Willam Blake: Selected Poetry

"Well, even the radical young artist-types in London thought he was barking mad. He certainly took the Romantic poet turn inward to extremes, creating a quasi-Biblical inner landscape of the mind through his art and poems. Most people know Blake through his little sing-song poems like ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’. But his longer works, which fill volumes, are worth tackling. Unlike Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems — so consciously accessible in style — these longer Romantic poems can be hard to read. But Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a mind-blowing exception. Straight away the heroine, Oothoon, is raped. What’s worse, Oothoon’s true love, Theotormon, takes no pity on her, but instead ties her and her rapist, Bromion, back-to-back in a cave. The rest of the poem consists of Bromion mocking her while Oothoon pleads with Theotormon not to reject her because she has been sexually violated. As Theotormon ignores her, “conversing with shadows dire” in his own tortured mind, Oothoon’s speeches become ever more desperate and ambitious. She inveighs against the ideology of female purity, against marriage, against jealousy. In her final appeal to Theortormon, she offers to act as a procuress for him, and to watch him fornicate with other women in the spirit of free love. All of this was written at the time when Jane Austen was a teenager and first dreaming up her unforgettable heroines, who barely show so much as an ankle. Forget Pride and Prejudice and Zombies . I’d like Elizabeth Bennett to show up in a Blake poem. Next time you’re tempted to feel jealous on someone’s account, remember this image from Blake: Such is self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed. Blake was a visual genius, as well as a great Romantic poet, and this is like a scene from a horror movie. Blake’s philosophy was: “if you love someone, set them free.” That is, to quote Sting who is himself, I’ve heard, a great fan of Blake, as were The Doors. Jealousy, possessiveness, emotional cruelty: all spring from “self-love” according to Blake, which is like “a creeping skeleton.” Some have suggested that the “lamplike eyes” are a code for syphilis, which would make jealousy, marriage, prostitution, venereal disease, etc. all part of one great cancerous sore eating at society and personal happiness. Blake can be bleak. But it’s great fun in class to argue whether he was right: if we want true political freedom, a new society, we have to begin with our personal relationships. Is that true? Blake makes his readers face up to the hard questions of modern life, and to very private fears."