The Book of Thel is a poem by
William BlakeWilliam Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the...
, dated 1789 and probably worked on in the period 1788 to 1790.
It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later
prophetic booksThe prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake are a series of difficult and obscure poetic works. While Blake worked as a commercial illustrator, these books were ones that he produced, with his own engravings, as an extended and largely private project...
. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line.
It was preceded by
Tiriel*For the Blake character, see Tiriel*For the opera with the same name, see Tiriel Tiriel is a symbolic poem, the first of so called "prophetic books" by William Blake . It was written around 1789, shortly before The Book of Thel. It was the first of his poems written in free septenaries...
, which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from
Tiriel were incorporated into
The Book of Thel.
This book consists of eight plates executed in illuminated printing.
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The Book of Thel is a poem by
William BlakeWilliam Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the...
, dated 1789 and probably worked on in the period 1788 to 1790.
It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later
prophetic booksThe prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake are a series of difficult and obscure poetic works. While Blake worked as a commercial illustrator, these books were ones that he produced, with his own engravings, as an extended and largely private project...
. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line.
It was preceded by
Tiriel*For the Blake character, see Tiriel*For the opera with the same name, see Tiriel Tiriel is a symbolic poem, the first of so called "prophetic books" by William Blake . It was written around 1789, shortly before The Book of Thel. It was the first of his poems written in free septenaries...
, which Blake left in manuscript. A few lines from
Tiriel were incorporated into
The Book of Thel.
This book consists of eight plates executed in illuminated printing. 15 copies of original print of 1789-1793 are known. Two copies have watermark of 1815, which are more elaborately colored than the others.
Thel's Motto
- Does the Eagle know what is in the pit,
- Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
- Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,
- Or Love in a golden bowl?
The first lines
- The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,
- All but the youngest. She in paleness sought the secret air,
- To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day.
- Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,
- And thus her gentle lamentation falls like the morning dew;
The story
The daughters of Mne Seraphim are all shepherdesses in the Vales of Har, apart from the youngest, Thel. She spends her time wandering on her own, trying to find the answer to the question that torments her: why does the springtime of life inevitably fade so that all things must end? She meets the Lily of the Valley who tries to comfort her. When Thel remains uncomforted, the Lily sends her on to ask the Cloud. The Cloud explains that he is part of a natural process and, although he sometimes disappears, he is never gone forever. Thel replies that she is not like the Cloud and when she disappears she will not return. So the Cloud suggests asking the same question of the Worm. The Worm is still a child and cannot answer. Instead it is the Worm’s mother, the Clod of Clay, who answers. The Clod explains that we do not live for ourselves, but for others. She invites Thel to enter into her underground realm and see the dark prison of the dead where Thel herself will one day reside. However, Thel is assailed by mysterious voices asking a whole series of yet more terrible questions about existence. Uttering a shriek, she flees back to her home in the Vales of Har. The pit represents sex and mortality of life, while the Vales of Har represent virginity and eternity. The first part of the poem shows the good part of life as in Songs of Innocence whereas the concluding part shows that life is full of sorrows where smiles are never seen like in Songs of Experience.
The question is "Why the physical senses darken the soul by excluding it from the wisdom and joy of eternity?".
Thel is the allegory of the unborn spirit who has gathered experience from her own discoveries and has decided to remain forever innocent.
Wouldn't a newborn run back to the womb if he or she had access to what Thel had discovered?
Quotations
- "The Book of Thel is an allegory of the unborn spirit visiting the world of generation. Thel rejects the self-sacrificing aspects of experience and flies back to eternity. The symbols of Lily-of-the-Valley, the Cloud, the Worm and the Clod of Clay represent idealistic fancy, youth, adolescence and motherhood."(Geoffrey Keynes
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was an English biographer, surgeon, physician, scholar and bibliophile...
)
- "The Book of Thel is best understood as a rewriting of Milton
John Milton was an English poet, author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica....
's ComusComus is a masque in honour of chastity, written by John Milton. It was first presented on Michaelmas, 1634, before John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle in celebration of the Earl's new post as President of Wales.Known colloquially as Comus, the mask's actual full title is A Mask...
. ... Blake tells the same story, but in biological terms, not moral ones."(S. Foster DamonS Foster Damon was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. He was born in Newton, Massachusetts. He was one of the Harvard Aesthetes, and married Louise Wheelwright, sister of John Wheelwright who was another poet identified with that grouping...
)
Trivia
- Metal singer Bruce Dickinson
Paul Bruce Dickinson is an English singer, TV presenter, airline pilot, radio show host, record producer, fencer, author, and songwriter best known as the vocalist of the metal band Iron Maiden...
recorded an adaptation of this for his 1998 album "The Chemical WeddingThe Chemical Wedding is the fifth studio album by English heavy metal singer Bruce Dickinson. It was released on July 14, 1998 through Sanctuary Records, and included the single "Killing Floor"—release only in Japan...
".
See also
- William Blake's prophetic books
The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake are a series of difficult and obscure poetic works. While Blake worked as a commercial illustrator, these books were ones that he produced, with his own engravings, as an extended and largely private project...
- Tiriel (Blake)
*For the Blake character, see Tiriel*For the opera with the same name, see Tiriel Tiriel is a symbolic poem, the first of so called "prophetic books" by William Blake . It was written around 1789, shortly before The Book of Thel. It was the first of his poems written in free septenaries...
- William Blake's mythology
The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology , in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology...
- Thel (opera)
Thel or The Lamentations of Thel is a chamber opera in four scenes with Prologue by a Russian composer Dmitri N. Smirnov to his own libretto after William Blake. It was composed in 1985-1986, and is in English ....
Further reading
- Grundy, Thomas E., "An Eye of gifts & graces" : A Reading of Blake's The Book of Thel", The Journal of the Faculty of Literature, Nagoya University
, abbreviated to }}, is a Japanese national university headquartered in Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, and is considered as one of the most prestigious universities in Japan....
, Japan. Vol.42, pp. 49-78 (1996/03/31)
External links