), then the revolutionary force of Orc is always converted into the controlling force of Urizen. Or to describe the phenomenon more accurately, in a successful revolution the force of Orc is sacrificed within the rebel, and the force of Urizen takes over as the rebel becomes the ruler (Frye 234).

In Blake's mythic system the incarnation of Orc would occur in the fallen world a limited number of times before the final revolution would move the fallen world back into its unfallen state. The last unsuccessful incarnation was the appearance of Jesus Christ, and the final incarnation which would lead to apocalypse was on the verge of occurring in the 1790's (Bloom 146). That is to say, the revolution begun in America in 1776 would spread across the Atlantic and throughout the world as the social aspect of the apocalypse which would bring everything in the universe back into its original eternal state, a state in which the realms of art, nature, and society would become one because every action would be imaginative, every birth would not end in death, and the hindering rule of law would no longer be necessary.

Within the structure of this myth, Blake tries metaphorically to represent as many levels of human aspiration and defeat as can be conceived. The cycle of desire and disappointment, moved by the vision of a universal awakening of the imagination, drives Blake's universe. There has historically been some critical controversy over the question of the unity of Blake's canon. Prior to Northrup Frye's publication of Fearful Symmetry in 1947, few scholars considered the works written after the Songs of Experience (1789) to be worth reading. In arguing that Blake's illuminated poetry is governed by a unified vision, Frye overstates his case by presenting Blake's thought as if it were fully developed from the beginning, as if his vision were fully conceived and his poetry fully planned from the time he began engraving it. In response to Frye's work, literary critics have advanced widely varying theories concerning the relative worthiness or unworthiness of parts of Blake's canon. Apparently disturbed by the newly developing interest in Blake, F. R. Leavis proposed that students should be taught that none of Blake's prophetic poems is a successful work of art (Leavis 66). Stanley Gardner argued that The First Book of Urizen (1795) is his last important poem (Gardner 7), whereas most critics who take Blake seriously agree with Frye that the late epics, Milton (1804), Jerusalem (1804), and the unfinished The Four Zoas, provide the fullest expressions of Blake's mythical universe.

Generally speaking, it would seem to me sensible to accept Blake as a poet whose vision and expression continued to develop as he continued to work, and to judge his individual works, as we would any other poet's works, not only for their own merits, but also in the context of their time and the poet's stage of development at that time. This study will trace a transition in Blake's poetry as he expanded his thematic emphasis from individual personal experience in The Book of Thel (1789) and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to large historical movements in America: A Prophecy (1793), Europe: A Prophecy (1794) and The Song of Los (1795).

Of the many critical books and articles published about Blake's work over the last fifty years, it would be impossible to overstate the continuing relevance of Northrup Frye's Fearful Symmetry. Frye was the first literary critic to consider all of Blake's work to be worth reading, and the first person to consider Blake as a serious and original thinker. He gave twentieth century readers a context in which to think of Blake. Prior to Frye, most of Blake's work was commonly considered that of either a madman spewing gibberish or a mystic writing in esoteric religious codes. After Frye, he quickly came to be considered one of the most important voices of English Romanticism in part because Frye explained to the world of literary interpretation that Blake's absolute faith in the reality of his vision depended not upon mysticism or madness, but upon his absolute belief in the reality of the human imagination.

Other important works I have depended upon include David Erdman's Blake: Prophet Against Empire, which explains in detail the aspects of historical allegory in Blake's work. Erdman argument that Blake deliberately made his poems difficult to understand in order to protect himself from a government hostile to political radicals. Erdman's explanations of the social conditions and historical events of England and America in the 1770's through the 1790's are especially important to anyone trying to understand the historical allegories America and Europe. Harold Bloom, in Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument, was the first to equate the figures of Los, Urizen, and Orc with the human principles of imagination, reason, and energy. S. Foster Damon's A Dictionary of Blake's Symbols is a commonly used reference guide and commentary to mythic names and places. Among the relevant minor secondary works are Carol Kowle's "Plate III and the Meaning of Europe" and Mark Anderson's, "Why is that Fairy in Europe?" both of which have filled a large critical gap left by the major critics by interpreting the meaning of the Introduction to Europe.

The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion are the two earliest of Blake's illustrated mythic poems, and the two narrowest in scope. They are also a perfectly suited pair of poems to use to investigate the meaning of Blake's concept of the fall from innocence to experience because they each depict as their subject a character whose existence in the state of absolute innocence is undergoing a challenge. Each poem depicts a response to this challenge that is contrary to the response of the other. Whereas Thel ends by fleeing the world of experience, Oothoon (the heroine of Visions) flies impetuously into life only to get caught in the inevitable traps of existence. In keeping with the spirit of the Proverb of Hell which states, "He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence" (Marriage 7.5), Blake offers no middle ground between the action of those who fall blindly into life, which leads to the traps and limitations of physical existence, and the inaction of those who decline to live, which cannot satisfy human souls.

In the history of Blake interpretation there has been some debate over whether to view Thel in her pre-fallen state as a living human or as a neo-platonic pre-existing soul. It is important to recognize that both interpretations are correct. Thel is the first mythic character Blake invented and the only one who represents only personal experience. At the personal level of existence, the distinction between the state of Beulah and the state of Generation is less a division of two places or times than of the two states of innocence and experience. Thel and Oothoon are young women whose existences in various complex stages of innocence and experience, or in various degrees of the unfallen and fallen states, are metaphors for the psychological states of young people who have to face moving inevitably from the innocence of childhood to the experience and responsibilities of adulthood. Thel seems to be part ethereal spirit and part pre-adolescent physical girl because she possesses qualities derived from the divine and from the physical realms. As an ethereal spirit she inhabits Beulah, the place of disembodied pre-existence from which she can only enter the physical world through the gate of the House of Clay. Even though her state of mind maintains her innocence and her seperation from the physical world, she is in reality a physical being and must move inevitably toward the realm of clay. It is true that Blake seems to be inconsistent in making Thel simultaneously physical and non-physical, but this inconsistency perfectly represents the human paradox Blake is trying to depict--the struggle between the eternal and the temporal elements of human existence.

As stated in the introduction, everything starts in Blake with the innocence of childhood and the fundamental disappointment and fear humans experience when confronted with the world as it is instead of as we had thought it to be. The description of the Vales of Har in The Book of Thel is the most beautiful and most detailed depiction in Blake's canon of the ethereal place of innocence he was later to identify as Beulah. The sense of beauty the poem presents derives from a perfect mixture of air and earth, of spirit and body, beginning with Thel's depiction of herself as mostly spirit:

Ah! Thel is like a wat'ry bow, and like a parting cloud;

Like a reflection in a glass; like shadows in the water;

Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant's face;

Like the dove's voice; like transient day; like music in the air.

Ah! Gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,

And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice

Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time. (Thel 1.8-14)

Thel in innocence is all air. She is the queen of things that barely exist: the dreams of infants, the dove's voice, and the weakest and most delicately beautiful of physical things, such as the lily which can barely support the weight of a butterfly. In answer to Thel's sighs for death, the Lilly tells her, "I am a watry weed,/And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales;/So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head/Yet I am visited from heaven and he that smiles on all" (1.16-19). Thus begins the series of four conversations Thel holds with the Lilly, the Cloud, the Worm, and the Clod of Clay comprising the first four of the five sections of the poem. All of these creatures inhabit the vales of Har.

Har is a perfect little world in which the selfish ego does not exist, an ideally functioning ecosystem in which everything that dies is glad to die so that another member of the ecosystem may flourish, a place of perfect spirituality where the Cloud is glad to unite in such a perfect marriage with the Dew that the Cloud loses every vestige of itself to become nourishment for the flowers, passing away, in its own words:

. . . to love, to peace, and raptures holy:

Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers;

And court the fair eyed dew to take me to her shining tent;

The weeping virgin, trembling kneels before the risen sun,

Till we arise link'd in a golden band, and never part;

But walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers. (3.11-15)

Following this description of the marriage of the Cloud and the Dew, the Lilly urges Thel to rejoice with the rest of Har because she too is clothed in light each morning and fed by heaven.

This admonition, and the deliberate lessons taught Thel by the Cloud, the Worm, and the Clod of Clay in the ensuing sections mark the primary difference between the mythic Book of Thel and personal lyrics of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The thematic parallels between the pair of mythic poems, Thel and Visions and the pair of volumes of lyrics, Innocence and Experience are obvious because each of the four works is a personal depiction of innocence being challenged. Generally speaking, Thel corresponds to Songs of Innocence because it is about innocence and avoidance, and Visions corresponds to Experience because it is about experience and confrontation. Unlike the Songs, however, The Book of Thel's organized symbolic structure allows Blake to point blatantly in the direction that Thel ought to go. Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience are designed to show real people living in varying stages of innocence, and confronting in various ways the evidence in their lives of the distinct separation of their inner and outer worlds. Thel, being less real than the chimney sweepers, for example, can be offered by the symbolic presences in her world the kind of direct education that is not available to the more earth bound innocents and initiates in the Songs.

The beauty of The Book of Thel derives in part from the delicate verse which describes the lovely and airy world of Har, but it also derives from the absolutely appropriate way in which Thel's simple metaphors concerning her condition come to life before her and become the intelligent instruments of her instruction. She has been an angelic queen of a world so delicately beautiful that it seems to hardly exist, a world so pure that it seems to contain no malevolence and no desire. She certainly identifies herself as a spiritual rather than physical being. Even in lamenting her own mortality she identifies herself with ethereal things that barely exist for brief periods. She is "like shadows in the water . . . like the dove's voice . . . like music in the air" (Thel 1.2,3). She is the faint cloud that forms over the vale in the morning and quickly fades in the heat of day. Each time she compares herself to an object of creation in order to express her dissatisfaction with life, that object appears before her to tell how perfect its life is and how it loves to fill its exact role in Har.

She begins by lamenting the death of the flowers, and making that death reflect upon her own transitory nature. But when the Lilly speaks up and recites a list of her own and Thel's blessings, Thel begins to distance herself from her identification with the flower. The Lilly has purpose, Thel argues, "giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o'ertired" (2.4). The Lilly has reason to be satisfied because she nourishes the lambs and cows, whereas Thel merely fades away useless like the morning cloud. When Thel compares herself to a Cloud, the Lilly of course calls the Cloud out of the sky to participate in the argument. When the Cloud describes his happy death, which is tantamount to his marriage with the Dew, Thel again decries her own uselessness, claiming now that she is not like the Cloud which fades away into "ten-fold life" (3.10), but she "only lives to be at death the food of worms" (3.24). Until this point, we have known that Thel is mortal, but we have not known that she is physical. The thrust of her rhetoric, which is to make herself appear more miserable and low born, moves her image of herself closer and closer to the realm of clay. As she discovers that each creature to whom she has compared herself does not view itself as lowly, or as unhappy as she is trying to depict herself, she quickly rejects the current metaphor for one which must be even more miserable.

Of course Thel can see no reason to rejoice in the possibility of being eaten at death by worms. But Har, a place of innocence, does not recognize the hierarchies that humans such as Thel assign to the natural world. The Cloud tells Thel that to be food for worms is a great blessing because "everything that lives, lives not alone nor for itself" (3.26, 27). The Cloud then calls the Worm to appear before Thel. The Worm is so humble that it cannot lift itself up to her, but must sit upon the Lilly. Neither can it speak aloud, but must whisper to the Clod of Clay, who speaks for it. From the Worm she learns the astonishing fact that God loves even the "meanest thing . . . [whose] bosom of itself is cold" (4.10, 11). In her response, Thel reveals her incomplete understanding of the nature of the realm of innocence when she equates her previous understanding of God's love for the Worm to her idea of justice: "That God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil foot/that wilful bruis'd its helpless form: but that he cherish'd it/With milk and oil, I never knew; and therfore did I weep,/And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away and lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot" (4.9-13).

This misunderstanding of the nature of God's love is underscored by the fact that Thel is the only character in Har who does not experience a daily communion with the Creator. She pines for a gentle death in the beginning of the poem in part because she wants to "hear the voice of him who walketh in the garden in the evening time" (1.14). That is to say, she wants to experience communion with the God of Genesis 2 who took daily walks in Eden. Both the Lilly and the Worm claim to experience daily contact with God, and the Cloud is in such perfect harmony with all of creation that it is not difficult to imagine that he could claim a similar experience.

When Thel admits her misunderstanding, the Matron Clay invites her to leave the airy realm and enter into the house of Clay. Thel, having acknowledged her physical existence when she admitted the fact that she will at death become food for worms, has been intellectually prepared to accept her life of clay. She is not prepared, however, for the psychological state she encounters when she enters into the house of Clay. What she finds when she enters the physical realm is a small symbolic landscape of Blake's vision of physical existence. The voice she hears when she approaches her grave does not give her the same lovely reasoning that 'God loves me despite my physical existence' she had earlier heard the Worm of Har argue. The voice emanating from her pit is rather a voice that bemoans the existence of the individual self, and all the unsatisfied desire that accompanies increasing self-awareness. The voice begins with a death lament similar in substance to Thel's cry at the beginning of the poem in the vales of Har: "Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?" (6.11); and leads her through a series of questions which speak of a growing sense of appetite and hunger deriving from the senses and creating natural fear and restlessness in the earth-bound human existence. The two final questions which end the poem suddenly and send Thel shrieking in fear back to the Vales of Har are about the hindrance of sexual desire: "Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!/Why a little curtain of flesh upon the bed of our desire?"(6.20). The series of questions voiced within the house of Clay indicate a world of physical existence (the world of experience) that is fundamentally different from the innocent world of Har. Whereas innocence is a place without desire or fear, experience is all desire and fear. For Thel, as a symbolic representation of developing humans, the awareness of death precipitates the fall into experience. Her concern with the death of the lotus blossom in the first lines of the poem quickly turns into a concern for her own death, which in turn engenders a number of questions about the relationship of the individual self to the rest of creation. This questioning of the nature of the individual leads to an obsession with the self that cannot be satisfied by any innocent vision of a unified creation. Each of the living creatures of Har tries to teach her universal love, universal equality, and universal order. But the perfect marriage, which is the marriage that occurs between the morning Cloud and the Dew, depends precisely upon the absence of the human ego, and can occur only when water comes together with other water. Thel in Har is increasingly out of her element. Each time a flower, a cloud, or a worm says to her, "universal love," she listens and learns, but always makes the discussion turn back upon herself. This acute awareness of the boundary between herself and others, a boundary that the Cloud does not recognize for himself, defines her as human. It is also this boundary that within the realm of clay creates the anxiety, fear, and desire that send her shrieking back into the vales of Har.

Blake does not offer any judgment of Thel's rejection of the human world, but it is clear that as a human being, the Garden of Eden will not satisfy her. Har is a place where she can only pine away knowing she is essentially different from every other creature living there. If we are to take Blake's proverb seriously that states, "He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence" (Marriage 7.5), then we should expect some unknown dire consequences to come from her declining to live. But in this poem Blake leaves unanswered questions concerning Thel's fate to accompany the unanswerable questions which make the realm of experience so frightening.

Besides the three most significant questions in part four regarding death and sexual hindrance, the question posed in that section which is most relevant to Blake's view of the world of experience is a little difficult to understand: "Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn,/Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?" (6.12, 13). Arrows related to the sense of sight are a kind of codified reference to human desire. Human eyelids are stored with arrows of desire because it is part of human nature to want what we see. Desire comes from the senses because it is impossible to desire what we do not know, and impossible to know what we do not experience through sensory perceptions. The eyelids are loaded with the arrows of desire because the eyes are our most powerful sense, and through them we experience our most powerful desires. The "thousand men in ambush" signify that desire in the world of experience is not only often frustrated, but it also often gets us into a great deal of trouble. The ambush of desire is one of the traps of experience that are a given part of the human experience, and are an element of the physical world that is a natural outgrowth of the original human paradox (the frustration of not being clearly and obviously immortal) which underlies all of human existence. In Europe the ambush of desire will be signified by the "gins and nets" which Enitharmon uses to catch all humans at birth. Our more immediate concern, however, is to investigate the poem which most specifically addresses the inevitable ambush of desire, and which is Blake's response in the realm of experience to the innocence of "Thel."

Visions and Thel are companion poems primarily because Visions begins where Thel ends. The world of experience Thel flees in fear at the end of her tale is the world Oothoon flies into without caution at the beginning of hers. Besides the complementary natures of the two plots, there are a number of characteristics of Visions which reflect back upon Thel. Thel's Motto, which appears on the title page to her poem, asks the questions: "Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?/Or wilt thou go ask the mole?" Brian Wilke has observed that Oothoon offers an answer by insisting that the two are wilfully different (Wilke 47): "Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath?/But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee" (Visions 5.39-40).

In some ways the contrasted characters of Thel and Oothoon, and the contrasted settings of the two poems seem to be negative images of each other. Thel is a wingless daughter of Mne Seraphim, and the heaviest element in a realm of air and light. While her angelic sisters are content to tend their flocks, she languishes over the flowers, contemplating death. Oothoon on the other hand is a winged daughter of Albion, the only human in a world weighted with human concerns who can fly, and the only human with the unrestrained energy to act upon her desires. Whereas The Book of Thel begins with Thel's sisters leading "round their sunny flocks" (Thel 1.1) apparently fulfilling their roles as shepherdesses in Har freely without complaint, Visions of the Daughters of Albion begins with Oothoon's sisters enslaved and weeping in a "trembling lamentation" (Visions 1.1). Whereas the flowers are to Thel emblems of the transitory nature of life, the contemplation of which leads her into a languid lamentation of her own death, the flower for Oothoon is an emblem of desire whose claim of permanence precipitates her impetuous actions.

Although the plot of Visions like The Book of Thel is primarily concerned with the plight of individuals (that is, the personal realm of existence), Blake begins in this poem to expand the scope of his subject. Whereas the plot of Thel centers around the developing ego of one isolated person, the plot of Visions is about a relationship of three people, Oothoon, Bromion, and Theotormon. Visions has a fairly simple and brief plot which functions primarily to develop an emblematic picture of the three people stuck in Bromion's cave. As the poem progresses through the plot and into the arguments of the characters, the image of the cave is increasingly endowed with societal and metaphysical significance. The story begins with Oothoon, who is a virgin, professing her love for Theotormon. In an act which signifies that she is making herself sexually available, she plucks a marigold and places it between her breasts. She then flies swiftly across Theotormon's realm where Bromion rapes her and holds her in his cave. Appalled at her suffering, Bromion offers the now pregnant Oothoon in marriage to Theotormon. But Theotormon, rendered incapable of action by his overwhelming jealousy, merely sits at the entrance to the cave and weeps. The picture formed at this point in the story appears on the frontispiece to the illustrated poem. Bromion and Oothoon are bound back to back in Bromion's cave. Theotormon squats weeping at the entrance, hiding his eyes and covering his ears. Bromion is looking off to the left at some approaching terror, Theotormon's "black jealous waters" (2.4) are lapping at the threshold to the cave. In the sky in the background the sun seems to be peering like an eye through clouds at the scene of human stasis below.

In the lines describing the scene in Bromion's cave, the characters of Oothoon and Bromion are generalized into the traits that cause their precarious state. Bromion is terror and Oothoon is meekness:

Bound back to back in Bromions caves terror & meekness dwell

At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard

With secret tears . . . . (2.5-7)

Oothoon quickly overcomes her state of meekness when she begins to act to free herself from Bromion's back. In the final action of the plot, which occurs on the second of eight plates, Oothoon struggles away from Bromion by assigning to herself and completing an act of penance which is strangely similar to the punishment of Prometheus. She calls down Theotormon's Eagles to tear away her defiled bosom in order that she may, in her words, "reflect the image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast" (2.15-16).

Upon this simple and brief story Blake overlays levels of meaning by endowing his primarily human characters with inhuman and aggregate human attributes. Oothoon is a fully human American woman. She is also associated with the American continent, and the American slaves. John Howard has argued that her association with her sisters across the ocean creates an analogous relationship between her plight as an American slave and the condition of English women of Blake's time, indicating that the women of England are the enslaved daughters of Albion who throughout the poem echo Oothoon's sighs (Howard 101). Clearly by the end of the poem Oothoon becomes a voice of rebellion representing all who are victims of outward Bromion-like oppression (slavery, rape, and the rule of law which encouraged slavery and rape), and all who are the objects of repressive sexual jealousy such as Theotormon displays toward her.

Theotormon and Bromion also possess attributes that are both human and inhuman. Theotormon is primarily a jealous man, but he is also ruler of a watery realm. Physically possessing the attributes of water, he, "rolld his waves around./And folded his black jealous waters around the adulterate pair" (3.2). He possesses the eagles which Oothoon calls from the sky to prey upon her breast, and he seems to be connected with dolphins which swim in jealousy around Bromion's caves. Bromion is primarily a human slave owner and landholder who becomes the voice of law and reason. By association he seems to be a spokes-person for Urizen, who is the creator and defender of human hierarchies which make slavery legal. Bromion's non-human attributes include thunder, which he uses to knock Oothoon out of the sky as she flies across Theotormon's realm, and storm clouds which gather as he shakes in angry tirades.

The effect of assigning natural attributes to these human characters is to extend their stories beyond the merely personal realm. Bromion's proclamation of ownership of Oothoon is tantamount to a proclamation of ownership of all American real estate and all American slaves. Addressing Oothoon, he claims:

Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:

Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:

They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:

Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent . . . . (1.19-23)

There is no difference to Bromion between owning a human and owning the plains of America. In his view everything and everybody must be controlled. In terms of Blake's political protest, the owners of the land are the owners of slaves, and the cruelty of ownership is a necessary part of keeping the established order in the world.

For the reader familiar with Songs of Experience, Visions also reverberates with the sound of metaphysical complaint. Although the characters are not clearly metaphysical symbols as are Los, Orc, and Urizen in later poems, it is nevertheless difficult to read Visions without thinking of the metaphysical complaint of Earth in the pair of poems which open Experience. In those two poems, entitled "Introduction" and "Earth's Answer," the voice of the Bard exhorts the fallen Earth to awaken to the innocent joy of God's gifts, saying, "The starry floor/The watry shore/Is giv'n thee till the break of day" (18-20). But from the Earth's perspective, the "starry floor" (which is an unusual expression for the sky), and the shore are not gifts but the boundaries which define her limits. She replies in part:

Prisoned on the watry shore

Starry jealousy does keep my den

Cold and hoar

Weeping o'er

I hear the father of ancient men.

. . .

Break this heavy chain,

That does freeze my bones around

Selfish! vain,

Eternal bane!

That free love with bondage bound. ("Answer" 6-10, 21-25)

So much of the contents of Visions seem to be condensed into the brief stanzas of "Earth's Answer" that a connection is readily made in the minds of the audience between the Earth railing against the fact of her physical existence and Oothoon wailing her insistence upon her freedom to love according to her desire. Although "Enslav'd" and "Prisoned" are not exactly synonyms, they are similar enough in meaning and sound that the reader of Visions is reminded as early as the first line that the Earth is chained between the sea and sky in the earlier poem. The images of the watery shore, the dewy morning, the den of jealousy, the complaint to the Creator, and especially the final line of "Earth's Answer" that disparages the binding of free love, all echo between the two poems and serve to link the primarily metaphysical concerns of "Earth's Answer" with the primarily personal concerns of Visions. When Bromion assigns to Oothoon attributes of the Earth, he associates her struggle against the human forces that want to impose limits upon her with the symbolic complaint of the living Earth against the divine order that establishes the ocean and sky as her outer limits.

Unlike the Earth, however, Oothoon quickly conquers the meekness which keeps her bound to the back of her oppressor. The most difficult part of the poem to understand is the portion of the plot which serves as the transition between the binding of Oothoon in Bromion's cave and her rising to hover at Theotormon's side where she begins her speech. The images in this passage are as bizarre and disconcerting as the idea that a raped woman should seek punishment:

Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weep! her tears are locked up;

But she can howl incessant writhing her soft snowy limbs.

And calling Theotormons Eagles to prey upon her flesh.

I call with holy voice! Kings of the sounding air,

Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect.

The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast.

The Eagles at her call descend rend their bleeding prey;

Theotormon severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile;

As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles. (Visions 2.11-19)

In part the injustice of this punishment is Blake's response to a conventional morality which values virginity over love and which considers the physical sexual act an act of defilement. Oothoon indicates the irony of her position by proclaiming herself to be holy even as she calls down a punishment meant to cleanse her of her supposed defilement. The Promethean nature of her chosen punishment indicates that she considers herself a hero and not a sinner. Prometheus was punished for bringing forbidden fire, a symbol of knowledge and freedom, to the human race. Oothoon, in her pursuit of sexual freedom, is also symbolically trying to liberate humanity.

Sexual rebellion is an appropriate symbol for general rebellion against external controls because it applies at the personal, social, and metaphysical levels of existence.

When she plucks the flower from Leutha's vale and pursues Theotormon, she is following the natural course of her desire. But such an act of the free pursuit of sexual desire by a young woman is forbidden socially because a young woman in Blake's eighteenth century England and America is expected to guard her virginity until she is married. Sexual freedom is also forbidden at the metaphysical level because of the natural dangers involved. Not only are life threatening diseases communicated between sexually liberated people, but in the eighteenth century childbirth also endangers the lives of women. For Oothoon to break convention and ignore caution is to act in defiance of society which makes the rules for women and God who creates the natural order which binds her to physical necessity. Her rebellion illustrates the paradox of the human condition. Her desire is simple and absolute, and her expression of desire is honest. When she plucks the flower from Leutha's vale and decides to pursue Theotormon, she says: "And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks" (1.13). But fulfillment of her desire is absolutely forbidden by forces from all levels.

Although her penance is ironic and her punishment undeserved, they nevertheless free her from Bromion's back. I believe the best way to interpret her purification ritual is to view it as a gesture of generosity toward Theotormon. She wants to be clean in his eyes so that she may reflect his image in her pure breast. She therefore calls his birds to tear away the defiled flesh. Her mistake is in not realizing that if he is to look upon his own reflection with favor, it is his visage which must be pure and clean. But he is forever changed by his severe jealousy. The effect of Bromion's imposition of sexual control over Oothoon is not limited to physical violence. Bromion's violence has forever cut off her free communication with her beloved. In the illustration of the three characters in Bromion's cave, Theotormon is covering his eyes and his ears. Throughout the remainder of the poem, no matter how loudly, how clearly, or how masterfully she conveys her state of freedom and purity, he will not hear her.

The fact that she has broken her bonds enough to hover in the air next to Theotormon indicates that her generous act of penance has partially restored the supernatural power that her original rebellion allowed her. In the beginning of the story, she takes flight immediately upon plucking the flower of desire. In "The Argument" section, which introduces the poem, she describes the act of taking flight simply as rising from Leutha's vale:

I loved Theotormon

And I was not ashamed

I trembled in my virgin fears

And I hid in Leutha's vale!

I plucked Leutha's flower,

And I rose up from the vale:

But the terrible thunders tore

My virgin mantle in twain. (iii.1-8)

Leutha's vale is a place of secret desire. Her entire rebellion, which shakes the foundations of Bromion's orderly world, consists simply of coming out of hiding and being honest about her sexuality.

John Howard has noticed that the illustration which accompanies the Argument appears to be a direct reference to a stanza of "Several Questions Answered," a little read poem from Blake's Notebook:

He who binds himself to a joy

Does the winged life destroy

But he who kisses joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sunrise. (1-4)

In the illustration, Oothoon kisses a youthful figure who is flying above the Marygold toward a sunrise. The illustration is intended to show that the joy she seeks is unconstrained and unconstraining. Love given freely does not seek to bind. In her act of kissing joy in flight, which in the main body of the poem corresponds to the act of plucking the flower, rising unashamed from the vale and approaching her beloved, she conquers the physical limitations imposed by gravity. She herself becomes, briefly, a joy in flight. When she frees herself from Bromion's side to hover over Theotormon, the illustration shows her levitated above the ground, but still chained to the Earth by the ankle. She can once again fly, but not far and no higher than a few feet. Her complete freedom would require a breaking of the bonds of silence her beloved creates with his jealousy. Opening Theotormon's mind to the point where he will begin communicating with her is the entire purpose of the argument she begins after rising to his side.

The remainder of the poem is comprised of speeches by the three characters. Oothoon argues for freedom, Bromion for control. Jealous Theotormon gives a languid muttering speech which reveals him merely as weak and ineffectual. Although the dramatic argument still centers around the sexual drama of the three characters, the free use of images and arguments which pertain to metaphysical attributes indicates that the characters consider their situation to have more than merely personal significance. Although Bromion's argument is certainly not made of straw, Blake nevertheless clearly takes the side of the victim and rebel Oothoon. She has the first and last speech, and the responses of the other two are relatively brief compared to her long exhortations and reveries.

She begins by exhorting Theotormon to arise with her because daylight has arrived and supplanted the deadly night that enclosed her. Her description of the night of Bromion's bondage does not describe a physical rape and enslavement, but the spiritual enslavement that all humans experience because we are mortal:

They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;

They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.

And they inclos'd my infinite brain into a narrow circle,

And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning

Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (2.30-34)

Here Bromion's law, which had bound her, is equated with the force of binding physical necessity. The terror of Bromion's scourge is the same as the recognition of human limitations. In Europe the image of the binding of the infinite into a physical shell will become an important image for the process of human birth. To Oothoon, the idea that she is bound by physical restrictions is merely a lie which is overcome by audacious belief. At the metaphysical level, the voice of the scourge becomes equated with the voice of the Reason because they both work to the purpose of imposing limitations. Pope would say that God is in his heaven and we can take comfort in the fact that all things are in their natural order. The voice of the Bard in the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience says that we can be thankful for the seashore and the heavens, which we cannot reach beyond. But Oothoon scoffs at the human skull which defines the limits of her infinite brain, and at the breast which forms an abyss for her heart. For the Bard, who loves the beauty of God's creation, the breaking day symbolizes the possibility of awakening the "slumberous mass" ("Introduction" 14) of Earth into vibrant life. Oothoon's position would be identical to the Bard's if he would also refuse to accept the human limitations implied by his love of nature. For her the imposition of the skull upon the brain and the abyss of the breast surrounding the heart, like the imposition of the shore and sky upon the earth, are the forces which close off human access to infinite joy, which obliterate and erase human life.

Because her joy is not independent of communication with her beloved, however, the awakening landscape darkens into a place of sickness and self-consciousness: "Instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye/In the eastern cloud: instead of night a sickly charnel house;/That Theotormon hears me not! to him the night and morn/Are both alike: a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears . . . " (2.35-37). People do not thrive in isolation. And without the open communication that would be symbolized by a mutual love between Oothoon and Theotormon, her vision of freedom cannot come to fruition. She answers his silence by arguing that individuals must obey their own natures, which are determined by desire and not by the imposition of law. The failure to recognize the power of obeying natural instead of imposed rule leads to a pattern of secrecy and hidden desire which is passed down through generations. For that reason, Oothoon wants to uncover "the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old" (3.13) in order that people may be as honest and open in their desires as the eagle who loves the sun or the worm who loves to curl around the "bones of death" (3.10).

When Oothoon begins to cry out that the experienced soul ought to be more appealing to Theotormon than the virgin, he finally breaks his silence. Whereas she has been speaking of the individual joys creatures experience when following their own desires, he declares that he cannot know distinction because of his sorrow. Theotormon is the weakest character in this drama and his speech is the least clear. He wallows in self pity and is nostalgic for ancient thoughts and the joy they once brought. Some scholars have criticized Oothoon for being attached to such a weak individual. However displeasing her love for him may seem to the audience, there are several reasons why it must remain as an integral part of the plot. Most important, for Oothoon to reject him as a lost cause or as an incompatible lover would be to compromise her and Blake's ideal. She is working against the experience of an unfair world in order to create an ideal world of experience in which sin and secret desire do not exist. In an ideal world, the relationship between the lovers would never have been stopped before it could begin. In continuing to pursue him, she is insisting upon the opportunity to begin the open communication that should have been available to them in the first place. She cannot reject him as incompatible because she will not get the opportunity to know him. If she were to acquiesce she would have allowed the scourge of Bromion to rule, aided by the secret desires and jealous tears of Theotormon. The strength and truth of her desire is central to her argument, and Theotormon is the object of that desire. Blake is not implying that a relationship between these two particular individuals would be ideal, but merely that outside influences cannot be allowed to keep it from beginning.

Theotormon's allegorical qualities also make him an essential part of this permanent, static triangle of the oppressed, the oppressor, and the willfully ignorant bystander. Oothoon as spokes-person for the oppressed can turn nowhere else because Theotormon represents everyone who is willfully ignorant of oppression. David Erdman has identified Theotormon in the political allegory as the English merchant class who did not own slaves but who profited from slavery by doing business with slave owners and slave traders (Erdman 47). Erdman's inference is helpful but a little too narrowly drawn. In some respects Erdman's allegory works if we can imagine large numbers of people in the English merchant class refusing to recognize the oppression of the slaves while declining to be slave owners themselves, as Theotormon declines to recognize that his adherence to jealousy and pain aids in the oppression of Oothoon. If we view the allegory from another direction, however, it falls apart. It is difficult to imagine any illicit gain Theotormon may be experiencing from Oothoon's oppression as the English merchants apparently profited from slavery. Harold Bloom has suggested that Theotormon's severe smile at Oothoon's punishment indicates that he takes a sadistic pleasure in her suffering (Bloom 109). Bloom's view does not seem quite right to me either. The smile is awkward and strange, but I see no evidence in the text that he is sadistic. In truth, the delineation of Theotormon's character is so vague that critics who want to explain him in detail must rely on speculation and conjecture. Interpretations such as Erdman's which try to provide clearly defined historical events and people for Blake's poetry to represent are more appropriately applied to the fully developed political allegories of Europe: A Prophecy and America: A Prophecy which cannot be understood today without the important historical knowledge Erdman's research provides.

Theotormon's characterization does, however, have some vague allegorical affiliations. As he sits weeping at the entrance to the cave, he seems to be sitting atop the slaves:

At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard

With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore

The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.

That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires

Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth. (2.6-10)

Theotormon is associated in this passage with the suffering of slaves, with the "religious caves" that house them, and with lust. The waves that were a few lines earlier "his black jealous waters" have become the voices of slaves. Although there is no indication that he oppresses them directly, his position over them implies a causal relationship. Theotormon is ruled by jealousy, secrecy, self absorption, and the unwillingness to face life honestly. When these character traits occur frequently in society, a social environment is formed in which a class of people weaker than Theotormon, such as women or slaves, may be enslaved or oppressed by a class of people stronger and more crass than Theotormon, such as slave owners or overbearing or power wielding husbands. The caves are religious because in Blake's mind religion is one of the tools used by society which provides an atmosphere that makes enslavement possible.

As discussed in the introduction, Blake believed that traditional religious belief creates a sense of hope among the victimized which makes their own oppression more acceptable to them. The idea that perpetual fires of lust result from religious inhibitions against the free expression of love will be more fully developed in Europe, a poem in which the caves of fear in Visions become the social and religious environment of the entire Christian era. In Visions the caves of religion fall directly under Theotormon's realm and are only tangentially related to Bromion's cave of terror because the hindering effect of religious belief is based upon the postponement of dynamic living until after death and not directly upon the fear of the scourge. In Blake's view such an avoidance of current life and current truth indicates the same willful hindrance of one's own infinite capacity that Theotormon's jealousy indicates. In the story, if Theotormon would merely open his mind to Oothoon's communication, Bromion's chains would fall away and the cave of terror would no longer exist. In the political allegory, if the world of people who are not overtly slave owners were to concede the humanity of the black race and refuse to do business with slave owners, the economic structure supporting the slave trade would collapse and slavery would no longer be possible.

In all of the parallel issues of jealousy, religion, slavery, and lust, it is the primacy of emotion over vision which leads to hindrance. The motto to this poem is "The eye sees more than the heart knows." Emotion is related to knowledge because it helps define the boundaries of acknowledged human experience. Theotormon cannot hear Oothoon and will not acknowledge her freedom because his jealousy will not allow him to penetrate that far into reality. Bromion, unlike Theotormon, acknowledges that the world of experience is larger than the narrow parameters of his emotional and intellectual world, that the parameters of human knowledge can be expanded by greater vision. But in his final speech he expresses a fear of humans' sensual response to a vision expanded by freedom. He implies that Oothoon is naive not to recognize that danger accompanies liberty and that she cannot know what kind of sensual beings humans will become when they take for themselves the liberty she advocates. After expressing his fear of the unknown he expresses a sense of comfort in and acceptance of an economic structure that keeps some rich and others poor, and a religious view which names "one law for both the lion and the ox" (4.22) and punishes the unworthy by binding them in eternal chains and keeping them from eternal life.

Bromion's comfort at the thought of an eternal heaven in which the lion and ox are governed by one law and an eternal hell in which "phantoms of existence" (4.24) are punished with fire and restrained with chains is answered by wails of protest and pain from Oothoon. She exposes the ultimate meaning of Bromion's cave by describing the cycles of fear and suffering his law causes. She describes her experience with Bromion as part of an ongoing generational cycle of violence and misery which will continue for as long as victims such as her remain meek and witnesses such as Theotormon remain modest. Acts of violence, in Oothoon's argument, beget children of violence. The abhorred birth she describes are the children of Bromion's rage, one of whom she is carrying. The child of her violent union with Bromion she predicts will grow to repeat the violence of his father, who is bound to live out his days in "terror driven to madness" (5.25), poised to hold a rod over his victim lest she escape. The abhorred child will also prematurely father children of his own rage. To Oothoon, the horrible, continually regenerating pattern of violence she has lived under, which is both domestic and societal, is ultimately caused by Urizen's abstract idea that says the lion can be made to lie down with the lamb, which is to say that harmony can be enforced by law. In Urizen's idea of heaven, the lion and the lamb obey laws which are not in their own natures, but are abstracted from a fearful and pitying human's idea of what they should be.

Oothoon rejects such abstractions as ridiculous and harmful. She begins her final speech with a lament that Urizen created men in his image:

O! Urizen! Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven:

Thy joys are tears! thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.

How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys

Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love. (5.3-6)

The idea that God made humans to be imitators of a nature outside themselves is antithetical to Oothoon's religious sense. And the idea that a world of love might be defined as a place where creatures as naturally different from each other as a lion and an ox should be governed by one law and should lie down together is antithetical to her love for individual life. The hypothetical world she proposes in her final speech is an answer in the world of experience to the innocence of Har. The perfect marriage of the Cloud and the Dew, in which the individuals are no longer distinguishable, is not what she seeks. She seeks rather a world in which individuals confront each other in happy, honest, lustful innocence.

Her vision of innocent happiness carries her into flights of wild ecstatic joy surpassed in English literature only by the flights of the fourth book of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. Oothoon exclaims wildly, "Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight/In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking/The vigorous joys of morning light" (6.4-6); and "I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy Love! free as the mountain wind!" (7.16). But her wild joy is always undermined by the fact that it is not answered. She admonishes Theotormon with brilliant arguments taken from the natural world, always accusing modesty, jealousy, and religious law of interfering with natural fulfillment and happiness. She accuses Theotormon of allowing religious abstractions to pull him into a state of solitude in which his sexual desire is fulfilled by contrived fantasies rather than by real communication in the experiential world. In the final lines the narration tells us that she wails her magnificent speeches every morning into Theotormon's ears, but he merely "sits/Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadow dire" (8.12).

For any reader who would pity Thel because she rejects in fear the world of experience, Blake offers the life of Oothoon as the horrendous alternative. She suffers horrors, and even her resilient spirit cannot break the spell of jealousy and rage that confronts her joy. She learns from the worm the answer to Thel's motto:

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath?

But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering church yard?

And a palace of eternity in the jaws of the hungry grave

Over his porch these words are written. Take thy bliss O Man!

And sweet shall be thy taste & sweet thy infant joys renew! (5.31-6.3)

But she alone understands the worm's message, and since her bliss includes a desire for community and love, she is forever stuck in isolation with a lonely vision of wonderful possibilities to increase her torment. In the trilogy of poems that immediately followed Visions in order of composition, Blake begins to develop a poetic image of an ultimate solution for Oothoon's loneliness, which is tantamount to offering a solution to the problems of slavery and oppression in the world. Because his idea of revolution also encompasses the desire for metaphysical freedom, his vision of the fight and accomplishment of universal freedom ends in an apocalypse and a rebirth in which everything that exists comes to life. The emptied grave becomes a womb shrieking with wild delight and those who have ruled by the scourge shrink away in terror.

In Blake's trilogy of apocalypse, he shifts the emphasis of his developing mythic universe from the realm of personal crisis seen in Thel and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, to a representation of large historical movements. With this change, the emotional tone of his work begins to become more complex. The plot of Visions is simple and the emotions straightforward: indignation at the oppressor, exasperation at the jealous bystander, empathy for the oppressed and joy at her rebellious energy. As Blake moves his topic into the realm of political allegory, he begins to add a dimension of cruelty to the otherwise sympathetic rebellious figure. Morton Paley and David Erdman both attribute Blake's growing ambiguity toward his ideal of revolutionary energy to a growing disillusionment with the despotism that followed the French Revolution.

The years 1793-95 were politically volatile years in Europe. Robespierre came to power in France as head of a revolutionary council in 1793. In the same year the English monarch declared war on France. In England the foreign war quickly brought food shortages which deepened into famine by 1794. In France, Robespierre's Reign of Terror brought severe and bloody oppression of French citizens by their own government. By 1795, Robespierre himself was executed by the government he had lead, ending the severe and austere policies of his reign.

The poems written during those years reflect Blake's growing sense of ambiguity toward his heroic revolutionary figures. This sense of ambiguity found its fullest expression in The Book of Ahania, which was written in 1795, the same year as the last poem in the trilogy. Paley has observed that in Ahania Blake names nine historical and mythical prototypes for the revolutionary leader: Moses, Satan, Absalom, Prometheus, Jesus, St. Sebastian, Odin, Adonis, and Robespierre. In Blake's view, these historical and mythical figures all struggled with and succumbed to the "Urizen principle" (Paley 81). That is to say, they started as revolutionaries and ended up supporting oppressive law. Ahania, which views the revolutionary figure entirely ironically, was written and printed after the end of Robespierre's Reign of Terror in France. Blake began the trilogy of apocalypse at the beginning of Robespierre's rule, and wrote it as he continued in power.

America, completed a few months after Robespierre came to power in 1793, is the simplest in tone and most optimistic of the three. Europe, completed in 1794 at the height of the bloody and austere reign in France, and during severe food shortages in England, is the most complex of all Blake's poems in plot, and the most difficult to read because of numerous obscure references to unknown mythic figures. Erdman believes that Blake deliberately obscured the plot because he wanted to avoid accusations of treason (211). The poem was written during a war and looks unfavorably upon the English government. Europe is a much darker poem than America and ends at the beginning of bloody war.

The Song of Los, written in 1795, completes the cycle of apocalypse that ends in a universal awakening in which everything dead begins to come to life. Although Blake remains true to the vision of universal awakening promised in the Introduction to Europe, the final fulfillment of that promise in the end of Los is darker and more complex than promised in the Introduction. The fairy in the Introduction to Europe promises to "shew you all alive/The World where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy" (iii. 17, 18). A joy of sorts is present in the Los account, but the image of awakening dead things balances a feeling of eeriness and the shrill sound of wild shrieking with a slowly developing sense of joy the world experiences in its own existence as it begins to become an organized system of individual life:

Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones

Join: shaking convuls'd the shivring clay breathes

And all flesh naked stands: Fathers and Friends;

Mothers & Infants; Kings & Warriors:

The Grave shrieks with delight, & shakes

Her hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:

Her bosom swells with wild desire:

And milk & Blood & glandous wine

In rivers rush & shout & dance,

On mountain, dale and plain. (Song of Los 7.31-40).

The image described in the last three lines here is the re-awakening of the natural world into the pre-fallen state in which everything was a living part of the original human organism. In The Four Zoas the images will be developed further of the parts of earth turning back into the parts of the original body it began as. The First Book of Urizen contains an account of the fall in which the vertebral spine of the god Urizen is bound and formed into the mountain ranges of the Earth. The last three lines of The Song of Los are the first hint of the development of the mythic view of the fallen world as a partially dead portion of the universal human body. In them the rivers of the earth become the veins which conduct the living and individually joyous bodily fluids over the body of the now living earth.

The trilogy of apocalypse tells the story of the struggle toward the metaphysical awakening found in the last two stanzas. In the most general terms, the story of the trilogy is about a process of awakening that moves by fits and starts from a state of partially realized potential, through a state of war and destruction, to the final triumph of revolutionary energy. The most immediate problem of interpretation readers encounter in this group of poems is caused by the complex plot structure. There are three distinct but interrelated stories running through the three poems, but only one of the stories begins and ends in the same poem. America and Europe are each divided into a Preludium section and a Prophecy section. In addition Europe contains a five stanza Introductory poem. The Song of Los is divided into two sections named "Africa" and "Asia." The Introduction to Europe tells of the process of awakening revolutionary energy at the personal level of existence. The Prophecy sections of America and Europe, combined with the "Africa" and "Asia" sections of The Song of Los, emphasize the political level. And the two Preludes of America and Europe combine with the final stanza of The Song of Los to tell it with purely mythical symbols.

In Blake's developing mythic system, the trilogy of America, Europe, and The Song of Los, represents a movement away from the primarily personal narrative found in Thel and Visions. The only section of the trilogy that concentrates on personal experience is the brief Introduction to Europe. It tells a story which contains none of the immediate emotional needs represented in Visions. This Introduction is so different in tone and apparent subject from both the Preludium and the Prophecy in Europe that critics have had difficulty interpreting it. The early twentieth-century editors D. J. Sloss and J. R. Wallis who published a volume of Blake's prophetic poems in 1926 included it only in an appendix at the end of the poem. They regarded it as an unsatisfactory preface and thought Blake must have rejected it in favor of the Preludium (Sloss 48). Although later editions accept it as part of the poem, none of the major works of criticism has given it more than a cursory mention. To fill in this critical gap, Carol Kowles and Mark Anderson have written articles arguing that the Introduction is an important part of the poem. One of the arguments for leaving it out is based upon the fact that it is only included in 2 of the 12 original engravings now existing, and that the plate it is engraved on is not the same size as the other plates of the poem. Kowles has argued that because the Introductory plate is included in the latest of the engraved sets, it was probably composed later than the rest of the poem and added by the author (Kowles 90).

More important, both Kowles and Anderson agree that thematic correspondences between the Introduction and the rest of the poem make it an intricate part of the composition. In defence of the many critics who have chosen to ignore the Introduction, I agree that Europe seems more unified in tone without it. If the Introduction had never been added to the poem, readers would never have missed it. Neither would they have imagined anything like the lighthearted account of the capture of the fairy to be an appropriate introduction to the gloomy prophecy of the destruction of Europe. It is also true, however, that if the Introduction had never been found, Blake's readers would be missing a joyous and concise account of his idea of the meaning of apocalypse. The tonal contrast between the Introduction and the Prophecy adds a welcome sense of levity to Blake's darkest, most pessimistic poem. Whereas America ends somewhat optimistically in flames that hurt only the heart of the oppressor, and The Song of Los ends at the beginning of a universal awakening, the Prophecy portion of Europe is merely a chronicle of destruction. The Introduction at least asserts that everything in England, even in 1794, was not merely death, destruction, and political maneuvering.

Unlike the tales of Thel and Oothoon, the extremely short personal tale of the Introduction is not a direct personal account of frustrated desire. It rather carries the theme of frustrated desire over from Visions of the Daughters of Albion by making it part of an intellectual discussion between the fictional writer of Europe and the fairy who inspires him. The Introduction begins with the mocking words of the fairy, who sits singing on a streaked tulip:

Five windows light the caverned man: thro' one he breathes the air;

Through one hears music of the spheres: thro' one the eternal vine

Flourishes; that he may receive the grapes: thro' one can look

And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth;

Thro' one himself pass out what time he please but he will not,

For stolen joys are sweet bread eaten in secret pleasant. (iii.1-6)

This song is a veiled philosophical rendering of the more immediately personal problem Oothoon has with Theotormon. In Visions, Oothoon fights against the idea of the cavernous skull which allows her to contact the infinite world only through the five small windows of the senses. Theotormon is pictured in most of the illustrations to that poem covering one or more of those windows with his hands and arms. The sensory window we would normally associate with the sense of touch, Blake's fairy implies in lines five and six is sexual touch.

As self-imposed sexual hindrance has in both Thel and Visions been used as a primary metaphor for the metaphysical oppression that cuts humans off from eternity, Blake's fairy here announces it to be the one sensory window to the eternal realm that people deliberately close. In Visions Oothoon is offended by the fact that Theotormon takes sexual pleasure in solitude:

. . . the youth shut up from

The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image

In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.

Are these not the places of religion, the rewards of continence,

The self enjoyings of self denial? why dost thou seek religion?

Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude

Where the horrible darkness is impressed

With reflections of desire? (Visions 7.5-11)

In the Prophecy portion of Europe the same marriage of sexual repression and formal religious teaching that offends Oothoon will be blamed for all the human woes of the eighteen hundred year Christian era. In the fairy's song, man is pretty good at using the first four senses, but the fifth sense is perverted by the pleasure he takes in secrecy. The deliberately obscure meaning of the line about the sense of touch is centered around the idea of sexual contact. The phrase "can himself pass out what time he please but he will not" includes the meaning that man loses the pleasure of open and honest physical contact when he chooses to delight in secret desire. Because the ambiguous phrase "can himself pass out" can also in a strange syntax mean physically moving himself out of himself, the fairy's song also hints at the hindering of the physical regenerative powers of the human race in the same way that the young isolated Theotormon "forgets to generate" in Visions.

The most compelling argument for including the Introduction as part of the poem is the fact that it follows the same general pattern of the other two parts. The road that leads to apocalypse at the level of the artist, however, is much less serious than at the political and metaphysical levels. The fairy announces the great human error in a playful and mocking fashion. The outdoor scene of the poet capturing the fairy seems almost as playful as a child catching butterflies. It is important to note, however, that the same forces at work in the other two parts of the poem are also at work here. The imaginative power of the fairy to expose the world as a living being and to dictate the poem Europe is the power of the eternal bard Los. The energy the poet uses to capture the power of Los is the energy of the rebel Orc. The rule the fairy announces when he claims that sexual hindrance cuts humans off from eternity is the reign of Enitharmon who manages to control the world in the Prophecy by declaring that "woman's love is sin" (Europe 6.5). Blake's growing sense of ambiguity toward the revolutionary forces of Orc and Los is indicated by the cruelty the fairy displays at the suffering of the flowers when he plucks them.

The aspects of the Introduction that are unique to it are the ideas that address poetic theory. In the fictional poet's mind, there is a link between the song of sexual hindrance and metaphysical theory. The question he asks in response to the song is, "what is the material world, and is it dead?" The fairy's answer is the most light-hearted enunciation of the Romantic theory of the imagination I have seen:

He laughing answered, I will write a book on leaves of flowers

If you will feed me on love-thoughts & give me now and then

A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so when I am tipsie

I'll sing to you to this soft lute; and shew you all alive

The world, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy. (iii.14-18)

Bringing the natural world to life involves the love thoughts of the human visionary written on the material of natural vegetation. An occasional flurry of poetic genius (sparkling poetic fancies) will intoxicate the fairies of nature so much that every particle of dust will live in individual joy. These lines contain many aspects of poetic theory common to the Romantic poets. They abandon, however the world of nature as an object of inspiration.

Whereas the natural world is often an inspiration for the poet discovered in lonely contemplation, the natural world in the Introduction to Europe, represented by the leaves of flowers, is primarily a tool of expression. Only after the rebel poet has captured the power of the bard does the natural world begin to come to life. As it begins to awaken in the end of The Song of Los and in The Four Zoas, the image of regenerated nature begins to take on a human form. Humanized nature is ultimately the object of Blake's vision, but nature itself is not the inspiration for it. There is no room in Blake for the solitude implied by Wordsworth's explanation of the source of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility" (Wordsworth 20) or for instances of tranquil communion with nature depicted in the Lyrical Ballads. The same is true of the pained solitude depicted in Shelley's more volatile communion with the unknowable "Intellectual Beauty." Blake's inspiration begins here with "love-thoughts" which implies human contact, and a large part of his problem with the condition of the world is the hindering of human contact.

For Blake, anything accomplished in solitude comes from the wrong center of power. When the power of Los falls under the influence of Urizen, it becomes a binding force, such as the Bard in the Introduction to Songs of Experience who wants the Earth to rejoice in her bondage. Repressive laws which in Blake's view keep the human race and the entire natural world in bondage are formed by those who live in fear and solitude, and cannot be formed by those who love. Sexual expression and sexual hindrance are in Thel, Visions, and Europe the most important symbols of communication and oppression because sex is the most immediate and most intense form of human communication which carries with it generational consequences. When the power of Los falls under the influence of Orc, on the other hand, it has the power to regenerate the world. The power of Orc over Los is depicted in this Introduction as the energy the poet expends in capturing the fairy, who is the agent of imagination. In the Prophecy portion of Europe, Orc's revolutionary power will be ignored for eighteen centuries. In the earlier Prophecy of America he has the power to destroy the kings of the earth. And in the pair of Preludes to America and Europe he is the symbol of human imaginative energy which has the power to bring the dying natural world to life.

In The Four Zoas, the image of regenerated nature in Blake's growing mythical world eventually becomes an entirely human image of one titanic man (Albion) who includes in his body all of humanity, and all of the living material world. The image of fallen nature in the two Preludes to the trilogy of apocalypse also begins to take on a singular human form, the nameless "shadowy daughter of Urthona." In Blake's developing method of myth-making, the Preludes represent his first dramatic tale of entirely symbolic characters. It is a symbolic story which includes no specific human characters and no specific human events. This method of story-telling will come to its fullest fruition in the poems written soon after the trilogy was completed. The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Los, and The Book of Ahania depict Blake's myth of the Fall of the Gods and the creation of the material world entirely as the result of interactions between the gods Urizen and Los. Individual humans come along as part of the result of the Fall, but they are not developed characters.

One of the effects of creating figures who are entirely symbolic instead of partially symbolic and partially individual is that Blake can give them more cohesive personalities and more coherent stories. Oothoon represents three distinct levels of human existence: the individual young woman, a race of oppressed people, and the force of human energy. Orc in the Preludes is simply the force of imaginative human energy. As a human force, Orc does not exclude the individual or group experience, but as a character in the story of the Preludes, his actions are mythically symbolic and do not bear the burden of having to be realistic on the personal level. The shadowy daughter, who represents the natural world, expresses her desires and frustrations in a more cohesive manner than Oothoon does because she is not filling three distinct roles. She represents one personality for all of nature. Because she is a personality, her expressions of desire are personal even while her existence is metaphysical.

As part of the tradition of Romantic ideas in literature, the story of the Preludes is about the relationship between Imagination and Nature. In Blake's model the "shadowy daughter" is the world of Generation. The distinction between Orc and Los in America is blurred. Los' bards are present on both sides of the battle, but Orc personifies both energy and imagination. We meet him in America chained like Oothoon and like the Earth of Experience somewhere beneath the heavens. The shadowy female is mute and invulnerable. She brings him food in iron baskets. After being enchained for fourteen years, he is strong enough and has enough desire for the woman that he is able to break the chains and embrace her:

Silent as despairing love, and strong as jealousy,

The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire;

Round the terrific loins he siez'd the panting struggling womb;

It joy'd: she put aside her clouds & smiled her first born smile;

As when a black cloud shews it light'nings to the silent deep. (2.1-5)

In accordance with Romantic thought, the embrace between human imaginative energy and Nature brings Nature to life. After their embrace she becomes aware of her material manifestations. Her initial joy at finding Orc a god "fallen to give life in regions of dark death" (2.9) quickly shifts to a mixture of joy and pain at the realization that she is full of sexual generation and death: "Oh what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire & my frost/Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by the lightnings rent;/This is eternal death . . . " (2.15-17). At this point her speech is abruptly interrupted because the fictional Bard who is telling her tale becomes enraged by his own story.

The story of Nature's partial awakening picks up again in the Preludium to Europe. It is spoken by the shadowy female who now requests her mother Enitharmon to bring forth other sons besides Orc to stop the process of endless generation and death that Orc's embrace has begun. She is weary of continually suffering the pain of death. She no longer believes that Orc is the promised savior come to bring undying life. In her complaint she describes her pain as if she were an inverted tree, constantly eating and being eaten:

My roots are brandish'd in the heavens. my fruits in earth beneath

Surge, Foam, and labour into life, first born & first consum'd!

Consumed and consuming!

Then why shouldst thou accursed mother bring me into life? (1.8-10)

This depiction of the natural world is a strange reversal of what we normally think of as physical reality. Fallen nature is rooted in the heavens, and the continual process of becoming brings its fruits forth into the material earth. The image of nature here is one of a tree with its roots growing in the air and its branches and fruits sprouting into the ground. This is the same sort of reversal of above and below ground images that occurs in The Book of Thel where Thel's entrance into physical reality is imaged as an entrance into the earth. The image serves as an appropriate metaphor for the relationship of the world of Beulah to the world of Generation. Fallen Nature is rooted in an unfallen realm, and had hoped that her union with Orc would bring her back to an unfallen state.

She has existence in both the eternal realm and the physical realm. The life she continually brings forth is not merely physical, but mental. She creates life in the form of fire and her mother seizes it and gives it bodily form. When her living creatures take on their bodily forms, they wander abroad and forget their connection to the fire which is their eternal facet:

I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames.

And thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad

And leave me void as death;

Ah! I am drown'd in shady woe, and visionary joy. (2.9-12)

The image of Nature drowning in woe and joy is not ambiguous, but dichotomous. Her experience is overwhelming in both joy and woe. In visionary joy she constantly brings forth fiery eternal beings. In shady woe she is chained to the eternal physical process of birth and death. She cries to her mother Enitharmon not to stamp with her signet "this vigorous progeny of fire." As in Visions the signet stamp indicates ownership and enslavement. When Nature asks freedom for her children from the stamp of the creator of physical bodies, she is asking for an end to the continual death of the generational cycles.

In the end of Nature's complaint she foresees the successful incarnation of Orc whose original embrace in the Preludium to Europe brought her only partially to life. She asks the question:

. . . who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?

To compass it with swaddling bands and who shall cherish it

With milk and honey?

I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.

She ceast & roll'd her shady clouds

Into the secret place (2.13-18)

Complaining nature gladly retreats to await the ultimate regeneration which is to follow the worldwide cataclysm about to occur in the continental chapters of America, Europe, and The Song of Los. The wholly symbolic figure of Nature will reappear as the hollow-wombed Grave shrieking with wild delight at the beginning of universal rebirth which starts at the end of the trilogy. The Prophecy of America depicts the successful manifestation of Orc on the American continent whose "thought creating fires" engulf the entire sensory world. The Prophecy of Europe symbolically depicts an unsuccessful incarnation of Orc and traces the results of that failure over an eighteen hundred year period. And The Song of Los acts as a denouement which shows the consternation of the kings of Africa and Asia at the battles in America and Europe, and winds down the stories of the clash of the demon Orc with the God Urizen by depicting the final fiery battle which ends in the defeat of Urizen.

In the Prophecy portion of America, the loss of the primarily personal point of view which dominated Visions simplifies the argument between the rebel and the dominator. In simple terms, Thel is about the beginning of personal desire and Visions is about the nature of continued desire. Because Orc is introduced in America not as an individual suffering oppression but as a symbolic representation of the human will to rid itself of oppression, the poem is psychologically less complex than Visions and symbolically more difficult. Although Orc lacks the personal dimension of Oothoon, he symbolizes the same ideal of dynamic energy that she does. The principle of energy he represents as an enlivening power in the universe is exactly the same as the imaginative energy Oothoon exerts in her attempt to awaken her beloved from his self absorption. Whereas Oothoon as a young woman attempting sexual freedom is doomed to failure, however, Orc as the creative human force in the universe must enjoy at least partial success.

In 1793, Blake's level of optimism about the power of the force of Orc to achieve permanent revolution is at its peak. By 1794 in the Prophecy of Europe Blake for the first time depicts a failure of the revolutionary Orc in which he aids his mother Enitharmon in her effort to sexually and religiously suppress many human generations. By 1795 in The Book of Ahania Orc becomes directly affiliated with Urizen the oppressor. And in the later "Four Zoas" he is part of the generational cycle of revolution and tyranny described in the introduction to this thesis. He begins as enslaved imaginative energy fighting the tyrant Urizen and ends after revolution as himself the tyrant Urizen battling a new Orc. This link between Urizen and Orc, however, has not yet been established by the writing of America. For now Orc is all revolutionary. He is an eternal life force railing against the force of death in the natural world. He is associated with the titan Prometheus chained for bringing fire, Jesus crucified for being the Word of God, Atlas arisen from under sunken Atlantis to challenge the rule of Albion, and the American warriors Washington, Paine, Franklin, Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green. In America he takes the form of a dragon slayer, of volcanic fireballs, and of a "horrent demon" when described from the point of view of the narrator. When addressed by the Guardian Prince of Albion, he is described as a serpent.

Like Visions the Prophecy of America is divided into a section of plot and a section of argument. Because Visions is about conflicts of love and sex, it appropriately begins with impetuous action and ends in argument. In keeping with the traditions of nations at war, who tend to justify their future actions with present rhetoric, America begins in argument and ends in plot. As Bromion viewed Oothoon as a libertine whose freedom would unleash a terrifying anarchy upon the world, the Guardian Prince views Orc as an anarchistic cannibal come to shake the foundations of the organized world:

. . . Art thou not Orc; who serpent formd

Stands at the gate of Enitharmon to devour her children;

Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities;

Lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of Gods Law;

Why dost thou come to Angels eyes in this terrific form? (7.3-7)

Orc of course views himself as a liberator of slaves and not as a killer of children. The poem gives voice to the Guardian of Albion, but takes the side of the revolutionary force. All the suffering that results from the war between Orc and the Guardian is blamed on Urizen's plagues which the Prince uses against the American rebels, but which are driven back by the fires of Orc to harm the Guardian's Angels in Europe.

The story begins with the Prince of Albion and the American warriors facing each other across the Atlantic. The Guardian Prince of Albion is the representative of Urizen on earth. He takes the form of a dragon. Like Bromion of Visions he is also associated with fear, reason, memory, and death. In the specific political allegory of the poem, he is the King of England. Albion is the human race in its fallen state. It is the Guardian's duty to keep Albion in his fallen state, which means allegorically that the King must suppress political revolution. The Americans' revolt gives rise to the volcanic eruption of the titan Orc come from out of the Atlantic to destroy the law of Urizen and to restore the joy of individual life. "I am Orc," he announces:

. . . the times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break;

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,

. . . That stony law I stamp to dust

. . . To renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof

That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity

May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty

The undefil'd tho' ravish'd in her cradle night and morn:

For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;

Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.

Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd. (8.1-15)

The freedom Orc announces here is no different from the freedom Oothoon cries for. Like Oothoon, Orc associates the religious emphasis on virginity with lechery, and the law of Moses with oppression. The binding law of Moses is also associated through the repeated image of the stone with the physical skull that Oothoon complained limits her infinite brain.

The Guardian laments the coming of Orc and sounds his war trumpets. The Americans do not respond to the trumpets, but briefly the lost city of Atlantis of the predeluvian Golden Age rises from the Atlantic with the thirteen guardian angels (Governors) of the American colonies sitting atop the peaks of the lost city. Harold Bloom interprets this rising of Atlantis to signify that the revolution has exposed the previously lost direct connection between earth and the divine realm which had been lost when Albion fell from eternity into time. This fall sank the Edenic Atlantis which became overwhelmed by the floods of chaos, cutting off the link between heaven and earth.

Boston's Angel questions the dishonesty and murder of the reigning regime and refuses to perform his role as Guardian. The other twelve Governors follow his lead, throwing down their scepters and running to the Atlantic shore to grovel at the feet of the American Generals. As the flames of Orc spread, Albion's Guardian responds by throwing his leprous pestilence down upon the American continent. The revolutionary fervor, however, is too strong to be stopped by plague, and the flames of Orc spread across the Atlantic, driving the leprous pestilence of Albion's guardian ahead of it. All harm that derives from the war is blamed upon the plagues of the Guardian and not upon the fires of Orc.

The primary difference between the success of Orc in the political realm and the failure of Oothoon in the personal realm is the fact that there is no counterpart to Theotormon in the account of the American Revolution. The Guardian of Albion obviously takes the position of Bromion, and Orc takes the position of Oothoon. Visions depicts Theotormon as straddling the fence both in his allegorical role as a class of people observing slavery and in his personal role as a disappointed lover. Unlike the problems of slavery and personal love, however, the American Revolution in Blake's simplified allegory required the participation of all the Americans. When the war is at its height, and the Americans are in immediate danger of collapsing at the hands of Urizen's pestilence, the Americans spontaneously act in concert to drive the plagues back across the Atlantic:

Then had America been lost, o'erwhelmed by the Atlantic,

And Earth had lost another portion of the infinite,

But all rush together in the night in wrath and raging fire.

The red fires rag'd! the plagues recoil'd! then roll'd they back with fury

On Albion's Angels . . . . (14.17-21)

After Albion's Angel has cast down his plagues upon America, the continent is in danger of succumbing to the advancing waters of the Atlantic and, following the course of Atlantis, sinking into the ocean. America at this moment because of its revolt has become inflamed with the eternal fires of paradise. It is a new Atlantis threatened to be overwhelmed by chaos. But it is saved by the rushing together of the inhabitants in wrath, inflamed in the raging fires of Orc to throw the pestilence back upon the British Guardian. The citizens of New York, the mariners of Boston, the scribe of Pennsylvania and the builder of Virginia who had momentarily thrown down their work in fear now act in unified rage to save their land from the enslavement of fear.

Urizen weeps as the fires of Orc spread across Europe and melt the bolts and hinges of "the five gates of their law built heaven" (16.22). The five gates of heaven represent the five senses through which humans have direct but limited contact with the eternal realm. The destruction of the five gates by the fires of Orc indicates that this is a final apocalypse of the sensory world driven by the direct communication of the human imagination with the eternal world. The eternal spirit of revolution created by the spontaneous rushing together of the American people has succeeded where Oothoon in isolation could not.

There is no need for Blake to give an account at the end of the poem of the nature of the awakening brought about by Orc's ultimate revolution because Orc has forecast his triumph during his argument with the Guardian of Albion. His speech is similar to Oothoon's complaints to Urizen and to the description of universal awakening at the end of The Song of Los:

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their station;

. . .

The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry'd.

Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field.

. . .

Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing

Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. (6.1-10)

The American Revolution for Blake represented the beginning of a movement toward an apocalypse of despotism and death made possible by concerted and free action of the mass of the oppressed and fearful people.

The flames of Orc that engulf the world at the end of the Prophecy of America are the same flames the shadowy daughter calls "this vigorous progeny of fires" in the Preludium to Europe. They are the creative and eternal aspect of the human race. The difference between the fires of Orc in the Preludium to Europe and in the Prophecy of America is that in America nobody has the power to stop them. In the Preludium to Europe, Enitharmon limits the spread of imaginative energy by stamping each flame with her "signet," giving it bodily form and perpetuating the generations of the human race. In the Prophecy of Europe Blake depicts the specific historical method by which Enitharmon has suppressed the fires of Orc in the eighteen centuries of the Christian era.

The prophecy begins by describing the birth of Christ through allusions to Milton's ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." The atmosphere of harmony and hope surrounding the birth of Jesus in Milton's poem is echoed in the first two stanzas of Blake's prophecy in which the human warriors leave the battlefields and return to their homes, the mythical sons and daughters of Los and Enitharmon gather together "like pearly clouds" in the crystal house of Los, and Los takes joy in the "peaceful Night."

As if in response to Milton's poem of peace, however, Blake's night of peace quickly begins to turn into a night of division. The God Urizen begins to stir in the north, and Urizen's sons look with envy upon Los. Like the singing fairy of the Introduction to Europe, Los is interested in intoxication, song, and rest rather than in the imaginative fire Orc can bring. As the eternal Bard, he also wants to bring everything under his own dominion, commanding his sons to:

Seize all the spirits of life and bind

Their warbling joys to our loud strings

Bind all the nourishing sweets of earth

To give us bliss, that we may drink the sparkling wine of Los

And let us laugh at war,

Despising toil and care

Because the days and nights of joy, in lucky hours renew. (Europe 4.3-9)

His explanation in line nine of his reason for ordering the binding of all joys to his harp strings echoes in rhythm, line length and sentence structure an important line from Visions and another from America. In Visions the Marygold of Leutha's vale encourages Oothoon to act upon her sexual desire with the words, "Because the soul of sweet delight/Can never pass away" (Visions 1.9, 10). And Orc in his speech of freedom in America proclaims his right to call for revolution "Because the soul of sweet delight, can never be defiled" (America 8.14). By putting the rhythms of these key lines into the mouth of Los, Blake reminds the reader of the calls for freedom in the earlier poems even as he offers Los' excuse for creating his own tyrannous regime. When Los announces that he will rely on "lucky hours" to keep the joy of Christ's birth alive, the audience understands that unlike Oothoon and Orc, Los is still living in a temporal, fallen state. Like his close relative, the Bard of the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience, he allows the power of his desire for rejoicing to align him with the binding principle of Urizen.

Los calls his son Orc who rises as a ball of fire from the place where he has been bound. In a symbolic act which gives her a voice and the power of energy, Enitharmon lowers herself into Orc's fiery ball and thus is able to begin to establish her reign. In Blake's continually developing mythology, Enitharmon is the wife of Los whose personality developed as part of the process of Los' fall from the eternal realm. Because she is the part of Los that represents his fallen aspect, the eighteen hundred year mistaken rule of Los is depicted as the rule of Enitharmon. Her method of rule has similarities to Urizen's rule in Visions and America except that she is inclined to rule by subtle entrapments and deceit as well as by force. Although she is more subtle and deceitful than Urizen, she is nevertheless more appealing. Whereas Bromion as Urizen's spokesman is driven in Visions by fear of the chaos of libertinism, Los in Europe is driven by the desire for joy. The problem is that he mistakes the source of joy. Instead of the energetic and creative joy of Orc, he wants the same lazy and inactive libertinism that Urizen fears. In order to establish his illicit reign of luck and drunkenness, he allows Enitharmon to rule, who does not mind stamping out all human joy in order to establish her regime.

Enitharmon's dominion is cast over humankind for eighteen hundred years by her two powers of governance, the Kings and the Priests. She sends Palamabron the priest and Rintrah the King to preach that "Woman's love is sin" (Europe 5.5). She instructs the Priest to use the threat of an allegorical hell and the promise of an allegorical heaven to forbid all sexual joy. To aid her male rulers, Enitharmon calls their female counterparts. Elynittria the "silver-bowed queen" is the counterpart to the King, and Ocalythron, the principle of jealousy, is the female aspect of the priest. As Enitharmon calls these four to work, she falls asleep. The history of the world under the perverted form of Christianity which constitutes her rule has no reality of its own in this poem but occurs only as Enitharmon's dream.

The specific political history depicted in the poem begins about where the political history of America leaves off. Albion's Angel has lost the battle for America, and now appears trying to govern England in a wounded and weakened condition. The temporal political events described in the mythic story of the battle for Europe are veiled depictions of specific events occurring in England between the end of the American War (1783) and the beginning of the English crusade against a revolutionary and belligerent France (1793). Interspersed between the events of the historical chronicle are mythological depictions of the fall of the infinite realm and the creation of the human race. These seemingly disparate topics logically fit together in Blake's mythology because he views all human events either as part of a continuing fall or as part of a reversal of the fall.

The political history begins with a reference to the wars that divided the rulers of Europe until the end of the American Revolution, and moves directly into a description of the state of the English government after the war has ended. Albion's Angel brings the plagues he caused in the American War back to the shores of England:

The cloud bears hard on Albions shore;

Fill'd with immortal demons of futurity.

In council gather the smitten Angels of Albion.

The cloud bears hard upon the council house; down rushing

On the heads of Albion's Angels

One hour they lay buried beneath the ruins of that hall;

But as the stars rise from the salt lake they arise in pain

In troubled mists o'erclouded by the terrors of strugling times. (9.9-16)

After the loss of the American War, Charles Fox and Lord North formed a coalition from within the government whose primary purpose was to defy the King's appointment of Shelburn to the office of the Prime Minister. Within six weeks the king was forced to acquiesce to the demands of the coalition and appoint their representative as Prime Minister. For the first time, for a brief period, the Prime Minister's government under the ministry of Fox and North in 1783 was not dominated by the King. The King quickly reestablished his influence over the government, however, as William Pitt became its head. Where Rintrah depicts a specific human character, he is Pitt. Rintrah's three attempts to blow "the iron tube" of war, the trumpet of doom, are interpreted by Erdman to represent three attempts by Pitt between 1787 and 1791 to contrive pretexts for declaring war against France (Erdman 2.12). Pitt privately conceded to a friend in 1791 that he was unable to gather enough public support for a military venture to risk his ministry in a war. By 1792, however, the declared policy of the French government to support any revolutionaries in Europe who wanted to fight to overthrow their own government put enough fear into sectors of the English populace that Pitt was able to push for a declaration of war without risking his government (Erdman 213).

Blake allegorically describes Pitt's attempts to achieve a state of war by using deceit to influence the morale of the English people by saying that Rintrah led his council in clouds of war to Druidism. Part of the meaning of Druidism as a symbol for Blake derives from the fact that he thought the ancient Druids to have used human sacrifice as part of their religious rituals. In contrast to the self-sacrifice of Washington and Paine, which Blake praised in America, Pitt's Druidism represents the aggressive sacrifice of others according to a self-righteous creed in which man has become "an Angel, Heaven a mighty circle turning, God a tyrant crown'd" (Europe 10.2). Blake imagines the Druidic serpent temple of Pitt to stretch across England along the Thames as the government of Pitt regains strength and he tries to re-establish the power of the King (Erdman 214).

The momentum of the revolutionary fervor of Orc, however, is too strong for even the forceful and deceitful Rintrah to readily repress. The struggle for the soul of England continues through political maneuvering on the part of Rintrah and the other Guardians of Albion and through energy and the force of anger on the part of Orc until finally a "mighty spirit" (13.4, 5) named Newton comes along who is strong enough to blow the trump of the last doom and begin the final war. Most critics have understood Newton to be Isaac Newton, who was in Blake's opinion the intellectual founder of materialism and absolute faith in the five senses. This reference to a figure from history serves as a transition for the reader between thinking of revolutions as specific physical wars and thinking of them as broader intellectual movements that lead to the physical actions of repression and revolution. Whereas a mere head of state, a small minded politician and "weak man" such as Rintrah does not have the ultimate power to move people to begin the final conflict, the thinker who created the intellectual environment of the modern human race does.

Unaware that the trump of final doom has sounded, or that eighteen hundred years have passed, Enitharmon awakens from her sleep and again calls her children to her night-time sports. As the forces of revolution and repression on earth have come to a head, however, the historical cycle turns from a period of repressive peace and the revelry of the Gods to the beginning of a universal uprising. When the symbolic dawn of revolution occurs on earth, all the children of Enitharmon flee except Orc. As dawn breaks he leaves the heavens and appears as the red light of revolution in France. As the poem ends, Los, "with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole . . . call[s] all his sons to the strife of blood" (Europe 15.10). The entire world is ready for war.

The function of the two sections of The Song of Los that immediately follow Europe in the trilogy is primarily to expand the political allegory to include the world beyond America and Europe. Whereas America and Europe address specific historical events which had already occurred, however, the spontaneous worldwide uprising Blake was awaiting never happened. Because Blake knew no current history of Africa and Asia which he could descibe as leading inevitably to revolution, the political allegories of The Song of Los are much less detailed and much less interesting than the allegories of the two previous poems. "Africa" primarily reiterates Blake's belief that law, reason, and theories of knowledge that depend primarily upon absolute trust in the five senses are all functions of the Fall and therefore bound to end with the final universal awakening. In "Asia" we see the kings of Asia looking with consternation at the approaching "thought-creating fires of Orc" (6.6) and hoping for a great leader to come along and use the usual devices of poverty and pestilence to suppress the revolution. Urizen hears their cries for help, and rises to meet Orc in a final battle. The last battle of the revolution is described in wholly symbolic terms as a fight between the flying dragon Urizen and the serpent and pillar of fire Orc. Urizen, emblem of Law, Reason, Death and everything that imposes limits, is of course defeated and the sleeping world begins to awaken to a new life.

Blake ends the trilogy of apocalypse at the very beginning of his predicted new era. In these poems of final redemption no details are given about the process of the universal awakening he predicts. He cannot describe in literal terms the war he expected to engulf the world, and he makes no case for the causal connection he claims to exist between the physical revolution he expected and the metaphysical revolution he begins to describe at the end The Song of Los. In the poems immediately following the trilogy of apocalypse he abandons the myth of the end of time in order to create his myths of the beginning. In Jerusalem published almost a decade later, and in the undated The Four Zoas he returns to the idea of a universal awakening with descriptions of a new City of God and with detailed symbolic depictions of the awakening of Albion. At the point of development of the poems we have covered, Blake is more interested in and more adept at depicting the ways in which humankind destroys itself than the ways in which it will redeem itself.

In ending this cycle of poems with hints of an ideal, living world, it would appear that Blake has returned to the idea of paradise he rejected in The Book of Thel, his first mythic poem. The difference between the vales of Har and the living world awakening at the end of The Song of Los, however, is that the new paradise is a human world in which nothing loses its individuality. The vales of Har is a dreamlike garden in which the perfect interaction between individuals is represented by the marriage of the Cloud and the Dew, the blending of water and water. The newly awakening natural world depicted at the end of Los on the other hand has a human character which values distinctness. Even the three human fluids sharing the same rivers ("milk & Blood & glandous wine" (7.38) do not mix together but celebrate their distinction by dancing across the hillsides. The importance of individual joy is the strongest theme running through the five poems this study has covered. Almost as important is the value of community. The mythic structures in these poems, functioning at the personal, social, and metaphysical levels of existence, serve to place the image of the individual self in its ideal relation to the rest of existence. The most important part of the world outside the self is to Blake the human community. In The Book of Thel Blake offers a blanket rejection of any ideal which does not leave the human ego intact. In Visions he extends his rejection of any ideal which envisions the loss of individuality to include the natural realm. Using the voice of Oothoon, he expresses his abhorrence at any law that would make the lion and the lamb lie down together, and further to proclaim the individual joy of each animal in creation. Using the characters of Oothoon, Theotormon, and Bromion to represent simultaneously the personal, social, and metaphysical realms of existence, he balances his depiction of the need for individuality with an expression of the need for human community and love when he insists that Oothoon's love for Theotormon must be requited openly and honestly in order to save the three characters from tortuous isolation.

In the trilogy of apocalypse he begins to de-emphasize the personal level of existence in favor of characters representing only large groups of people and large political movements. Although personal experience is no longer his subject, he continues to emphasize the importance of the human individual by developing a titanic human figure as his ultimate symbol of the re-awakened human community and natural world. Albion, who is introduced in America and begins to awaken in The Song of Los is shown in later poems to contain within his body every living thing acting freely and individually for its own joy, and yet acting in concert with every other living thing for the common good. The most indicative depiction Blake gives of human movement toward Paradise during this period is found in America when he imagines the entire American community rushing together in spontaneous action to drive back forces of oppression and death--an act which begins the process of world-wide revolution and leads eventually to the establishment of the ideal order, the perfect mixture of community and individuality.

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