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Blake: A Crisis of Love and Jealousy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

John Sutherland
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Abstract

Blake's attitude toward sexual love changed in significant ways during the late 1790's. Before that time, Blake thought of sex as potentially liberating—as a prime method of achieving the fourfold vision of Eternity. After that time he connected sexual love with pity and compassion, not with liberation. He came to think of sexual love as a force which tied individuals to the endless cycles of the fallen world; a force which at best might lead to the delightful, but limited, threefold vision of Beulah. Details of this important shift of attitude are suggested on the basis of close examination and discussion of three poems: “William Bond,” “My Spectre Around Me…,” and “The Crystal Cabinet.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 87 , Issue 3 , May 1972 , pp. 424 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1972

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References

1 William Blake, Milton, Pl. 21, 11. 8–10, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 114. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent page references to Blake's work are to this edition.

2 1 am reminded here of Roth Edmond's cynicism in Faulkner's “Delta Autumn.” Uncle Ike has just affirmed: “I think that every man and woman, at the instant when it dont even matter whether they marry or not, I think that whether they marry then or afterward or dont never, at that instant the two of them together were God.” Edmond's response is: “Then there are some Gods in this world I wouldn't want to touch, and with a damn long stick.” William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random n.d.), p. 348.

3 Crabb Robinson's Diary in Arthur Symons, William Blake (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), p. 269.

4 See Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence, R. I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1965), p. 95.

5 Pp. 467–68. For an interesting interpretation which disagrees on some key points with the following, cf. Margaret Rudd, Organized Innocence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 3–19, et passim.

6 Cf. Enitharmon / Eve / Catherine Blake's moralistic approach to sex in The Four Zoas, Night vna, as described in my essay “Blake and Urizen,” in Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 251–53, et passim.

7 Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, Everyman's Library ed. (London: Dent, 1942), pp. 314–15.

8 Gilchrist, p. 327.