“And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” by William Blake

Image © Jeff Japp

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

I have not written in a while because I have been traveling in Israel. I had an opportunity to visit the Holy Land so in spite of the images of danger and unrest that are prevalent in the media, I could not pass on the chance to explore the area that is central to the three major western religions. I spent about ten days there and it was an amazing experience. The image above is a picture I took from atop the Mount of Olives looking down on the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem. So, it should not surprise you that the first thing I read upon returning home was Blake’s poem which is part of the Preface to his larger work, Milton.

In this poem, I believe Blake is using Christ as a symbol for divine poetic genius. During the first two stanzas, Blake ponders whether the divine inspiration visited England, particularly London, a place he sees as dark, dismal, and a place where people are enslaved in the drudgery of factory life that was part of the Industrial Revolution.

The last two stanzas are what I find the most interesting about this poem. He invokes symbols from biblical text to represent creative inspiration, summoning the divine presence to guide him in his artistic endeavor. When he states “I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:” he making a vow to struggle internally and never lay down his pen (the pen is after all mightier than the sword) until he has succeeds in bringing the divine presence to England and transforms the country into a land of beauty and spirituality.

The trip to Israel was a moving experience for me, especially since I am so interested in spirituality, art, and history. In my sojourn there, I was immersed in all of these things. It will take some time to fully process the experience, but reading and writing always help me to internalize major events in my life.

Cheers and blessings.

“Prometheus Unbound” by Percy Bysshe Shelley: Part 1 – Overview

By the time I was halfway through reading this again (I had read it a couple times in college), I realized that there was no way I could just write a single post about this work. It is just too complex. So, I am going to write a short series of posts on it. This is the first and I will update it with links to the subsequent posts after I get them written.

In his preface to the play, Shelley states that he drew inspiration from the lost drama of the same name by Aeschylus. Shelley uses the Prometheus myth to represent Satan as opposition to tyranny (symbolized by God/Jupiter) and as the champion of humankind.

The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.

Throughout the play, Shelley asserts that love is the ultimate human emotion which will ultimately lead to the defeat of fear, tyranny, and oppression. Love is the energy which permeates everything in the world, and the highest goal of art is the expression of this universal love which will ultimately deliver humanity to freedom.

Shelley, in his preface, seems as defiant as Prometheus and Satan. He asserts that he would rather burn in Hell than bow artistically to Christian law.

For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.

In my subsequent post, I will look closer at specific passages which in my opinion represent some of the key issues in this drama. As I mentioned, this is a very dense and complex work, and I will not be able to cover everything, but I will do my best to hit some of the main aspects.

“A Little Boy Lost” by William Blake

Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to Thought
A greater than itself to know:

And Father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.

The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seiz’d his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired the Priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
Lo what a fiend is here! said he:
One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy Mystery.

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They strip’d him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,

And burn’d him in a holy place
Where many had been burn’d before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such thing done on Albion’s shore?

In this poem, Blake presents us with an image of a boy who is martyred for heretical beliefs. During the first stanza, the boy expresses love for the divine spirit within. He venerates himself because he feels God is inside of him. He also acknowledges that he can never fully understand the essence of God, since God is ineffable and exists beyond the grasp of human thought.

The beginning of the second stanza almost sounds like Cordelia speaking to Lear, but then in the last two lines of that stanza, the boy likens himself to a bird picking up crumbs. I see this as a metaphor for people who follow around priests and pick up only the scraps of wisdom that are doled out to them. I suspect that this is what angers the priest.

The boy is then accused of being “One who sets reason up for judge / Of our most holy Mystery.” On one level, this could be representative of the conflict between scientific inquiry and faith-based church doctrine. But it could also be a reference to Blake’s mythological creation, Urizen. In Blake’s mythology, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law, and correlates to Satan as expressed by Milton.

The boy is then stripped and bound before being burnt, a punishment too often inflicted upon heretics. In the image accompanying the poem, we see the parents weeping before the flames that engulf their child. Blake also includes an image of ivy vines climbing the side of the page. Ivy has a few symbolic interpretations. It can represent the intertwining between humans and the divine; it can symbolize the indestructible aspect of the human soul and consciousness; and finally, because ivy is poisonous, it could be a symbol of either vengeance or the toxic aspect of organized religion.

Blake ends his poem with a question, which I believe he is posing to the reader: “Are such thing done on Albion’s shore?” He is questioning whether such things are still done in England. I think it is a question that is still valid today. Are such things done in any country? Sadly, yes. People are still persecuted, tortured, and killed in some countries based upon their spiritual beliefs. Hopefully we will evolve as a species, and like the boy in this poem, learn to recognize the spark of divine spirit in all human beings.