William Blake

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: [1] The Argument

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, Hungry clouds swag on the deep. Once meek, and in a perilous path The just man kept his course along The Vale of Death. Roses are planted where thorns grow, And on the barren heath Sing the honey bees. Then the perilous path was planted, And a river and a spring On every cliff and tomb; 6 And on the bleached bones Red clay brought forth: Till the villain left the paths of ease To walk in perilous paths, and drive The just man into barren climes. Now the sneaking serpent walks In mild humility; And the just man rages in the wilds Where lions roam. Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, Hungry clouds swag on the deep. As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, and the return of Adam into Paradise. —See Isaiah xxxiv. and xxxv. chap. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is heaven. Evil is hell. Blake composed The Marriage of Heaven and Hell between approximately 1790 to 1793. In it he sets forth some of his concepts of poetic imagination and belief that he would later develop in his Prophetic Books.