William Blake: Spiritually Infinite as opposed to Religious
...in society. This loath of the Church may also be seen in several poems from Songs of Experience. “The Chimney Sweeper” tells a tale of a melancholy child whose parents have forsaken him in favour of a hypocritical church. Blake suggests that religion teaches suffering on Earth as a virtue which will lead to happiness in heaven. However the speaker of this poem tends to disagree with this concept and displays a contempt toward the church, his parents, and the utterance of hypocritical prayers. “London” is another example of a poem which exhibits the corruption of the church. Blake speaks of a weak, fearful, and oppressed society formed by charters and bans. The “mind-forg’d manacles” represent the restraint or metaphorical chains, that the poor were forced to endure. The clearest example of Blake’s abhorrence to religion appears in the third paragraph where he writes, “how the Chimney-sweepers cry every blackning church appalls.” This refers not only to the blackening of soot and cries of chimney sweepers, but to the allusion of evil. This evil is represented in the imagery of a tainted or darkened church and in the allusion to child labour. Blake also criticizes religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where he places his own beliefs of desire against reason and the church. “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.” (Plate 5) Blake treats religion in a similar manner in plate 16 where he alludes to the church as chains “of weak and tame minds which have the power to resist energy. According to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.” He also mentions the prolific and devouring as two classes of men who should be enemies and always stay separated. He proclaims that whoever attempts to unite the two, seeks to destroy existence. He follows this statement with the concept of religion as “an endeavour to reconcile the two”, which may provide further evidence against Blake as a religious man. The stance that Blake took in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may also question his spirituality. In plate five, Blake turns around the account in “Paradise Lost”, in his version telling of a Messiah who fell and formed a heaven from what he stole of the Abyss, as opposed to Satan’s fall in Milton. Blake satirizes work’s such as Milton’s “Paradise Lost”,Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, and the philosophies of Swedenborg and Aristotle. He places himself and other poets and prophets as members of the Devil’s party. This may lead one to believe that Blake is not religious because he sides with the Devil. In the “Proverbs of Hell”, Blake manipulates the Old Testament’s “Book of Proverbs”, and writes statements which are adverse to the original proverbs. “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity” (Plate 7, line 4). This sentence is unconventional and may be considered non religious to those who believe in prudence as a virtue. Blake becomes so passionate against reason and rules, that he goes so far as to write “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (plate10, l12-13) which capitalizes on Blake’s rejection of ration and reasoning. However eccentric his views appear, the “Proverbs of Hell” must be read as a satire and are not meant to be taken in complete seriousness. Although there appears to be a lot...