"Har and Heva bathing"; Har and Heva are shown naked in a shallow stream whilst Mnetha lies behind looking on.
Many years before Tiriel begins, Har was overthrown by his children, Tiriel, Ijim and Zazel. As time went by, he and his wife, Heva, came to reside in the Vales of Har, where they gradually succumbed to dementia, regressing to a childlike state to such an extent that they came to think their guardian, Mnetha, is their mother, spending their days chasing birds and singing in a "great cage" (Tiriel; 3:21). After Tiriel loses his throne to his own children, he visits Har and Heva. Excited by the visit, although unaware that Tiriel is their son, they ask him to stay with them, but he refuses and resumes his wanderings. Later, after Tiriel has had most of his own children killed, he returns to the Vales with the express purpose of condemning his parents, and the way they brought him up, declaring that Har's laws and his own wisdom now "end together in a curse" (8:8);
The child springs from the womb. the father ready stands to form The infant head while the mother idle plays with her dog on her couch The young bosom is cold for lack of mothers nourishment & milk Is cut off from the weeping mouth with difficulty & pain The little lids are lifted & the little nostrils opend The father forms a whip to rouze the sluggish senses to act And scourges off all youthful fancies from the newborn man Then walks the weak infant in sorrow compelld to number footsteps Upon the sand. &c And when the drone has reachd his crawling length Black berries appear that poison all around him. Such was Tiriel Compelld to pray repugnant & to humble the immortal spirit Till I am subtil as a serpent in a paradise Consuming all both flowers & fruits insects & warbling birds And now my paradise is falln & a drear sandy plain Returns my thirsty hissings in a curse on thee O Har Mistaken father of a lawless race my voice is past[1]
—Tiriel 8:12-28
Upon this declamation, Tiriel then dies at their feet.
In the Africa section of the later poem The Song of Los (1795), which is set chronologically before Tiriel, Har and Heva are forced to flee into the wilderness, after their family rebel against them. In their exile in the desert, they then turn into reptiles.
As a character, S. Foster Damon believes that Har represents both the "decadent poetry of Blake's day"[3] and the traditional spirit of Christianity.[4]Northrop Frye reaches a similar conclusion, but also sees divergence in the character, arguing that although Har and Heva are based on Adam and Eve, "Har is distinguished from Adam. Adam is ordinary man in his mixed twofold nature of imagination and Selfhood. Har is the human Selfhood which, though men spend most of their time trying to express it, never achieves reality and is identified only as death. Har, unlike Adam, never outgrows his garden but remains there shut up from the world in a permanent state of near-existence."[5]Harold Bloom agrees with this interpretation, arguing that "Har is natural man, the isolated selfhood." Bloom also believes that Har is comparable to Struldbruggs from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Tithonus from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem of the same name (1859).[6]
'Har' is the Hebrew word for 'mountain', thus giving an inherent irony to the phrase "Vales of Har". Damon believes this conveys the ironic sense that "he who was a mountain now lives in a vale, cut off from mankind.[3]
Blake's mythology
The Song of Los, Plate 4, showing Har and Heva fleeing from the "War & Lust" of their brethren.
Both Har and the Vales of Har feature in Blake's subsequent prophetic work. The Vales of Har are mentioned in The Book of Thel (1790), and it is in the Vales where lives Thel herself. Throughout the poem they are represented as a place of purity and innocence; "I walk through the vales of Har. and smell the sweetest flowers" (3:18). At the end of the poem, when Thel is shown the world of experience outside the Vales, she panics and flees back to the safety of her home; "The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek./Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har" (6:21-22).
In the Africa section The Song of Los (1795), which is set chronologically before Tiriel, Har and Heva flee into the wilderness, after their family rebel against them:
Since that dread day when Har and Heva fled. Because their brethren & sisters liv'd in War & Lust; And as they fled they shrunk Into two narrow doleful forms: Creeping in reptile flesh upon The bosom of the ground:[7]
—The Song of Los: plate 4, lines 4-9
Damon refers to this transformation as turning them into "serpents of materialism," which he relates back to their role in Tiriel.[3]
Har and Ijim are also briefly mentioned in Vala, or The Four Zoas (1796-1803), where Har is the sixteenth son of Los and Enitharmon, and Ijim the eighteenth. Har's immediate father is Satan, representative of self-love in Blake, and his children are Ijim and Ochim (The Four Zoas, VIII:360).
1 2 3 S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover: University Press of New England 1965; revised ed. 1988), 174
↑ Harold Bloom, "Commentary" in David V. Erdman (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Press, 1965; 2nd ed. 1982), 946
In the mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional society. Originally, Urizen represented one half of a two-part system, with him representing reason and Los, his opposition, representing imagination. In Blake's reworking of his mythic system, Urizen is one of the four Zoas that result from the division of the primordial man, Albion, and he continues to represent reason. He has an Emanation, or paired female equivalent, Ahania, who stands for Pleasure. In Blake's myth, Urizen is joined by many daughters with three representing aspects of the body. He is also joined by many sons, with four representing the four elements. These sons join in rebellion against their father but are later united in the Last Judgment. In many of Blake's books, Urizen is seen with four books that represent the various laws that he places upon humanity.
Jerusalem, subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion, is the last, longest and greatest in scope of the prophetic books written and illustrated by the English poet, artist and engraver William Blake. Etched in handwriting, accompanied by small sketches, marginal figures and huge full-plate illustrations, it has been described as "visionary theatre". The poet himself believed it was his masterpiece and it has been said that "of all Blake's illuminated epics, this is by far the most public and accessible". Nonetheless, only six copies were printed in Blake's lifetime and the book, like all of Blake's prophetic works, was all but ignored by his contemporaries.
The Book of Thel is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably composed in the period 1788 to 1790. It is illustrated by his own plates, and compared to his later prophetic books is relatively short and easier to understand. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line. It was preceded by Tiriel, which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from Tiriel were incorporated into The Book of Thel. Most of the poem is in unrhymed verse.
The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English writer William Blake, illustrated by Blake's own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the "First". The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake's mythology, who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the "primeaval priest" and tells how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma. Los and Enitharmon create a space within Urizen's fallen universe to give birth to their son Orc, the spirit of revolution and freedom.
The prophetic books of the 18th-century English poet and artist William Blake are a series of lengthy, interrelated poetic works drawing upon Blake's own personal mythology. They have been described as forming "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". While Blake worked as a commercial illustrator, these books were ones that he produced, with his own engravings, as an extended and largely private project.
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Luvah is one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial man, was divided fourfold. He represents love, passion, and rebellious energy. His Emanation is Vala; his fallen form is Orc. Throughout Blake's mythological system, he is opposed to Urizen, the representation of reason. He is also connected to Jesus, who takes upon his form as the being of love after Luvah falls and turns to a being of hate.
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Urthona is one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial man, was divided fourfold. Specifically, he is the Zoa of inspiration and creativity, and he is a blacksmith god. His female counterpart is Enitharmon. Urthona usually appears in his "fallen" form, that of Los.
The Spectre is one aspect of the fourfold nature of the human psyche along with Humanity, Emanation and Shadow that William Blake used to explore his spiritual mythology throughout his poetry and art. As one of Blake's elements of the psyche, Spectre takes on symbolic meaning when referred to throughout his poems. According to professor Joseph Hogan, "Spectre functions to define individuals from others [...] When it is separated [from Emanation], it is reason, trying to define everything in terms of unchanging essences." Thus, according to Samuel Foster Damon, Spectre epitomizes "Reason separated from humanity" and "Self-centered selfhood" or, as Alexander S. Gourlay puts it, Spectre is "characterized by self-defensive rationalization".
Tiriel is the eponymous character in a poem by William Blake written c.1789, and considered the first of his prophetic books. The character of Tiriel is often interpreted as a foreshadowing of Urizen, representative of conventionality and conformity, and one of the major characters in Blake's as yet unrealised mythological system.
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Los is the fallen form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas. He is referred to as the "eternal prophet" and creates the visionary city of Golgonooza. Los is regularly described as a smith, beating with his hammer on a forge, which is metaphorically connected to the beating of the human heart. The bellows of his forge are the human lungs. Los's emanation, Enitharmon, represents spiritual beauty and embodies pity, but at the same time creates the spatial aspect of the fallen world, weaving bodies for men and creating sexual strife through her insistence upon chastity. In the Book of Urizen (1794), Los and Enitharmon have a child, Orc, who is the embodiment of the spirit of revolution. The name Los is, by common critical acceptance, an anagram of Sol, the Latin word for "sun". Such innovations are common in many of Blake's prophetic poems.
Tiriel is a narrative poem by William Blake, written c.1789. Considered the first of his prophetic books, it is also the first poem in which Blake used free septenaries, which he would go on to use in much of his later verse. Tiriel was unpublished during Blake's lifetime and remained so until 1874, when it appeared in William Michael Rossetti's Poetical Works of William Blake. Although Blake did not engrave the poem, he did make twelve sepia drawings to accompany the rough and unfinished manuscript, although three of them are considered lost as they have not been traced since 1863.
Tiriel, Op. 41, is a 1985 opera by the Russian composer Dmitri Smirnov in three acts with a symphonic prologue to his own English libretto after a poem of the same title by William Blake. It has been translated into Russian and German. It was first performed at the Stadttheater Freiburg on 28 January 1989.
"The Little Girl Found" is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Experience in 1794. In the poem, the parents of a seven-year-old girl, called Lyca, are looking desperately for their young daughter who is lost in the desert. During days and nights they go on looking for the girl up to the moment they find a lion which tells them where the child lies.
"Infant Joy" is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was first published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789 and is the counterpart to "Infant Sorrow", which was published at a later date in Songs of Experience in 1794.
Vala, or The Four Zoas refers to one of the uncompleted prophetic books by the English poet William Blake, begun in 1797. The eponymous main characters of the book are the Four Zoas, who were created by the fall of Albion in Blake's mythology. It consists of nine books, referred to as "nights". These outline the interactions of the Zoas, their fallen forms and their Emanations. Blake intended the book to be a summation of his mythic universe but, dissatisfied, he abandoned the effort in 1807, leaving the poem in a rough draft and its engraving unfinished. The text of the poem was first published, in 1893, by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and his fellow collaborator, the English writer and poet Edwin John Ellis, in their three-volume commentary book about William Blake's works, The Works of William Blake.
The Song of Los is one of William Blake's epic poems, known as prophetic books. The poem consists of two sections, "Africa" and "Asia". In the first section Blake catalogues the decline of morality in Europe, which he blames on both the African slave trade and enlightenment philosophers. The book provides a historical context for The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, and also ties those more obscure works to The Continental Prophecies, "Europe" and "America". The second section consists of Los urging revolution.
The Book of Los is a 1795 prophetic book by the English poet and painter William Blake. It exists in only one copy, now held by The British Museum. The book is related to the Book of Urizen and to the Continental prophecies; it is essentially a retelling of Urizen from the point of view of Los. The book has been described as a rewriting of the ancient myth of creation that equates fall with the loss of spiritual vision brought about by selfhood.
Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957. In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000.
The Voice of the Ancient Bard is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789, but later moved to Songs of Experience, the second part of the larger collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794.
In William Blake's mythology, Beulah, originally Hebrew בְּעוּלָה, is "the realm of the Subconscious, the source of poetic inspiration and of dreams." It is also, according to Blake scholar Alexander S. Gourlay, "a dreamy paradise where the sexes, though divided, blissfully converse in shameless selflessness. Beulah is available through dreams and visions to those in Ulro, the utterly fallen world." Between Eternity and Ulro, it is imagined as a place without conflict similar to a conventional image of heaven or Eternity. However, for Blake, the idea of an everlasting peaceful Eternity is misguided and fallen.
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