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TAYLOR BLAKE
1789. Book of Thel engraved.
1790 or 1791. Dissertation on
Eleusinianand Bacchic mysteries.
1792. Philosophical and Mathe- 1793 ff. Marriageof Heaven and
matical Commentariesof Proclus Hell engraved.
(editionin Yale Library).
1793. Plato's Cratylus, Phaedo, 1793. Visions of Daughters of
Parmenidesand Timaeus. Albionengraved.
1793. Sallust on the Godsand the
World.
1794. Five books of Plotinus (in- 1794. Books of Urizen engraved.
cludingthat on the descentof the 1794. Songs of Experience en-
soul). graved.
1797 ff. The Four Zoas written.
1804. The Works of Plato. 1804 ff. Milton engraved.
1804ff. Jerusalemengraved.
Any one reading these books in chronological sequence will see
Blake's Neo-Platonism steadily increasing in proportion to what
he could have amassed from Taylor. In some cases there may have
been other sources3 available, in some there certainly were not;
but for all cases under discussion Taylor was a possible source,
sometimes, apparently, the only one. Even where Blake could
have drawn from other writers, it seems improbable that he did.
For example, the creation of Urizen in The Book of Urizen shows
a marked likeness to the creation of man in Plato's Timaeus.4
Taylor's translation of the Timaeus was not the only version in
existence; but it is rather striking that it had appeared so shortly
before Blake's poem. A comparison of Taylor's translation will
show how direct the borrowing from Plato was:
Blake's Bookof Urizen194-205.
"Restlessturn'dthe Immortal,enchain'd,
Heavingdolorous,anguish'd,unbearable;
Till a roof, shaggy, wild, enclos'd
In an orb his fountainof thought.
In a horrible,dreamfulslumber,
Like the linked infernalchain,
A vast Spine writh'din torment
Upon the winds, shootingpain'd
31 have made,not an exhaustivesearch,but a reasonably
thoroughone,
withoutfindingsuchsources.
4Firstnoticedby Professor
Damon.
V
Blake's Preface to Milton:
"The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid,
of Plato & Cicero."
Taylor's Commentaries of Proclus (II, 216):
"We are informed by Numenius, the Pythogorean, that Plato's suc-
cessors, Speusippus, Zenocrates, and Polemo, perverted his dogmata, and
almost entirely changed the whole of his philosophy."
VI
Blake repeatedly uses "non-entity" as equivalent to delusion, the
state of Ulro. (See Sloss and Wallis, II, 239).
There is a similar use in The Commentariesof Proclus. (I, xxxi): "On
the former system, she is on a level with the most degraded natures, the
receptacle of material species, and the spectator of delusion and non-
entity." (II, 348, note): "Body, and its properties, belong to the region
of non-entity." (II, 349, note): "Whatever becomes corporeal in an
eminent degree, as falling fast into non-entity, has but little power of
recalling itself into one."
Cratylus, etc., 1793 (p. 430): "From thence they verge downwards
and extend to perfect non-entity, or the last of things-that is, to matter
itself."
VII
Blake's "black water" of Jerusalem 4. 10 is explained by Professor
Damon'? as materialism-the Sea of Time and Space. But how did Blake
come to use that peculiar symbolism? In The Commentaries (II, 230)
occurs the phrase: "By which we may safely pass through the night of
oblivion over the dark and stormy ocean of matter." And again (II, 234):
"To shun the bitter stream of sanguine life." (II, 283): "The Stoics
assert that the sun is nourished by the exhalation of the sea; the moon
from the effluvia of fountains and rivers; but the stars from the exhalation
of the earth ..... It is necessary therefore that souls, whether they are
corporeal or incorporeal, while they attract bodies, must verge to humid-
ity, and be incorporated with humid natures, especially such souls, as
from their material inclinations ought to be united with blood, and con-
fined in humid bodies as in a watery tegument." (II, 294): "Again,
according to Plato, the deep, the sea, and a tempest are so many symbols
of the constitution of matter."
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 12): "'The Egyptians,' says
Simplicius, 'called matter, which they symbolically denominated water,
the dregs or sediment of the first life'."
The Cratylus, etc., 1793 (p. 132): "A fish, from its residence in the sea,
represents a life merged in generation."
10 S. F. Damon, WilliamBlake, 1924,p. 435.
VIII
Blake's Jerusalem, 59, 26-48:
"And one Daughter of Los sat at the fiery Reel, & another
Sat at the shining Loom, with her sisters attending round:
Terrible their distress, & their sorrow cannot be utter'd.
And another Daughter of Los sat at the Spinning Wheel:
Endless their labour, with bitter food, void of sleep:
Tho' hungry, they labour: they rouze themselves, anxious,
Hour after hour labouring at the whirling Wheel ....
Other Daughters of Los, labouring at Looms less fine,
Create the Silk-worm & the Spider & the Catterpillar
To assist in their most grievous work of pity & compassion.
And others Create the wooly Lamb and the downy Fowl."
Commentariesof Proclus (II, 284):
"What symbol is more proper to souls descending into generation,
and the tenacious vestment of body, than as the poet says, 'Nymphs
weaving on stony beams purple garments wonderful to behold?' ....
The purple garments plainly appear to be the flesh with which we are
invested. .... Thus according to Orpheus, Proserpine, who presides over
everything generated from seed, is represented weaving a web."
IX
In Blake's Jerusalem one of the sons of Albion is named Hyle. Blake
may have got this word from Henry More's Psychozoia of the seventeenth
century, where Hyle is an allegorical character. But he may also have
got it from Taylor. (Commentariesof Proclus, II, 287, note): "But it is
this hyle or matter which composes all that body of the world which we
everywhere perceive adorned with impressions of forms."
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (23):
"Blessed! thrice blessed! who, with winged speed,
From Hyle's dread voracious barking flies."
Sallust (p. 124):
"The raging uproar lulls
Of dire-resounding Hyle's mighty flood."
Sallust (p. 136):
"And lest deep-merged in Hyle's stormy mire,
Her powers reluctant suffer tortures dire."
Sallust (p. 155):
"And from Hyle's stormy main,
To her father back again,
To her true immortal goal
Lead my wand'ring, weary soul."
Sallust (p. 157):
"Fraudful Hyle here prepares
Me to plunge through magic snares."
x
Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 89-94:
"Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?
Tell me where dwell the joys of old, & where the ancient loves,
And when will they renew again, & the night of oblivion past,
That I might traverse times & spaces far remote, and bring
Comforts into a present sorrow and a night of pain?
Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight?"
Commentaries of Proclus, II, 230:
"The mathematical sciences are indeed the proper means of acquiring
wisdom, but they ought never to be considered as its end. They are the
bridge as it were between sense and intellect by which we may safely
pass through the night of oblivionover the dark and stormy ocean of matter,
to the lucid regions of the intelligible world; and he who is desirous of
returning to his true country will speedily pass over this bridge, without
making any needless delays in his passage."
(II, 276): "The mathematical science; by whose assistance, we first
recognize the glimmerings of truth, and discover the dawning beams of
intellect emerging, as it were, from the night of oblivion."
XI
With the main thesis of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
compare the following (Commentariesof Proclus, I, ci):
"But in the third place, being elevated to supernal natures, and
judging these to be alone true, they affirm themselves to be ignorant of
all they formerly imagined themselves to know; in which degree Socrates
professed to find himself, when he said, this one thing I know, that I know
nothing; an ignorance preferable to all the knowledge gained by the most
unwearied experimental enquiries."
XII
Blake uses "generation" in the Neo-Platonic sense as meaning birth
into material life, putting on the garment of flesh. For examples see Sloss
and Wallis, II, 162-163.
Similarly the Commentariesof Proclus (I, xci) read: "For true being,
according to the Platonists, is without generation, because it has an
infinite power of being totally present at the same time: and body is said
to be generated, because it always possesses in itself an infinite flowing
power, which it cannot at once totally receive."
XIII
Blake's Jerusalem, 38, 16-21:
"Mutual in one another's love and wrath all renewing,
We live as One Man: for, contracting our infinite senses,
We behold multitude; or, expanding, we behold as one,
As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man
We call Jesus the Christ: and he in us and we in him
Live in perfect harmony in Eden, the land of life."
Commentariesof Proclus (I, x):
"Will it not, therefore, be proper, in the first place, to enquire, with
the great Plotinus, whether multitude is not a departure and distance
from one, so that infinity itself is a separation from unity in the extreme,
because it is no other than innumerable multitude; that on this account
it becomes evil; and that we contract a similar nature when departing
from intellectual unity, we are divided by sensible multitude."
XIV
Blake's peculiar use of the word "Spectre" to represent "the reasoning
power" with its false picture of life, is well known. Examples can be found
in Sloss and Wallis (II, 226-233). The word occurs in a sense resembling
Blake's in The Commentaries (I, 53): "For the conjectural power knows
the spectres of sensible forms, while they are beheld in water and other
bodies, which perspicuously represent their image."
XV
Blake repeatedly uses the figure of the "Wine-press," often with great
lack of clearness. See Sloss and Wallis, II, 254-256.
At times, at least, he may have had in mind the following passage
from The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 144): "The pressing of
grapes is as evident a symbol of dispersion as the tearing of wool; and
this circumstance was doubtless one principal reason why grapes were
consecrated to Bacchus: for a grape, previous to its pressure, aptly repre-
sents that which is collected into one; and when it is pressed into juice,
it no less aptly represents the diffusion of that which was before collected
and entire."
XVI
Repeatedly in Jerusalem Blake speaks of the starry wheels of Albion's
sons, meaning apparently, mistaken systems of thought. An example
is Jerusalem 5, 3-5:
"Cambridge & Oxford & London
Are driven among the starry Wheels, rent away and dissipated
In Chasms & Abysses of Sorrow."
Compare The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 142):
"In the first place, then, with respect to the wheel, since Dionysus,
as we have already explained, is the mundane intellect, and intellect is of
an elevating and convertive nature, nothing can be a more apt symbol
of intellectual action than a wheel or sphere."
Also Sallust (p. 34): "But of the bodies contained in the world, some
imitate intellect, and revolve in a circle; but others soul, and are moved
in a right line."
XVII
The Four Zoas (end of Night V):
"The Woes of Urizen, shut up in the deep dens of Urthona ....
I will arise, explore these dens, and find that deep pulsation
That shakes my caverns with strong shudders: perhaps this is the
night
Of Prophecy, and Luvah hath burst his way from Enitharmon."
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (pp. 103-104):
"The reader may observe how Proserpina, being represented as con-
fined in the dark recess of a prison and bound with fetters, confirms the
explanation of the fable here given as symbolical of the descent of the
soul .... What emblem can more beautifully represent the evolutions
and outgoings of an intellectual nature into the regions of sense than the
wanderings of Ceres by the light of torches through the darkness of night,
and continuing the pursuit still she proceeds into the depths of Hades
itself?"
XVIII1
Visions of the Daughters of Albion-Argument:
"I pluck6d Leutha's flower,
And I rose up from the vale;
But the terrible thunders tore
My virgin mantle in twain."
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 99):
"Proserpina, therefore, or the soul, at the very instant of her descent
into matter, is, with the utmost propriety, represented as eagerly engaged
in plucking this fatal flower; for her faculties at this period are entirely
occupied with a life divided about the fluctuating condition of body.
After this, Pluto, forcing his passage through the earth, seizes on
Proserpina."
XIX
Blake repeatedly speaks of the union or reunion of the soul with the
body as "death" and of people absorbed in material affairs as "dead."
Examples may be found in Sloss and Wallis, II, 147.
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 5): "That the soul, indeed, till
purified by philosophy, suffers death through its union with the body,
was obvious to the philologist Macrobius .... The death of the soul was
nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds of the body."
XX
Jerusalem (33, 35-34, 11):
"Vala replied in clouds of tears, Albion's garment embracing:
'I was a City & a Temple built by Albion's Children.
XXII
Vala (I, 86-92):
"There is from Great Eternity a mild & pleasant rest
Nam'd Beulah, a Soft Moony Universe, feminine, lovely,
Pure, mild & Gentle, given in Mercy to those who sleep,
Eternally Created by the Lamb of God, around,
On all sides, within & without the Universal Man.
The Daughters of Beulah follow sleepers in all their Dreams,
Creating Spaces lest they fall into Eternal Death."
The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 13):
Quotes from Ficinus the opinion of the ancient theologists: " 'They
asserted that prudent men, who earnestly employed themselves in divine
concerns, were above all others in a vigilant state. But that imprudent
[i.e., without foresight] men, who pursued objects of a different nature,
XXVI
Blake's hostile, or at least distrustful, attitude toward Nature might
easily have been inspired by Taylor's Introduction to the Timaeus.
Cratylus, etc., 1793 (p. 375):
"With respect to the term nature, which is differently defined by
different philosophers, it is necessary to inform the reader, that Plato does
not consider either matter or material form, or body, or natural powers,
as worthy to be called nature; though nature has been thus denominated
by others. Nor does he think proper to call it soul; but establishing its
essence between soul and corporeal powers, he considers it as inferior to
the former through its being divided about bodies, and its incapacity of
conversion to itself, but as surpassing the latter through its containing
the reasons of all things, and generating and vivifying every part of the
visible world. For nature verges toward bodies, and is inseparable from
their fluctuating empire."
XXVII
Taylor, like Blake, uses the word "abyss" to symbolize matter or
materialism:
Sallust (p. 128):
"Nor e'er remember in the dark abyss
The splendid palace of their sire sublime."
XXVIII
Blake's Book of Ahania (Ch. V):
"The lamenting voice of Ahania,
Weeping upon the Void!
And round the Tree of Fuzon,
Distant in solitary night,
Her voice was heard, but no form
Had she; but her tears from clouds
Eternal fell round the Tree.
And the voice cried: 'Ah Urizen! Love!
Flower of the morning! I weep on the verge
Of Nonentity!-how wide the Abyss
Between Ahania and thee'! ...."
Taylor's Sallust (pp. 165-166) (To Vesta):
"While on Hyle's stormy sea,
Wide I roam in search of thee,
Graciously thine arm extend,
And my soul from all defend:....
And soon cut the fatal folds
Through which guileful nature holds
Me indignant from thy sight
Exil'd in the realms of night,
XXXIII
Sloss and Wallis (II, 194) in discussing the sons of Los, say that one
class of them were "never generated," a phrase of Blake's which "eludes
interpretation." But it does not elude interpretation after one has read
Taylor's Sallust (p. 5):
"The essences of the gods are neither generated; for eternal natures
are without generation; and those beings are eternal who possess a first
power, and are naturally void of passivity."
XXXIV
Blake's Jerusalem (27, 35-36):
"Albion gave his deadly groan,
And all the Atlantic Mountains shook."
Cratylus, etc., 1793 (p. 399), Introduction to Timaeus:
"According to the saying of Heraclitus, he who passes through a very
profound region will arrive at the Atlantic mountain, whose magnitude
is such, according to the relation of the Aethiopian historians, that it
touches the aether, and casts a shadow of five thousand stadia in extent."
XXXV
In Blake's Milton, p. 32 (and reproduced there in the Quaritch ed. of
1893) is a diagram by Blake of a vast egg. It contains the names of Adam
and Satan, surrounded by the four intersecting circles of the Four Zoas.
Apparently it is Blake's chart of that mental universe through which
Milton took his course. This may have been suggested by the Cratylus
of 1793 (p. 286):
"Time is symbolically placed for the one principle of the universe;
but aether and chaos, for the two posterior to this one: and being, simply
considered, is represented under the symbol of an egg." And five or six
pages later: "The egg itself is heaven: from the bursting of which into
two parts, the sections are said to have become heaven and earth."
This chart of Blake's was his drawing of what he called "the mundane
shell." The phrase was probably suggested by Taylor's work, for, though
its exact form does not appear there, the adjective "mundane" is con-
stantly used in ways that would suggest it. We quote a few examples:
Cratylus, etc. (p. 56, note): "mundane gods"-"mundane natures"
(p. 61, note): "mundane subsistence"-"mundane intellect"-"mundane
soul"; (p. 63, note): "mundane establishment"-"mundane concerns";
(p. 70, note): "mundane idiom"; (p. 372): "mundane animal."
(p. 372) (Introduction to Timaeus):
"The whole mundane animal too is connected together, according to
the united comprehension which subsists in the intelligible world; and the
parts which it contains are distributed so as to harmonize with the whole,
both such as are corporeal and such as are vital. For partial souls are
introduced into its spacious receptacle, are placed about the mundane
gods, and become mundane through the luciform vehicles with which they
are connected."
Sallust (p. 133, note) speaks of "the mundane order."
Sallust (p. 156): "Of the mundane gods the king."
Sallust (p. 162): "Thy power exempt from mundane forms we see."
XXXVI
The following passage from Blake's Four Zoas (IX, 478-482) may be
simply a bit of idyllic poetry:
"And on the river's margin she ungirded her golden girdle;
She stood in the river & view'd herself within the wat'ry glass,
And her bright hair was wet with the waters. She rose up from the
river,
And as she rose, her Eyes were open'd to the world of waters:
She saw Tharmas sitting upon the rocks beside the wavy Sea."
But if this passage has a symbolic meaning, it may be explained by the
following excerpt from The Works of Plato (II, 514):
"For, as if some one standing on the margin of a river should behold
the image and form of himself in the floating stream, he indeed will pre-
serve his face unchanged, but the stream being all-variously moved will
change the image. .... After the same manner the soul, beholding the
image of herself in body, borne along in the river of generation, and
variously disposed at different times, through inward passions and ex-
ternal impulses, is indeed herself impassive, but thinks that she suffers,
and, being ignorant of, and mistaking her image for, herself, is disturbed,
astonished, and perplexed."
XXVII
Blake's Milton (16, 21-26):
"The Mundane Shell is a vast Concave Earth, an immense
Harden'd shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth,
Enlarg'd into dimension & deform'd into indefinite space
In Twenty-seven Heavens and all their Hells, with Chaos
And Ancient Night & Purgatory. It is a cavernous Earth
Of labyrinthine intricacy, twenty-seven folds of opakeness."
Blake's Jerusalem (75, 10):
"And these the names of the Twenty-sevenHeavens & their Churches:"
Works of Plato (II, 629):
"But Timaeus, in what he here says, converting things last to such as
are first, and the terminations of the soul to its summit establishes this
to be octuple, and that twenty-seventimes, the first." Also on the pre-
ceding page Taylor has the footnote: "Let it be remembered that the first
numbers of the soul are, as we have observed in the Introduction to this
Dialogue, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27." These passages are part of a discussion on
the mystic properties of numbers, which might easily have left with Blake
the impression that 27 was the supreme Platonic number, as 3 was the
supreme number of the Trinitarians.
XXXVIII
Blake's Jerusalem (98, 7-8):
"At the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect
The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appear'd in Heaven."
Works of Plato'3 (II, 283):
"Intellect, possessing its life in eternity, and in an essence ever in
energy, and fixing all its intelligence collectively in itself, is perfectly
divine." (II, 475, note): "Intellect, therefore, is alone unconquerable;
but science and scientific reasoning are vanquished by intellect, according
to the knowledge of being." (V, 523, note): "His [Apollo's] emission of
arrows is the symbol of his destroying everything inordinate, wandering,
and immoderate in the world."
XXXIX
Blake's Milton (23, 72):
"Time is the mercy of Eternity."
Worksof Plato (II, 279):
"Time is the image of eternity."
XL
Blake's Four Zoas (IX, 616-619):
"The feast was spread in the bright South, & the Eternal Man
Sat at the feast rejoicing, & the wine of Eternity
Was serv'd round by the flames of Luvah all day & all the night.
And many Eternal Men sat at the golden feast."
Works of Plato (II, 578, note):
"According to the theology of Plato, there is not one father of the
universe only, one providence, and one divine law, but many fathers
subordinate to the one first father."
XLI
With the wanderings of Blake's Urizen in The Four Zoas, Night VI
compare Works of Plato (II, 506, note): "But the fourth and last genus is
that which abundantly wanders, which descends as far as to Tartarus,
and is again excited from its dark profundities, evolving all-various forms
of life, employing various manners, and at different times different
passions. It also obtains various forms of animals, daemoniacal, human,
irrational, but is at the same time corrected by Justice, returns from earth
to heaven, and is circularly led from matter to intellect, according to
certain orderly periods of wholes."
XLII
For Blake's use of the symbolic "veil of Vala" see Sloss and Wallis,
II, 251. The conception may have been suggested by such passages as the
following in The Works of Plato: (I, 520), "The veil of Minerva is an
emblem of that one life or nature of the universe, which the goddess
weaves by those intellectual vital powers which she contains." (II, 487,
note): "Hence soul'4 is said .... to extend itself to the extremities of
heaven, as vivifying it on all sides; and to invest the universe as with a
veil, as possessing powers exempt from divisible bulk."
Cratylus, etc., 1793 (p. xvi):
"Men who are ignorantly called men of learning.... who, like
Homer's mice, impiously nibble the veil of Wisdom, and would willingly
destroy the work of her celestial hands."
XLIII
Blake's Songs of Innocence ("Night")15:
"When wolves and tigers howl for prey,
They pitying stand and weep."
Works of Plato (I, 501):
"Why therefore should you wonder that many according to life are
wolves, many are swine, and many are invested with some other form of
irrational animals?"
XLIV
Blake's Jerusalem (opening):
"Of the Sleep of Ulro and of the passage through Eternal Death and
of the awaking to Eternal Life."
Works of Plato (I, 493):
"As they advance however in perfection, are excited from body, and
collect their powers from matter, they become more prolific, and more
inventive of the things about which they were before unprolific and
dubious, through the sluggishness and privation of life proceeding from
matter, and the sleep of generation." (Invert the order of one of the above
sentences, and you find both running parallel in thought throughout.)
Works of Plato (II, 459):
"As this introduction and the following translations were the result
of no moderate labour and perseverance, I earnestly hope they may be
the means of awakening some few at least from the sleep of oblivion."
XLV
Blake's ["To Thomas Butts"]'6:
"With my inward eye, 'tis an old man grey,
With my outward, a Thistle across my way."
Works of P7lato(I, 66, note):
"But sometimes one herb, or one stone, is sufficient to a divine opera-
tion. Thus, a thistle is sufficient to procure the sudden appearance of
some superior power."
XLVI
Blake's Four Zoas (V, 164-165):
"Nor all the power of Luvah's Bulls,
Tho they each morning drag the unwilling Sun out of the deep."
Works of Plato (IV, 449, note):
"But they say that the moon is drawn by two bulls."
15This was written before TheWorksof Platowas even planned. But the like-
ness may representsome commonsource,now lost, and so help to interpretBlake.
16Accordingto Sampson (PoeticalWorksof Wm. Blake, p. 187 of 1913 ed.),
this was writtensome two years beforeTheWorksof Plato appeared. But thereis
the possibilityof personalcontact between Blake and Taylor.
XLVII
For Blake's use of the "polypus" see Sloss and Wallis, II, 207. In
The Works of Plato (III, 478), the editor translates a passage from "The
Banquet" as follows: "So that every one of us at present is but the tally
of a human creature; which has been cut like a polypus, and out of one
made two." Of this passage the editor says in the footnote: "Under this
difficulty of ascertaining what animal is meant by the /'TTrramentioned
here by Plato, we have translated it a polypus, because the wonderful
is the same with that in the polypus,
property ascribed here to the ,Vrlrra
which a few years since afforded great entertainment to the virtuosi in
many parts of Europe."
XLVIII
Blake's Jerusalem (99, 1-4):
"All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth, & Stone; all
Human Forms identified, living, going forth & returning-wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing,
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality."
Works of Plato (I, 64, note):
"Hence we may behold the sun and moon in the earth, but according
to a terrene quality; but in the celestial regions, all plants, and stones,
and animals, possessing an intellectual life according to a celestial nature."
XLIX
Blake's Jerusalem (p. 77):
"Is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain?"
Works of Plato (I, Ixxxiii):
"That vast whole of wholes, in which all other wholes are centered
and rooted, and which is no other than the principle of all principles,
and the fountain of deity itself."
L
Blake's Songs of Experience'7:
"Ah Sunflower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after the sweet golden clime,
Where the traveller's journey is done."
Worksof Plato (I, 64, note):
"Hence the sun-flower, as far as it is able, moves in a circular dance
toward the sun; so that, if any one could hear the pulsation made by its
circuit in the air, he would perceive something composed by a sound of
this kind, in honour of its king, such as a plant is capable of framing."
17The Songsof Experienceappearedten years beforeTheWorksof Plato. But
there is the possibilitythat Blake knewTaylorpersonally,and got ideas fromhim
long beforethey appearedin print.
LI
Blake's Jerusalem (p. 77):
"I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall."
Works of Plato (I, lvix):
"Having thus taken a general survey of the great world, and descended
from the intelligible to the sensible universe, let us still, adhering to that
golden chainl8 which is bound round the summit of Olympus, and from
which all things are suspended, descend to the microcosm man." Ibid.
(I, lxxxvii): "By these men [Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, etc.], who
were truly links of the golden chain of deity, all that is sublime, all that is
mystic in the doctrines of Plato .... was freed from its obscurity and
unfolded into the most pleasing and admirable light." (If Blake had this
passage in mind in the above stanza, he would be referring to himself
as the last link in the golden chain of Neo-Platonic thinkers. This belief
is strengthened by the following passage: Works of Plato (I, xc): "Por-
phyry being let down to men like a mercurial chain, through his various
erudition, unfolded everything into perspicuity and purity."
Such is the evidence. It probably shows that Blake read these
particular works of Taylor. But, more important than that, it
shows that much of his thought was drawn in some way from Neo-
Platonic sources and can be given a dignified and poetical inter-
pretation in the light of Neo-Platonic teaching.
FREDERICK E. PIERCE
Yale University
18 The
phrase "goldenchain"is found in Homerand Milton, but neitheruses
it to symbolizea continuoussystem of thought. Since Prof. Lowes,in his Roadto
Xanadu, has shown that Coleridgeread Taylor enthusiastically,the following
quotationfrom Coleridge'sprose may be in point: "Fromthe time of Honorius
to the destructionof Constantinople.... there was a continued successionof
individualintellects;the goldenchainwasneverwhollybroken,thoughthe connect-
ing linkswereoftenof basermetal"(TheComplete Worksof SamuelTaylorColeridge,
ed. by Prof. Shedd,New York, 1853,IV, 30.)