Tyranny in the Poetry of William Blake
Revolutionary Ideals of Society Revealed in Blake's Work
Sep 30, 2008
Amidst the social turbulence inspired by the action and ideas of the French Revolution, the art of William Blake is conspicuous for its refusal to conform even to the conventional principles of challenge which many other revolutionary writers were promoting.
Tyranny within the System
Tyranny can be defined as a “cruel or oppressive government or rule” (ODE 2005) and, although his contemporaries advocated institutional change to eliminate the cruelty in the system, Blake saw its very basis within the political, social and religious apparatus of the state.
He describes all ‘law’ and its appeal to ‘reason’ as tyrannical with regards to human nature, moving him to criticise the founding concepts of this oppression rather than outward structural problems, which the French Revolution, and other activists, were purporting to reform.
These ideas are more overtly expounded by the prose Marriage of Heaven and Hell but also inform the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Blake calls into question the underlying framework of society but also the accepted Christian beliefs which form its most fundamental philosophies of good and evil, Heaven and Hell and innocence and experience, and in ‘The Tyger’ and The First Book of Urizen he even complicates the formal myth of the creation.
Tyranny of Law
Blake also criticises public declarations and laws which necessitate internal control, again seeing them as part of the inherent tyranny of society over the self.
The phrase “One Law” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 24) of oppression accentuates the imposition by even a single set of rules on human nature. This is developed further in the later poem, The First Book of Urizen where Blake emphatically repeats “one”, culminating in “One King, one God, one Law” (Urizen ch2, v8) and labelling God’s original act of creation as a tyrannous imposition.
Within the context of this reworking of the biblical ‘First Book of Moses,’ it may be assumed that the “one law” is that of Moses and thus the very first formal ‘restraints’ presented to humans as, paradoxically, the foundation of the new ‘free’ peoples of Israel.
This reinforces Blake’s criticism of all, and any, laws as tyrannous because, for him, these roots begin at the start of all civilisations, just as Moses’ Israelites are presented as by Christianity, and accepted as by his contemporary society.
Thus, for Blake, tyranny lies not in the flawed tools of the regime but at the heart of its ideology and at the roots of civilisation, where ‘reason’ and the idea of a governing power were first brought forward through God.
A Revolutionary?
With his life spent in isolation, Blake resembles the now typical image of the ‘revolutionary’, scribbling his ideas in self-imposed exile from the society he abhors, using his “imagination …as the vehicle of revolutionary change in the outside world” (Wu 2006:172).
However, there is something intensely personal in this dissatisfaction which defies appropriation by critics into the public sphere, something which he himself initiated through the sacrifice of mass-production to his unique use of artistry and the total control of the extended product through self-publication.
A criticism of tyranny can never be dismissed but many of his ideas promote the destruction of boundaries to the extent that they are untenable to the socialised beings which humans, including Blake’s readership, irrevocably remain.
