[Magdalen] Eternity's Sunrise

[Jim Guthrie]

Anyone read this one yet? Looks interesting from the NYT Review:

William Blake is for many people the author of a few famous poems and 
some ­often cited bits of provocative advice: “The road of excess leads to the 
palace of wisdom”; “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted 
desires.” It’s worth recalling, as Leo Damrosch does in his lucid and absorbing 
new book, “Eternity’s Sunrise,” that Blake grouped much of this advice under the 
heading “Proverbs of Hell.” That’s how they talk there.

Similarly, it’s worth recalling that the famous poems, dazzling in their genuine 
simplicity of tone and diction, allow all kinds of complicated thoughts to hover 
around them. When a chimney sweep tells us that a dream of another life and a 
kindly God allow the boys to get back to work in good spirits — “So if all do 
their duty, they need not fear harm” — we have to wonder whether this uplifting 
disciplinary moral is the end of the story. And when, in a related work, Blake 
describes the singing of thousands of children from charity schools gathered in 
St. Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks to their benefactors as “like a mighty wind” 
and “like harmonious thunderings,” the noise is perhaps a little too 
threatening. The critic and biographer Geoffrey Keynes said, “The poem sounds 
sentimental, but more probably it was ironic.” More probably still, perhaps, it 
was both, but then we have to think about the dosages. As Damrosch astutely 
remarks about the chimney sweep poem, “the consolation that the boys feel is 
very real, and their lives would be even more miserable if it were taken away 
from them.”

Blake was born in 1757 and published his “Songs of Innocence” in 1789 and the 
combined “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” in 1794. His later “prophetic 
books,” patiently engraved and colored, appeared in minimal editions, each print 
slightly different from the other: Only four copies of “Milton” were published 
in his lifetime and only five of “Jerusalem.” He died in 1827, and one of his 
best epitaphs, though not intended as such, came from his wife and co-worker, 
Catherine. “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company,” she said late in their 
life together; “he is always in Paradise.” The comment is usually taken as a 
mark of humble admiration, but as Damrosch exclaims, “surely it is ironic!” 
Among the things Catherine Blake is not explicitly saying must be “It isn’t easy 
to be married to a man who is always somewhere else” and “Think of all the 
other, worse places where husbands spend their time.”

Damrosch is the author of a highly regarded biography of Swift, and earlier 
works on Rousseau and Tocqueville. There is an attractive hint of a secret 
passion in his telling us that “after half a century of living with Blake,” he 
remains “in awe of the depth and range” of the poet’s genius. This awe is 
accompanied by an unusual sense of ease and intimacy with Blake’s work.

“Eternity’s Sunrise” has a biographical shape, but as Damrosch says, “it is not 
a systematic biography.” It describes Blake’s early life, maps out his London 
and the intellectual and artistic culture of his time, tells us about his 
marriage, his friendships, his death. But the heart of the book is in its 
evocation of the complexities of the early poems, and the “kaleidoscopic dreams” 
of the vast later works, where Blake sought to display the secret history of 
creation and of humanity’s submission to an alien, authoritarian God. The result 
was that some of his distinguished Romantic contemporaries thought he was mad, 
but then Blake himself sometimes regarded madness as a form of necessary 
dissent. In what Damrosch calls some of Blake’s “most eloquent lines,” the poet 
wrote:

Let the slave grinding at he mill run out into the field;
Let him look up into theheavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchanted soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.

Blake’s name for this liberated condition, when he imagined it as a place, was 
Jerusalem, and his well-known lyric, set to music by Hubert Parry and sung in 
England now on every conceivable occasion, is much less consoling than it looks. 
The implied but unmistakable answer to the poem’s questions about Christ (“And 
did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green: / . . . 
And did the Countenance Divine / Shine forth upon our clouded hills?”) is “only 
in legend,” and the more than implied answer to its question about the liberated 
world itself (“And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic 
 mills?”) is “certainly not.” That’s why we need to keep trying to build it, in 
Blake’s time and ours. That’s what the poem’s “chariot of fire” is for, and its 
promise of unceasing “mental fight.” The discreetly dramatic shift in speaking 
subject of the last stanza, from “I will not cease” to “Till we have built,” is, 
as Damrosch says, “a call to collective commitment.” Yet Blake deleted the poem 
from two of the four copies of “Milton,” the longer text that contained it. 
Perhaps he saw all the hypocrisy that was coming.

ETERNITY’S SUNRISE
The Imaginative World of William Blake
By Leo Damrosch
Illustrated. 332 pp. Yale University Press. $30.

Cheers,
Jim

"The enemy isn’t liberalism;
the enemy isn’t conservatism.
The enemy, is baloney." - Lars Erik Nelson