WHAT ARE THE THEMES OF THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL?

WHAT IS BLAKE TRYING TO CONVEY THROUGH THIS TEXT? HOW SUCCESFULLY HAS HE DONE IT?

HE WHO USES TO SEEA PERFECT WHOLE, /MUST SEE IT IN ITS MINUTE PARTICULARS, ORGANIZD----Blakes poem the Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be looked upon in two ways; as a verbal text which is part narrative, part satire and partly epigram. It can also be looked upon as a visual text which gives us a clearer idea of the imaginative images that Blake is using as his symbols. The poem written just after the destructive results of the French revolution promulgates his idealism which raises up ideas, vision, prophecy which will go beyond rational thinking. The idea of revolution propagates the political, prophetic, religious radicalism in the text. He was influenced by the Swiss philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborgs writings at first because Swedenborg tried to look at the alternative views of the world and the mysticism associated with religion. But later he found that he was a materialistic philosopher and in this text, he is continuously attacking him. He is also reconfiguring the idea of reason v/s imagination, challenging the very conventions of 18th century philosophy. Spiritual sensation stands as one of the important themes of the poem. Acc. To Blake Man is not merely capable of divinity, but is, even in the fallen state, divine in essence. Spiritual perception is not merely a superior kind of physical sense perception but it transforms objects. And it does so imaginatively, making them into symbolic forms which reveals the significance of those objects to the life of men, and thus shows their real forms. Thus the conventional notion of heaven and hell is changed at last in the poem. Imagination for Blake is visionary imagination and he is not looking for verisimilitude because imagination is part of what can be called visionary poetics or aesthetics. The doctrine of contraries reaches its zenith in this poem. It is a kind of Blakean philosophy which posits contraries are positive/ a negation is not a contrary. In the poem, Blake presents contraries as positive and complementary forces which when allowed to interact without external restraint, impart to life a motion and tension that makes it creative. It generates a kind of dynamics in the universe which generates energies also. Blakes personal and revolutionary beliefs comes into forefront where he expresses a deliberately depolarized and unified version of the cosmos in which the material world and the physical desire are equally part of the divine order; hence a marriage between heaven and hell. It is a vision of a dualistic world not a world of binaries. The poet prophet Rintrah is introduced in the beginning of the poem who is full of rage and signifies the creative energy. Rintrah is a force of change. Blake uses conventional animal and fire imagery but he is changing the connotations of these symbols. Visions are equated as truths and juxtaposes the images which are contrary. Good is heaven. Evil is hell. this Christian idea is countered by the New Heaven created by Blake. It is a manifesto or prophetic proclamation attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate both are necessary and interchangeable too. Blake reverses the conventional process and the restore the abstractions which the religious call good and evil to their true and original identities as contraries. So in the voice of the devil, Blake creates a new image of Man where energy signifies the desire for creation, whereas reason signifies the desire for order. Therefore the opposition between expansion and contraction, idea and form remain positively contradictory yet complementary. Thus with the radical regeneration of imagination in man, he constructs Man in a perfect holistic image, both rational and imaginative.

Proverbs of hell parodies and inverses the conventional proverbs of the Bible. Blakes proverbs introduces no repression and he is overturning the idea of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the starting of knowledgeBible; the theme conforms to a certain kind of behavior which is prejudged as truth. For a new dispensation, Proverbs of Hell is dependent on ones intuition, ones desire and natural inclination. The plate no. 11 talks about such an anthropomorphic religion which was liberal, it tries to communicate a truth. The presence of intuitive characteristic therefore is a divine presence. He often amalgamates the image of human beings and animals and this is necessary acc. to him as two contraries are qualities, forces are imminences and progression therefore is continued creativeness. Through each memorable fancy, he reveals the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutionalized religion. Fancy is equal to imagination for Blake. Memorable fancies are the intuitive visions which are momentary, fragmentary insights in some kind of truth. While it is challenging the ideas of heaven and hell, it follows the biblical structures and it is the aphoristic, epigrammatic stipulations that Blake wants to make about the new Heaven and Hell. The poet-prophet enjoys the journey to hell and rejects the fact that blasphemies will lead to eternal damnation as notions put forward by the angel and religion. Again looking at the prophecies of Isaiah and the Ezekiel, there is an emergence of new hope and which can bring change in the context of social inequality, racial discrimination. Each memorable fancy is followed by certain ideas and transmission of knowledge. The two kinds of man prolific and the devourer acc. to him cannot be good and bad respectively. And they cannot be separated also. Both are necessary and both must strive positively. The song of liberty stands as an apocalyptic end to the entire theme used in the poem. The freewheeling medley of humour and seriousness, exposition and anecdote, prose and poetry, it does not propose to abolish or simply invert conventional moral categories, but rather it undermines unimaginative, simplistic systems in which passive good is valued over active evil. One can say that he successfully conveyed the themes in the poem as Blake rewrites the apocalypse and it is Blakes apocalypse as he propagates that Christian apocalypse is also a myth. He is challenging the readers to form a new form of reality where the apocalyptic vision is able to hold together opposing tendencies. It is not only a political, social change or progression but the change of mind. Marriage is certainly the consummation or coming together of ideas. As human thought and life need the stimulus and opposing forces to give them creative movement, there is a marital unity between the angel and the devil, good and evil. And in doing so, he also sees divine and human as interchangeable. The whole creation, Blake predicts will appear infinite and holy then. As he brings songs of innocence and songs of experience together, similarly in this poem, he reasserts the fact that Man will reach the stage of Higher Innocence and return to Eden with the amalgamation of contraries and to transform the forms of oppression and status quo, imagination surely emerges as a new religion of the new dualistic world. And the dualistic world are brought together by the m mytho-theological synthesis of the thesis and anti-thesis with the alchemical nature of imagination.

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