5 The vale of death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted,
10 And a river, and a spring, On every cliff and tomb; And on the bleached bones Red clay2 brought forth;
Till the villain left the paths of ease, 15 To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility, And the just man rages in the wilds
20 Where lions roam.
Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
PLATE 3
As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg3 is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah xxxiv & XXXV Chap.4
1. Rintrah plays the role of the angry Old Testament prophet Elijah as well as of John the Baptist, the voice 'crying in the wilderness' (Matthew 3), preparing the way for Christ the Messiah. It has been plausibly suggested that stanzas 2?5 summarize the course of biblical history to the present time. 'Once' (line 3) refers to Old Testament history after the Fall; 'Then' (line 9) is the time of the birth of Christ. 'Till' (line 14) identifies the era when Christianity was perverted into an institutional religion. 'Now' (line 17) is the time of the wrathful portent of the French Revolution. In this final era the hypocritical serpent represents the priest of the 'angels' in the poem, while 'the just man' is embodied in Blake, a raging poet and prophet in the guise of a devil. 'Swag' (line 2): sag, hang down. 2. In Hebrew the literal meaning of 'Adam,' or created man. The probable reference is to the birth of the Redeemer, the new Adam.
3. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688?1772), Swedish scientist and religious philosopher, had predicted, on the basis of his visions, that the Last Judgment and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven would occur in 1757. This was precisely the year of Blake's birth. Now, in 1790, Blake is thirty-three, the age at which Christ had been resurrected from the tomb; correspondingly, Blake rises from the tomb of his past life in his new role as imaginative artist who will redeem his age. But, Blake ironically comments, the works he will engrave in his resurrection will constitute the Eternal Hell, the contrary brought into simultaneous being by Swedenborg s limited New Heaven. 4. Isaiah 34 prophesies 'the day of the Lord's vengeance,' a time of violent destruction and blood
.
112 / WILLIAM BLAKE
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
PLATE 4
The Voice of the Devil
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles; Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True: 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd 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. PLATE 5
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restraind, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost,5 & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan, and his children are call'd Sin & Death.6
But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is call'd Satan.7
For this history has been adopted by both parties.
It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devil's account is, that the Messi[pLATE 6]ah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss. This is shewn in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on;8 the Jehovah of
shed; Isaiah 35 prophesies the redemption to follow, in which 'the desert shall. . . blossom as the rose,' 'in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert,' and 'no lion shall be there,' but 'an highway shall be there . . . and it shall be called The way of holiness' (cf. 'The Argument,' lines 3?11, 20). Blake combines with these chapters Isaiah 63, in which 'Edom' is the place from which comes the man whose garments are red with the blood he has spilled; for as he says, 'the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.' Blake interprets this last phrase as predicting the time when Adam would regain his lost Paradise. Also relevant is Genesis 36.1, where the Edomites are identified as the descendants of the disinherited Esau, cheated out of his father's blessing by Jacob.
5. What follows, to the end of this section, is Blake's 'diabolical' reading of Milton's Paradise Lost. For other Romantic comments on the magnificence of Milton's Satan see 'The Satanic and Byronic Hero' at Norton Literature Online. 6. Satan's giving birth to Sin and then incestuously begetting Death upon her is described in Paradise Lost 2.745ff.; the war in heaven, referred to three lines below, in which the Messiah defeated Satan and drove him out of heaven, is described in 6.824ff. 7. In the Book of Job, Satan plays the role of Job's moral accuser and physical tormentor. 8. Possibly John 14.16?17, where Christ says he 'will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter . . . Even the Spirit of truth.'
