Tuesday
In observance of America’s 250th anniversary, which lasts all year, I recently read William Blake’s America: A Prophecy, which celebrates the revolutionary energies that the world was witnessing in Britain’s American colonies. As I read it, I couldn’t help but substitute DJT for King George. Those of us who feel that we need a new revolution to revitalize the nation can find inspiration in Blake’s poem.
In America Blake draws on a complex cosmology that he invented and that I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that the spirit of revolution is embodied in the figure of red Orc (nothing like Tolkien’s orcs), who is chained like Prometheus. Bringing him food is a silent woman, daughter of the deity that has imprisoned him. To her he reveals his longing for freedom, which captures the excitement that America’s fight for independence stirred in many:
“Dark virgin,” said the hairy youth, “thy father stern abhorr’d;
Rivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars;
Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion,
Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash
The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding
Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,
On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds.
For chain’d beneath I rend these caverns; when thou bringest food
I howl my joy…”
Inspired by this “dark virgin,” Orc breaks his chains, leading her to speak for the first time:
Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry.
“I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go;
Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa;
And thou art fall’n to give me life in regions of dark death.
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions
Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep:
I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love;
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.
O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire & my frost
Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent;
This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.”
Blake is well aware that revolutions involve “howling pains” along with the joy of freedom, as Ken Burns’s series on the American Revolution makes clear.
We next get a glimpse of both George III, described as “the Guardian Prince of Albion [England],” and America’s revolutionaries. The “Warren” in the list may be Mercy Otis Warren, who according to Frank Hudson was a female Thomas Paine:
The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent,
Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore:
Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night,
Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green;
Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albion’s fiery Prince.
Washington spoke; Friends of America look over the Atlantic sea;
A bended bow is lifted in heaven, & a heavy iron chain
Descends link by link from Albion’s cliffs across the sea to bind
Brothers & sons of America, till our faces pale and yellow;
Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands work-bruis’d,
Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the whip
Descend to generations that in future times forget.—
In defiance of the king, Orc roars out his exhilarating call for freedom, tapping into images from Jesus’s resurrection as he does so:
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained 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.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.
Orc continues on in this strain. In the following passage, Urizen is the white patriarchal version of God who has perverted Jesus’s message. (This is the God that many Trump churches worship.) As Orc and Blake see it, true virginity is not to be found in “pale religious lechery” but in open and free sexuality. What state religion condemns as “lustful fires” are actually holy, with humans being able to walk through them without being consumed. That’s because “everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.” The “soul of sweet delight,” Blake assures us, “can never be defiled”:
The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break;
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps;
To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof.
That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty
The undefil’d tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn:
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.
Two passages especially hit me given that, on this 250th anniversary, we have a president who would dearly love to be a king. The first passage shows George III realizing that he can’t subdue the soul of America. In our America, the Trump resistors are our Washington and Paine and Warren. The king laments,
America is darkned; and my punishing Demons terrified
Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dry’d in the wind.
They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth.
They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plow and spade.
They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the castle of princes.
They cannot bring the stubbed oak to overgrow the hills.
For terrible men stand on the shores, & in their robes I see
Children take shelter from the lightnings, there stands Washington
And Paine and Warren with their foreheads reard toward the east…
For his part, Orc—now called “Boston’s angel”—points out how, in George III’s world, truth, trade, generosity, the laws of peace, and the virtues of abstinence have all been perverted:
He cried: Why trembles honesty and like a murderer,
Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station!
Must the generous tremble & leave his joy, to the idle: to the pestilence!
That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by, & the sandy desart is giv’n to the strong
What God is he, writes laws of peace, & clothes him in a tempest
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs
What crawling villain preaches abstinence & wraps himself
In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay.
People trembling for telling the truth? The ungenerous as unrestrained performers of the energies of nature? Generosity become a means by which to get rich? Megachurch preachers advocating GOP austerity measures as they take in millions? It sounds all too familiar.
In response to Orc’s rebellion, George sends forth his forces, which Blake describes as plagues:
His plagues obedient to his voice flew forth out of their clouds
Falling upon America, as a storm to cut them off
As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear
In the end, however, the plagues boomerang as America’s spirit of freedom in turn travels to Europe, where it challenges the crowned heads. While they seek to escape, withdrawing into their decaying fortresses, Orc will not be denied:
Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France Spain & Italy,
In terror view’d the bands of Albion, and the ancient Guardians
Fainting upon the elements, smitten with their own plagues
They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven
Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair
With fierce disease and lust, unable to stem the fires of Orc;
But the five gates were consum’d, & their bolts and hinges melted
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of men
Would Blake be disillusioned by what America has become? Actually, he predicted it. In another poem (“The Grey Monk”) he has the most succinct statement I know of revolutions going bad:
The iron hand crush’d the tyrant’s head
And became a tyrant in his stead.
As it channels Orc’s longing for freedom, the revolution to overthrow Trumpism must be non-violent. Above all, it must never lose sight of thevision that drives it. It must “look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air.”
