"Song of Liberty" ~ William Blake

"Song of Liberty" from The Marriage Between Heaven and Hell

1) The Eternal Female groan'd!  It was heard all over the Earth.
2) Albion's coast is sick, silent.  The American meadows faint!
3) Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter accross the ocean.  France, rend down thy dungeon!
4) Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome!
5) Cast thy keys, O Rome!  into the deep, down falling, even to eternity down and falling,
6) And weep.
7) In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror, howling.
8) On those infinite mountains of light, now barr'd out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry king!
9) Flagg'd with grey-brow'd snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav'd over the deep.
10) The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield; forth went the hand of Jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl'd the new-born wonder thro' the starry night.
11) The fire, the fire, is falling!
12) Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine.  O African! black African! Go, winged thought, widen his forehead!
13) The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.
14) Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary element, roaring, fled away.
15) Down rush'd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his grey-brow'd counsellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants, banners, castles, slings, and rocks,
16) Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's den's;
17) All night beneath the ruins; then, their sullen flames faded, emerge round the gloomy King.
18) With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
19) Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,
20) Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of the night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.

Chorus
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy!  Nor his accepted brethren-- whom, tyrant, he calls free-- lay the bound or build the roof!  Nor pale Religion's lechery call that Virginity that wishes but acts not!
For everything that lives is Holy!

Dictionary:
rend- tear down
visage- appearance, countenance
hoary- gray or white with age; ancient; stale
promulgate- to announce or declare publicly
plume- to adorn with plumes (feathers)



The Resource Guide is pretty clear on this poem (RG 2, p. 26-7) and the Fine Arts Day packet also adds some pretty good detail, but I guess I’ll sum up what they said and then add in a few observations I made myself.


William Blake often speaks in two levels: the spiritual and the political, if you will the fictional and the real. This is especially evident in the first few lines (1-5), which is full of supposedly obvious symbolism (technically speaking, it is obvious—to the people who lived during that time period and for the people who spend their time thinking about politics from a couple hundred years ago): I speak of “Shadows of Prophecy”, France’s “dungeon”, the “barriers of old Rome”, and all that other good stuff that we read, think we understand, and completely forget 2 seconds later. I think this is basically telling us what was going on in the world, but to understand it, we need to know the lingo:

• “The Eternal Female”, reminds me, in some way, of Mother Nature—the source of all things that happen on Earth. Even though I don’t believe in it, it’s like the primordial soup that all life came from (I believe that’s what the current atheist belief is). This is kind of a bad example, considering the fact that Blake is so spiritual, therefore I highly doubt that he’d suggest any such POV, not to mention I don’t think the theory existed in 1792 (was Darwin even alive at that time?) Anyways, the point is that the “Eternal Female” is like the source of all things, if you will. Like Mother Earth in Greek mythology—immortal.

• Albion= England. Which makes sense, becomes then “Albion’s coast” would mean the land of England, the coasts of England, the edges of England, the place of England where news and ideas created by the English is transported to the rest of world, whatever you want to think of it as. I especially like the last of my examples, because if the messengers of England are “sick” and “silent”, that means that the English aren’t saying anything about what’s happening. On page 24 of the Fine Arts Day Packet: “Metaphorically Blake writes of England waiting silently for revolution, but with nothing to say.

• Quite obviously, the “American meadows”= America. By “American meadows faint”, I don’t believe Blake meant that the Americans keeled over, but that the American Revolution appeared not to have an impact on Europe.

• “Shadows of Prophecy”= the revolutionary spirit, or at least the idea the feudal ways won’t last. This idea is spreading from America, across the ocean to Europe.

• France’s “dungeon”= the Bastille, which the resource guide reminds us fell 3 years before this poem was published/written/whatever (the Bastille fell in 1789, the poem was engraved in 1792, which makes sense because the poem is one of the last pieces to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which began in 1790 and ended around 1793).

• Line 4, where Spain must get rid of Rome’s influence, ties in with Line 5, where Rome must throw away its keys (to prisons, or something of the like). This refers to the fact that Rome and Spain were the centers of Catholicism. Also note in Line 4 that is says “burst the barriers of OLD Rome”, which is just tellin’ us that it’s talkin’ about the ancient regime. It is a call for a new era, the new-born terror referred to in Line 7.

Right, so that was a little more than a glossary of the lingo, but from that, we get this:

-The idea of the revolution began in America but now threatens Europe.

-It’s happenin’ in France first.

-Rome and Spain need to get away from the Roman Catholic Church’s oppression.

Moving on! Line 6 intrigues me, because it’s simply “And weep”, which is funny because the shortest verse in the Bible is “Jesus wept” (I forget where it is; I only remember that Becca showed me that when I was in 3rd grade). Not sure if Blake meant that (I think he did), but this is just another way to show how Blake’s works imitate the Bible—besides the fact that he has enough works that if put together would amount to about the size of the Bible, his poems also dwell on political and spiritual concerns, and “Song of Liberty” is even numbered like the verses of the Bible! Besides this reference, the only other thing I could get out of this line is that the rest of the world must follow the Shadows of Prophecy, but there will be a great cost or pain or something that’ll cause tears. (Like the Reign of Terror, yeah?)

After those first few “verses”, Blake REALLY starts to speak on the fictional level. Lines 7-11 are especially action-packed, in a very weird way. There are two sides to this fight: the young, revolutionary infant of the Eternal Female, and the “evil, corrupt, tyrannical, godless, and simply stupid ideology that is hated above all else”, otherwise known as the monarchy (this may be a good time to add that I, Sarah Palmer, do not necessarily hold that opinion; I’m just doing my job to make you understand how Blake sees this… but you know, he MIGHT NOT see it this way entirely, since I am only presuming so based on the information from the resource guides—that he was an avid supporter of the Revolution, wrote poems about it with passion and fervor unmatched by any other English Romantic poet because he himself was in France at the time of the Revolution, etc). . It is very important to know which side Blake is referring to, and what happens to them, so I shall rewrite these lines in a way that I, and hopefully you, will get. YRIEF is the first side; ECTGSSI is the second, ‘kay?

7. The Eternal Female took YRIEF

8. To the mountains, the throne of ECTGSSI,

9. Who is old and overdue, and jealous of YRIEF’s youth,

10. So ECTGSSI threw YRIEF of the mountain.

11. And now YRIEF is falling through the sky.

Okay, so I know that this version cut out a lot of words, but this is actually a very good synopsis of the action in Lines 7-11 (in my opinion, anyway). Let me explain a little bit:

Line 7: the “trembling hands” belong to the Eternal Female, and the new-born terror is YRIEF

Line 8: the “Infinite mountains of light” is a little geographic description of where the Eternal Female presents the “new-born fire” (YRIEF) to the “starry king” (ECTGSSI).

Line 9: A little description of ECTGSSI. His throne is the mountains that they’re on, and it’s plagued with time and coldness, so that ECTGSSI has “grey-brow’d snows and thunderous visages”, which I take to mean he’s cold and so old that his eyebrows are gray and he looks crazy. The “jealous wings” also represent ECTGSSI, who is referred to jealous because he’s old and YRIEF isn’t. This also reminds me a little bit of how in the Bible God sometimes says “for I am a jealous god”, which doesn’t mean that he wants everything you own and his envy is just clawing at him inside to the point where a fuming hatred is consuming him. Deduce what you can from that.

Line 10: The speary hand is ECTGSSI as well, and the jealous reference to ECTGSSI appears again, and its hand “hurl’d the new-born terror thro’ the starry night”, aka ECTGSSI threw YRIEF off the mountain.

Line 11: The fire represents YRIEF.

Anything that you don’t really get and I didn’t explain to a cracker crumb, you’re gonna hafta find the missing link yourself.

Now, this is what I believe what Lines 7-11 symbolize, but please employ the idea of synergy and tell me if you have a better theory:

The revolutionary spirit threatened the ancient regime because it won the hearts of the people, something which the ancient regime hadn’t had in a long time because it’s outdated, si? So when members of the ancient regime met the revolution supporters, challenging the throne, they tried to destroy it with censorship and whatnot. The revolutionary spirit is referred o as “fire” because fire consumes, much like the revolutionary spirit did. Or perhaps bright fire is the opposite of the cool, murky, mysterious darkness of the evil conservatives? Or maybe it’s because fire chemically changes things to the point where you can’t change ‘em back (unless you’re a wizard or something, but those people aren’t real), just as the revolution changes France to the point of no return?!?!?!? I really don’t know, but my best guess is the first one.

Line 12 is a short blip back to the real world—Londoners, Jews, and Africans, which the Resource Guide describes as “iconic figures whom he [William Blake] sees as enslaved by institutions of power” (p.27, column 2, paragraph 2, lines 1 and 2 ). Blake wants these three groups of people to “Look up!” at the action that is described in Lines 13-20). From whatever they are going to see, the English must “enlarge” their “countenances”, which I take to mean to be more open-minded, the Jews must “leave counting gold” and “return to... oil and wine” (aka humble themselves), and the African must “widen his forehead”—get smarter.

From this point onward, I’m not really quite sure what’s happening, so I’ll just show what I do get, pose my questions, and leave it up to you guys to figure it out for me:

13. YRIEF falls into the Atlantic Ocean, which refers back to the geography description from line 8, and is the same ocean that the Shadows of Prophecy crossed over. YRIEF’s setting is compared to the setting sun. According to the Resource Guide, YRIEF spiritually represents the redeemer referred to in the second coming of Christ, and more Revelations references (think apocalypse, tribulation, etc). This makes me think of the resurrection, which appears to be a major theme in this year’s decathlon.

14. The resource guide says that even though YRIEF falls into the sea, the sea runs away from it (which I think would be interesting to see… like how Moses parts the Red Sea; but then, I suppose the ocean isn’t really an ocean, but just a symbol of something… of what, I don’t know), so “the hoary element” is the ocean. What I don’t get is—why does the ocean run away from flee from YRIEF? Why is the ocean described as “hoary”, which means ancient? Why is this significant to the plot of this story? Why is the ocean described as sleeping, moreover sleeping eternally? I suppose all these questions could be answered if I knew the answer to this one: WHAT DOES THE OCEAN REPRESENT? (Egad, I hate how I capitalized that—it reminds me of this one line from the movie A Perfect Getaway, which wasn’t half bad, but occasionally had very corny lines, like: WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW? Anyways, back to the show.)

15-6. Somehow, ECTGSSI and everything he own—his counselors, warriors, and all the others, are being rushed downward, are falling, and end up buried in Urthona’s dens. The reason why I really don’t get this, is because I can’t find the parallel in the real world—when does the ancient regime try to get rid of the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries actually become extinguished, but the ancient regime along with it? Am I interpreting this right? And what about the “grey-brow’d counselors, thunderous warriors” part, which is obviously a reference to Line 9’s “grey-brow’d snows and thunderous visages”—what is the comparison? And then there’s the “Urthona” problem. Apparently, Mr. Blake likes to create his own fictional characters, which I curse him for doing, because I can’t find a parallel for it, Google doesn’t recognize it, and the description in the Resource Guide doesn’t make any sense: “Urthona, who appears here for the first time in Blake’s work, represent the imaginative faculty, but in this line, the dens refer to the lowest levels of creativity.” WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THEY TRYING TO TELL ME?!? Help me, por favor.

17. Here, the ancient regime is still in Urthona’s dens, whatever those are, and after their “sullen flames” (which I don’t understand—isn’t YRIEF described with fire?), they congregate around the devil. What is Blake suggesting? What is the parallel with the real world?

18. The devil leads the ECTGSSI around the wilderness (Urthona’s dens?) and goes around announcing his law (apparently the devil loves his “ten commands”, which I again don’t get—the Bible clearly says the devil is the OPPOSITE of God, therefore if God loves order, the devil hates it). What confuses me even more is that he glances his “beamy eyelids OVER the deep in dark dismay”. If the ECTGSSI fell into Urthona’s dens, where the devil is now leading them, wouldn’t they have to look UP, seeing as there isn’t anywhere to look down?

19. Okay, so now we find that YRIEF’s son is rising in the east (another reference to resurrection?) with the morning, which is what the devil is looking at.

20. And so finally YRIEF’s son extinguishes the devil’s law, which I suppose represents the end of the ancient regime. I get this line, except for the last part—“and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.”

Now, finally we have the chorus, thus making this nice little poem a song. The chorus calls for the end of old ways, where the tyrannical nobility and lecherous priests tainted “the sons of joy”, because “everything that lives is Holy”.
If you guys get at all what I don’t, or have a better solution, please let me know and leave a comment! I’ll be sure to have my questions answered by the end of the AcaDec meet where we talk about this one anyway.
Happy studying!


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For more works by William Blake: http://dps.holtof.com/blake/index.htm