The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, is the most complex work of Blake's early years. It consists of 24 Plates (as well as three further Plates under the separate title “A Song of Liberty”) and has at its heart an opposition between Heaven, conceived as an image of restraint and passivity, and Hell, an image of energy and action. Both of these “contraries”, Blake claims, are necessary for human life; but there is little doubt as to which is more to his taste. In the fourth Plate we hear the voice of the Devil, making three crucial claims which in turn underpin Blake's own world-view:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

This rejection of reason as the touchstone of the human in favour of a revaluation of the body and its desires is pursued throughout the Marriage, perhaps most famously in some of the “proverbs of Hell” which comprise Plates 7 to 10 of the poem. Some of the best-known, frequently to be found as recently as the 1960s as emblematic graffiti, are the following: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Exuberance is Beauty. Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Some of these aphorisms, especially the last-quoted, may appear mystically anarchic; but it must be remembered that Blake is trying to assert a different set of values against the received wisdom of his day. Later in the poem, the narrator has an encounter with an “Angel”, who threatens him with Hell for his beliefs; but the narrator counters by delving into his own imagination and showing the “Angel” that his vision of Heaven and Hell is merely an extension of his belief in the changelessness of society, and that an alternative vision, based on change and potentiality, is also possible.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen as a kind of treatise on how to think beyond confining limits, on how to value energy and excitement and not to be restrained by conventional patterns of thought. If it speaks in its title of a “marriage”, the reader is nonetheless at liberty to question whether this marriage will necessarily be a smooth one, and whether what is really at stake here is an eternal battle between order and chaos, between reason and energy, between social constraint and imaginative freedom.

Visions of the Daughters of Albion

The central action of Visions of the Daughters of Albion is clear. The maiden Oothoon, accepting love, goes fearlessly to her lover Theotormon, but her happiness is short-lived. She is raped by a figure of violence, Bromion, but worse, Theotormon thereafter regards her as defiled; in his jealousy he ties Oothoon and Bromion back to back, and it is with this unmoving scene that the poem concludes. What, then, is the poem about? At one level, it is clearly about sexual jealousy and about double standards. In the last part of the poem, Oothoon has a long and very powerful speech on these themes:

I cry, Love! Love! Love! Happy, happy love, free as the mountain wind! Can that be love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water, That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day, To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary, dark, Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight? Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.

But it also needs to be remembered that alongside this indictment of the curtailment of sexual freedom, Oothoon is referred to as the 'soft soul of America', and throughout the poem there runs a critique of both British oppression of the colonies and also the American slave trade.