"The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom": Alternative Economies of Excess in Blake's Continental Prophecies

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2006 by Castellano, Katey

Blake goes on to critique calculated generosity, a critique that connects The Song of Los with Europe:

The churches and hospitals are linked to castles and palaces because the storage of wealth in the castles and palaces reflect the calculated generosity towards the poor in the churches and hospitals. Thus the "care" that churches and hospitals extend reinforces a moral economy that stockpiles goods and defers gratification. Blake claims that the calculated generosity of the churches and hospitals insures that there will be no need for excessive expenditure.10

In The Song of Los, the spiritual world of excess and infinity is at first bound and hemmed in by religious law, which seeks to establish guidelines for morality that impose restrictions on spontaneous spiritual acts. The religious law then culminates in Enlightenment reason:

Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave

Laws & Religions to the sons of Har binding them more

And more to the Earth: closing and restraining;

Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete

Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke. (4, 13-17)

Again Blake points to a connection between religious law and the Enlightenment, using the same two philosophers from Europe, Newton and Locke. Their philosophical insights replaced spontaneous, faith-based perception with perception based on procedure, thus reining in the natural spiritual energies of humanity.

In "Asia," despotic kings run from the "thought-creating fires of Ore" (6,6), or from revolutionary energy, and while this seems to be an auspicious moment, I argue that it is important to read Blake's Continental prophecies as an unfolding prophecy continually expanding in scope; in Europe "thought" changed the infinite into a serpent and crowned a tyrant. Thus Ore's revolutionary fervor arising from "thought" must be held suspect. Blake's last Continental prophecy demonstrates an increasing hostility towards reason, and therefore realistic political situations are absent from the poem, as the prophecy chronicles the mass movements of humanity in relation to Blake's mythological giant forms. The end of The Song of Los makes clear that a real revolution is spiritual in nature: "Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones / Join: shaking convuls'd the shivering clay breathes" (7, 31-32). Ezekiel's dry bones manifest themselves again, yet this time the bones are coming together, which they could not do under Newton's command.

The dry bones of The Song of Los will be revitalized because they are not entirely anonymous; these bones are in the "ancient place" of Jerusalem, and they belong to Adam, who "Lay bleach'd in the garden of Eden," and Noah, who is "as white as snow / On the mountains of Ararat" (7,21,23). Skeletons of the Jewish patriarchs arise again to become the human race-"all naked flesh"-and thus the redemption of humanity literally arises out of its Judeo-Christian ancestry. Blake's vision of revolution, therefore, differs profoundly from the goals of the secular radicals who wanted to disregard religious tradition in order to facilitate progress.