Blake’s focus on sensation, instinct, and desire in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell results in a profoundly sensuous reading experience. He bombards the senses in both a latent and manifest manner, using flamboyantly illustrative language that creates a vivid sensory experience as one internalizes the Devil’s fire and the Angel’s cloud. His constant shifting of sentence structure and narration (from the “Proverbs of Hell” to “Memorable Fancy” to standard stanzas), hyper-animated language, bouncing rhythm, and the densely illuminated pages that a contemporary reader would have seen are overt appeals to the reader’s cognitive/sensory perception. The subtextual engagement with the senses seems to me to occur through Blake’s use of the natural world to question, allegorize, and even satirize Enlightenment dogmatism with regards to reason and religion. In the second “Proverbs of Hell” stanza beginning on line 22 Blake states:
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
…………..
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
Blake posits that sensory desires such as pride, lust, wrath, and nudity (with ‘woman’ grouped among various animals, but that’s another issue) displayed by all of god’s creations represent universal instincts inherent to human and animal biology that need not be suppressed. The “roaring”, “raging”, and “destructive” capacities of both man and nature are sublime effects of Blake’s fusion of holiness and desire, the sacred and the profane, the bodily and the spiritual. “Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth,” Blake states in line 27. I took this to mean that it is not the rational logic of the Enlightenment that determines truth, nor is it a narrow set of principles upheld by a religious institution. According to Blake anything that one senses, perceives, or believes in is true, establishing a philosophical relativism that calls into question the stringent dichotomy of good (heaven) and evil (hell) upon which Christian ideology is based.
Where do you put your trust? If the doors of perception are cleansed, then believe in what you perceive, not what you abstract from perception. Blake is this odd Enlightenment figure who distrusts Enlightenment abstraction (the very process one might say that they invented).
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