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A piece of William Blake poetry I uncovered today, whilst randomly flipping through my Penguin version of The Complete Poems:
O for a voice like thunder and a tongue
To drown the throat of war!�When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the Nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!
This is a curious poem (intended as a prologue to an unwritten drama about Edward IV), because it finds echoes in both the past and the future. Blake, who was a master at using Bible texts and rhetoric in the service of his recreation of religious experience, here echoes a passage from the prophet Nahum, chapter 1, verses 5-6:
The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him.
This is the story of a vengeful God, torching everything in sight.
Its echo to the future is in the kinds of munitions that human beings have developed that ignite the air and propagate the “flood of Death.” And of course Blake is the natural connection between the old prophet and the wars that rage in the deserts around Nahum’s old stomping grounds because he indignantly rails against the appropriation of what was considered God’s exclusive destructive power by humans, and political leaders. He moves that power into the hands of humans and imagines what kind of damage we could all do with it.
As a visionary poet, Blake sometimes gives me the creeps.
