Pantheism in Blakes's Poetry

This study will examine pantheism in the poetry of William Blake. The study will investigate Blake's religious faith in its relationship with the concepts of pantheism.

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," as Lindsay writes, Blake expresses his powerful and mystical views through the filter of pantheism: "Blake merges his persons with natural forces such as fire, wind, cloud, water, light. Man's relation to nature is also his relation to his fellows and to himself. Hunger and filth are 'pestilent fogs round cities of men.' The spectres of religious men are driven out of the abbeys 'by the fiery cloud of Voltaire, and thunderous rocks of Rousseau.' . . . Clouds play a large role in the symbolism. They represent power, they are high and immaterial, emblems of transcendence. But they are also the source and site of storm and darkness. Shadowing the earth, they are the barrier of the brooding dead that obscures the sight of the living. Yet as they ascend and grow luminous, fading into the sun, they represent true vision" (57).

Here we see Blake's reliance on pantheistic concepts as a source of both power and significance in his poetry. Pantheism is, simply, the belief that God is in all things and all things are in God. God and the physical universe, in that respect, can be understood as a single entity. There are wide-ranging variations in pantheistic belief, from the religious mysticism of Hinduism, for example, to Blake's poetic appreciation of nature, to the

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him as visions from the eternal, spiritual world from which, as he believed, we are more or less cut off by earthly life" (135). In other words, the pantheism of Blake was used by the poet as a means, for both himself and the willing reader, to transcend the limitations of the commonplace human perception of reality and achieve a vision of eternal life in which God was in everything and everything was in God. Blake believed that imagination, and not logic or reason, was the key to the deepest reality that could be apprehended by human beings. His imagination was free enough to be able to see God and his attributes in everything in the world, particularly in the elements of nature. As with pantheists of every era, however, Blake could see both the dark and lighter sides of this vision. In "To Winter," for example, the darkest and coldest season seems to ride supreme over the earth, but it is a more-powerful overseeing God which finally controls Winter itself: (Winter) hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep Rides heavy; his storms are unchained, sheathed In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes, For he hath reared his scepter o'er the world . . . He takes his seat upon the cliffs,--the mariner Cries in vain. Poor litt

Category: Literature - P