Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (p 111)

Category: long poem
Date: 1790-3

-complex irony/satire
-anti orthodox Christian/piety/morality
-Hell associated with the body and its desires, consists of energy, abundance, and freedom; and heaven with the soul, reason, restraint, passivity, and prohibition (aka Conventional Good)
-Real Good: marriage of the two (The Prolific/The Devouring)
-Rintrah – Elijah
-French Revolution – serpents represent hypocritical priests/inst. Religion disguised as Angels, and the Just Man is the raging prophet poet (Blake) seen as the Devil
-composed during a radical time of political conflict right after the FR. Written in prose, except for ‘argument’ and ‘song of liberty’
-describes poets visit to Hell (influenced by Swedenborg)
-conception of hell is not a place of punishment, but of unrepressed energy and not authoritarian like Heaven.
-wanted to reveal oppressive nature of conventional morality and religion
-proverbs of hell energize thought/ are controversial
-visits print house in hell, where they etch, which Blake swears to do on Earth (ref. to underground revolutionaries making pamphlets at the time)
-ends with revolutionary prophecies, asks for the world to break bonds of religious and political oppression
-marriage between social constraint and imaginative freedom, reason and energy, order and chaos – challenges to have a new way of thinking


-ashley smith (sorry!)