Eternity's Sunrise by Leo Damrosch

Author:Leo Damrosch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

Apocalypse

In Milton and Jerusalem, the culminating apocalypse—the breakthrough into Eternity when Albion awakens—is only briefly described, but in The Four Zoas it is described at great length. The chronology of these three works is not entirely clear, but their sequence is. Blake began The Four Zoas in 1797 and revised that never-engraved manuscript at various times. Some of its material was recycled in the fifty-plate Milton in 1804, which was first printed in 1811. By then Blake had gotten started on Jerusalem, possibly as early as 1808, and he continued to enlarge that poem over many years. In its final form it filled a hundred plates, divided rather arbitrarily into four books of equal size, and was printed at last in 1820. And although each of the final two prophecies ends with an apocalypse, it is almost endlessly deferred and surprisingly anticlimactic when it finally arrives.

In The Four Zoas, it is Los who precipitates the apocalypse by ripping Urizen’s rigid heavens apart:

His right hand branching out in fibrous strength

Seized the sun, his left hand like dark roots covered the moon,

And tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense.

Then fell the fires of Eternity with loud and shrill

Sound of loud trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven,

A mighty sound articulate: “Awake ye dead and come

To judgment from the four winds, awake and come away!”7

This breakthrough is a colossal expansion of the liberation of humanity that had been anticipated in America: A Prophecy. Now, however, the cruelty is far more shocking than in that optimistic early work.

The tree of Mystery went up in folding flames;

Blood issued out in mighty volumes pouring in whirlpools fierce

From out the flood gates of the sky.

The gates are burst, down pour The torrents black upon the earth, the blood pours down incessant;

Kings in their palaces lie drowned, shepherds their flocks their tents

Roll down the mountains in black torrents, cities villages

High spires and castles drowned in the black deluge; shoal on shoal

Float the dead carcasses of men and beasts driven to and fro on waves

Of foaming blood beneath the black incessant sky till all

Mystery’s tyrants are cut off and not one left on earth. . . .

From the clotted gore and from the hollow den

Start forth the trembling millions into flames of mental fire,

Bathing their limbs in the bright visions of Eternity.

The grapes of wrath from Revelation are explicitly invoked:

But in the wine presses the human grapes sing not nor dance,

They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming.8

Insofar as a historical apocalypse has taken place, this may refer to the bloodshed of the French Revolution and the counterrevolutionary wars that followed. Insofar as the apocalypse is internal, it is the psychic pain that accompanies any deep, far-reaching change, which entails a drastic reordering of the self.

It is apparent that by the time Blake engraved Milton and Jerusalem, he no longer thought that an apocalyptic liberation of humanity could be fully attained. In Milton it never occurs at all, but is only described as about to happen.

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