An Explication of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake’s trouble with orthodoxy within religion was never more apparent than in his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It becomes clear that his problems with the Church run deeper than just their organization, but with their views on good and evil, and there is still debate today about what Blake’s true feelings were and how they were conveyed through the poem. This paper will simply explain the nature of the poem and the events that come together within it. The beginning of Marriage sets up an image of a man walking through a “perilous path” that is described as “The vale of death” (Blake 1.4-5). Rintrah, a personification of wrath, watches the man be swayed from his path by the “sneaking serpent,” which can easily be interpreted as the Devil (Blake 1.17). The man is driven into the wild to fend for himself, where he will struggle and be tempted by the good and evil sides of himself and of the world. The next plate that Blake writes is not in a poetic form, but instead calls forth a challenge to the Swedenborgian view of religion. He humorously writes that “it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up” (Blake 3). Blake’s jokes about Swedenborg’s relationship to Jesus Christ and his changes to the Christian church lead into his next point, which is how contradictory he believes these religious teachings to be in the first place. Blake claims that “Without contraries is no progression” (3). He claims that everything has an opposite, and without those, no man can move forward. This is where the religious get their concepts of Good and Evil, which they easily equate to Heaven and Hell, which Blake seems uncomfortable with. The next plate that Blake writes, named “The Voice of the Devil,” explains three major understandings of the bible, which are that all men have a body separate from his soul, that Evil, or energy, is that of the body and Good, or reason, is that of the soul, and finally, that all men will be punished by God and sent to Hell for following his Evil, or energies. Blake immediately rebukes these claims by explaining that the soul cannot be separate from the body, Energy is the only thing that drives life, and that Energy, or Evil, is “Eternal Delight” (4). He goes on to describe, in short sentences which are broken up like paragraphs, that the only people “who restrain desire, do so because there is weak enough to be restrained,” giving the impression that those who do not give in to temptation aren’t the strongest of their kind, but rather the weakest for allowing themselves to be restrained at all (Blake 5). He goes on to complain that Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, calls the original Archangel Satan or the Devil, and that also in the Book of Job in the bible, the Messiah is called Satan as well, and that everyone must be aware of these historical similarities. Blake’s note of Milton being “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” once again displays his sense of humor when criticizing those who claim to be so tightly knit with God, although he seems much less critical of Milton than he is of Swedenborg. The speaker then moves through the fires of Hell, where he “delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity,” which reiterates Blake’s beliefs that Angels, or the “Good,” cannot see the true genius that takes place outside of the good, or in the Energy and “Evil” (Blake 6). He stumbles upon the Devil, who is writing “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (Blake 7). This question of how man can see when he’s limiting himself to his Good side only immediately leads into arguably the most controversial part of Marriage, which are the “Proverbs of Hell.” These proverbs mimic the proverbs of the bible, but while some are a bit amusing in their simplicity, like “The busy bee has no time for sorrow,” (Blake 7.11) there are also maddeningly confusing proverbs as well, such as “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. / The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. / The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God” (Blake 7.22-24). Many of these proverbs are satirical and over exaggerated, and many critics have agreed that Blake was only modestly influenced by the biblical Proverbs. The most interesting parts of these Proverbs, however, is that none of them encourage poor behaviors; they instead inform the reader that being saintly and never doing anything that one desires will only prevent progress of that person. When he explains that “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” (Blake 9.49), Blake sounds as if he is posing a challenge to never just accept restraints, but to discover one’s own limits through experience instead of stories told to one from another source. He never denounces God, rather he embraces Him, with Proverbs that explain that “As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers” (Blake 9.46). These Proverbs can easily stand alone, one by one, open to interpretation, but the speaker collects these Proverbs, putting them together in a manner that they can feed off one another as well. Proverbs give a certain sense of pattern, between the Energy, or Evil Proverbs, or the reflection of hierarchy and differences within the poem as well. When he finishes gathering his Proverbs, he criticizes the Priesthood, saying that it began when “a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize of abstract the mental deities from their objects” (Blake 11). This leads them to forget that God is in everything, and thus the Church began to jade the very notion of religion and God. The speaker then sits down to eat with Isaiah and Ezekiel, the two prophets, and asks them about what they were thinking when they asserted that God had spoken to them. Isaiah told the speaker that he “saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing…I cared not for consequences but wrote” (Blake 12). The two prophets then explained that all those of Israel were so consumed with the idea that all Gods were originally of their own God that they began to hate all priests and philosophers of all the countries around them for teaching that their own Gods were the true God. They also both said that it was dishonest to resist (a theme Blake writes about over and over again in Marriage) one’s own genius just because it is easier. After speaking to Isaiah and Ezekiel, the speaker states quite frankly that “the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years” (Blake 14). He claims that he has heard in Hell that when the cherub guarding the tree of life leaves his post, that the “whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (Blake 14). He then goes on to speak of the sensual enjoyment that will become, and how all those who believed that their bodies were distinctly different than their souls will understand the truth, and this will happen when the speaker exposes these things himself. The speaker tells us that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (Blake 14). He speaks that man has closed himself off and therefore cannot see the whole that he lives within. After he describes the Printing house in Hell, which is how the information is passed from generation to generation in Hell, he once again describes a dichotomy of Good and Evil that can be represented, which is now the Prolific and the Devouring, the Good and Evil respectively. The speaker explains that although the devourer seems to be the Evil force, consuming whatever it pleases, really “the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea received the excess of his delights” (Blake 16). He continues to explain that the two classes of men will always be on Earth, and any attempt to reconcile these classes of Prolific and Devourer will destroy all existence. He goes further to say that “Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two,” which explains Blake’s distrust in orthodoxy. An angel then approaches the speaker and pities him, telling him that he feels sorry for him that he will spend all eternity in Hell, to which the speaker replies that they should sit down and contemplate who has it better, the angel or himself. The angel takes him up above to see his lot, which is a fiery pit of horrible things, black and white spiders fighting each other, sea monsters, and oceans of fire, blood and fire and brimstone. And when the angel leaves the speaker there, he sees nothing but a river and a nice moon, hearing harps and other pleasantries. The speaker finds the angel and explains to him that the place was all because the angel showed it to him that way, and the then takes the opportunity to do the same to the angel. The speaker shows the angel many different shackled animals, ones were too weak to escape their chains, some of which had resorted to eating its own tail. The angel is upset with him for showing him this, and tells him that “we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics” (Blake 20). He then states one of the most powerful lines in the piece: “Opposition is true Friendship,” which cements his themes of duality (Blake 20). The speaker then begins to criticize Swedenborg even further, telling the reader that “Swedenborg has not written one new truth:…he has written all falsehoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed ith Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions” (Blake 21). He contests everything Swedenborg has written for he has not even seen the “Evil,” yet continues to write of the Good. Blake has already made it clear that it is impossible to truly know Good or Evil without grasping the other side as well. The speaker then sees the Devil and an Angel conversing, arguing over whether Jesus was all perfect and all knowing, and whether his Ten Commandments and laws make fools of all men, makes them nothing but insignificant sinners. The Devil contests this point and tells the Angel: “no virture can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules” (Blake 23-24). The Devil does accept Jesus as all virtue, but refuses to accept his infallibility. The Angel, hearing this argument, then stretches his arms out and embraces the fire of Hell, transforming into Elijah. This is not to say that all Good is consumed by Evil, but rather that when exposed to both sides, Evil can be transformed into goodness, but will still always be there. It is never completely gone from one’s being; rather it has the potential for coming back eternally. Blake then writes A Song of Liberty, a twenty line song about “The Eternal Female” and how she gave birth to a newborn which was thrown and seen by everyone across the world, and destroys the notion of these “stony laws,” which can be interpreted as the Ten Commandments, or those rules that all men follow (or were supposed to, according to the Church). When this happens, the “Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease” (Blake 27). All the warring ideals and concepts will come to an end when religion is finally stopped. Blake ends by stating that all of the categories of Good and Evil will be cast aside, and some day we will realize that “every thing that lives is Holy” (Blake 27). Blake’s epic piece The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not only a criticism of Swedenborg, but of the way all orthodox religions warped the idea of Good and Evil. He attempted to show everyone the importance of duality and unity between the body and soul, Heaven and Hell, and Energy and Reason. All of these things combined would make people complete and whole, but until then, no man could truly understand the nature of God and being holy.

Works Cited
Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Emanuel Swedenborg. New York, 1 July 2010.
M. Williams, Nicholas. "‘The Sciences of Life’: Living Form in William Blake and Aldous Huxley." Romanticism (2009): 41-53.
Stewart, David. "The Context of Blakean Contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Essays in Literature (Spring 1994): 43-53.
Villalobos, John. "William Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell' and the Tradition of Wisdom Literature." Studies in Philology (Spring 1990): 246-260.