SOURCE: Chayes, Irene H. “The Marginal Design on Jerusalem 12.” Blake Studies 7, no. 1 (1974): 51-76.

[In the following essay, Chayes analyzes the designs in the margins of Jerusalem as a way of understanding themes and structure in the work.]

Among the many lively, varied, and unjustly neglected minor designs in Jerusalem, those that occupy the vertical margins on a number of plates make up a distinct and consistent group. Typically, they form unified sequences of images, usually human figures, which may be related to similar designs elsewhere in Jerusalem, or by allusive borrowings may recall Blake's illuminated books from much earlier in his career; at the same time, their relation to the texts on the same plates is likely to be oblique or incidental. There are two external limitations governing the marginal designs as a group which are particularly relevant to long-standing Blakean themes. Because the composition is necessarily vertical, the movements within these designs must be either ascending or descending, or sometimes both, even though there may be nothing about ascent or descent in the accompanying texts. Moreover, the margins in which the designs appear are all on the righthand side, not of the original plate but of the final, printed page, as the reader sees it before him. In the rare instances of pages with designs in both margins, such as plates 34 and 36,¹ those at the right are the more fully developed.

In spite of the lingering influence of Joseph Wicksteed's more than half-century-old hypothesis about the disposition of hands and feet in the Job illustrations, it seems to be agreed now that Blake did not work according to a fixed symbolism of right and left; sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to determine what in any given circumstance he actually regarded as right and as left. In Jerusalem, fortunately, there is a clue in the inscriptions “Sheep” and “Goats” at the top of plate 3, where the words are incised in the copper and, printed, appear in white. The two inscriptions are clearly opposed as right and left, but in neither instance does the combination of word and location conform to Wicksteed's principle that right signifies the good or spiritual and left the evil or material. On Jerusalem 3, “Sheep” is lettered in the upper lefthand corner and “Goats” directly opposite, at the upper right. As Wicksteed himself noted in his later commentary on Jerusalem,² the point of view implied on plate 3 is that of Christ the Judge in a traditional Last Judgment scene, on whose left hand the Damned are cast down to Hell while on his right the Elect ascend to Heaven; to the spectator looking at such a scene, the two sides of course are reversed. Blake followed tradition in his own drawings of the Last Judgment, in which the Damned expectably are falling on the spectator's right. If, as it seems, the inscriptions were added to Jerusalem 3 some time after the plate was originally etched, perhaps as part of the revision that cancelled whole lines in the text, the addition may have been suggested to Blake by his work on one or another of the several Last Judgment drawings, which have been dated from 1806 on.³

Not all the designs in Jerusalem, certainly, are affected by the inscriptions on plate 3, or are affected equally. For those systematically assigned to the righthand margins, however, the designation “Goats” at the upper right on the dedicatory page, at the outset of the whole work, sets convenient bounds of meaning, telling us that everything in such designs—the allusiveness of the images, their formal relations, the overall movements within the composition—pertains in one way or another to error, which according to Blake's moral eschatology is to be cast off at the Last Judgment in the mind of every man. In this respect, the designation on plate 3 functions much like the title Songs of Innocence or, better, Songs of Experience in the joint collection of Songs: that is, as a means of orientation, a broad initial perspective in which it is possible to begin considering individual designs.

One of the most complex individual designs is that in the margin of plate 12, which in effect chose itself as the subject of this essay, after I had tried to understand it in a footnote on a very different matter. The analysis that follows here is admittedly more detailed than many discussions so far of more important pictures by Blake. Even so, it is the kind of analysis that could profitably be made of most of the minor designs in Jerusalem, both the marginal sequences and others, and I offer it as at least a suggestion of method.⁴

I

On J 12, which marks a relatively static interlude in Chapter I, the text falls into three sections. The first twenty lines refer generally to the building of Golgonooza, which has been under way since the beginning of the chapter. The middle third, from line 25 through line 44, is occupied by the lyrical and allegorical passage beginning “What are those golden builders doing?” In the remaining twenty-two lines, Blake launches into a description of the city of Golgonooza and its environs, which continues through the next plate. The passage that seems most relevant to the design in the margin occurs in the first section and is neither lyrical nor descriptive but dramatic, the conclusion of Los's report of his vision (“And Los said, I behold the finger of God in terrors!”) as he stands before his furnaces:

Yet why despair! I saw the finger of God go forth
Upon my Furnaces, from within the Wheels of Albions Sons:
Fixing their Systems, permanent: by mathematic power
Giving a body to Falshood that it may be cast off for ever.
With Demonstrative Science piercing Apollyon with his own bow!
God is within, & without! he is even in the depths of Hell!

(10-15, E153/K631)⁵

As in other passages in Blake's texts which are juxtaposed to his designs, there are certain images and phrases here that are suggestive in themselves, regardless of their own context. “Fixing their Systems,” “mathematic power” and “Demonstrative Science,” “giving a body,” “piercing Apollyon with his own bow”: these leap to the eye of the reader who has the completed page before him. Assuming that the text for each plate was finished, perhaps even etched, before he began to consider the design, Blake himself may have been similarly impressed by these verbal keys on J 12, all of which occur in the upper quarter of the plate.

The directional movements in the marginal designs of Jerusalem are not uniform and are not always a reliable guide to the order in which the elements composing them were executed or suggested, or even the order in which they should be read.⁶ On J 12, however, Blake apparently began at the top, and the main movement is downward, with two lesser and unequal movements upward, both originating with the female figures who are situated at the terminal points of the margin, one at the top, the other at the bottom. Each is fully clothed, with her back toward the viewer and her head turned to the right and slightly lifted. The figure at the bottom has raised one arm, the right, straight above her head; the other holds both arms raised but bent at the elbows, as she touches the brim of her large plumed hat, as though judging the effect before an invisible mirror. Between these two figures is the third, nude and evidently male, stretched out head downward as though he were diving from a great height. His head is turned to his right and toward the viewer as he reaches down with his right arm to set a huge pair of compasses on a terrestrial globe, which occupies the space between the compasses and the head of the woman at the bottom of the margin. The diver's foot—also the right, the only one shown—is near the train of the gown worn by the woman above him; at the same time, his downreaching arm approaches the upraised arm of the woman below, which is extended halfway up the globe. For the second and third figures, but not the first, there are suggestions of setting: clouds between the man and the text, and near the second woman the contours of uneven or broken ground, including a dark area which may be a shadow cast by her upright figure.

These images fully occupy the margin, but their shape and orientation are not necessarily determined by the amount of space available to the right of the irregular lines of verse. The vertical pose of the male figure leaves space unfilled, which permits the introduction of the clouds beside him; on the other hand, the globe is drawn in a space so narrow that its left side remains unfinished at least in black and white copies, and the longer lines of text encroach upon it. (The circumference of the globe is drawn in completely in the Stirling-Mellon coloured copy, that is, Copy E.) Very possibly the intermingling of text and image in this part of the design was at first an accident, but if so, it was an accident Blake knew how to exploit; at two strategic points on the globe the verbal intrusions are sufficiently apposite to become important clues which are put in the reader-spectator's way. Other line-endings acquire relevance through simple juxtaposition, so that on the full illuminated page portions of the text may have a visual function as well as their more usual literary and cognitive function. The total design thus is made up of separate elements whose relation to each other even in a spatial sense is by no means clear at first glance. The major elements—the three human figures and the globe—come to the attention at first separately and then in varying combinations which change in meaning as their components change. The meaning of the design as a whole is different again, and it becomes accessible only when the meanings of the parts have been understood, separately and in combination. The bounds for all such meanings are set by Blake's arbitrary designations of left and right on plate 3, which (it is being assumed here) apply to all the Jerusalem plates with vertical marginal designs. In the instance of J 12 in particular, the rightward tilt toward error and its destined consequence is made emphatic by the fact that in their different ways all three figures are turned or are looking toward their own right, and two of the three have extended their right arms.

In the analysis that follows, the order in which the various parts of the design are considered will be the logical order of increasing complexity, beginning with the relatively simple first female figure, who is poised alone at the top of the margin, beside the first twenty lines of verse. These lines include Los's account of his vision, preceded by a brief opening paragraph concerning Vala, whom previously Jerusalem has “animated” by her tears (11:25): “Why wilt thou give to her a Body whose life is but a Shade? / Her joy and love, a shade: a shade of sweet repose: / But animated and vegetated, she is a devouring worm: / What shall we do for thee O lovely mild Jerusalem?” (lines 1-4). The word “shade,” repeated with its near-synonym “shadow” several times throughout the passage, in effect bounds the figure in the margin: as the last word in line one, it appears slightly above and to the left of the plume on her hat; ending line 19, it is lettered near the last fold of her train. Another arresting word occurs in lines 18-19, where the “sons” of Los create “spaces” for both Vala and Jerusalem within the “Starry Wheels of Albions Sons.” This act of improvised creation may have suggested the placement of the pictorial figure nearby, in the space left invitingly blank by the comparatively short lines of verse. Conversely, the idea of protective “spaces” created by art which is reflected in J 11:10-12 and 12:17-20 may have been suggested to Blake the poet by Blake the graphic artist's practice of inserting pictures of all kinds in the spaces between the lines of text and in the margins of his etched plates, including J 11 and J 12.

Whether or not the female figure at the top of the margin on J 12 is identified specifically as the Vala of the text,⁷ the emphasis on her clothing acquires a meaning from the passages of verse just cited which is reinforced by the verbal imagery. The “body” Jerusalem inadvertently has given to Vala, whose “life” is properly “but a Shade,” threatens destruction because it enables her, Vala, to grow beyond simple animation into a “devouring worm.” The same phrase, “giving a body,” is used in line 13 in reference to a similar act with a different effect: conscious creation for the purpose of destruction; making Falsehood definite and unmistakable so that “it may be cast off for ever.” Twice denominated a “shade” by the adjacent text, the woman in the margin is characterized not only by her decorative hat and tight-waisted, full-skirted gown but also by the curious scalloped frills along the outer edges of her arms, which resemble the bat-wings of Los's Spectre—as he appears on Jerusalem 6, for example—or the finlike outline of the swimming figure, also female, at the bottom of plate 11, who probably is Vala herself.⁸ Hat, gown, and fins or featherless wings: all make up a “body” which is as ephemeral as fashionable clothing and as easily discarded, along with which the wearer, the dangerous shade Falsehood, will also be discarded, cast out among the Goats on whose side of the page the personifying figure stands.

On a plate with no clearly defined margin, this figure would be acceptable as a graphic equivalent of the metaphorical language in one particular line of the neighboring text, comparable to many among Blake's illustrations to Gray and Young. But on J 12 there can be no doubt that there is a margin extending the full vertical length of the plate, and perhaps originally in response to the waiting space below, Blake began to explore and elaborate the partial metaphors in lines 12 and 14, with the result that as it evolved downward the design became increasingly complex and increasingly independent of the passages in the text that first prompted it.

II

In Los's “finger of God” speech, the agency by which a body is to be given to Falsehood is specified: it is “mathematic power” (line 12), which in the manner of Biblical parallel structure is balanced by “Demonstrative Science” in line 14. These references, unexpected in their own context, perhaps suggested, or anticipated, the pair of compasses in the hand of the second figure, the descending male nude who from the tip of his toe to the tip of the compasses occupies approximately the same amount of space in the margin as the woman above him. On the strength of both the references in Los's speech and the motif of the compasses, some commentators have identified this figure as the Isaac Newton of Blake's familiar polemical conception.⁹ As will be seen, there is a context in which the pose and the gesture together do have appropriate Newtonian overtones. In immediate pictorial terms, however, the figure has nothing in common with Blake's symbolic portrait of Newton in the 1795 color print save the fact that he is holding a pair of compasses and the further fact that he is nude. Instead, the way in which he is holding the compasses is a righthanded version of the famous gesture by the Ancient of Days, and his physical attitude as a whole is readily traced back to plate 4 of America: A Prophecy, in the lefthand margin of which a robed and white-bearded personage is descending almost perpendicularly, with a book in his right hand and a spear or dart in his left. The chief difference between the two poses is that on J 12 the figure in effect has been turned over, reoriented from left to right, so that he now presents his right side to the viewer.

Of the head of the figure with the compasses, there is little to be noticed except that the face is beardless but the hair is definitely not the short and tightly curled hair of Newton in Blake's color print, or of Los in all standard representations. Blown back and upward and ending in two sharp points, it is somewhat like the hair of the spear-carrier of America 4, although it is not white, and even more like the hair of Christ in “Rout of the Rebel Angels,” one of Blake's watercolor drawings in his first set of illustrations to Paradise Lost, executed in 1807.¹⁰ If the date of 1804 on the title-page is accurate at least in reference to the year when Blake began work on Jerusalem, the male figure in the margin of plate 12 probably would have preceded and hence perhaps contributed to the portrayal of Christ in the watercolor.¹¹ The peculiar wind-blown effect of the hair was to become a visual signature of Blake's Christ, if it was not one at the beginning, for it returns in the designs on J 96 and J 99, combined with the standard Urizenic white beard, to reveal the risen Albion as both Jehovah and Christ, man and God redeeming each other.

Despite their difference in date, the figure on J 12 and the Christ of “Rout of the Rebel Angels” are brought together by a common background of image and association in Blake's illuminated books of the early 1790's. In the watercolor, Christ is disposed in a variant of the attitude of the Ancient of Days, and the arrow in his bow, which is aimed straight down toward the defeated angels, replaces the Ancient's compasses. The parallel reflects more than a pragmatic borrowing by Blake from himself, for a link between his conception of the Creator of the material universe and Milton's Christ can be found in the passage from Paradise Lost which in Copy D of Europe: A Prophecy is inscribed on the frontispiece, the original version of “The Ancient of Days.” Milton's demiurge who takes up “the golden Compasses, prepar'd / In Gods eternal store, to circumscribe / This Universe, and all created things”¹² is the Son, or Word, the Logos of theological tradition. Earlier still, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he had been equated with the victorious defender of Heaven in a significant way: “The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. / And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is calld the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death / But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call'd Satan. / For this history has been adopted by both parties / It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devils account is, that the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss” (5-6, E34/K150). In these terms—which properly are the terms used by “the Devil,” the spokesman for absolute Energy—both creation and casting-out are forms of restraint or circumscription, separation and exclusion for the sake of control or “government.”¹³ Hence, too, the implements used in both actions are equal and to this extent interchangeable: the circumscribing compasses of the creating Word; the bow and arrow which are turned against the rebellious energies by the counter-revolutionary Christ.¹⁴

In the light of “Rout of the Rebel Angels” to come, the word “bow” in line 14 of J 12 may seem to have a special resonance. It has no antecedent in the surrounding text; at most, it might be an echo of the unnamed weapon with which Scofield near the end of the preceding plate “shoots beneath Jerusalems walls to undermine her foundations” (11:23). Reinforced by the military imagery just before it in 11:19-21—“beamy spears,” “arrows of gold,” “iron armour”—line 11:23 may, however, have reminded Blake of the diving warrior of America 4 and thereby made the pose available for adaptation on J 12. In his original form, with beard, robe, and spear, either attacking or fleeing from attack by the “terror” Orc,¹⁵ the same warrior perhaps gave rise to the reference to Apollyon, for which there is even less preparation in the immediate text than for the bow. In Revelation 9:11, Apollyon is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name “in the Greek tongue” means “destroyer.” If Blake connected “Apollyon” with the similar-sounding “Apollo,” the bow mentioned in J 12:14 could be explained as an inevitable transformation of the bearded warrior's spear, before both bow and spear gave way to the graphic image of the compasses.

Since the Apollyon of Revelation presides over the punishment of “those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads” (9:4), that is, those who have been cast out, “piercing Apollyon with his own bow” in the fullest sense would have complex eschatological implications beyond the range of either the text or the design on J 12.¹⁶ In a general and figurative sense, the phrase and the whole line including it will have a possible application to another aspect of the design, which will be considered a little later. In the meantime, the figure in the margin who is holding compasses and not a bow or a spear may be identified initially as the creating Word of Paradise Lost, Christ as demiurge, of whom he would be a more direct representation than the patriarchal Ancient of Days had been. Like the Platonic and medieval Christian Logos of the tradition inherited by Milton himself, this figure is using “mathematic power” in an act of cosmic creation; at the same time, in the terms of lines 12 and 13 of the text, the world he is creating should be a “body” he is giving to Falsehood so that it may be cast off for ever. That one form of such a “body” could be a terrestrial globe of the kind used by geographers and navigators, carefully scored over most of its surface, as Blake's globe is, to show latitude and longitude: this had in fact been anticipated in Milton, in a passage on true and false views of the universe: “As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner, / As of a Globe rolling thro Voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro” (29:15-16, E126/K516). It is evidently as falsehood and delusion also that similar globe images appear in two other Jerusalem designs, on the title-page and plate 53; in each instance, the globe is accompanied by celestial luminaries—stars, a crescent moon, the sun—and along with them serves as an attribute of an ornate and elaborately symbolic female “body” which itself is destined to be cast off.¹⁷

On J 12, the tips of the compasses touch only the uppermost segment of the globe, and if the remainder of the margin were blank, the discussion so far would be sufficient to relate the design adequately to the concluding lines of Los's report of his vision. The terrestrial globe, limited to the segment under the compasses of the descending Word, then would be an alternate or companion image to the finny or bat-winged gown worn by the woman personifying Falsehood above: as a “body” which is being “given” to the false appearance of the world known to reason, the delusion of Ulro; a creation executed on the cosmic level for the express purpose of destruction. Since according to Blake's millenarianism of the imagination the rationalist-materialist's view of the universe is among the major errors that will be cast off at the Last Judgment, the broadly Apocalyptic associations of the name Apollyon would indirectly confirm the ultimate purpose for which in Los's speech the false “systems” are to be “fixed.” But there is more to the design, of course. The globe continues downward, and below it but less distant than the male figure above is the second female figure, in whom the descending movement is abruptly reversed and turned upward. In contrast to the marked disjunction between the first two of the four elements that make up the total composition, the last three elements form a distinct and unified group, of male, female, and terrestrial globe, from which the first female figure is excluded and which bears the greater weight of potential meaning. Since it is the globe that brings the two human figures into relation to each other, it must be considered next, first as a separate image.

Beside the lower portion of the design, which includes most of the globe image plus the figure of the woman, there begins in the text an incantatory “fourfold” survey of Golgonooza, one of a number of passages of similarly fearful symmetry in Blake's later works.¹⁸ As an introduction, the lines at 12:45 through 12:60 set forth a hierarchy of correspondences for the cardinal points of the universe, ranging from those seen in the perspective of Eternity, to the “Four Worlds of Humanity” within the psyche, to the major senses of the human body. Indirectly and inexactly, four points are indicated also on the image of the globe in the margin. The lefthand compass leg comes down where by convention the North Pole is located, although the only label, and that by an apparent spatial coincidence, is the word “joy,” which ends line 42 in the “golden builders” passage nearby. Opposite, on the underside of the globe, is a corkscrewlike projection which might—or might not—mark the South Pole; extending out from the text, along what should be the imaginary line of the Equator, is the last phrase of line 47, which happens to be “east & west.” The spectator however has no assurance that the four points on this globe follow the conventional arrangement, according to which north is at the top, south at the bottom, and east and west at right and left, respectively. On the contrary, the phrase ending line 47, which intrudes into the design to reverse the expected order of east and west, functions as an impromptu legend to tell us that the perspective in which this globe and the figures about it are to be viewed is different from that of the mapmaker or the student of geography consulting a diagram of the earth.

The obvious source of an alternative perspective is the neighboring text, and in lines 54-56 we find one, set forth just below and to the left of the globe: “And the Four Points are thus beheld in Great Eternity / West, the Circumference: South, the Zenith: North, / The Nadir: East, the Center, unapproachable for ever.” Even though here they belong to Eternity, these correspondences may preserve an early and subjective view of the earth and the heavens which Joseph Wicksteed in his commentary on Jerusalem reconstructed for Blake himself: a literally anthropocentric view, as of an observer watching the sun move clockwise across the sky from sunrise to sunset.¹⁹ To that observer, east or the point of sunrise would indeed be at his left hand, and west, the point of sunset, would be at his right. Identified with the point where the sun is at its highest, south would be overhead, at the Zenith; north, marking the point where the sun is totally out of sight, would then be the Nadir, the distant opposite of south, located somewhere underground or on the other side of the earth, perhaps in another world. It may be such a point of view, both naive and “eternal,” that the reader-spectator contemplating the group in the margin of J 12 is being invited to adopt as his own, so that, accepting east as left and west as right from the indication in the text,²⁰ he will go on to place south toward the top of the page, beyond the tip of the man's upturned foot, and north toward the bottom, below the hem of the woman's skirts. Within the group of images, the orientation is more complex, but dependent on the presence of a governing point of view outside the design as a standard against which the internal errors of perspective can be judged.

Since the figures of the man and the woman are both moving vertically but in opposing directions, and they are almost, if not quite, mirror images of each other in gesture and attitude, the implication is that the globe between them is being viewed, and approached, in two different though equally limited perspectives, from above and from below. Moreover, the two figures approach each other by way of the point on the globe toward which both are reaching and which thus is common to both perspectives: that is, the point where the lefthand compass leg rests and the word “joy” is printed, which conventionally would mark terrestrial north. It is in relation to this common point that each of the two figures is defined, and for each there arises a new context which is far from the immediate concerns of the verse text nearby. In the next two sections of this analysis, the relevant texts and designs will be from works considerably earlier than Jerusalem, recalled by motifs which are indirect allusions or direct borrowings, brought together in the global group in new combinations. For the descending male figure, the new context is again largely the contribution of Europe: A Prophecy, a work to which there is an incidental allusion in the text of J 12. As has been seen, his gesture with the compasses relates this figure to Milton's demiurgic Christ, by way of the Ancient of Days in the frontispiece to Europe. Now, through the contact of his compasses with the surface of the globe and specifically with the point conventionally marking the North Pole, the same figure attracts to himself a passage from the text of Europe which is important in itself and which will lend him a further identity. In similar fashion, the female figure below the globe will be linked by a web of association and allusion with other Blake works as early as the Songs and The Book of Thel.

III

The “golden builders” lyric begins with a passing allusion to “soft Ethinthus” (lines 25-26), who in Europe is one of the daughters of Enitharmon, invoked as a water-spirit (14:1-4, E64/K243). The passage relevant to the J 12 design occurs earlier, in the text of Europe 10, where the visit of Albion's Angel to the serpent temple at Verulam prompts an elegiac digression, with echoes of Milton's Lycidas in the closing lines, lamenting the fall of the eternal mind into the state of insensibility represented by the Stone of Night:

                                                                                     … oblique it stood, o'erhung
With purple flowers and berries red; image of that sweet south,
Once open to the heavens and elevated on the human neck,
Now overgrown with hair and coverd with a stony roof,
Downward 'tis sunk beneath th' attractive north, that round the feet
A raging whirlpool draws the dizzy enquirer to his grave.

(10:26-31, E62/K241-42)²¹

The “attractive north” is of course the northern magnetic pole of the earth, which the male figure on J 12 is marking by virtue of what may be a remote pun, conflating compasses as dividers with the mariner's compass, whose needle points always to the north. Although the victim in Europe is sunk beneath the north, the headlong character of his fall confirms the double perspective suggested in the Jerusalem design, and especially the orientation of the man with the compasses.

In his prelapsarian state, the implication is, Eternal man stood with his head toward the south, which is to say upward, toward the Zenith of the heavens. When he fell, he was turned upside down, with his feet toward the north, the Nadir of Eternity, which coincides with terrestrial north, and his head toward the opposite pole, or terrestrial south; hence in the lament the Stone of Night, as the skull of fallen man, is lodged specifically in the southern porch of the temple. There is further confirmation of such an inversion and change of perspective in the Introduction to Songs of Experience, which in the last stanza also glancingly echoes Lycidas: if the “starry floor” and “watry shore” (two separate images apparently extracted from Milton's “watry floar”) are both barriers to a return to Eternity, in the perspective of earth the heavens are a “floor” only to feet which are upraised after the kind of fall envisioned in Eu 10:30-31. In the perspective of Eternity, which the Bard in the Introduction may be assuming for himself, the “starry floor” would be at the Nadir, beneath the feet of the unfallen.

Visually, the clouds in the margin of J 12 place the man with the compasses between the celestial “floor” (or the Mundane Shell, as it had become in the meantime) and the surface of the global earth, with his feet turned upward and his head downward, so that he too is moving from Eternal south to terrestrial north. The one possible point of difference, an important one, between the pictorial figure and the vague anthropomorphic image in the verse passage would concern the nature of the former's descent. In the character of Milton's Christ, he might be descending for the purpose which the Bard (again in the Introduction to Songs of Experience) attributes explicitly to the “Holy Word”: “That might controll / The starry pole; / And fallen fallen light renew!” There is another possibility, however. In the famous color print, the attribute of Blake's Newton is a pair of compasses, which thereby becomes a symbol not only of mathematics but also and more especially of Newton's philosophy of “experiment,” or empirical investigation. If the latent Newtonian overtones of the compasses combine with the image of the globe to transform the Platonic-Christian and Miltonic Logos into a mundane and vulnerable, inquiring human reason, the figure on J 12 may indeed be falling, drawn down toward the magnetic north by its “attractive” effect on the symbolic implement of scientific investigation itself.

Indirect evidence that such a transformation is to be understood can be found in the design on Europe 10 and its own relevance to the group of man, woman, and globe on J 12. In the margin, the left in this instance, a crested serpent emitting flames from its head and spiralling downward in seven counter-clockwise coils sums up the common pattern of movement in the fall from Eternity which has been evolving in the text. The fall began when “Thought chang'd the infinite to a serpent” (line 16), and the image has a multiple reference, not limited to the shape of the Druidic temple and the physiological constriction of the human body, that “reptile form” which according to Blake's conceit of the moment lies broken and divided in the ruins of the temple itself.²² The fall of the mind and body of archetypal humanity was accompanied by a loss of flexibility in the senses, when their “ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens / Were bended downward” (lines 14-15). “Earths rolling in circles of space” (line 19) and “heaven a mighty circle turning” (line 23) indicate more specifically that the serpentine creation by thought responsible for these effects was the conception of celestial motion in the form of what Blake elsewhere in his poetry, as in the text of J 12, was to call “starry wheels.” The regular and unvarying revolutions of the astronomical circles or “wheels” is illustrated by the serpent coils in the margin, all approximately equal in diameter, which number seven in evident reference to the spheres of the five planets plus the sun and the moon.²³

Thus, in devising a system of circular, repetitive movement for the heavenly bodies, intellect in effect became what it thought and imposed a similar pattern on the human body and hence on human perception, including perception of the whole metaphysical and moral order of the universe: “Then was the serpent temple form'd, image of the infinite / Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel; / Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd” (lines 21-23). When the image makes its last appearance in the passage, as the “raging whirlpool” in which the “dizzy enquirer” drowns, it represents polar magnetism as a vortical force, which Blake perhaps intended to comprise Newtonian gravitation as well, for consistency with Newtonian astronomy. Inquiring reason trapped empirically by the effects of one of its own abstract formulations: excluding the important associations of the proper name, this would be a dramatic illustration of Apollyon pierced with his own bow—or, in terms of the visible descent on J 12, with the compasses of Demonstrative Science.

The serpent imagery of Europe 10 is echoed elsewhere in Jerusalem in both text and design.²⁴ On J 12, it returns as a pictorial version of the “whirlpool,” which however is mechanical rather than reptilian. The projection at the underside of the globe, directly opposite the “attractive north,” is a graduated spiral, turning in at least four rounds, whose direction may be either clockwise or counter-clockwise.²⁵ Most plausibly, this represents the rotation of the earth on its axis, as “the two Poles turn on their valves of gold” (M 29:11): another example of the “finite revolutions” introduced into the universe by self-limiting scientific thought, which on a lower level repeats the grand movements of the starry wheels. At the same time, the spiral shape in proximity to the head of the woman below the globe is a reminder that in a work even earlier than Europe, The Book of Thel, a whirlpool had been an image of constricted perception in one particular sense, hearing: “Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?” (6:17, E6/K130). In Europe, too, although “ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens” implicitly characterize the prelapsarian sense processes generally, in context the movement and its redirection belong specifically to hearing, preceded by the concentration of sight in “two stationary orbs” and followed by the barring of the nostrils (10:11-15). Although the woman on J 12 makes no overt gesture to call attention to her sense of hearing—unlike the male figure near the bottom of the marginal design on J 42 for example, who is covering his ears with his hands—the position of her head would leave her left ear open to whatever sounds may come from the turning earth. Since the drill-like, mechanical form of the spiral suggests an especially painful kind of constriction and concentration in both the organ and the sounds it conveys, there may be a parody here of the “music of the spheres” which according to the Fairy's song in the preface to Europe (iii, E58/K237) the ear ideally brings to the “cavern'd Man.”

Hearing is not the only sense whose operation seems to be indicated by or through the attitudes and gestures of the figures on J 12, although it is the only one to be confirmed by an external image. Above the globe, the head of the descending man is turned to show us an arc which must be his eye, along with another that may be intended to represent his nose. To the Fairy of Europe, the function of the eye is to enable man to see “small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth”—which in Blake's own terms is not Eternity but the “vegetable” or “vegetative” world of material nature. Since the “Vegetative Universe opens like a flower from the Earths center” and “expands in Stars to the Mundane Shell” (J 13:34-35), and the man with the compasses is looking down toward the globe whose bare, cartographic surface is yet to produce growth of any kind, he is generally conforming to the Fairy's prescription, but in a way that incidentally reveals the limitations of the Fairy's view of humanity. The woman's eye is not visible, and in the direction in which she is looking, along a diagonal line toward the righthand edge of the page which would miss the globe entirely, there is nothing for her to see. If hearing is her passive sense, her active sense is embodied in her pointing and partly open hand, at the end of the arm that rises along the curving side of the globe above her head: that is, the sense of touch, the sexual sense, through which in the Fairy's song man can “pass out what time he please” from his imprisoning cavern.

Three certain senses, then, are associated with three different parts of the terrestrial globe, and we are brought back to the text and another set of correspondences for the cardinal points: “And the Eyes are the South, and the Nostrils are the East. / And the Tongue is the West, and the Ear is the North” (12:59-60). These are the correspondences which will be listed again, in the same order, for the reintegrated Zoas at the conclusion of Jerusalem (98:16-18, E255/K745). The perspective in the latter passage is unquestionably that of Eternity, which again coincides with that of the naive observer standing on his own rooftop, and along with the indirect indications in other Blake texts and in the design itself, the listings confirm that it is in a similar perspective—perhaps identified with the point of view of the reader-spectator just beyond the page—that the cosmic group in the margin of J 12 should be seen. That the eye and the ear in the design seem to be associated with the wrong points—the eye with the north and the ear with the south, both in the conventional terrestrial pattern—may actually be a clue to the place of earth in the whole perspective.²⁶

Otherwise, and more importantly, the effect of the list of sense correspondences is to suggest a third meaning for the globe as a symbolic image. An intrusion from the text which has not yet been mentioned is the last word in line 57, which extends into the margin almost to the female figure. Since the word is “Humanity” and it ends just under the spiral projection from the globe, it seems to stand as a legend, naming not a point or a line on the globe but the whole globe itself. Thus, after having represented the universe created by the Miltonic Word, and then the natural world of rationalism and demonstrative science, the terrestrial globe becomes an image of the human body as macrocosm, precisely the antithesis of Blake's Grand Man image of eternity in his poetry. With this change in meaning for the central object in the marginal group, the emphasis within the group is altered, and we now are directed to the figure of the woman and to the gesture that establishes her relation to the globe, in a new context of associations and allusions which does not concern the man with the compasses.

IV

An arm upraised, usually by a female figure who is plucking or accepting a bunch of grapes (or alternatively an object that visually resembles a bunch of grapes) is a standard motif in Blake's designs; the prototype of a number of such figures is the girl at the far right on the second plate of “The Ecchoing Green,” who is using her left arm and in a reversal of the Temptation according to the Book of Genesis is being handed the grapes by a boy reclining on the bough overhead.²⁷ In the Fairy's song in Europe, such a transaction is implied by the formula for the third window of sense: “… thro' one, the eternal vine / Flourishes, that he may recieve the grapes” (iii:2-3, E58/K237). Presumably, at least in part, it was the association of the reaching or grasping hand with the eventual taste of the grapes, as well as an accommodation to the Zoa Tharmas,²⁸ that led Blake in his later works to reduce the number of senses from five to four by combining touch and taste in the Tongue, which is the established organ of the third sense in the list of correspondences at J 12:59-60. In the later designs, however, taste and touch may still be distinguished, as they are in the two top figures in the design on J 42, and as the organ of touch the woman's hand in the margin of J 12 is comparable to the “Tongue” specified in line 60 of the text.

Although by the time of Jerusalem the reaching gesture had become a standard Blakean motif, it is related more particularly to a significant variant in the Songs. In the scene on the first plate of “The Little Girl Lost,” the female member of the pair of figures is also situated at the lower right, also presents her back to the viewer, and is turned toward her own right, where her lover stands passively, looking toward her; with her left arm and hand she is pointing straight up through the boughs of the drooping, willow-like tree overhead, in the direction of a large bird, perhaps a bird of Paradise, which is mounting still higher toward the top of the plate.²⁹ A similar species of bird appears elsewhere in the Songs and in other works of the same period, evidently as a symbol of pleasure through the senses. “How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?” (MHH 7, E35/K150). A more specifically sexual meaning is implied by the flight of several birds of Paradise about the text of “A Little Girl Lost,” the companion poem to “The Little Girl Lost,” in which Ona and her lover play Adam and Eve in their Edenic garden. Except for the fact that no one is standing beside her and she is raising her right arm rather than her left, the physical attitude of the woman on J 12 is almost identical with that of her predecessor in “The Little Girl Lost.” Although there is no soaring bird here, she is pointing to a verbal equivalent of its flight in the word “joy” at the top of her own world; as she reaches upward, her bent knees suggest that she is in the act of rising or trying to rise to her feet, as though to follow her pointing hand the full distance to its target.

In its own context, the aspiring gesture in “The Little Girl Lost” has uncertain implications. If the woman is Ona, we know that in her own “lost” poem her pursuit of delight is condemned by “her father white” as a “crime.” If she is Lyca of the twin lost-and-found poems, she will not seek to rise at all but instead will descend, carried down to the caves of the wild beasts, where she will still be asleep when the narrative ends.³⁰ In the related situation in the text at the beginning of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1:11-17), ambiguity is replaced by overt irony: Oothoon plucks the symbol of temptation, which is a flower rather than fruit, and rises up directly “in wing'd exulting swift delight,” only to be struck down and enslaved. A subtler irony attends the visible aspiration of the woman on J 12. Her objective, her Zenith of joy, is actually the Nadir of Eternity, which in any event in its distant northern location is beyond her reach, even were she to stand up to her full height.³¹ Arrested in her partial ascent, she is able to reach a point only slightly above the Equator, and her hand comes to rest in the quarter of the globe which the indicator phrase at the end of line 47 tells us is the west.

In itself, the designation “west” is almost a redundancy for frustration, for in the survey of the city of Golgonooza that follows in the text of J 13 the Western Gate and its four subsidiary gates are “all clos'd up till the last day, when the graves shall yield their dead” (13:11). Correspondingly, in the fourfold world of the human body the gate of the Tongue, also associated with the west, is also “closed.”³² Separated from the Zoa myth and the characterization of Tharmas, the closing of the Tongue is the equivalent of the shrinking of the senses described at Europe 10 or protested at the conclusion of The Book of Thel. (The metaphor of closing a gate is in fact used, although of a different sense, at Eu 10:14-15: “the nostrils golden gates shut / Turn'd outward, barr'd and petrify'd against the infinite.”) For the woman on J 12, the sense of touch is “closed,” or obstructed, in her vainly pointing and reaching hand, which cannot grasp joy. Since her head is turned away, upward and to the right, further westward than her hand (which curves slightly to the left as it crosses the Equator), and her mouth is blocked by her raised arm, we may be expected to understand that her sense of taste is “closed” also.³³ Only her ear seems to be open, turned toward the constricted polar spiral of the globe through which, in this context, like Thel in the land of the dead she may be listening to the collectively mourning “voices of the ground,” which become her own voice. “Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” In Thel's lament, a catalogue of the pains of sense (6:11-20, E6/K130), the hymen symbolizes the barrier opposed by the whole “organized” physical body to the yearnings within: yearnings of the imprisoned soul for deliverance, in the borrowed Neoplatonic terms of the lament proper; yearnings also generated by the body itself, through what Blake in another work of about the same time called the “confined nature of bodily sensation.”³⁴

Although the concepts of Neoplatonism are only incidental to Blake's theme of the closed senses, it is worth noting that two details in the design on J 12 are recognizable as visual counterparts of Neoplatonist imagery in the texts of both “The Little Girl Lost” and the last section of The Book of Thel.³⁵ The dark area below the half-kneeling figure of the woman may be a shadow, but it also suggests the “hollow pit,” the “grave plot,” from which Thel hears her own sorrowing voice. The pit or grave symbolizes the imprisoning “corporeal” body; so, with a different emphasis, does Lyca's “slender dress,” which is “loos'd” before the beasts carry her naked to their caves. The full-skirted folds of a similar dress (which is represented, as not yet “loos'd,” in the first two designs of “The Little Girl Lost”) are gathered about the legs of the woman who is trying to rise, as though to hold her rooted in the ground.

V

The kind of ascent the woman on J 12 might be envisioning appears in a later design in Jerusalem; the first of the two horizontal scenes on plate 54, in which nude female figures, some with upraised right arms, are effortlessly rising on both sides of a cloudy sphere labelled “This World.”³⁶ Inside the sphere are inscribed four additional correspondences for the cardinal points: “Pity” and “Wrath” at left and right; “Reason” at the top and “Desire” at the bottom. The diagrammatic sphere may well have been suggested by the main group in the margin of J 12, and in turn its polar coordinates, Reason and Desire, could be inscribed on the terrestrial globe in the earlier design, to bring the male figure and the female finally into relation to each other, with the globe in its last metamorphosis as an image of “This World” within, the fallen human psyche. Mainly through the attribute of the compasses, the male figure has already been identified with Reason in two different aspects, on two different levels of analogy: as the Miltonic Word, and as the inquiring reason of demonstrative science. Similarly, through the associations and implications of her pose, in which she mutely sums up the experiences of Blake's early feminine protagonists, the female figure may be seen as a personification of Desire, balancing Reason on the opposite side of the globe that is their common world.

The polarity of Reason and Desire, schematically represented on J 54, is in accord with the well-known prescription in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” In the more complex scene on J 12, the figures are recognizable as contraries in the ways that have been noted, by their physical attitudes and their opposing orientations to the globe, which they see in opposing perspectives. In contrast to the never-ending conflict postulated in Marriage for all contraries, however, the contrariety of Reason and Desire in this design is implicitly neutralized by the situations in the earlier poems by Blake which are associated with each figure separately. Different though the original contexts are, the situations recalled by the motifs that have been discussed above all converge in frustration, error, delusion, miscalculation, by both Reason and Desire, and both are victims. What we know and what we see combine to tell us that the incomplete movements in which the two figures are arrested will not bring them into “progressive” dialectical collision but will lead them instead to follow each other at hopeless cross-purposes, each trapped in and compounding the other's error as well as his or her own. Reason trying to control the starry pole of nature is falling into his grave in the circumscribed natural world, which is a creation of Reason in both its theological and its scientific aspects. At the same time, Desire is trying to rise out of her grave by her own effort, on a direct path upward; yet in reaching toward joy she is actually aspiring to the delusive heaven of Reason, located in the north where Reason himself is being drawn down.³⁷ Even so, Desire is frustrated at the outset by the closed gates of the senses, whose inflexible “organic” forms came into existence with the formulation of rational scientific laws for the motions of the heavens, when thought changed the infinite to a serpent. Yet through those same laws the dizzy enquirer Reason himself. … So error revolves.

“Giving a body to Falshood that it may be cast off for ever”: Ordinarily, of course, frustration, error, delusion, miscalculation, however disastrous their consequences, are not the equivalent of falsehood, and it might seem that Reason, Desire, and This World in the lower part of the design remain apart from Falsehood at the top. Although the male figure is physically close to the fashionable female shade, by his attitude, his orientation, and especially his nudity he might belong to an entirely different composition. Both female figures are clothed, but the very garment motif they share might seem to distinguish one effectively from the other. Falsehood has accepted the factitious “body” so willingly that it is becoming part of her, like a bat's wings or the fins of a fish.³⁸ For Desire, on the other hand, the dress that weighs her down is a body she is trying to cast off for her own deliverance. Yet, placed as they are respectively at the top and at the bottom of the design, like still another pair of polar extremes, the two figures nevertheless are not contraries but parallels, both turned from the viewer and facing in the same wrong direction. Desire is looking away from the direction in which her hand is pointing; the line of Falsehood's gaze would lead out of the page at the upper righthand corner, perhaps to the counter-heaven of those cast out. Moreover, if we follow the elevated arm of Desire straight up the margin, we arrive ultimately at the figure of Falsehood, who stands free above the clouds with skirts billowing and her own arms raised toward her hat brim in a circle of self-completion. Is the only deliverance attainable by Desire the false belief that she is not in bondage?

Acting to create his own world, Reason falls into error and is involved at cross-purposes with Desire; acting in error and at cross-purposes with Reason, Desire tries to transcend her world and moves toward Falsehood. This might be an acceptable capsule reading of the design as a whole, which to some degree would reduce the distance between the harsh terms of Los's speech at 12:10-15 and the actual situations and relationships called up by the main group of images in the margin. It would mean, too, that the design ends where it began, with the standing female figure at the top of the margin. Although the terrestrial globe is a necessary alternate and then substitute image as the design is elaborated, when the elaboration is complete the original garment-body of Falsehood re-emerges, as a more efficient because more readily discarded image which assimilates the literally earthly body-and-mind of Humanity below. With the ultimate casting-off of both, the way will be open for the liberation of the mind and the senses at all four points of Eternity, an end toward which the whole poem Jerusalem is moving.

Notes

1. The copy of Jerusalem used in this study is the black-and-white Linnell-Rinder copy (Copy C), via the Blake Trust heliogravure facsimile as reproduced by The Beechhurst Press, New York, 1955. Reproductions, however, are from Copy D, Harvard University Library.

2. Joseph Wicksteed, William Blake's Jerusalem (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1955), p. 113. (This volume, hereafter cited by the author's name, is companion to the facsimile.) Elsewhere in his commentary Wicksteed continues to identify left as the “bodily” side and right as the “spiritual.” More complex left-and-right patterns are discussed by Edward J. Rose, “Visionary Forms Dramatic: Grammatical and Iconographical Movement in Blake's Verse and Designs,” Criticism, 8 (1966), 111-14. For more recent comments, consult the index (s.v. “left-right symbolism”) in BVFD—on which see n. 4 below.

3. See Albert S. Roe, “A Drawing of the Last Judgment,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 21 (1957), 40n.

4. In succeeding notes, the following title abbreviations will be used. For Blake's works: Am = America: A Prophecy; ARO = All Religions Are One; BT = The Book of Thel; Eu = Europe: A Prophecy; FZ = The Four Zoas; J = Jerusalem; M = Milton; MHH = The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; T = Tiriel; VLJ = A Vision of the Last Judgment. For major books cited: BVFD = Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970); Damon Festschrift = William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1969); Huntington Catalogue = C. H. Collins Baker, Catalogue of William Blake's Drawings and Paintings in the Huntington Library, rev. and enl. by R. R. Wark (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1969); Keynes Festschrift = William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

   All quotations from Blake's texts are to E: The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, 4th printing, rev. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), and to K: The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3rd printing, rev. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971).

5. Similar visions, also involving Los's furnaces and the “finger of God,” occur at FZ 56:23-27 and J 48:44-45. Line 15 echoes J 3:7 in Blake's own address “To the Public.”

6. See, for example, the varying rising and falling movements on pls. 5, 7, and 13 nearby. On pls. 9, 19, and 24, the vertical movements in the margins are complicated by figures which seem to emerge from or to enter the horizontal designs on the same plates.

7. To Wicksteed, p. 136, she is the Vala of J generally, representing “the triumph of ‘Mother Nature,’ whether as conceived by the Rationalist or the upholders of ‘Natural Religion.’” In contrast, Claudette Kemper sees the figure as a local and particular irony of the moment, which was “personally entertaining to Blake”: a “fashionable Jerusalem” the golden builders are trying to “lure” to Golgonooza by their “socially acceptable” and “right sounding” constructions. See “The Interlinear Drawings in Blake's Jerusalem,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 64 (1960), 593; the remainder of the design on J 12 is not considered in this article.

8. Other female images in J associated with bat-wings occur in the designs on pls. 3, 33, and 58. The chief precedent for a similar association with fish-fins would have been Blake's representations of the female gold-fish in his illustrations to Gray's Cat ode; see William Blake's Water-Colours Illustrating the Poems of Thomas Gray (Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara, 1972), “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,” designs 7, 9, 10.

9. Thus Wicksteed, p. 136.

10. On this drawing, see Huntington Catalogue, pp. 20-21 and pl. VIII; and Edward J. Rose, “Blake's Illustrations for Paradise Lost, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso: A Thematic Reading,” Hartford Studies in Literature, 2 (1970), 54-55. The episode illustrated occurs in Paradise Lost at VI.835-66.

11. Granted that for J “all the etching, with the possible exception of the title page, is later than June 1805” (E730), the two figures would be brought even nearer to each other in time.

12. Paradise Lost VII.225-27. All Milton quotations are from The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1971).

13. On Milton's Messiah as Satan, see also Rose, “Blake's Illustrations for Paradise Lost,” p. 55. One of the interlinear designs on MHH 5 includes a tiny figure with a pair of compasses, appropriately situated; see David V. Erdman, et al., “Reading the Illuminations of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Keynes Festschrift, pp. 173-74 and pl. 42.

14. Cf. the two versions of the title-page of Blake's Genesis manuscript: in the first version (ca. 1821), God the Father as Creator holds a bow, which in the second version (ca. 1826) is replaced by a pair of compasses. See Huntington Catalogue, pp. 40-41 and pls. XXXII and XXXIII. The exchange of the bow for the compasses is noted by John E. Grant, “Envisioning the First Night Thoughts,” BVFD, pp. 333-34, n. 9.

15. See Am 4:6-11. The design is discussed in the context of America by David V. Erdman, “America: New Expanses,” BVFD, pp. 106-7; pls. 30 and 31 of BVFD reproduce two versions of the plate.

16. Blake does not mention Apollyon again until VLJ, p. 84: “on the Left hand Apollyon is foild before the Sword of Michael” (E551). This seems to be a reference not to Revelation but to the episode of the Valley of Humiliation in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Pt. I, in which Christian with the help of “blessed Michael” defeats a monster named Apollyon. Among Blake's later watercolors illustrating Bunyan (ca. 1824), Apollyon is portrayed as a grotesque monster, in keeping with the description in the text. Curiously, however, in the illustration of another episode, “Faithful's Martyrdom,” the warrior from Am 4 reappears, complete with robe, white hair, and beard but reversed in pose and value: he is the soul of Faithful, rising in right profile, with arms bent at the elbows and hands pressed together in prayer. See the Limited Editions Club ed., with introduction by Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Spiral Press, 1941), pls. XX and XXIII. The plate numbered XXIX in this edition, considered by Keynes (p. xxviii) to be actually a rejected design for Paradise Regained, includes yet another variant of the original descending pose (this time not in profile), in which the white beard and the pointed effect of the upswept, wind-blown hair are combined with the nudity and the reaching right arm of the compass-bearer from J 12.

17. On the title-page, see I. H. Chayes, “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche,” BVFD, p. 239; on J 53, Henry Lesnick, “The Antithetical Vision of Jerusalem,” BVFD, p. 398.

18. There is an interesting parallel in Richard Brothers' quadrangular plan of the New Jerusalem (1802), on which see Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” Keynes Festschrift, pp. 273-78 and pl. 68.

19. Wicksteed, pp. 2-3 and 131-34, locates the post of observation for such a view at the upper windows of Blake's childhood home, which faced south by east. The passage from which Wicksteed evidently took his suggestion, M 29:14-16, concludes with the rejection of the “reasoner's” notion of “a Globe rolling thro Voidness,” cited above. As a whole, the passage purports to describe the conception of “the Spaces called Earth” held by the ordinary man, who knows only the world he sees around his dwelling-place, “Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount / Of twenty-five cubits in height” (E126/K516).

20. There may be a symbolic as well as a practical reason for the unfinished state of the globe at its left or (as amended) eastern side in black and white copies: when the Zoas changed places in the cosmic psyche, Luvah left his place in the east, which became a void. (See FZ 74:15-19; J 32:25-29 and 59:15-18.) Hence at 12:56 “East, the Center,” is “unapproachable for ever.”

    Although the important movements in this design are between north and south, the reversal of east and west anticipates the opposition that will be made explicit in the text of J 77 between the “current of Creation” and the movement of the “Wheel of Religion.” For one interpretation of J 77, see Wicksteed, pp. 223-25, and in contrast, Edward J. Rose, “Iconographical Movement,” pp. 112-13.

21. Cf. “Look homeward Angel now” (1. 163); “Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar” (1. 167); “So Lycidas sunk low but mounted high” (1. 172); and especially “where ere thy bones are hurl'd, / … Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide / Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world” (11. 155-58).

22. The “ancient temple serpent-form'd” Blake probably had in mind in Eu 10:2-3 appears in the full-page design on J 100. Cf. William Stukely's reconstruction of the serpent temple at Avebury, in Ruthven Todd, Tracks in the Snow (London: Grey Walls Press, 1946), pl. 14. The “reptile form” was mentioned first in T 8:10-11.

23. The “starry wheels” have recently been discussed by Edward J. Rose, “Wheels Within Wheels in Blake's Jerusalem,” Studies in Romanticism, 11 (1972), 37-46. Although he recognizes the theme of the shrinking of the senses, Michael J. Tolley unnecessarily goes to “history” and the Seven Eyes of God to explain the serpent coils; see “Europe: ‘to those ychained in sleep,’” BVFD, pp. 136-37.

    The large and brilliantly colored serpent on the Eu title-page is usually accepted as a symbol of Orc. However, in view of the serpent imagery of Eu 10 there may be significance in the irregular size, disposition, and equivocal movement of the coils of the graphic serpent, which number four, with perhaps a fifth partially cut off by the edge of the plate. The coils are turning in a counter-clockwise direction if the serpent as a symbol of sense is already collapsing downward, but clockwise if it is still making its “ever-varying spiral ascents.”

24. Cf., e.g., J 15:12-13 (“Reasonings like vast Serpents / Infold my limbs,” preceded by a reference to Bacon and Newton in 1. 11), and the design at the bottom of J 41 [Stirling 46], in which the wheel of the chariot is formed by flattened, clockwise serpent coils.

25. According to Wicksteed, p. 136, the “little spiral” is a clockwise motion of the globe, as it appears to “Jerusalem, sitting below,” in contrast to the counter-clockwise motion seen by “Blake's symbolical Newton, looking down with his compasses.” A modified version of this interpretation, opposing eastward and westward movements of both the globe and the “celestial sphere” [sic], is put forward by Henry Lesnick, “The Function of Perspective in Blake's Jerusalem,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 73 (1969), 54-55.

26. If the eyes of the descending man have been turned downward from Eternity, he probably can still be associated with a south which lies somewhere above the floor of the heavens. If the woman is listening to the inner sounds of the earth, the point toward which her ear is turned probably can be called north, even though it is located at a point on the globe which ordinarily would mark the South Pole. This would be north as the extended Nadir of Eternity, covering the whole earth as a continuous region of darkness and negation; not so much the polar opposite of north as north drawn out to its non-“attractive” limit, the terrestrial vortex losing its force and winding down to an end as an inflexible shell of sense.

27. Variants of this gesture are discussed by John E. Grant, “Regeneration in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Damon Festschrift, pp. 366-67, and Erdman, Keynes Festschrift, pp. 170-71.

28. See S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence, R. I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1965), s.v. “Tharmas,” p. 399.

29. I take this opportunity to correct a misstatement in my “Little Girls Lost: Problems of a Romantic Archetype,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Spectrum-Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 68. It is not strictly true, of course, that on the first plate of “The Little Girl Lost” the “fatal fruit is being plucked” by the female figure. I should have said that the female figure is pointing toward the bird with the same gesture with which she might have plucked or received the “fatal fruit,” like the girl in “The Ecchoing Green.”

30. There is an allusion to the situation in “A Little Girl Lost” in the second of the horizontal designs on J 9. A variant of the concluding scene of “The Little Girl Found” appears in the first horizontal design, near the top of the same page. See Wicksteed, p. 124.

31. Although the word is separated from the text when it is read as a point on the globe, “joy” in 11. 41-42 actually refers to the future reception of Jerusalem (as both city and woman) in the new Lambeth: “Lambeth! the Bride the Lambs Wife loveth thee: / Thou art one with her & knowest not of self in thy supreme joy.” In the contexts called up by the gesture of the woman in the design, the joy she aspires to is very different from the altruistic joy promised Lambeth. The whole “golden builders” passage has an importance, both in itself and in relation to the design, which unfortunately cannot be considered in this essay. Previous critical comment is summarized by Paley, Keynes Festschrift, pp. 279-80.

32. See FZ 5:41-43; M 29:40; J 14:26-27.

33. The closing of the gate of the tongue is strikingly illustrated by the two female figures at the summit of the human column in the margin of J 42. Each with her upraised left arm is able to make contact with the huge grapes in the cluster at the top of the page, but the mouths of both are blocked. The higher of the two is standing on the mouth of the lower, and her own mouth, in fact her whole head, is lost to sight among the grapes she is trying to “receive.”

34. ARO, Principle 6.

35. The “classic” Neoplatonist reading of these poems is that by Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), chaps. iv and v. See also George Mills Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill, N. C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), chap. xv.

36. This apparently is the “World of Phantasy,” and “World of Shapes in craving lust & devouring appetite,” for which the Spectre denounces Albion (54:23-24, E201-202/K685).

37. In the later marginal design on J 89, the aspiration seems about to be achieved, in terms that reflect both the nature of the delusion and the origins of the two lower figures on J 12. Still with her right arm raised, the woman in effect has risen from her grave and is ascending into the sky, where birds can be seen flying in the distance. Above, descending to hand her what looks to be a large scalloped crown, is an inverted figure with upblown hair who in his turn has gone back to the robe and the lefthand orientation of the Apollyonlike warrior of Am 4. (The warrior, and thence the two figures from J 12, may have been recalled by the lines at 89:9-13, in which the Covering Cherub is revealed as a “Human Dragon,” “majestic image / Of Selfhood, Body put off.”)

38. In this respect, the image is a graphic counterpart of a verbal conceit such as Eu 12:16-17: “his furr'd robes & false locks / Adhered and grew one with his flesh” (E63). The standard against which both clothed female figures here are to be judged is Jerusalem herself, in her ideal state: “In Great Eternity, every particular Form gives forth or Emanates / Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision / And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every Man” (54:1-3; E201/K684).