William Blake's "Visions of the
Daughters of Albion"
Jan 22, 2011
Paul Brown
Title plate of "Visions of the Daughters of Albion". - Wikimedia Commons
William Blake creates a symbolic representation of social
injustice and a radical view of erotic spirituality in this
unconventional poem.
In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Blake begins to
develop the more complex symbolic approach that characterizes
his later poems. He also expands his thematic range, relating his
previously developed concept of the senses being a prison that
limits human perception of the infinite, to an erotic vision of
transcendence. The poem marks the first appearance of a key
figure, Urizen, who plays a large role in the later poems and
represents a further refinement of Blake’s concept of artificial
material division.
Blake uses figures symbolic of America and England to also
represent innocence and human limitation
The title plate of the poem bears a single line as an epigraph: “The
Eye sees more than the Heart knows”. At first glance, this appears
to be an inversion of Blake’s usual arguments concerning the
senses. In his previous works, particularly The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, the five senses bind perception, because we believe that
sensory perception is all there is to life and are unable to perceive
the infinite.
We would expect the eye to be the limited sensory organ and the
heart to be associated with the spirit and with the infinite, but Blake
turns these expectations on their heads. Here, the heart is the
material organ, knowing only what is seen through our limited
senses, while the eye is not the familiar organ of sight but instead
a spiritual entity with access to the world beyond the boundaries of
sensory perception.
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A brief argument follows, in the voice of the poem’s principal
figure, Oothoon. The early lines of the poem establish Oothoon as
“the soft soul of America”, representative of the land itself before
colonization and its inhabitants. The place she inhabits, the vales
of Leutha, is very much like the valley of Har in The Book of Thel: a
pristine, Edenic place, as yet untouched by the dualistic fallacy that
separates man from direct understanding of God. Blake
consciously references and parodies Genesis in this section.
Where Eve was tempted by the serpent and brought low by eating
the fruit from the Tree of Life, Oothoon is kept from fearing death
by following a nymph’s advice to pluck a flower, safe in the
understanding that another one will grow in its place.
The radicalism of "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" is
grounded in political and social realities
But Oothoon’s paradise is destroyed by the interference of
Bromion, representative of the brutality of colonization and slavery.
His rape of Oothoon in the poem’s narrative is explicitly linked to
the colonial powers’ rape of the land and peoples of America: “Thy
soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:/Stampt
with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun;/They are
obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:/Their daughters
worship terrors and obey the violent”.
As with his previous works on religion, Blake expresses a radical
vision here, but it is one that is more specifically rooted in concrete
political realities. He has already described the “Daughters of
Albion”, looking across the sea and lamenting Oothoon’s fate, as
“Enslav’d”, and in so doing explicitly links the condition of
England’s women, expected to be subservient to their husbands
and reduced to little more than property by law once married, to
the condition of the enslaved in America. Though the poem dates
from well after American independence, it is an acknowledgement
that the injustices present in the America of Blake’s time were
intimately linked to its British heritage, and an indictment of both
the colonizers and those who perpetuated the crimes they began.
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There is a third figure in this narrative: Theotormon, established in
the opening Argument as Oothoon’s lover. He is the counterpoint
to Oothoon’s understanding and connection with the world beyond
the material; where she refuses to accept Bromion’s tyranny and
rejects the notion that all experience can be obtained through the
five senses, Theotormon is entirely consumed with weeping and
dismisses the importance of any questions of materiality.
Theotormon is man in his fallen state: so entirely absorbed in
himself, seeing nothing beyond his own grief, that he cannot even
hope for transcendence.
Blake presents erotic liberation as a means of spiritual
transcendence
But Oothoon still has that potential, since she not only understands
the limitations of the senses but also sees the erotic as a path to
transcendence. She rejects the image presented by Urizen,
described as “Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven!”- the
false idea that mankind holds of God, a figure of division who binds
mankind to its sensory limitations. Instead, she makes a direct
connection between the innocence of infancy and sensual delights,
and condemns those who would “catch virgin joy,/And brand it with
the name of whore”. Blake once again proves to be ahead of his
time, celebrating female sexuality in an era where the very notion
of female sexual pleasure was viewed skeptically.
Oothoon seeks to free Theotormon from his “hypocrite modesty”,
and to awaken him to the recognition that “every thing that lives is
holy”- a line repeated from the conclusion of The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, and a crucial idea in Blake’s system. At the end
of the poem, Theotormon remains unmoved, sitting “Upon the
margind ocean conversing with shadows dire”.
Where Oothoon understands the unity of being, Theotormon has
closed himself off to her vision of sensual awakening and is unable
to break through his own limitations. The poem ends with this
vision of despair, but in Oothoon’s erotic reveries, it also presents
a hopeful vision, one that also embodies a radical social ideal
where a recognition of universal equality leads to a liberation from
slavery and injustice.
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