The Romantic Book of Living and Dying

Abstract

Blake’s view of death, as its poetic exploration in Milton suggests, was more complicated than most standard interpretations of it as simply the closing event of consciousness, and when Milton accepts his visionary mission to redeem his emanation Ololon, crying out “I go to Eternal Death” (E 108: 14.14), readers are left to ponder the implications of such a commitment for the poet of Paradise Lost, who had already been dead for over 120 years at the time Blake wrote his mini-epic. Milton could only assume his role as an “awakener” by descending into a realm of “Eternal Death” located in the “Sea of Time and Space,” and Blake’s representation of material existence as the plane of death functions across the span of his work as a poetic constant (from The Book of Thel to Jerusalem). As Jerome McGann indicates, the type of “redemption through death and the annihilation of the righteous selfhood” envisioned in Milton originated, for Blake, in Christian myth, and as argued in the preceding chapter, “The Life of Jesus, along with all the economies of the Christian mystery, properly stands at the pivot of what Blake sought to accomplish” (McGann “Blake’s Prophecies” 10) in his prophetic assemblage. However, McGann also immediately acknowledges that this mythic structure of self-sacrifice, for Blake, has “nothing to do with religion as we commonly know it,” given Blake’s complete refashioning of Jesus and of Christianity itself.