5bO
HAROLD BLOOM
H e stood trembling
&
Enitharmon clung around his knees
,Their: sensesunexpansive in one stedfast bulk remain
The .night blew cold
&
Enitharmon shriekd on the dismal
wi~d
Her pale hands cling around her husband
&
over her weak head
Shadows of Eternal Death sit in the leaden air
But the soft pipe the flute the viol organ harp
&
cymbal
And the sweet sound of silver voices calm the weary couch
Of Enitharmon but her groans drown the immortal harps
Loud
&
more loud the living music floats upon the air
Faint
&
more faint the daylight wanes. The' wheels of turning darkness
Began in solemn revolutions. Earth convulsd with rending pangs
Rockd to
&
from
&
cried sore at the groans of Enitharmon
Still the faint harps
&
silver voices calm the weary couch
But from the caves of deepest night ascending in clouds of mist
The winter spread his wide black wings across from pole to pole
Grim frost beneath
&
terrible snow linkd in a marriage chain
Began a dismal dance. The winds around on pointed rocks
Settled like bats innumerable ready to fly abroad
If
Wordsworth's method, as Pottle remarked, was one of transfigura–
tion, then Blake's, in this terrific passage, seems to be poised between
the phantasmagoria of the surrealists, and the massive and detailed vi–
sionary realism of Milton. The matter of common percep tion is wholly
absent here ; no descriptive detail awaits transfiguration. Yet the great–
ness of the passage does not dwell on ly in its carrying-over of the Mil–
tonic sublime into a conceptualized night-w·orld. Like every major pas–
sage in Blake, it is polemical, and it fights not only the technologists and
materialists of Blake's own time, but also the servants of Urizen who
abound in
ou~ n~w
technological dreariness. To explore the dens of
Urizen is to come to terms with a fallen world, but to see the irrelevance
of that world to ' the imagination, as Blake does in the passage that
I've quoted, is to see what an intellectual fighter must see, if he believes,
as Blake did, that the Eternal Great Humanity Divine can tear Himself
free frorri any l()cal, time-bound accidents of context, whether the con–
text be provided by nature, or by the technological extensions of nature.
For Blake,. as for Wordsworth and Shelley, there are no extensions of
man; there are oilly more humanized or less humanized men. Explora–
tions that are not apocalyptic are, to Blake, exploitations; they lead to
religions of concealment. The passage I have quoted from Blake is
about the ' completion of the Fall of Man, which is made final when
the imao-ination accepts unnecessary limitations. The terror felt by Los is
