Blake and Tradition by Kathleen Raine

Author:Kathleen Raine [Raine Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

This beautiful passage, with that concrete visual quality to which Blake always responded when reading any abstract work, gave him at once the philosophy and the images of the poem. The flower is praying, or aspiring, to the sun, confined as it is to its “terrene” condition. Love, thus realized, is no longer “dung upon the ground,” fertilizing only the process of generation; it is a spiritual pilgrimage.

It is likely that in Proclus’ heliotrope and selenitrope we have the originals of the youth and the virgin of Blake’s poem – the youth obedient to the sun, the virgin to the moon, ruler of women. This pair are the earliest foreshadowing of Los, regent of the sun, and his emanation Enitharmon, ruler of the “moony” night, who, like the “pale Virgin shrouded in snow,” is described as “Pale as a cloud of snow.”57 Los on his first appearance, in Europe, is called “Possessor of the moon,” and must therefore be the sun, whom the moon obeys. These two characters are often identified, in a personal way, with Blake himself and with his wife; and we also feel that Ah! Sun-flower is a personal utterance – “my Sun-flower” being Blake himself.

Blake must have known, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Clyte, in love with Apollo but abandoned by him, who turned always toward the sun, following his course across the heavens until she was changed into a sunflower. But Blake’s flower is specifically masculine – “my Sun-flower” – as he later felt himself to be possessed by the solar Los. If Blake’s sunflower comes from Proclus rather than the more familiar story of Ovid, this masculine quality is explained. The masculine soul (or heliotrope) is subject to the sun, the feminine (the selenitrope) to the moon.58

Los is also the regent of time; and the sunflower, too, is closely associated with the time process. Los rules the sun itself:

. . . the unwearied Sun by Los created

To measure Time and Space to mortal Men every morning.59

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.