It’s been a while, but we’ll continue this week with our on-going William Blake transcription – Allen lecturing at Naropa on William Blake on March 8 1979 (continuing from here – Allen is lecturing on Blake’s prophetic book, Europe – A Prophecy)
AG: Okay. So for those who came late, Enitharmon here may stand for the Queen of England at that time, who was over-awing the mad King George. And so the sleep (and) the repressive aspect of female will here may be simply a symbolic statement of the political role of the Queen of England at the time two years before Blake was writing.
Meanwhile, “Rolling volumes of grey mist involve Churches, Palaces,Towers: /For Urizen unclaspd his Book!” – (that is, opened it up to show…) “..feeding his soul with pity/The youth of England hid in gloom curse the paind heavens..” – ( So this is the youth revolution of 1792, actually. There was a youth revolution against the authority of the king. And this is a kind of pretty picture of something parallel to our own ’60’s.
“The youth of England hid in gloom curse the paind heavens; compell’d/Into the deadly night to see the form of Albions Angel/Their parents brought them forth & aged ignorance preaches canting,/On a vast rock, percievd by those senses that are clos’d from thought:/ Bleak, dark, abrupt, it stands & overshadows London city/They saw his boney feet on the rock, the flesh consum’d in flames:/They saw the Serpent temple lifted above, shadowing the Island white..”
Now what this is (is that) there was apparently a proclamation on May 24th, 1792, which was a Royal Proclamation issued, actually, from the Queen’s house, not from the King’s, against diverse, wicked and seditious writings, aimed mainly at Thomas Paine‘s Rights of Man. So this is a commentary on Urizen unclasping his book – which is the book of laws, proclamations, repressive legislation – parallel to what we mythologically know of in our own time as McCarthyism. So there was a law against seditious writings (in) those days, which Blake felt very directly, because Paine’s revolutionary Jacobin pamphlets had been published by the printer (Joseph) Johnson, who had also printed Blake’s “French Revolution Volume I”. So this is cutting close to home for Blake.
“Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder:/The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion..”
Now dig this picture:
“Driven out by the flames of Orc; his furr’d robes & false locks/Adhered and grew one with his flesh, and nerves & veins shot thro’ them/ With dismal torment sick, hanging upon the wind: he fled/ Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate..” – (Like (President Richard) Nixon, somewhat) – ” Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate; all the soldiers/Fled from his sight: he drag’d his torments to the wilderness.”
Does anybody have any idea what that’s all about? The “Guardian of the secret codes”? Has anybody read that up in Erdman?
Student: The paragraph itself is about the downfall of Chancellor Thurlow.
AG: (Baron Edward) Thurlow, yeah. Do you have any notes on that, or can you explain that, or should I read that out?
Student (2): I don’t know what you’re talking about.
AG: Well, there were these laws against sedition, which, oddly enough, backfired, according to Erdman here.
“The next episode in “Europe” is presented in identifiable detail and serves to confirm the present interpretation of Blake’s narrative.” As a political one. “The episode has long since faded on the pages of history, but we can easily see how it delighted Blake’s sense of irony. For Pitt’s” – (Sir William Pitt was the war-like heavy-handed pro-military draconian law giver, who was running (the British government) at the time; England was Pitt’s so to speak) – “first victim following the Anti-Jacobin ban was not Tom Paine but one of the Angels of Pitt’s own cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor and Keeper of the Seal and Guardian of the King’s Conscience,” – (that’s his title – “Lord High Chancellor and Keeper of the Seal and Guardian of the King’s Conscience”) – “described by one Patriot as a man ‘with Norman Conquest in his eyebrow and the feudal system in every feature of his face.’ Chancellor Thurlow often took an independent line, and for years Pitt had been seeking to rid himself of his formidable colleague. His chance came when the Chancellor ridiculed Pitt’s Sinking Fund Bill as the work of “a mere reptile of a minister” and told Parliament than no bill should attempt to bind all future governments. The grain of sedition in this remark was infinitesimal, but Pitt promptly asked the King to dismiss Lord Thurlow, counting on his own indispensability at a time when he had filled the King’s mind with alarm’ – (over the French Revolution and (the) Jacobins). “To Thurlow’s amazement the King readily tugged off Thurlow’s “insignia… and at the end of the session Thurlow was compelled to relinquish the Great Seal and doff his judicial gown and wig.”
So here a “circumstantial detail of Thurlow’s leaving the Westminster government buildings and fleeing in shame and anger down Great George Street to St. Jame’s Park. In a similar if less vivid reconstruction” a biographer of Thurlow “pictures his last appearance as Chancellor … his driving to St. James’s Palace to surrender the Seal, his dejection as ‘a solitary outcast’ and his ‘diminished consequence’ when seen ‘without his robes'” and “‘without his great wig.'”
So Blake’s comment on this political incident:
“The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion,/Driven out by the flames of Orc; his furr’d robes & false locks/Adhered and grew one with his flesh, and nerves & veins shot thro’ them/With dismal torment sick, hanging upon the wind: he fled/Groveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate..”
That’s really like one-to-one political correlation between Blake’s hyperbole (and) rhetoric, and the newspaper history of his time.
to be continued
Audio for the above can be found here, beginning at the start of the tape and concluding at approximately seven-and-a-quarter minutes in