The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

   Poems are vehicles for grand thoughts in short lines, one does not need to read pages of scribbled lines to found oneself in awe, wondering deep and mysterious thoughts from a few simple stanzas, such is the power of poetry, and Blake’s prophetic style transports us through Heaven and Hell in this little yet charged book.

   He introduces the book by stating that without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. He claims this is The Voice of the Devil, and the Devil says that “Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul this is an error, Man has no Body distinct from his Soul and those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer, or Reason, usurps its place and governs the unwilling”.

   The book is divided into nine small chapter, two poems and a few “Memorable Fancy´s” as he calls them, little histories where he remembers things like walking through Hell to collect the “Proverbs from Hell”, being in a Printing house there and seeing the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation, talking to angels and dining with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, where he asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, to which Isaiah answered: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discovered the infinite in everything, and as I was then persuaded, and remain confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.’ Then Blake asked: ‘Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?’ Isaiah replied: ‘All poets that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains’.

   So from this we can clearly see in a paradoxical way how Blake feels about writing as if he himself had walked through Hell, talked to Angels or Prophets from the Bible and such, because for him when it comes to poetry, poets should not bound their inspiration to a mere image of reality, because existence to them is infinite and thus so should be poetry.

   William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.

   If you want to get wiser read the Proverbs of Hell or hear a Declmation of it in spanish I recommend both at the same time.