The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, originally comprising 27 plates of engraved copper, is an exuberant, often playful satire written mostly in prose by English poet, artist, and engraver William Blake. It was composed between 1790 and 1792, at the dawn of the Romantic era in England. Blake published the work himself using his own method of printing. He would etch copperplates with text and designs and then print the plates and color them by hand. One of Blake’s early works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell uses a variety of styles and genres, including prose, proverbs, free-verse poetry, and illustrations. It celebrates what Blake believed was the dawn of a new era of individual, political, and spiritual freedom following the French Revolution that began in 1789.

Blake attacks the theology of his former mentor Emanuel Swedenborg and inverts conventional categories of good and evil in order to denounce the restrictive morality promoted by Church and State. Using the voice of the “Devil,” as well as a speaker who serves as a stand-in for Blake himself, he exalts energy and desire and downgrades the reason and restraint that is championed by the orthodox “Angels.” His purpose is to correct error, promote individual self-expression, and reveal the joyful, infinite nature of life.

Note: When citing the source material, this guide uses plate, line, and/or verse numbers, depending on the form of the section being cited. The numbered and illustrated plates that this guide refers to can be viewed by clicking the Blake Archive link in the Poem Text section.

Poet Biography

Poet, painter, engraver, prophet, visionary, and seer, William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, the seventh child of James Blake, a hosier, and his wife. Blake showed a talent for art at an early age, and when he was 10, his father sent him to Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand. At the age of 14, Blake was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver, and he qualified as a journeyman engraver in 1779. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art but was quickly disillusioned with its methods of training, and he returned to engraving, from which he would earn an at times precarious living for the rest of his life. Working on commissions that he received to illustrate books, he was a lower-middle-class artisan. He worked by hand with the tools of his trade while also pursuing his calling as a painter and developing his vision and esoteric mythology about the fall and redemption of humankind.

In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a market gardener. The following year, two of Blake’s friends printed Poetical Sketches, a collection of poems that Blake had written between the ages of 11 and 20. In the 1780s, Blake began developing his craft in earnest, experimenting with different verse forms and themes. He also developed his own method of printing and began to print books that consisted of his own poetry, with illustrations. One of these was Songs of Innocence (1789), in which he celebrated the innocent joy of childhood. Five years later, in 1794, he published a companion piece with that collection, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in which he explored the darker side of life when childhood innocence is exploited and destroyed.

Like many of the English Romantic poets, Blake was inspired by the French Revolution, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1792) celebrated that epochal event. More illuminated works soon followed, including America: A Prophecy (1793) and Europe: A Prophecy (1794). The Book of Urizen (1794), The Song of Los (1795), The Book of Ahania (1795), and The Book of Los (1795) were part of Blake’s developing myth of the tyranny of reason and the necessity of freeing the creative imagination. Blake also worked on a long prophetic poem first titled Vala and then The Four Zoas, in which he continued to develop his complex mythology that explored the fractured workings of the human psyche and mapped the road back to its original divine wholeness. He never completed The Four Zoas but mined many of its passages for other works.

In 1802, William and Catherine moved to a cottage in Felpham, near Chichester, Sussex, on England’s southern coast, where Blake was supported by a patron, the minor poet William Hayley. The following year, Blake evicted a drunken soldier from his garden. The soldier accused him of uttering threats against the king, and Blake was charged with sedition. He was tried and acquitted in Chichester in 1804. By that time, the Blakes had returned to live in London, where he completed one of his finest prophetic books, Milton: A Poem (1804), in which the poet John Milton, whom Blake revered, comes back to earth to redeem his theological errors. That same year, Blake began his long epic poem Jerusalem, in which Albion, the universal man, with the help of Los, the creative imagination, awakens to his divine humanity. Blake worked on Jerusalem until 1820.

During this period, the Blakes had little money. Blake was still accepting commissions as an engraver, but there were fewer of them, and Blake himself had developed a reputation as an eccentric person. Some even believed him to be “insane.” The only exhibition of his art in his lifetime, in 1807, was a failure, so he was little known as an artist, and his poetry was known only to a few.

His artistic fortunes took an upturn in 1818, however, and a new patron named John Linnell commissioned Blake’s designs, Illustrations of the Book of Job (published 1826). Blake also gathered around him a group of disciples, young artists who called him “the Interpreter.”

Blake died on August 12, 1827, at the age of 69. At his death, he was working on a series of designs illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy. His reputation developed only gradually over the remainder of the century, and it was not until the 20th century that he began to be appreciated as one of the greatest poets and artists of the Romantic era.

Poem Text

Text Only:

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1790-1792. Project Gutenberg.

Text and Design:

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1790-1792. The Blake Archive.

Summary

The text begins with a poem in free verse titled “The Argument” (Plates 2-3) that depicts the figure of Rintrah, who stands for righteous wrath and presages revolution. Blake then announces his theme, in which he inverts conventional religious thought. He sets out the necessity of “Contraries,” or opposites, in existence, particularly reason and energy. The righteous (the Angels) declare that reason is good and is associated with Heaven and the soul, and energy is evil and is associated with Hell and the body.

Blake’s “Voice of the Devil” (Plates 4-6) is in prose, and corrects the error of the conventional Angels, declaring that the life-promoting energies that emerge through natural and imaginative desire are the true sources of joy. Body and soul are not two separate entities, and desire should not be restrained by reason.

Blake then expands on his announcement in five satirical sections, also in prose, each titled “A Memorable Fancy.” In the first of these imaginative fantasies (Plates 6-7), he immerses himself in the creative fires and collects 70 “Proverbs of Hell” (Plates 7-11). Many of these aphorisms extol the life of energy and natural instinct over reason.

In the second “Memorable Fancy” (Plates 12-14), Blake speaks with the Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, who confirm Blake’s views that the expanded human senses can experience the infinite nature of life.

The third “Memorable Fancy” (Plates 15-17) shows how the creative faculty passes on knowledge through the generations by the making of books. Blake makes a distinction between the Devourers (reason) and the Prolific (the creative artists).

In the fourth “Memorable Fancy” (Plates 17-22), Blake and an Angel (symbolic of conventional religion) go on a fantastic journey together in which each shows the other what his destiny is. Blake’s vision triumphs. He then criticizes the Angel’s reliance on reason, which ignores the other contrary, the energy of the Devil.

The fifth and final “Memorable Fancy” (Plates 22-24) presents another contest between Blake’s Devil and the Angel. The Angel is converted to the Devil’s point of view, and he and Blake become friends and read the Bible together.

Finally, “A Song of Liberty” (Plates 25-27), made up of a numbered series of 20 poetic verses, announces the imminent spiritual awakening of the world through revolutionary political action. The section and work ends with a Chorus that issues the proclamation that “every thing that lives is Holy” (Plate 27).