- Here on the banks of the Thames, Los builded Golgonooza,
In the midst of the rocks of the Altars of Albion. In fears
He builded it, in rage and in fury. It is the Spiritual Fourfold
London: continually building and continually decaying desolate!
In eternal labours: loud the Furnaces and loud the Anvils
Of Death.
(Jerusalem 53:16-22 203)
Golgonooza appears a number of times in Blake's works: 17 times in 4Z; 22 times in Milton, and 22 times in Jerusalem. Interpretations of the term are quite varied, depending to a large degree on the interpreter's spiritual orientation: "Los builded Golgonooza": Los represents the fallen imagination, ie the creative builder of the material realm. Eventually Jerusalem takes the place of Golgonooza.
Good and evil might be considered the fallen equivalent of truth and error.
The trouble with good and evil is that you value your attitudes, actions, etc. as good and the others' as evil. This has motivated wars through the ages.
Blake believed that in Eternity there is no good and evil. Instead truth and error are resolved with "intellectual spears, and long winged arrows of thought" (Jerusalem 34:15 E180)
In Milton 'Eternal Death' meant leaving Heaven (as Jesus is reported to have done) to improve the sad situation on Earth.
In Blake's 'Milton' the poet, Milton, "goes to Eternal Death" from his home in heaven, like Jesus had done or Buddha, to rescue "the nations" from the toils of the God of this World (Milton Plate 14:14).
In 1800 at the invitation of the famous poet William Hayley, the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex, near the sea. By 1803 they were back in London.
Blake used "the God of this world" 7 times according to the Blake concordance. Two of them occur near the end of The Everlasting Gospel (page 523)
mind forg'd manacles:
Blake found people, then (and now) uniformly blind to the mental chains that sentenced them to a mediocre existence. He used this famous term in his Songs of Experience.
The term is used in this work repeatedly explaining Blake's approach to his prophetic poetry.
Blake found people, then (and now) uniformly blind to the mental chains that sentenced them to a mediocre existence. He used this famous term in his Songs of Experience.
The term is used in this work repeatedly explaining Blake's approach to his prophetic poetry.
Moment of Grace: The Moment of Grace or the Felpham Moment in this work represents the turning point in Blake's life when he awakened to the riches of Christ. He commemorated it with the poem he called the First Vision of Light.
As per Friedlander: The young Blake had thought the great struggle in human life was between Luvah and Urizen, energy and its boundaries. By the end of the Felpham period, Blake had come to view the great struggle as being between the visionaries, who saw all men as part of the divine family, and the rationalizing masses, concerned only with personal security.
- Thus was the Lamb of God condemnd to Death
They naild him upon the tree of Mystery weeping over him
And then mocking and then worshipping calling him Lord and King
(Four Zoas 8-110[106][1st].3; E379)
The Four Zoas: a long poem that served as a kind of first draft to 'Milton' and 'Jerusalem'. Reading this closely one may discern the spiritual growth which Blake went through culminating in the Moment of Grace .
Plato's Myth of the Cave had a big influence on Blake's understanding.
With the "narrow chinks of his cavern" found in Plate 11 of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake of course had an obvious source.
The Couches of the Dead is a universal symbol representing those who have died to Eternity in order to be born into our fallen world.
The 'main chance' is a term Blake referred to for using his art (without integrity) for commercial purposes.
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