Fearful Symmetry by Frye Northrop

Author:Frye, Northrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

9

THE NIGHTMARE WITH HER NINEFOLD

BY 1796 Blake had completed nearly all the “minor prophecies” which belonged in his canon, and his next task was to work out what we have called a cyclic vision of life from the Fall to the Last Judgment in one long poem. This would constitute in a single form the totality of what Blake came into the world to say, and would be his poetic testament or Word of God in him. It would be, in short, his “epic” (which etymologically means “word,” as does “myth”). It is evident, then, that Blake was not planning a series of epics, but a single crowning masterpiece. The moment in which the epic poet finally chooses his subject is the crisis of his life, as Dante and Milton at least show very clearly; and his choice, once made, almost precludes the idea of ever finding another. “An epic from Bob Southey every spring”1 is possible, because Southey’s poems are not epics at all, but simply narratives: “epic” in that sense is not the name of a form but literary jargon for “long poem.” No poet, unless the Iliad and the Odyssey are by the same man, has ever completed a second real epic on a theme radically different from the first.

Some of the minor prophecies, notably The Book of Urizen, look like early drafts of an epic, but Blake’s first real attempt was the poem which was first called Vala and later The Four Zoas, on which he worked for several years. Yet in spite of all this work the poem was never engraved, and was left abandoned in an extraordinary manuscript. We shall try to suggest reasons for this: in the meantime, The Four Zoas remains the greatest abortive masterpiece in English literature. It is not Blake’s greatest poem, and by Blake’s standards it is not a poem at all; but it contains some of his finest writing, and there is much to show that it would have contained some of his best engraving. Anyone who cares about either poetry or painting must see in its unfinished state a major cultural disaster.

The two titles indicate that Blake revised the scheme of the poem at least once. A second revision appears to have been begun, but before it had proceeded far Blake realized that he was thinking in terms of another poem altogether. At first, evidently, he intended to cast his epic into the form of a prophecy uttered by a Sibyl, as in the Völuspa in the Elder Edda from which he got the name “Vala.” As he went on, the working-out of the far richer symbolism of the “Zoas” reduced Vala to a minor character, while the Muse or Sibyl addressed at the beginning shrank into a vestigial “Eno,”2 a daughter of Beulah or inspiration, so chosen to contrast with the Classical Muse who is a daughter of Memory. Through the eyes of this Eno Blake sees the whole of existence projected in the form of a single drama of fall, redemption and apocalypse.

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