AG: So this poem next, ” (To) Tirzah”, is a poem that was put into The Songs of Innocence and Experience later. It’s the last element that he laid in. And Tirzah is mortal nature, but feminine. Later it becomes Vala, I think. It’s, I think, an adaptation of a Gnostic Ruha the name in some Hebrew Gnostic schools for the veil of illusion of this material universe. Mother Nature, but Mother Nature seen as corruptible, illusory, (a) trick. Let’s see what he has about Tirzah in here. (Allen turns to Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary)
Student: There’s a lot in here, actually.
AG: Yeah, (an) enormous amount, yeah – The “creator of the physical body, the ‘Mother of my Mortal part’, and thus the mother of death. ‘She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow… She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain!” – (“Her fingers number every Nerve” – remember from “The Mental Traveller“? – “For the (little) Babe is born… Her fingers number every Nerve” – “Number every nerve” – that is, (to) rationalize every nerve. give a definite form but, at the same time, boundary and limitation).
“She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red hot heart! .. She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely Heavens, two yet but one, each in the other sweet reflected.” (That’s in “Milton”
What else? “Tirzah is the daughter of Rahab” – (Rahab of “The Four Zoas” – “Rehab is the Whore, Tirzah is the Prude, the ‘pure woman,’ the false ideal which leads men astray. Rahab squanders her lust, but Tirzah, though her souls is ‘seven furnaces’, withholds her lust, to use it as a weapon against man.” (This is also part of Enitharmon‘s eighteen-hundreed-year-old-Christian-history dream. “She is his temptress. She tortures him….” And so forth.
Let’s see if there’s anything else. “”To Tirzah” was added as the terminal lyric for The Songs of Experience about 1795″”. So that’s much later than any other poem). The “declaration of individuality and hence of independence from the mother and the whole material system which she represents. In renouncing Tirzah, the ‘Mother of my Mortal part,’ who so cruelly molded his heart, limited his senses, betrayed him to mortal life, the poet twice uses the words of Jesus to Mary – ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ The lad who does not cast off the mother-image is not yet a man. Thus this act of Revolution is a fitting end to (The Songs of) Experience.”
A scourge. So it’s a really interesting poem. I once set it to music but I never worked out the chords.
Whate’er is Born of Mortal Birth,/Must be consumed with the Earth/To rise from Generation free;/ Then what have I to do with thee?/ The Sexes sprung from Shame & Pride/Blow’d in the morn: in evening died/But Mercy changed Death into Sleep;/The Sexes rose to work & weep./Thou Mother of my Mortal part/With cruelty didst mould my Heart,/And with false self-deceiving tears,/Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears./ Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay/And me to Mortal Life betray:/The Death of Jesus set me free,/Then what have I to do with thee?
AG: It’s a really interesting declaration against mortal… against the Mother Goddess, in a way. Or it’s a Gnostic version of the Mother Goddess as total illusion. And it has in it a lot of the keys of his prior symbolism.
In the poem (“The Human Abstract“) – “Pity would be no more,/If we did not make somebody Poor:/And Mercy no more could be,/If all were as happy as we..”
“But Mercy changd Death into Sleep.” In other words, Blake is saying that merciful liberal human philosophy is afraid of death. Says Ona, “You’re not going to die. When you go to sleep you go up to heaven.” (She) doesn’t want to admit death and then the regeneration through the pillar of the graveyard made by the worm. So, “The sexes rose to work & weep/… false self-deceiving tears,/Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears.” (“Oh, don’t break through your body, you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t drop that acid, you’ll hurt yourself. You’ll go crazy. You’ll make your mother unhappy if you leave home or leave the universe or leave your mind”)
“Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay/And me to Mortal Life betray.” – (That’s really the utmost accusation against the Mother Goddess).
to be continued